Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010

Michael J. Petrilli , Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Janie Scull / September 30, 2010

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College is a publishing phenomenon. Since its release earlier this year, it has hovered within or near the top 100 books on Amazon.com. What Lemov is selling—forty-nine nitty-gritty tips and practical tools culled from observing uber-effective teachers—is clearly in high demand. But why is it in such short supply?

Because a majority of America’s education school professors—the instructors responsible for preparing the lion’s share of our nation’s teachers—remain committed to romantic/progressivist ideals and shrug off the mission of transmitting Lemov-style tips and tools to aspiring teachers.

That’s one take-away from Fordham’s newest report, Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010. The study, authored by veteran analysts Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett, surveyed over 700 education professors across the land to determine how they view their own roles and what they think of myriad K-12 policy developments that have taken place over the last decade. It uncovers some troubling trends among the professoriate. For example:

• Only 24 percent believe it “absolutely essential” to produce “teachers who understand how to work with the state’s standards, tests and accountability systems”;
• Just 37 percent say it is “absolutely essential” to focus on developing “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom”; and
• Fewer than two in five find it “absolutely essential” to “create teachers who are trained to address the challenges of high-needs students in

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  Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010

Kill HQT ASAP

Michael J. Petrilli / September 30, 2010

No Child Left Behind’s “highly qualified teachers” provision deserves to die. That was so even before this week’s surprise ruling by the (oft-overturned) Ninth Circuit. The court invalidated a Bush-era regulation that allowed Teach For America participants (and other alternatively certified teachers) to be considered “highly qualified” while they worked toward full state certification. This is a huge deal—and creates a serious crisis in Ninth Circuit states—for it automatically puts schools that hire TFA teachers “out of compliance” with Title I, and would require them to send letters home within a month telling parents that their kids are being taught by unqualified teachers.

A little background might help. When Congress wrote NCLB, there was some debate about whether TFA types should be considered “highly qualified” under the law. Lawmakers essentially punted by writing confusing—you might say contradictory—language:

The term “highly qualified”—when used with respect to any public elementary school or secondary school teacher teaching in a State, means that—(i) the teacher has obtained full State certification as a teacher (including certification obtained through alternative routes to certification) or passed the State teacher licensing examination, and holds a license to teach in such State, except that when used with respect to any teacher teaching in a public charter school, the term means that the teacher meets the requirements set forth in the State’s public charter school law; and (ii) the teacher has not had certification or

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Kill HQT ASAP

Zuckerberg "friends" Newark

September 30, 2010

Facebook Founder to Donate $100 Million to Help Remake Newark's Public Schools, by Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times, September 22, 2010.

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, recently offered up a $100 million grant to Newark Public Schools. Announcing the gift, Zuckerberg told Oprah (who, in her show’s waning days, has suddenly acquired a keen interest in education) that he singled out Newark Mayor Cory Booker as a strong change-agent who, he deemed, was worth the investment. The gift has created quite a stir around the Brick City: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has happily bequeathed virtually all control of Newark schools—which has unsuccessfully lingered under state purview for the last fifteen years—to Booker, while Booker must raise matching dollars to get Zuckerberg’s dough. History says Booker is pretty good at bringing money to Newark; what remains to be seen is how well he’ll spend it. He’s got Zuckerberg’s vote of confidence, at least. Gadfly wonders, though, why all these smart folks think education miracles will follow the arrival of still more money in a school system that already spends $22,000 per pupil and gets not one iota of return on the dollar.

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Zuckerberg "friends" Newark

Bigger and better

September 30, 2010

4,100 Students Prove 'Small is Better' Rule Wrong, by Sam Dillon, New York Times, September 27, 2010.

The “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” of big schools is that most are dropout factories, therefore all will be so. Enter Brockton High in Brockton, Massachusetts. Once known for a state exam pass-rate of about 25 percent and a drop-out rate of one in three, Brockton has seen stellar gains on test scores in recent years. That kind of transformation is every struggling school’s dream and the end goal of the turnaround initiatives funded by the rather plush federal School Improvement Grants. Yet Brockton’s secret potion for success omits all the regularly prescribed ingredients: breaking a big, unmanageable school into pieces, replacing the school leader and teachers, and infusing gobs of money. On the contrary, the recipe was simple: A small core group of teachers took one look at the “embarrassing” (in the words of one) 1999 test scores and decided it was time to go back to the basics. They incorporated reading, writing, and speaking into every class—even gym—and repurposed union-negotiated meeting times for strategic planning. Only one teacher was fired (though many were initially made uncomfortable by the new changes, the dynamic take-no-prisoners-but-be-nice principal won naysayers to her reform court)—and all the changes obeyed the union contract. What’s more, the school still has its 4,100 students.

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Bigger and better

Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform, 16th Edition

Janie Scull / September 30, 2010

Matthew Ladner, Andrew T. LeFevre, and Dan Lips, Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform, 16th Edition, (Washington, DC: American Legislative Exchange Council, September 2010).

The sixteenth edition of the annual report card from ALEC, a free-market dedicated coalition of state legislators, spends most of its ink explaining the need for school reform in America. Almost overshadowed by this manifesto is the analysis that makes the report so interesting. The report conducts two kinds: First, it assesses a state’s ability to educate its low-income students (irrespective of race) by analyzing NAEP scores of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch (FRL); then, it grades each state on its overall education reform “friendliness,” through metrics like openness to school choice and alternative certification. (Coincidentally, we conducted a similar city-based assessment of reform-mindedness this summer.) The report’s authors choose the performance of FRL recipients because of the group’s inherent invariability, which maximizes state comparibility by minimizing vast economic differences among student populations from state to state. Despite this, however, it was troubling that half of the top ten states in this category had low-income populations that were mostly white. On reform-friendliness, the methods were a bit more complex. ALEC graded states on multiple measures, such as the rigor of state standards, available types of school choice, and the existence of alternative certification routes. On both counts, Florida was the big winner, ranking third in student performance and first in reform-mindedness—and being the only state in the top

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Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform, 16th Edition

Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching

Stafford Palmieri / September 30, 2010

Matthew G. Springer, Dale Ballou, Laura Hamilton, Vi-Nhuan Le, J.R. Lockwood, Daniel F. McCaffrey, Matthew Pepper, and Brian M. Stecher, "Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching" (Nashville, TN: National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, September 2010).

This much-anticipated study made waves even before it was released. That's because it presents some of the most methodologically sound evidence available to date on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of monetary incentives for teachers to produce better student outcomes. But its robust design examined only one narrow question: Is offering teachers a reasonable chance to earn up to $15,000 extra dollars enough to significantly raise value-added student achievement? The Vanderbilt research team divided a group of about 300 volunteer middle school math teachers in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) into a control group, who received only a small stipend for participating, and a treatment group, who both received the stipend and were eligible for $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 bonuses for raising the valued-added scores of their math students. For three years (2006-07 through 2008-09), analysts compared each participating teacher's students' value-added gains to state wide average gains, and then averaged those "benchmarked" scores for the teacher's class. To earn a bonus, the gains had to be at least in the 80th percentile of gains for the district, based on distributions of gains from the two years prior to POINT (2004-06). The findings were disappointing: Treatment teachers' students

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Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching

E-Learning 2010: E-Educators Evolving

Amanda Olberg / September 30, 2010

Education Week, E-Learning 2010: E-Educators Evolving (Education Week, September 2010).

This interactive report from Education Week, the second in a three-part series, offers a collection of articles that address key e-learning issues such as educator standards, training, preparedness, and compensation—and offers interesting background for those new to the e-learning circuit. One article focuses on the development of voluntary standards for e-educators (courtesy of groups like the International Association for K-12 Online Learning)—as states reveal significant disparities in the standards that govern online learning.  Another tackles teacher quality: Some experts question the value of saddling online educators with additional entry requirements, while others fight for increased professional development and teacher training. What passes for professional development in this realm is highly variable; even still most teachers get no ed school training in the online classroom. There is no consensus when it comes to how e-educators are trained or held accountable. This is a hot-topic report with a somewhat sobering message for those riding high on the possibilities of online learning: nothing is yet for sure and there’s still a long way to go.

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E-Learning 2010: E-Educators Evolving