From the Washington Post:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000—but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights, two union members familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.

Union members

said teachers are opposed to giving up seniority and tenure, no matter the size of their raise, and probably would reject such a proposal.

“You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security,” a union member said. “When you trade that, it seems to me you’re not getting much.”

Rhee, who declined to comment yesterday because of the ongoing negotiations, has said she wants a contract that would “revolutionize education as we know it.” She also has said she wants to improve instruction by ensuring that the District “has the most highly compensated and competent” teachers in the country.

Education experts who follow teacher contract issues said that D.C. teachers would be among the highest-paid educators in the nation under Rhee’s plan and that a proposal eliminating seniority and tenure would be groundbreaking.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, we hear from college graduates who recognized a crummy job market and decided to channel their energies into service programs, like Teach for America. Great idea, right? More teachers for TFA in the interim and more opportunities to introduce grads to a career they may not have thought about.

But then we read this:

Teach for America has an agreement with certain companies, such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., to grant corps members with existing job offers a two-year “deferral” so they can teach for two years and still have a job waiting for them when their commitment is over. It also runs something akin to a career-placement office to connect former teachers with recruiters at major companies, including General Electric Co., McKinsey & Co. and Google Inc.

And this:

That kind of partnership with non-teaching career paths helped Mike Stewart’s father feel better about his son’s joining the organization. “My fear was that he’d go into the teaching world right off the bat,” after his service, says the elder Mike Stewart, executive vice president of a medical-device company. “One thing that gives me some comfort is that he is still planning on going to law school.”

With so many reasons to bail from teaching the second a commitment ends (great job connections! Parent pressure!), how will these grads consider classroom service a career instead of a bullet point on a resume?

We’ve been accused at times of union-bashing (as distinct from the teacher-bashing attributed to Liam, yesterday and today), but perhaps we can cede that mantle to Thomas Sowell. From his column on National Review Online today:

during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. At the bitter moment of defeat the head of the French teachers’ union was told, “You are partially responsible for the defeat.”

His point, though, is that patriotism matters, and that the French union helped water it down in the 1920s and 30s. I’m not enough of a historian to wade into that issue, but as we approach July Fourth, it should be said that teaching students about America’s greatness (and yes, mistakes too) is something we should applaud, not shun. In 2003, Fordham gathered an esteemed group of authors who made that very point, in a volume that still has relevance today.

Julie Greenberg wrote about the “Mantle of Martyrdom” in a past edition of NCTQ’s TQ Bulletin.

Sandwiching thirteen years of teaching between two periods of policy work, I have acquired an unusual perspective on the culture dominating the teaching profession. I learned early on that we teachers are a sensitive bunch. My warning to non-teachers: never question the martyrdom of teachers.

Whoops.

Clearly, it’s struck a chord and it’s worth unpacking: Why do so many teachers lean so heavily, when criticized, on the “you’ve never yourself been a teacher” argument? As I noted here, it’s logically baseless. Imagine lawyers, doctors, oil-company executives mounting such a defense. If one may judge the performance of only those whose occupations he at one time or another shared, then he is prohibited from judging the performance of almost everyone—the lazy sales associate ["Barista," I mean] at Starbucks, for example, or the incompetent dentist who leaves his patient’s mouth feeling as if it were invaded by those particularly nasty African bees.

But perhaps the one in question has, in fact, worked as a waiter. And so he feels assured that his critique of the poor service he received at dinner last night is quite within bounds. Alas, no. He is mistaken, you see, because the restaurant at which he once delivered entrees to customers cannot be considered very busy, whereas the restaurant at which he dined last night certainly is. (The restaurant analogy is here used to demonstrate the further silliness of teachers who trumpet their work in urban schools, as opposed to the cushy schools across town.)

I’m familiar with no other profession that so often trots out this crutch. I was just discussing with others in the office why teachers, in particular, pledge such allegiance to this martyr mantra. And no, it’s not because teaching is a tough, unrewarding job—rarely have I heard gentlemen who ride on the backs of garbage trucks, when upbraided for not collecting the refuse, respond, “Well, you haven’t ever been a sanitation worker, now have you?”

Furthermore, the teachers who evoke this lame excuse are typically lightyears behind the wonks they vilify in realizing what actually works for public schools. We already know, for instance, that carrying on about the disadvantages that plague one’s pupils is a bridge to nowhere. The high-school teacher is upset that his students didn’t receive a solid middle-school education, the middle-school teacher upbraids his elementary-school counterparts for the same, the elementary-school teacher wonders why his students didn’t go to pre-K, the pre-K teacher complains about his students’ lack of nutrition... and so it goes, all the way back until we reach the moment of conception and realize that the world is just an unequal place.

Lots of teachers have realized that. Lots of schools enroll kids with every disadvantage under the sun and still manage to teach them well (see the Education Trust website for a comprehensive list). Those teachers that make excuses, that complain that their critics have never taught in an urban classroom, do not live on the moral mountaintop they think they do, nor are their apologias needed in any school—urban or otherwise.

We are pretty good at generating buzz for upcoming reports at Fordham (doesn’t hurt that those reports are typically buzzworthy) but this article in Education Week yesterday fostered buzz without alerting me to the bite. It summarizes what I imagine to be fairly complex research findings on a topic that many folks are interested in, then doesn’t tell us exactly when the actually study is to be published or released (sometime “soon”). So I rely on the journalist’s take of the findings (risky but unavoidable).

Harvard researcher Tom Kane and colleagues apparently conducted a random assignment study analyzing whether students in classrooms with National Boards teachers (i.e., those that have received the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards-NBPTS-credential) learned more than students taught by comparison teachers. To my knowledge, this is the first random assignment study conducted on this contentious topic (see here, here, and here). We’re told that students with teachers with high ratings on the Boards gained more than students in classes with lower-scoring Board teachers. And though test score differences between students with Board teachers and with non-applicant teachers were positive, they were not statistically significant. Kane sums it up this way:

Ineffective teachers are just as likely as effective teachers to apply for national-board certification but the board process does seem to provide some information on teachers’ effectiveness, so people who are certified are a little better than the average non-applicant, and unsuccessful applicants are worse than non-applicants.

Okay, so some encouraging news for National Boards folks but not mind-blowing either. The value-added analysis, though, showed even stronger results, i.e., it better predicted which teachers were most likely to produce sizable student learning gains than did the National Board measures. Based on the study findings, researchers are calling on the NBPTS to take into account student learning gains as part of their credentialing process. Hmmm... sounds like a pretty good idea, but not one that will likely be embraced anytime soon. Mary Dilworth, NBPTS vice president, responds, “We need to spend a little more time looking actually at the assessment that we’re using to gauge student performance.” True, but this doesn’t rule out the possibility of piloting a value-added National Boards credential in states which have sound data infrastructure, strong standards, and highly-regarded, aligned assessments. It would be a welcome contribution to our understanding of teacher quality.

I was intrigued by the article and really look forward to reading the study. I’m just not sure when that’s going to happen...

An attack weathered by all education-policy pundits who have not taught in dreadful, moldy, urban schools where classes are dismissed to the sound of gunfire is this: “Ah ha! But you haven’t spent time in the classroom and therefore have no grounds for opining.” How silly, though, if our legislators, staring at their 18.5 percent approval ratings, took to CSPAN and said, “Foolish Americans. You have no idea how difficult it is to serve one’s country! The vast majority of you have never been politicians, and probably you couldn’t even legislate new flags for your respective city halls. So, shush up.”  

That’s not the same thing, Liam! Oh, isn’t it?

The teachers, it seems, are upset with me. I annoyed more than a few of them when I wrote, in my review of HBO’s Hard Times at Douglass High, that the educators at Douglass High School in Baltimore “weren’t cutting it.” The documentary seemed to make that pretty clear; so, too, the school’s culture and test scores. And yet, as so many classroom managers are quick to note, I’ve just missed it all so very badly.

Take this chap, for example, a teacher who in a particularly fired-up blog post tagged me with a rather unflattering sobriquet. He did not like my diagnosis of what ails Douglass High. But as a co-worker pointed out, when one takes to the blogosphere to rain insults upon others, one should, as a matter of course, take pains to do so in a grammatically appropriate manner. Our friend (the, ahem, teacher) has failed in that task through his predilection for inserting apostrophes whenever he deems them necessary, proper grammar be damned—e.g., “According to its author, Liam Julian, it’s incompetent administrators’ and teachers’ who are to blame for the fact that Douglass is failing just like thousands of other urban schools in the United States.” I’m just saying.

Our friend also dislikes my prescription for improving the health of an English class, which, I wrote, eschews “having a valuable conversation about Nick Carraway’s flaws, say, or the mistakes of old men who fish for marlin.” The angry blogger responds: “According to Julian, if we just made these kids read The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick, all would be well. Think about that: if we just make poor black kids read books by white folks about white folks, all will be okay.”

This gentleman is ostensibly a teacher, and probably he considers himself a good one. Leaving aside his odd insinuation that black students should not read anything by white authors and his weird statement that Moby Dick is a book about white people (a white whale, I thought)—what are we to make of his substitution of Melville for Hemingway? Moby Dick was no marlin.

It is safe to assume, I think, that we are dealing here with a well-intentioned person who undoubtedly knows quite a bit about pedagogical, Marxist theory but next to nothing about anything worthwhile, such as grammar and literature. I respectfully venture that such individuals should not be in charge of classrooms of kids. If I must be pilloried for that zany statement, so be it.

Update: One of the nice things (or bad things, depending, really, on one’s post-breakfast mood on any given day) about blogging is the immediacy and interactivity of it. Several commenters, whose gripes are available below, did not appreciate my Marlin/Whale diagram (which Coby helped to design) or the accompanying words. I must note, first, that such diagrams are clearly necessary because certain persons (see above for an example), cannot on their own distinguish between these two highly distinct marine personalities. And now, about those accompanying words.

We learn that I shouldn’t have pointed out the poor grammar and literary ignorance of the blogger in question; such notes are “derogatory” and contribute to a “vicious cycle.” Vicious it really isn’t—I merely offered some advice about not inserting apostrophes willy-nilly, which is a sound suggestion, any way you slice it. But to insinuate, as one commenter does, that my words are irrelevant is quite wrong. First, they’re funny, and humor always has relevance in my book, especially in an education-policy world where stolidly and solemnity rules and if you tell a joke you garner looks as if you’d just broken wind. Second, they make a point: We have someone who claims to be a teacher, who leads a classroom of students, who questions my ability to pass judgment on the performance of other teachers—and he can barely construct a readable sentence. This is a problem worth noting. Third, let it be known: This isn’t some namby-pamby, change we can blog in-type operation. I play by old-school rules, which clearly state, in Section 3-B, that if one is called a derogatory name or has his honor in some other way tarnished he cannot, ought not, will not brush it off. He will skewer his attacker, perhaps with wit, perhaps with a rapier (if circumstances and local laws and customs permit). Those who are offended by such rules may suck their thumbs and clutch their blankies, or they may simply close their eyes when coming upon any blog post bylined “Liam Julian.”

At first glance, this New York Times article on Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice looks to be another feel-good story about the small schools initiative. It mentions the usual statistics—93 percent of seniors graduated, most are going to college, etc—but then the article takes a moment to focus on the dedicated teachers who make it all possible. As in many high-performing charter schools, this specific small school has a young principal (Elana Karopkin, 32). For four years she’s led the school and produced what on the surface appear to be positive results. But, Ms. Karopkin is leaving her school to become an assistant superintendent at Achievement First. Here’s what she has to say about the move:

Ms. Karopkin said it would be unfair to say she was burned out, but admitted she was nothing less than “exhausted,” both physically and emotionally. “You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”

I’m not sure that Achievement First will be much different (although perhaps in an oversight role the pressure subsides a smidge), but that’s beside the point. Ms. Karopkin’s comments are a rare, frank look at what happens when the raw enthusiasm of a twenty-something out to change the world collides with reality. Yes, these greenhorns enter these schools (be them small, charter, urban, etc.) with open minds and full hearts, but they’re also incredibly driven and perfectionists (per Ms. Karopkin). Within Teach For America, “corps members have an average GPA of 3.6 and 95 percent held leadership positions on their college campuses.” Based on their performance, I’d hazard a guess that the majority of these young reformers are not accustomed to failure.  And when they see failure—students failing classes, dropping out of school, ending up on the streets—that is completely out of their control, it saps their will to continue the Sisyphean task of pushing kids to better and brighter futures. Therefore, the ultimate question is: how can schools capture the energy of these young teachers and funnel it such that it sustains for a longer period of time?

Could it be with more money? Smaller class sizes? Tempered expectations? A more gradual introduction to the problems of an urban classroom? For his part, chancellor Joel Klein said

“When people are part of the world of changing things for children, they don’t view it is as work,” he said, pointing to members of his own staff who log 14-hour days.

Perhaps Klein’s crew doesn’t view their work as such, but I’m not sure many of them spend time in the classroom. For the teachers that do, whether they view it as “work” or not, they require the means to maintain their sanity. If both innovative school districts and charter schools can’t figure out how to meet these needs, we’ll continue to lose our most talented reformers in the trenches.

Don’t miss this important new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality regarding the preparation of competent elementary-school math teachers. Titled No Common Denominator, it finds, after reviewing a national sample of ed-school-based undergraduate teacher prep programs, that fewer than 15 percent of them require enough of the right kinds of courses. It names names, too! It also makes a boatload of recommendations, nearly all of them contrary to current practice and some of them also contrary to conventional teacher-quality-reform wisdom. All this was unveiled earlier today (at a well-attended event on the roof of the Hotel Hay-Adams, looking down upon the White House itself). If you’d been there you’d have enjoyed a fine presentation by top NCTQ policy analyst Julie Greenberg. Second best is to read what she wrote—there are PDFs for the press release, executive summary, and full report (and a version with full appendices).

Regarding my review of Hard Times at Douglass High, a teacher (Mr. McDermott) who was featured in the documentary leaves a comment on Flypaper:

While I agree with much of your global criticism in the NRO article, I find your view of the teachers and staff distressingly shortsighted. All the teacher training and certification in the world cannot fully prepare you for what you’re walking into each day at a school like Douglass. It’s a constant give and take of expectations, discipline, and academic rigor. If you push too hard, the kids drop out. If you don’t push enough, they run wild. Factor in the empty mandates from politicians that every child must succeed, add to it the diminished authority of the classroom teacher, and multiply it all by the impotent curricula created by educrats who are disconnected from the realities of classroom implementation, and you’ve got a formula for failure.

You think I wasn’t pining to make literary allusions during my lesson they profiled in the documentary, to elevate it above the concrete here and now that these kids are mired in? I was following curriculum, sir. Curriculum that I, as a certified teacher, was mandated to work from by the state of Maryland. Curriculum passed down from on high by the same pedantic wonks who feel they have the answers to what ails public education, but don’t have the constitution take their philosophies to the front lines to apply in person.

I’ll be talking more about Hard Times today at 3 p.m. today on WBAL, to which one may listen live by clicking here and then clicking the “listen live” link in the top right left corner of the page.

About the short review that Coby kindly mentions: I wrote it for a lay audience, one not tuned in to every shift in k-12 minutiae, and so I didn’t dive into the issues as much as perhaps I could have. I also didn’t write about the positive things going on at Douglass High circa 2004 (the debate program, the choir); alas, word count restrictions made it so, and it was more important to note how the positives were undermined by the negatives. The documentary shows a staff that seems to care about its students and is generally well-intentioned. It doesn’t seem so very different, in fact, from staffs one might encounter at suburban public high schools. But whereas suburban schools may be able to get away with employing people who are kind but in many ways incapable, urban schools such as Douglass cannot. After watching Hard Times at Douglass High, one would be hard-pressed to argue against more mechanisms—results-based mechanisms—for holding teachers and administrators accountable.

Update: Here’s the New York Times review.

I’m with the union on this one. Let my weekends go!

Education Week reports today that data collected from the states by the U.S. Department of Education show the percentage of core classes in the nation taught by highly-qualified teachers is around 94 percent for 2006-2007. The numbers for high-poverty schools are slightly lower, but still pretty high—illustrating once again that the gaping loophole in the teacher quality provision known as HOUSEE invites states to game the system. North Dakota, for instance, boasts a full 100 percent of its core-subject classes taught by highly-qualified teachers. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s 100 percent in high-poverty schools, low-poverty schools, elementary schools, and secondary schools—every single core class taught by a highly-qualified teacher who demonstrates content knowledge expertise.

Others have already spoken about this problem quite eloquently. And though we admit to spotting a silver lining in here for charter schools, the fact remains that these latest overinflated data are just downright silly. Barnett Berry at the Center for Teaching Quality says as much:

The way states define highly-qualified teachers and what counts and doesn’t count varies, ... rendering cross-state comparisons useless.

True, and the same adjective applies to the data themselves.

I was expecting a bit more from Eduwonk’s $5 billion challenge. The winner, just announced, would use the money to

Create a new role for the classroom called an “Associate Teacher” that works with a teacher for 2 years before becoming a full-fledged teacher. Every classroom team would include a teacher, an associate teacher and a teacher assistant. It would cost a lot of money to run, but would help meet the needs of all children.

This might improve teaching quality a bit, but it would leave a lot to fix in the teaching profession, let alone American education writ large, which was the subject of the challenge.

For instance, this plan would do nothing to raise the quality of teaching candidates, who typically have lower SAT and ACT scores and come from less-competitive universities than their peers in other professions. Furthermore, even when districts ramp up recruiting efforts, bureaucratic and union barriers often deter the most qualified candidates from taking the jobs anyway. Why use the $5 billion for a bit of professional development (of questionable utility) when you could try to attract better candidates from the get-go?

Nor does the “associate teacher” plan do anything to fix the dysfunctional school culture that spurs so many qualified teachers to switch to careers that are more professionally rewarding and less of a threat to one’s sanity. The $5-billion teacher will still waste valuable time and energy battling with incompetent administrators. She’ll still bump up against inane union and district rules that bar her from using common sense in her classroom. And all this will still burn her out, leading her either to quit or to give in and let the broken system carry her languidly along until retirement, and its fat pension, brings sweet respite.

My vote? Just give the whole $5 billion to KIPP.

The New York Times had a nice piece Saturday on the Garden State’s alternative certification program, the first and largest state effort of its kind. (Forty percent of New Jersey’s teachers come to the classroom through this “alternative.”) An idea that was once a lightening rod is no longer so:

At one time the alternate route was controversial, said Roger Leon, who took it in 1992. He is now an assistant superintendent in Newark. His superiors and fellow teachers had a dim view of teachers who had not majored in education, he said.

Mr. Leon admitted he confronted a steep learning curve. “I spent the entire weekend before school opened organizing the classroom, getting it to look just right,” he said. “And then they showed up. I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ I recall a paper airplane flying past me.”

Today nontraditionally trained teachers are commonplace in Newark and in other cities. Newark hired 115 this year, as well as 37 through Teach for America, another nontraditional program.

We’ve long believed New Jersey’s program to be a model, and wish we can say that it exemplifies the typical alternative route to teaching. Unfortunately, it does not. Other states should take a trip to the Jersey Shore this summer and find out how it’s done.

A study to appear in October by MIT economist Joshua Angrist and University of Chicago business school professor Jonathan Guryan apparently says yes, according to this article. That’s a counter-intuitive finding, of course; many reformers (ourselves included) have argued forever that tough teacher tests will deter poorly educated people from becoming teachers while attracting talented individuals. But maybe not. Here’s how the scholars explain it:

First, they note, applicants whose educational backgrounds qualify them to teach are also likely qualified to work in other fields. When they weigh their job options, they calculate the cost in time, effort and money of the mandated tests as salary reductions.

“Higher quality applicants, as measured by outside earnings potential, are more likely to pass the test,” Angrist says, but they’re also more likely to want wages that will repay their efforts to take the tests. In addition, they’re consumers; they can look for jobs at companies that don’t require costly licensing tests.

Second, the discouragement effect, as economists call it, serves as a barrier to applicants broadly, Angrist notes. People who might be great teachers may choose not to study or pay for certification for myriad reasons, a loss for U.S. students in public schools.

I asked my podcast buddy, AEI’s Rick Hess, about his thoughts on the study. Though it’s not yet available for viewing, that didn’t dissuade him from weighing in. (He could be a blogger!)

It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where this makes sense. We know people tend to steer away from obstacles unless those are attached to a strong brand (e.g., Marine Corps, Teach For America) and when they don’t have a lot of precise information on the obstacles, they may just assume they’re a headache and steer clear.  Since it’s the most high-quality folks who have most avenues open to them, even modest obstacles may be enough for them to look elsewhere.

Beyond that, they may presume either that tests are: (a) going to be embarrassingly easy and that they don’t want to waste their time on a silly profession with minimum competency tests or (b) that the tests are going to be challenging and that they don’t want to waste their time and money on an exam that they’re afraid they won’t pass. (Remember, studies from psychology tend to suggest that it’s the people towards the upper end of the achievement distribution who are often less sure of themselves than those lower down.)

All of this suggests that we still need what we’ve needed for a long time, which is much more good fieldwork (e.g. surveys, analyses, interviews) which helps us understand why people do or don’t enter teaching and how much of that is the product of factors which we can manipulate.

Note Hess’s last point—the call for more research. I suppose he still is a scholar, and not a blogger, at heart. But Rick, thanks for the assist!

This woman isn’t just saving her life, she’s saving taxpayers money.

I read stuff like this and think it’s some kind of joke. That teachers in Los Angeles are required to spend one hour of the school day protesting outside school, or else, according to union president A.J. Duffy, they “will be crossing a picket line,” is just anachronistic and ridiculous. Students (remember them?) will be supervised by aides, administrators, and parent volunteers—although the district is concerned that pupils will not, in fact, be adequately supervised and that mischief will ensue. Too bad.

Also: What do students learn when they witness their instructors shirking their job responsibilities, marching around the schoolhouse’s exterior walls, banging drums and hoisting signs? While Americans puzzle over how best to instill some sense of discipline and respect for authority in the public schools, teachers engage in this type of irresponsible display, which puts forth a clear message: “Kids, challenge authority and don’t live up to your commitments.”

Teachers bridle when someone makes the mistake of not calling them “professionals.” Certainly many teachers are fine people and fine workers and provide an honorable service for which they deserve respect. But the fact is this: Public school teachers are simply missing in their jobs—by choice, I should add—huge chunks of what “professionalism” entails. They are not judged by their performance; they are paid in lock-step salary schedules that their unions favor; and many of them, it seems, find it completely permissible to leave their classrooms whenever they have a bone to pick with the governor, legislature, district leadership, or even their own union.

We wonder why our students aren’t prepared for the real world, but many of their teachers don’t actually operate in it.

In a Gadfly article that’s ruffled some feathers, Mike wrote last week that “the health insurance costs associated with treating overweight teachers and other school staff are taking a major bite out of public education budgets. I estimate that these costs come to at least $2.5 billion annually—more than Maine spends on its entire k-12 system in a year.”

Liam, for one, wasn’t offended. On the contrary, he was driven to action: he stayed up all night penning this Policy Review piece on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. It’s a must-read for teachers looking to eat better and the school administrators who wish they would. (Those with only a passing interest in education will find much of interest, as well.)

Photo by Flickr user snrang.

Wondering why all that extra federal money for “teacher quality” just seems to get absorbed by the system? Maybe this is why.

I’m encouraged this morning reading this article about Idaho’s work in crafting standardized performance evaluations for teachers. Apparently, some are hoping it paves the way for pay-for-performance plans for teachers (another good thing).

To be sure, recent reports indicate that teacher evaluations are pretty poor on the whole. I’ve had the opportunity over the years to take a look at some of these evaluations, particularly those in urban school districts, and concur that they can be pretty embarrassing, often treating “personal hygiene” on the same plane as “teacher knowledge of subject”—that is, if the latter is even included.

To be fair, there are some fantastic evaluation instruments out there for assessing teachers’ skills and knowledge. The Teacher Advancement Program, for instance, has one they use as part of their professional development and performance-based pay program. It’s a research-based rubric that includes nearly 20 indicators (such as teacher content knowledge, teacher knowledge of students, academic feedback, and use of problem solving skills)—each one with corresponding benchmarks that operationalize what it means to be exemplary, proficient, or needing improvement. Let’s hope the potato state can be a model for other states/districts interested in overhauling their teacher evaluations so that they actually serve to help teachers serve students.

That’s one finding from this new Public Agenda survey. This request brings to mind the famous Rolling Stones song, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Over the past fifty years, the number of students in the American public school system went up about 50 percent while the number of teachers tripled. How low can we go? Will teachers ever think their classes are small enough? Doubtful.

I was reviewing a federal evaluation report that came out last week on small schools (also known as schools within schools or small learning communities). The idea is that large high schools are made impersonal, in part, by sheer magnitude; thus, efforts should be made to cut down on class sizes as to render a more individualized and personal education to students. As most folks who follow ed policy know, the Gates Foundation has done the most in recent years to bring attention (and money) to this issue. So I was interested in what the researchers at Abt Associates had found.

Turns out that reading about the key study finding (i.e., most schools are creating freshmen academies and career academies) wasn’t as interesting as another thing I noticed. And that is that most teachers received little more than three days of professional development per year related to teaching in small learning communities—these would be things like tailoring instruction to individual student needs. Talk to most any teacher and she will tell you that differentiating instruction based on student ability is one of the hardest things to do in a classroom; my former professor in graduate school, Dr. Carol Tomlinson, has written much about how to do this well. So I was struck that teachers participating in SLCs had received such paltry training in how to do what their school had presumably received a nice chunk of change to do.

It’s unfortunately typical of ed reform programs. Schools receive funding to do Reform X but little in the way of training to do it well, or in helping get teachers on board to ensure that the reform is implemented with fidelity and good faith.

Malcolm Gladwell, kicking-off last week’s New Yorker Conference, spoke about the mismatch problem—i.e., the hiring of people based on qualities or characteristics that have little or nothing to do with what delivers success in the position being filled.

For example, Gladwell discussed how scouting combines—at which the best college players must jump high, run fast, be strong in front of professional scouts—is a lousy predictor of athletes’ eventual success.

Another profession that Gladwell thinks suffers from the mismatch problem: teaching. “So teaching is a profession that is every bit as screwed up as professional sports,” he said. (He addresses teaching about halfway through his talk.)