Everybody loves the underdog except when it comes to education reform. More than a week after the Florida Senate rejected the parent trigger bill, the story line is now David v. Goliath, with David (played by established parent groups like the Florida PTA and Fund Education Now) squeaking out a victory over Goliath (starring Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, and the Republican-dominated Legislature.)

The truth is, titans clashed while David was en route to his second job.

The underdogs who are lost in this narrative are low-income and working-class parents. They have virtually no one in their corner as they deal with conditions in their schools that would spark outrage – and quick remedies – if they happened in more affluent schools.

To take teacher quality and equity as an example: High-poverty schools have the highest teacher turnover rates, the most rookie teachers, the most out-of-field teachers, the most teachers who failed certification exams, the fewest board certified, etc.  We all know how destructive that is, year after year, kid after kid, generation after generation. And yet, it’s just kind of accepted. (more…)

Don’t like what an education reformer has to say? Just call them a teacher basher.

Increasingly, that’s what teachers and others are doing, with this recent blog post on CNN – “When did teacher bashing become the new national pastime?” – being the latest in a long list of examples.

Most of these articles set out straw men. There’s the frequent assertion that we only want to judge teacher performance by one standardized test score (few do). And another that teachers simply face an impossible job with students who are too damaged or too unmotivated to learn (a myth Education Trust dispelled long ago.) Most reformers assert quite properly that a teacher is the heart of the education system and the key to improving it. They should be treated better. They should be valued more highly. But the conundrum seems to be that teachers just don’t seem to believe that anyone can fairly measure what they do, so they collectively have resisted all efforts to implement meaningful performance standards. I find that odd, however, because I have never met a teacher who couldn’t tell me in a couple of minutes who the best and worst teachers in the school are

If we assume a good teacher enables a student to advance quickly and a poor teacher does the opposite, then it becomes difficult to dispute that the teaching profession is horribly broken. (more…)

Four years ago, I helped create and lead a school improvement and professional development partnership between the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning and the Pinellas County school district. As part of this project I conducted 3,500 classroom observations over two years in which I assessed the quality of student and teacher engagement when I entered each classroom. Second-graders engaged in a turn and talk with an evaluation or synthesis prompt would score high, second-graders sitting at their desks doodling on a worksheet while their teacher shopped online at her desk would score low, and second-graders sitting passively at their desks while their teacher talked would fall in the middle. While this assessment was not a comprehensive measure of instructional quality, it provided a good snapshot and, with 3,500 data points, patterns were easy to discern.

The first year, each school’s data fell into a bell curve, with about 10 percent to 15 percent of the instruction falling at the top and bottom of the curve and 70 percent to 80 percent falling in the middle. Apparently teacher-centric instruction is still the norm in our schools, just as it’s been for the last 200 years. Toward the end of year one, we presented our findings to the schools and provided some professional development. Consequently the year two data skewed more positively with most of the low-end assessments moving to the middle. We saw only a slight increase in the upper levels.

I was unaware of each school’s state grade when I made my observations, but given the negligible variation between schools that I found in either year, I decided to see if there was a relationship between school grades and quality of teaching. There was none. That is, the quality of student and teacher engagement in schools graded A was identical to that in schools graded B, C and D. There were no F schools in our sample.

But while there was no variation between schools, the variation within schools was large. Every school had a small number of teachers who consistently scored high on our scale and an equally small number who consistently scored low. (more…)