Raise up your staff, part 2

In part 1, we looked at new principal training programs preparing school leaders to manage increasingly businessified education settings. Now we turn our attention to the preparation of the teachers -- the professional subjects of educational management and the front-line leaders of classrooms. New York City currently claims a three-year new teacher attrition rate of 40% or more. Clearly new teachers are under-supported and under-prepared for their professional roles.

Doug Lemov, once a successful teacher and now a managing director with Uncommon Schools, recognized this and set out to do something about it. As the national rhetoric has shifted toward "getting rid of bad teachers," Lemov realized that many good people were failing as teachers simply because they had never actually learned how to teach. Replacing them with equally ill-prepared peers would not solve the problem. He set out to discover and codify the specific practices effective teachers employ. Last year Lemov published his book of "49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path toward College." He uses the book as a guide to train new teachers in the Uncommon Schools network.

Last spring, I had the opportunity to read an advanced draft of the book and see the techniques in practice in several classrooms at Uncommon's Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School. The effect was impressive. Students as young as five were consistently orderly, engaged, and on-task. It was all very controlled. Admittedly, this is a huge step up from the disorganization and lack of focus I have witnessed in over a dozen New York City schools.

It disturbs me, though, especially in light of recent research on problem solving and executive functioning, that Lemov devotes only one chapter out of 12 -- less than 15 pages of his 310 page book -- to "Challenging Students to Think Critically." As long as we're businessifying our educational system, let us not forget that What Gets Measured Gets Improved. Current high-stakes tests prioritize measuring content knowledge over critical thinking, and Lemov's Taxonomy aims to improve those measurements.

I agree with Lemov (and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, and so many others) that we need to commit to training teachers effectively if we expect them to be effective in the classroom. Lemov's techniques have been critical to the excellent test scores achieved by Uncommon's students, but let's not trick ourselves into thinking that excellence in test scores equals excellent education. Lemov's Taxonomy is a wonderful and necessary start to preparing effective educators, but for the sake of excellence let it not be an end.