Ready for some good news out of Congress?

A few senators on both sides of the aisle spoke some sense about education in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, today, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed for an education budget increase. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) agreed in principle, saying, "It is wishful thinking to expect improvements in school quality when we are laying off teachers."

In the same meeting, Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jack Reed (D-RI) criticized competitive grant programs including Race to the Top (RTTT) and Promise Neighborhood (PN) grants. Shelby expressed concern that RTTT ensures inequitable funding and threatens states' rights by introducing a de facto requirement for states to support charter schools. Reed cautioned that funding should not be allocated to "untested" competitive grants, while being stripped from research-based programs.

The senators gently couched their concerns in party rhetoric, but my hope is that this is a sign of a larger political shift away from trying to apply competition-based business strategies to an education system that is supposed to provide equitable education to all. With increasing attention to the way this country educates its children, it seems more folks are starting to understand that the economic purpose of schools is not to turn a profit, but to ensure strong profits, over time, across all industries, by providing a skilled, knowledgeable, creative, and capable national workforce.

Links:

Reuters on the Senate Committee Meeting

HuffPo on the Senate Committee Meeting

FOUR, FOUR, FOUR improvements in ONE

The big news out of the Big Apple this week is that the city is ending its merit pay pilot program after a study showed that the merit pay had no effect on student achievement. Analysts at RAND, the independent research company that designed the study of the program, suggest that the small bonuses were not motivating enough to change teacher behavior in the current context of one-test-fits-all carrot-and-stick "accountability."

The NYC merit pay program focused on motivating existing teachers to work hard to boost student scores, but what if we shift the focus to motivating existing hard workers to lend their efforts to same goal? This would more closely resemble the national strategies of top-performing Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. McKinsey&Company, another research company, recently released the report of their comprehensive study of what factors might motivate current teachers and top college grads to teach in high-needs schools.

Much has been made of this study, and the reports and commentaries I had read focused heavily on radically increasing (essentially doubling) teacher pay in order to draw top students into teaching, especially in high-needs schools. However, the study itself does not suggest that increasing teacher salary is the only, or even necessarily the most effective strategy to provide the highest-need students with top-tier teachers. In fact, the results of the study imply that the most effective progress could be made by combining a few different strategies targeted to different populations.

Salary increases were especially motivating for top grads in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) who expect to take their pick from a range of well-paid career options. Salary also motivated top college grads, but the study found that simply marketing teaching careers to college students and providing drastically better training for entering teachers would go a long way toward motivating top grads to pursue teaching careers.

The one group not very motivated by salary increases was current teachers. These folks, who had already spent a few years working in the system, placed more value on good working conditions, professional development, and excellent school leadership. The fabulous news here is that all three of these indicators also independently raise student performance, and all three can be achieved by simply attracting excellent school leadership to work in the highest need schools. The McKinsey report proposed several different "scenarios" to attract top-tier teachers, but by focusing on independent variables instead of combined effects they missed this simplest one.

Links:

Edweek article on the end of the NYC merit-pay pilot program

McKinsey's Closing the Talent Gap

A business leader, a university president, and a teacher walk into Iowa....

Interesting news out of Iowa today as Governor Branstad prepares for his July 25-26 Education Summit. Today's roundtable discussions with business leaders, college and university presidents, and teachers were made available for live streaming and the videos of each roundtable are to be posted after the events. It looks like the Iowa Department of education will also make the summit presentations widely available during that event in a couple of weeks.

Just one comment for now, about integrating a few of these ideas. Business leaders rightly pointed out that teachers need to be appropriately compensated for their work, just as employees in the private sector are. The group focused on increasing pay for teachers in higher-demand positions (challenging schools, math and science instruction, special education) as well as performance-based pay. Later, in the teacher roundtable, teachers pointed out that one stellar teacher in a mediocre school cannot independently raise the field of education or the even the function of the school where they teach; great schools are the result of great coordination.

This is why any serious performance-based pay system must be implemented at the school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. Whole schools must be accountable for rising or sinking together, just as whole businesses are. John Bloomhall, president and CEO of Diamond Mills (an animal feed company) suggested during the business leaders' roundtable, "If I had a classroom, I'd put the [students] in charge of being successful: 'Your job is to make sure every kid gets a passing grade." This is the strategy we need for schools: we need to tell school communities that it is their responsibility to make sure every teacher succeeds, and we need to give them the resources to do it.

You can access the videos here: https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv/default.aspx

Raise up your staff, part 1

As efforts continue to make schools run more like businesses, the job of principals is becoming more like the job of CEOs. Balancing school budgets and making large purchasing decisions used to be the purview of school boards and school districts, but principals are increasingly expected to make the short- and long-term decisions about the business aspects of the schools they head. In response to this shift, some new preparation programs are focusing heavily on the business and management side of running a school.

In 2008, Rice University, an elite private school with no education department, introduced an MBA program for aspiring school leaders. The program focuses on developing the business skills of principals, while de-emphasizing the role of principal as instructional leader. The directors of the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP) are explicit about thinking of principals as CEOs. Being a good principal means being a good manager -- of employees, data, and financials.

According to REEP, it also means bringing new ideas to the field of education. Traditional preparation programs focus on developing instructional leaders who are well-versed in education theory and history, like super-teachers who can help their faculty develop as educational professionals. In contrast, programs like REEP seek to develop leaders who challenge accepted education theory and are willing to try new approaches to get better results.

I respect the efforts of programs like REEP (including the New York City Leadership Academy) to prepare principals for a job that increasingly requires business management skills. I also agree that the public education world needs big thinkers and innovators to face the challenges of educating an increasingly under-resourced student population to participate in an increasingly technology-driven business world. But I think it is a mistake (and such an easy mistake for people coming from a business paradigm) for the directors of these programs to position themselves as competition for traditional principal preparation programs.

The reality is that today's schools need brilliant instructional leaders, capable of connecting with and supporting students and teachers, and excellent business managers, able to collect, analyze, and utilize data to make decisions about staffing and budgets. I wonder if it's possible, or wise, to expect principals to handle a job that big and varied. According to a 2009 NY Times article on the uncertain success of the NYC Leadership academy, Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of the only independent study of the Academy so far, has her doubts. The article quotes Schwartz saying, "It may be that it's an impossible job.... You're asking for things that don't often come in the same person."

Next Monday is Independence Day; tune in for Celebrating independence, Ed Nerd style.