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

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.

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.

Take me to your leader

We suffer here in the United States, particularly in New York, from a crisis in educational leadership. Though there are plenty of examples of individual teachers and principals succeeding, at every level we find many more people in positions of leadership who are unable to lead. Are our institutions wholly corrupt and our leaders essentially unethical or personally incompetent? I doubt it. The bigger problem (and thank goodness, because it's a problem we can tackle) is leaders who are woefully under-prepared.

I recently listened to a TED Talk by Patrick Awuah on educating leaders. As Mr. Awuah spoke about education and leadership in Ghana, I kept seeing parallels to our own situation here in NYC: horrifying disorganization; leaders making "breathtakingly bad decisions"; leaders who are more in touch with a sense of entitlement than any real sense of responsibility. Mr. Awuah states again and again that "leadership matters." And it does.

In education, leadership matters at every level. Classroom teachers must be effective leaders for their students. Increasingly, teachers in special education must also lead teams of classroom assistants who are also expected to lead the students in their charge. Within the school, teacher coaches and mentors must lead their peers in evaluating and improving classroom practices. Yet traditional preparation programs for assistants, teachers, and mentors provide little or no training in leadership development.

Principals' training programs are often the first place educators encounter meaningful coursework and instruction on what it means to be a effective leader and how to go about being one. Yet there is serious debate about the best structure and most important priorities for principals' training programs. On Friday, we will examine the merits of several different programs and their approaches to leadership training for principals.

Tune in next time for: Raise up your staff, part 1