Unacceptable

Today I'd like to introduce you to John Kuhn, superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District in North Texas. Kuhn is a life-long advocate of public education and public accountability. This weekend, at the National Save Our Schools Rally in Washington DC, he spoke passionately about the vital need for great public schools, the critical importance of a no-excuses public attitude toward educating America's kids, and what it will really take to create the equitable education system our great country deserves. For now, as we work toward those goals, Kuhn says, "I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children [private schools] will not educate.... I am unacceptable and proud of it!"

Make no mistake: unacceptable as he is according to current educator grading methods, Kuhn is not an apologist for bad teaching; he is only asking for appropriate systems of evaluation. In April, Kuhn appealed to his state legislature for a two-year moratorium on high-stakes testing. When one representative asked Kuhn why he thought teachers shouldn't be graded, he wasn't prepared with his answer. However, he recognized that this is a question that keeps coming up for educators, and being unprepared to answer makes us look, in his words, "like [we] are just whiners who don't want to be held accountable at all." So he thought about it and developed an articulation, not of why teachers shouldn't be graded, but of how the state has become a bad teacher and, thus, an irresponsible grader.

His emphatic and empathetic response to this question provides a useful starting point for all of us who believe teachers should be graded, but fairly. It's only a starting point, as some folks pointed out in the comments. It is up to the rest of us to develop our own articulations of how to create better forms of teacher accountability, how to fairly evaluate teachers and push them toward achieving greatness. Until we put meaningful teacher evaluation, support, and development systems in place, we must join Kuhn in proudly bearing the label of unacceptable.

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.