Teaching-- NY Times Article

Here is a fascinating New York Times Article that Uncle John passed along... (with my own opinions italicized at the start)

I find the teaching academy mentioned in the article to be of particular interest. One of the major issues, as I see it, is our failure to invest in education as an investment in our economy. How do you get a top college graduate to choose to be a teacher and not an attorney or business leader when at one you can make $34,000 and at the others you can start at $60,000? How do you keep a teacher invested in teaching?

For me, one of the hardest parts of my jobs is the time commitment to do it well. Essentially, to do it well, you have the 7 hour commitment while students are there and then you have all the time required to prepare for another lesson. I mean, imagine preparing a 7 hour presentation in 40 minutes of prep time. The during-the-day prep time is NOT enough for teachers to actively incorporate best practices and meet the needs of struggling learners. With rare exceptions, I almost always work the 7 hours with the students plus AT LEAST another 2-3 hours per day... so, including work on weekends... I work at least 50 hours a week and could do a MUCH better job if I worked 60 hours a week. Yet, when someone chooses teaching or when you start dating a teacher, you don't think... oh, this person's going to be working 60 hour weeks. A lawyer, doctor, candlestick maker-- sure, you anticipate those late nights. But, our very conception of teachers is that they get lots of vacations.

I think another major issue in schools is discipline. Schools' hands are often tied relative to what consequence can be issued. I'm NOT suggesting we start implementing corporal punishment... but I'm saying that discipline is a major part of the problem. One class of 35 can achieve much more than a class of 20 if the dynamic is right. Students with disciplinary issues can easily monopolize a teacher's time-- in the classroom and outside (for meetings and documentation and interventions). The majority of exemplar schools have found means of sidestepping this. For instance, charter schools, particularly the KIPP schools, are routinely recognized for their miraculous academic gains. However, almost all charter schools can suspend or expel students with significantly shortened due process than is incumbent on public schools. The solution? I wish I knew... My best suggestion at this point is setting up some type of highly structured alternative schools to which repeat disciplinary offenders can be sent with relatively limited delays. Or, perhaps parents could be required to sit with or provide an aide for repeatedly disruptive students... okay, maybe not. This would obviously be aimed at deterring behaviors and raising accountability... not an actual practice. However, we absolutely cannot make the gains we need with disruptive behavior. I'm interested to see the changes that come in the years to come, because there aren't easy answers.

November 20, 2010
Teaching for America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national
security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be
covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department.
President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us
today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been
getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all
fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.

Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4
speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time.
Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more
unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report
by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their
report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in
the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal
record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in
college attainment.

“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added
Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go.
We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the
same stuff and expect different results.”

Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform —
particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the
most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though,
is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?

Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to
thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the
ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.

If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like
Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the
top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from
an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they
recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”

Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points
to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough
County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for
higher pay for the best performers.

“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about
excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and
throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing
students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said,
“we can’t pay you enough.”

That is why Duncan is starting a “national teacher campaign” to recruit new talent. “We
have to systemically create the environment and the incentives where people want to come
into the profession. Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland
— don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And
in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”

Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student
achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and
charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating
it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next
decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and
compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said
Duncan. We have to get this right.

Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National
Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the
profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and
assessment in the 21st century.”

All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who
turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and
elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the
more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that
will truly ensure our national security.