Education Improvement Myths that Need to Die

Do you read Edutopia? I love that George Luca's educational foundation looks for evidence-based interventions and works hard to spread those ideas around. A couple of weeks ago, Mark Phillips published a review of 50 Myths that Threaten America's Public Schools. Phillips highlighted the eight myths that he thinks are most damaging, but he didn't link to the relevant research.

I hope every policy reads the book, but for those of you with a little less time to devote to ed policy reading, I thought I'd share some of the compelling work out there that shows maybe we're not focusing on the interventions that will help the most disadvantaged students.

Myth #1 - Teachers are the most important factor in student learning. Socioeconomic status and parents' education level actually play much bigger roles in student learning.

Myth #2 - Homework boosts student achievement. Research on homework actually tends to be pretty mixed. This coming year, I'm going to try to give students homework designed to help them develop a personal reading practice. I'm interested to see how that goes.

Myth #3 - Class size does not matter. This myth really gets me as I've seen my caseload increase year after year. This increase diminishes my ability to differentiate, and class size could also have an effect on students' wage potential.

Myth #4 - A successful program works everywhere. I think we've seen this not work in nearly every charter model that has yet to be brought to scale. Humans are a difficult variable to control.

Myth #5 - Zero tolerance policies are making schools safer. Researchers have been finding for a long time that automatic suspensions or expulsions don't do much to make schools safer. They also do plenty to increase socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps.

Myth #6 - Money doesn't matter. This did get linked in the Edutopia piece and you should watch it. And read pretty much everything by Linda Darling-Hammond you can find.

Myth #7 - College admissions are meritocratic. Inside Higher Ed found differently when they surveyed college admissions directors in 2011.

Myth #8 - Merit pay for teachers works. Research in both Tennessee and New York City suggests paying teachers to improve students' test taking skills rather than focus on authentic learning have done little to improve either.

Of course, a lot of these studies are based on what a mentor teacher of mine calls the "McDonald's of testing" -- standardized tests that are cheap, quick, and not healthy at all. I'm still trying to figure out how we can get divisions and states to adopt learning measures that are more useful and statistically less noisy. But that's a post for another day.

The Best Three Reasons to Be a Teacher?

I recently heard the phrase "There are three good reasons to be a teacher: June, July, and August." I've heard the sentiment, if not the exact words, before, and I still get just as angry.

Most school divisions around here will end in mid- to late June with teachers reporting back in early August. So, I guess that just leaves us with July.

Some teachers quantify their "earned" summer vacation by pointing out that we work an average of fifty-three hours of week. If you're contracted for thirty-five hours as many teachers are, that's 576 hours we're working past our contracts a year. Those hours equal over eighty-two additional teaching days.

But I think we're not acknowledging something important when we talk about teachers' summer vacations.  I think of a vacation as something I can take or do while still getting paid. As a teacher, however, during summer break, I've essentially been laid off and have chosen to split my paychecks from the academic year up into small enough chunks that I can continue to eat and pay my student loans.

What's the answer to this problem of de-professionalization? Year-round schools (and if that's the case, when do we have the chance to recharge, plan, and attend classes)? Contracts that reflect the time most teachers put into their classrooms? Summer work relating to policy and curriculum?

I haven't found the answer yet, but I know that I'm a teacher no matter the season. 

Why We Don't Need Teacher Appreciation Week

While the PTO breakfast, the Facebook posts, and the e-mails lauding teachers are sincere and heartfelt this week, they all ring a little hollow as I look at my stressed-out students and our overworked school psychologist who bounces between three buildings trying to meet the mental health needs of over 1400 students -- needs that must be met if kids are to thrive in the classroom.

For fifty-one weeks a year, I hear a lot about how teachers are the problem, the school I spent tens of thousands of dollars to go to is garbage (for the record, I felt well-prepared by my program), and tests designed by people who have never worked in the classroom are the best way to monitor student progress and teacher quality. 

We don't need Teacher Appreciation Day. We don't need Teacher Appreciation Week. If we valued the teaching profession the way our kids and country need us to, people would be aware and appreciative of the teachers working to build knowledge and our economy throughout the year.

Here's my teacher appreciation wish list:

• some type of entrance exam into education school designed by practicing classroom teachers
• a rigorous two-year course of study that includes one thousand hours in the classroom and also courses in classroom organization to help teachers develop the systems necessary for a smoothly-running classroom
• a wage commiserate with the value we add to the economy 
• a national teacher licensing exam, also designed by practicing teachers, that includes plenty of emphasis on using understandings of cognitive development in the classroom
• smaller caseloads so teachers can make meaningful impacts in kids' lives by building relationships
• a decreased emphasis on statistically noisy, poorly-designed standardized tests and an increased emphasis on project-based learning designed and evaluated by master teachers
• room to grow professionally without permanently leaving the classroom. 

I have a lot of other wishes for making meaningful changes to public education. In fact, I keep a running list. But during this teacher appreciation week, I think the list above wouldn't be a bad start. 

The Wal-Marting of US Public Schools

Friday's New York Times had an article detailing the amount of money the Walton Family Foundation has given to charter schools in the last decade or so.  The Waltons inherited their money from Sam Walton who started Wal-Mart -- the store that actively seeks to sell you as much cheap junk from China as possible.

I have to admit that I felt my educator's heart sinking as I read the story. I'm not anti-charter. I hope to lead my own school one day, and I applaud American Federation of Teachers Presidnet Albert Shanker's idea of essentially creating a research and development arm of typical public schools. These teacher-led schools would be an environment to try new and innovative approaches to education with a population that was invested enough in school to leave the typical neighborhood school. Teachers at the charter could take what they learned about their interventions back to their colleagues at the neighborhood school and work together to make sure that all public schools in the US supported all students.


Thanks to the foundation run by the family behind Wal-Mart, however, charter schools have lost their original mission. They've become billed as band-aids to our current education "crisis" and replacements for the neighborhood schools that are painted as failing by virtue of test scores that were never designed to measure what we're using them to measure. They also fail to educate students in need of special education skills and one large charter chain recently sought to oust students with high needs from their home school.

The parents in the story seemed caught in between wanting to support their local schools and believing that the local schools couldn't provide what charter schools can -- including better libraries and technology.

But I'm not a parent yet; I'm just a teacher who sees kids labor in a system that works for them sometimes and doesn't work for them others. I think our public schools could use some visioning and some investment in that vision. We'll get nowhere, however, in creating public schools that educate every child in the US to the highest possible expectation if we let the same people who brought us Wal-Mart bring us the next generation of public schools.

Getting to the "Main Event"

Over the weekend, my mentor teacher from my first teaching job posted a link to this blog post. The teacher implores students to realize that the content learned in school is not the "main event." The teacher argues that the social and emotional learning that goes into getting up, getting to class, engaging with the material and others, and getting the work done is the main event of school.

I think I've always believed that. I nodded emphatically in graduate school when we were told we were going out into the world to teach students not content. I've embraced one-on-one conversations with students about how to change their attitude and believe in their ability to meet adversity with grace (instead of the oft used alternatives of yelling or shutting down).

But I'm not sure I've communicated to my students outside of our weekly community meetings why school's main events are about so much more than grades and sitting quietly for forty-five minute stretches. I'm going to share this blog post with them and discuss what it means to not quit and what support they need not to just make it through these last few weeks of school but to thrive in them. I'll report back on what I hear.

One of my teacher friends with whom I shared this link said she planned to edit out the "grow a pair" statement not for it's "colorful" aspect but because she doesn't want students to see success as gendered. I think Ms. C is spot on, and I'll be doing the same.

Education Reading for the Weekend

At the beginning of the year, a student told me that he didn't believe that our public schools are more segregated than they were in the years following Brown. This in-depth article in The Atlantic proves it's true. I wish they'd focus more on the ways in which de facto segregation have affected students in other parts of the country rather than assuming we have a regional problem, but it's an important read nonetheless.

I missed this important debate in the New York Times about parents opting their kids out of testing. I look forward to thinking about the implications of those choices. 

The American Statistical Association came out against the value-added method of evaluating teachers based on their students' test scores on the grounds that the data provided by standardized tests doesn't actually measure teachers' contributions to student learning.

Finally, I got to guest blog at the Curry Blog last week. Thanks, Curry folks!

Have a great weekend! Try not to grade too many papers.

What's the Right Level of Parental Involvement?

In this week's Sunday New York Times, Professor Keith Robinson and Professor Angel Harris examined ways in which parental involvement had the greatest impact on student achievement. Their work defined student achievement as standardized test scores and grades. While I think that our students and policy makers both need a more nuanced understanding of achievement. I haven't figured out exactly how to quantify it (but that's a subject for another post entirely), and there is still much to learn from the data we do have.

Harris and Robinson found that "observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it." The pairs research also suggests that parents had similar levels of involvement regardless of race which can hopefully lay to rest the old canard that some racial groups care more about eduction than others.

So, how should schools engage parents in ways that will help students become successful? Students from all backgrounds often seem to struggle with seeing their thirteen years of public education as a gift and investment in their futures. Parents can provide wisdom and help students develop positive feelings toward school. Parents can also model respect for teachers and their wisdom as professionals who sometimes see sides of kids not on display at home.

Teachers, what are some of the most meaningful parent interactions you've had? Parents, what do you need from schools to be able to support your children? Do you think we'll ever be able to bridge the divide between home and school?