Category Archives: Education Policy

If McCleary Doesn’t Motivate the Legislature, What Will?

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

It is now March of 2016, and all we have is a plan to make a plan.

Let’s look back at the timeline (Source).

It was January of 2007 when the state was first sued for not meeting its constitutional duty to adequately fund public schools.

In February of 2010, the King County Superior Court upheld the original ruling, in favor of McCleary et al.

January 2012, and the State Supreme Court upheld the King County Superior Court’s ruling.

In December of 2012, the state’s report to the court was deemed inadequate: the state was failing to fulfill the conditions of the ruling.

Continue reading →

Making Student Growth Matter

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Assessment, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

I am no fan of standardized testing, so one of the greatest strengths of our teacher evaluation system in Washington state is that it empowers teachers to use classroom-based assessments (and data) to illustrate how they are fostering growth in students’ knowledge and skills. Closer to the kid always is the way to go, so using an assessment I designed or chose with my learners in mind will always (for me) trump using a corporate product, no matter how “standards aligned” it might claim to be.

One problem that I am seeing throughout my district and in other districts whose staff I support through WEA is that with all the many moving parts of teaching, student growth examination often ends of falling into the realm of “whatever is easiest to count.” Further, as I engage in deeper conversations with teachers who go this route, the whole student growth process becomes an exercise in compliance and thus a box to be checked.

When this occurs, we’re letting ourselves choose to waste our own time.

I have worked with teachers for several years now to design and implement student growth goals, and some patterns are starting to emerge:

What teachers are doing that works: Continue reading →

Washington’s Retired Teachers as Substitutes Bill

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Education Policy

Last IMG_0670week I had 42 students in my classroom.

The teacher next door called in sick; so did the teacher down the hall. Unfortunately, there were no available substitutes. We solved the dilemma by dividing the students from the two teacher-less classrooms among four other, nearby classrooms.

The result was six classes of students crammed into four classrooms.

The problem, besides the fact that our classrooms were extremely overcrowded and under-furnished, is that teachers within a grade-level team aren’t exactly at the same place in the curriculum. Thus, it wasn’t feasibly for any of us to simply push ahead with what we had planned for the day. I ended up doing an easy-to-prepare craft activity. (See figure A)

The kids loved it but I didn’t. I can’t stand wasted time and there was a lot of it. Basically we had close to 200 students doing busy-work for most of a day. That’s a lot of wasted time.

Like many states, Washington has a teacher shortage. And the leading edge of that shortage is the substitute pool. Those substitutes who have been looking for full-time employment now have it, and the remaining subs are usually booked days in advance.

The underlying problem is that there just aren’t as many people going into education as there used to be. The reasons behind this problem are legion. But it essentially boils down to the fact that teaching just isn’t the attractive career choice it once was.

I’m not exactly sure how we solve that problem in the long-term, but it’ll probably involve money.

But in the meantime, we’ve got a crisis on our hands. Like it or not, teachers can’t always be in their classrooms. They get sick, their spouses get sick, their kids get sick, their parents get sick, they have meetings, they have professional development and sometimes they just take the day off. Most teachers average about ten days out of the classroom each year, and right now the substitute pool just isn’t deep enough.

One way to solve the problem is to make it easier for retired teachers to work as substitutes. Many schools – like mine – have a recently retired teacher who’s not quite ready to hang it up entirely and becomes the “house sub.” We have Colleen. Colleen knows the faculty, knows the kids and knows the routine. She’s the perfect sub.

The problem is, Colleen can’t work as many days as we want her. That’s because there’s a policy restricting the amount of time retired teachers can work without compromising their pension benefits.

The good news is that there’s a bill in Olympia to address this. HB 1737 will let the Colleens in our state work as a substitute for up to 630 hours per school year without losing their pension.

Will it solve the problem? No. But it’ll help. It’ll let us use recently retired teachers as substitutes until we get through the current substitute crisis.

And it’ll keep me from having 42 students in my classroom.

Washington State’s Cursive Bill

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Education Policy, Elementary, Uncategorized

roachSenator Pam Roach introduced a bill last week in Olympia that would require schools to teach cursive writing. According to her, reading and writing in cursive is “part of being an American.” I don’t know about that, but as a third and fourth grade teacher with over thirty years’ experience, I do know a lot about cursive writing.

And what I know tells me that this bill is doomed. At least I hope it is. Continue reading →

ESSA and Gifted Education

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Education Policy, Professional Development

For my entire career in education—and I started teaching in 1977—the federal government limited its involvement in gifted education to Javits grants, investing millions of dollars over the decades in scientifically-based research into gifted education.

Javits grants have not gone away. But the federal government has finally moved beyond Javits grants in addressing the needs of gifted students in America. I am thrilled that directives regarding gifted and talented students are peppered throughout the Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA).

The overarching goal of the ESSA is “to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education.” The law requires that “each local educational agency will monitor students’ progress in meeting the challenging State academic standards by … developing and implementing a well-rounded program of instruction to meet the academic needs of all students” (page 134, lines 10-22, emphasis mine).

In the past, states and districts reported data for students performing at the proficient level and below. Now they must also provide data for students performing at advanced levels. That PLC question 4 might look a lot more important to school and district administrators when the high scores are disaggregated out!

The feds know their requirements are going to cost money, so for the first time they say districts (“local educational agencies”) may use Title I funds to “assist schools in identifying and serving gifted and talented students” (page 138, lines 17-18, emphasis mine). One huge impact that funding could have is allowing districts to employ universal screening for gifted and talented programs, which we do at my district in second grade and which can help overcome the “gifted gap” among racial groups (see article).

Districts applying for Title II professional development funds must supply “a description of how the State educational agency will improve the skills of teachers, principals, or other school leaders in order to enable them

  • to identify students with specific learning needs, particularly children with disabilities, English learners, students who are gifted and talented, and students with low literacy levels, and
  • provide instruction based on the needs of such students” (page 328, lines 9-17, bullets mine).

In that professional development, districts are to provide “training to support the identification of students who are gifted and talented, including high-ability students who have not been formally identified for gifted education services, and implementing instructional practices that support the education of such students, such as:

  • early entrance to kindergarten;
  • enrichment, acceleration, and curriculum compacting activities; and
  • dual or concurrent enrollment programs in secondary school and postsecondary education” (page 343, lines 1-13).

Let’s look at the kinds of practices the feds recommend, starting with early entrance. At a Washington Association of Educators of Talented and Gifted (WAETAG) conference years ago, I met a parent who came to get advice about her four-year-old son. He was auditing courses at the university where her husband was a professor. She said she didn’t want to enroll him and make him a media sensation, but those classes were the only places where he got his intellectual needs met.

I asked where they lived and told her they might want to consider moving since there were about five schools in the country with elementary programs for the severely and profoundly gifted. She said if those schools existed, then moving made sense. “After all, his little brother? He’s even smarter.”

Some students need to start school before five years old.

When you think of enrichment activities, don’t be limited by suggestions in trade books. Gifted students crave novelty—they find learning brand new information and skills exciting. My lesson comparing causes of World Wars 1 and 2 went well over an hour, and when I finally put a stop to it, my students objected vehemently. “No!” they howled. “Don’t stop! Keep going!” Why? Depth and richness of information. The students were building connections. I was helping them make sense of the world.

There is more research in the literature supporting acceleration than any other intervention for gifted. My student who is currently triple-accelerated in math (my fourth grader in seventh grade math) is one of the best students in his math group. He could probably move up another grade level, but then he’d be working on his own, and his mom and I decided we’d keep him in this group this year. He’s happy there.

Curriculum compacting has been around for decades. My high school teachers did it in the 1960s. My sophomore year advanced placement English teacher gave our class the end-of-the-year exam at the beginning of the year. After he graded it, he told us, “You know most of the stuff on the test except you are shaky on punctuation, and you really don’t understand commas.” So we spent a month learning punctuation. Three weeks of that was commas. At the end of September we took the test again and did fine. Then we had the rest of the year to do the actual work of the class—learning public speaking. It’s a time-tested idea, which is probably why it’s on the list of recommended practices.

As for dual or concurrent enrollment programs, we do well. In Washington we have both AP and Running Start. But, in my humble opinion, we ought to be open, in a similar way, to students taking a three-year middle school program in two years. Or taking middle school and high school classes at the same time. Those options would certainly be allowed, and I think encouraged, under the ESSA.

The Javits grants studied gifted students for generations and decided that gifted students can be identified, they have educational needs, and that those needs can be met through several well-documented strategies. Now the ESSA is saying, “Go meet those needs. Here are some excellent ways to do it. And you can use federal money to help!” If your district needs help finding Highly Capable professional development specialists, go to the WAETAG site.

Classroom Management and the Teacher Shortage

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Social Issues

Of the lessons I learned about classroom behavior management over the years, the one that has had the greatest payoff is my realization that the behavior a student presents is less important to address than the conditions which precipitate that behavior.

In other words, if Johnny is acting out in class all the time, I could perpetually redirect him, eventually punish him, and finally succeed in getting him to be quiet. A better approach, however, would be to deeply consider what conditions are causing Johnny to act out all the time, and then address those conditions, or help Johnny be better at coping with those conditions.

Treating the action has the potential to shut Johnny down (which in the moment, may appear to be the goal). Treating the conditions helps create the new conditions wherein Johnny might succeed.

When I read recently that during a work session our legislature had been briefed on the growing teacher shortage state- and nation-wide, which included discussion about promising practices in recruiting and training new teachers, I immediately thought of classroom management.

Disturbingly, this discussion referenced ways to “make it easier” for people to get on the pathway toward becoming a teacher. (Seriously, it is not that hard to become a teacher when we think of “become” as “get a job as.” It’s just that no one in their right mind wants to do it anymore. Let’s pause and think about the consequences of easier paths to teaching for a second: If we draw a pool of applicants who make their decision to become teachers because it was easy to become a teacher, what will happen when they face the incredibly hard work of actual teaching?)

Making it easier for people to become teachers doesn’t solve the problem.

Providing alternative pathways to certification doesn’t solve the problem.

Districts actively recruiting undergrads or setting up university partnerships doesn’t solve the problem.

We need to directly and boldly address the conditions that have created turnover and the teacher shortage. If we do not, the problem will not go away: Instead, we will perpetually rotate through failed solutions, always blaming the solution for being the wrong answer when in reality we’re answering the wrong question.

Here is what I believe has created the teacher turnover and teacher shortage problem. Unless these get fixed, it won’t matter how we recruit, how easy we make it to get a teaching license, or what partnerships schools and universities try to cultivate.

Our real problems: Continue reading →

Understanding the Frederich case

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear Frederich v. California Teachers Association, on appeal from the Ninth Circuit, I knew immediately that teacher’s unions would come under fire by the media and other political pundits who have, so often, found disdain for the role of public sector unions in the workplace.  The Court heard arguments in the case yesterday and we can expect the Court to provide its decision by the end of June, when it ends its annual session.  

 

At stake is the ability for a union to prevent the free rider problem.  The free rider problem occurs when non union members, who do not pay membership fees/dues, receive the same benefits/incentives as union members.  Because teacher’s unions work to improve working conditions for all teachers, not just their members, it is plausible that teachers in Washington would seek to change their status as union members to agency fee payers.  Being an agency fee payer means that the teacher pays a fee to the local union for the union to negotiate the local collective bargaining agreement (CBA) from which the agency fee payer, a non member, also benefits.  If the Court strikes down the right of a union to collect agency fees for the work that the union does for the benefit of all of teachers, not just members, non members are able to “ride for free” on the coattails of union members.  Frederich asserts that all union work is political and that her union advocates for issues/areas that she disagrees with, asserting that the union leverages increased salaries against classroom size (see the article from NPR on January 11, 2016).   Although the state of California has come down on the side of the California Teachers Association, recognizing them as a bargaining agent for the 325,000 certificated employees in the state, the role of public sector unions is now in the balance if the Supreme Court sides with Frederich.

 

I’ve been the co-president of my local association for the past nine years.  I’ve bargained three contracts, soon to bargain my fourth, and I’ve had the pleasure of working to improve the conditions for the teachers in my district.  Over the past three contracts, our teachers have earned access to fifteen days of extra pay for the work that they do outside of contract hours.  Our teachers have seen increased dollars allocated towards skyrocketing health care costs and more money placed into their professional development, so that they may seek further education that benefits their students.  Because of our union’s work, our school district pays all of the fees associated with National Board Certification and has worked with our district to establish an OSPI approved cohort.  We have worked to advocate for smaller classroom sizes, increased stipends, and more paraeducators for our students and our teachers.  All teachers, regardless of whether they are members or agency fee payers benefit.  Most of the work that I do as co-president benefits all teachers, not just our members.  In addition, our union benefits our school community.  We provide three scholarships to graduating high school students, regardless of whether the student’s parent is an affiliated member with the union.  For our members, we provide three scholarships to teachers who want to further their education.  We work to be good stewards of fees, returning them to our members in the form of classroom grants for supplies and materials that go directly in the hands of the students.  If Frederich wins, fewer teachers will likely join the union and since the union cannot collect agency fees, fewer funds will be available to support the work of the union. Teachers who have been outliers to union activity will not have to support the work of the union to negotiate the contract and advocate for student and teacher needs.
I am proud of the union work that I do and of my union here in Washington.  We work hard to advocate for student needs which includes providing them with the best quality education possible.  I shudder to think what the state legislature, which has just recently come back into session, thinks is the best quality education.  Frederich has serious ramifications nationwide but let us not look past the potential consequences in our state.  With our legislature in contempt of the Supreme Court, now is the time for more advocacy at the state level, not less.  Teachers need their union to serve as one united voice to speak for our practice.  Our union advocates for our students by supporting reduced class sizes, reducing testing mandates, and bringing awareness to the social justice issues that our students face.  The Court’s decision will surely impact the work of our local and state union to do the advocacy work that our students and teachers need them to do.

ESSA: A New Direction? (Part Two)

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

Last Friday I shared some of my evolving thinking around the No Child Left Behind replacement act, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Certainly there are valid criticisms of the law as written, but that doesn’t change this first key fact:

When Our State Shifts Policy, Teacher Voice Will Be Key
Believe it or not, Washington state has done an increasingly better job of working with real, live, practicing teachers for designing and implementing broad education policy. I know because as a practicing teacher, I saw it happen and participated in it…and saw how teacher input did actually shape policy decisions. McCleary and that mess is a different can of worms.

While our Washington might stay the course in many ways (we did, after all, hold our ground about not requiring the use of standardized test scores for teacher evaluation, and the feds punished us by revoking our NCLB waiver…and yes, we were the only state to have our waiver revoked), there will certainly be policy decisions for us to consider and ensure teacher voice around:

    • Standards: Let’s not toss babies with bathwater. Many folks in our state have issues with the Common Core, so this may be an opportunity to make revisions to our standards. However, not everything in the Common Core is inherently bad; some of us actually like the standards. The question is then about compromise and agreements about how standards should be used to improve student learning in the state of Washington…and what role teacher autonomy can and should play in this.
    • Testing: I’m all for streamlining an assessment system. We have to always return to this question when it comes to testing and data: What are we going to do with the test data? I love that our evaluation law requires student growth that can be shown using classroom-based and teacher-designed assessments: That policy is keeping “data” close to where it can be used for making decisions about student learning. Since ESSA still requires some form of standardized testing, what will that look like in Washington and how can we guarantee that testing information is used appropriately? Here’s a crazy thought, not a policy proposal, but worth a ponder nonetheless: howsabout we test in September, not to evaluate “how we did,” but to give clarity about “what we need to do”?
    • Accountability: Man I hate that word. The question we need to ask instead is this: How will we know that state policies and district implementation are in concert to positively impact student learning?
    • Intervention: This is where I am (perhaps naively) the most optimistic. I am fundamentally opposed to the premise that struggling schools deserve sanctions, punishment, and re-organization. More than anything else, struggling schools deserve more resources, more stability, and more support. How can we create a system where, when a school ends up performing at the “bottom,” the prospect of state intervention is a welcome relief, not a source of fear?

And Teacher Leadership?
Title II of the law, which existed previously to support teacher, preparation, training and recruitment, now more explicitly opens the door for funding related to teacher leadership roles and positions. Thus, states and districts seem to have a bit more room to fund teacher leadership (compensate teachers in teacher-leadership roles) under Title II grants. I’m very much a policy novice, so I don’t know what sorts of changes in practice this language change will precipitate. However, given the Department of Education’s Teach To Lead initiative and the nationwide conversation around teacher leadership, it seems to be one more positive step toward providing resources to support engaging teachers in leadership and systems influence.

Overall, ESSA is certainly a better policy than NCLB. True, it’d be hard to craft something worse. Will ESSA be the magic wand that fixes everything by next September? No, of course not, but sadly this expectation will certainly lead some, as soon as next September, to proclaim it a failure.

Even though teachers have the busy day-to-day work of supporting students, it is incumbent upon us to keep our ears up, and speak up, as the discussion about ESSA continues. Here in our state, I am confident that we will be offered opportunities to shape the direction we go with our new apparent autonomy: we need to be ready to respond to that call.

ESSA: A New Direction? (Part One)

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

Maybe, maybe not.

I’ve been reading quite a few very divergent opinion pieces and policy summaries about the No Child Left Behind replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act. I’ll be the first to admit that my first impressions were overwhelmingly positive, perhaps because I am easily influenced by syntactical shifts such as moving from the presumption of deficiency (We are leaving kids behind!) to the presumption of potential (All student can succeed!). I’m an advertiser’s dream.

Critics of ESSA are starting to emerge, of course, with argument ranging from the concern that Common Core is merely ‘not required’ as opposed to ‘forbidden, dismantled, and burned in effigy,’ to the reality that the amount of federally required testing hasn’t actually changed, despite all the hoopla. (One source points out that while states are given more autonomy and control under ESSA, the over-testing was actually the result of state and local policies, not federal policies.)

One of the most convincing critiques of ESSA has less to do with its content and more to do with its use as a political and rhetorical tool. Both Democrats and Republicans stand to benefit from playing this up as a “bipartisan” agreement. Some of the language is essentially moot: In the cases of at least 40 states, NCLB waivers granted states the same supposed autonomy as they will gain under ESSA; Similarly, Obama’s call for a cap on testing (that it take up no more than 2% of instructional time) sounded great in theory, but data suggests that most schools are already under that 2% cap based on time required for SBAC and PARCC assessments.

The shift of power to states is also receiving criticism, with one point being that states still must submit plans to the federal government for review and approval. I get the concern behind this, but the law also guarantees a hearing for states whose plans are denied. It’s imperfect, but in an accountability-addicted system like we have had for the last twelve years, this is a reasonable “stepping down” of dosage.

How States Can Really Screw This Up:
First and foremost, for states who have been wrestling for more autonomy and freedom from the burdensome yoke of Common Core Standards, I hope the baby doesn’t go out with the bathwater when it comes to standards. Standards in and of themselves are not evil, and like I’ve said many times, I’m not married to Common Core: I taught to standards before under a different name, and should CCSS be tossed, there’d be some sort of system of standards that would replace it. As a high school English teacher, the Common Core didn’t rock my world in the way it apparently did at other levels where concerns about developmental appropriateness do deserve rational examination and discourse. ESSA opens the door for revision at the state level, if nothing else.

What I’d hate to see is an unnecessary investment in inventing another wheel: New standards just so we can avoid calling them Common Core and escape the political public-relations nightmare whose symptoms include asinine Facebook posts about Common Core Sex Ed.

Another way to screw this up is for states to make the same mistakes so central to No Child Left Behind: Falling into the trap of designing the standards or assessment system that seems “easiest to administer” rather than the system that actually improves student learning. This should be the greatest lesson for states from the failure of NCLB: Differentiation is key. From a broad systems perspective, differentiation is hard (heck, it’s hard in the classroom), and for “accountability” purposes, differentiation is difficult to administer. Which leads me to my next thought:

This: Let Us Abolish the Cult of Accountability
I’m not saying schools or teachers shouldn’t be “held accountable,” but a system focused on accountability tends to oversimplify large and complex problems. (Take a read about “Accountabalism” and how it destroys the very systems it attempts to fix.)

I’d love a six-year moratorium on all use of the word “accountability.” Instead, let’s get clearer on what we’re actually talking about. Are we talking about improving test scores? Then let’s talk about that, not “accountability.” Are we talking about measuring teacher impact on student learning? Then there’s our language, not “accountability.” Accountability has come to imply the assumption of imminent failure if accountability controls are not in place. That schools are failing is an assumption we need to stop permitting in dialogue around public education.

In a couple of days, I’ll be posting Part Two of my thinking: What this all means for teacher voice and teacher leadership…particularly since teacher leadership is explicitly called out in the text of the law.

 

Nation’s Teachers (Under) React to ESSA

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Education Policy

By Tom510_1leopard

For thirteen long years the country endured a law that very few supported. A law that spawned malaise, demoralization and corruption. A law that everyone knew wasn’t working and had to be changed. And when it finally died, a nation rejoiced.

I’m referring, of course, of Prohibition. If I was referring to No Child Left Behind, the last word of that paragraph would have been “yawned.”

Why is it that last week’s re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which is now called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) barely caused a stir? Even in faculty rooms?! The law was passed on Wednesday, signed on Thursday, and not a word was spoken at my school until Friday, when our principal spent about two minutes explaining how our school was no long “failing.” And even then, no one in the room could correctly name the new law.

Why the indifference?

Is it because teachers are too busy to even know about this news? Could be. Teachers do work hard, and the work is such that we don’t really have a chance to tune in to the news during the day. And when we get home, our evenings are pretty much filled with taking care of our own families and planning for the next day.

Or is it because teachers are too cynical to really care? After thirteen years under NCLB, it’s hard to take federal education policy seriously. After all, we were basically given a legislative mandate to make every child hit grade level; an arbitrarily imagined level that roughly corresponds to “average.” Which essentially means that we had twelve years to make sure that every kid in the country is at or above average. It was hard to take that seriously.

I think it’s both of those and then some. Consider this: On Wednesday, while the law was being passed, I spent the morning getting fourth graders to apply close reading strategies to complex word problems; helping them translate text into situation equations, which could then be solved. With a labelled answer. I spent the afternoon getting those same fourth graders to summarize realistic fiction by mentioning the setting, main characters and major plot points. And in between I was finalizing the final roster for our first “Homework Club” where a handful of local high school honor students work with the lowest 5% of our student population in my classroom after school.

There is an ironic disconnect between federal education policy and what’s happening in schools. Ironic, because most of us are already doing – and have been doing – exactly what federal policy is trying to get us to do: teaching quality lessons and providing remediation for those students who need it.

ESSA is a big deal. And it’s a huge improvement over what it replaced. A huge improvement, in that it represents a transfer of control from the federal to the state level.

 

But because of the damage done to the relationship between the Department of Education and classroom teachers, it might be awhile before teachers bother to notice.