This meme was sent by Teacher in a Strange Land – what is it that I really want policy makers to know before they draft legislation that impacts my classroom?
- My students are not trends, statistics, numbers, or stereotypes. They are complex human beings, each with their own story that includes unique and special circumstances that contribute to their performance in school and their ability to achieve.
- Likewise, I am not a machine that can spew out canned curriculum at a set pace. I am a Professional , dedicated, heart and soul, to educating our youth and making this world a little bit more understandable to them. In order to do that, I have to know them, their abilities, and their interests.
- Punishing “low-performing schools” is not going to help them achieve at a higher level. Financially rewarding high-performing schools is simply helping the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
- One of the prime factors in failing schools is almost never addressed – transience and absenteeism. More focus needs to be put on helping the transient population become more stable and getting kids to school on a regular basis. The schools that end up having to account for these kids at WASL time (when they frequentloy don’t even show up for the test) should be given special consideration.
- Educational policy should be written by educators who understand all of the above (and everything else that will come as a response to this meme) – not by legislators whose main experience in public education was the thirteen years they spent from kindergarten through their senior year.
Additionally….and what great timing, this excerpt just appeared in my email box and I started reading the document the NBCTs prescribed (medical term on purpose).
What I like best about how this was written up is that there was a problem in education so “they” went to the best of the best teachers for the solution. To me, that just makes sense. Ask a doctor how best to give medical advice. Ask a teacher how best to improve struggling schools. Ask a cook how best to create meringue (something I cannot make or spell correctly–except here, since I looked it up).
Bob, Kim, Nancy, Et al, I appreciate the wonderful dialogue we have going. I value your insight and your critical thoughts. This is how we educate each other and create a better educational system because it is, after all, all about the students.
Here is the excerpt from my email from Ms. Harmon:
Recruiting and retaining good teachers for high-needs schools may be the biggest problem facing America’s education policy makers. Education has tried a range of incentives to entice teachers to take challenging assignments but in a recent article Staffing High-Needs Schools: Insights from the Nation’s Best Teachers, author Barnett Berry goes straight to the source for ideas on how to tackle this situation.
The Center for Teaching Quality held state policy summits involving more than 1,700 National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) from North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Washington to examine recruitment and retention research. Washington’s summit in October 2006 was co-hosted by CSTP, WEA and OSPI. Read Washington’s summit report at:
cstp-wa.org/Navigational/Teacherleadership/NBCT_policy_summit/policy.htm
Across the five states the NBCTs laid out a comprehensive list of 142 specific policy recommendations that, if implemented, they believe would significantly alleviate the nation’s problems in staffing high-needs schools. The report organizes them into the following five major recommendations:
1. Transform the teaching and learning conditions in high-needs schools.
2. Prepare and support teachers for the specific challenges posed by working in high-needs schools.
3. Recruit and develop administrators who can draw on the expertise of specially prepared teacher leaders.
4. Create a menu of recruitment incentives, but focus on growing teacher expertise within high-needs schools.
5. Build awareness among policy makers, practitioners, and members of the public about the importance of National Board Certification for high-needs schools.
NBCTs believe that the bulk of incentives should focus on growing accomplished teachers from within high-needs schools. Salary incentives alone will not be enough to encourage accomplished teachers to move to or remain in dysfunctional schools. .
[Bob, you stated] External validity, Travis, is a fact of life in medical and legal professions
True, to a point, and to a point less than that in education. A great number of my friends, by some twist in life have jobs in medicine or law. The hospital at which my wife works, the doctors, my friends, create a doctor’s group and this group sets what happens in their ER, the pay and the schedules for the doctors, even the classes that they take. For example, inapsine, a medicine used, apparently more frequently on the west coast then the east some 6 years ago, was removed from this particular ER because this one doctor did some research and found a better one for the purpose with fewer side effects (inapsine has many side effects). He decided the drug was not good for the ER so he and the doctor group restructured their own professional setting to suit the needs that they felt were best.
Let’s look at this in a shorter version: a professional decides what is best for his/her professional setting and then makes the change without any hassle, because, indeed, they are the professional of the profession and for someone else, say, outside the profession, to make a statement on how the profession should be run would be ridiculous.
Now, do not get me wrong. I am not trying to set up a negative tone here. However, I think there is a strong difference in how teachers interact with their profession and doctors.
I was a painter for 10 years and when I know something needed to be changed, or a system was better, or a product superior, I brought it up to the group or just changed it. In teaching, I am told what to teach (curriculum), how to teach it (use these dittos and make sure you are on page 50 by winter break), and why (state assessments).
This is not good for education. If you get anything from this meme, please let it be that the profession of teaching needs some revision in who runs it and how it runs.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks, Nancy, for clarifying your point.
In trying to find some common ground, Bob, I went to your web site and found the following paragraph:
“I have more confidence as a teacher in objective, experimental, empirical, behavioral research results than from anecdotes and school program evaluation reports. Yet, results from any of these strategies yield more confidence than from personal experience and other forms of non-objective data.”
I am also a big data collector. I sort and organize every single bit of data I can grab to try and understand my kids more holistically. However, if I leave out the anecdotal information, all I have are trends, which might “honor the duty” of the legislators that I might or might not have “hired” by casting my vote, but definitely honors the personal and intimate nature of the relationship that I try to build with the kids in my classroom. Like with the whole language vs. phonics debate, I don’t understand why it has to be one or the other. Why can’t we consider both? I certainly don’t want to eliminate the generalizations that the legislators work with, but the deeper view I have of students as individuals should also be taken into consideration. All I ask is that teachers are involved in the writing of the policies that impact what happens in our classrooms.
Hospital administrators might not be doctors, but while they have a say in how a hospital is run, they certainly don’t tell doctors how to practice medicine.
Yes, I agree, Nancy, if you mean that policy makers hire us to solve problems they think we should address, even when some of us don’t honor their duty.
Well, there’s customer satisfaction and there’s data gathering to inform practice–both of which are present in all the professions. Perhaps what Travis and Kim are referring to is having someone with little knowledge of working conditions or best practice control your profession.
Good teachers and schools certainly use valid and standardized measures to assess their own practice. I do agree with Kim that having legislators who want to micromanage school effectiveness based on their own paltry experience is annoying, and not particularly helpful. In one state, a legislator wanted to reorganize the entire social studies curriculum, moving the study of Economics down into the first grade (from the 4th grade). First grade teachers made a case for the lack of developmental readiness of your average six-year old to mentally deconstruct economic systems. The legislator kept saying “Can’t you just start a school store?” When they tried to teach it, the first graders didn’t, in fact, “get it.” Because they weren’t ready. They’re re-organizing. Again.
External validity, Travis, is a fact of life in medical and legal professions, just as it is in our occupation of school teaching.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh, I like #5. Why is it that we (teachers) allow other people to make up the system in which we work? Sure, policymakers are to blame, but so are teachers. Having one’s work guided by people outside of the work is not present in the medical and legal professions. Why do we allow it in education?