This piece from NBCT Kareen Borders was originally posted on the Ready Washington Coalition’s blog, and available here. It is reposted with the Coalition and the author’s permission.

Why did the states create the Common Core State Standards?  

We are preparing our students to compete in a world that is different than ours, and education needs to be responsive to this.  The bottom line is that my middle school science students need to be ready for college, career and life.  Right now, 80% of entering college freshmen are not prepared academically for first-year courses, according to ACT, and the United States spends an estimated $3 billion a year on college remediation, according to Complete College America. 

Does this mean that as a teacher, I wasn’t doing a good job or didn’t have high goals before? 

Unequivocally, the answer is no.  Teachers have been doing and continue to do a great job.  I see Common Core as an exciting shift that will finally put standards into place that aren’t full of education-ese; standards that will allow me to be innovative in helping my students to reach these goals. Clear goals, rather than long and vague goals about what students need to know and be able to do are long overdue.  And what I especially like: CCSS get teachers out of the test-prep business in their classrooms and frees up teachers to provide opportunities for richer learning and mastery of increasingly difficult problems and texts. So, I can concentrate on the work of preparing my students for college, career, and life.  Will it be hard work?  Yes. Teachers are ready to take on this hard work.  Major shifts in instruction are already happening in thousands of classrooms.

Continue reading →

By Tom

There’s a good reason why they don’t make movies about quiet, level-headed subordination: people would rather watch a group of oppressed college students stand up to authority and go down fighting in a blaze of rowdy mayhem than watch those same kids curb their excesses, buckle down and apply themselves to their studies.

Likewise, when the federal government applies pressure to a state in order to force compliance to an education agenda with which that state disagrees, the natural impulse is to stand up for our integrity and accept whatever consequences might follow.

And that’s exactly what happened in Washington. Arne Duncan followed through on his threat to withdraw our waiver from NCLB because our legislature didn’t mandate the use of standardized test scores in our teacher evaluation system. We stood up to our oppressor and lost. And now we face the consequences.

Here’s what that looks like in my fourth grade classroom. I have a student named Lamar who began the year reading seven words a minute. He struggled with basic addition facts. He had no idea how to write a sentence and his behavior was keeping himself and his classmates from learning.

Lamar now reads 70 words per minute. He can solve long division problems and add fractions. Last week he wrote a story with a credible main character, a clear setting and a cohesive plot. His behavior isn’t perfect, but it no longer compromises his learning.

Although I would love to claim credit for this turnaround, I can’t. Lamar gets thirty minutes of extra help for reading fluency every morning; he meets with a small group for reading comprehension and writing skills; he has a ten-minute meeting every day with a para-educator to go over his behavior and study skills; he meets with a math specialist for 45 minutes every afternoon. In other words, Lamar gets as much support as our school can possibly throw his way.

The reason we’re able to do this is that our school qualifies for Title 1 funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When our state was granted a waiver from NCLB, the previous restrictions for how that money was spent were removed. Consequently, our school was free to spend money on kids like Lamar as we saw fit.

And it’s working.

But now that waiver has been replaced and Title 1 money comes with a lot of strings. Instead of paying for learning support and para-educator time, we now have to spend part of that money for teacher training and private tutoring. With all due respect to teacher trainers and private tutors, I doubt Lamar will benefit from either one as much as he’s benefiting from his current program.

I like standing up to authority and sticking it to the man as much as the next guy. But I’d much rather see Lamar grow up to be the first person in his family to go to college. And when he gets there, I’d like him go a little crazy and make a few mistakes; and then learn from those mistakes, buckle down, finish school and become a quiet, level-headed family man.

But that just got a little harder.

By Mark

Every year for the rest of my career, I am expected to be able to demonstrate, using assessment data, how my students' skills and knowledge have grown. This year I teach 9th grade. Next year it looks like I'll probably be teaching 12th grade. Based on my content standards, my work with my PLC, and my own professional judgment, I not only document that growth, that growth is truly what I care about fostering.

And yet I do that without state test data.

Washington state has lost its waiver from the flawed NCLB policy because the legislature did not change our evaluation law to require the use of state tests. As painful as now being subject to NCLB rules may be, the decision to keep state test data as "can be used" rather than "must be used" was the right choice.

Like many "right choices," it was a hard decision to arrive at for our leaders. Like many "right choices," there are plenty of people who don't fully understand. This choice will have consequences, like so many right choices will, but what makes it right is that the long term benefits–and the upholding of principle–are greater.

I know that the set-aside required by the loss of the waiver will cause many districts to struggle. I'm not aiming to minimize that. To me though, Washington state is doing the right thing, and sometimes doing the right thing is hard.

B y Tom

I was listening to NPR this morning and there was an interview with the authors of Thanks for the Feedback, the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. I immediately thought of TPEP, since all of us are about to receive the most comprehensive dose of feedback on our teaching than we’ve had in a long, long time. For me it’s been decades since I’ve had a serious conversation with my principal about what I’m doing well and how I can improve as a teacher. The authors of the book, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, made the point that in the overall scheme of things, the act of receiving feedback is probably more important that the act of giving it. When it comes to TPEP, I completely agree. Much has been made of the role principals play in our new evaluation system. But there’s been little attention paid to our role, as consumers of the feedback.

Feedback, of course, comes in two forms: positive and negative. Most of us have no trouble receiving positive feedback; it’s the negative kind that causes problems. Negative feedback is another term for criticism, and even when it’s “constructive,” it’s still painful. Stone and Heen point out that there’s a paradox surrounding criticism: on the one hand, humans have the need for approval; we want others to think well of us. On the other hand, most of us have a desire to constantly improve at what we do. So while criticism can be used for improvement, which we like, it also makes it clear that someone doesn’t completely approve of what we’re doing, which we don’t like.

Since we’re about to get a hearty helping of constructive feedback, let me make the following suggestions:

Continue reading →

By Maren Johnson

“It’s not a ‘report card.’ It’s a guidance policy with some teeth.”
     ~One individual describing a potential new teacher assignment reporting policy soon to be considered by the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB).

So what’s going on? Potential new policy would create a public data base on the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) website reporting the number of students in each school without properly endorsed teachers.  At the same time, endorsements in areas such as general science might be limited to specific courses—more limited than they were previously. It is important to note that teachers would not be prohibited from teaching outside of their endorsement area, but the numbers would be publicly reported.

Targets would be set, and schools failing to meet these targets would be reported to the state legislature. Finally, no grandfather clause—these new endorsement reporting guidelines for teaching assignments would apply to all current teachers, no matter when they originally received their endorsements, and what specific courses those endorsements were valid for at the time.

Here’s the potential WAC language—it’s from the March 2014 PESB meeting documents: 

Beginning September 1, 2014, the Professional Educator Standards Board shall annually make publicly available a report on the number of students in courses assigned to a teacher of record with or without a matching endorsement appropriate to that course.

No later than September 1, 2017, the Professional Educator Standards Board shall adopt performance targets related to teacher assignments match to state course codes and report annually to the House and Senate education committees of the Washington State Legislature those districts failing to meet these targets.

Without a doubt, it is important to have teachers who are well prepared to teach the courses to which they are assigned. One concern? The report of districts failing to meet these targets might not reflect a problem with the teacher workforce, or a problem with schools making poor staffing decisions. Rather, this report might reflect variables over which the school has no control–for example, the size of the school itself.

Small schools, with their small staffs, find it difficult to hire teachers with exactly the right endorsements for each course—many small schools only have one science teacher! If there are concurrent policy changes such as teachers with general science endorsements not being considered appropriately endorsed for certain advanced science courses, we are going to end up with a very large number of schools reported as “failing to meet the target.” 

Continue reading →

By Tom

By now you’ve probably heard that there’s a campaign afoot to gather signatures for Initiative 1351, which, if passed, would significantly lower class sizes in Washington State. The campaign to get the initiative on the ballot is sponsored by Class Size Counts, an organization whose name pretty much sums up their mission. But the campaign picked up most of its steam last month at the WEA Representative Assembly when the delegates voted to support it.

This initiative would mandate class sizes of 17 for primary grades and 24 for fourth grade on up. High-poverty schools would have class sizes of 15 and 23.

All of this sounds great, of course, except for the issue of money. 1351 would put half of the financial burden on the state and the other half on local districts. And that financial burden is definitely not nothing.

Continue reading →