By Mark

When some new idea surfaces in education, it gets acronymized. A general rule: if you want to make a project die, give it a clunky acronym. When the acronym makes a word, it can have subtle positive power (I think of CSTP which comes out as "See-Step"… I look, I move forward) or less subtle negative power (as in the HSPEs–"his pees"–with which everyone has to deal eventually, as opposed to the opposite pronoun which it is best to avoid.) With Common Core on the way the HSPE's expiration date is already set.

That rumination aside, the U.S. Department of Education has released details of its RESPECT initiative which is ostensibly aimed at cultivating teacher leadership, collaboration and potential in an effort to transform the profession and therefore schools themselves. RESPECT is an acronym/acrostic built of the phrases Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching. Cute, a touch contrived, but that's only if you're cynical (which I apparently am, this Saturday morning before coffee).

Let's look at the meat of it. The opening line, "Every child in America deserves a high quality education…" reminded me of the "Don't you care about kids?" question I used to get when I'd vocally oppose our administration's newest trendy initiative. My cynicism started to wear off around page four, and by the end, my gears were turning. 

I see some potential in this. My interest is piqued but any gelling optimism is necessarily cautious. Take a read if you haven't already, (it looks like a 30 page .pdf, but skip the propaganda at the beginning and start around section II…the photos, citations and text boxes bulk up the pagination, so it is actually a fairly quick read).

What do you think? Like my students, I always learn more from the conversation.

By Kristin

Last February a Senator from Tennessee proposed legislation that would reduce welfare benefits-  "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families" (TANF) – by 30% if children weren't performing in school. 

"Performing" was defined by one journalist as “Advancing from one grade to the next and receiving a score of proficient or advanced on required state examinations in the subject areas of mathematics and reading/language arts."

The bill is dead, considered too punitive, misdirected, and begging for judicial action to make it out of the Senate debate, but it raises some interesting issues because I think we all saw this coming.  Everyone is desperate to find a way to help struggling students perform better, and various sticks and carrots are being designed to make that happen.

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By Kristin

Are any of us really surprised by the news that 35 Atlanta Schools district officials and employees, including the Superintendent, were indicted because of cheating on state tests?

Of course we are.  In Washington State we're not so whipped about scores that we can imagine going into a windowless, locked room, being called the "chosen ones," and replacing wrong answers with right. I think it should stay that way.  The line between honorable and desperate isn't so thick we can assume teachers in Washington will never be told to raise their scores no matter what it took – wink wink.  In fact it's already happened.

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By Tom White

Chad Aldeman, an analyst and blogger for the Education
Sector, recently wrote about Washington’s teacher evaluation system. It’s an
interesting read. You can cut to the chase by looking at his blog post here,
or if you’re feeling ambitious, you can tackle the whole article here.

His basic point is that Washington State judges an
overwhelming majority of its teacher as satisfactory, regardless of their
students’ achievement. He calls this the “Evergreen Effect” which is a
reference to “The Widget Effect,” a phenomenon in which education policy-makers
treat teachers as interchangeable “widgets,” ignoring their relative
effectiveness.

I have several reactions to his thoughtful piece.

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By Mark

It seems like a no-brainer. If you want to evaluate my effectiveness as a teacher, you need to look at what I do in my classroom. If you want to evaluate my impact on student learning, you need to look at the work I make my students do and see how that work reflects my students' growth over time.

This is the right way to judge my job performance. But doing it this way takes time, is complicated for my boss (who has to do the same for two-dozen other teachers in two-dozen other contexts), and requires physical and intellectual investment into practices that can sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging (read: it requires change).

Too often in education, doing the difficult, right thing is avoided in favor of doing the simpler, easier to administer thing. When our students do this, we chastise them for cutting corners and missing out on the real value of the work–by doing so they are only cheating themselves, we tell them. When we do this as a system, we are cheating society.

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By Kristin

I'm the short one in the photo.  That's my boat at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta in 1993, my last year of college at the University of Washington.  This picture wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't be a college graduate, if it hadn't been for someone at my high school who, without being asked by me or my parents to do so, put me in honors classes and on a college track.  

SB 5243 does what some mysterious educator did for me in 1984; it requires that schools automatically place a capable student in academically accelerated classes.  What a beautiful policy.

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By Mark

Like you probably have, I've read the books, sat through the professional development, and learned the theories. Each time I learn a little, but nothing like what I learn when I get to watch another teacher in action.

Whether it is through video or through actually getting to walk into a fellow teacher's room and just watch, those minutes invested to simply observe pay far greater dividends than the time or money I invest in reading about best practice or watching a fancy powerpoint click away.

OSPI and CSTP, through support from the Gates Foundation, and working on ways to use teacher video as a springboard for meaningful professional conversation in a variety of contexts. The tools being created are literally like being fly on the wall–or like looking through a two-way mirror–into the unmediated workings of a colleague's classroom, a real classroom with its real kids who sometimes aren't on task, sometimes say silly things, or sometimes take a brilliant question to an even more brilliant answer. Hopefully, these resources will be available later this year, but I've had the privilege to be part of designing and piloting some of the protocols that teachers can use to take advantage of the two-way mirror of peer observation.

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