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Insight
With all the mayor’s talk about firing “ineffective” teachers, it seems there must be a big supply of replacements just waiting in the wings, busily perfecting their lesson plans and brushing up on testing metrics. One can only hope so. Because 6,000 teachers and support staff left on their own last year, even more than the year before.
Could your 7th-graders predict the future of the whale population on earth after reading two stories about endangered species? Could your 11th-graders represent both sides of the debate on fracking, or evaluate the quality of a piece of writing?
What is evidence of good teaching, or bad? It’s not student test scores. But neither is it an unquantifiable “gut feeling.”
Let’s set aside the hieroglyphics — the wacky value-added models no one understands. How can you identify an effective teacher? Maybe ask the students they teach. In a new booklet filled with moving stories, New York City teen writers recall teachers who helped them learn to navigate the confusing world around them.
The 2011 state test results, released in August, show city students made progress since last year, when the tests were first made harder to pass — but the reported gains mask some persistent problems.
It’s both true and not true that computers change everything in a school. Students have access to the tools to design cities, make movies and talk face to face with kids on the other side of the world. That changes instruction. But it’s also true that there is no imaginable replacement for a teacher in a classroom. The iSchool, in fact, has more than most.
Bill Gates recently wrote an editorial in The Washington Post, “How teacher development could revolutionize our schools,” in which he argued that most of what we have been doing in education for the last four decades hasn’t worked. But finally, he wrote, we have figured out “the big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems.”
At an international summit on education held in New York City on March 16 - 17, the nations with the highest-performing school systems explained that they treat their teachers with the utmost trust and reverence, and allow them wide latitude in what and how they teach.
If state budgets are as bad as Republican governors warn, then, of course, sacrifice is required. But before we ask public-sector workers to pay the freight, let’s be sure everyone is paying their fair share.
Since 2005, the shares of special education students, homeless students and overage students in schools slated for closure have increased faster than in the rest of the city’s schools.
Getting effective teachers means making teachers effective. Yes, that sentence came out as intended. Bear with me. The problem with trying to identify effective teachers — whether by student test score or principal observation or both — is that there is nothing inherent in either plan to make teachers effective.
Things are bad out there and, according to new U.S. Census data, they aren’t getting better. Information from the 2009 census, the American Community Survey released in September, found that applications for food stamps are at an all-time high, and the gap between rich and poor is at its widest ever.
What can we learn from turnaround high schools — schools that were stuck or flailing, but now boast high student achievement and committed staffs? For starters, nothing simple. Each school turns around on its own terms, according to “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” a new report by Ronald Ferguson and his colleagues at Harvard University.
Welcome back! And let’s not waste a moment. Here is your first multiple-choice question of the new school year.
As another “cohort” of young people leaves our sheltering arms, teachers might wonder how many of them meet President Obama’s dual goals of “college- and career-ready.” While we’ve spent years trying to make sure our graduates are prepared for college, career-ready may be the tougher challenge.
Mounting evidence suggests that many high school graduates — in New York City and around the nation — would not be prepared to write college-level papers that ask the student to analyze written text, not just describe it. In response to disturbing rates of college failure, President Obama has proposed that federal K-12 education standards shift to a goal of making all students “college- and career-ready,” instead of the current goal of “adequate yearly progress.”
It was welcome news earlier in March that a record 59 percent of the city’s Class of 2009 graduated on time. But their teachers may have felt mixed emotions. As they know, the next step for the graduates they just launched is the harder one. In New York City and many other urban districts, high school graduates are not going on to succeed in college and careers in anything like the numbers they should be.
Fire the principal. Sack the teachers. Raise the bar. Bring in a charter. Close it down. These “solutions” to chronically low-performing schools are all found in the guidelines for winning a piece of Race to the Top, the $4 billion pot of federal dollars intended to drive educational change and improvement across the country.
Back in 2006, ABC’s John Stossel set the low bar for reporting on public schools. In his 20/20 segment “Stupid in America,” he depicted all the teachers as lazy, the students as stupid and charter schools as superior.
School turnarounds are difficult — ask anyone who has been part of one — but it’s hard to see how simply closing a low-performing school is any solution. Still, among those who favor a corporate approach to running school systems, turnarounds are viewed as not worth the investment.
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