by Sandee Crowther, President, PDK International

We have just completed the “Aughts” (2000-2009) and for many of us a great deal has changed!  Some things many of us were using are beginning to disappear or even become obsolete!  How many of you still use dial up internet, cameras with film, state and city maps to locate something, email accounts that you have to pay for, public pay phones, PDAs, VCRs, calling 411, movie rental stores??  You may still use some of these things but many of them are becoming obsolete.  Some newspapers and magazines are going out of business, some people no longer have a landline, even phone books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and record stores may disappear.

Some of these things are disappearing because we buy, use, and love the new gadgets: iPhones, iPods, flatscreen TVs, GPSs, TiVo DVRs, USB thumb drives, and Kindles.  Think about how this is changing how we do things and what we use and need to have with us.  Yes, I even got rid of my old Palm Pilot and older version cell phone and shifted to an iPhone and love having everything I need in one product and using intuitive touch rather than a bunch of buttons.

But the bigger questions for educators is what does this mean for those we are NOW educating or will be educating in the near future?  What might become obsolete in education by the end of this new decade?   Some possibilities: desks, homework, fear of Wikipedia, lockers, typical cafeteria food, outsourced webmastering (use the students instead), paperbacks, language labs, education classes that don’t teach or model the use of  technology, the role of standardized tests in college admissions, even paper????

We need to prepare our students for this century with the skills they need: communication and collaboration,  critical thinking and problem solving,  information, communications, and technology literacy, leadership and responsibility.  At the same time we need to let them use the tools they already know how to use as a part of their learning process.

So “What’s on Your Mind”  as we figure out how to provide the best education possible for our students?

In a prior life, I was a high school assistant principal and then principal for seven years.  My professional goals as a school administrator were identified using a time-honored evaluation process of mutually establishing objectives with my boss. At the time, I felt everything was as it should be, and that I did a good job as a school leader.

Reflecting back, I now know that something was missing. I needed larger goals to guide my practice; goals that extended beyond the confines of our high school and school district. And I needed greater clarity on my primary objective, i.e., to do everything in my power to help every student learn to his or her full potential.

Fast forward 25 years.  I serve on the steering committee for the Advanced Certification for Educational Leaders, a new program being developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Steering committee members met earlier this month to review progress in identifying the nine core propositions and the standards that will guide development of the certification program.

Advanced certification will be offered to school principals similar to how national board certification is available to classroom teachers. It’s not an entry level certificate so it will not replace initial administrator credentialing. It will require submission of a comprehensive portfolio demonstrating skills, applications and dispositions—a portfolio that will be scored by highly skilled school administrators using advanced techniques. It’s anticipated that advanced certification will be available to principals in 2012.

I concluded three things in attending these meetings:

• School principals are essential in our efforts to dramatically improve education in the U.S. given the dramatic changes forced upon our society by new technologies.
• School principals need a program like advanced certification to identify compelling goals to guide their practice.
• NBPTS is the perfect agency to create this advanced certification program.

The three school administrator associations, the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), fully support this initiative.

NBPTS staff led steering committee members in several excellent discussions. One of the most compelling discussions clarified that committee members were unanimous that advanced certification must only be awarded to principals who can demonstrate, via their submitted portfolio, increased levels of student achievement.

That’s good news.  However, the challenge will be developing the appropriate student assessment systems that will capture important measures of improved student achievement. Currently, measuring student learning using standardized tests in reading and math does not meet that criterion. And principals will want a rational approach to documenting increased student achievement before they will submit for advanced certification.

Improved student assessments are central to many initiatives including the reauthorized federal legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA); Race to the Top (RTTT) funding; and the federally supported efforts to turn around schools.  Advanced Certification for Educational Leaders is one more reason to replace our antiquated student assessment and school accountability system with a 21st-century approach that is rational and that will measure what students need to learn.

Bill Bushaw

I thought I’d take advantage of the blog to get out the word about a Call for Manuscripts that we’ve posted.

Kappan editors will review a wide range of manuscripts related to each of the following topics. The questions listed are intended to be guides for writers and are not intended to be an exhaustive list of potential topics. Before submitting a manuscript to Kappan, please review the writers’ guidelines posted on our web site: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/write.htm

Deadline for submissions: Jan. 15, 2010

Early childhood education

Should all children have access to early, tax-supported education programs or should those programs be limited to low-income/at-risk children? What happens to Head Start and other such early education programs if the United States moves to a universal program?

How do K-12 school systems change if schools/districts begin to include young children in education programs? What are the implications for financing schools? What are the implications for buildings? What are the implications for school culture?

How would the United States transition to a system that provided early education for all children or for low-income/at-risk children?

How would we prepare early elementary teachers differently if we knew that we were providing formal education for all children beginning at age three?

What kind of certification would be necessary if widespread early childhood education became the norm?

Developmentally, when and what kind of learning is appropriate for young children?

What non-American models of early childhood education could inform U.S. policy and practice?

Merit pay/Performance pay

What have we learned from previous experiments with merit/performance pay, particularly those that have tried to enforce accountability by linking compensation to student outcomes? Where are there examples of districts that have experimented with merit/performance pay? What do those experiments look like? What have we learned from those experiments?

What does it take to get teachers’ unions on board with merit pay/performance pay? Where are we likely to see unions go with this in the future? Does union involvement/support of merit/performance pay undermine the very reason for unions to exist? Can unions exist in an environment in which merit/performance pay becomes widespread?

How is the question of teacher evaluation addressed in various pay experiments? What are we learning about changing/improving teacher evaluations? If we fix the evaluations, do we really need to change the pay system?

What are the prospects for using value-added (growth) measures to support merit/performance pay systems?

How is teacher compensation determined outside the United States? What can the United States learn from these examples?

What’s the relationship between compensation reform and other potential or needed reforms? How would changes in teacher compensation link with other organizational or systemic changes?

The changing face of teacher education

What have schools of teacher education learned from alternate routes to teaching (teacher residency programs, New Teacher Project, Teach for America)? Will schools of teacher education survive?

What do personnel directors, principals, and other educators who hire teachers say about how schools of teacher education need to change? What do new teachers say about how well they were prepared for the reality of today’s classrooms?

What works in preparing teachers for an education system that demands results in student learning? Is there evidence from longitudinal tracking of teacher education graduates that shows a relationship between the quality of a preparation program and student learning results?

How would changes in teacher education programs affect university budgets? What impact does that have on changing those programs?

Where are there exemplary schools of teacher education? What do they look like and what can other programs learn from these exemplars?

What can the United States learn from teacher preparation programs in other nations?

If you care about truthful and accurate reporting about education, then consider this tale about the authorship and content of a new report on charter management organizations.

The story begins with Education Sector co-founder Tom Toch (now Kappan’s Washington View columnist) and his extensive research on charter management organizations (CMOs) and their ability to thrive and sustain themselves long term. Toch’s 20,000-word report was finished last spring and circulated for comments in early June. You can read that draft copy here: http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2009/11/millot-read-tochs-draft-of-edsectors-cmo-report-here.html

Toch and I were negotiating a plan to have him write a shorter synopsis of the report for publication in Kappan this fall. But Toch left Education Sector over the summer and the future of the report was suddenly up in the air.

But Toch did give everyone a head’s up about his observations in an Education Week commentary in October. “Even with an infusion of federal funding, it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much more rapidly without compromising the quality of their schools. The risk, charter school finance experts warn, is that the Obama administration’s ambitious initiatives could end up leading to the opening of many marginal schools by overextended charter networks,” he wrote.

When EdSector published the report a few weeks ago (Growing Pains: Scaling up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools), Toch was not named as an author and much of his analysis was missing. Judge for yourself by reading the EdSector version: www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=1090702

What EdSector abandoned were Toch’s insightful observations about the inability of CMOs to deliver new charter schools at the scale envisioned by Secy. of Education Arne Duncan without compromising the quality of the schools. Go to his original report for the details on that.

Sometime this fall, Andy Rotherham, Ed Sector’s remaining co-founder also announced he would be leaving the nonprofit in early 2010. Was there a connection between his announcement and this sanitized report?

The beauty of the web is that those who are interested in this issue can read both reports and draw their own conclusions. One thing that’s clear, however, is that the whole affair has damaged Education Sector’s reputation for fair observation and comment.

In an era when newspapers are cutting staffs and newsholes, having access to arms-length reporting about schools obtains more and more value. Increasingly, nonprofit are the ones that will be expected to assume the mantle as objective analysts of the field. Nonprofits that accept foundation money to do their work are already often challenged by funders who want to adapt reports to fit their views — although there’s no evidence in this case that the funder wanted Toch’s work sanitized. Nonprofits with a stated agenda already present enough of a danger in a world being overcome by opinion rather than fact. Readers, beware.

You must watch this inspiring three-minute video about becoming a teacher.

I will send you a free DVD copy if you reply with your name and address.

Bill Bushaw

Hooray for NCLB! (read on to understand why I wrote that)

The hard work of creating rigorous and internationally benchmarked education standards continues (see my October 28 blog post). The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is a voluntary effort led by the nation’s governors and their highest-ranking education policymakers, state superintendents and commissioners. It has the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s support, and best of all, Congress has stayed out of the fray (I guess they’re busy with healthcare and energy). 

The declared intent is to identify fewer but more rigorous standards. If done well, this will set the stage for developing curricular materials and instructional approaches that focus on thinking and creating, not memorization and regurgitation.

With lots of educator training (retraining), this will permit student-centered learning (jargon for learning where students are actively involved and not listening to a teacher lecture or required to complete a mind numbing worksheet). 

There is one final challenge. We can’t use a testing model created at the turn of the 20th century to measure success of a (jargon warning) student-centered and technology-driven  instructional approach created over 100 years later.

Fortunately, policymakers within the U.S. Department of Education, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association recognize this. That’s why the secretary has set aside $350 million to fund new approaches to measuring student achievement and holding schools accountable (YEA!). 

Just as they’re doing now with the common core standards, this new assessment and accountability system must be voluntary and led collectively by the states.  The U.S. Department of Education must fund it, but not lead it, and Congress must stay away. 

Finally, we need to engage the best researchers at our nation’s universities and those working at the testing companies to devise 21^st century student assessments that support a 21^st century accountability model.

These efforts will help teachers create their own classroom tests that measure thinking, not forcing students to regurgitate facts.  They will be of high quality, and will be linked to high-quality standardized measures that focus on performance, creativity and thinking skills. And the system will measure whether individual students are making needed achievement gains each year, because that’s the only way to really know that some children are not left behind.

For all the flaws in the No Child Left Behind legislation, one of its greatest legacies is that it demonstrated how our current system of 50 different sets of state standards and outdated tests undermined the best efforts of our teachers and other school leaders–and for that I say HOORAY.

Bill Bushaw

Linda Darling-Hammond is one of our nation’s most highly regarded education researchers on various topics including teachers and teaching, and international standards and assessment.  Linda also serves as a member of the Phi Delta Kappan board of editorial consultants.

Tuesday, November 17, Edutopia is sponsoring two FREE webinars featuring Linda Darling-Hammond. The first, “What would it mean to be internationally competitive? How the United States can learn from standards and assessments in high-achieving nations,” is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Eastern/8:30 a.m. Pacific.

The second webinar, “Lessons from abroad: International standards and assessments,” will be offered at 6:30 p.m. Eastern/3:30 p.m. Pacific.

You can register online for one or both webinars.

The December Kappan will then feature Linda Darling-Hammond’s article entitled, “America’s commitment to equity will determine our future.”

Don’t miss any of these learning opportunities, and after attending or reading, comment here on what you learned.

Bill

If you’re not a runner, you may not be aware of the debate about whether you can be a “real” marathoner if you take six or more hours to run 26.2 miles.
The most recent backing-and-forthing began with a snarky comment from a marathoner in the Oct 22 issue of The New York Times. “It’s a joke to run a marathon by walking every other mile or by finishing in six, seven, eight hours,” said Adrienne Wald, 54, the women’s cross-country coach at the College of New Rochelle, who ran her first marathon in 1984.

A joke?

More than 20% of the 43,741 runners in the recent New York City Marathon reportedly took more than five hours to complete the course. Maybe 20 runners were actually running to finish first in that race. Most had no hope of winning. That means that 43,721 runners had some other goal in mind. Many were running for personal best times, but plenty were proving their mettle simply by crossing the finish line, whether in four or five or six or seven hours. Even a back-of-the-pack marathoner has typically run at least a couple of hundred of miles in preparation for the event. I find it pretty insulting for anyone to suggest that that sort of effort is a “joke.”

So what’s this got to do with education? I see the same sickness in schools where we confuse speed with wits. We set limits on how much time a child can spend in a certain grade level before they are “held back” in order to “keep up” with other students. We set arbitrary time limits for how much minutes students can spend on tests. Those who can’t finish in that amount of time are labeled as less smart than their peers who speed to the finish. We even require students to jump through many hoops in order to get permission to have more time to complete a test.

Does that mean those students have learned less than their swifter counterparts? Or just that it took them longer to cross the finish line? Is their race any less worthy than that of other students?

Marathon organizers usually judge the success of their “test” by whether there is solid competition at the front of the pack plus great participation from a huge field of runners. Likewise, in schools, we should applaud students who surge to the front and excel. But we also ought to cheer on classrooms of students who get to the same knowledge at a slower pace. We tend to demean the learning that these students acquire, failing to recognize that education should be more about growth and less about competition among students, between schools, between districts, between nations. Personal growth matters, not just collective measures of achievement.

In The New York Times article, I most liked this sentiment from the legendary gold medalist Frank Shorter who called criticisms of slow runners “snobbery.” “You never hear that from elite runners. Elite runners admire other people’s performance. I find it much better to welcome slow runners to the club than to vote them out.”

When I take to the streets for my run tomorrow morning, I can assure you that I won’t be worried about whether I beat someone else who’s running. I’ll be focused on whether I’ve bested myself. That is the focus that will improve someone who is running or someone who is learning. I may be a plodder but I’ll be better tomorrow than I was today.

This year’s PDK/Gallup poll of the “Public’s Attitudes toward the Public Schools” asked Americans the following question. 

As you may know, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides increased funding to education. Which of the following areas in education do you believe should receive the most new funding?

The number one choice expressed by Americans was, “keep teachers that were planned to be laid off” (46%), followed by “provide more support for the lowest performing schools” (36%), with “build new or modernize existing school buildings” a distant third at 15 percent.

So what happened? 

The U.S. Department of Education just released a report based on state reports of stimulus spending submitted to the Office of Management and Budget on Friday, October 30^th. The report documents that 325,000 teaching jobs were saved with funds provided by the economic stimulus legislation approved by Congress and signed into law by the President last January.

Be forewarned–the report provides detailed state-by-state results so be careful before printing as it’s 250 pages long.

Bill

Several years ago, I was privileged to spend an hour a week mentoring Natavia, a 4^th-grader in Detroit. She had been held back a year because of poor reading skills. When I gave her a book at Christmas, I later learned it was the first book she had ever owned.

The challenges in this girl’s life are too numerous to name here. Her poor reading skills meant she was lost at school, unable to keep up anytime the class had to read something, unable to work through story problems, unable to appreciate anything related to reading. In spite of this, Natavia showed up promptly at school every morning primarily because the school fed her breakfast. (She told me with great pride that she didn’t need an alarm clock because her stomach woke her up every morning.)

Natavia was clearly bright enough to be able to read. Her spoken vocabulary was fine. But she could not translate words she could speak into words she could read. By late October when I met her, she had failed every weekly spelling test that year. She was polite to me but sullen about anything related to academics.

Her teacher asked me to tackle spelling first. Each week, Natavia and I took her spelling list and read the words aloud. If she didn’t know the meaning of a word, we looked it up in a dictionary. She said she had never used a dictionary before. In the beginning, I asked her to write every word 10 times on a sheet of paper. I called Natavia’s mother and asked her to have Natavia repeat this task at home at least once before the test. Her mother said she had never helped any of her children with homework.

On the very next spelling test, Natavia got more than half of the words right. Her taste of success inspired her to work harder. Three weeks later, she was scoring 100% on each test and continued to do so for the rest of the year. Can you spell exhilaration?

This is not a transformation story. A once-a-week mentor cannot turn around a kid’s life and I did not turnaround Natavia’s overall academic performance. But it is an example of the many little tasks that go undone in schools, not because teachers or schools don’t care but because the challenges are just so immense. Natavia’s teacher should have taught her how to study spelling. But she had 30 other students just like Natavia. Actually, Natavia was probably one of the least challenging students because she was largely respectful and mild-mannered, which could explain why her needs were easily overlooked. (Consider the boy who ate out of the paste pot because he was hungry and the paste tasted minty. Or the boy who banged his head into the desk or the wall whenever he became frustrated in class. Or the nine-year-old girl who was overtly sexual with male students and male staff.)

What must we do as a nation to ensure that children like Natavia obtain the same high-quality education that Kappan readers expect for their own children?

We’ve long ago learned that closing gaps in learning for children like Natavia is a complex process that requires far more than figuring out how to prepare for a spelling test. But even in my deepest pessimism, I do believe that we are closer to an agreement that closing gaps is essential if we are to live up to our expectation of equity.

We might fight, often bitterly, over the appropriate tools to use in the battle for equity. If we at least agree that all children deserve a high-quality education, then I am hopeful that we are at last moving in the right direction.