I’m intrigued by what I’m reading about The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School in New York City.

What’s attracting attention right now are the salaries that the school is paying teachers: $125,000 a year plus up to a $25,000 annual bonus based on schoolwide performance.

By anyone’s standards, that’s serious money.

TEP will begin the school year with 120 5^th graders, many of them from low-income families and many of them with low academic performance. The school will add a grade a year until it becomes a 5-8 school with 480 children and 28 teachers. In addition to a traditional academic program of math, science, English, and social studies, TEP students will also take Latin and music every day and physical education three times a week. An extended day program offers tutoring in academics or extra-curricular opportunities, all staffed by teachers.

TEP also starts the school year with eight teaching stars, all hired after a nationwide search and after founder and principal Zeke Vanderhoek personally visited their classrooms to see them in action. When he announced his plans to seek the best teachers for his new school, Vanderhoek received 600 applications, according to the New York Times (June 4, 2009).

For their lofty salaries, teachers will work an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. day and spend most of the summer in professional development. Each will also take on an administrative task, such as overseeing technology or assessments. Visual arts and technology are integrated into all courses, according to the web site.

“Teachers are the key lever to a great education for kids…so every dollar spent on a teacher is more valuable than a dollar spent on a variety of other education reforms,” Vanderhoek told the Christian Science Monitor (August 23, 2009, p. 15).

If Vanderhoek were doing nothing but providing big bucks to teachers, I wouldn’t be interested in his school. But, at least on the surface, he seems to be creating a school that believes in teacher expertise. Over time, I expect that he and his teachers will learn that they need other support systems to keep them going. I’m anxious to watch this school during this year and succeeding years.

Learn more about this project at www.tepcharter.org/

My service on my local school board taught me many lessons that I never expected — and sometimes didn’t want — to learn. Quite a few of those lessons involved bullying of students at school, near school, or on the Internet when they were away from school. None of them were pretty stories.

The one that sticks in my mind most, however, was the story of a high school boy who could not use the school bathroom in peace because other boys thought he was gay. This boy dashed home during the lunch hour during his entire high school career just so he could use the toilet at home. Not once, his mother told me, had he ever eaten lunch with friends during high school.

That seems like such a small incident when you think that it happened on one day. But when you consider that this happened roughly 700 times during this boy’s adolescence, then it becomes a different situation entirely.

Do gay students need advocates? Absolutely, they do. Are they alone in needing to feel safe at school? Unfortunately, they are not. One study estimated that about 15% of all students were bullied during their school career. A recent survey by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) revealed that 91% of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) middle school students said they had been verbally harassed and 59% had been physically harassed because of their sexual orientation. Although the population of LGBT students is relatively small compared to the rest of the school population, those numbers suggest to me they are being disproportionately targeted by other students.

That’s one reason I was impressed when I learned that Secretary Arne Duncan had appointed Kevin Jennings, founder of GLSEN, to the post of assistant deputy  secretary overseeing the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools.

Now Jennings has predictably become the newest target in a bullying campaign by  the anti-everything crowd. A few days ago, 53 Republicans sent President Obama a letter calling for Jennings’ dismissal because he “played an integral role in promoting homosexuality and pushing a pro-homosexual agenda in America’s schools.” The letter writers claimed that Jennings lacked the necessary qualifications to serve in the safe schools job.

That’s not what I see. What I see is a man who has devoted his professional life to improving the quality of life for thousands of American students. Through GLSEN and his other work, Jennings has helped focus the discussion about gay students where it belongs: ensuring that all students feel safe and protected in schools. Creating a civil and respectful atmosphere in school should not be a political issue.

As for me, I’ll judge Jennings on the merits of his work, not on any alleged past misdeeds or errors of youth. Will he be a bureaucrat who talks a lot and achieves little? My hope is that he’ll be an educator who elevates the discussion and challenges all of us to create civil and respectful classrooms and schools where all of our children can learn in safety.

Most of the education community is just learning that Kappan columnist Jerry Bracey died in his sleep Oct. 20 at his home in Port Townsend, Washington.

The tributes are pouring in, something that would probably surprise Jerry who seemed to thrive by irking the field, not delighting it.

Jerry Bracey was not a reporter in the traditional ink-stained wretch sense of the word. But he certainly possessed a reporter’s mentality about how to approach his work. I always thought that he exemplified the vision that Thomas Jefferson laid out for newspapers and their employees: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Jerry surely took heed of that counsel.

I’ll write more about Jerry when more information is available. For now, I offer this sweet tribute that Alfie Kohn posted on his Twitter page: “Spirited crusader for accuracy, integrity; denounced false claims, misuse of stats; made the right enemies.”

Most would agree that there is seldom a single solution to a problem just like there isn’t one way to teach or one way to lead. Yet we fall into the one-size-fits-all mentality repeatedly. This is particularly true when creating education policy. We pay lip service to the ideal that there are probably multiple ways to address a problem, and then approve a policy that completely ignores that reality.

That’s why I was so shocked, pleased, delighted (take your pick) when I read Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools, By Robert Balfanz, Cheryl Almeida, Adria Steinberg, Janet Santos, and Joanna Hornig Fox.

This report was created at Jobs for the Future, Education for Economic Opportunity, and delivers a sensible approach to transforming the 2.000 high schools that produce more than half of the high school dropouts in the U.S. (Alliance for Excellent Education)

What’s most remarkable is that the report offers an approach that recognizes that according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) the dropout problem isn’t the same in the 50 states, suggesting that the solutions pursued in each state should be unique to that state’s challenges.

The report divides states into groups depending upon three factors: a) the big-city challenge, b) statewide spread, and c) statewide crisis. For example, for reasons defined in the report, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee all fall under the big-city challenge.

The report then offers four recommendations for immediate federal action:

• Require states seeking “Race to the Top” funding to use analytic data on graduation rates and low graduation-rate high schools as part of their plans for turning around failing schools.
• Build the capacity of states, districts and schools to implement appropriate high school reform strategies.
• Designate additional federal innovation funding for the development and replication of effective school designs to use in transforming or replacing low graduation-rate high schools.
• Target federal financing to high schools, districts and states with the most pressing dropout problems.

According to this year’s PDK/Gallup poll of the “Public’s Attitudes toward Their Public Schools,” over 90% of Americans believe that the U.S. dropout rate is either the most important or one of the most important problems facing high schools today. This report offers substantive ideas on how to address American’s concerns.

Bill Bushaw

When I was deputy state superintendent in Michigan my boss, Tom Watkins referred to our colleges of education as the “weakest link” in education. As I read Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks made at Teachers College, Columbia University on October 22, 2009, I thought he was heading in the same direction—and for a while he was.

He raised many of the concerns that have been raised in the past about America’s teacher preparation programs including several examples taken from Arthur Levine’s 2006 report, “Remaking Teacher Education.” He also talked about the need to produce lots of new teachers given the pending retirements of the “baby boom” educators, and the reality that alternative certificate routes, while getting lots of attention, don’t account for that many new teachers.

But then the secretary changed course and spoke of his optimism about important new initiatives.  He talked about Jim Cibulka, the new president at NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), and its major revision of teacher education requirements that should strengthen the clinical focus of teacher preparation programs. And the secretary talked about other excellent programs, several of which Levine highlighted in his 2006 report.

What frustrated me is that the Secretary said nothing about our opportunity build a pipeline that can significantly improve the number of great teachers we have in the classroom, and at the same time, increase the number of underrepresented teachers, i.e., males, Hispanics and African-Americans. How do we do this? We recruit from a captive audience, students in our middle level and high schools.

It’s almost like we’re ashamed to do this, yet any other business would KILL to have the opportunities we have to recruit those young people we want teaching in our classrooms. Some school districts, e.g., Jefferson County schools in Kentucky, in partnerships with local universities GET IT.  They recruit and they’re getting great results. They identify potential teachers in middle school when students are first deciding on their careers. Then they nurture, mentor and support these young people through high school, through college and back into their school district. And they get lots of great teachers as a result—great teachers who stay.

Think how absurd this is! Current national policy, through career technical funding provided through federal Perkins IV legislation, supports with lots of money, high school programs that develop the next generation of retailers, technicians, farmers, and health care specialists, but there’s not one penny for the next generation of educators.

The number one way to improve public education in America is to have more great teachers. Few will argue with that. Of course, investments to improve our teaching force must be viewed in the long-term. We will not see results in just a couple of years. But why would we not do everything possible, including developing comprehensive recruiting and mentoring programs in middle level and high schools, to ensure that our future classroom teachers are the best in the world?

Bill

In March 2009, I read a fascinating education book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson.

Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor, which gave me pause. I’ve heard too many business people oversimplify the challenges we face in our schools and universities. But as I read the first few chapters, I was pleasantly surprised that Christensen didn’t attack educators and did understand complex education issues.

In earlier books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen writes about “disruptive innovation” in the business world, documenting that excellent companies were undermined through no fault of their own by an innovation so disruptive to their business model that they eventually went out of business.

Christensen and his two co-authors then took these concepts and applied them to education with some intriguing insights. He describes how “disruptive innovation” will gain a foothold in education, and then eventually radically change how teachers teach and children learn. He describes this disruption as “student-centric learning.”

I was impressed that the authors had done their research in early childhood education, and the concept of multiple intelligences, topics that are generally not addressed by business people.

My one reservation about this book centers on accountability. Rightly so, Americans want to hold their schools and universities accountable, but our current accountability models employing multiple choice, pencil and paper tests that focus on status and not added value inhibit innovation. Unfortunately, this reality was not addressed in Disrupting Class.

Disrupting class is a quick read and well written. While you may not agree with the content, as informed educators and policymakers, you need to know that these ideas are circulating, and, could dramatically change how we teach.

Bill