Egregious Sensationalism Continued

Today's winner of the CNN.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism goes to ABC News, for this headline:

"Alabama Teacher Accused of Sex, Murder Plot"

The only possible silver lining that I can see here is that perhaps this marks some level of media fatique with the tried-and-true, grossly voyeuristic "Female high school teacher has sex with male student" story, the prominence of which is always in direct proportion to the teacher's physical resemblance to Nicole Kidman in "To Die For."

Good looking blonde teacher = front-page national news.
Older, not-so-attractive teacher = page 9 of the Metro section.

In other words, the same process the media use to decide whether or not they care about missing children.

Maybe now there at least needs to be an ancillary murder plot or something else to spice up the story before it runs large like this.

Story tip: Ethan Gray.

Stop. No, STOP. Read this Report.

This report should be ( and I promise this phrase will be used with extreme judiciousness here at the Quick and the Ed) required reading for anyone interested in improving the quality of teachers in American classrooms.

Written by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, the premise is straightforward: school districts should pay less attention to teachers' paper credentials and more attention to actual success in the classroom, reconfiguring their tenure and compensation policies to be more aggressive about not retaining the teachers who are least successful in helping students learn and giving salary bonuses to those who are most successful, particularly with low-income students.

There is powerful logic at work here. For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers--certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master's degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat, some (like having a Masters' degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.

But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name--old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.

The Gordon paper simply takes these finding to their logical conclusion: instead of shaping teacher policy around things we know don't matter very much, let's shape teacher policy around things we know matter a lot. Instead of fighting a losing up-front battle to filter and sort prospective teachers based on qualities that may have a tenuous connection to success in the classroom, let's filter and sort them based on actual success in the classroom.

This would be a seismic change in the way teachers are prepared, hired, and treated as professionals. Really, an earth-spins-backward-on-its-axis, time-reverses-direction, Margot-Kidder-flies-up-out-of-a-ditch magnitude of change. It would mean taking seriously a fact that most educators know intuitively yet is largely absent from teacher policy: teaching is an extraordinarily complicated endeavor, and people find different ways to be good at it. You can train and test prospective teachers, give them knowledge and skill, and those things are important, but once they get into the classroom some teachers bring additional talents, work ethic, intelligence, drive, etc. to bear, and others don't. Those differences matter a lot to student learning.

This report has the courage to take seriously plain facts that many people know but are unwilling to act upon, because doing so would be a huge challenge to the status quo. Read it today.

Not from the Onion

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Young people who adopt the "Goth" lifestyle of dark clothes and introspective music are more likely to commit self-harm or attempt suicide than other youngsters, a Scottish study has found.

I know this is nothing to laugh about, but it seems like investigating the obvious to me.

Fugly

DC Education Blog's Nathan critiques the design of DCPS's new facilities master plan website. Since I have the aesthetic sensibilities of a small wombat, I'll defer to others on this matter. But I do hope this isn't a premonition of things to come when the new facilities plan is released on May 28th.

What I Don't Get (one of many things)

Joe Williams has been blogging at the Chalkboard about this school space smackdown between a NYC school district school, the elite New Explorations in Science, Technology and Math, and the Ross Global Academy Charter School, which the NYC Department of Education wants to co-locate in NEST's building. That this debate is getting ugly is nothing surprising.

But here's what I don't get: NEST is subject to possible co-location because it is underenrolled and has extra space. Yet there are thousands of kids in New York City, in the grades NEST serves, who are entitled under NCLB to transfer out of their low-performing schools but can't because there aren't enough spaces available in higher-performing ones. NEST doesn't have an AYP rating under NCLB because it doesn't receive Title I funds, but it is rated "in good standing" under New York's state accountability system, and has higher-test scores than the average NYC public school. So, if NEST's principal is really that opposed to charter co-location, why doesn't she offer to solve the excess space problem by opening up all the excess space in the school to students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools under NCLB? If NEST's parents and educators don't want to do that, then it's pretty obvious that the excess space would be better allocated to people who ARE trying to expand the number of high-performing school spaces for underserved kids in NYC.

Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary!

Acclaimed children's book author Beverly Cleary is 90 today. The author of nearly 40 children's books spanning five decades--including Henry Huggins, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and her best-known book, Ramona the Pest--Clearly has helped countless children--including me--learn to enjoy reading through her work, which is amusing, relatable, and fundamentally respectful of children. Happy Birthday, Mrs. Cleary.

What Success in Higher Education Really Means

I spent last Thursday and Friday in my former home town of Indianapolis testifying at the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Some very interesting discussions focused on what higher education quality really means. Which made me look back to the article the Washington Post ran last week reporting that that Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the President of George Washington University, will be stepping down after nearly 20 years on the job. It's worth giving their top-line summary of his accomplishments a careful read:

"During his time as the 15th president of GWU, the school grew physically, financially and in academic reputation. The endowment is nearly $1 billion, almost $800 million more than when Trachtenberg arrived in 1988; undergraduate applications have jumped from 6,000 to more than 20,000 annually (moving it from the ranks of a "safe" school to one that many students now worry about gaining admission to); and a number of the school's programs have climbed in national rankings. In 2004, there were 10,556 undergraduates.

The city's largest private employer, GWU under Trachtenberg also opened the first new hospital in the District in 25 years, created five new schools and elevated athletics.

"He made the school much more national in scope and impression, upgraded the faculty and bettered the tone of the school for everyone," said Charles Manatt, a lawyer and board of trustees chairman."

First, I want to be clear that I have no reason to think that Stephen Trachtenberg is anything other than a very good president, nor that GW is anything other than a very good school.

But it's telling to observe the terms under which the success for institutional leaders in higher education is defined. To summarize, Trachtenberg did a great job of increasing the institution's wealth, exclusivity, and reputation (as gauged by the academic credentials of its faculty), as well as expanding the physical plant.

Nowhere is there a mention of how much better a job GW did in educating its students under Trachtenberg or helping them earn degrees, how much more they learned or how increasingly successful they were as they moved on into further education, the workforce, and their lives.

I'm not saying none of those things happened. But they aren't mentioned, for the simple reason that nobody really knows if they happened or not. Colleges and universities gather and make available virtually no information about the learning outcomes of their students.

Thus, institutions aren't judged on student outcomes. They're judged on the aforementioned measures of wealth, exclusivity, and reputation, which (not coincidentally) are the primary drivers of the rankings published by the likes of U.S. News and World Report. The most succesful higher education leaders--and Trachtenberg seems to have been quite successful--understand these rules of the game and play them well.

Inevitably, this has the effect of marginalizing student success when it comes to institutional priorities and resources. Successful university presidents must raise a lot money, increase the applicant pool, and attract star faculty. They can take steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This distinction between mandatory and optional priorities makes a huge difference, generally not to the benefit of undergraduates.

Anecdotes, Suspicion, Discrimination, and How Gender Sterotypes Hurt Early Learning

I think this Tampa Tribune article (hat tip to the EdWonks) about the suspicions unfairly cast on male kindergarten teachers is pretty silly. For starters, it's a prime example of the non-education education story, to steal a phrase coined by Kevin. In March, a local male kindergarten teacher was arrested on charges of "sexual performance with a child," and someone at the Tampa Trib apparently thought that might cause parents and the public to fear all male early childhood teachers--a tiny fraction of kindergarten teachers in the area--are pedophiles. The article offers no evidence that parents are worried about this possibility--even the anecdotes the reporter gathers sorta run against the theme.

But there's also a serious issue here, in the underlying assumption that seems to run through the piece that no normal, healthy young man would choose to work with small children unless he had an ulterior motive. Teacher quality is a huge challenge in early childhood education, particularly for preschool teachers, who are oftern very low-paid, than for kindergarten teachers, who are typically paid on part with other elementary school teachers.

I think a major reason that early childhood workers are so poorly paid is that working with young children has traditionally been seen as a woman's job, and therefore not something that's really worthwhile or should be well paid. (The insistence of some early childhood advocates on conflating educationally-focused and purely custodial care is also part of the problem here, IMHO). I don't think improving the quality of preschool and early childhood education requires having more male teachers, but I also don't think wages for preschool teachers--and therefore quality--are going to raise near as much as they need to until we stop viewing it solely as a "women's job."

What Education Policy Positions Say About Politicians

I'm stepping a bit on Andy's turf with this, but Matthew Yglesias has a great post at TPMcafe about how the issues a candidate for elected office chooses to talk about and how he or she talks about them define who the candidate is for the public.

This is particularly relevant to education. Most voters don't choose a candidate solely based on his or her positions on education topics, but how a candidate chooses to talk about education and the degree to which he or she chooses to emphasize it to send an important message to voters about the candidate's character and values: is he pro-reform?, will she stand up to special interests?, does he care about social justice, opportunity, and helping the weakest in society? etc.

Interestingly, the two examples Yglesias highlights of politicians using an issue to define themselves--John Edwards talking about child poverty in 2004, and George W. Bush's outreach to African Americans (including the emphasis on NCLB and the "soft bigotry of low expectations) in 2000--both focused heavily on children, including education.

In any case, if you're interested in the politics of education, particularly the Democratic side, read the post.

What Does Immigration Mean for Public Education?

Unless you've been living under a rock the last few weeks, it's been pretty obvious that immigration remains a highly contentious issue in the United States. Today, up to 180,000 people are expected to participate in a pro-immigrant demonstration on the National Mall, just a few blocks from my office.

Regardless of what your stance is on the political questions about immigration now before Congress, it's clear that immigrants and children of immigrants have become a significant part of the U.S. population, and that, for both demographic and economic reasons, they're going to continue to be one.

In fact, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute (which I highly recommend reading), nearly one in five school-aged children in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the child of immigrants. The majority of these children were born in the United States, and are proficient English speakers, but such changing demographics do raise new questions for public schools. In particular, many schools lack the resources or expertise to effectively educate the 6 million children who do not now speak English proficiently, and the increasing geographic dispersion of immigrants--who are now settling in non-border states and places not traditionally seen as destinations for immigration--means more schools that lack experience teaching children of immigrants or English language learners must now face these challenges. There's also the question of what role public schools play in equipping immigrants, children of immigrants, and, indeed, all the children they serve, to be good citizens.

Unfortunately, because the conversation about immigration is so polarized (as are questions about public education), there's not a lot of honest public conversation about these issues that isn't laden with political baggage.