March Board of Ed: teacher licensure and preparation

 Hills: "a really good Board conversation broke out" when it was proposed 
anyone having an issues, we should postpone the vote until April
"and no, individually answering questions is not the same as the Board discussion"
yeah, there is an uncomfortable amount of offline discussion...

Martinez: good intentions within the law
part of a larger initiative
"this by itself will not solve it all"
make sure we're doing research on it, monitoring it

memo is here; summary of public comment is here 

Board of Ed for January: on educator prep

 There is a memo here.

Erin Hashimoto-Martell
Claire Abbott who is really soft and hard to hear
there are over 1200 preparation programs; 62 sponsoring organizations; 4300 completers on average each year
periodic formal review done by DESE (itself; not outsourced); approval generally is for seven years

Joint Board of Ed/Higher Ed meeting: teacher preparation

Wulfson: 40% of new teachers each year come out of MA public higher ed system
backup on this is here
68 different sponsoring organizations, 1800+ programs
first year teachers from public colleges and universities are disproportionally hired into high-needs schools and assigned students who are farther behind academically
"student achievement starts first with" teacher preparation

Joint Board of Ed/Higher Ed meeting: Opening and Early College

The agenda for all of today is here. The early college documents are here.
Welcome from Bridgewater State President Clark, who notes that Bridgewater State is the largest producer of teachers in the state.

State Education meetings this week

and also my schedule!
DESE, amusingly, has posted a single agenda for all the of the upcoming meetings. Just keep scrolling! 
Tomorrow, we have the annual joint meeting of the Board of Higher Ed with the Board of K-12 Ed. That's down at Bridgewater State starting at nine am. The joint meeting includes discussion on:

• an update on the early college initiative, which was the focus of much of last year's meeting. The short version is "staff from the DHE, ESE, and EOE are providing support for partnerships that will be submitting a final application for designation" with the applications due February 9.
• an informational presentation (I'd call it) on educator preparation, or "where do teachers come from?" You can see from the chart in that presentation that Bridgewater State remains, far and away, the largest state producer of teachers in the state; I assume they also have data for non-state colleges and universities, which may be of less relevance to the Higher Ed board but would be interesting to see.
• a report on increasing access to high school computer science

Something that I thought we'd see that isn't here is something on the new MCAS, particularly as that's supposed to be aiming towards grade 12 preparation. Perhaps because we haven't done a high school round yet?

After the joint meeting, the K-12 board meets on its own (scheduled for 11:15; just enough time to rearrange the chairs). On that agenda, following opening comments:

• an update on the Commissioner search. It will be interesting to see if any additional information is offered in this update: how many, for example, were actually interviewed. 
• there is a discussion and proposed vote to solicit public comment on the revised history and social studies standards. If you have questions about that, if you scroll to the bottom, the backups are already posted (hurray!). 
• there is the promised discussion coming on weight within the accountability standards. Note the following from the memo:

  Our priorities should be reflected not only in the indicators included, but also in their weighting in the calculation. Furthermore, the results should provide a clear picture of school performance in order to help us direct our limited resources for assistance to schools that most need them...any change in this ratio will affect both our classification of schools for accountability purposes and our calculation of the lowest performing ten percent of districts for charter school purposes.

• There is an update on the students enrolling from Puerto Rico; as of January 5, 2440 students have enrolled.
• There is an update on the two new charter schools applying for charters; note that Acting Commissioner Wulfson has, as yet, not made any recommendations regarding these. He will do so before the February meeting.
• Bentley Academy, a Horace Mann in Salem, is asking for a waiver of the state requirement that its accountability plan be approved by its collective bargaining unit, which has declined to take action. 
• Paulo Freire Charter in Springfield is being recommended for a conditional renewal.

Presented for the Board's information, but not action are: education laws enacted in 2017; recommendations on integrating student supports;  a report on dual enrollment 2008-15; a report on efforts to upgrade school technology; a report on grants; and charter matters approved by the Commissioner.

On Wednesday, Governor Baker will release his FY19 state budget.

On Thursday, the Rennie Center is doing their annual Conditions on Education in the Commonwealth; the speaker this year is former Secretary of Education John King. The hashtag is #COE2018.

On Friday, beginning at nine, the Board of Education will interview the three finalists for Massachusetts Commissioner of Education. The interviews are at the Omni Parker House in Boston and are open to the public. They will also be livestreamed. 

On Monday at noon back in Malden, the Board of Education will meet to vote for a new Commissioner. 

No Time to Lose: National Council of State Legislatures weighs in on the post-NCLB universe

The National Council of State Legislatures after 18 months of study today released a report on what successful school systems around the world are doing. Their interest is in influencing the post-NCLB, state-focused, U.S. education universe. The full report can be downloaded here.
NPR has a good summary of the first three points in their report:

1: More Help For The Youngest Learners In the U.S., poverty is a powerful drag on the youngest learners, with too many children showing up to kindergarten both hungry and lacking important cognitive and noncognitive skills. Research suggests that preschool, when done well, can have a profound impact on children's lives, but too often in the U.S. it's done badly or not at all...

2: Teachers Need To Be Better And, in this case, "better" is a big tent. The report's authors say it starts when future teachers are still students...Once these top-flight teachers enter the classroom, they also enter a very different professional reality — one that involves as much training as teaching. In some places, the report says, just "30 percent to 35 percent of a teacher's time is spent teaching students, while the rest is spent on activities such as working in teams with other teachers to develop and improve lessons, observing and critiquing classes, and working with struggling students." Too often in the U.S., teachers work in isolation, cut off from their fellow teachers. In contrast, Stephenson says, many high-performing countries have embraced a team-teaching model, where newer teachers are constantly observing veteran teachers and being observed, fine-tuning their skills in real time. Overseas, observation is about improvement — not just accountability. And then there's pay. Yes, other nations have higher standards for their teachers, but with those standards come increased respect and pay, on par with engineers and accountants. Imagine that. 

3: Fix Career And Technical Education (CTE) You know, the classes formerly known as "voc-ed" — auto repair, welding, carpentry, etc. The report suggests that, in the U.S., many schools have failed to adapt their CTE offerings to fit the needs of the modern economy, preparing students for jobs of the past instead of matching them with today's employers. It's strange given the mantra heard often from U.S. policymakers and educators, that today's schools should prepare students to be "college and career ready." In reality, Takumi, the Hawaii Democrat, says many schools "have kind of pushed career to the side." As a result, too often students need college in order to be career ready. To make matters worse, in the U.S. CTE also has a perception problem. Stephenson, the Utah Republican, says "it is considered a second tier for low-performing students. ... That is our tradition in America." . It's a chicken-or-egg problem. Whether that perception created the current reality or was created by it, both need to change.

The fourth item is "reforms that are connected and aligned as parts of a clearly planned and carefully designed comprehensive systems," which is not only difficult to summarize: it's also difficult to do.

It'll be interesting and informative to see which states do anything about any of this at all. 

California may reverse their monolingual bill...and they're going to need teachers

Excellent article from the Hechinger Report on California's effort to reverse the ridiculous Unz law that ended bilingual education, except in particular cases.
This does mean, though, that California is going to need more dual language teachers, of which there already is a shortage.
Both, incidentally, are true of Massachusetts, as well: we are WAY overdue on reversing our parallel law, and we already have such a shortage. We need to step it up in getting the kind of education and support dual language teachers need.

We are not Tom Brady, either (UPDATED)

I got a couple of questions last week about WPS's being listed as a partner with Sposato Graduate School of Education, which is coming out of the MATCH charter school....is 'empire' too grand a word to use?
This was at least partly in response to a piece "I Am Not Tom Brady," posted last week by Jennifer Berkshire. In it, Amy Berard, who taught for the Lawrence Public Schools under their state receiver, wrote of a teacher training technique that involved her being coached through an earpiece while she was actively teaching. If you haven't read it, please do. There are some ties between the organizations that did this and Sposato.

I didn't know anything at all about it, so I sent off a couple of inquiries to administration. I was told that Sposato (which is collaborating with the Harvard Graduate School of Education) had had a preliminary meeting with some in Human Resources, who had been favorably impressed by the support given to new teachers through such a program. A second meeting with our Human Resources Director was to follow to get more information and discuss further, but it never happened. And now we're between HR directors, and not likely to add something like this to what is being juggled, at least at this point.
I was also told that WPS would ask that Sposato remove WPS from their "partners" list, which has not as of this morning happened.

UPDATE: WPS is no longer listed. We've been told it was a typo; you'll note "Waltham" is now up.

And today in people not knowing that they're talking about

Goodness, we're having quite a week in the Telegram and Gazette "As I See It" section, aren't we? The Pioneer Institute yesterday and DFER today!
Should you have forgotten who DFER is, here's a quick reminder of whom we're dealing with and why we should not be listening to them on, well, probably anything. They don't--mercifully--have much of a presence in Massachusetts (and Massachusetts election laws prevent them from flooding elections with funds the way that they have elsewhere in the country, at least directly), but let us not forget where this is coming from.
That said, the editorial itself is essentially alarmist rhetoric, not even doing much with the report from NCTQ: "crisis," "especially dire," "below average" and on and on: BE AFRAID! BE VERY AFRAID!
And the report from which this all draws is round two of NCTQ: NCTQ, which comes to this with a foundational bias, which has terrible methodology (yes, that's from last year, but they used the same system this year), and in some ways made it even worse than it had been before. And the ratings, make no mistake, have some schools running scared, with what are going to be bad results on teaching and learning in classrooms at the colleges and universities.
The best analogy I've seen for this is if you rated restaurants by take out menus, without ever visiting the restaurants or eating the food; I'd only add that you're having it all done by critics who don't like to eat.
Why are we giving these people any attention? They don't know what they're talking about.

The insanity in push on evaluating teacher training programs

A telling couple of paragraphs from today's Politico article:

A recent study funded by the Education Department found that value-added measures may fluctuate significantly due to factors beyond the teachers’ control, including random events such as a dog barking loudly outside a classroom window, distracting students during their standardized test. A 2010 study, also funded by the Education Department, found the models misidentify as many as 50 percent of teachers — pegging them as average when they’re actually better or worse than their peers, or singling them out for praise or condemnation when they’re actually average.

Yet another challenge: Calculating scores for educators who do not teach subjects or grades assessed with standardized exams. Nationally, some 70 percent of teachers — including most high school and early elementary teachers, plus art, music and physical education teachers — fall into that category.

Despite such complications, Muñoz made clear in a call with reporters on Thursday that Obama wants student test scores, or other measures of student growth, to figure heavily into states’ evaluations of teacher prep programs.

“This is something the president has a real sense of urgency about,” she said. “What happens in the classroom matters. It doesn’t just matter — it’s the whole ballgame.” So using student outcomes to evaluate teacher preparation programs “is really fundamental to making sure we’re successful,” Muñoz said. “We believe that’s a concept … whose time has come.”

Thus:

• it's junk science
• the Administration knows it's junk science, because one of its own departments is saying so.
• we're going to do it anyway because it's "time has come."

This. Is. Insane.
(h/t to Perdido Street School for the link)

Rebellion in the ranks

In case you missed it: there's a rebellion going on in the alums of Teach for America. Previously known for going on to law school or med school, or (more destructively) becoming the next wave of ed "reform" leaders, there's now a growing movement of those leaving the TFA ranks and fighting against much of what TFA does and stands for. TruthOut has good coverage of not only the "what" by the "why."
Go figure: you take a group of college grads who have just spent the past four years being trained by elite colleges in research and critical thinking, indoctrinate them in non-researched based education theories that don't stand up to critical thinking, and then send them out to experience how poorly those theories work on the ground. And then they come back and argue that it's not working. Who could have foreseen that one?
And while you're reading thoughts on TFA, you might take a look at this--angry, and rightfully so--post from Jess Yarmosky, who has finished her TFA time and has some thoughts to share.

And while we're talking teacher evaluation

...Bruce Baker has a good rundown on how evaluating teachers, or teachers' prep programs, by student test scores, really doesn't work.

Less than quality work

Before you take too seriously the National Council on Teacher Quality* report on teacher preparation programs, please take a look at Linda Darling-Hammond's analysis of the report's...quality. Or lack thereof.


*as I believe I have said in the past: this is a bit like cutting down all the trees and building a "Maple Drive."

Worcester School Committee meets tomorrow

The Worcester School Committee meets tomorrow afternoon at 4 pm. You'll find the agenda here.
On the agenda:

• We have local citizenry coming in to discuss the ACLU's arrest report and the WOO card.
• Reporting out are TLSS (twice), Governance and Employee Issues, and Accountability and Student Achievement (links to come).
• The usual August boatload of people retiring, resigning, and taking a leave of absence. I assume that we're getting all of the summer hires at the first September meeting.
• The Mass Association of School Committees proposed resolutions are up for review, before the fall delegates' assembly. 
• A number of requests for reviews or reports (demonstrating that it's been awhile since our last meeting!)--more stringent phys ed requirements, an update on the Common Core implementation, painting of crosswalks, the family involvement plan, staff assignments, staff summer training, elementary school libraries, charter school reimbursement, dual language immersion programs...
• Also, we've got a grant coming in for Chandler Magnet School.

Tomorrow, 4 pm, City Hall!

Ron Ferguson speaking at Worcester Tech today

This post has been removed.

Yes, we are a pilot district

And, yes, Worcester is a pilot district for the ELL teacher training. We'll have a group of 25 teachers, and it will be the equivalent of a college course, with half the training taking place in person and half online.
(and, as a side note: administrators who answer their emails on weekend are excellent)

Changes in English Language Learning coming in Massachusetts

There's an article in EdWeek this week covering the upcoming changes in English Language Learning in the Commonwealth, in answer to a Department of Justice investigation finding ELL programs to be inadequate. Much of what this is going to mean is a requirement that teachers in all four "core" (English, math, science, and social studies) take a course on language acquisition, something which will be required of all core-content teachers being licensed after 2016. Administrators who supervise such teachers will also be required to have the training.
This obviously hugely important to do.
It's a massive undertaking to train this many teachers in this amount of time, in addition to all the regular things we do PD in, in addition to the changes in the teacher evaluation, which is also requiring teacher and administrator training.I have yet to hear exactly how we're handling this; I'll update when I do!

Expensive mistakes

I walked out of last night's event with a colleague from one of our suburbs. I asked him, "So, when are you guys going to bring Teach for America to your town?"
And then when we stopped laughing...
Because this is another bright idea that we're inflicting on high poverty students who can least afford it. The suburbs are not going to stop hiring well-educated, well-trained, experienced teachers for scantily trained college grads with no experience. That would be ridiculous.

Not to mention that paying TFA $5000 per corps member (over and above a step 1 teacher's salary) is a complete waste of public funds.

Speaking of Teach for America

At tonight's Worcester Regional Research Bureau event, we heard from Teach for America and the Boston Teachers' Residency program, in addition to contributions from Assumption's education department and myself.
In the interests of full disclosure (and in case it becomes a local issue), here are the resources I used in my response:
The most comprehensive look on Teach for America to date is the Great Lakes Center review of the evidence that came out in 2010.It exhaustively goes through the research available. Among other conclusions: TFA corps members do about as well as other teachers with no training or background in education and that they improve at about the same rates with two exceptions: in some cases they are marginally better at teaching their students math, and in several cases, there is a worrying negative impact on reading that persists over time. TFA is no longer serving students in underserved districts. Teacher persistence rate in actual classroom teaching,, when the numbers are dug down. somewhere around 20 to 15 percent of teachers remaining after five years.There is lots more there; if you read nothing else, go through that one.
This is included in that review, but  Linda Darling-Hammond on how teacher preparation makes a huge difference is here. This has lead to an ongoing attack on Darling-Hammond by TFA, incidentally.
A run through of the research TFA offers in support and how it...doesn't support can be found here. Seriously, there's a reason why we need to require statistic classes.
I borrowed Gary Rubenstein's line about every TFA corps member owning their district a third year due to the lousy job they did the first year from here 
Jim Horn does his usual good job of pointing out that far too much of this is being predicated on test scores, anyway, here.
A good run through of the somewhat crazy assumptions behind the very idea of TFA, also pointing out the harm that this does (and from a Canadian perspective) is here.
In addition to personal experience and much of what I've read and learned elsewhere, my argument on mutual development of teacher excellence was informed by Anthony Cody's blog post from last week on school turnaround.
I have not read Learning on Other People's Kids, but the title says much. Press release on the book is here.
A whole new set of questions is raised by Barbara Miner in her article for Rethinking Schools.What is the policy drive behind TFA? Where does all the money go? And what is going on with their 501 (c) 4?

For those interested: the forum was taped by channel 13 and will, I am told, be up online as well.

President Obama's FY13 proposal

I should open by saying that this stands little chance of passing as proposed.
President Obama presented his budget request to Congress on Monday, and the proposals lines up with what his administration has focused on so far:

the Race to the Top franchise, launched under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, would get $850 million, a big jump from the current year’s level of $550 million... a $100 million increase to the nearly $300 million Teacher Incentive Fund, which provides grants to districts to create pay-for-performance programs...

Promise Neighborhoods, which was drastically underfunded for such an extensive program, is up for $100 million.
Worryingly, some bread-and-butter programs that districts really depend on are slated for level-funding:

...Title I grants to help districts educate disadvantaged children would get $14.5 billion, and special education state grants would get $11.6 billion...

And note that these, unlike RTTT, are programs with a long track record of making a substantial difference in kids' lives and educations. 

And if you haven't had enough of competitive grant programs, here's a new one:

...the $5 billion proposal for a new, competitive grant program that would help states take what the administration is billing as big, “bold” steps to overhaul teacher quality. For example, states could use the funds to revamp colleges of education and make them more selective, make sure teachers’ salaries are tied to student achievement, improve professional development and offer teachers more planning time, and craft new evaluation systems.

Combined that with the proposed changes to Title II:

Mr. Obama also wants to direct a big portion of the nearly $2.5 billion in funding that states now use for class-size reduction and professional development to a competitive grant program. The proposal would siphon off a quarter of the funding—$about 620 million—for competitive grants that focus on a host of teacher-quality issues, including expanding the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics teachers, and bolstering teacher preparation

and you've got a) local budgetary messes and b) even more business for the grant-writing department. As this administration has a lousy record when it comes to tying these grants to actual research on what helps kids...not a great direction.
However, there is a request for $30 billion to work on school facilities!