Molding a Career in Education

A new magnet program in Hillborough County, Florida is preparing high school students to become future educators. In a landscape where there is constant debate on how to train and create quality educators for our youth, this program may be a step in the right direction.

The school system opened the Urban Teaching Academies at three high schools and currently have 70 freshman enrolled. If the students are successful, the school district may cover college tuition if they pursue a degree in education. 

While the program is in its infancy, students will soon be shadowing teachers and see how lesson plans are made, how to manage classroom time, even how to take attendance. Students will also receive the same training teachers receive on how to apply their knowledge and lessons in the classroom. In a state with a 10% unemployment rate, school officials hope that having a degree in education, along with a program of continuous support that starts in high school, will help the state grow its own active teachers. 

 

Tomorrow, the Ed. Writers Association Annual Meeting will feature a session on the futre of Ed. Schools. Stay tuned for more on innovations in preservice teacher training . . .

Middle School Math and the Achievement Gap

Researchers from the University of Illinois say that if you want to make real strides toward closing the achievement gap, give students in urban schools with primarily black and Latino student populations access to high-level math courses in middle school. In addition, researchers advise that schools start rigorous coursework early in a student's career, focus on teacher quality, and reduce class sizes to encourage more focused, academic learning environments.

Following 6,500 public school students as they progressed from 8th to 10th grade and focusing on the effects of school-related behaviors, math placement, and achievement, researchers found that students who take advanced math courses in middle school develop behaviors that augment achievement over time. High expectations, rigorous work, and the academic climate in these middle school math classes give students skills that have positive effects in later grades. Advanced math enrollment in middle school means students are more likely to take higher-level math courses in high school.

Studies like this one from the University of Illinois help focus work on closing the achievement gap, but they need to be received as part of a holistic approach. Last September, Tom Loveless authored a study that cautioned against pushing unprepared students in algebra without the right supports. 

Economic Cutbacks Inspire a Controversial Idea: Do Schools Really Need Principals?

In the Tucson (Ariz.) Unified School District, administrators are scrambling to find ways to make an 18 percent budget cutback. Some are considering getting rid of counselors, while others are considering closing down libraries. Because of the madness that the economic crisis has reaped, some are raising questions about the necessity of principals.

Seven principals have already been informed they will be laid off in the near future. Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen says school districts across the United States work without principals, but Tucson will need to develop a comprehensive plan in order to eliminate principals from schools. Others in the community are irked and argue that the leadership a principal brings to schools is invaluable.

A handful of small schools around the country have experimented with having teachers run schools with no principals, but can a massive school district handle not having the leadership and guidance principals bring? Many opponents say that a school district as large a Tucson's would be hurt by the lack of principals even if teachers work longer hours to keep things running smoothly, as many have already said they will.

In light of the economic crisis, do you feel that schools could run well without the leadership provided by a principal?

The “Homework Lady” Sounds Off

Cathy Vatterott, author of the upcoming ASCD book Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs, joined the debate surrounding Marshall County, W.Va., where the school system is using her research to consider ending the district policy of penalizing students for incomplete homework.

In a Charleston Daily Mail article and an interview on MetroNews Talkline radio yesterday, Vatterott stresses that traditional homework practices are usually idealized and overrated. She does not believe in eliminating homework; however, Vatterott thinks teachers should ensure fewer take-home assignments and more targeted learning tasks: “When homework is really boring and painful and when kids don’t understand what they’re doing, it really impacts their view of learning,” said Vatterott.

Last month, The Juggle, a parent-focused Wall Street Journal blog, tackled kids “drowning in homework.” Vatterott acknowledges not only the importance of parents’ roles, but also the significance of socioeconomic status on students’ home environments. She advocates that “homework that cannot be done without help is not good homework.” In the end, Vatterott wants students to be responsible for their own learning, rather than the grade on their homework.

How have you handled “My dog ate my homework!”? What is your district doing to make homework more effective for all students?

 

Cathy Vatterott is a university professor and a former middle school teacher and principal. You can contact her at www.homeworklady.com. Her book Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs will be published in July 2009.

Achievement Gaps Create "Permanent National Recession"

What if, in the 15 years following A Nation at Risk, the United States had risen to the top of international standards for academic excellence?

The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, a new report from McKinsey & Company, predicts that the U.S. GDP would be $1.3-2.3 trillion higher if the achievement gap between the United States and its international peers were closed in 1998.

The report breaks out the economic consequences of multiple gap categories: achievement gaps between U.S. states, between the U.S. and other countries, between racial categories, and between income levels. In addition to the trillions-scale GDP consequences for not closing the gap between the United States and international peers, we waste roughly 2–5 percent of our GDP for each remaining gap category we neglect. (As much as $700 billion or more for gaps within the states, $670 billion for income-based gaps, $525 billion for gaps between black and Latino students and their white peers.)

"It's the equivalent to a permanent national recession," McKinsey's Bryan Hancock says. "We waste 3 to 5 billion dollars a day by not closing these achievement gaps. This is not simply an issue about poor kids in poor schools; it's about most kids in most schools."

*Update: The Education Equality Project added video from the event to their site.

In Math, Concepts Are King

New research out of Vanderbilt University claims teaching the basic concepts at work in a math problem is more useful than teaching the procedures for solving a math problem. The study complements a growing body of research that supports teaching math concepts along with problem solving.

The key phrase here is "more useful"—no one seems to argue teaching concepts along with problem-solving procedures. But will the "more useful" mean instruction could swing wildly toward concept teaching exclusively? Or is that just the paranoid rambling of someone far behind on her RSS reading? Speaking of, here's a solipsistic take on some hot math posts of yesterblog—with a nod to the importance of teaching concepts:

• Research showing gestures can play a major role in teaching math concepts.
• Oregon's Lebanon Community Schools District getting good results by teaching algebra concepts in the early grades.
• From the EL archives, "How Mathematics Counts" advocates for contextualizing math concepts and communicating their application across content areas.
• And a caveat that math concepts must be taught in relation to real-world applications.

Help a Principal Get Creative with Scheduling

For the last few years, my school has experimented with a rotating seven-period schedule. (If today is periods 1-2-3-4-5, then tomorrow is periods 6-7-1-2-3 and so on . . . you get the point).

Teachers, students, and parents love the schedule. The idea of classes meeting at different times of the day has been embraced as the biggest plus—gone is the dreaded last period of the day (every day) class that we have all experienced.

For me, it's a bit of a nightmare because it makes hiring part-time teachers nearly impossible, and if I want to send 8th graders to the local high school in the morning to take a course too advanced to be taught in my building (i.e., I have four students ready for Algebra 2), it can be hard to work it into this rotating schedule.

Still, the benefits have outweighed the costs thus far, so we're sticking with it and dealing with the problems. Are any of you doing anything creative or different with your master schedule? I'd love to hear some fresh ideas. Remember that what is old hat for you may be completely foreign to me, so please just throw out some ideas that you know have worked for kids.

(Submitted by 2009 Outstanding Young Educator Marc Cohen, principal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Md.)

My Back Pages: Internet Killed the TV Star?

A discussion of literacy in today's classrooms inevitably involves the Internet, and schools are working furiously to keep up with the new demands of the Internet age. But the World Wide Web isn't the first innovation that has permeated education. It's instructive to look back at how educators dealt with the last major technological change that influenced literacy: the television.

In the December 1978 Educational Leadership, Western Washington University clinical professor Don Brown predicts that television is here to stay. He urges educators to learn to use television to their advantage instead of "constantly decrying its content." 

Read the article: Reading TV: Today's Basic (PDF)

Vote for ASCD!

ASCD's video "Tell Congress to Invest in Schools" has been nominated for Best Short-Form Video for the 2009 Nonprofit Video Awards by DogooderTV. DogooderTV selected ASCD's video on high school dropout rates and how America's collective voice is needed to urge Congress to act from more than 400 submissions. 

Please take the time to vote for "Tell Congress to Invest in Schools" and show your support for ASCD.

EdBlog Watch: Digital Education

Education Week is blog-happy; it keeps adding to its stable of entertaining and edifying blogs. One of the latest and most useful additions is Digital Education, by Katie Ash and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, which covers the intersection of technology and education from all angles.

What will you find at Digital Education? One post describes a high school's use of Google Earth, a free online service, to explore ancient Rome. Another post takes a broader view, asking, "How Effective Is Ed. Software, Really?" After discussing recent research, Ash states, "As I hear over and over from people in all areas of ed-tech: it's not the technology, but what you do with the technology that counts." This breadth of content makes Digital Education a must-read.

Educational Leadership Programs: Your Chance to Weigh In

A few years back, the education community was abuzz over the quality (or lack thereof) of educational leadership programs due largely to a report authored by Art Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Levine claimed university programs that prepare elementary- and secondary-school administrators were "inadequate to appalling." While many deans and professors rejected Levine’s research methodology and/or findings, others agreed that schools needed to improve.

ASCD recently participated in the revision of standards for leadership programs seeking NCATE accreditation and the public is invited to comment. The revised standards seek to define what an entry-level candidate in a leadership preparation program at an NCATE college or university should know and be able to do.

Here's your chance to express your opinion--The deadline for public comment is Friday, May 10, 2009, at midnight:

• ELCC Program Standards Draft - Building-Level
  
• ELCC Program Standards Draft - District-Level 

Engaging Students in Learning

As many of you know, ASCD's Whole Child Initiative is based on the belief that students must be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. Since we launched the Whole Child Web site just over two years ago, we have noticed the resources we've posted about engaging students have received the most traffic. We think this could be because most educators know that we need to engage students in learning, but they are having difficulty doing so in light of the mounting pressures of assessment and acocuntability.

To respond to this need, ASCD created a new e-book, Engaging the Whole Child: Reflections on Best Practices in Learning, Teaching, and Leadership, which is available for free download through May 6. The e-book includes a collection of articles from Educational Leadership by renowned authors such as Carol Ann Tomlinson, Richard Sagor, Nell Noddings, Thomas R. Guskey, and Allison Zmuda. The articles address how to inspire trust and confidence, deepen students' thinking, instill the desire to achieve, build on student interests, and more.

How do you engage students in learning? Share your thoughts here.

Web Patrol

Kids aren't always aware that what they post on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter might carry consequences in the offline world. Recently, law enforcement has used social networking sites to scan kids' profiles for incriminating information and to prevent future crimes. Officers say they have arrested gang members and avoided looming fights using information from social networking sites, but many students and parents feel it is a violation of their privacy.

"It's outside of school," high school senior Sarah Steinberg told the Washington Post, "and I just don't think it should be part of the school's job to do that."

In an age where social networking sites offer the option to privatize an individual's own page and when even prospective professional athletes are being scrutinized because of their Internet activities:

Do you think authorities are overstepping their boundaries by monitoring students' Web pages? Perhaps we should, instead, teach students to be responsible community members on- and offline (like this kid, who saved her Facebook friend's life)?

Reforms Will Lengthen School Year, Day

Arne Duncan continues to use press appearances to underscore the need for a longer school year and day, in the United States. The education secretary has identified time in school as significantly influencing achievement and says the traditional calendar most U.S. schools follow puts those students at a disadvantage when compared to their peers in India and China.

More time in schools begs the question, how will it be it allocated? If international protocol is our guide, we're going to need to find a lot more math and science teachers.

Struggling Teachers: Boot or Retrain?

In the April issue of Education Update, the article "Supporting Struggling Teachers" asks whether struggling teachers should get the boot or be retrained. Robyn Jackson, author of Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, says, "Teachers don't get have the option of getting rid of 'bad' kids, so why is our only solution to get rid of 'bad' teachers?" Some education experts and administrators say professional development, coaching, and mentoring can give underperforming teachers the tools they need to improve.

What do you think—should they stay, or should they go? How can you help teachers who struggle in the classroom?

[Bonus: Check out this new report (PDF) from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future on how best to retain inexperienced new teachers with learning teams.]

One-Size-Doesn't-Fit-ELL

Our guest blogger Judith Rance-Roney describes a personal encounter that illustrates the theme of her article in the April 2009 Educational Leadership. In the article, she points out that adolescent English language learners are a heterogeneous population, and teachers need to craft education plans that address their unique individual needs. Too often, that doesn't happen:

In one of my forays to a nearby school, I sat in on a sheltered math class for English language learners in a district known for its best practice in educating ELLs, many of whom were long-term English learners and native speakers of Spanish. The teacher had plastered the walls with terms, used visuals to illustrate concepts, and used copious amounts of Spanish to scaffold the math learning.

So, here I am in the back of the room observing and taking notes about how teachers are applying best practice introduced in the professional development program. Over to the right in the back with me is a lone student, desk tight in the back corner, flipping the pages of his math textbook and doodling in his notebook, totally oblivious to the activity at the blackboard.

"Oh yeah," the teacher explained afterwards. "That’s Piotr. He came from Poland a few months ago. He doesn't speak any English."

H-E-L-L-O. In this teacher's "No Child Left Behind" practices, Piotr did not even appear at the starting gate.

Have you had a similar experience with a one-size-fits-all mentality when educating adolescent English learners? 

And in response to Rance-Roney's article, Mary Ann Zehr at EdWeek's Learning the Language is looking for examples of schools that mix ELLs with native-English-speaking students but still give the ELLs focused instruction to acquire language skills.

How Are Boston's ELLs Faring Under Sheltered Immersion?

A report released April 8 by the Mauricio Gaston Institute in Boston shows troubling trends in student engagement and achievement among English language learners (ELLs) in Boston's public schools since 2003. A voter referendum in 2002 caused Boston's public schools to switch from transitional bilingual education to sheltered English immersion (in which ELLs are taught in English only) as default instruction.

Among the report's key findings are that the dropout rate for Boston high school students classified as Limited English Proficient nearly doubled from 2003 to 2006. By 2006, high school LEP students had the highest dropout rate of all students compared, although LEP students showed the lowest dropout rates in 2003 when transitional bilingual education was instructional policy. The proportion of LEP students in middle school who dropped out more than tripled.

My Back Pages: Woodstock, a Moon Landing, and ELL (1969)

The year 1969 was a tumultuous one—especially for three children ages 6 through 10 who landed in the United States without any knowledge of the English language. In the December 1969 issue of Educational Leadership, Theda M. Wilson of Baltimore City Public Schools describes what methods effectively helped them acquire English.

In particular, she cites three games they played in the classroom, playground, and living room: Simon Says, Guess What I’m Thinking?, and 20 Questions. The educator also stresses the importance of interaction with peers who are fluent in English, hands-on experiential learning, and frequent corrective feedback.

• Read the article: English as a Second Language (PDF)

We’ve certainly expanded our knowledge of what works in educating English language learners—for a comprehensive meta-analysis of research, see Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners—but this look back almost 40 years is a fascinating time capsule of how educators approached the issue in the past.

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members can access to EL issues from 1943 to the present by signing in at www.ascd.org.

Ed. Reform Movement Needs to Adopt Powerful Symbols, Rotherham Says

I just read an interesting thought-piece by Andy Rotherham about how education reformers are hindered by negative symbolic associations or fail to capitalize on compelling, rallying symbolism. Poaching from Rotherham's piece:

Given the scale of America's education problem, reformers do not want for compelling symbols. Yet the education reform movement has failed to organize itself around compelling symbols or imagery. For instance, almost half of all minority students fail to complete high school . . . The annual symbolism of half-empty graduations across America's great cities could serve as a rallying cry to dramatically improve schools. But it's a catastrophe largely ignored outside of reform circles.

And in conclusion:

Fairly or not, imagery matters. Social movements do not succeed on moral force alone; they need leadership and strategy as well. Today's reformers are battling negative imagery as well as the reflexive conservatism that often hampers public school reform. Consequently they are fighting for incremental reform rather than the dramatic change the country needs. 

So, what say you, education leaders—what rallying symbolism would you use in your community? The Fargo sandbagger-brigade image comes to mind.

EdBlog Watch: Learn More with TeachMoore

As a part of the Teacher Leaders Network blog group, Renee Moore’s insightful blog TeachMoore brings readers a relatively unique perspective: the longtime high school English teacher and former Mississippi Teacher of the Year is now an instructor at a community college. She has published extensively on culturally engaged instruction. Her breadth of experience leads to thoughtful posts on a wide variety of topics.

Moore recently posted her "Advice for the Next President" as part of a collection of similar writings collected by John Merrow at Learning Matters. Her advice emphasizes the need to recognize, reward, and listen to highly skilled teachers working under difficult circumstances. Another TeachMoore post praises the idea of an ancestry-based curriculum proposed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as an effective way to engage African American students in history and science.