From “Why Johnnie Can’t Read” (1955) to Decentralization (1971) to Mayoral Control (2002) and A Nation at Risk (1983) one magic bullet after another. Bush junior No Child Left Behind (2002) and its offspring, the Every Child Succeeds Act (2016), add in the Common Core (2010) leading up to phonics and the Science of Reading and A Portrait of a Graduate (2026), the race continues, are there potions? Magic bullets?
Over my career, as a UFT District Rep, member of Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) teams, a school support team member in the Chancellor’s High School District and Affinity Districts: I’ve visited scores of schools and hundreds of classrooms, and teacher performance: probably a bell-shaped curve.
Early in Charlotte Danielson’s career I attended one of her professional development activities, sixty-four domains, ranking endless teacher performances, I asked, “Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, ‘Pornography is hard to define but I know it when I see it, is it the same with good teaching?” Charlotte demurred.
Teaching is an art, not a science.
Occasionally I’d enter a classroom that was electric, usually, teachers working hard, at a complex and ofttimes frustrating job. “My first period lesson was great, kids really engaged, not so in the second period, how can I change my methodology for the third period? Teachers have to be nimble and adaptive, a quality never taught.
To change output we have to change input.
Some of us are better athletes, musicians, artists or teachers. Do you inherit these skills, can it be the household in which you were raised, perhaps coaching made me better, aka guided practice. 10,000 hours of practice doesn’t make us into outstanding athletes or musicians or teachers as Malcolm Gladwell suggested.
In NYC state test scores surged last year and nosedived this year, the chancellor committed to doing the same activities: have teachers suddenly forgotten how to teach? Principals forgot how to principal? Or, did the chancellor forget how to lead? Did he ever know how to lead? Or, as we suspect, fudging the actual standardized tests?
In a NY Times op ed a philosophy professor at Williams College proffers directed classroom discussion may be more valuable than writing assignments.
In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates offers a startling criticism of writing. Written words, he claims, are not the true children of knowledge, because writing cannot speak, answer questions or come to its own defense. Only through conversation among minds, he suggests, does reason yield real insight. For the past two millenniums, this appraisal has seemed like a failure to appreciate the power of writing. But perhaps Socrates was right, and we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas.
I don’t rely on prepared scripts when I teach, and few of the teachers I most admire do. Instead, I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another. I want to make new connections in the immediacy of our back-and-forth. I want to recall a thread from two class meetings ago spontaneously and weave it into my improvised lecture while snapping into new ways of thinking about it in the moment.
There is no right or wrong, “teaching,” aka connecting with an audience, is complex, more art than skill, hopefully we are self-critical reflective thinkers and performers, after all, a classroom is a stage.
Another Times article asks highly regarded education professors to rank education strategies/interventions for impact and cost using test scores as the measurement tool.
The results suggest that any meaningful change will probably require multiple evidence-backed strategies, with a focus on executing them well for the long term, and based on the needs of the students and teachers in each place.
Good luck!!
The Gates Foundation three-year $50M MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) Study), thousands of teachers videoed with 360 degree cameras and the teaching being coded by trained observers.
Over the span of three years, dozens of education experts and researchers, 3,000 teacher volunteers in six urban districts, 20,000 videotaped lessons, student surveys, and student performance on state and supplemental higher-order thinking skills tests, have given us a much better understanding of what great teaching looks like.
The researchers created an algorithm that you may find useful,
Specifically, to infer a teacher’s track record of student achievement impacts, we started by estimating the following value-added model, using students’ achievement on state tests, Sit , as the dependent variable:
(1) SX it =+ itbc XS jt ++ im it-1 S jt-1 + fit
(See above link, I have no idea what this all means!)
The Gates “research” was buried in the report, perhaps it was an idea that can’t be packaged and sold, perhaps because it would minimize the role of elites?
Research shows that teachers learn best from each other, and that a school leadership model that leverages teacher leadership can positively impact instruction. Why not turn to teachers to help lead in the area they know best? School leadership should include teacher leaders as part of the solution to improving teaching and learning — giving space and time for collaboration, reflection, and observation, and improving their craft through meaningful teacher-to-teacher learning.
David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1995) traipse through “reform” after “reform,” reminding us that,
“…policy elites -people who managed the economy who have privileged access to the media and to political officials, who controlled foundations who were education leaders in the universities and in city and state superintendencies who redesigned and led organizations of many kinds – gained disproportionate authority over education reform.”
Tyack and Cuban go on to tell us,
“Change where it counts the most – in the daily interactions of teachers and students – is the hardest to achieve and the most important, but we are not pessimistic about improving public schools‘
“To do this requires not only the will and commitment but also an accurate understanding of schools as institutions”
“We favor attempts to bring about such improvements by working from the inside out, especially enlisting the support and skills of teachers as key actors in reform. . … “
“Teachers can not do the job alone.”
“They need resources of time and money, practical designs for change and collegial support. And can succeed best if they do their work in partnership with parents.”
Thirty years have passed and, sadly, the “elites” continue to impose one magic bullet after another.
New York State has made Regent Examinations optional and apparently each of the 700 New York State schools districts will craft their own high school graduation assessment tools Will everybody graduate? How do you teach the Portrait of s Graduate concepts?
How do you measure them?
Leading a school is an incredibly difficult task, ideally a team of a school leader and a cohort of peer selected teacher leaders. The Affinity District, a cohort of public schools, operating within the UFT contract “managed” by a number of not-for-profits, the PROSE schools, a joint-Department of Education initiative that gives schools wide latitude in school design. Unfortunately chancellors have attempted to extinguish one of the highly successful components with the school system.
As the legislative session approaches , is it time to reconfigure the management structure?
Stay tuned.
