Change Would Bring Higher Degree of Professionalism, Respect To Teaching

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Michael Loeb, a third-year educator, teaches middle school students with special needs in the Throgs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx, NY.

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." That's how Nobel Prize for Literature winner George Bernard Shaw saw it over 100 years ago when he wrote these now infamous words. Educators know first-hand that Shaw was wrong. But we have to do more to change lingering misperceptions. Considering the enormous role education plays in shaping the lives of our kids, it is essential we elevate the status of teachers in our society.

President Obama told us during his State of the Union that one of the biggest impacts on a child's lifetime success comes from teachers. The president reminded us, "In South Korea, teachers are known as nation builders. Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect."

I agree, and I believe changing some of the archaic rules that hamstring our profession would be a good start. In particular, ending last in, first out would help foster respect that's missing for teachers. LIFO, as it's called, is the policy that states that during difficult economic times teacher layoffs must be determined by seniority -- not quality.

Studies show that President Obama is correct: the most influential factor in a child's school education is his or her teacher. However, in most states and districts, seniority trumps effectiveness. That is not valuing the important work we do.

Layoffs are awful. They would devastate students at the school where I teach. My friends, who also happen to be my colleagues, would lose their jobs and opportunities to do work they love. But making matters worse is how we go about layoffs when they do occur. What successful organization or business would make painful layoff decisions without taking the effectiveness of its employees into account?

I often hear that public education is not the private sector -- we don't sell derivatives, counsel, or medical treatments. I couldn't agree more. The future of our children is unequivocally more important. How will we attract new, talented, relentless teachers if potential educators know they may be out of a job in a year or two regardless of how they do? Are we really going to convince graduates or career changers to become educators and not bankers, lawyers, doctors, or anything else with LIFO in place?

Ending this bad public policy is not a silver bullet. We still need a comprehensive teacher evaluation system, more strong school leadership, better pay, training and support for teachers, and more collaboration between teachers and parents. But ending LIFO would be a substantive and symbolic shift toward acknowledging the need to keep our best teachers in the classroom. In my three years, I have seen teachers who have changed kids' lives. We cannot afford to lose a single one of these amazing educators.

If education doesn't work out for a teacher, he or she will have to find a new job. But if education doesn't work out for kids, they will have likely lost something much more valuable -- their only opportunity to reach their potential. For many of my students, this means a lost opportunity to break out of a cycle of poverty. In the richest, most innovative, and most patriotic nation we can -- and must -- do better for our kids.

Educators are able to change kids' lives. We need our laws to reflect the reality that teachers are, in fact, those who can.

The views presented on our guest blogs are the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of StudentsFirst. We thank all of our guest bloggers for their thoughtful perspectives.

A Break For One Is Not Enough...We Need The Force Of Many

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Mialisa Bonta comes from a family of Puerto Rican activists in New York. She has worked for nearly twenty years on behalf of youth in education reform, community building, and philanthropy. She is an alumnus of Yale College (B.A.), Harvard School of Education (Ed.M) and Yale Law School (J.D.). Mialisa currently lives in Alameda, CA where her family, husband Rob and three children Reina, Iliana, and Andres are named plaintiffs in the Robles Wong v. CA lawsuit brought forth by a broad coalition of students, parents, school districts, and education organizations challenging the state of California to fulfill its constitutional obligation to adequately educate its students by fixing its broken school finance system.

My name is Mialisa Bonta. I am responsible for establishing strategic partnerships for StudentsFirst, initially focused on engaging other education reform organizations to build upon the movement to Save Great Teachers.

I joined StudentsFirst because I believe that we need fundamental change in our educational system and it will require the collective activism of a nation to ensure students are held at the center of our policy decisions and have access to great teachers and schools that put them on a path to success.

As an elementary school student in the Bronx, one teacher intervened for me, helping me to avoid going to a middle school known to be a dead-end for learning. It was life-changing, a personal lottery of sorts, as I was able to go to a great secondary school, then on to college, graduate school in education and eventually law school. I was a good student, but no more special than the other students in my grade. I was 1 out of over 100 students. The others, well...

The personal experience of the child became the political challenge for the adult. I have worked with students, teachers, parents and district leaders throughout my career to change the odds that I faced, but that are still so unfortunately prevalent for so many of our students today. My experiences with different organizations, whether community-based youth programs like LEAP in Connecticut, national pathway-to-college groups like Breakthrough Collaborative, or with the Stupski Foundation, focused on district-reform, have all taught me a critical lesson. One group, acting independently, cannot achieve the transformative educational changes that we all seek for our children.

Over the next several months, StudentsFirst will actively pursue partnerships with a range of education reform organizations, civil rights groups, researchers, education associations, and district, local and state leaders. We will strive to transform our independent actions into a collective force spurring our leaders to be courageous while reminding the nation that education should not be a thing left to chance, but rather is something we all hold as fundamental right.

A Teacher's Perspective--It's Time To Take A Risk And Support Real Reform

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Ben Salkowe is a fifth grade teacher in Nevada and co-leader of the Scholars Working OverTime (SWOT) program at Keller Elementary School. SWOT is the first extended-day, college-prep program for students in East Las Vegas, and now Ben is working to support education reform legislation that would impact communities across his state.

By any measure, my state ranks at the bottom of the nation for the quality of education we offer our kids. Nevada's achievement on standardized assessments is dismal and our annual dropout rate is heartbreaking. This reality is what makes the state hearing I recently attended so extraordinary.

Last Saturday morning, the Ways and Means Committee of our state assembly heard several hours of testimony from teachers, school districts, and community leaders on a landmark education reform package. The reforms moving through the legislature would tackle Nevada's challenges directly by making students' academic growth the bottom line at every level of our system.

It is hard to overstate the potential impact of these reforms. This year, hundreds of great teachers in my district are in line to be laid off due to budget cuts. Nevada's "last in, first out" (LIFO) rules require that these layoffs be based solely on the years a teacher has worked, with no consideration of the achievement a teacher has led in his or her classroom. The proposed reforms tell districts forced to layoff teachers that they should do so based on effectiveness, not seniority.

We also have an evaluation system that rates nearly every one of us as satisfactory, despite the fact that our state has been one of the lowest performing in the nation for years. That just doesn't add up. How can we evaluate an educator without considering the growth they lead students to achieve? The new legislation says evaluations in our system, for both teachers and administrators, should be based on the academic growth students make in their classrooms and their buildings.

The morning after the hearing, I scanned the local headlines. When I saw the story at the top of the Reno Gazette-Journal, I was puzzled. "Teachers argue against Nevada bill that would cut tenure." I had been at the hearing and I knew many educators who supported this legislation. How could the takeaway have been that teachers opposed the reform package?

When I thought back to the testimonies, I started to realize the challenge we face. Despite some strong statements from teachers who wanted to see LIFO ended, many veteran educators who spoke up did so in opposition to the proposals. They were not opposed to the goals of the legislation, but worried and confused about what it would look like to overhaul a system so many of them had worked in for years.

Change may be difficult, but our status quo is unacceptable. It is time to take a risk. Those of us teachers who have questions about these proposals need to ask them with the understanding that all of us want to produce better outcomes for our students. And those of us teachers who support these reforms need to step out of our classrooms and start talking to our colleagues and our community members about the chance we have to make history.

The real game changer in education reform -- the thing that will really turn our state around -- will not be a piece of legislation. It is going to take a shift in the mindsets of people throughout our communities. That starts with those of us who understand these challenges the best. That starts with teachers.

Paying Teachers What They Deserve

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Theodore Hershberg is a professor of public policy and history and director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. Claire Robertson-Kraft, an IES Fellow, is pursuing her PhD in Education Policy in Penn’s Graduate School of Education. More information about their comprehensive framework for school reform can be found at their website: .

One of the most important messages StudentsFirst can help bring to parents and taxpayers is the need to reform the system of compensation for teachers in our nation’s public schools.

Two decades of research on the annual progress of individual students shows empirically what we have always known anecdotally – good teachers matter. In fact, teacher quality is the most important factor affecting the rate of student learning. In our current system, teacher salaries are based on years in the classroom and academic credentials, neither of which has been shown to have a meaningful impact on student learning. Attracting and retaining the most talented and committed women and men to the teaching profession requires a system that makes teaching a more financially rewarding and intellectually satisfying experience.

Developing the right pay-for-performance system is not always easy, as recent research from a Nashville-based program demonstrated. That particular program showed that paying teachers bonuses for increasing test scores did little to improve student achievement in middle-school math. But it would be wrong for defenders of the status quo to use this as evidence that compensation reforms are unnecessary.

Pay-for-performance is actually a much fairer way to compensate teachers. Consider this: using value-added measures as indicators of performance, we find, roughly speaking, that two-thirds of teachers in grades 3-8 are effective, i.e., they provide their students with a year’s worth of growth in a year; the remaining third are split between highly effective and ineffective. Yet in our current system both of these groups – the top and bottom performers – are compensated as if they were average teachers. So in paying everyone without regard to whether their students learn, we are on average misclassifying at least one-third of teachers.

If we are to recruit more of the best and brightest to the teaching profession, keep more of our most talented teachers in their classrooms, and attract the most able career changers, we will have to provide higher annual pay based on effectiveness. We must recognize that at the very moment we want our students to master new and more demanding academic standards that are benchmarked to meet international rigor, we are disproportionately recruiting new teachers from the bottom third of our college graduates.

Bonus pay by itself is not the answer, however. The reality is most teachers need additional training and support to increase student achievement. As such, we need to create a system that not only provides higher salaries for our top performers to incentivize improvement, but also offers high-quality professional development aligned to teachers' needs. New compensation systems will work only if they are coupled with meaningful feedback and support teachers need to grow professionally.

Additionally, new incentives and rewards must be balanced with risk and consequences, which is why we must also reform our system of tenure, remediation, and dismissal. Peer Assistance and Review processes, such as we describe in A Grand Bargain for Education Reform: New Rewards and Supports for New Accountability (Harvard Education Press, 2009), provide due process for teachers, but can also lead to timely dismissal for those who, despite the provision of time and resources, are unable either through lack of ability or lack of effort to improve their instruction. Most importantly, these systems treat teachers as equal partners in the reform process.

New compensation systems are necessary and can work, but they will be widely implemented only when a sufficient number of parents and citizens are organized to demand systemic change in our state capitals. That makes StudentsFirst’s efforts to raise the profile and level of dialogue about this issue an important contribution to education reform.

The views presented on our guest blogs are the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of StudentsFirst. We thank all of our guest bloggers for their thoughtful perspectives.

Let's Talk About, And Tackle, The Achievement Gap

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Courter Shimeall is currently pursuing a dual degree in law and public policy at Ohio State. Prior to being a student, he taught middle school English for two years in Watts, California, and then worked for Teach For America in recruiting for several years. Courter stays active in issues regarding educational inequality. He is an alumnus of the College of Wooster (B.A.) and Loyola Marymount University (M.A. Ed.). He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, Angela, who is a public school teacher.

I'm always struck by the way those debating the state of public education lump together communities across the socio-economic spectrum as if they're all the same. "Public education" becomes an un-diverse, monolithic term that encompasses every American school student. But those who have taught in a low-income community -- or have experience in both low-income and higher-income areas -- know this is not the case.

In truth, the communities are far different, particularly in educational prospects. The statistics for students in low-income communities bear this out. Roughly 14 million school-age children live in low-income communities in America, and their high school graduation rate is about 50 percent. African American males, who often come from low-income backgrounds, are more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college in this country.

Spend a few minutes researching or paying attention and the truth becomes increasingly clear: the state of education in low-income communities is far worse than in other communities.

The distinction is especially relevant in light of some of the recent national debates over issues such as "last in, first out," the role of teachers' unions and teacher tenure. Because the communities are indeed so different, these policies have different effects.

Not surprisingly, the policies disproportionately hurt students in low-income communities. In particular, "last in, first out" and a system of teacher tenure without any means of objective criteria to discern job-performance both serve to deflect accountability. They also perpetuate the status quo.

The status quo might work for students who come from higher-income communities, have broader safety nets, and enjoy a stronger financial background. But, given the educational prospects and achievement rates of students in low-income communities, the status quo is definitely not working for everyone.

For the vast majority of Americans who believe that education is a basic civil right, this is not acceptable.

So, what can we do about it? For starters, we can have an honest debate and talk about the unique problems facing students in low-income communities. And, in recognizing the problems, we can talk about the solutions in a way that's not one-size-fits-all. The more we lump together communities that face different issues, and that need different educational policies, the more we perpetuate a status quo that isn't working for kids in low-income communities.

Students in these communities cannot afford to wait for adults to re-frame the debate and realize the difference. If we fail to act, the ones who will suffer the most are those who rarely have a voice in these debates: the students.

Teacher Absences And Their Effect On Kids

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Raegen T. Miller is the Associate Director for Education Research at American Progress. His work focuses on strategic management of human capital in education. He has published articles in peer-reviewed research journals shedding light on the productivity costs of teacher absences. He holds a doctorate in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Raegen’s work in education policy is grounded in many years of practice and service. He taught mathematics in the United States and abroad, in traditional public schools and in charter schools, and in urban and suburban settings. Raegen completed his teacher training at Stanford University, and he holds an M.S. in mathematics from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He was a trustee of Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Somerville, Massachusetts, and he served as president of his local teachers’ union in Palo Alto, California.

Dunkin' Donuts ran a television ad a few years ago that captured the conventional wisdom about what happens in a classroom when the teacher is absent. The ad shows a gangly young man standing in the front of the classroom. He announces that he's the substitute teacher for the day, whereupon a hail of paper-wads flies his way. Many people find it hard not to laugh at the ad, as intended. But the subject of teacher absence is a serious matter in terms of basic safety, financial cost, learning loss, and equity.

As the ad suggests, safety is a big concern, and not just the safety of substitute teachers. The absence of the regular teacher may create opportunities for bullying and horseplay that have no place in a safe classroom. Parents, even ones who would laugh at the ad, are quick to name their concerns about children's safety during teacher absences.

The financial costs of teacher absence are not trivial. Public school teachers in the United States are absent between nine and 10 days per year, on average. This means that between kindergarten and 12th grade, a typical student is taught by someone other than the regularly assigned teacher for the equivalent of two-thirds of a school year. Stipends for substitute teachers and associated administrative costs amount to $4 billion annually. But the chaotic classroom in the Dunkin' ad also suggests costs to student learning.

Researchers have recently documented that students' academic achievement suffers because of their regular teachers' absences. This is no great surprise if instruction essentially stops during absences. Some substitute teachers, no doubt, are extraordinarily talented, but they tend to lack the qualifications and training of regular teachers. While all regular teachers hold at least a bachelor's degree, a high school diploma suffices for substitute teaching in many states. The most compelling research to date suggests that the daily learning loss caused by a teacher absence is equivalent to that suffered when replacing a teacher of average quality with a teacher drawn from the bottom tenth or fifth of the talent pool. This sounds like a big deal, and it's only compounded by equity concerns.

Students in schools serving predominantly low-income families and students of color experience teacher absence at higher rates than students in more affluent, whiter communities. Thus, part of the achievement gap stems from a teacher attendance gap.

Dunkin' Donuts and its ad firm were not thinking deeply about the challenges posed by teacher absences, some of which are unavoidable. Policymakers ought to think about these challenges.

• Federal policymakers should amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to require school-level information about teacher absences on school report cards.
• State policymakers should re-examine and justify statutes governing teachers' paid leave privileges. Ohio law, for example, requires districts to furnish teachers with 15 sick-days and 3 personal-days annually. Eighteen days is a tenth of the school year.
• Local policymakers should encourage experimentation with and evaluation of incentive policies designed to reduce levels of teacher absence. Many examples of such policies exist, and teachers do respond to them. Aldine Independent School District in Texas, for instance, offers tax-sheltered bonus payments for teachers with exceptionally few absences, and North Carolina requires teachers to pay a co-payment for each absence above a certain threshold level.

More on this topic available here:http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/10/teacher_absence.html

Secretary Duncan And Governor Daniels Came To My Class!

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My name is Andrew Porter and I am in the seventh grade at Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School in Indianapolis, Indiana. I am here today to talk about what it was like to have Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan) and the Governor of Indiana (Mitch Daniels) come to our school and visit my class.

My day started off in first period with my teacher Mr. Larson. In first period Mr. Larson explained who was coming to our school and why. When he told us who was coming, that is when my nerves kicked in. I was so nervous I couldn’t focus on our lesson. Really the Secretary of Education and the Governor of Indiana are coming to our school…I couldn’t believe it!

Second period came next with Ms. Kim and the excitement was still all throughout my body. The class looked scared and we mostly admitted to it as well. There was one thing I forgot about. We had a science exam and it was a long one. To calm myself down of all of the excitement I just thought about my favorite hobby basketball and I flew through that test in a breeze. After second period was finished it was time for lunch. Lunch was usually time for us to relax and catch up on the latest seventh-grade news, but today we had to eat lunch in our room because they were setting up television cameras and seating for the town hall meeting in our lunchroom.

Walking down the hallway with our lunches to our fourth period classroom, the excitement was at its peak because the buzz had started that our special guests had arrived. While eating lunch, the whole class was talking about the cameras and the ways our lunchroom had been transformed for the special event. While I was still nervous, I tried to keep it to myself.

It was fourth period when Governor Mitch Daniels and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan began touring the school. The excitement and nervousness was impossible for us to contain. Yet we knew we had to get it together by fifth period, when our distinguished guests would be visiting my class.

Finally it was time. Our class was in our best posture of all year ready to see Governor Daniels and Secretary Duncan walk through the door. Then, it happened, cameras and flashes everywhere. They walked in while we were in the middle of mirroring our teacher using gestures and words to understand the five stages of plot.

Mr. Larson asked Mr. Robinson, our principal, if he wanted to stop our class for questions. He did. First, Governor Daniels and Secretary Duncan asked if we had any questions. At first, no one raised their hand, so I stepped up and asked a question. I asked, "How hard was it achieving your position and what did you have to do to get there?"

Governor Daniels answered, "It was extremely hard and I had to work hard everyday even having late nights, but anything working hard for is worth it in the long run." Soon other students were asking questions to our special guests. In the end, I felt their visit was a great success. They had to leave to go to the meeting, but everyone wanted to hear more from them.

Mr. Larson was so proud of our class and said we did an awesome job. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget.