PLEASE NOTE: The summit is open to the public but requires advance registration. To register, visit http://go.usa.gov/P4m
-Patricia
By Jennifer R. Lloyd | San Antonio Express-News
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will visit San Antonio tonight and Friday to discuss college affordability and the role Hispanic students could play in boosting college completion rates, officials said.
After speaking in Austin today, Duncan will travel to San Antonio for a “college affordability and Hispanic community town hall” tonight with Mayor Julián Castro. The meeting will be at 6:10 p.m. at Café College, 131 El Paso St., a U.S. Department of Education news release states.
Duncan will discuss “the importance of college and the key role that Latinos play to help the nation meet the president's goal to lead the world in college completion by 2020,” according to the release.
The invitation-only event is mostly for students and parents and is already full, but NOWCastSA will webcast the event live, and Café College will open a classroom for 120 people to view the webcast at the site, said Eyra Perez, executive director of the San Antonio Education Partnership.
At 9 a.m. Friday, Duncan will speak at the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit at Fox Tech High School, 637 N. Main Ave.
At the day-long summit, a long list of administration officials and about 300 community members will discuss education, job creation, health care and immigration, according to an itinerary released by the White House.
Showing posts with label Duncan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duncan. Show all posts
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Sunday, August 14, 2011
State Challenges Seen as Whittling Away Federal Education Law
“States are going to sit and watch federal accountability implode. We’re seeing the end of an era.”
Go on wit yo bad self, Montana. Resist!! I don't know about you, friends, but I'm ready for the revolution. Rediculous to hear Duncan call NCLB a "slow-motion train wreck,” then turn around and propose an even more egregious system. The Blueprint is wack, don't believe the hype!
-Patricia
By SAM DILLON | NY Times
August 14, 2011
HELENA, Mont. — As hundreds of schools here and across the nation faced being labeled failures under the federal No Child Left Behind law, Montana education officials defiantly informed Washington this spring that they would stop raising testing targets as the law requires, despite warnings that doing so could cost the state millions of dollars in federal aid.
But in an agreement to be announced here on Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will allow Montana to keep most of the schools off the law’s blacklist, and the state will pay no penalty.
With several other Western states also rebelling against the requirement that 100 percent of American students be proficient in English and math by 2014, some education officials and experts see signs that years of federal dominance of public school accountability may be drawing to a close.
“Pretty soon all the schools will be failing in America, and at that point the law becomes meaningless,” said Larry K. Shumway, superintendent of public instruction in Utah. “States are going to sit and watch federal accountability implode. We’re seeing the end of an era.”
It is no secret that the Obama administration dislikes many provisions of the No Child law, which President George W. Bush signed in 2002 and vigorously enforced, in court and with fines against states — including Texas, his own.
Mr. Duncan has called the law a “slow-motion train wreck,” tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to rewrite it, and last week promised to provide waivers this fall to states that sign on to the president’s school improvement agenda, with criteria similar to those in his Race to the Top grant competition.
Mr. Duncan says he is still devising the new waiver policy, and his office denied waiver requests lodged by Arkansas and Kansas this spring.
But when officials in Montana and a handful of other states simply refused to follow the strictures of the No Child law in recent weeks, his aides quietly helped them find provisions in the law that avoided a public showdown, signaling a more profound shift.
Here in Montana, 158 schools were to be newly labeled failures. But that number fell to three when federal officials allowed the state to redraw its schedule of testing targets, a critical component of the No Child law’s ambitious approach to forcing all schools to show steady progress toward 100 percent proficiency.
“Secretary Duncan is disassembling what was a very strong federal role, and some states’ rights officials and governors smell blood,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written academic studies on the No Child law. “This is a big federalist chess game. Until now, Washington has had the stronger position. Going forward, states will be stronger.”
The uprising by states began in April, when Denise Juneau, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction, was calculating how many of her schools would not reach their targets this year.
Of the state’s 821 public schools, 225 had already fallen short. If the targets, which the law calls annual measurable objectives, rose again as scheduled, that number would increase to 383, including many schools that Ms. Juneau said were raising student achievement.
In Bozeman, a university town where at least 90 percent of students scored above proficiency in reading this spring, 8 of the 10 schools would nonetheless have failed to meet rising targets.
On April 25, Ms. Juneau wrote to the education secretary asking for “some alleviation of the strict across the board, one-size-fits-all, absolute bar of 100 percent proficiency.” Six weeks later, she hosted a meeting of school chiefs from 10 rural states and passed around her defiant letter.
”We’re not asking for permission,” Ms. Juneau told the group. “We’re just telling them we won’t raise our annual objectives this year.”
Diane DeBacker, the education commissioner in Kansas whose waiver request federal officials had already denied, did not follow suit. “Kansas is just not that rebel a state,” she said in a June interview. But the superintendents in Idaho and Utah soon sent their own letters to Washington.
“It is our intention to not increase the annual measurable objectives for the 2011 school year,” Mr. Shumway of Utah wrote, bluntly.
“The current federal law has taken Idaho and other states as far as it can,” wrote that state’s superintendent, Tom Luna. “Idaho does not have the luxury of spending time and limited resources on meeting the rigid requirements of an outdated accountability system.”
Melody Schopp, South Dakota’s education secretary, followed a week later with a letter saying she, too, would not lift testing targets, because to do so “would inappropriately label schools as failing.”
Half a dozen other states have joined the chorus in recent weeks, using less defiant language but still asking for relief from the testing mandates, according to Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Others are broadly rewriting their school accountability systems and requesting a new contract with Washington that would give states a more dominant role.
It was in this context of educational insurrection by some states that President Obama and Mr. Duncan developed their waivers initiative. Critics have called it executive branch overreach, challenging Mr. Duncan’s authority to extend waivers, selectively, based in part on states’ approaches to lifting achievement.
But in dealing with Montana and the others, the administration seems to have been searching for pragmatic ways to defuse potentially embarrassing standoffs.
The law requires testing targets to increase at least every three years. Idaho and Utah both raised them in 2008. Michael Yudin, deputy assistant secretary of education, said that action enabled him to approve keeping both states’ targets steady for a third year.
Montana’s case was trickier because its targets had not risen since 2007.
On July 1, Secretary Duncan wrote to Ms. Juneau, warning that “Montana is now out of compliance,” and that the Department of Education could withhold millions of dollars in aid to disadvantaged students. He gave Montana until Aug. 15 to change its stance.
That warning notwithstanding, Ms. Juneau announced on Aug. 5 that she had held the state’s testing targets steady.
That put Montana on a collision course with Washington — until federal officials discovered that when the state rewrote its standards in 2005, it did not use an opportunity provided by the law to redraw its schedule of raising testing targets, said Justin Hamilton, a Department of Education spokesman.
Working with Washington, Ms. Juneau retroactively redrew the schedule. As a result, all but three of the 158 schools she thought were destined for the federal failure list could be spared.
“I consider that a win,” Ms. Juneau said.
Go on wit yo bad self, Montana. Resist!! I don't know about you, friends, but I'm ready for the revolution. Rediculous to hear Duncan call NCLB a "slow-motion train wreck,” then turn around and propose an even more egregious system. The Blueprint is wack, don't believe the hype!
-Patricia
By SAM DILLON | NY Times
August 14, 2011
HELENA, Mont. — As hundreds of schools here and across the nation faced being labeled failures under the federal No Child Left Behind law, Montana education officials defiantly informed Washington this spring that they would stop raising testing targets as the law requires, despite warnings that doing so could cost the state millions of dollars in federal aid.
But in an agreement to be announced here on Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will allow Montana to keep most of the schools off the law’s blacklist, and the state will pay no penalty.
With several other Western states also rebelling against the requirement that 100 percent of American students be proficient in English and math by 2014, some education officials and experts see signs that years of federal dominance of public school accountability may be drawing to a close.
“Pretty soon all the schools will be failing in America, and at that point the law becomes meaningless,” said Larry K. Shumway, superintendent of public instruction in Utah. “States are going to sit and watch federal accountability implode. We’re seeing the end of an era.”
It is no secret that the Obama administration dislikes many provisions of the No Child law, which President George W. Bush signed in 2002 and vigorously enforced, in court and with fines against states — including Texas, his own.
Mr. Duncan has called the law a “slow-motion train wreck,” tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to rewrite it, and last week promised to provide waivers this fall to states that sign on to the president’s school improvement agenda, with criteria similar to those in his Race to the Top grant competition.
Mr. Duncan says he is still devising the new waiver policy, and his office denied waiver requests lodged by Arkansas and Kansas this spring.
But when officials in Montana and a handful of other states simply refused to follow the strictures of the No Child law in recent weeks, his aides quietly helped them find provisions in the law that avoided a public showdown, signaling a more profound shift.
Here in Montana, 158 schools were to be newly labeled failures. But that number fell to three when federal officials allowed the state to redraw its schedule of testing targets, a critical component of the No Child law’s ambitious approach to forcing all schools to show steady progress toward 100 percent proficiency.
“Secretary Duncan is disassembling what was a very strong federal role, and some states’ rights officials and governors smell blood,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written academic studies on the No Child law. “This is a big federalist chess game. Until now, Washington has had the stronger position. Going forward, states will be stronger.”
The uprising by states began in April, when Denise Juneau, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction, was calculating how many of her schools would not reach their targets this year.
Of the state’s 821 public schools, 225 had already fallen short. If the targets, which the law calls annual measurable objectives, rose again as scheduled, that number would increase to 383, including many schools that Ms. Juneau said were raising student achievement.
In Bozeman, a university town where at least 90 percent of students scored above proficiency in reading this spring, 8 of the 10 schools would nonetheless have failed to meet rising targets.
On April 25, Ms. Juneau wrote to the education secretary asking for “some alleviation of the strict across the board, one-size-fits-all, absolute bar of 100 percent proficiency.” Six weeks later, she hosted a meeting of school chiefs from 10 rural states and passed around her defiant letter.
”We’re not asking for permission,” Ms. Juneau told the group. “We’re just telling them we won’t raise our annual objectives this year.”
Diane DeBacker, the education commissioner in Kansas whose waiver request federal officials had already denied, did not follow suit. “Kansas is just not that rebel a state,” she said in a June interview. But the superintendents in Idaho and Utah soon sent their own letters to Washington.
“It is our intention to not increase the annual measurable objectives for the 2011 school year,” Mr. Shumway of Utah wrote, bluntly.
“The current federal law has taken Idaho and other states as far as it can,” wrote that state’s superintendent, Tom Luna. “Idaho does not have the luxury of spending time and limited resources on meeting the rigid requirements of an outdated accountability system.”
Melody Schopp, South Dakota’s education secretary, followed a week later with a letter saying she, too, would not lift testing targets, because to do so “would inappropriately label schools as failing.”
Half a dozen other states have joined the chorus in recent weeks, using less defiant language but still asking for relief from the testing mandates, according to Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Others are broadly rewriting their school accountability systems and requesting a new contract with Washington that would give states a more dominant role.
It was in this context of educational insurrection by some states that President Obama and Mr. Duncan developed their waivers initiative. Critics have called it executive branch overreach, challenging Mr. Duncan’s authority to extend waivers, selectively, based in part on states’ approaches to lifting achievement.
But in dealing with Montana and the others, the administration seems to have been searching for pragmatic ways to defuse potentially embarrassing standoffs.
The law requires testing targets to increase at least every three years. Idaho and Utah both raised them in 2008. Michael Yudin, deputy assistant secretary of education, said that action enabled him to approve keeping both states’ targets steady for a third year.
Montana’s case was trickier because its targets had not risen since 2007.
On July 1, Secretary Duncan wrote to Ms. Juneau, warning that “Montana is now out of compliance,” and that the Department of Education could withhold millions of dollars in aid to disadvantaged students. He gave Montana until Aug. 15 to change its stance.
That warning notwithstanding, Ms. Juneau announced on Aug. 5 that she had held the state’s testing targets steady.
That put Montana on a collision course with Washington — until federal officials discovered that when the state rewrote its standards in 2005, it did not use an opportunity provided by the law to redraw its schedule of raising testing targets, said Justin Hamilton, a Department of Education spokesman.
Working with Washington, Ms. Juneau retroactively redrew the schedule. As a result, all but three of the 158 schools she thought were destined for the federal failure list could be spared.
“I consider that a win,” Ms. Juneau said.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
School reform: A chance for bipartisan governing
I think Duncan and the rest of the nation can learn a lot about what the Blueprint might look like in practice if they were in the know on the different dimensions of HB 3, Texas' new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) System.
-Patricia
By Arne Duncan
Monday, January 3, 2011
With a new Congress set to begin, key members on both sides of the aisle are poised to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In fact, the work has been underway for much of the past year, and few areas are more suited for bipartisan action than education reform.
On many issues, Democrats and Republicans agree, starting with the fact that no one likes how NCLB labels schools as failures, even when they are making broad gains. Parents, teachers, and lawmakers want a system that measures not just an arbitrary level of proficiency, but student growth and school progress in ways that better reflect the impact of a school and its teachers on student learning.
Most people dislike NCLB's one-size-fits-all mandates, which apply even if a community has better local solutions than federally dictated tutoring or school-transfer options. Providing more flexibility to schools, districts and states - while also holding them accountable - is the goal of many people in both parties.
Both Republicans and Democrats embrace the transparency of NCLB and the requirement to disaggregate data to show achievement gaps by race, income, English proficiency and disability, but they are concerned that NCLB is driving some educators to teach to the test instead of providing a well-rounded education.
That is why many people across the political spectrum support the work of 44 states to replace multiple choice "bubble" tests with a new test that helps inform and improve instruction by accurately measuring what children know across the full range of college and career-ready standards, and measures other skills, such as critical-thinking abilities.
NCLB's accountability provisions also prompted many states to lower standards, but governors and legislators from both parties in all but a handful of states have rectified the problem by voluntarily adopting higher college and career-ready standards set by state education officials.
Finally, almost no one believes the teacher quality provisions of NCLB are helping elevate the teaching profession, or ensuring that the most challenged students get their fair share of the best teachers. More and more, teachers, parents, and union and business leaders want a real definition of teacher effectiveness based on multiple measures, including student growth, principal observation and peer review.
These issues are at the heart of the Obama administration's blueprint for reauthorizing ESEA: more flexibility and fairness in our accountability system, a bigger investment in teachers and principals, and a sharper focus on schools and students most at risk.
This common-sense agenda also reflects the quiet bipartisan revolution underway at the state and local level. With the incentive of the Race to the Top program, governors, states and districts across America are implementing comprehensive plans to reform education systems and boost student achievement.
School districts and their local partners in inner cities and rural communities are overcoming poverty and family breakdown to create high-performing schools, including charters and traditional public schools. They are taking bold steps to turn around low-performing schools by investing in teachers, rebuilding school staff, lengthening the school day and changing curricula.
In partnership with local teacher unions, districts are finding new ways to evaluate and compensate their teachers and staff their schools. Some districts have reshaped labor agreements around student success - and teachers have strongly supported these groundbreaking agreements. On Capitol Hill, numerous internal meetings with staff as well as external meetings with educational stakeholders have occurred, several hearings have also been held, and some legislative language has been drafted and shared at the staff level.
The urgency for reform has never been greater. Today, American students trail many other nations in reading, math and science, and a quarter of them do not graduate high school on time. Many college students do not finish, despite the clear national need for more college-educated workers who can successfully compete in the global economy.
President Obama in 2009 set a national goal that America will once again lead the world in college completion by 2020. With our economic and national security at risk, this is a goal Republicans, Democrats and all Americans can unite behind.
Since coming to Washington, I've been told that partisan politics inevitably trumps bipartisan governing. But if I have learned anything as education secretary, it is that conventional wisdom serves to prop up the status quo - and is often wrong.
In the past two years, I have spoken with hundreds of Republican and Democratic mayors, governors and members of Congress. While we don't agree on everything, our core goals are shared - and we all want to fix NCLB to better support reform at the state and local level. So, let's do something together for our children that will build America's future, strengthen our economy and reflect well on us all.
-Patricia
By Arne Duncan
Monday, January 3, 2011
With a new Congress set to begin, key members on both sides of the aisle are poised to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In fact, the work has been underway for much of the past year, and few areas are more suited for bipartisan action than education reform.
On many issues, Democrats and Republicans agree, starting with the fact that no one likes how NCLB labels schools as failures, even when they are making broad gains. Parents, teachers, and lawmakers want a system that measures not just an arbitrary level of proficiency, but student growth and school progress in ways that better reflect the impact of a school and its teachers on student learning.
Most people dislike NCLB's one-size-fits-all mandates, which apply even if a community has better local solutions than federally dictated tutoring or school-transfer options. Providing more flexibility to schools, districts and states - while also holding them accountable - is the goal of many people in both parties.
Both Republicans and Democrats embrace the transparency of NCLB and the requirement to disaggregate data to show achievement gaps by race, income, English proficiency and disability, but they are concerned that NCLB is driving some educators to teach to the test instead of providing a well-rounded education.
That is why many people across the political spectrum support the work of 44 states to replace multiple choice "bubble" tests with a new test that helps inform and improve instruction by accurately measuring what children know across the full range of college and career-ready standards, and measures other skills, such as critical-thinking abilities.
NCLB's accountability provisions also prompted many states to lower standards, but governors and legislators from both parties in all but a handful of states have rectified the problem by voluntarily adopting higher college and career-ready standards set by state education officials.
Finally, almost no one believes the teacher quality provisions of NCLB are helping elevate the teaching profession, or ensuring that the most challenged students get their fair share of the best teachers. More and more, teachers, parents, and union and business leaders want a real definition of teacher effectiveness based on multiple measures, including student growth, principal observation and peer review.
These issues are at the heart of the Obama administration's blueprint for reauthorizing ESEA: more flexibility and fairness in our accountability system, a bigger investment in teachers and principals, and a sharper focus on schools and students most at risk.
This common-sense agenda also reflects the quiet bipartisan revolution underway at the state and local level. With the incentive of the Race to the Top program, governors, states and districts across America are implementing comprehensive plans to reform education systems and boost student achievement.
School districts and their local partners in inner cities and rural communities are overcoming poverty and family breakdown to create high-performing schools, including charters and traditional public schools. They are taking bold steps to turn around low-performing schools by investing in teachers, rebuilding school staff, lengthening the school day and changing curricula.
In partnership with local teacher unions, districts are finding new ways to evaluate and compensate their teachers and staff their schools. Some districts have reshaped labor agreements around student success - and teachers have strongly supported these groundbreaking agreements. On Capitol Hill, numerous internal meetings with staff as well as external meetings with educational stakeholders have occurred, several hearings have also been held, and some legislative language has been drafted and shared at the staff level.
The urgency for reform has never been greater. Today, American students trail many other nations in reading, math and science, and a quarter of them do not graduate high school on time. Many college students do not finish, despite the clear national need for more college-educated workers who can successfully compete in the global economy.
President Obama in 2009 set a national goal that America will once again lead the world in college completion by 2020. With our economic and national security at risk, this is a goal Republicans, Democrats and all Americans can unite behind.
Since coming to Washington, I've been told that partisan politics inevitably trumps bipartisan governing. But if I have learned anything as education secretary, it is that conventional wisdom serves to prop up the status quo - and is often wrong.
In the past two years, I have spoken with hundreds of Republican and Democratic mayors, governors and members of Congress. While we don't agree on everything, our core goals are shared - and we all want to fix NCLB to better support reform at the state and local level. So, let's do something together for our children that will build America's future, strengthen our economy and reflect well on us all.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Duncan Aims to Make Incentives Key Element of ESEA
Education Secretary Weighs Priorities for Law's Renewal
By Alyson Klein | Ed Week
December 1, 2009
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said last week that he envisions a significant new emphasis on federal incentives for high-performing schools, districts, and states in the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, expected to be taken up by Congress as early as next year.
Mr. Duncan said the Department of Education is considering proposals that would offer increased autonomy, recognition, and resources for states that commit to adopting college- and career-readiness standards, and for schools and districts that make significant progress in student achievement.
“Under [the No Child Left Behind Act] there are basically no incentives. There was nothing. There are 50 ways to fail, and if you succeeded there was nothing there for you,” the secretary said in a wide-ranging interview with Education Week reporters
Read on...
By Alyson Klein | Ed Week
December 1, 2009
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said last week that he envisions a significant new emphasis on federal incentives for high-performing schools, districts, and states in the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, expected to be taken up by Congress as early as next year.
Mr. Duncan said the Department of Education is considering proposals that would offer increased autonomy, recognition, and resources for states that commit to adopting college- and career-readiness standards, and for schools and districts that make significant progress in student achievement.
“Under [the No Child Left Behind Act] there are basically no incentives. There was nothing. There are 50 ways to fail, and if you succeeded there was nothing there for you,” the secretary said in a wide-ranging interview with Education Week reporters
Read on...
Monday, November 09, 2009
"Bracey Report" Curtain-Call Takes on Trendy Education Reforms
Here's the link to the full brief
It centers on "three prominent policy-relevant assumptions":
1. High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between
whites and minorities.
2. Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more
common elected board governance systems.
3. Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.
Worth the read.
-Patricia
Press Release
November 9, 2009
Late researcher's final work turned his critical eye toward 'high-quality' schools, mayoral control, and the push for higher standards
Contact: Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@colorado.edu
BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (November 9, 2009) -- The 2009 edition of the annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" offers a sober assessment of three popular education reforms, finding all of them wanting. Readers will be informed by one last critical analysis from celebrated education researcher Gerald Bracey, who completed his 18th and final "Bracey Report" shortly before his unexpected death October 20 at the age of 69.
The 2009 report is published today by the Education in the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. Previous editions of the report were published in the educational journal Phi Delta Kappan.
Bracey first targets blithe calls to create "high-quality schools," calls that he contends ignore the enormous challenges that urban schools in particular face when educating children born into poverty. He then looks at mayoral control and concludes that little evidence supports claims that turning control of urban schools over to mayors will spur meaningful educational improvement. Finally, Bracey examines the drive to impose ‘higher' standards on schools, which he maintains is little more than a rush toward even more standardized testing that is likely to further impoverish education.
Edited after his death by Susan Ohanian and Pat Hinchey, the 2009 Report departs from Bracey's past practice, which typically entailed a comprehensive survey of policies relating to public education. Instead, it focuses on these three specifically defined policies. He analyzed the record and research regarding each policy and came away skeptical, leveling particularly pointed criticism at the administration of President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for uncritically advancing questionable approaches.
In examining the push for "high-quality schools," Bracey first noted that he found no single definition or agreement on the specifics of "high quality." Moreover, he wrote, the relentless focus on creating such schools has consistently ignored the overwhelming impact of poverty on the educational opportunities for children. He wrote, "Thus, the key question becomes can schools alone overcome the difficulties associated with poverty? Advocates who answer yes usually contend that to be high-quality, schools need only high standards, high expectations, and strong principals leading a faculty of highly qualified teachers. However, terms like 'high standards' and 'high expectations' are usually left undefined, as if their meanings were self evident--which they are not. Ignoring such gaps in rationale, No Child Left Behind's reliance on testing and sanctions codifies the conception that schools alone are capable of erasing the achievement gap and need only to be required to do so." Why, he asks, would the new administration choose to continue down that path?
Bracey similarly found that programs putting mayors in control of public school systems in New York and Chicago do not live up to their claims. For instance, he wrote that "vaunted improvements in test scores do not appear for Chicago's black and Latino students." He concluded that Chicago's "Renaissance" looks to some "more like a return to the Dark Ages."
Finally, turning his attention to the demand for higher standards, Bracey observed: "After 100 years of cries for higher standards, we are still in an education crisis. The push for higher standards has not worked. Perhaps it is time to try something else."
For that "something else,' Bracey returned to a school that President Obama might know well himself. Citing an essay in Education Week by Seattle University's David Marshak, Bracey suggested that Sidwell Friends School, where Obama's daughters are enrolled, offers a model for the children of all other American parents--a fresh, richly textured and human-centered approach to the questions of quality and standards, an approach that is a striking contrast to the model being pushed on America's public schools.
"Many would find Sidwell's approach 'high quality,' but test scores are not mentioned in its statements of philosophy or expectations," Bracey wrote. "Sidwell emphasizes 'greeting the day with enthusiasm,' 'a search for truth,' and 'sensitivity to the human condition.' The President has not answered Marshak. He should."
Find "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report
CONTACT:
Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@colorado.edu
The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses. This policy brief was made possible in part by the generous support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/
EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org)
It centers on "three prominent policy-relevant assumptions":
1. High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between
whites and minorities.
2. Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more
common elected board governance systems.
3. Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.
Worth the read.
-Patricia
Press Release
November 9, 2009
Late researcher's final work turned his critical eye toward 'high-quality' schools, mayoral control, and the push for higher standards
Contact: Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@colorado.edu
BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (November 9, 2009) -- The 2009 edition of the annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" offers a sober assessment of three popular education reforms, finding all of them wanting. Readers will be informed by one last critical analysis from celebrated education researcher Gerald Bracey, who completed his 18th and final "Bracey Report" shortly before his unexpected death October 20 at the age of 69.
The 2009 report is published today by the Education in the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. Previous editions of the report were published in the educational journal Phi Delta Kappan.
Bracey first targets blithe calls to create "high-quality schools," calls that he contends ignore the enormous challenges that urban schools in particular face when educating children born into poverty. He then looks at mayoral control and concludes that little evidence supports claims that turning control of urban schools over to mayors will spur meaningful educational improvement. Finally, Bracey examines the drive to impose ‘higher' standards on schools, which he maintains is little more than a rush toward even more standardized testing that is likely to further impoverish education.
Edited after his death by Susan Ohanian and Pat Hinchey, the 2009 Report departs from Bracey's past practice, which typically entailed a comprehensive survey of policies relating to public education. Instead, it focuses on these three specifically defined policies. He analyzed the record and research regarding each policy and came away skeptical, leveling particularly pointed criticism at the administration of President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for uncritically advancing questionable approaches.
In examining the push for "high-quality schools," Bracey first noted that he found no single definition or agreement on the specifics of "high quality." Moreover, he wrote, the relentless focus on creating such schools has consistently ignored the overwhelming impact of poverty on the educational opportunities for children. He wrote, "Thus, the key question becomes can schools alone overcome the difficulties associated with poverty? Advocates who answer yes usually contend that to be high-quality, schools need only high standards, high expectations, and strong principals leading a faculty of highly qualified teachers. However, terms like 'high standards' and 'high expectations' are usually left undefined, as if their meanings were self evident--which they are not. Ignoring such gaps in rationale, No Child Left Behind's reliance on testing and sanctions codifies the conception that schools alone are capable of erasing the achievement gap and need only to be required to do so." Why, he asks, would the new administration choose to continue down that path?
Bracey similarly found that programs putting mayors in control of public school systems in New York and Chicago do not live up to their claims. For instance, he wrote that "vaunted improvements in test scores do not appear for Chicago's black and Latino students." He concluded that Chicago's "Renaissance" looks to some "more like a return to the Dark Ages."
Finally, turning his attention to the demand for higher standards, Bracey observed: "After 100 years of cries for higher standards, we are still in an education crisis. The push for higher standards has not worked. Perhaps it is time to try something else."
For that "something else,' Bracey returned to a school that President Obama might know well himself. Citing an essay in Education Week by Seattle University's David Marshak, Bracey suggested that Sidwell Friends School, where Obama's daughters are enrolled, offers a model for the children of all other American parents--a fresh, richly textured and human-centered approach to the questions of quality and standards, an approach that is a striking contrast to the model being pushed on America's public schools.
"Many would find Sidwell's approach 'high quality,' but test scores are not mentioned in its statements of philosophy or expectations," Bracey wrote. "Sidwell emphasizes 'greeting the day with enthusiasm,' 'a search for truth,' and 'sensitivity to the human condition.' The President has not answered Marshak. He should."
Find "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report
CONTACT:
Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@colorado.edu
The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses. This policy brief was made possible in part by the generous support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/
EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
PRESS RELEASES: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Says Colleges of Education Must Improve for Reforms to Succeed
FOR RELEASE:
October 22, 2009
Contact: Justin Hamilton (202) 591- 6734 or
Jane Glickman (202) 401-1307
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for America’s colleges of education to dramatically change how they prepare the next generation of teachers so that they are ready to prepare their future students for success in college and careers.
Noting that America’s schools will need to hire up to 200,000 first-time teachers annually for the next five years, Duncan said that those new teachers need the knowledge and skill to prepare students for success in the global economy.
“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” Duncan said in a major speech at Teachers College, Columbia University. “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering.”
More than half of the nation’s teachers graduate from a school of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 220,000 students graduate from a teacher college every year. In recent years, several alternative certification programs such as High Tech High, The New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs have emerged. But those programs produce fewer than 10,000 new teachers annually.
“To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers,” Duncan said. “But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago.”
Colleges of education need to make dramatic changes to prepare today’s children to compete in the global economy. Teacher-preparation programs should ensure that new teachers will master the content of the subjects they’ll teach and they will have well-supported field-based experiences embedded throughout their preparation programs. Their ultimate goal should be to create a generation of teachers who are focused on improving student achievement and ready to deliver on that goal.
Duncan highlighted emerging efforts to improve teacher education that are being led by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, as well as individual colleges of education.
The Teachers College speech was Duncan’s second major address on the subject of teaching. On Oct. 9, he spoke to students at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, telling them that America needs to recruit an army of new teachers to ensure its long-term economic prosperity.
Earlier this week, Secretary Duncan discussed the importance of teaching with close to 100 teachers and fielded questions from additional teachers across the country in a televised town hall meeting.
October 22, 2009
Contact: Justin Hamilton (202) 591- 6734 or
Jane Glickman (202) 401-1307
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for America’s colleges of education to dramatically change how they prepare the next generation of teachers so that they are ready to prepare their future students for success in college and careers.
Noting that America’s schools will need to hire up to 200,000 first-time teachers annually for the next five years, Duncan said that those new teachers need the knowledge and skill to prepare students for success in the global economy.
“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” Duncan said in a major speech at Teachers College, Columbia University. “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering.”
More than half of the nation’s teachers graduate from a school of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 220,000 students graduate from a teacher college every year. In recent years, several alternative certification programs such as High Tech High, The New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs have emerged. But those programs produce fewer than 10,000 new teachers annually.
“To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers,” Duncan said. “But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago.”
Colleges of education need to make dramatic changes to prepare today’s children to compete in the global economy. Teacher-preparation programs should ensure that new teachers will master the content of the subjects they’ll teach and they will have well-supported field-based experiences embedded throughout their preparation programs. Their ultimate goal should be to create a generation of teachers who are focused on improving student achievement and ready to deliver on that goal.
Duncan highlighted emerging efforts to improve teacher education that are being led by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, as well as individual colleges of education.
The Teachers College speech was Duncan’s second major address on the subject of teaching. On Oct. 9, he spoke to students at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, telling them that America needs to recruit an army of new teachers to ensure its long-term economic prosperity.
Earlier this week, Secretary Duncan discussed the importance of teaching with close to 100 teachers and fielded questions from additional teachers across the country in a televised town hall meeting.
Teacher Preparation: Reforming the Uncertain Profession—Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University
Here is a speech delivered by Sec. Duncan today at Teachers College.
-Patricia
Teacher Preparation: Reforming the Uncertain Profession—Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University
FOR RELEASE:
October 22, 2009
It's an honor and pleasure to be here at Columbia Teachers College—the oldest, largest, and most storied graduate school of education in the United States. Here in this citadel of teacher preparation, where giants like John Dewey played such a formative role, I've come to speak to you today about the need for a sea-change in our schools of education.
Like the Teachers College, many schools of education have provided high-quality preparation programs for aspiring teachers for years. In the last decade, a slew of education schools have also upgraded their programs or launched rigorous practice-based initiatives to adapt to the realities of preparing instructors to teach diverse students in the information age.
I am going to talk about some of those shining examples in just a moment. Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America's university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering. But I am optimistic that, despite the obstacles to reform, the seeds of real change have been planted.
America faces three great educational challenges that make the need to improve teacher preparation programs all the more urgent. First, the education that millions of Americans got in the past simply won't do anymore. In the information age, it is impossible to drop out of school and land a good job. Even workers with high school diplomas but without college degrees are going to find they have limited opportunities in a competitive global economy. As President Obama has said, "education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success—it's a prerequisite to success."
Second, education, as Horace Mann said nearly two centuries ago, has long been the great equalizer in America. No matter what your race, national origin, disability, or zip code, every child is entitled to a quality public education. Today, more than ever, we acknowledge America's need—and a public school's obligation—to teach all students to their full potential. And yet today we are still way too far from achieving that dream of equal educational opportunity.
Nearly 30 percent of our students today drop out or fail to complete high school on time—that is 1.2 million kids a year. Barely 60 percent of African-American and Latino students graduate on time—and in many cities, half or more of low-income teens drop out of school.
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. And that is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.
Now the nation's rising educational demands are only half the picture. The third force propelling the nation's need for more and better teachers is the massive exodus of Baby Boomers from the teaching force in the next decade.
We currently have about 3.2 million teachers who work in some 95,000 schools. But more than half of those teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. And during the next four years we could lose a third of our veteran teachers and school leaders to retirement and attrition. By 2014, just five short years from now, the U.S. Department of Education projects that up to one million new teaching positions will be filled by new teachers.
These major demographic shifts mean that teaching is going to be a booming profession in the years ahead—with school districts nationwide making up to 200,000 new, first-time hires annually. Our ability to attract, and more importantly retain, great talent over the next five years will shape public education for the next 30 years—it is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
It is important to emphasize that the challenge to our schools is not just a looming teacher shortage, but rather a shortage of great teachers in the schools and communities where they are needed most. As Lyndon Johnson foresaw in 1965, "tomorrow's teachers must not merely be plentiful enough, they must be good enough. They must possess the old virtues of energy and dedication, but they must possess new knowledge and new skill." In our new era of accountability, it is not enough for a teacher to say, "I taught it—but the students didn't learn it." As Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, that is akin to saying "the operation was a success but the patient died."
More than 40 years later after Johnson spoke, high-poverty, high-needs schools still struggle to attract and retain good teachers. Teacher openings in science and math—subjects that are vitally important to the future—are often hard to fill with effective instructors. And students with disabilities and English language learners are still underserved. Rural classrooms are facing shortages and we have far too few teachers of color. Nationwide, more than 35 percent of public school students are Hispanic or black, but less than 15 percent of our teachers are black or Latino. That's a problem that is not self-correcting—we must proactively work on it. It is especially troubling that less than two percent of our nation's teachers are African American males.
To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers. But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago. Today teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs. Teaching has never been more difficult, it has never been more important, and the desperate need for more student success has never been so urgent. Are we adequately preparing future teachers to win this critical battle?
I am urging every teacher education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts. America's great educational challenges require that this new generation of well-prepared teachers significantly boost student learning and increase college-readiness. President Obama has set an ambitious goal of having America regain its position as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But to reach that goal, both our K-12 system and our teacher preparation programs have to get dramatically better. The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status quo has passed.
Now there is a reason why so many of us remember a favorite teacher forever. A great teacher can literally change the course of a student's life. They light a lifelong curiosity, a desire to participate in democracy, and instill a thirst for knowledge. It's no surprise that studies repeatedly document that the single biggest influence on student academic growth is the quality of the teacher standing in front of the classroom—not socioeconomic status, not family background, but the quality of the teacher at the head of the class.
Earlier this month at Thomas Jefferson's fabled Rotunda at the University of Virginia, I issued a call to teaching as an essential national mission of our time. But the fact is that recruiting and preparing this army of great, new teachers depends heavily on our nation's colleges of education.
More than half of tomorrow's teachers will be trained at colleges of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that schools and departments of education produce about 220,000 certified teachers a year. Now I am all in favor of expanding high-quality alternative certificate routes, like High Tech High, the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs. But these promising alternative programs produce fewer than 10,000 teachers per year.
The predominance of education schools in preparing teachers is not the only reason this is a national priority and a critical concern for higher education. My good friend, Congressman George Miller, the chair of the House Committee on Education and a great reform advocate, points out that America's taxpayers already generously support teacher preparation programs. And it is only right that this investment should be well spent.
In the 2007-08 school year, nearly 30 percent of undergraduate education majors received Pell Grants totaling close to a billion dollars. That same year, about 40 percent of undergraduate education majors received $3 billion in Federal Loans. All told, the federal government now provides about $4 billion a year in Pell Grants and Federal Loans to support students and our university-based teacher preparation programs.
At the same time, graduate schools of education have a huge impact on post-baccalaureate enrollment—they award nearly 30 percent of all master's degrees, more than any other branch of graduate studies. And unlike independent alternative certification programs, university-based teacher preparation programs have unique advantages—they are financially self-sustaining, have math and science departments on campus to assist in specialized training, they can provide rich content knowledge in the liberal arts, and they are in a position to research and test what works to improve student learning.
Now it is not possible to talk honestly about radical improvements to teacher preparation programs without acknowledging the troubled history of education schools and stubborn barriers to reform. To echo a sentiment voiced by deans of education schools, almost since colleges of education came into being they have frequently been treated like the Rodney Dangerfield of higher education. Historically, education schools were the institution that got no respect—from the Oval Office to the Provost's Office, from university presidents to Secretaries of Education.
From the onset of education schools a century ago they have been beset by skeptics who believed that teachers are born, not made. In William James' popular lectures, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, published in 1899, James warned that educators made "a very great mistake" in assuming that child psychology could help provide "methods of instruction for immediate school-room use."
James thought that teaching was an instinctual art—and many of his colleagues in academia agreed that teaching was more a craft than a profession. In his book The Uncertain Profession, former ed school administrator Arthur Powell argued that "none of the social sciences spawned by the American university at the end of the nineteenth century has had a more volatile and troublesome history than the field of education."
The dismissal of teacher preparation programs by the liberal arts faculty on many campuses was so complete that in the 1930s the president of Harvard described Harvard's Graduate School of Education as a "kitten that ought to be drowned." Columbia itself was not exempt from soul-searching about the effectiveness of colleges of education. In 1944, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Teachers College, Harvard president James Bryant Conant gave a speech here calling for a "Truce Among Educators"—a plea, he acknowledged, that fell on deaf ears. Nearly 20 years later, Conant authored a two-year study of education schools that acknowledged many students believed their required courses at ed school were "Mickey Mouse" courses.
Jacques Barzun, who wrote the classic bestseller Teacher in America—and later went on to be Columbia's provost—was equally unsparing in his critique of education schools. In his essay "The Art of Making Teachers," Barzun wrote that "teacher training is based on a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by a total lack of imagination."
Jump forward to 1963 and you find that President Kennedy was voicing many of the same concerns about the quality of educational research that continue to resound today. "Research in education," President Kennedy declared, "has been astonishingly meager and frequently ignored . . . It is appalling that so little is known about the level of performance, comparative value of alternative investments and specialized problems of our educational system."
More than three decades later, not much—or at least not enough—had changed. In 1995, the Holmes Group, a coalition of ed school deans, issued a pointed report warning that "The education school should cease to act as a silent agent in the preservation of the status quo." In 1999, Richard Riley, one of my predecessors as Secretary of Education, told the National Press Club that "we can no longer fiddle around the edges of how we recruit, prepare, retain, and reward America's teachers.... Our colleges of education can no longer be the sleepy backwaters."
Now, as you know, the most recent comprehensive study of education schools was carried out by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College. Levine's 2006 study found numerous examples of exemplary programs. But he also documented the persistence of problems that had afflicted ed schools for decades. "At the moment," he wrote, "teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world... unruly and disordered." "The bottom line," he concluded, "is that we lack empirical evidence of what works in preparing teachers for an outcome-based education system. We don't know what, where, how, or when teacher education is most effective."
Ed school deans and faculty interviewed for Levine's study painted an unflattering picture of teacher education, which they complained was "subjective, obscure, faddish . . . out-of-touch, politically correct . . . and failed to address the burning problems in the nation's schools." English professor E.D Hirsch, the father of the acclaimed, content-rich Core Knowledge Program, got his own taste of the ideological blinders at colleges of education when he chose to teach an ed school course on the causes and cure of the achievement gap. Having authored the 1987 bestseller, Cultural Literacy, Hirsch anticipated that his course would be oversubscribed. But three years in a row, only 10 or so students enrolled. Finally, one of Hirsch's students informed him that other professors in the ed school were encouraging students to shun the course because it ran counter to their pedagogical beliefs.
More than three out of five ed school alum surveyed for the Levine report said their training did not prepare them adequately for their work in the classroom. In my seven years as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and in my current job as I've travelled the country, I've had hundreds of conversations with great young teachers. And they echo many of the same concerns about ed schools voiced in the Levine report and in earlier decades. In particular they say two things about their training in ed school. First, most of them say they did not get the hands-on practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. And second, they say there were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning. On Tuesday night, at a national town hall meeting with teachers, I asked the studio audience of about 100 teachers how they felt about their schools of ed. An uneasy laughter filled the room—not the kind of response that engenders confidence.
Now the obvious question arises, why have teacher preparation programs historically been difficult to reform? And how is it that, in the face of this history, I am actually optimistic that important changes are already underway in teacher preparation programs?
Let me start by answering that first question, about the obstacles to reform. It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform in a variety of ways.
For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics—while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.
This robbing Peter to pay Paul is shortsighted. If teaching is—and should be—one of our most revered professions, teacher preparation programs should be among a university's most important responsibilities. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule.
It takes a university to prepare a teacher. The arts and sciences faculty play an absolutely essential role in strengthening the content knowledge of aspiring teachers. I do not understand when college presidents and deans of the arts and science faculty ignore their teacher preparation programs—and yet complain about the cost of providing remedial classes to freshmen. Simply put, incoming freshmen don't know the content because too often they have been taught by teachers who don't know the content well. In my view, Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, got it right when he said that "Only if the best institutions care about [public] schools and their own schools of education will the public think they are worth caring about; and nothing could be more clearly the business of America's academic leaders."
Now the fact is that states, districts, and the federal government are also culpable for the persistence of weak teacher preparation programs. Most states routinely approve teacher education programs, and licensing exams typically measure basic skills and subject matter knowledge with paper-and-pencil tests without any real-world assessment of classroom readiness. Local mentoring programs for new teachers are poorly funded and often poorly organized at the district level.
Less than a handful of states and districts carefully track the performance of teachers to their teacher preparation programs to identify which programs are producing well-prepared teachers—and which programs are not turning out effective teachers. We should be studying and copying the practices of effective teacher preparation programs—and encouraging the lowest-performers to shape up or shut down.
Even the failure of some education schools to develop a rigorous, research-based curriculum cannot solely be laid at their door step. We all know that the reading and math wars have gone on for decades—but that doesn't mean they are destined to last forever. Thanks to the national reading panel and other national expert assessments, educators know much more about the science of teaching reading and math today than a decade ago. Yet, as your president, Susan Fuhrman recently pointed out, countries like Singapore, South Korea, and the Czech Republic that outperform us in science and math provide teachers with much clearer guidance on key ideas and content to be mastered in each grade.
Now, each of these barriers to reform that I've just cited is beginning to slowly recede—and that is one reason why I remain optimistic that real improvements and change in teacher preparation programs are underway.
For the first time, 48 states have banded together to develop common college and career-ready standards for high school students—and the federal government is providing generous incentives through the Race to the Top Fund to encourage rigorous standards, including setting aside $350 million to fund the competitive development of better assessments for the standards. Just a year ago, many education experts doubted states would ever agree on common college-ready standards.
The draft Race to the Top criteria would also reward states that publicly report and link student achievement data to the programs where teachers and principals were credentialed. And the federal government is funding a large expansion of teacher residency programs in high-need districts and schools, including one to be run out of Teachers College.
As you know, teacher residency programs follow a medical model of training, with residents placed in schools with extensive induction and support during a year-long apprenticeship. In Chicago, I was lucky to work with the Academy for Urban School Leadership program, one of the nation's top residency programs. The U.S. Department of Education recently announced $43 million in grants for 28 Teacher Quality Partnership programs that went to colleges of education and high-need school districts, with more than half of the five-year grants supporting residency programs. An additional $100 million in grants included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be awarded early next year.
At the state and district level, states like Louisiana are leading the way in building the longitudinal data systems that enable states to track and compare the impact of new teachers from teacher preparation programs on student achievement over a period of years. Louisiana's system is already up and running, linking teacher education programs in the state back to student performance and growth in math, English, reading, science, and social studies.
All students in Louisiana in grades four through nine who took one of the state assessments are eligible for inclusion in Louisiana's evaluation of teacher impact—and the state uses three years of data involving hundreds of thousands of students and tens of thousands of teachers. Louisiana is using that information to identify effective and ineffective programs for the first time—and university-based teacher education programs are using the outcomes data to revamp and strengthen their programs. Officials at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette opted to increase admission requirements, added a career counseling program to better prepare teachers for the transition to the classroom, and boosted coursework requirements in English language arts. Real change, based upon the real outcomes of children—revolutionary, isn't it?
Right now, Louisiana is the only state in the nation that tracks the effectiveness of its teacher preparation programs. Every state in the nation should be doing the same—and, as I said, we are going to provide incentives for states to do so in the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition. It's a simple but obvious idea—college of educations and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. Transparency, longitudinal data, and competition can be powerful tonics for programs stuck in the past.
Several districts are moving to track the impact of teacher preparation programs on outcomes. Here in New York, the Teacher Policy Research Project, sponsored by the University of Albany and Stanford University, recently assessed the impact that 31 elementary teacher preparation programs have had on math and English achievement in New York City. They found that the difference between the average impact of the 31 teacher preparation programs and the top value-added institution for first-year teachers was about the same as the difference in average learning for a classroom of low-income students and those who are not poor. The New York study is yet another example of how we are finally beginning to get the comparative data on education investments that President Kennedy sought so long ago.
Now, just as states and districts are beginning to link teacher education programs to student outcomes, universities are also taking their responsibility to improve teacher preparation more seriously. I have been involved in a Listening and Learning tour during the last nine months that has taken me to more than 30 states. Everywhere I go I see universities partnering with school districts, opening up lab schools, magnet schools, and charter schools, and creating professional development schools for ed school students to gain clinical experience. In droves, universities have opened their doors to alternative certification programs—and are paying greater attention to the quality and supervision of student teachers during their clinical training.
As you know, the accreditation of schools of education is a voluntary process, and historically coursework had been given greater priority than clinical training for students in accreditation. But there also are encouraging signs that colleges of education want to make self-policing more meaningful, with clinical experience driving coursework. Both NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and AACTE, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, are firmly behind the new drive to link teacher preparation programs to better student outcomes.
In June, NCATE and its president, Jim Cibulka, announced the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years. It includes new accreditation requirements that will oblige institutions to strengthen the clinical focus of their programs and foster demonstrable increases in student learning. NCATE's new accreditation system will be modeled in part on Tennessee's evolving experiment, where the Board of Regents has decided that all undergraduate teacher candidates will spend their senior year in year-long residencies in P-12 schools. I hope other states and schools of education shift more to the residency-model of training.
Under the leadership of Sharon Robinson, the AACTE and its 800 colleges and universities have made it a core mission to have pre-service education lead to substantial increases in student achievement. AACTE has also recently launched a series of new programs and initiatives designed to improve teacher effectiveness. One of their most promising initiatives to date is the development of the first nationally accessible assessment of teacher candidate readiness. Under this performance-based assessment, supervising teachers and faculty would evaluate student teachers in the classroom. And student teachers and interns would be required to plan and teach a week-long stint of instruction mapped to state standards and provide commentaries on videotapes of their instruction and classroom management.
AACTE's project is based on PACT, California's Performance Assessment for Teachers, which Linda Darling-Hammond and a wide-ranging consortium of teacher preparation programs in California have done so much to pioneer. Already 14 states have signed up to pilot the performance assessment.
In the end, I don't think the ingredients of a good teacher preparation are much of a mystery anymore. Our best programs are coherent, up-to-date, research-based, and provide students with subject mastery. They have a strong and substantial field-based program in local public schools that drives much of the course work in classroom management and student learning and prepares students to teach diverse pupils in high-needs settings. And these programs have a shared vision of what constitutes good teaching and best practices—including a single-minded focus on improving student learning and using data to inform instruction.
The program here at Teachers College, which turns out about 700 teachers a year, explicitly trains students to use data to continuously improve their own instruction and target student learning gaps. Every student teacher in the elementary education program at TC completes at least two semesters of student teaching, and unlike some education schools, every student teacher works under the careful supervision of a well-qualified mentor teacher. About half of TC's graduating teachers in 2007-08 ended up in high-needs schools in New York City. Your commitment to research what really works to advance student learning is impressive.
Earlier this month, I spoke to students at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and found a similarly top-notch program where fifth-year students teach full-time during their first semester. I see David Steiner, your great new commissioner in New York in the audience, and David created an extraordinary teacher preparation program at Hunter College. Like Virginia's program, it has a carefully-run clinical program that videotapes student teachers and helps them learn from their experience.
In contrast to some colleges of education, David also encouraged the incorporation of best practices from a new generation of high-performing charter schools. He even established an alternative certification program for teachers of record—Teacher You—for KIPP, Achievement First, and the Uncommon Schools.
There are many other first-rate teacher preparation programs—Stanford, the University of Washington, and Michigan, just to name a few. But I want to be clear that it doesn't take an elite university and a big endowment to create a good teacher education program.
At Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, home of the National Teachers Hall of Fame, the Teachers College is the crown jewel of the school. Roughly 80 percent of students are supervised by full-time education faculty instead of adjuncts—and all elementary education professors are in the public schools every day. Senior year is a 100 percent field-based program in Emporia's public schools, where student teachers do everything from assisting with grading to sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.
Alverno College, a Catholic women's college in Milwaukee, also requires a rigorous field experience in the public schools and has faculty and local principals assess videotapes of student teachers. Eighty-five percent of Alverno graduates are still in the classroom five years after graduation, an extremely high retention rate. At Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, Project Prime, a partnership with the Rapid City Schools uses school-based math coaches and graduate level courses for teachers to successfully boost math achievement among Native American students.
I cite all these examples to point out that, with courage and commitment, our teacher preparation programs absolutely can provide dynamic and effective teacher preparation for the 21st century—leaving the sleepy backwaters that Secretary Riley spoke of behind. In place of the uncertain profession, I want to see teacher preparation programs one day rival those of other professions.
When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, we will be reinvesting in teacher education programs. We will encourage partnerships with states and districts that address teacher shortages in high-needs areas. And we will encourage programs committed to results: Programs that use data, including student achievement data, to foster an ethic of continuous improvement for students and teachers.
Our best teacher preparation programs see the smart use of data as a boon that can help them improve, not as a burden. They see competition from alternative providers not as a threat but as a force from which they can learn, benefit, and share ideas.
It's often said that great teachers are unsung heroes, but for me that truism has real meaning. Teaching is one of the few professions that is not just a job or even an adventure—it's a calling. Great teachers strive to help every student unlock their potential and develop the habits of mind that will serve them for a lifetime. They believe that every student has a gift—even when students doubt themselves.
Henry Adams said that "a teacher affects eternity—he can never tell where his influence stops." That is a weighty responsibility and a unique privilege. I thank you for all that you have done and will do to train the next generation of great teachers. The challenges facing our nation's schools of education are great. But so is the opportunity to better serve our children and the common good.
Thank you.
-Patricia
Teacher Preparation: Reforming the Uncertain Profession—Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University
FOR RELEASE:
October 22, 2009
It's an honor and pleasure to be here at Columbia Teachers College—the oldest, largest, and most storied graduate school of education in the United States. Here in this citadel of teacher preparation, where giants like John Dewey played such a formative role, I've come to speak to you today about the need for a sea-change in our schools of education.
Like the Teachers College, many schools of education have provided high-quality preparation programs for aspiring teachers for years. In the last decade, a slew of education schools have also upgraded their programs or launched rigorous practice-based initiatives to adapt to the realities of preparing instructors to teach diverse students in the information age.
I am going to talk about some of those shining examples in just a moment. Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America's university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering. But I am optimistic that, despite the obstacles to reform, the seeds of real change have been planted.
America faces three great educational challenges that make the need to improve teacher preparation programs all the more urgent. First, the education that millions of Americans got in the past simply won't do anymore. In the information age, it is impossible to drop out of school and land a good job. Even workers with high school diplomas but without college degrees are going to find they have limited opportunities in a competitive global economy. As President Obama has said, "education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success—it's a prerequisite to success."
Second, education, as Horace Mann said nearly two centuries ago, has long been the great equalizer in America. No matter what your race, national origin, disability, or zip code, every child is entitled to a quality public education. Today, more than ever, we acknowledge America's need—and a public school's obligation—to teach all students to their full potential. And yet today we are still way too far from achieving that dream of equal educational opportunity.
Nearly 30 percent of our students today drop out or fail to complete high school on time—that is 1.2 million kids a year. Barely 60 percent of African-American and Latino students graduate on time—and in many cities, half or more of low-income teens drop out of school.
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. And that is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.
Now the nation's rising educational demands are only half the picture. The third force propelling the nation's need for more and better teachers is the massive exodus of Baby Boomers from the teaching force in the next decade.
We currently have about 3.2 million teachers who work in some 95,000 schools. But more than half of those teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. And during the next four years we could lose a third of our veteran teachers and school leaders to retirement and attrition. By 2014, just five short years from now, the U.S. Department of Education projects that up to one million new teaching positions will be filled by new teachers.
These major demographic shifts mean that teaching is going to be a booming profession in the years ahead—with school districts nationwide making up to 200,000 new, first-time hires annually. Our ability to attract, and more importantly retain, great talent over the next five years will shape public education for the next 30 years—it is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
It is important to emphasize that the challenge to our schools is not just a looming teacher shortage, but rather a shortage of great teachers in the schools and communities where they are needed most. As Lyndon Johnson foresaw in 1965, "tomorrow's teachers must not merely be plentiful enough, they must be good enough. They must possess the old virtues of energy and dedication, but they must possess new knowledge and new skill." In our new era of accountability, it is not enough for a teacher to say, "I taught it—but the students didn't learn it." As Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, that is akin to saying "the operation was a success but the patient died."
More than 40 years later after Johnson spoke, high-poverty, high-needs schools still struggle to attract and retain good teachers. Teacher openings in science and math—subjects that are vitally important to the future—are often hard to fill with effective instructors. And students with disabilities and English language learners are still underserved. Rural classrooms are facing shortages and we have far too few teachers of color. Nationwide, more than 35 percent of public school students are Hispanic or black, but less than 15 percent of our teachers are black or Latino. That's a problem that is not self-correcting—we must proactively work on it. It is especially troubling that less than two percent of our nation's teachers are African American males.
To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers. But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago. Today teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs. Teaching has never been more difficult, it has never been more important, and the desperate need for more student success has never been so urgent. Are we adequately preparing future teachers to win this critical battle?
I am urging every teacher education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts. America's great educational challenges require that this new generation of well-prepared teachers significantly boost student learning and increase college-readiness. President Obama has set an ambitious goal of having America regain its position as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But to reach that goal, both our K-12 system and our teacher preparation programs have to get dramatically better. The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status quo has passed.
Now there is a reason why so many of us remember a favorite teacher forever. A great teacher can literally change the course of a student's life. They light a lifelong curiosity, a desire to participate in democracy, and instill a thirst for knowledge. It's no surprise that studies repeatedly document that the single biggest influence on student academic growth is the quality of the teacher standing in front of the classroom—not socioeconomic status, not family background, but the quality of the teacher at the head of the class.
Earlier this month at Thomas Jefferson's fabled Rotunda at the University of Virginia, I issued a call to teaching as an essential national mission of our time. But the fact is that recruiting and preparing this army of great, new teachers depends heavily on our nation's colleges of education.
More than half of tomorrow's teachers will be trained at colleges of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that schools and departments of education produce about 220,000 certified teachers a year. Now I am all in favor of expanding high-quality alternative certificate routes, like High Tech High, the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs. But these promising alternative programs produce fewer than 10,000 teachers per year.
The predominance of education schools in preparing teachers is not the only reason this is a national priority and a critical concern for higher education. My good friend, Congressman George Miller, the chair of the House Committee on Education and a great reform advocate, points out that America's taxpayers already generously support teacher preparation programs. And it is only right that this investment should be well spent.
In the 2007-08 school year, nearly 30 percent of undergraduate education majors received Pell Grants totaling close to a billion dollars. That same year, about 40 percent of undergraduate education majors received $3 billion in Federal Loans. All told, the federal government now provides about $4 billion a year in Pell Grants and Federal Loans to support students and our university-based teacher preparation programs.
At the same time, graduate schools of education have a huge impact on post-baccalaureate enrollment—they award nearly 30 percent of all master's degrees, more than any other branch of graduate studies. And unlike independent alternative certification programs, university-based teacher preparation programs have unique advantages—they are financially self-sustaining, have math and science departments on campus to assist in specialized training, they can provide rich content knowledge in the liberal arts, and they are in a position to research and test what works to improve student learning.
Now it is not possible to talk honestly about radical improvements to teacher preparation programs without acknowledging the troubled history of education schools and stubborn barriers to reform. To echo a sentiment voiced by deans of education schools, almost since colleges of education came into being they have frequently been treated like the Rodney Dangerfield of higher education. Historically, education schools were the institution that got no respect—from the Oval Office to the Provost's Office, from university presidents to Secretaries of Education.
From the onset of education schools a century ago they have been beset by skeptics who believed that teachers are born, not made. In William James' popular lectures, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, published in 1899, James warned that educators made "a very great mistake" in assuming that child psychology could help provide "methods of instruction for immediate school-room use."
James thought that teaching was an instinctual art—and many of his colleagues in academia agreed that teaching was more a craft than a profession. In his book The Uncertain Profession, former ed school administrator Arthur Powell argued that "none of the social sciences spawned by the American university at the end of the nineteenth century has had a more volatile and troublesome history than the field of education."
The dismissal of teacher preparation programs by the liberal arts faculty on many campuses was so complete that in the 1930s the president of Harvard described Harvard's Graduate School of Education as a "kitten that ought to be drowned." Columbia itself was not exempt from soul-searching about the effectiveness of colleges of education. In 1944, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Teachers College, Harvard president James Bryant Conant gave a speech here calling for a "Truce Among Educators"—a plea, he acknowledged, that fell on deaf ears. Nearly 20 years later, Conant authored a two-year study of education schools that acknowledged many students believed their required courses at ed school were "Mickey Mouse" courses.
Jacques Barzun, who wrote the classic bestseller Teacher in America—and later went on to be Columbia's provost—was equally unsparing in his critique of education schools. In his essay "The Art of Making Teachers," Barzun wrote that "teacher training is based on a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by a total lack of imagination."
Jump forward to 1963 and you find that President Kennedy was voicing many of the same concerns about the quality of educational research that continue to resound today. "Research in education," President Kennedy declared, "has been astonishingly meager and frequently ignored . . . It is appalling that so little is known about the level of performance, comparative value of alternative investments and specialized problems of our educational system."
More than three decades later, not much—or at least not enough—had changed. In 1995, the Holmes Group, a coalition of ed school deans, issued a pointed report warning that "The education school should cease to act as a silent agent in the preservation of the status quo." In 1999, Richard Riley, one of my predecessors as Secretary of Education, told the National Press Club that "we can no longer fiddle around the edges of how we recruit, prepare, retain, and reward America's teachers.... Our colleges of education can no longer be the sleepy backwaters."
Now, as you know, the most recent comprehensive study of education schools was carried out by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College. Levine's 2006 study found numerous examples of exemplary programs. But he also documented the persistence of problems that had afflicted ed schools for decades. "At the moment," he wrote, "teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world... unruly and disordered." "The bottom line," he concluded, "is that we lack empirical evidence of what works in preparing teachers for an outcome-based education system. We don't know what, where, how, or when teacher education is most effective."
Ed school deans and faculty interviewed for Levine's study painted an unflattering picture of teacher education, which they complained was "subjective, obscure, faddish . . . out-of-touch, politically correct . . . and failed to address the burning problems in the nation's schools." English professor E.D Hirsch, the father of the acclaimed, content-rich Core Knowledge Program, got his own taste of the ideological blinders at colleges of education when he chose to teach an ed school course on the causes and cure of the achievement gap. Having authored the 1987 bestseller, Cultural Literacy, Hirsch anticipated that his course would be oversubscribed. But three years in a row, only 10 or so students enrolled. Finally, one of Hirsch's students informed him that other professors in the ed school were encouraging students to shun the course because it ran counter to their pedagogical beliefs.
More than three out of five ed school alum surveyed for the Levine report said their training did not prepare them adequately for their work in the classroom. In my seven years as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and in my current job as I've travelled the country, I've had hundreds of conversations with great young teachers. And they echo many of the same concerns about ed schools voiced in the Levine report and in earlier decades. In particular they say two things about their training in ed school. First, most of them say they did not get the hands-on practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. And second, they say there were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning. On Tuesday night, at a national town hall meeting with teachers, I asked the studio audience of about 100 teachers how they felt about their schools of ed. An uneasy laughter filled the room—not the kind of response that engenders confidence.
Now the obvious question arises, why have teacher preparation programs historically been difficult to reform? And how is it that, in the face of this history, I am actually optimistic that important changes are already underway in teacher preparation programs?
Let me start by answering that first question, about the obstacles to reform. It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform in a variety of ways.
For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics—while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.
This robbing Peter to pay Paul is shortsighted. If teaching is—and should be—one of our most revered professions, teacher preparation programs should be among a university's most important responsibilities. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule.
It takes a university to prepare a teacher. The arts and sciences faculty play an absolutely essential role in strengthening the content knowledge of aspiring teachers. I do not understand when college presidents and deans of the arts and science faculty ignore their teacher preparation programs—and yet complain about the cost of providing remedial classes to freshmen. Simply put, incoming freshmen don't know the content because too often they have been taught by teachers who don't know the content well. In my view, Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, got it right when he said that "Only if the best institutions care about [public] schools and their own schools of education will the public think they are worth caring about; and nothing could be more clearly the business of America's academic leaders."
Now the fact is that states, districts, and the federal government are also culpable for the persistence of weak teacher preparation programs. Most states routinely approve teacher education programs, and licensing exams typically measure basic skills and subject matter knowledge with paper-and-pencil tests without any real-world assessment of classroom readiness. Local mentoring programs for new teachers are poorly funded and often poorly organized at the district level.
Less than a handful of states and districts carefully track the performance of teachers to their teacher preparation programs to identify which programs are producing well-prepared teachers—and which programs are not turning out effective teachers. We should be studying and copying the practices of effective teacher preparation programs—and encouraging the lowest-performers to shape up or shut down.
Even the failure of some education schools to develop a rigorous, research-based curriculum cannot solely be laid at their door step. We all know that the reading and math wars have gone on for decades—but that doesn't mean they are destined to last forever. Thanks to the national reading panel and other national expert assessments, educators know much more about the science of teaching reading and math today than a decade ago. Yet, as your president, Susan Fuhrman recently pointed out, countries like Singapore, South Korea, and the Czech Republic that outperform us in science and math provide teachers with much clearer guidance on key ideas and content to be mastered in each grade.
Now, each of these barriers to reform that I've just cited is beginning to slowly recede—and that is one reason why I remain optimistic that real improvements and change in teacher preparation programs are underway.
For the first time, 48 states have banded together to develop common college and career-ready standards for high school students—and the federal government is providing generous incentives through the Race to the Top Fund to encourage rigorous standards, including setting aside $350 million to fund the competitive development of better assessments for the standards. Just a year ago, many education experts doubted states would ever agree on common college-ready standards.
The draft Race to the Top criteria would also reward states that publicly report and link student achievement data to the programs where teachers and principals were credentialed. And the federal government is funding a large expansion of teacher residency programs in high-need districts and schools, including one to be run out of Teachers College.
As you know, teacher residency programs follow a medical model of training, with residents placed in schools with extensive induction and support during a year-long apprenticeship. In Chicago, I was lucky to work with the Academy for Urban School Leadership program, one of the nation's top residency programs. The U.S. Department of Education recently announced $43 million in grants for 28 Teacher Quality Partnership programs that went to colleges of education and high-need school districts, with more than half of the five-year grants supporting residency programs. An additional $100 million in grants included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be awarded early next year.
At the state and district level, states like Louisiana are leading the way in building the longitudinal data systems that enable states to track and compare the impact of new teachers from teacher preparation programs on student achievement over a period of years. Louisiana's system is already up and running, linking teacher education programs in the state back to student performance and growth in math, English, reading, science, and social studies.
All students in Louisiana in grades four through nine who took one of the state assessments are eligible for inclusion in Louisiana's evaluation of teacher impact—and the state uses three years of data involving hundreds of thousands of students and tens of thousands of teachers. Louisiana is using that information to identify effective and ineffective programs for the first time—and university-based teacher education programs are using the outcomes data to revamp and strengthen their programs. Officials at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette opted to increase admission requirements, added a career counseling program to better prepare teachers for the transition to the classroom, and boosted coursework requirements in English language arts. Real change, based upon the real outcomes of children—revolutionary, isn't it?
Right now, Louisiana is the only state in the nation that tracks the effectiveness of its teacher preparation programs. Every state in the nation should be doing the same—and, as I said, we are going to provide incentives for states to do so in the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition. It's a simple but obvious idea—college of educations and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. Transparency, longitudinal data, and competition can be powerful tonics for programs stuck in the past.
Several districts are moving to track the impact of teacher preparation programs on outcomes. Here in New York, the Teacher Policy Research Project, sponsored by the University of Albany and Stanford University, recently assessed the impact that 31 elementary teacher preparation programs have had on math and English achievement in New York City. They found that the difference between the average impact of the 31 teacher preparation programs and the top value-added institution for first-year teachers was about the same as the difference in average learning for a classroom of low-income students and those who are not poor. The New York study is yet another example of how we are finally beginning to get the comparative data on education investments that President Kennedy sought so long ago.
Now, just as states and districts are beginning to link teacher education programs to student outcomes, universities are also taking their responsibility to improve teacher preparation more seriously. I have been involved in a Listening and Learning tour during the last nine months that has taken me to more than 30 states. Everywhere I go I see universities partnering with school districts, opening up lab schools, magnet schools, and charter schools, and creating professional development schools for ed school students to gain clinical experience. In droves, universities have opened their doors to alternative certification programs—and are paying greater attention to the quality and supervision of student teachers during their clinical training.
As you know, the accreditation of schools of education is a voluntary process, and historically coursework had been given greater priority than clinical training for students in accreditation. But there also are encouraging signs that colleges of education want to make self-policing more meaningful, with clinical experience driving coursework. Both NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and AACTE, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, are firmly behind the new drive to link teacher preparation programs to better student outcomes.
In June, NCATE and its president, Jim Cibulka, announced the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years. It includes new accreditation requirements that will oblige institutions to strengthen the clinical focus of their programs and foster demonstrable increases in student learning. NCATE's new accreditation system will be modeled in part on Tennessee's evolving experiment, where the Board of Regents has decided that all undergraduate teacher candidates will spend their senior year in year-long residencies in P-12 schools. I hope other states and schools of education shift more to the residency-model of training.
Under the leadership of Sharon Robinson, the AACTE and its 800 colleges and universities have made it a core mission to have pre-service education lead to substantial increases in student achievement. AACTE has also recently launched a series of new programs and initiatives designed to improve teacher effectiveness. One of their most promising initiatives to date is the development of the first nationally accessible assessment of teacher candidate readiness. Under this performance-based assessment, supervising teachers and faculty would evaluate student teachers in the classroom. And student teachers and interns would be required to plan and teach a week-long stint of instruction mapped to state standards and provide commentaries on videotapes of their instruction and classroom management.
AACTE's project is based on PACT, California's Performance Assessment for Teachers, which Linda Darling-Hammond and a wide-ranging consortium of teacher preparation programs in California have done so much to pioneer. Already 14 states have signed up to pilot the performance assessment.
In the end, I don't think the ingredients of a good teacher preparation are much of a mystery anymore. Our best programs are coherent, up-to-date, research-based, and provide students with subject mastery. They have a strong and substantial field-based program in local public schools that drives much of the course work in classroom management and student learning and prepares students to teach diverse pupils in high-needs settings. And these programs have a shared vision of what constitutes good teaching and best practices—including a single-minded focus on improving student learning and using data to inform instruction.
The program here at Teachers College, which turns out about 700 teachers a year, explicitly trains students to use data to continuously improve their own instruction and target student learning gaps. Every student teacher in the elementary education program at TC completes at least two semesters of student teaching, and unlike some education schools, every student teacher works under the careful supervision of a well-qualified mentor teacher. About half of TC's graduating teachers in 2007-08 ended up in high-needs schools in New York City. Your commitment to research what really works to advance student learning is impressive.
Earlier this month, I spoke to students at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and found a similarly top-notch program where fifth-year students teach full-time during their first semester. I see David Steiner, your great new commissioner in New York in the audience, and David created an extraordinary teacher preparation program at Hunter College. Like Virginia's program, it has a carefully-run clinical program that videotapes student teachers and helps them learn from their experience.
In contrast to some colleges of education, David also encouraged the incorporation of best practices from a new generation of high-performing charter schools. He even established an alternative certification program for teachers of record—Teacher You—for KIPP, Achievement First, and the Uncommon Schools.
There are many other first-rate teacher preparation programs—Stanford, the University of Washington, and Michigan, just to name a few. But I want to be clear that it doesn't take an elite university and a big endowment to create a good teacher education program.
At Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, home of the National Teachers Hall of Fame, the Teachers College is the crown jewel of the school. Roughly 80 percent of students are supervised by full-time education faculty instead of adjuncts—and all elementary education professors are in the public schools every day. Senior year is a 100 percent field-based program in Emporia's public schools, where student teachers do everything from assisting with grading to sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.
Alverno College, a Catholic women's college in Milwaukee, also requires a rigorous field experience in the public schools and has faculty and local principals assess videotapes of student teachers. Eighty-five percent of Alverno graduates are still in the classroom five years after graduation, an extremely high retention rate. At Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, Project Prime, a partnership with the Rapid City Schools uses school-based math coaches and graduate level courses for teachers to successfully boost math achievement among Native American students.
I cite all these examples to point out that, with courage and commitment, our teacher preparation programs absolutely can provide dynamic and effective teacher preparation for the 21st century—leaving the sleepy backwaters that Secretary Riley spoke of behind. In place of the uncertain profession, I want to see teacher preparation programs one day rival those of other professions.
When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, we will be reinvesting in teacher education programs. We will encourage partnerships with states and districts that address teacher shortages in high-needs areas. And we will encourage programs committed to results: Programs that use data, including student achievement data, to foster an ethic of continuous improvement for students and teachers.
Our best teacher preparation programs see the smart use of data as a boon that can help them improve, not as a burden. They see competition from alternative providers not as a threat but as a force from which they can learn, benefit, and share ideas.
It's often said that great teachers are unsung heroes, but for me that truism has real meaning. Teaching is one of the few professions that is not just a job or even an adventure—it's a calling. Great teachers strive to help every student unlock their potential and develop the habits of mind that will serve them for a lifetime. They believe that every student has a gift—even when students doubt themselves.
Henry Adams said that "a teacher affects eternity—he can never tell where his influence stops." That is a weighty responsibility and a unique privilege. I thank you for all that you have done and will do to train the next generation of great teachers. The challenges facing our nation's schools of education are great. But so is the opportunity to better serve our children and the common good.
Thank you.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
PRESS RELEASE: Secretary Duncan Challenges National Education Association to Accelerate School Reforms
FOR RELEASE:
July 2, 2009 Contact: John White
Press Secretary
john.white@ed.gov
(202) 401-1576
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today praised the National Education Association for its effort to improve the quality of the education workforce and challenged the union to reevaluate some of its policies on compensating teachers and offering them job protections.
Speaking at the NEA's annual convention in San Diego, Duncan said that the unions needed to relax contract rules to recruit, reward and retain highly effective educators, especially in low-performing schools in need of dramatic improvements.
"If we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way," Duncan said. "Children have only one chance to get an education."
Specifically, Duncan asked the union to bargain for contracts that change rules creating a single salary schedule, offering seniority benefits, and protecting ineffective teachers who have tenure. Duncan also encouraged the union to include student achievement when evaluating teachers and deciding their compensation.
"Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions," Duncan said. "That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible."
Duncan praised the NEA for its work to improve teacher quality in its advocacy for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and other professional development programs. Duncan noted that more than a thousand teachers earned certification from the national board during his seven years as CEO of Chicago public schools.
"I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children," Duncan said.
The speech was the last in a series in which Duncan outlined the specific goals on the four policy initiatives states must address under the $5 billion Race to the Top Fund, a competitive grant program that will make grants to states leading the way in school reform.
Duncan's earlier speeches addressed the importance of using of data to inform instruction and education policy decisions, the imperative for world-class standards and assessments, and the need for charter school operators to join the effort to turn around low-performing schools.
Immediately after his speech, Duncan participated in a panel discussion, where he discussed the No Child Left Behind Act with 10 NEA members and heard comments from the NEA members in the audience. The event was the sixth stop on the secretary's "NCLB Listening and Learning Tour." He previously visited West Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, Montana and New Jersey.
Duncan and senior members of his team will continue traveling across the country to gather ideas on how to improve the NCLB and inform the Obama administration's proposal to reauthorize it.
Remarks of Arne Duncan to the National Education Association—Partners in Reform
FOR RELEASE:
July 2, 2009
Good morning. Thank you for having me and thank you for hosting one of our Listening and Learning events. We embarked on this tour to hear from people in classrooms and schools—people who are facing educational challenges and finding solutions.
I've now been to 22 states and dozens of communities. I've met with hundreds of teachers and principals, education support staff, students, parents, superintendents, college professors, higher education administrators, and community leaders.
Everyone I spoke with understands that the status quo is not good enough. They want to get better—they need to get better—and they're willing to work even harder. They just want to be part of the process and they want their voices to be heard.
So I look forward today to hearing your voices—hearing what you have to say—hearing your ideas for improving American education. I encourage you to think boldly and courageously—to challenge me, challenge yourselves, and challenge each other.
But we must be willing to do more than talk. We all must be willing to change. As I said recently, education reform isn't a table around which we all talk. It's a moving train and we all need to get on board.
I have had some compelling conversations with the NEA leadership and many of your members. I'm convinced that if everyone is on board this train—it will gain enough speed, momentum and direction to take public education to a new and better place.
In recent weeks, I have given a series of speeches about the four core reforms embodied in the Recovery Act leading up to the release of $5 billion dollars in competitive grants.
The first speech was about creating data systems that follow the progress of students from pre-K through college so teachers can better meet the needs of students and we can help identify teachers who are doing well or who are struggling.
The second speech was about adopting higher standards and creating high-quality assessments. I want to thank you for your support of higher standards. That's the kind of leadership we need on a whole range of issues.
The third speech was about turning around our most troubled schools. We proposed several models and invited everyone to be part of the solution: unions, charters, non-profits, for-profits, universities, states and districts.
I also challenged the audience of charter school operators and authorizers to get much more serious about accountability. They must not protect third-rate charters. Those schools need too close. Charter schools are public schools and they should be held to the same standards as everyone else.
Today is the last of my four speeches—and the focus today is on the quality of the education workforce—teachers, principals and education support professionals. I want to acknowledge some of the good things that we have done—and talk about some of the things we haven't done.
I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education because—when thousands of schools are chronically failing and millions of children are dropping out each year—we all must think differently.
It's not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You and I must be willing to change.
I know we won't all agree on everything—but I'm confident there will be more we agree with than not. It starts with our shared values.
We believe it is our moral obligation to give children the very best education possible. We believe every child can learn and every school can succeed. We believe teaching is a profession and good teachers and principals are essential to success.
Unlike many of you, my values and views on education were not shaped in the front of a classroom. In 1961 my mother began an after-school, inner-city tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago and raised my brother, sister and me as a part of her program.
That daily experience was an absolutely formative one for all three of us and we all tried to follow in her footsteps in various ways. It was work filled both with great heartbreak and also amazing triumph.
We experienced our share of early, violent deaths because of the community's chaos, and those experiences shape you and frankly scar you in ways that to this day are difficult to talk about.
But from the group of friends I grew up studying with and playing ball with, from one street corner at 46th and Greenwood, emerged literally a brain surgeon, a Hollywood movie star, one of my top administrators at the Chicago Public Schools, and one of IBM's international corporate leaders.
How did this happen? Because these children despite tremendous poverty, despite staggering neighborhood violence, despite challenges at home, had my mother and others in their lives who gave them real opportunities, real support and guidance over the years, and had the highest expectations for them. And because of that opportunity, their gifts and their talents, and their fierce desire to succeed, blossomed.
What I learned as a little boy, what continues to motivate my mother today 48 years after she began her work, are the same two values that motivate all of you.
It is a fundamental, unalterable belief that every child can learn, and a fundamental understanding of the tremendous urgency of our work. Simply put, we cannot wait because our children cannot wait.
I've met a thousand educators like my mother in schools all across America. I've seen them on an Indian reservation in Montana, in a West Virginia middle school, at a high school in Detroit and a charter school in Newark.
All of us remember educator or coach who changed our life. It stays with us forever. It sustains us, guides us and inspires us. They're the ones who commit those everyday acts of kindness and love and never ask for anything in return. They counsel troubled teens, take phone calls at night, and reach into their pockets for lunch money for children who are too ashamed to ask.
I've seen how much these educators want to be valued for their work and honored for what they are: dedicated, professional, compassionate, serious and responsible. These are the qualities of a great educator and we have millions of them all across America.
My next experience was with the I Have A Dream foundation—where we adopted a class of students and agreed to send them to college if they stayed in school. The previous class had a 67% dropout rate while we had an 87% graduation rate.
After that, I helped start a small new traditional neighborhood public school—the Ariel Academy. It wasn't a charter. It had union teachers and today it is one of the highest-performing public schools in Chicago—even though all of the kids come from poverty.
Finally, I spent seven years running the Chicago Public Schools—where I learned other important lessons. We set up 150 community schools open 12 hours a day offering classes to adults and students.
We paid teachers to work extra hours and many of them took on that responsibility because they were committed to the school's success. Schools must support the social and emotional needs of students and engage the whole family.
We also increased the number of National Board Certified teachers in Chicago to about 1200—from about a dozen when I started. We partnered with the Union and with the Chicago Public Education Fund—which is a group of business leaders. Together we grew NBC faster than anywhere else in the nation.
I am big believer in this program, but let's also be honest: school systems pay teachers billions of dollars more each year for earning PD credentials that do very little to improve the quality of teaching.
At the same time, many schools give nothing at all to the teachers who go the extra mile and make all the difference in students' lives. Excellence matters and we should honor it—fairly, transparently, and on terms teachers can embrace.
The President and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works. And that is what we did in Chicago. We enlisted the help of 24 of the best teachers in the system to design a pilot performance compensation system. We also sat down with the union and bargained it out.
It was based on classroom observation, whole school performance and individual classroom performance, measured in part by growth in student learning. The rewards and incentives for good performance went to every adult in the school—including custodians and cafeteria workers—not just the individual teachers.
Where you see high-performing schools—it's the culture—every adult taking responsibility and creating a culture of high expectations.
We're asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs "with" you—and "for" you—not "to" you—programs that will put money in the pockets of your teachers and support personnel by recognizing and rewarding excellence.
So I begin our conversation today around some important areas of agreement: excellence in teaching, good professional development, school's open longer hours, and a shared responsibility for student success among all the adults in the school building.
But the President and I want to go further. I want to describe some tough challenges and ask you how we can work together to meet them. Let's start by talking about under-performing schools.
We don't need a study to tell us that chronically under-performing schools do not have the best principals and teachers. Experience tells us that failing schools usually have poor leadership—and poor leadership usually drives away good teachers.
Now often—we try replacing the leadership—and sometimes that works. We need to invest much more in principal leadership. We need to recruit and train the very best people possible because the job is hard and the cost of failure is too high.
Principals run multi-million dollar budgets, they hire, train and manage scores of people, and the best of them are also instructional leaders who are trained in classroom observation. It's a lot to ask of anyone—and we need 95,000 of them in America.
Great principals lead talented instructional teams that drive student performance and close achievement gaps. They deserve to be recognized and rewarded. But if they're not up to the job, they need to go.
Similarly, in struggling schools, we have tried boosting support for teaching staff and making other changes around curriculum, school day, etc.—and sometimes it has worked. I always favor more support, collaboration, mentoring and time on task.
But sometimes, despite our best efforts, these methods don't work. Today, America has about 5000 schools that continue to underperform year after year, despite our best efforts.
2,000 high schools produce half of the dropouts in the country. Their kids are years behind grade. They are perpetuating poverty and social failure. When it comes to these schools, we need to think differently. We need the courage to change.
We need to go into a room—states, districts, unions, administrators, foundations, think tanks, charters, non-profits, parents, and elected officials—lock the door—throw out the rule books—and start with a clean slate.
We need to be open and honest about the challenges and the barriers. If we agree that children need more time—then we must give it to them. If we agree that teachers need more support, then we must give it to them.
But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way. Children have only one chance to get an education.
It's also not about charters or unions. Chicago has turnaround schools led by a businessman who uses union teachers and he's getting great results. So does Green Dot in Los Angeles.
But Mastery Charters in Philadelphia is a different turnaround model and we need that as well. There is so much urgency and so much need in under-performing schools that we can't impede successful models like these, regardless of governance structure.
The NEA has an honest and passionate leader in Dennis Van Roekel. He shares our sense of urgency. He has told me personally that he'll walk into any room with anyone to talk about how to turn schools around.
And that gives me hope. We're losing too many children today and incremental change won't save them. We need dramatic change.
And we can't continue to blame each other or blame the system. We are the system and it is up to us—you and me—to change it. So let's talk about that.
We created seniority rules that protect teachers from arbitrary and capricious management—and that's a good goal. But sometimes those rules place teachers in schools and communities where they won't succeed—and that's wrong.
We created tenure rules to make sure that a struggling teacher gets a fair opportunity to improve—and that's a good goal. But when an ineffective teacher gets a chance to improve and doesn't—and when the tenure system keeps that teacher in the classroom anyway—then the system is protecting jobs rather than children. That's not a good thing. We need to work together to change that.
I told the charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled. I told the school boards that if they can't improve student achievement—they have a moral obligation to consider mayoral control.
And I'm telling you as well—that when inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children—then we are not only putting kids at risk—we're putting the entire education system at risk. We're inviting the attack of parents and the public—and that is not good for any of us.
I believe that teacher unions are at a crossroads. These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.
A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that? We need to work together to change this.
Now let's talk about data. I understand that word can make people nervous but I see data first and foremost as a barometer. It tells us what is happening. Used properly, it can help teachers better understand the needs of their students. Too often, teachers don't have good data to inform instruction and help raise student achievement.
Data can also help identify and support teachers who are struggling. And it can help evaluate them. The problem is that some states prohibit linking student achievement and teacher effectiveness.
I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.
It's time we all admit that just as our testing system is deeply flawed—so is our teacher evaluation system—and the losers are not just the children. When great teachers are unrecognized and unrewarded—when struggling teachers are unsupported—and when failing teachers are unaddressed—the teaching profession is damaged.
We need to work together to fix this and I will meet you more than halfway. I will demand the same of every principal, administrator, school board member, elected official and parent. I ask only the same of you that I ask of myself and others.
The NEA has long history of reform on issues of health care, child advocacy, civil rights, and disabilities rights. And I don't begin to suggest that all teachers and unions are standing in the way of reform. I know many of your members and affiliates have been working on these issues. In Illinois for example—the IEA has led a 20-year effort to build labor-management partnerships around school improvement.
One of the leaders of that effort—Jo Anderson—has joined our team. He's here today and I thank him for his work.
I also want to acknowledge my general counsel Charlie Rose who was our labor lawyer in Illinois. Charlie told me—years ago—that the key to making progress on education reform begins with respect for the labor-management relationship.
I believe that and I salute union-management partnerships all across America that are working together to develop better hiring, compensation, evaluation and turnaround strategies. But we need to move faster and we need to go further.
America's teachers are yearning to be partners in reform and change. They want teaching to be a respected profession that has high standards for performance, rewards excellence, provides opportunities for advancement, and promotes real collaboration.
They are tired of being demonized, blamed, and disrespected. They want to get on the train. Let me share a powerful quote from your former President, Mary Hatwood Futrell:
"The education reform movement demands not only that we seize the opportunity, but that we embrace the responsibility that is ours. You and I must provide the leadership ... and share this responsibility with every parent and citizen who is concerned about safeguarding the sanctity and purpose of public education for all."
Taking her words to heart, our challenge is to make sure every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes. So today, I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children.
You've heard my voice—and I appreciate that. Now I want to hear your voices. I began my remarks with a personal story. I just want to close with one more:
Dr. Martin Luther King came to the West Side of Chicago in 1966 to protest housing discrimination. His powerful and inspiring message brought billions of dollars into that community for housing, job-training, and community development.
But when I took over the public schools in Chicago—35 years later—the children of North Lawndale were still desperately poor. You have to ask yourself why—after so much money and time—nothing had changed?
It's because they forgot to invest in the one thing with the power to transform lives. They forgot education. They put all of that money into bricks and mortar and social programs but they forgot to give the people the skills they need to help themselves.
President Obama learned that lesson and that's why the Recovery Act invests more than $100 billion dollars in education. I want to thank NEA for your support. That money is going into our classrooms to keep teachers teaching and kids learning—so we can educate our way to a better economy.
The President understands that the nation that out-teaches us today will out-compete us tomorrow. He understands that education is the foundation of our economic strategy and the only sure path to long-term economic strength.
That's why he wants America to produce the highest percentage of college graduates by the end of the next decade. This is our moon-shot. This is our call to action.
It is an economic imperative and a moral imperative. This is the civil rights issue of our generation—the fight for a quality education is about so much more than education. It's a fight for social justice. And he's counting on you to lead that fight.
There is simply no more important work in our society than education. The President understands that, parents understand that, America understands that. Now we—all of us together—must act on that understanding and move forward.
Thank you.
July 2, 2009 Contact: John White
Press Secretary
john.white@ed.gov
(202) 401-1576
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today praised the National Education Association for its effort to improve the quality of the education workforce and challenged the union to reevaluate some of its policies on compensating teachers and offering them job protections.
Speaking at the NEA's annual convention in San Diego, Duncan said that the unions needed to relax contract rules to recruit, reward and retain highly effective educators, especially in low-performing schools in need of dramatic improvements.
"If we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way," Duncan said. "Children have only one chance to get an education."
Specifically, Duncan asked the union to bargain for contracts that change rules creating a single salary schedule, offering seniority benefits, and protecting ineffective teachers who have tenure. Duncan also encouraged the union to include student achievement when evaluating teachers and deciding their compensation.
"Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions," Duncan said. "That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible."
Duncan praised the NEA for its work to improve teacher quality in its advocacy for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and other professional development programs. Duncan noted that more than a thousand teachers earned certification from the national board during his seven years as CEO of Chicago public schools.
"I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children," Duncan said.
The speech was the last in a series in which Duncan outlined the specific goals on the four policy initiatives states must address under the $5 billion Race to the Top Fund, a competitive grant program that will make grants to states leading the way in school reform.
Duncan's earlier speeches addressed the importance of using of data to inform instruction and education policy decisions, the imperative for world-class standards and assessments, and the need for charter school operators to join the effort to turn around low-performing schools.
Immediately after his speech, Duncan participated in a panel discussion, where he discussed the No Child Left Behind Act with 10 NEA members and heard comments from the NEA members in the audience. The event was the sixth stop on the secretary's "NCLB Listening and Learning Tour." He previously visited West Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, Montana and New Jersey.
Duncan and senior members of his team will continue traveling across the country to gather ideas on how to improve the NCLB and inform the Obama administration's proposal to reauthorize it.
Remarks of Arne Duncan to the National Education Association—Partners in Reform
FOR RELEASE:
July 2, 2009
Good morning. Thank you for having me and thank you for hosting one of our Listening and Learning events. We embarked on this tour to hear from people in classrooms and schools—people who are facing educational challenges and finding solutions.
I've now been to 22 states and dozens of communities. I've met with hundreds of teachers and principals, education support staff, students, parents, superintendents, college professors, higher education administrators, and community leaders.
Everyone I spoke with understands that the status quo is not good enough. They want to get better—they need to get better—and they're willing to work even harder. They just want to be part of the process and they want their voices to be heard.
So I look forward today to hearing your voices—hearing what you have to say—hearing your ideas for improving American education. I encourage you to think boldly and courageously—to challenge me, challenge yourselves, and challenge each other.
But we must be willing to do more than talk. We all must be willing to change. As I said recently, education reform isn't a table around which we all talk. It's a moving train and we all need to get on board.
I have had some compelling conversations with the NEA leadership and many of your members. I'm convinced that if everyone is on board this train—it will gain enough speed, momentum and direction to take public education to a new and better place.
In recent weeks, I have given a series of speeches about the four core reforms embodied in the Recovery Act leading up to the release of $5 billion dollars in competitive grants.
The first speech was about creating data systems that follow the progress of students from pre-K through college so teachers can better meet the needs of students and we can help identify teachers who are doing well or who are struggling.
The second speech was about adopting higher standards and creating high-quality assessments. I want to thank you for your support of higher standards. That's the kind of leadership we need on a whole range of issues.
The third speech was about turning around our most troubled schools. We proposed several models and invited everyone to be part of the solution: unions, charters, non-profits, for-profits, universities, states and districts.
I also challenged the audience of charter school operators and authorizers to get much more serious about accountability. They must not protect third-rate charters. Those schools need too close. Charter schools are public schools and they should be held to the same standards as everyone else.
Today is the last of my four speeches—and the focus today is on the quality of the education workforce—teachers, principals and education support professionals. I want to acknowledge some of the good things that we have done—and talk about some of the things we haven't done.
I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education because—when thousands of schools are chronically failing and millions of children are dropping out each year—we all must think differently.
It's not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You and I must be willing to change.
I know we won't all agree on everything—but I'm confident there will be more we agree with than not. It starts with our shared values.
We believe it is our moral obligation to give children the very best education possible. We believe every child can learn and every school can succeed. We believe teaching is a profession and good teachers and principals are essential to success.
Unlike many of you, my values and views on education were not shaped in the front of a classroom. In 1961 my mother began an after-school, inner-city tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago and raised my brother, sister and me as a part of her program.
That daily experience was an absolutely formative one for all three of us and we all tried to follow in her footsteps in various ways. It was work filled both with great heartbreak and also amazing triumph.
We experienced our share of early, violent deaths because of the community's chaos, and those experiences shape you and frankly scar you in ways that to this day are difficult to talk about.
But from the group of friends I grew up studying with and playing ball with, from one street corner at 46th and Greenwood, emerged literally a brain surgeon, a Hollywood movie star, one of my top administrators at the Chicago Public Schools, and one of IBM's international corporate leaders.
How did this happen? Because these children despite tremendous poverty, despite staggering neighborhood violence, despite challenges at home, had my mother and others in their lives who gave them real opportunities, real support and guidance over the years, and had the highest expectations for them. And because of that opportunity, their gifts and their talents, and their fierce desire to succeed, blossomed.
What I learned as a little boy, what continues to motivate my mother today 48 years after she began her work, are the same two values that motivate all of you.
It is a fundamental, unalterable belief that every child can learn, and a fundamental understanding of the tremendous urgency of our work. Simply put, we cannot wait because our children cannot wait.
I've met a thousand educators like my mother in schools all across America. I've seen them on an Indian reservation in Montana, in a West Virginia middle school, at a high school in Detroit and a charter school in Newark.
All of us remember educator or coach who changed our life. It stays with us forever. It sustains us, guides us and inspires us. They're the ones who commit those everyday acts of kindness and love and never ask for anything in return. They counsel troubled teens, take phone calls at night, and reach into their pockets for lunch money for children who are too ashamed to ask.
I've seen how much these educators want to be valued for their work and honored for what they are: dedicated, professional, compassionate, serious and responsible. These are the qualities of a great educator and we have millions of them all across America.
My next experience was with the I Have A Dream foundation—where we adopted a class of students and agreed to send them to college if they stayed in school. The previous class had a 67% dropout rate while we had an 87% graduation rate.
After that, I helped start a small new traditional neighborhood public school—the Ariel Academy. It wasn't a charter. It had union teachers and today it is one of the highest-performing public schools in Chicago—even though all of the kids come from poverty.
Finally, I spent seven years running the Chicago Public Schools—where I learned other important lessons. We set up 150 community schools open 12 hours a day offering classes to adults and students.
We paid teachers to work extra hours and many of them took on that responsibility because they were committed to the school's success. Schools must support the social and emotional needs of students and engage the whole family.
We also increased the number of National Board Certified teachers in Chicago to about 1200—from about a dozen when I started. We partnered with the Union and with the Chicago Public Education Fund—which is a group of business leaders. Together we grew NBC faster than anywhere else in the nation.
I am big believer in this program, but let's also be honest: school systems pay teachers billions of dollars more each year for earning PD credentials that do very little to improve the quality of teaching.
At the same time, many schools give nothing at all to the teachers who go the extra mile and make all the difference in students' lives. Excellence matters and we should honor it—fairly, transparently, and on terms teachers can embrace.
The President and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works. And that is what we did in Chicago. We enlisted the help of 24 of the best teachers in the system to design a pilot performance compensation system. We also sat down with the union and bargained it out.
It was based on classroom observation, whole school performance and individual classroom performance, measured in part by growth in student learning. The rewards and incentives for good performance went to every adult in the school—including custodians and cafeteria workers—not just the individual teachers.
Where you see high-performing schools—it's the culture—every adult taking responsibility and creating a culture of high expectations.
We're asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs "with" you—and "for" you—not "to" you—programs that will put money in the pockets of your teachers and support personnel by recognizing and rewarding excellence.
So I begin our conversation today around some important areas of agreement: excellence in teaching, good professional development, school's open longer hours, and a shared responsibility for student success among all the adults in the school building.
But the President and I want to go further. I want to describe some tough challenges and ask you how we can work together to meet them. Let's start by talking about under-performing schools.
We don't need a study to tell us that chronically under-performing schools do not have the best principals and teachers. Experience tells us that failing schools usually have poor leadership—and poor leadership usually drives away good teachers.
Now often—we try replacing the leadership—and sometimes that works. We need to invest much more in principal leadership. We need to recruit and train the very best people possible because the job is hard and the cost of failure is too high.
Principals run multi-million dollar budgets, they hire, train and manage scores of people, and the best of them are also instructional leaders who are trained in classroom observation. It's a lot to ask of anyone—and we need 95,000 of them in America.
Great principals lead talented instructional teams that drive student performance and close achievement gaps. They deserve to be recognized and rewarded. But if they're not up to the job, they need to go.
Similarly, in struggling schools, we have tried boosting support for teaching staff and making other changes around curriculum, school day, etc.—and sometimes it has worked. I always favor more support, collaboration, mentoring and time on task.
But sometimes, despite our best efforts, these methods don't work. Today, America has about 5000 schools that continue to underperform year after year, despite our best efforts.
2,000 high schools produce half of the dropouts in the country. Their kids are years behind grade. They are perpetuating poverty and social failure. When it comes to these schools, we need to think differently. We need the courage to change.
We need to go into a room—states, districts, unions, administrators, foundations, think tanks, charters, non-profits, parents, and elected officials—lock the door—throw out the rule books—and start with a clean slate.
We need to be open and honest about the challenges and the barriers. If we agree that children need more time—then we must give it to them. If we agree that teachers need more support, then we must give it to them.
But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way. Children have only one chance to get an education.
It's also not about charters or unions. Chicago has turnaround schools led by a businessman who uses union teachers and he's getting great results. So does Green Dot in Los Angeles.
But Mastery Charters in Philadelphia is a different turnaround model and we need that as well. There is so much urgency and so much need in under-performing schools that we can't impede successful models like these, regardless of governance structure.
The NEA has an honest and passionate leader in Dennis Van Roekel. He shares our sense of urgency. He has told me personally that he'll walk into any room with anyone to talk about how to turn schools around.
And that gives me hope. We're losing too many children today and incremental change won't save them. We need dramatic change.
And we can't continue to blame each other or blame the system. We are the system and it is up to us—you and me—to change it. So let's talk about that.
We created seniority rules that protect teachers from arbitrary and capricious management—and that's a good goal. But sometimes those rules place teachers in schools and communities where they won't succeed—and that's wrong.
We created tenure rules to make sure that a struggling teacher gets a fair opportunity to improve—and that's a good goal. But when an ineffective teacher gets a chance to improve and doesn't—and when the tenure system keeps that teacher in the classroom anyway—then the system is protecting jobs rather than children. That's not a good thing. We need to work together to change that.
I told the charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled. I told the school boards that if they can't improve student achievement—they have a moral obligation to consider mayoral control.
And I'm telling you as well—that when inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children—then we are not only putting kids at risk—we're putting the entire education system at risk. We're inviting the attack of parents and the public—and that is not good for any of us.
I believe that teacher unions are at a crossroads. These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.
A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that? We need to work together to change this.
Now let's talk about data. I understand that word can make people nervous but I see data first and foremost as a barometer. It tells us what is happening. Used properly, it can help teachers better understand the needs of their students. Too often, teachers don't have good data to inform instruction and help raise student achievement.
Data can also help identify and support teachers who are struggling. And it can help evaluate them. The problem is that some states prohibit linking student achievement and teacher effectiveness.
I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.
It's time we all admit that just as our testing system is deeply flawed—so is our teacher evaluation system—and the losers are not just the children. When great teachers are unrecognized and unrewarded—when struggling teachers are unsupported—and when failing teachers are unaddressed—the teaching profession is damaged.
We need to work together to fix this and I will meet you more than halfway. I will demand the same of every principal, administrator, school board member, elected official and parent. I ask only the same of you that I ask of myself and others.
The NEA has long history of reform on issues of health care, child advocacy, civil rights, and disabilities rights. And I don't begin to suggest that all teachers and unions are standing in the way of reform. I know many of your members and affiliates have been working on these issues. In Illinois for example—the IEA has led a 20-year effort to build labor-management partnerships around school improvement.
One of the leaders of that effort—Jo Anderson—has joined our team. He's here today and I thank him for his work.
I also want to acknowledge my general counsel Charlie Rose who was our labor lawyer in Illinois. Charlie told me—years ago—that the key to making progress on education reform begins with respect for the labor-management relationship.
I believe that and I salute union-management partnerships all across America that are working together to develop better hiring, compensation, evaluation and turnaround strategies. But we need to move faster and we need to go further.
America's teachers are yearning to be partners in reform and change. They want teaching to be a respected profession that has high standards for performance, rewards excellence, provides opportunities for advancement, and promotes real collaboration.
They are tired of being demonized, blamed, and disrespected. They want to get on the train. Let me share a powerful quote from your former President, Mary Hatwood Futrell:
"The education reform movement demands not only that we seize the opportunity, but that we embrace the responsibility that is ours. You and I must provide the leadership ... and share this responsibility with every parent and citizen who is concerned about safeguarding the sanctity and purpose of public education for all."
Taking her words to heart, our challenge is to make sure every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes. So today, I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children.
You've heard my voice—and I appreciate that. Now I want to hear your voices. I began my remarks with a personal story. I just want to close with one more:
Dr. Martin Luther King came to the West Side of Chicago in 1966 to protest housing discrimination. His powerful and inspiring message brought billions of dollars into that community for housing, job-training, and community development.
But when I took over the public schools in Chicago—35 years later—the children of North Lawndale were still desperately poor. You have to ask yourself why—after so much money and time—nothing had changed?
It's because they forgot to invest in the one thing with the power to transform lives. They forgot education. They put all of that money into bricks and mortar and social programs but they forgot to give the people the skills they need to help themselves.
President Obama learned that lesson and that's why the Recovery Act invests more than $100 billion dollars in education. I want to thank NEA for your support. That money is going into our classrooms to keep teachers teaching and kids learning—so we can educate our way to a better economy.
The President understands that the nation that out-teaches us today will out-compete us tomorrow. He understands that education is the foundation of our economic strategy and the only sure path to long-term economic strength.
That's why he wants America to produce the highest percentage of college graduates by the end of the next decade. This is our moon-shot. This is our call to action.
It is an economic imperative and a moral imperative. This is the civil rights issue of our generation—the fight for a quality education is about so much more than education. It's a fight for social justice. And he's counting on you to lead that fight.
There is simply no more important work in our society than education. The President understands that, parents understand that, America understands that. Now we—all of us together—must act on that understanding and move forward.
Thank you.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Push is on for a ‘common’ education standard for US schoolchildren
It's also important to know the number of teachers who teach out-of-field, and how they are disproportionately distributed across poor, minority-serving schools.
In addition to providing short-term stimulus money there needs to be a discussion on equitable funding that will ensure that all schools have the capacity to help all children and youth meet their goals relative to their needs.
Also check out the previous post to this blog "46 States Agree to Common Academic Standards Effort"
-Patricia
The state-by-state system leaves many students 'inadequately prepared,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday at a Monitor breakfast.
By Dave Cook|Staff writer
June 10, 2009
Washington
Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his weight Wednesday behind a “common” education standard for all of America’s schoolchildren, saying the current state-by-state system has produced uneven results in which some students “are totally, inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate.”
Mr. Duncan, who has been on a cross-country “listening tour” in preparation for submitting revisions for the No Child Left Behind Act, says he’s encountered support for the idea of a national standard. “Teachers have been really positive on this idea of common standards,” he said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. “That has played much better with teachers than I thought it would.”
The secretary acknowledged, though, that what he calls “common higher standards, internationally benchmarked” would face hurdles and involve political pain. States and local governments are protective of their prerogative to set educational standards, and what Duncan is suggesting would be a huge break with tradition.
“Politicians don’t like to go out and say, ‘We are really struggling,’ or ‘Our kids are behind,’ or ‘Our kids are at a competitive disadvantage,’ ” Duncan said.
A better alternative to the state-by-state approach, he says, is to “get away from each state doing its own thing. Let’s do one thing, and let’s hold ourselves accountable.” But raising the bar, he acknowledged, means “test scores are going to drop in some places precipitously. And what we have to do is we have to give those politicians cover for doing the right thing. So there is a real tricky balance that we have to work on here.”
Mum on No Child Left Behind
The tall, fast-talking Duncan, who ran the Chicago public school system before being named to the Cabinet, was not ready to spell out the changes the Obama administration will propose in No Child Left Behind, a law spearheaded by the Bush administration that is currently up for reauthorization.
But he signaled his druthers on Wednesday. “I want to be much tighter on the goal … college-ready, career-ready, international benchmark standards, very high bar” compared with the Bush administration’s approach to No Child Left Behind. “But then let folks be more creative, more innovative in hitting that high bar – holding them accountable for results,” Duncan said.
As a result of No Child Left Behind, “children have been lied to, parents have been lied to,” he said.
In many states, he charged, standards have been “dumbed down so much” that those who pass the test “are barely able to graduate from high school and you are totally inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate from there.”
An extra $100 billion may add leverage
Duncan, whose long friendship with Barack Obama is based in part on their shared love of basketball, has been given some financial weapons to help sell his views. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gives the Education Department almost $100 billion in stimulus money to distribute around the nation.
While on his listening tour, Duncan said, he also found “a lot of interest in financial literacy from parents, from teachers … given how tough the economy is.”
In the current economic climate, the soaring price of college is also much on voters’ minds. Duncan said the Obama administration is “putting some incentives in place” on the issue. But the secretary argued, too, that market forces could help corral run-away tuition costs.
“Parents and students are really smart consumers,” he said. “They have more options than ever before. And where college costs at a particular school are skyrocketing, I think those places are going to put themselves out of business. I think the marketplace is going to correct this.”
Praise for his predecessor
While Duncan’s criticized some Bush administration educational policies, he praised his predecessor, Margaret Spellings.
“What I will always give Secretary Spellings and the previous administration credit for is for shining the spotlight on the horrendous differences in outcomes between white children and African-American and Latino children.”
Tracking outcomes is a key theme for the secretary, who argues for “comprehensive data systems” that let states track both teacher and student performance – and relationships between the two.
“I want to be able to track every child throughout their educational trajectory, so we know what they are doing. Secondly, I want to track children back to teachers, so we know the impact the teachers are having on those children. And third, I want to be able to track those students back to teacher, and teachers back to the schools of education, so we can understand which schools of education and which feeder programs are producing the teachers that are producing the students that had the most gain.”
California, he noted, has “this phenomenal student data system. They have a great teacher data system. And there is a firewall between them … this thing is a huge, huge barrier that is hurting kids. We so have got to literally tear down this firewall.”
On a trip to California, Duncan said, he raised the issue with teachers whose political clout was behind the firewall.
“I spoke there and said, your top 10 percent, your top 30,000 teachers, would be among he best in the world. The best any place in the world. Your bottom 10 percent, your bottom 30,000, should find another profession. And no one in this room can tell me who is in what category. That is a real problem.”
In addition to providing short-term stimulus money there needs to be a discussion on equitable funding that will ensure that all schools have the capacity to help all children and youth meet their goals relative to their needs.
Also check out the previous post to this blog "46 States Agree to Common Academic Standards Effort"
-Patricia
The state-by-state system leaves many students 'inadequately prepared,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday at a Monitor breakfast.
By Dave Cook|Staff writer
June 10, 2009
Washington
Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his weight Wednesday behind a “common” education standard for all of America’s schoolchildren, saying the current state-by-state system has produced uneven results in which some students “are totally, inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate.”
Mr. Duncan, who has been on a cross-country “listening tour” in preparation for submitting revisions for the No Child Left Behind Act, says he’s encountered support for the idea of a national standard. “Teachers have been really positive on this idea of common standards,” he said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. “That has played much better with teachers than I thought it would.”
The secretary acknowledged, though, that what he calls “common higher standards, internationally benchmarked” would face hurdles and involve political pain. States and local governments are protective of their prerogative to set educational standards, and what Duncan is suggesting would be a huge break with tradition.
“Politicians don’t like to go out and say, ‘We are really struggling,’ or ‘Our kids are behind,’ or ‘Our kids are at a competitive disadvantage,’ ” Duncan said.
A better alternative to the state-by-state approach, he says, is to “get away from each state doing its own thing. Let’s do one thing, and let’s hold ourselves accountable.” But raising the bar, he acknowledged, means “test scores are going to drop in some places precipitously. And what we have to do is we have to give those politicians cover for doing the right thing. So there is a real tricky balance that we have to work on here.”
Mum on No Child Left Behind
The tall, fast-talking Duncan, who ran the Chicago public school system before being named to the Cabinet, was not ready to spell out the changes the Obama administration will propose in No Child Left Behind, a law spearheaded by the Bush administration that is currently up for reauthorization.
But he signaled his druthers on Wednesday. “I want to be much tighter on the goal … college-ready, career-ready, international benchmark standards, very high bar” compared with the Bush administration’s approach to No Child Left Behind. “But then let folks be more creative, more innovative in hitting that high bar – holding them accountable for results,” Duncan said.
As a result of No Child Left Behind, “children have been lied to, parents have been lied to,” he said.
In many states, he charged, standards have been “dumbed down so much” that those who pass the test “are barely able to graduate from high school and you are totally inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate from there.”
An extra $100 billion may add leverage
Duncan, whose long friendship with Barack Obama is based in part on their shared love of basketball, has been given some financial weapons to help sell his views. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gives the Education Department almost $100 billion in stimulus money to distribute around the nation.
While on his listening tour, Duncan said, he also found “a lot of interest in financial literacy from parents, from teachers … given how tough the economy is.”
In the current economic climate, the soaring price of college is also much on voters’ minds. Duncan said the Obama administration is “putting some incentives in place” on the issue. But the secretary argued, too, that market forces could help corral run-away tuition costs.
“Parents and students are really smart consumers,” he said. “They have more options than ever before. And where college costs at a particular school are skyrocketing, I think those places are going to put themselves out of business. I think the marketplace is going to correct this.”
Praise for his predecessor
While Duncan’s criticized some Bush administration educational policies, he praised his predecessor, Margaret Spellings.
“What I will always give Secretary Spellings and the previous administration credit for is for shining the spotlight on the horrendous differences in outcomes between white children and African-American and Latino children.”
Tracking outcomes is a key theme for the secretary, who argues for “comprehensive data systems” that let states track both teacher and student performance – and relationships between the two.
“I want to be able to track every child throughout their educational trajectory, so we know what they are doing. Secondly, I want to track children back to teachers, so we know the impact the teachers are having on those children. And third, I want to be able to track those students back to teacher, and teachers back to the schools of education, so we can understand which schools of education and which feeder programs are producing the teachers that are producing the students that had the most gain.”
California, he noted, has “this phenomenal student data system. They have a great teacher data system. And there is a firewall between them … this thing is a huge, huge barrier that is hurting kids. We so have got to literally tear down this firewall.”
On a trip to California, Duncan said, he raised the issue with teachers whose political clout was behind the firewall.
“I spoke there and said, your top 10 percent, your top 30,000 teachers, would be among he best in the world. The best any place in the world. Your bottom 10 percent, your bottom 30,000, should find another profession. And no one in this room can tell me who is in what category. That is a real problem.”
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Duncan: States could lose out on stimulus cash
By LIBBY QUAID | Associated Press
May 28, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — States will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday.
Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let more kids into charter schools.
"States like that would not be helping their chances, I can say that," Duncan told The Associated Press during a visit to a high school in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.
President Barack Obama wants to expand the number of charter schools, a daunting task in many states with laws that limit their numbers. The president argues that charter schools are creating many innovations in education today.
Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently of local school boards, often free from the constraints of union contracts in traditional schools. As a result, they are hotly opposed by teachers and other critics who say they drain money and talent from other public schools.
But the federal stimulus law gives Obama a powerful incentive to push the expansion of charter schools. The law set up a $5 billion fund to reward states and school districts that adopt innovations the administration supports. The fund is part of $100 billion for education over the next two years.
"We want to reward those states that are willing to lead the country where we need to go and are willing to push this reform agenda very, very hard," Duncan told the AP.
"There are a number of states that are leading this effort, and we want to invest a huge amount of money into them, a minimum of $100 million, probably north of that," he said.
"And the states that don't have the stomach or the political will, unfortunately, they're going to lose out," Duncan said.
Tennessee is a logical candidate for the stimulus money. The state recently overhauled its graduation requirements, academic standards and state tests, all among Obama's priorities. Tennessee had been criticized for having weak standards because its kids passed state exams, yet did poorly on well-regarded national tests.
State officials have been talking about what they might do with the stimulus money. One idea is to create an early warning system that identifies kids at risk of dropping out. Another is to make its exhaustive warehouse of student tracking data much less cumbersome for teachers to use.
At the same time, Tennessee has perhaps the most restrictive charter school law in the country. The number of charters is capped at 50, and only failing students in failing schools are eligible to attend.
A bill in the state legislature would allow any child getting free or reduced-price meals to attend a charter school, but the cap would remain. About 16 charter schools are open in the state.
However, the Democratic caucus blocked the measure earlier this month in the House Education Committee. Only a couple of weeks remain before lawmakers adjourn for the year.
Republican state Rep. Beth Harwell, who sponsored the bill, said she's worried the state will hurt its chances at the stimulus money.
"I'm very concerned," Harwell said. "It's like we're shooting ourselves in the foot. I just would hate to see us lose this opportunity."
Duncan's comments came during a visit to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Duncan spoke at a research symposium, then held a brief interview with reporters for the school newspaper and yearbook.
May 28, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — States will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday.
Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let more kids into charter schools.
"States like that would not be helping their chances, I can say that," Duncan told The Associated Press during a visit to a high school in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.
President Barack Obama wants to expand the number of charter schools, a daunting task in many states with laws that limit their numbers. The president argues that charter schools are creating many innovations in education today.
Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently of local school boards, often free from the constraints of union contracts in traditional schools. As a result, they are hotly opposed by teachers and other critics who say they drain money and talent from other public schools.
But the federal stimulus law gives Obama a powerful incentive to push the expansion of charter schools. The law set up a $5 billion fund to reward states and school districts that adopt innovations the administration supports. The fund is part of $100 billion for education over the next two years.
"We want to reward those states that are willing to lead the country where we need to go and are willing to push this reform agenda very, very hard," Duncan told the AP.
"There are a number of states that are leading this effort, and we want to invest a huge amount of money into them, a minimum of $100 million, probably north of that," he said.
"And the states that don't have the stomach or the political will, unfortunately, they're going to lose out," Duncan said.
Tennessee is a logical candidate for the stimulus money. The state recently overhauled its graduation requirements, academic standards and state tests, all among Obama's priorities. Tennessee had been criticized for having weak standards because its kids passed state exams, yet did poorly on well-regarded national tests.
State officials have been talking about what they might do with the stimulus money. One idea is to create an early warning system that identifies kids at risk of dropping out. Another is to make its exhaustive warehouse of student tracking data much less cumbersome for teachers to use.
At the same time, Tennessee has perhaps the most restrictive charter school law in the country. The number of charters is capped at 50, and only failing students in failing schools are eligible to attend.
A bill in the state legislature would allow any child getting free or reduced-price meals to attend a charter school, but the cap would remain. About 16 charter schools are open in the state.
However, the Democratic caucus blocked the measure earlier this month in the House Education Committee. Only a couple of weeks remain before lawmakers adjourn for the year.
Republican state Rep. Beth Harwell, who sponsored the bill, said she's worried the state will hurt its chances at the stimulus money.
"I'm very concerned," Harwell said. "It's like we're shooting ourselves in the foot. I just would hate to see us lose this opportunity."
Duncan's comments came during a visit to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Duncan spoke at a research symposium, then held a brief interview with reporters for the school newspaper and yearbook.
Don't put mayors in charge of schools
Some good points made in this Ed-Op piece. Another sad link is the role of the manufacture in developing high school course sequences.
-Patricia
By MIKE SULLIVAN | Houston Chronicle
May 30, 2009
We are certainly living in interesting political times, with politicians of different stripes wearing curious new hats.
For example, the president of the United States today also wears the old fedora of an auto industry executive. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter just traded hats in jumping from the GOP to the Democratic Party. And bringing us full circle, Minnesotans appear to have given comedian Al Franken a chance to trade his jester’s hat for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But to me, the most disturbing development of all came when the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently announced a new movement to place mayors in charge of struggling school districts.
Running a school district is one hat we shouldn’t ask, or permit, mayors to wear.
As a former trustee of the Humble Independent School District, let me assure you there is already plenty of politics in our educational system without putting a full-blown politician with so many other responsibilities at the top of the organizational chart.
Indeed, given the overwhelming volume of duties confronting any mayor, it raises the question: Why would a mayor want to involve himself/herself in school district issues, when the current system of electing school board trustees can adequately handle the job? Can’t we trust voters to choose the people and the policies they want to govern their local school district?
Or are we destined, as Americans and Texans, to continue this dangerous new trend of ceding more power and control of our lives to the ruling class? When did we cease to be a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”?
Ask any mayor or mayoral candidate the following four questions:
What is WADA (weighted average daily attendance) and how does it affect our school funding?
What is an IEP (individual education plan) and how does the federal government determine which student needs one and which doesn’t?
How does the Permanent School Fund influence bond construction costs?
And what’s the difference between the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education?
These are just four questions that every school board trustee has learned the answers to through mandated annual state training.
School board trustees and superintendents receive specialized training and are committed to serving their districts. They do not need municipal government politics creeping into their business.
Of course, the idea of a mayor controlling a school board or school district is not new. It has been tried around the country, and the results have been, at best, mixed.
No mayor of Houston, current or future, should meddle in school district affairs. The business of running school districts must be left to those elected by the public for that specific purpose, and to the superintendent that those elected trustees chose.
Oh, one more thing. Houston’s mayor earns $176,762; council members make $51,758; school board trustees make nothing. School board trustees are clearly not serving for the salary and benefits. They serve for the sake of serving — because they are committed to the education system, the students and parents, and the teachers.
That’s the one hat they want to wear; that’s the hat they deserve to wear; that’s the hat we should let them wear without more political meddling.
Sullivan is a former trustee of the Humble Independent School District and the current District E council member for the city of Houston.
-Patricia
By MIKE SULLIVAN | Houston Chronicle
May 30, 2009
We are certainly living in interesting political times, with politicians of different stripes wearing curious new hats.
For example, the president of the United States today also wears the old fedora of an auto industry executive. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter just traded hats in jumping from the GOP to the Democratic Party. And bringing us full circle, Minnesotans appear to have given comedian Al Franken a chance to trade his jester’s hat for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But to me, the most disturbing development of all came when the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently announced a new movement to place mayors in charge of struggling school districts.
Running a school district is one hat we shouldn’t ask, or permit, mayors to wear.
As a former trustee of the Humble Independent School District, let me assure you there is already plenty of politics in our educational system without putting a full-blown politician with so many other responsibilities at the top of the organizational chart.
Indeed, given the overwhelming volume of duties confronting any mayor, it raises the question: Why would a mayor want to involve himself/herself in school district issues, when the current system of electing school board trustees can adequately handle the job? Can’t we trust voters to choose the people and the policies they want to govern their local school district?
Or are we destined, as Americans and Texans, to continue this dangerous new trend of ceding more power and control of our lives to the ruling class? When did we cease to be a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”?
Ask any mayor or mayoral candidate the following four questions:
What is WADA (weighted average daily attendance) and how does it affect our school funding?
What is an IEP (individual education plan) and how does the federal government determine which student needs one and which doesn’t?
How does the Permanent School Fund influence bond construction costs?
And what’s the difference between the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education?
These are just four questions that every school board trustee has learned the answers to through mandated annual state training.
School board trustees and superintendents receive specialized training and are committed to serving their districts. They do not need municipal government politics creeping into their business.
Of course, the idea of a mayor controlling a school board or school district is not new. It has been tried around the country, and the results have been, at best, mixed.
No mayor of Houston, current or future, should meddle in school district affairs. The business of running school districts must be left to those elected by the public for that specific purpose, and to the superintendent that those elected trustees chose.
Oh, one more thing. Houston’s mayor earns $176,762; council members make $51,758; school board trustees make nothing. School board trustees are clearly not serving for the salary and benefits. They serve for the sake of serving — because they are committed to the education system, the students and parents, and the teachers.
That’s the one hat they want to wear; that’s the hat they deserve to wear; that’s the hat we should let them wear without more political meddling.
Sullivan is a former trustee of the Humble Independent School District and the current District E council member for the city of Houston.
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