Part VI of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Laurence Holt, EVP and Chief Product Officer for Wireless Generation, and an author of And Now For Something Completely Different, a guide to Instructional Improvement Systems from which the post below is adapted:
Dear Finalist,
First, congratulations! I assume you are busy [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Teacher Effectiveness'
In Search of a Theory of Action: A Letter to Race to the Top Finalists
Teacher Video Clubs
An interesting article in the February, 2010, technology-focused JSD ($$, see list of contents) from the National Staff Development Council. Viewer Discussion is Advised describes video clubs that focus teacher discussion on student learning:
Each month, these seven teachers get together and watch video clips from their classrooms on computer monitors or television screens….A video club [...]
Valuing Good Teaching
Research has shown time and again that experience matters in good teaching. What it hasn’t shown is that every experience matters equally. In fact, a teacher’s first few years on the job are by far the most important, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the vast majority of teaching improvement comes in the first [...]
Highly Qualified Effective Teachers
The intrepid EdWeek bloggers Alyson Klein and Stephen Sawchuk caught a passage in President Obama’s latest budget proposal that would require states to, “develop a definition of ‘effective teacher’ that is based in significant part on student learning, and to put in place a system that links the academic achievement and growth of students to [...]
Teaching is the Worst Job on Earth
Education Week recently ran a commentary by Teach for America corpsmember Kerry Kretchmar. Kretchmar starts out by recalling her first year teaching 32 kids in a rat-infested South Bronx basement. This is exactly the type of call-to-action that attracts young well-educated service-minded people to make a difference in the lives of poor children. It’s a [...]
The Link Between School Design and Quality Teaching
Generations Schools has found a way to redesign teachers’ work, ending the isolated classroom, enabling ongoing teacher collaboration and planning, and giving teachers time to learn from each other and to learn from their work. It has extended its school year to 200 days for students—20 more than the national average—without having to extend work [...]
Random Thoughts on the Race to the Top
First of all kudos to the Dept. of Education staff for putting out these regulation and largely sticking to a reform agenda while making reasonable adjustments. While some technical details caught my attention like the myopic calculation of ensuring that education is a funding priority, I found myself agreeing with most of the priorities the [...]
The Way It Could Be
Two out of five of America’s teachers are disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, says a new study by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates.
But, as I argue here, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are better designs for teaching, designs that can improve teacher satisfaction and effectiveness at the same time. Read [...]
Can You Support “Growth” and Oppose “Value-Added”?
The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teacher’s union, opposes the draft regulations for the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund primarily because of language requiring states to be able to link teachers with student test score results. They cannot support it because:
Reviews of research on value-added methodologies for estimating teacher “effects” based [...]
Not Exactly
Fred Hiatt sat down with Bill Gates to talk education reform, producing a pretty straightforward reformist summary in the Post yesterday. One point, however, deserves clarification. Hiatt said:
In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master’s degree or teacher’s [...]
The Nature of Teaching
Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November ‘08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled “Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?” Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included ”a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of [...]
The Gladwell/ Kane Theory of Teacher Recruitment
Overheard: a business CEO will hire any Harvard MBA before they even begin the program. It isn’t the education itself that makes them valuable employees, in this estimation, it’s the screen that let them in that proves their quality. In education, it turns out all of our traditional screens, and even some untraditional ones, don’t [...]
Which Teachers?
All the top consulting, legal, financial, and engineering firms keep a list of schools from which they recruit students each year. They don’t attend job fairs at Directional State University, because (supposedly) DSU graduates aren’t at the same caliber of those from Harvard, Yale, or other elites. What if you could test it, though? What [...]
Magnitude
Expanding on something I alluded to in the post below about training and certifying teachers vs. attracting and selecting them: the way these issues are often discussed reveals one of the weak spots in the way research is applied to policy. Essentially, people don’t properly account for differences in magnitude.
All rational people want education policy [...]
g(t)?
Writing in the Boston Globe (per Matt Yglesias), Harvard economist Edward Glaeser cites Tom Kane’s research on teacher quality, saying:
The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some [...]
"would not benefit…"
A little after noon today, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, sent an email to its members that begins as follows:
Dear [member],
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed regulations that would require a DC Public School (DCPS) teacher to demonstrate effectiveness as a condition [...]
Teaching, the Null Hypothesis, and the Status Quo
I’ve had a couple of off-line conversations in the last week–one about measuring teacher effectiveness, the other about college graduation rates–that both led me to try answer the eternal question of : Why are academics so often wrong about public policy questions?
The short answer is: they’re trying to answer the wrong question.
The somewhat longer answer [...]
The "Trans-Classroom" Teacher
The new issue of Innovate: The Journal of Online Education features a thoughtful article by Teachers College’s Susan Lowes about the possibilities arising from an emerging cohort of “trans-classroom” teachers:
…Although face-to-face and online courses do indeed take place in separate environments, the social field of the teacher who teaches them increasingly includes both. And as [...]
Value-Added Comes of Age
About four and a half years ago, I was working on a policy paper focused on a developing and controversial method of measuring teacher effectiveness called “value-added.” Created by Dr. Bill Sanders in Tennessee in the mid-1990s, the essence of value-added is pretty simple: Using annual standardized test scores, look at the prior achievement history [...]
The Unions Come Clean
Over at EdWise, Leo Casey finally reveals the answer to the Master’s degree mystery. It’s well worth reading, because Leo describes exactly what’s wrong with teacher policy today. But first, a few house-cleaning items:
Leo alleges that the Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor (CLV) study cited in the previous post refutes the findings and recommendations in the [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.