Standards-based reform. School-to-work. No Child Left Behind. Small schools. Teacher effectiveness. College- and career-ready standards. Grit. The U.S.
education policy community features a long history of studying and later dropping reform concepts.
Still, it is hard to believe that, just a few years ago, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was unseated, teachers were on strike in Chicago, and the public forum nationwide was alight over teacher evaluation reforms.
Before we have a tendency to move to successive reform plan of the day, we have a tendency to owe it to those that worked therefore laborious to implement those teacher analysis reforms to require a
step back and reflect on the many lessons to be learned. I feel that obligation more keenly than most, having asked thousands of teachers and district leaders to work on the Measures of Effective Teaching project, which I led as a deputy director within the K-12 team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Speaking just for myself, I describe four high-level lessons I learned regarding the role of financial aid in U.S.
education reform.
Opening the Classroom Door
But, first, let’s bear in mind why teacher analysis reform was and remains therefore essential.
For more than four decades, researchers have documented large differences in student achievement gains when similar students are assigned to different teachers in the same schools.
We conjointly grasp that effective lecturers are often known supported their past student action gains and room practices.
Those assessments have been confirmed by randomly assigning teachers to a different set of classrooms and subsequently tracking student outcomes. Moreover, we have learned that it is difficult to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers before they enter the classroom.
The indicators that districts presently use once hiring teachers—teaching credentials and content knowledge—explain very little of the variation in teachers’ consequent effectiveness within the room.
In other words, differences in teaching practice are a primary driver of children’s outcomes, both in the short- and long-term. But the first chance to meaningfully assess a teacher’s abilities is after she is on the job. That’s one of the reasons why reforming teacher performance evaluations—in which nearly every teacher receives the same “satisfactory” rating—were so critical.
However, that’s not the only reason. In 1977, John Meyer and Brian Rowan observed that classroom activities are “de-coupled” from district and school oversight, that teachers enjoy tremendous autonomy once they close the classroom door.
They hypothesized that the private room was associate structure survival mechanism to shield lecture rooms from external interference.
To keep up appearances, faculties bear the motions of managing instruction, declaring 98 percent or more of teachers’ instruction as “satisfactory” and student achievement as “proficient.” However, they
do therefore with none substantive effort to manage what happens within lecture rooms.
Whether or not Meyer and European mountain ash were right regarding the cause, instruction has not been viewed as a collective, organizational responsibility in most public schools in the United States.
Policymakers have increased pressure on superintendents and principals to improve student outcomes, but they do not seem to realize that school level leaders often have little visibility into classrooms and little leverage to change what teachers do.
Before the recent reforms, there were no formal rubrics for conducting classroom observations, no common vocabulary for discussing teaching.
Indeed, as we saw in Atlanta and elsewhere, administrators were willing to do almost anything in order to avoid having to interfere in teachers’ instructional practices—including tampering with students’ answer sheets and going to jail!
Some mistakenly see teachers’ autonomy as the signature perquisite of a profession.
Much of the argument close teacher analysis reform rests on the unspoken norm that the room door ought to stay closed.
But once there's no collective responsibility for educational quality, when each new generation of teachers must invent their own practice (drawing largely on the instructional methods they experienced
as children), teaching cannot improve from one generation to the next.
The closed room door could defend the flame of individual creative thinking early in a very teacher’s career, but, without the oxygen of external observation and feedback, the flame goes out.
In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offered to help a set of districts to build the essential components of a new personnel system, to “re-couple” school management with classroom practice. Seven sites signed on. That included three large districts: Pittsburgh Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, and Memphis Public Schools in Tennessee (which merged with Shelby County in 2013). In addition, four California-based charter networks took part: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and Partnership to Uplift Communities Schools. The Gates foundation would ultimately invest $215 million in the initiative. (The $575 million figure that is often quoted reflected funds from federal, state and local sources, which may or may not have reflected a net increase in spending.)
Teacher evaluation reform was certainly controversial.
However, it had been ne'er merely regarding firing low-performing lecturers.
We hoped that up analysis systems would result in a cascade of positive structure changes within college agencies.
For example, new formal observation rubrics could provide teachers and supervisors with a common vocabulary for discussing instruction, which is a necessary ingredient for collective improvement.
New data from value-added measures and formal rubrics could give managers more confidence in their subjective assessments of probationary teachers and help them set a high standard for promotion. New student surveys could engage the entire school community in the mission of instructional improvement. Finally, rather than seeing accountability in conflict with the goal of teacher growth, we saw some level of accountability as necessary for improving professional development.
If lecturers and supervisors were getting to invest their time in improvement, we believed that it should “count” in some official way.
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