One of the axioms of corporate reform in education is that experience doesn’t matter. Also, they say, degrees don’t matter. Certification doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except “performance” or “results,” and these are defined as the “measurables,” the test scores. If a teacher can get students to produce higher test scores, he or she is a good teacher. If they can do it year after year, they are “great” teachers.
Reformers say that you can’t know in advance who the great teachers are. You have to collect the test scores for three or four years, and then you know who they are, and you give them a bonus. You also know who the “bad” teachers are, and you fire them.
But is it true that experience doesn’t matter? The reformers’ claim that teachers reach their peak performance by their third or fourth year, and they never get any better.
This could be taken in different ways. It might mean that teachers hit their stride in the third or fourth year, and districts should hold on to those who have reached that level. It also might mean that districts should avoid TFA, because most of them will leave after two years, and never hit their stride.
But reformers think it means experience doesn’t count, because teachers don’t continue to improve after that magical third or fourth year.
Of course, this is based on economists’ analysis of test scores, not interaction with teachers or deep study and observation of teacher performance.
This teacher disagrees:
After 26 years, I am still tryng to perfect my craft and get better every day. Building my own classroom library of close to 1,700 YAL books takes years. Reading most of them, or at least the first in a series, and keeping up with the interests of 12 and 13 year olds is constant, time-consuming and ever changing. There is so much that can’t be measured by a Gates selected “researcher” who has no clue how to relate to, motivate and respect children. |
Next year will be my 38th year teaching, and my last. I know what kind of teacher I was in my 3rd and 4th years, and I know what kind of teacher I am now. I think this is the argument I find most offensive from the deformers. To point to me and tell me I’m ineffective? What they really mean is ‘expensive’. If they could lay me off, they could hire two entry-year teachers for my salary…entry year teachers who will never be around long enough to retire from that job. This whole insane climate begins and ends with high-stakes testing. All educators know they do not measure learning, the love of learning, the excitement of learning.
Since I don’t teach in a tested area (I invented and nurtured my own English elective, Reading for Pleasure which, ironically DOES raise ACT scores), nearly half of my evaluation under the new scheme, will be based on our school’s English 2 and Algebra 1 test scores. That’s how MY effectiveness will be evaluated. So, how on earth will any policymaker be able to ‘judge’ my effectiveness in the classroom?
So, how am I preparing for my last year of teaching? Reading books about my craft and profession, reading books to recommend to my students, writing, and looking for opportunities to improve my practice. Don’t tell me I was more effective my 3rd year of teaching. I was so clueless…didn’t even know what I didn’t know!
Look back over a lifetime of learning, all my best teachers were good teachers because they were true human beings, who loved what they taught and loved to see others learn it, but most of all they were true human beings, who conveyed their full humanity in everything they did.
Everything else is just ashes and dust …
Edit. “Looking back …”
eschools are best but thereis no much awareness about this in india some westren countries are already using eschools it is better if they run by universities
Does one say experience doesn’t matter only in education where teachers put their heart and soul to do the right thing for their students. Or do we look at it in that way across the board in all walks of life. I think edreformers need to sit back and chill (I think that’s the right term) awhile.
Does this apply to all professions?
So Derek Jeter never got better after his third or fourth year?
A doctor never got better after three or four years of surgery?
Pavarotti never improved his singing ability after three or four years?
Are they busy researching all professions to suit their preconceived notions or only teaching?
The bottom line is this is about money, creating a cheap work force and a revolving door of at-will employees who can be tossed aside whenever they become too expensive.
The reason the “reformers” belittle experience is because they want to find every excuse in the book to deny teachers retirement vesting or can those who are near retirement. Interesting they keep harping on three or four years, when it takes five to become vested in a pension, and belittle over-50, experienced teachers as some kind of fossils. This is all about the money.
And then you have a problem with school boards that clearly belittle experience for administrators, let alone teachers. In my old school district, Washoe County School District, they just hired somebody Friday for superintendent who is completely unqualified for the job. He has never been a teacher or a school site administrator in his life; his background is in accounting and he worked as a CPA. He was previously hired as a deputy superintendent at WCSD when the former superintendent brought him out from Chicago, thinking that because this guy was a crony of Arne Duncan’s, he could score federal money for WCSD. This man couldn’t bring in enough money, so he was forced out and worked for Clark County School District in Nevada as deputy superintendent of INSTRUCTION despite having NO experience as a teacher or principal or NO knowledge about instruction in schools. He lasted a year becoming a laughingstock there before taking the WCSD job Friday. Apparently it is legal for anybody off the street to be able to work as a superintendent in Nevada as long as he or she can delegate the work to those who are qualified. This guy, Pedro Martinez, did this in Clark County by hiring layer upon layer of administrators in order to cover up his own deficiencies.
It was absolutely appalling the rationale the school board gave for picking this candidate over people who WERE qualified. They really believed superintendents (and this one is Broad Academy, by the way) didn’t need to be career educators to be school district leaders. What kills me is three of the seven-member board are retired administrators, one is a charter school co-founder, and another is married to a WCSD teacher.
Teachers and other staff at that district are really going to get it now. Not that they weren’t maltreated before, but it will get much, much worse.
Philly dodged a bullet if what you say about Martinez is true. Being the cynic though, he’ll just add this to his resume which will make him all the more desirable to a school district looking for “experience”.http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/philadelphia-school-district-hires-hite-leader-of-suburban-dc-district-as-new-superintendent/2012/06/29/gJQAPLfRCW_story.html
What public education needs now is this — That the whole motley crew of ALEC-o-holics, banksters, bean-counters, bubble-brainers, business bunko artists, corporate raiders, cyborg schoolers, disaster capitalists, emergency mongers, hedge-fund hawkers, junk-bond hucksters, monopoly gamers, optical scammers, parochial school pushers, and every petty pelting politician should pull their noses out of the duties of professional educators and remove their thumbs from the public funding pie before they wreck the public education system as badly as all the other things they have managed to destroy with their ignorance of fundamentals and their get-rich-quick schemes.
This is prime!
It’s absurd to contend that teachers don’t get better after the third year, or indeed any year. I’m in my 28th year, and I’m the best teacher I’ve ever been. As a teacher, in front of dozens of teenagers at a time, you always try new things. Some work, and some don’t. The more things you try, the more you learn, and the more you have to draw upon.
In fact, when I’m faced with a situation, I have a substantially larger bag of tricks to deal with it than I did 25 years ago. Were I not learning, the likelihood would be that I was dead, and if that were the case, I would indeed be an ineffective teacher.
However, the assumption that teachers don’t get better after three years seems to emanate from people like Bill Gates, who thinks that DVDs of great teachers are equal to being in their classrooms. This preposterous notion assumes that interaction with a live teacher is of no importance whatsoever. It begs the question, if Mr. Gates cannot even perceive the blatantly obvious, where’s the evidence that he is learning anything, or at least anything of value?
Yes, yes and yes to all the above. At 4 years teaching art I was just beginning to know the most effective ways to teach it. And it is all about the money and all about turning kids into statistics that leads to money. Banksters ran the economy into the ground but they didn’t get fired. Charter E- schools for profit here in Ohio have an excemption from standards precisely because their results are so abysmal….hello? Anybody been fired from that camp? I proctored graduation tests for 10th graders that had blank “end” pages inexplicably inserted in the middle of the test and kids didn’t turn the pages and so failed the test. We should fire the test makers, right? Didn’t happen……the test producers said it was’t their fault, the kids should have turned the page to search for more test. They weren’t fired. So obviously anyone would conclude we need to fire the teacher? Wrong. The people who are accountable now are the people running the show, teachers and their unions clearly aren’t doing that (helloooooo, NEA, where are you?).
Reformers cite research that suggests that the “benefit of experience” (that is, the years of experience considered in relation to test score gains) peaks within the first few years of teaching. In other words, teachers in their second or third years will see significantly more student progress than teachers in their first years. From there, teachers with more experience see more student progress still, but the gains aren’t as drastic.
Taking this research with all the necessary salt and other fixings, it makes some sense. It’s a far cry from the interpretations commonly cast on it–namely, that teachers stop improving, or that their improvement slows, after the first three years.
You can’t have drastic gains from one year to the next indefinitely. The tests themselves don’t allow for them. The very setup nearly ensures that the gains will slow down at some point. And yet, according to this same research (I am citing a 2007 study by Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor),
“Compared to a teacher with no experience, the benefits of experience rise monotonically to a peak in the range of 0.092 (from model 4) to 0.119 (from model 5) standard deviations after 21-27 years of experience, with more than half of the gain occurring during the first couple of years of teaching.”
Yes, more than half the gain happens in the first couple years, but the gain does not stop.
I wrote about this in 2010:
http://gothamschools.org/2010/04/06/why-teaching-experience-matters/
Thank you for posting the link….very informative. We need to get the message out to the public. Many believe their “research”/spin and it is quite maddening.
Thanks, Linda. Of course, I agree with the commenters here that test score gains are a narrow, limiting, and often preposterous way to measure teacher improvement.
In reply to Diane,
“. . . and often preposterous way to measure teacher improvement.”
Just as it is impossible to “measure” student learning as it is a logical falsehood to attempt to “quantify” a “quality” (and anytime one starts with a false premise more likely than not the results will be false/invalid-although once in a blue moon one might stumble across a correct/valid result by sheer luck, the ol blind squirrel/acorn thing) it is impossible to “measure” teacher improvement.
I believe we need to pound this concept, a la mass marketing/repetition, each and every time we hear this false meme/paradigm being spouted. We can’t allow ourselves to fall into repeating this verbal trap and we can’t let the deformers get away with such shabby nonsense.
Duane,
No, it is not impossible to measure teacher improvement. It is just impossible to measure it completely, and it is destructive to rely on a single measure.
Measure is not only numerical. We are continually measuring things that we consider good (or bad). There are films that we love more than others AND consider better than others–and we have reasons for considering them better.
The ancient Greek “metron” has rich literal and figurative meanings–and so does the concept of “measure” today if we go beyond the crass or inappropriate uses.
Teachers frequently compare their current understanding and practice to past understanding and practice. They use discernment to judge (and, yes, measure) how well a lesson went.
I am not falling into a verbal trap. Nor will I engage in verbal pounding/mass marketing.
As a teacher of 30+ years, I have no doubt that my experience has made me a better teacher than I was years ago. Being a teacher really isn’t a matter of years taught or age, however, it is a matter of the heart! I continue to be passionate about my profession and spend countless hours on my own striving to become a better teacher, not for the test scores, but for my students. I would invite those who are “reforming” education, to come spend time in a classroom with truly dedicated teachers. Watch as teachers juggle parent conferences, state standards, common core standards, professional learning communities, team meetings, staff meetings, lesson plans, assessments, data organizations, and ….. what is it I’m forgetting? Oh, yes. Students – young people who come to us with feelings, with family issues, with poverty, with abuse, with lack of parental support, and with a need to connect to the adult in the classroom. My experience, though seen as costly by reformers (not by financial advisors, however) is priceless! My hope is that someday younger teachers may have the joy and excitement that I have been privileged to experience in the classroom.
Julie,
That was beautiful.
This is easy to understand.
By year 5 or 6, most teachers have improved about all they can at the the stuff we know how to measure quickly and cheaply. Teachers know their unit and lesson plans. These seems those mistakes. The know how to get that level of content across.
Let’s say that they have that foundation in place.
But what about the other stuff? What about the stuff we don’t know how to test quickly and easily? What about the “lessons worth learning for a lifetime”? How long does it take to get that down pat?
I fit your scenario pretty well. I just finished year 11 and I still have no idea how to get that “lessons worth learning a lifetime” stuff down pat.
In fact, I didn’t even start thinking about it until year 7 or so. It make take me 10 or even 15 more years to learn.
Been a public high school Spanish teacher for 18 years now and I don’t know if I’ve ever had any “lessons worth learning for a lifetime”. And I don’t try, I just don’t think in those terms-I just try to help the students learn a little Spanish. Are there other “lessons”/hidden curriculum that the students may learn. Probably! What is a “lesson worth learning for a lifetime”?
To Duane Swacker: Perhaps you answered your own question when you touched upon the implicit curriculum. Lessons worth learning for a lifetime are rooted in the behavior that we as educators model and encourage in our classrooms: the intangible, the unmeasurable, the meaningful, the lasting. What do I remember about 2nd grade today? I remember that I became too engrossed in my work one day and didn’t realize I needed to use the restroom until it was too late to confidently stand and leave the room. I knew there was no way to avoid having an “accident” occur. When I whispered this to my teacher, she asked for my opinion on how best to resolve the problem. I suggested that she take the other students to the library or outside for a brief recess so I could make a mad dash for the restroom and, remarkably, she did! This is a lesson that has lasted for a lifetime. Today when one of my own students has a problem or concern, I don’t just apply a solution. I ask the student for his/her own suggestions so I can honor/incorporate them whenever possible. Miss Hamilton taught me that in 2nd grade. I learned that from my teacher. The implicit curriculum is what makes education both memorable and unmeasurable.
Lowie,
Great anecdote, thanks for sharing and reminding us that it really is in the best interests of the students to get their input into many facets of classroom life.
Some days i want to look up my students from my first year of teaching and tell them how sorry I am that I wasn’t a better teacher for them. I was adequate but not great. I didn’t have the vast amount of knowledge about children that I have now. I still see the faces of some of those children that I think I might have been able to reach had I known more. This has motivated me to go back to school to get a degree first in reading, and then in students with disabilities. For my own knowledge and to improve my practice I took and continue to take classes in American Sign Language to provide another way for my students to communicate with me and each other, particularly those for whom English is not their first language and students who are on the spectrum, and students for whom speaking in a group where they’re not comfortable is impossible. I have just signed on to be a candidate for the National Boards..all to improve my practice. I get no additional monies for continuing to learn and improve.
If experience doesn’t matter and credentials don’t matter, I may consider becoming a heart surgeon. I wonder if Bill Gates, Mayor Bloomberg, Arne Duncan, Chancellor Walcott, Michelle Rhee, and all the others who spout junk science would be willing for me to perform open heart surgery on them or would they want the current equivalent of Michael DeBakey or Christian Barnard?
In the end, it’s all about money.
When those with the power send their own children to schools with inexperienced teachers and teachers with no credentials, I’ll be more inclined to listen to them. Until then, I will continue to teach my students and improve my practice and fight against those who would destroy the American Public School System for their own greed.
This thread reminds me of this passage in a positive way-
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost
Diane, thank you for posting today, seizing the moment sometimes overpowers plans.
I hope to teach long enough and live long enough to hit a peak, but so far, my experience enriches and raises each subsequent year.
For teachers actually dedicated to the mission we’re really on, I’m inclined to believe there is a ‘peak”, but it’s a rare one, and much different one from what the corporatists imagine. I think it is beyond my attainment.
I just completed my twelfth year of teaching high school English. To say I haven’t improved as a teacher over the past seven to eight years would be absurd.
Here in Memphis we’re awaiting what will become of the merger set for the 2013-14 school year. The 18-member Transition Planning Commission, beholden to the Gates Foundation for the $90 million grant given to MCS that will carry over into the unified district, has recommended the following regarding teacher compensation:
“The current average salary of MCS and SCS teachers is the highest in Tennessee. Teachers are currently paid on the basis of a step (years of experience) and lane (degree attainment) system. Approximately 30% of total teacher compensation in the district is based on years of experience and degree attainment. Yet national research shows gains to teacher experience leveling off after four to five years. Local data shows no relationship between years of experience and student value-added data after the first two years in MCS and at all in SCS.
Given this, the TPC recommends the district redesign teacher compensation to better attract and retain effective teachers, including attracting teachers to and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff positions. Additionally, teachers with sustained, demonstrated effectiveness should be eligible for salary increases and career advancement opportunities. To enable this differential compensation, the TPC recommends freezing the additional compensation paid for advanced degrees.”
In short, experience and advanced degrees won’t count for anything, just students’ test scores.
The TPC has no governing power, though. The 23-member unified school board has yet to vote on what portions of the plan they will adopt, amend, or ignore. Yesterday I emailed all 23 board members my concerns regarding the pay structure recommendations, citing research regarding the impreciseness of value-added models and pay incentives’ lack of effect on students’ test scores (Vanderbilt’s 2010 study). I further argued that the TPC’s proposed pay structure seemed more likely to repel talent than attract it.
If there are other readers here who teach or live in Memphis, I urge you to make your opinions known to the board.
I thought I was a very good teacher until the “teach to the test” mentality came into my building. My principal wanted that bonus. And because of that, I couldn’t wait to retire. And as soon as I could, I did. Experience was no longer valued.
I found more of my time was spent on useless paperwork than doing the job I loved and doing it the way I knew would benefit my students. I used to teach writing as “a process”. But that became forbidden. My principal wanted a memoir (not an easy genre) by the end of September instead of a simple narrative. And every month after that we had to hand in another completed writing piece. The days of launching the writing workshop were gone. The days of drafting, editing and revision were never the same and many times the dreaded red pen would rear its ugly head just to meet the deadline. On top of that, I was forced to follow the curriculum as written. I always reviewed and retaught basic math concepts before following the curriculum because those concepts were the foundation to build upon. But now we are on “a schedule” starting the first day of school because there are so many assessments. My students always did well on standardized tests when I got to reteach the basics. I could pick and choose the lessons I thought should come first. But Princeton Review or Pearson dictated what was best for my students. A student’s mind does not understand that. The days of September being a time for setting up routines, classroom management (becoming a family) and review were gone. Even the time I would devote to concepts was cut in half because the calendar wouldn’t allow me to do that. My time was spent on binders and other nonsense that were collected. The stress to meet those deadlines was horrific. Common prep became a time for the principal to meet and dictate more mandates. There was no collaboration. And now lessons had to follow some artificial rubric even if it didn’t apply to the concept at hand. The straw that really broke the camel’s back for me was when my principal told us that reading response journals should only contain test-prep questions. She no longer wanted the students’ reflections. They no longer mattered. So what could have instilled a life-long love of reading was turned into a test.
Experience in my case became the enemy because the joy I once felt and my students felt was taking over by something sinister. My students would no longer be judged by their progress. It wouldn’t make any difference if they improved socially or psychologically and those improvements would results in better academic performance. But academic performance is now the first and foremost indicator of a student’s progress. And if a child has emotional or academic problems, the powers-that-be don’t care. A teacher’s judgment is no longer valued. And people like Pearson and Danielson are dictating every move and decision a teacher makes.
One of Winerip’s last columns (before the Times no longer cared for his pieces because they ran contrary to their editorials) was how hard it was for a principal in Tennessee to give a wonderful review to a wonderful lesson because it didn’t follow some artificial rubric. Only an experienced and brave teacher would have the courage to rip up the rubric and do what’s right. But how long can that last? People still have to feed their families.
Teacher Michele Kerr wrote a beautiful piece on this subject (as guest-blogger for Larry Cuban):
Wow! That was beautiful. I loved all the links, the audio, the tie-in with Jon Mayer. I actually read it once and then a second time participating in the lesson.
The kids love it when you can tie in present day music and the whole concept can be related to their lives. Beautiful lesson!
I saved it under my reading list on my iPad. Thanks for posting Diana. Great lesson Michelle!
Young students in elementary school would love those poems as well. I used to be a poetry cluster, and I was very surprised how my special ed students responded to poetry. Their sensitivity really came through and they wrote beautiful poems as well. I also liked using “House on Mango Street”.
I wonder what will become of this once Common Core rears its ugly
head?
Schoolgal,
It broke my heart to read your comment. I am hanging on by a thread to continue to do what’s right for children. I am not a testing grade although high stakes testing is coming to pre-k. Those children who have not developed according to Pearson’s rubrics will get thrown away or I shall be blamed for their lack of skills.
I am still hopeful that one morning I will wake up and this nightmare will be over. Just like Joe McCarthy. In the meantime thousands of children are losing out on a decent education.
Dear Sheila,
Don’t feel too bad for me. I get to sleep in every day. I no longer have to drive through snow or teach in a non-air conditioned room during a heat wave while my mayor gets a special window a/c for his SUV.
How sad it is that Pre-K is no longer a place to learn through play? I saw the changes in kinder when all learning centers were removed and replaced with Open Court and EveryDay Math. My niece lives in Tennessee and thankfully the law for admissions to kinder was changed, otherwise she was going to hold her daughter back a year rather than start her at age 4. Her daughter attends a private pre-school where they are not subjected to tests and can still enjoy school. My only concern is that school will not be a good experience for her now that the new evaluation system is in place.
If you are lucky enough to have a principal who allows you to close your doors and do what’s right, you’re lucky. My principal used to be that way until “the bonus”.
I am planning on sending a donation to Parents Across America because I believe it will be the parents and not the teachers who have a better chance at winning this fight. I am hoping more parents open up chapters in their neighborhoods and states. The only way the teachers can win this IMHO is to have a national strike, but the union leadership is too tied to Obama and Duncan to do it.
Good luck Sheila!!
I don’t have time to run down citations now, because I’m very busy with my 2nd teaching job and I really have to find a 3rd job ASAP, so I won’t be able to write here much anymore, but here’s the gist of the matter as I see it:
I was very interested in expert-novice comparison research in my doctoral training and I examined a lot of it then. Novices and experts in many different fields have been studied and, on the path towards becoming an expert, various stages of increasing competence have been identified. The development of expertise requires a concerted effort towards self-improvement, which experience alone does not automatically result in (or virtually all of us would be cooking like Julia Child at a some point), but experience is necessary to be able to hone one’s craft and improve one’s skills.
Genereally, on average, researchers have found that it takes about 10 years of that concerted effort towards improvement to become an expert. However, there are differences by field, as well as outliers. For teachers, the research varies, but it’s been found to be about 7 years. Three areas of teacher expertise that have been identified include pedagogy, content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
I see a few issues:
Most of the expert-novice comparison research has not been based on standardized test scores of experts, let alone the test scores of their own trainees, while corporate education “reform” today is all about those test scores.
“Reformers” often cite think tanks and researchers have found quality issues around that. See: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Think-Tank-Research-Quality
A lot of research cited by “reformers” has only been peer-reviewed by people in other fields, such as economists’ research in economics journals, rather than research published by educational researchers in peer-reviewed in education journals.
I believe that standardized test scores do not sufficiently measure learning and teaching, nor expertise, to warrant high-stakes application, which is my professional opinion after working over 40 years in my field and studies in four degree programs. However, I have to admit that it’s also due to anecdotal evidnce based on my personal experiences:
As with most of us, I would not have had my career if it weren’t for great educators who taught and encouraged me. I also had my share of bad teachers whose discouragements severely impacted my learning. I won’t go into the details now, but suffice it to say that, after enjoying my Pre-School and Kindergarten experiences, I came to hate reading, math, teachers and school, due to teachers who often berated and humiliated children in my primary classes.
I attended schools in a large urban district that has given kids standardized tests for decades and I never scored well. That was partly because I lost my self-confidence, developed test-anxiety, and my motivation to achieve decreased. It was also because they didn’t test what my later teachers, in middle school and high school, recognized as my strengths, writing and creativity. It wasn’t until I was an adult, who had become an autonomous learner, that I scored well on a standardized test.
So, as long as standardized tests don’t measure all critical components of effective teaching, such as teacher dispositions, encouragement, pedagogy, content knowledge and pedagogigcal content knowledge, as well as more areas of student learning, including writing and creativity, I have a problem with claims that they sufficiently measure expertise and achievement.
Just my hard-earned 2 cents.
Your post points out the myriad problems of “expertise” and what it takes to be considered an expert in something. Before teaching, among a number of other occupations, I was (still am) a “master” upholsterer. What does that mean? Well, it means you can start with an upholstered piece, completely take it apart down to the wood frame, re-glue the frame if needed replacing broken parts, replace the spring units with the old or new, depending if the old are still good enough, tie the coil springs, repad the frame, make new patterns, cut the fabric so that all the patterns match as much as possible (one of the harder parts along with the next step), sew the parts together as needed, stuff the cushions, and reapply the fabric so that the piece is (if done correctly) better than the original. Each step has its own ins and outs, good ways and bad ways to handle them.
I didn’t learn that in a year or two. I’d say it took about five years to get to where I was doing upholstery as good as I could-and I never produced the “perfect” piece that I strove far as there was always some little flaw/aspect that I wasn’t 100% happy with. No one else knew what it was but as soon as I saw the piece afterwards, years later, my eyes would go to that “trouble” spot.
Teaching is very similar in that each piece, i.e., the student has his/her inherent “quirkiness” (meant in a good way not negative although at times that quirkiness can be quite negative) that has to be dealt with on an individual basis.
I worked for a furniture store that specialized in “custom” upholstered pieces along with case goods, lamps, pictures, etc. . . . Now I had to “adjust” my definition of “custom” because the pieces were factory made and didn’t really fit my definition of custom, but each piece was made to order individually but they did not have the same total pattern matching, smoothness, tight fit, etc. . . , that I considered custom. But to untrained eyes, the pieces were fine. (I have to put on my “ignorant” consumer eyes when looking at factory made upholstered pieces).
Where I’m going with this is that the education deformers would like us to believe that their “standardized”/”privatized” version of education will be “custom” just as the marketers for the upholstered goods “captured” the term “custom” from the “master” (individual) upholsterers. It (privatized) education with inexperienced teachers is not and cannot be the same as schools that “pay” to have “master” teachers, i.e., the most experienced ones.
It’s really frustrating to not be able to edit my typos, after my posts hit the blog! Sorry about spelling errors that I didn’t catch until now.
I have been teaching for 27 years. I am still passionate about teaching. I have been Teacher of the Year twice in my school, 2008-2009 and 2012-2013! Hmmm…guess the reformers are wrong about hitting my stride! I am a lifelong learner, therefore I only continue to get better!
I often said that by the time I retired, I’d be organized meaning I wouldn’t have to spend so much time out of the classroom gathering and looking for materials or as much time writing lesson plans. Well, the ability to go to a folder with a label on a topic that I needed did become easier, but time adding to that folder and deleting from that folder never stopped. The lesson plans never stayed the same. How could they when you had a different group of students to teach? How could they when, as I was teaching a state history course, remain exactly the same? History was being made everyday. I’m retired now. But, everyday, I hear and talk to teachers who are always in the “learning more mode”. So, they can become more effective. That’s what teachers do! Fortunately, I never knew too many that remained stagnant in professional growth.
Is this 3rd-4th year stride specific to teachers, or does it pertain to other professions? If that research has not taken place, can anyone tell me why not? Who are these people, and what, if anything, do they really know about children, or people in general, and their relationships? Any good teacher knows it’s important to know your subject matter. Do these ‘researchers’ know their subject matter? Evidently not. I go to the dentist twice a year. Perhaps I should help decide dental standards. I drive a car. Perhaps I should help decide automotive standards. I have money in the bank. Perhaps I should decide banking standards. This is no different than the non-educators deciding our standards.
What if we ask the automotive industry to make a reliable car out of wood, or plastic, or paper, and pass the same tests as all other cars? Isn’t that the same as expecting ALL students the same age to pass the same test?
How do the countries with high test scores look at their teachers, compared to the U.S.? What sort of respect do teachers in, say, China, or Finland get, as compared to the U.S.? What sort of education for special needs children do they offer? Why do so many educated people from other countries move to the U.S. if they have special needs children? Does Mr. Gates attempt to answer any of these questions?
There are far, far more great teachers than bad ones in the U.S. Does Mr. Gates bother to get to know those teachers? Mr. Gates wouldn’t last a week as an elementary school teacher. I dare him to try.
I thought I was a great teacher my first year. I made all sorts of mistakes, and I just cringe to think of them now–I really didn’t have much of a clue. I really didn’t improve much my second year either, and it wasn’t until my fifth year that I actually had confidence as a teacher and could really say to myself that I had vastly improved. I could see it so many ways,mfrom my ease in the classroom, managing routines, not to mention making a million decsions all day with assuredness.
This is my twenty-eighth year and I get better at teaching all the time. I’ve mentored at least fifteen students teachers over the years, and I’ve learned new things from them too. Teaching is parly an art, a good part, and I don’t think a teacher is ever done perfecting this art form. Teaching is also a craft, so there are always new techniques to try, and new ways of looking at what I’ve always thought was the best way to approach this or that.
As far as degrees are concerned, I am especially amused that reformers think teachers don’t seem to need to be learners. Granted, learning doesn’t jut take place within the structure of the classroom, but getting advanced degrees benefits teachers in that we not only become better educated, but being on the other side of the desk is humbling, and reminds us of the pressures and joys our students experience. Also important, getting advanced degrees adds prestige and professionalism to teaching in general because it demonstrates that teachers value the life of the mind, that we consider what we do as intellectual work. We live in a terribly anti-intellectual society, and to say that advanced education doesn’t matter in the teaching profession, puts this on naked display.
To me, one of the missing links in the eyes of the “reformers” is how much difference an experienced teacher down the hall makes in the practice of a new teacher. I have been in the classroom seven years, and without a doubt my students’ experiences now are so much better than they were a few years ago. However, when I was in my second and third year of teaching, I felt relatively strong. The ONLY reason why was my mentor across the hall who had been teaching for twenty years. She guided me through murky conversations with parents, setting high expectations and holding kids to them, and even how to navigate the complex political world of public school, among so much more. Her influence certainly wouldn’t have shown up in the data, but it would be ridiculous to pretend like I did it alone. Many of these third and fourth year teachers who are so successful (according to some measures) have to have the same support I did.
Great comments above. I’m sickened by what some of you have experienced after all you’ve given to our profession.
The next organized attack across the country is higher ed. The talking points about certification not being important will hit education programs right in the jaw; and they won’t like it. If they think common ed can organize, wait til they see what higher ed can do.
The university system is already under attack in Florida. Our governor wants professors to be judged by student evaluations. They want professors to give up tenure in exchange for the opportunity to earn bonuses for research and such. They want to rate education schools based on the VAM scores of their graduates and admissions profile.
Is Warren Buffet a better investor today than he was in his third year, or is he living off his third year investment decisions?
Was Steve Jobs living off his third-year abilities when he and his team created the iPad?
Surely there is a middle ground. Railing against TFA as a teacher development program has flaws. I am in a unique position to be traditionally certified from UMBC and also be a Baltimore TFA Corps Member. I joined TFA because I knew that my traditional program did not adequately prepare me to teach in my urban classroom in Baltimore. True to form, I received much of the training I desired in TFA. When you look at 3 and 5 year retention data in urban districts such as Baltimore, retention rates are equal if not greater than traditionally certified teachers. The son of a career teacher, I have a healthy respect for the value of experience. But I also know that it is not a sure fire way to fix schools. Neither is TFA. Our challenge is to find common ground between innovation and experiential knowledge.
What did you gain from your five weeks of TFA training that was as valuable as a year of training, which is what most other nations require?
Do you think the teaching profession would benefit if everyone had only five weeks of training?
I specifically gained the following at Summer Institute:
– opportunities to explicitly practice classroom management skills in collaborative groups (not typical to a traditional program); we utilized assertive discipline training via Lee Canter
– real-time feedback through an observation debrief cycle occurring over a few days (as opposed to weeks/months typical to a debrief with a university-based supervisor)
– discussions of identify of self and diversity competencies
– data-driven instruction modules and coaching absent from most NCATE aligned programs
The other component of TFA unaddressed is the established professional learning community through corps members. Teaching in some of America’s most challenging schools is a daunting task. Having a formalized network of fellow new teachers going through this process proved to be very beneficial and rewarding through my first two years of teaching.
In my previous post, I addressed that our traditional programs tend to prepare us for middle to high performing suburban and rural schools. There are many causes for this. Many of our schools rely on consistent, professional development school (PDS) partnerships. These partnerships tend to be formed with consistently stable schools in more established communities. We learn to teach through that lens in traditional training programs. Of course, there are exceptions, but our traditional programs prepare us for traditional schools.
On a related note, our urban schools hit a major supply gap of teachers in the 90s as traditional colleges and universities failed to provide the requisite number of teachers who were highly qualified and willing to attend. In much of the country, we have a surplus of highly qualified teachers but a shortage of teachers willing to teach in urban schools, particularly in high-need content areas. TFA fills this gap in cities like Baltimore, where few other teachers are willing to teach.
I don’t know about Baltimore but your claims are not at all consistent with my experiences. I have taught at several colleges in Chicago, since the mid 90s, and each of those universities focuses on urban education and partners with inner city schools, where pre-service teachers have many clinical experiences, beginning in their first year of college. I even ran a tutoring program for one university, at a school in the gang ridden shadows of the Cook County jail, where my students taught low income 8th graders. I also worked as a teacher coach for our district, at a number of inner city schools, so I know very well that there are programs to guide and support new and struggling teachers working in schools with at-risk kids.
I’m a veteran classroom teacher myself and I’m very famiiar with the concerns of both experienced and new teachers. My city was arleady reeling from years of mayoral control and CEO Paul Vallas’ edicts when Arne Duncan became CEO of our schools. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the elementary school teacher shortage started here in 2003-2004, shortly after the testing craze of NCLB took effect, nor that the shortage has continued every year since. The following year is when Duncan instituted his “Renaissance 2010” plan to close 60 – 70 schools and open 100 new schools, at least two-thirds of which were to be charter or contract schools. That very conveniently resulted in reducing the number of higher paid veteran teachers, and eased the hiring of minimally trained lower paid novices. This is the model for our country now, and TFA appears to be a willing pawn in the corporate sponsored political agenda to squeeze out experienced career teachers.
I see now that I omitted the fact that teachers’ car windows were often broken at the school where my students worked with 8th graders, which is why I described that environment.
I am not convinced in reference to your retention data and if you are referring to those who stay in the classroom and teach five days a week. Studies completed, not by TFA, do not support that length of time. Also, TFA considers almost anything as staying in education…even becoming an “educational consultant” or a lobbyist or a politician is counted by TFA as “teaching”. Very few continue to teach in public schools as a life long career. For most it is a teach for a while stint while padding your resume and trying to figure out your real career. Comments by TFA leadership on their site leave the impression that the TFA types are the smartest in the room and they will be the ones to transform education.
Interesting they started twenty years ago and that still hasn’t happened and we still have an achievement gap. Reading Gary Rubenstein’s blog also gives a reader an inside look at the
TFA propaganda. One former member said it should be called TFWW…teach for Wendy’s wallet.
Innovation and experiential knowledge are not mutually exclusive. School reform has been around a long time and many veteran teachers, committed to lifelong learning, have developed a lot of experiential knowledge from implementing a wide variety of innovative practices. Many teachers began their careers as bright, idealistic youth determined to not emulate old fogies and open to trying new approaches, in order to foster optimal learning for all students.
TFAers do not have an exclusive on innovation, and since they lack experiential knowledge, it’s hard to fathom that they even have a grasp of what innovative practices have been tried before and which innovations are truly new in education today. As someone who has been teaching through varous forms of distance learning for well over a decade, I can assure you that even this is no longer new, though it certainly does continue to evolve.
I wholeheartedly agree that innovation and experience are not mutually exclusive, particularly under collaborative principal leadership. In rebuilding school communities where experienced teachers have resorted to “closing the door” after watching ineffective leaders come and go, the inclusion of teachers new to the profession who are exposed to new ideas and research can infuse new practice and energy. The varying approaches of different generations also proves to be a benefit to teacher teams (see http://intl.kappanmagazine.org/content/92/8/14.abstract).
Again, my argument is not that TFA teachers provide a surefire fix to our schools. Nor do I argue that they are superior to traditional teachers. I do believe TFA is value-added to our current educational landscape.
jlmichael, to what new ideas and research specifically are you referring? In my 16 years of experience, I have seen ideas come and go only to return again when some higher-up at the state DOE thinks that he or she has some kind of innovative approach despite the fact that we’ve tried that method before. Teachers with experience under their belts have an understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in their classrooms. I highly doubt that TFA has some miracle approach on how to teach that will revolutionize the profession.
“Value-added” is another one of those “buzzwords” that reformers like to infuse into the teaching environment. The mere fact that you used the term shows that there is an obvious “superman” mentality in the TFA concept (not just to quote that propaganda of a movie) wherein success is quantifiable in the same way that businesses measure success by profits. Students are not “products”–they’re people as are those who teach them. You cannot put a number on the complexity of teachers’ contributions to the students of our country.
There are honest people that have honest concerns, and I think it benefits us to acknowledge them.
Teaching is a physically demanding job. It is also unrelenting in its inflexibility. I have worked through a few health crises with little trouble, because my job allows me to go to the bathroom whenever I need to, or to take breaks during the day and make up time later, to schedule appointments mid day, etc.
One of our real problems in education, for both educators and students, is that when individual teachers have health crises, we have few good options, especially when it’s a teacher nearing retirement age. Because we are asking our schools to run so lean, there is no slack in the system, and no jobs in the path that have temporary flexibility. Their pensions prevent a career change out of education; their health demands they hang on to their job for health insurance. This can create very difficult situations for the administration, for the staff member, and for the students in the class that year.
Couple that with situations like so many schools face this year, where a carefully chosen and freshly hired young staff member is dismissed for budget reasons and a teacher who struggled with a nagging health problem and you can appreciate the frustration.
But there are a couple of things:
1. Budget cuts removing staff positions are harmful to students on their face, regardless of which teachers are removed.
2. Removing teachers for cause is an exercise that is wholly independent of budget cuts. That is, you can and should remove teachers that aren’t working out even if you need to hire more teachers. And you can do it in times of budget cuts, too.
3. The retirement system that penalizes mid-career switches into or out of education might be improved. Why can’t credits be transferred between teacher pension systems and Social Security in some way?
4. Trying to cut teaching positions (in large districts particularly) by any means other than seniority itself costs time, staff, energy, and morale, all of which would be better spent in classrooms. Worse, it probably doesn’t give any “better” results anyway.
I love working with the long-time experienced teachers I’ve encountered in my daughter’s school. I feel they have mentored me along with my daughter, even in my brief interactions with them. My daughter and her classmates are so fortunate to work with a mix of younger and older teachers who work well together and complement each other.
Experience does matter, and I also appreciated the comment above talking about the importance of teachers becoming a student for a while. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the scores. I’m sure that calligraphy class that Steve Jobs took at Reed that he credits with inspiring much of the Macintosh architecture didn’t improve his GRE scores either (had he taken that exam). Nevertheless, it seems to have been consequential.
The problem with the businessmen’s thinking about education is that they have a great problem and confusion about the different products of business and classrooms, that is, widgets for the busnessmen and students for the teachers. The widgets are things, and the students each and every one have different strengths and weaknesses. Teachers have different abilities to use various methods of teaching. Students learn better with some teaching methods. These facts make teaching more complicated than most businessmen realize. It makes what they say about teacher experience suspect.
From a Gates interview with NPR back in April:
“Still, Gates said he believed in evaluations. He said if Microsoft didn’t have evaluations, ‘it wouldn’t have worked.’
He said that seniority and educational degrees didn’t correlate with ‘who was writing the best code.'”
I wrote at the time: “He seems to think teaching is analogous to code writing. Codes have learning styles, distractions, apathy, home influence.”
Gates’s argument is this: A) Some of my best code writers don’t have the most seniority or education. B) Some of my code writers with seniority and advanced degrees aren’t among my best code writers. C) Therefore, seniority and advanced degrees are worthless. And the he goes on to apply the same argument to education.
The problem is it’s a weak argument. In education, it’s true that you can find some younger teachers (those who have taught enough to hit their stride) who are better than some older colleagues. But that certainly doesn’t mean that all, most, or even a significant fraction of younger teachers are better than their veteran counterparts. Moreover, it stands to reason that someone with a natural gift for teaching would only be that much better with experience and further training.
Does Gates tell his best young code writers not to pursue advanced degrees? Or better yet, to quit the profession before experience diminishes their talent?
Bill Gates’ opinions about who writes the best code is the main thing that keeps McAfee and Norton in business.
But I think it’s pretty obvious what you get when you cross Management Information Science with Education —
MIS-EDUCATION …
Microsoft is notorious for a particular style of hiring and interviewing that leaves a lot of very talented software people off the table.
I would say also that Microsoft is not known as a software innovator nor as a company that writes especially wonderful and resilient code. Indeed, most of their ‘innovations’ come from buying other companies and absorbing their code and staff or from copying the work of others.
Diane, I feel you are painting with a very broad brush here.
Most reform-minded people I know believe experience counts and that most teachers improve the longer they practice their profession. The idea that teachers peak in their third or fourth year teaching is silly.
Maybe reformers peak in their third or fourth year promoting reforms? 🙂
Perhaps you have done so already, but you should name names. Who are the people saying these silly things?
Reformers do object to the idea that experience AUTOMATICALLY equals high-quality (in any profession). Results do matter, no apology for that.
Bill Gates said in remarks last year that teachers should not be paid extra for experience or degrees. He was relying on the work of Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, who appears in “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and who has argued that firing the “bottom 5-10% of teachers, based on the scores of their students, would lead to a dramatic improvement in national performance as well as trillions of dollars in GDP.
Of course not EVERY reformer says or believes this, but the statement gets repeated over and over–by influential individuals, think tanks, and the press.
Here’s a blog on the Denver Post where Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute justifies this assertion by citing a number of studies.
http://blogs.denverpost.com/coloradoclassroom/2009/04/23/teacher-effectiveness-the-studies/153/
She and others fail to acknowledge (a) the inadequacy of test scores for measuring even student improvement, let alone teacher improvement; (b) intricacies within these very studies; (c) substantive differences from subject to subject and grade level to grade level; (d) the effect of experienced teachers on novice teachers (teachers do not walk around in glass bubbles); and much more.
I want my students to do well on tests of the actual subject matter. I teach philosophy at my school; when I give a test on Plato, I take their performance partly as a reflection of my teaching. I go over their responses and ask myself, “What could I have made clearer? What would I emphasize next time?” Good tests do tell teachers something about their work, if they are well designed and based on the curriculum. However, if I got to a point where my students did well on, say, 8 of the 10 Plato questions, and then didn’t see as much “growth” in the following years, would I conclude that my improvement had slowed? No. High school kids are not going to become Plato scholars in a period of three weeks. The fact that they’re reading, understanding, and grappling with Plato is fantastic. I look for ways to teach Plato (and other philosophers and ideas) better, but after a certain point, that is not going to translate into dramatic average test score gains. Period.
And I’m not even talking about a standardized test, which often has a tenuous link to curriculum. ELA standardized tests (at least in New York) tend to emphasize generic skills and formulaic essays. If you’ve scored tests, you may have seen just how little the scores have to do with the substance of what the students write.
I have been teaching science in high school for 25 years and have an award winning program. I believe a diversity of faculty is the best way to bring our students into reality of the work force. I also think that there are teachers that get better every year as I have. I take it upon myself to constantly improve, to learn the lessons of each year and carry them forward. Effective administration can take care of the small amount of burn outs and teachers that have lost their entusiasm and care for children but that takes good administration and they are so rare you would sooner get a camel through he eye of a needle. The union protections and good pay keep these people in education. Instead we have huge and costly programs complete with tests, privatization, and removal of pensions, reduction of pay and media cultivation of public animosity. All for want of good administrators. Getting rid of more experienced teachers is all about cost cutting.
So here we are and we will see where we go. I think it is very much like the Chinese cultural revolution- a huge sweeping failure to get rid of another failure. We are a profession in need of a way to get rid of bad teachers, not old ones, not ones with less education etc We are being held responsible for a culture that has lost its opportunity and we are about to use politics and policy to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
“Effective administration can take care of the small amount of burn outs and teachers that have lost their entusiasm and care for children but that takes good administration and they are so rare you would sooner get a camel through he eye of a needle. The union protections and good pay keep these people in education.”
Elissa, union protections don’t keep “bad” teachers on the job–faulty administrations do. Unions only protect a teacher’s right to due process wherein if it is proven that the teacher is not effective, the teacher is dismissed…with the union’s blessing. It’s not a good idea to spread misinformation regarding due process.
“Unqualified is the new qualified!” (Gary Stager 2005)
Experience we’re told doesn’t matter. So why is this? Well, one reason might be the belief that all teaching is, is lecturing, delivering facts and passing out papers. We all know that is a crock of crap. Another reason. It makes it easier to justify firing teachers and replace them with 5 week wonders. If you repeat this along with a quality teacher (whatever the definition of ‘quality ‘ is) is all that matters in the classroom, then there really is no reason for having a person who understands child psychology, pedagogy, children; a person who plans lessons with the goals of teaching and enriching a child’s life and also believes that there is more to teaching-then just a relaying of facts. Experience matters. Why do we trust the people who don’t believe this with our children’s education? Why.? How comfortable are you with a surgeon telling you this is his first procedure? A mechanic with his first brake job? An air traffic controller? Why should education be any different? Don’t say that the examples above deal with safety and teaching is well…important but not life threatening. Well- tell that to the kids whose been taught by people with so little experience. It wasn’t life threatening. Yeah! It was just life altering.
One last thing. It would be nice if all these “sage” reformers stopped for a moment and took a look at the possible consequences for their actions. Who needs an experienced college professor or one who researches and teaches? (Very timely due to Bill Gates setting his sights on higher public education.) Why not have your entire collegiate learning experience taught by TA’s, and not graduate TA’s. Heck, I just finished the course therefore, I’m qualified to teach it.
How many of you are eager to have your children taught by a teacher with 5 weeks, or a year or two’s experience? Not many? Why? If it’s good enough for children of the city or the hinterlands/sticks then it should be good enough for you
OK, I’ll begin by admitting that the “eschools” comment pushed my buttons, as a veteran classroom teacher and as a professor who has taught at both bricks and mortar and online schools (with college students from across the globe).
“eschools are best” and “better” if “run by universities”, AND if they are only for adults, not P-12 students –who should have limited screen time, more active learning and more personal, face to face interactions with peers and teachers.
Even at the university level, online schools are not the best fit for all adult students. Those who currently benefit most from online US programs are autonomous learners, with good English literacy skills, and corporations running for-profit schools.
However, a lot of corporations waiting in the wings for school “reform” to hit public higher ed, including Bill Gates, so they can increase online learning and reap profits, have failed to realize that they’ve already missed the boat on that. Colleges with online programs are no longer dependent on a proprietary Learning Management System (LMS).
More and more universities (including for-profits) have been switching over to the wide variety of open source LMS platforms that are available today. Therefore, while profiteers seek to tear apart what has been often referred to as, “the greatest higher education system in the world” (see link below), there is very little likelihood that corporations will benefit much from the online colleges in the US that they want to see proliferate –unless, of course, they open their own schools.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/united-states-global-ranking_n_1514261.html
Apparently, opening a degree granting for-profit college can be done rather easily these days, too (re: Relay, Phoenix, Kaplan, etc.), so, our public community colleges and universities need not be taken down for corporations to profit from higher ed.
Can’t you just envision the University of Microsoft, with “stack ranked” students and professors? I can only imagine how that’s going to be depicted online. Their management approach is very similar to the demeaning “pyramid” that the abrasive Dance Moms teacher uses on her young students. It’s all about the carrot and the stick –which we already know DoE supports.
One would think that technologically advanced people would have evolved from that archaic model. But, then, so many of those prganizations are led by non-educators and college drop-outs who think, by virtue of the size of their bank accounts, they have the right to tell college professors and P-12 educators what to do.
That is, unfortunately, consistent with a culture that kowtows to celebrity and wealth –often regardless of the true value of the contributions such people have made to our society. However, while the overly glorified 1% may have the financial edge, 99% is a HUGE number of people and we must continue to speak out against such nonsensical, inhumane corporate practices being imposed on us, as teachers, parents, students and communities.