A reader pointed out that Lodge McCammon proposed his plan to change teacher compensation in North Carolina at least two years ago. McCammon is the author of the much-discussed 60-30-10 proposal. Actually, Lindsay Wagner cited this article in her report this morning. The article was written by McCammon, not taken out of context.
He wrote then:
“RALEIGH — Our nation is plagued by a failing system of education. While there appear to be endless solutions, few are yielding substantial results. I’m ready to make a statement: Educational problems may be solved with economic solutions! Pay our most efficient teachers per pupil and then allow them the option to increase class sizes and/or the number of classes they teach.
We want to recruit, maintain and empower the finest teachers in order to offer the best possible education to all students. So first, let’s get down to the basics: We need to pay great teachers more.
It’s not a radical idea, or even a new idea, though it seems impossible given the current economic limitations. I’m not advocating new funding in order to pay teachers more. I am instead suggesting a reallocation of funds to support the most effective teachers who are willing and able to serve more students.
Basic technologies have created significant advancements in classroom efficiencies. The 21st century classroom looks quite different than classrooms of the past. Therefore, it is now possible for a teacher who has adopted more efficient teaching practices to take on more students while offering high-quality, personalized instruction.
One of these newer practices is “flipping” the classroom. In a “flipped” classroom traditional lecture is removed from class and instead, the teacher uses video lectures that can be viewed by students at any time and as many times as needed. This frees up class time that can be used for collaboration, active learning and creative problem solving.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/12/26/1730586/how-new-teaching-merits-higher.html#storylink=cpy
What McKammon didn’t know in 2011 was that at the very moment he wrote that article, students in North Carolina were taking the TIMSS tests in math and science. When the results were released in 2012, students in North Carolina ranked among the best in the world.
North Carolina is embarked on reckless schemes to get rid of teachers, when it should be developing smart plans to support and retain them. They are doing a great job–those who have not fled the state–and they deserve recognition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The pure ignorance of this proposal is glaringly evident to anyone who has EVER taught real students in a real classroom in NC or anywhere: CHILDREN ARE NOT COOKIE CUTTER MACHINES. I can not fathom a classroom of children with different abilities, backgrounds, you know, CHILDREN sitting behind a computer monitor happily staying in their seats, on task, watching the teacher videos and then making the “teacher” more money by passing the standardized test on that lesson. Maybe if this “expert” had of just stopped by a REAL classroom at any time and observed REAL children, not pieces of data to be manipulated at the least cost, this asinine proposal would of gone in the trash where it belongs.
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Absolutely stupid idea. How many of the students will actually watch the video lectures? They will dump this idea into poor districts so their education is ripped off by people looking to make money off of children. As Diane has asked many times, “Why does the US DOE and Obama not speak out against this garbage?” We have no leadership in this country-just corrupt and clueless politicians.
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Amen. exactly!
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This whole North Carolina plan
reminds me of an old post of mine.
Brace yourself for…
“10 Minutes of Ed Reform Lunacy”
(my alternate title to this video BELOW) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7ZnrEQqxFvY#at=90
Oh
my
God…
It’s beyond bizarre… in its arguments
for raising class size, for replacing live
teachers with computers,
and with on-line instructors…
and the video’s graphics… cartoon
kids placed within specious graphs
while walking on treadmills… (its
creators not recognizing the irony
and connotations that such an
image carries with it)
the “excellence”-deprived teachers
and students are colored gray, but
who turn multi-colored
as they transform into newly-superior
beings of “excellence”…
and the super-excellent teachers
sport “stars” like in the classic Dr.
Seuss book “THE SNEETCHES”.
Also, you could make a drinking
game out of this: you must drink
a shot every time you hear
the words “excellent” or “excellence”
spoken.
This has got to be an ONION
parody… but it’s not.
It does serve the purpose in illustrating
what certain folks genuinely believe to
be effective “ed reform”, while
providing a good laugh in the process.
I found this video—with a hilariously
sarcastic description— on Edushyster’s
blog:
http://edushyster.com/?p=2948#more-2948
The COMMENTS continue the hilarity:
Here’s a sampling:
— “I could only watch that video for
about 2 minutes before I was nauseated
by a wave of ‘excellence’! I am sure
you have already noticed a lack of
source material, and the irony of
wanting these ‘excellent’ teachers
to teach critical thinking
to a gazillion students.
“I have no idea how one can do
both, but I guess I’m not ‘excellent’
enough.”
— “Were these ‘excellent teachers’
hatched from pods? Where did they
come from? How did they get to be
excellent teachers? The bottom line
is that teacher quality is, in great part,
dependent on the preparation
programs from which the teachers
graduated.”
— “This video had to be a big,
group project of people never in
the classroom. They broke up into
four groups to figure out a way to
teach more kids with less ‘excellent’
teachers, got back together, and
presented their ideas. I can see the
big Post-it sheets on the walls filled
with magic marker brainstorms,
arrows, underlining, oh my. End of
day, they turned it all over to the
facilitators who boiled it down into
this fantasy.
“And undoubtedly got paid
more for this one ridiculous
video than an average excellent
teacher makes in several
years. I’d retch but don’t want to
waste my excellent box wine.”
— “It’s useless to resist. If you think
‘opportunity culture’ is ridiculous
marketing language for yet another fad,
it doesn’t matter. They’re bringing this
gift to ALL schools, whether parents,
teachers and children like it or not.
It’s the oddest philanthropy I have ever
seen. It’s mandatory!”
===========
And who created this monstrosity?
Check it out at:
http://opportunityculture.org/ocat/
Here’s the usual suspects:
– – – – – – – –
Celine Coggins, Chief Executive Officer, Teach Plus
John Danner, Co-Founder and CEO, Rocketship Education
Alex Hernandez, Partner and Vice President,
Charter School Growth Fund
Michael Horn, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Education,
Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation
Karen Hawley Miles, President and Executive Director,
Education Resource Strategies
Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Program Officer in Urban Education,
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Sydney Morris, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer,
Educators 4 Excellence
Marguerite Roza, Director, Edunomics Lab,
Georgetown University and Senior Scholar,
Center on Reinventing Public Education
Ariela Rozman, Chief Executive Officer, TNTP
Butch Trusty, Senior Program Officer for Education,
The Joyce Foundation
S. Denise Watts, Zone Superintendent and Executive Director,
Project L.I.F.T./Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools
Jeff Wetzler, Executive Vice President,
†eacher Preparation, Support, and Development,
and Chief Learning Officer, Teach For America
– – – – – – – – – – –
As the COMMENT-ers put it,
— “Wow…the same suspects…TFA,
TNTP, E4E…
“Has anyone (listed here) ever taught or
stayed in the classroom for more than
two years? They are all experts at
something they don’t want to do anymore.”
— “Of course… the creators of this
video were all so committed,
passionate, inspired and all-around
‘excellent’ at teaching that …
They… Stopped… Doing… It.”
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To paraphrase, basic technologies have created advancement in efficiency.
So, is video to video equal to face to face? I see that Bill Gates still travels to Davos, that the president still operates AF one, and that the titans of industry spend billions on private aircraft. So, I don’t think anyone really believes the technology is a substitute for having people in the same room, and I believe this is true for education as well.
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It’s an understatement, to say the least, that Lodge McCammon’s ideas are crackpot and at the outer fringes of rationality.
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Again and again corporate backed reformers deny the truth about the overall quality of education in the USA, ignore the true issue- poverty, cry ‘the sky is falling’, and seek to mechanize then privatize our schools for their own financial benefit.
Fight back NC teachers- the children need you!
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Here’s the American Enterprise Institute pushing the same basic idea:
http://educationnext.org/schooling-rebooted/?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_campaign=hootsuite
It also has a blatant commercial plug for Kaplan and it is co-written by someone from Kaplan, so there’s some of that “efficiency” we’re all striving for.
Don’t accuse them of replacing teachers with screens just because they’re replacing teachers with screens.
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Chiara – that was the most annoying, self righteous article I have ever read. The author knows NOTHING about being a teacher. As if all teachers just stand in front of the room and drone on about a topic. We already are engineers – utilizing all sorts types of educational models, including active participation, to engage the students in the learning process. And if our lesson isn’t working, then we have to think on our feet and change course. This immediate feedback and redirection can’t be found on a recorded lesson (how boring – like watching Mr Wizard all day – it gets old after awhile).
And didn’t he realize that tables and chairs can be reconfigured and moved around. They aren’t bolted to the floor. Plus, students have legs – they can be moved about as well.
And, surprise, many teachers ARE paid extra for larger classes. Buffalo teachers are paid extra per student when their class size goes over a certain amount depending on the grade – usually at 30 or 32 students. I’ve never heard of anyone requesting more students so they can earn more money. The renumeration is not worth the extra aggravation. In high school, it’s the total number of students that counts. So one class can have fifteen and the next class thirty nine, but the average of 27 is not considered an overage.
So the article is just wrong, wrong, and wrong.
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Thanks for the explanation of “flipping”. I had no idea what it meant in this context, I thought it was almost the same as flipping in sales, like to flip a car is to buy it, make some repairs, and then sell it; or plain ol’ arbitrage. Which sadly I bet will be a thing in a privatized future.
His article runs on an infuriating number of assumptions and it’s a shame that TIMSS numbers didn’t banish him back underneath the stone he came from. I am glad that this is now coming to light so we can finish the job.
Keep on fighting the good fight everyone.
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When I taught in Kansas City and they were short on subs, you could double up a class and receive sub pay on top of your pay. It was considered a desperate situation, solved by the willingness of teachers to be flexible and take on more responsibility for that day. It was not ideal.
I see the flipping idea as being sort of like that. I am all for innovation, but innovation that could hurt quality should be well thought out before being put into place.
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A good teacher doesn’t sit and lecture or show a “video” for the whole period. They use a recording as a visual device, discussing and adding to the information. A lecture is supplemented by various activities, readings, or discussions.
Taped lectures might be a good tool for students who miss a class, but not as a replacement for the regular teaching process.
Back to the drawing board (try this out on your own kids first).
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I have some colleagues who use the flipped classroom idea with success. I, however, feel like students spend too much time in front of screens as it is and could benefit from some “analog” experiences.
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Would it be more speaking if we called them interactive dynamic books instead of screens?
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Or, you could call them Powerpoint bullet lists on a screen, which is what most of the online curricula that I see (and I see a LOT of it) looks like. I, too, believe that these technologies hold great, great promise, but they can also be terribly abused. I know for a fact that many educational publishers are now issuing product development guidelines that break subjects into topics that are each to be “covered” on a single screen without popups or links beyond those they have explicitly called for (e.g., vocabulary popups). And so we get lessons that are extraordinarily telegraphed. Imagine teaching intro macroeconomics via text messages. I have seen, in the past four years, an enormous amount of this dumbing down in online materials, and the amount of that crap is increasing daily.
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Read any bad books lately?
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LOL. Yes, TE, a few. Good point. But here we are talking about a ubiquitous practice in contemporary online educational materials. I have likewise written and spoken against the common practice among textbook publishers of issuing content development guidelines that require a single page-length for each topic covered, as though every topic were of equal difficulty or complexity. Many publishers are now actually having writers work in Powerpoint because doing so translates so readily to a screen-by-screen presentation of the final product. And so we are seeing, in these materials, the same sorts of problems that Edward Tufte wrote about so eloquently in “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.”
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I’ve seen very few engaging power points. I can only think of one. The rest were
b-o-r-i-n-g. They don’t make good notes to study from, either. Even the good ones are barely tolerable.
The most interesting classes were the ones where the teacher would tell anecdotes or true stories to illustrate their points. I still remember those classes. I can’t remember the content of a single PowerPoint (except that one engaging one – by an excellent children’s author).
So yes, let’s make school a punishment – Or something to be endured instead of loved.
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The flipped classroom is one technique in a teacher’s toolkit, to be used when appropriate, with the right material and the right students. Elevating this approach to the status of a quotidian modus operandi is one of the nuttiest ideas to have come from education deformers in a long, long time. When this idea is coupled with the outrageous proposal currently being considered by the North Carolina legislature to mandate the creation of a “three caste” system for the state’s public school teachers, it goes right over the edge of sanity into utter lunacy.
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I am guessing that “Lodge’s” love of flipping involves his own money-making venture. I notice he has earned his PhD and must have a lot in loans to pay off. Once again.. some transparency in “selling ideas such as his” should be made. I am so tired of people like him promoting ideas with a rather transparent agenda.. making money. With his proposal, teachers wanting to be in the “career track” will have to learn to “flip” so of course he has a whole program with training to offer. See part of his website…
http://lodgemccammon.com/flip/training/ ughhhh!
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Oh, and the other issue I have is with someone who USED TO TEACH in the classroom for a little while but leaves the classroom and suddenly begins marketing ideas he/she develops as a one size fits all approach. Teachers who are IN the classroom have a far more realistic lens on which to make decisions as to what will work best for students they see daily.
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I had to go and see his bio for myself. Here it is “Dr. Lodge McCammon is an educational pioneer. His career began in 2003 at Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he taught Civics and AP Economics. McCammon received a Ph.D. from NC State University in 2008 and continued his work by developing innovative practices and sharing them with students, teachers and schools across the world. At the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation he developed a new teaching method called Fizz, which encourages teachers to use extraordinarily simple video recording techniques in order to completely transform teaching and learning. McCammon is also a studio composer who writes standards-based songs, with supporting materials, about advanced curriculum for K-12 classrooms. His songs and related materials can be found in Discovery Education Streaming.”
I want to know how someone can “write standards-based songs.” Seriously. As a music teacher, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. :X
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These ideas about teaching methods and technologies should be welcomed as part of the teacher’s toolkit. Where they go terribly, terribly wrong is when they are mandated–when they become the one true path.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html
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Robert – thank you for sharing this little “ditty” by Isaac Asimov. I hope others will take a look.
I love when we do literary references. I actually met Asimov on several occasions (I was a big SF fan in college). He was an amazing man and his works are definitely worth a read. So many aspects of our life which seemed impossible when the first appeared in Science Fiction stories are now too, too true. Electronic schools are here and that totally automated house is just around the corner.
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@ shepherd.. YOU ARE SO RIGHT!!!! If these methods worked for McCammon while he was in the classroom … great for him but leave it there. He can share his ideas so that other teachers can CHOOSE to try them out but NOT SHOVE THEM DOWN teacher’s throats as “the one true path”… I remember Lucy Caulkin’s with her “balanced literacy” being shoved down all NYC students’ throats. And now it is Charlotte Danielson!
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Crunchydeb, you made me laugh out loud!
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Well, Harold Hill was a musician, too. Of course, in the end Hill sticks around River City and actually teaches the kids to play instruments. I would not expect Mr. McCammon to do the same.
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The Improved Lodge:
60% Apprentice @ 32K
30% Master @ 52K
9.999% Career @ 72K
0.001% Grand Jedi Master @ 92K
And, instead of videos students will learn at home using interactive micro-lessons delivered by holographic images of Salman Khan writing on a chalkboard
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If we want to shake our image as LAZY, overpaid babysitters, sending kids home to watch videos of our lessons is probably not the way to go.
“We’re paying that Grand Jedi Master teacher $92K of our hard earned tax dollars and the best he can do is give my 13 year old kid a video lesson. Why that lazy . . . .”
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I still don’t understand the premise of the “flipped” classroom. Can anyone explain why a teacher doesn’t do both? Why toss the lecture? Why can’t a short lecture or demonstration be followed by some interesting and engaging activity that involve collaboration, active learning and creative problem solving? Is the advantage of video lectures that can be viewed by students at any time and as many times as needed really worth the trade off?
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It certainly can be a combination of some lecture and some discussion. I think simply taping yourself as a talking head is not the way to go here. Take advantage of the endless resources that are available on the net and mash them together.
If you want to teach about price ceilings (I know this isn’t really necessary for citizens in NYC, but it is for those who grow up in the middle of the country), don’t make them watch you talking about it, have them watch this: http://yadayadayadaecon.com/clip/12/ and talk about it in class.
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Dear Mr McCammon,
I gather that your idea was part of a brainstorming session, & not necessarily meant as a state bill. And I’m glad to see you’ve dropped the ’20-yr max’ idea, which surely would discourage anyone interested in considering teaching as a career. Embracing a constant churn of low-experience employees, though perhaps seeming a cost-effective idea, does not translate well to a knowledge-intensive field where new employees cost more to administer and train, and effectiveness is generally accepted as being in the 5-yr+ range.
But the main point here is that ‘flipping a classroom’ is simply one of many potentially effective methods to deliver content, many(if not all) of which are readily available to teachers via the internet, PD sessions, etc. The glory of being a teacher is that one assesses the class and brainstorms– just as you have done– and designs the curriculum and its delivery to suit, re-assesses, adapting, tweaking according to what fits the individuals in the group, the group’s access to technology, etc etc. That’s what teaching is all about.
Should the state government intervene and dictate one particular method for everyone regardless of the particular market and its needs– well, you are a businessman, I think you know what this does to innovation.
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well said!
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Per-pupil pay is the mother of all oddball merit pay schemes. Ok let us say you only allow ‘master’ teachers or 5+ yr teachers to go for the extra pay of teaching 30 kids. There would be no way to stop people from gaming the system to get 30 perfectly behaved kids. Do you want teachers to flee difficult schools and go to easier to teach schools???? Do you want your top people only gunning for the honors kids?? Do you really want people with no business taking on extra students trying to take on 5, 10, 20 more only to see them fail? Yeah, that’s fair to the students whose teacher bit off more than they could chew, sure.
Pay for outcomes I can swallow (done right) but per-pupil suggests that the one teacher with their own textbook company and mooc can teach 1000 self motivated students and make a mint. Where do you stop with this idea?? Scale is not the problem in terms of cost ineffectiveness; quality is more important, and we don’t even measure that very objectively as it is.
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It would have worked for me – as the School Librarian in two buildings for PreK to 12, I taught over a thousand students each year. (Actually an overwhelming thought).
I think $100 per student would have been a fair price. I did give them some individual attention and differentiated instruction.
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It would suck though for the Special Ed teachers who only had six, eight, or twelve kids, at most, in their classroom.
Or what about the Reading Coaches who only saw students in small groups. Not a big pay check for them either.
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Many comments here have reminded me of Harold Hill as well. Find out what is new in town and argue that it is the first step on the road to degradation.
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