August 13
I was given this yesterday.......
Right on the button!!
July 13, 2013
I was given this yesterday.......
Right on the button!!
July 13, 2013
The Trouble With Testing Mania
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Congress made a sensible decision a decade ago when it required the states to administer yearly tests to public school students in exchange for federal education aid. The theory behind the No Child Left Behind Act was that holding schools accountable for test scores would force them to improve instruction for groups of children whom they had historically shortchanged.
Testing did spur some progress in student performance. But it has become clear to us over time that testing was being overemphasized — and misused — in schools that were substituting test preparation for instruction. Even though test-driven reforms were helpful in the beginning, it is now clear that they will never bring this country’s schools up to par with those of the high-performing nations that have left us far behind in math, science and even literacy instruction.
Congress required the states to give annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) as a way of ensuring that students were making progress and that minority children were being fairly educated. Schools that did not meet performance targets for two years were labeled as needing improvement and subjected to sanctions. Fearing that they would be labeled poor performers, schools and districts — especially in low-income areas — rolled out a relentless series of “diagnostic” tests that were actually practice rounds for the high-stakes exams to come.
That the real tests were weak, and did not gauge the skills students needed to succeed, made matters worse. Unfortunately, most states did not invest in rigorous, high-quality exams with open-ended essay questions that test reasoning skill. Rather, they opted for cheap, multiple-choice tests of marginal value. While practically making exams the center of the educational mission, the country underinvested in curriculum development and teacher training, overlooking the approaches that other nations use to help teachers get constantly better.
The government went further in the testing direction through its competitive grant program, known as Race to the Top, and a waiver program related to No Child Left Behind, both of which pushed the states to create teacher evaluation systems that take student test data into account. Test scores should figure in evaluations, but the measures have to be fair, properly calibrated and statistically valid — all of which means that these evaluation systems cannot be rushed into service before they are ready.
Foreign nations with the highest-performing school systems did not build them this way. In fact, none of the top-performing nations have opted for a regime of grade-by-grade standardized tests. Instead, they typically have gateway exams that determine, for example, if high school students have met their standards. These countries typically have strong, national curriculums. Perhaps most important, they set a high bar for entry into the teaching profession and make sure that the institutions that train teachers do it exceedingly well.
In Finland, for example, teacher preparation programs are highly competitive and extremely challenging. (The programs are free to students and come with a living stipend.) Close attention is devoted not just to scholarly and research matters but to pedagogical skills.
This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”
Some problems could be partly solved by the Common Core learning standards, an ambitious set of goals for what students should learn. The Common Core, adopted by all but a handful of states, could move the nation away from rote memorization — and those cheap, color-in-the-bubble tests — and toward a writing-intensive system that gives students the reasoning skills they need in the new economy. But the concept has become the subject of a backlash from test-weary parents who have little confidence in a whole new round of exams that the system will require. Beyond that, teachers are understandably worried that they will be evaluated — and pushed out of jobs — based on how their students perform on tests related to the old curriculum while they are being asked to teach the new one. If school officials fail to resolve these issues in a fair manner, the national effort to install the new standards could collapse.
Congress could ease some of the test mania by rethinking the way schools are evaluated under No Child Left Behind. Test scores are important to that process, but modest weight should be given to a few other indicators, like advanced courses, promotion rates, college-going rates and so on. Similarly, the states that have allowed the districts to choke schools with the diagnostic tests and data collection could reverse that trend so that schools have perhaps one or two higher-quality tests per year. In other words, the country needs to reconsider its obsession with testing, which can make education worse, not better.
Can School Reform Hurt Communities?
By SARAH CARR
NEW ORLEANS — BEFORE Hurricane Katrina, about 74 percent of this city’s schools were considered “failing,” based mainly on their standardized test scores. By 2012, that figure had dropped to 42 percent, even as the bar for passing was raised. Average ACT scores for the city’s public school students have inched up. In 2011, black students in New Orleans outperformed their peers in the rest of Louisiana for the first time since the state test scores have been tracked.
There are multiple explanations for the improvements. The schools spend more per pupil on average than they did before Katrina, for example. But most explanations have focused on the radical overhaul of the city’s education system: the expansion of independent charter schools (which more than 80 percent of New Orleans public school children now attend); a greater reliance on alternative teacher training programs like Teach for America; and the increased use of test scores to determine whether educators should keep their jobs and schools should stay open.
New Orleans may be the extreme test case, but reforms like these are reshaping public education across the country. The movement is rooted in the notion that “fixing” schools is the strongest lever for lifting communities out of poverty. The criminal justice and health care systems may be broken, living-wage jobs in short supply, and families forced to live in unstable or unsafe conditions. But the buck supposedly stops in the classroom. Thus teachers can find themselves charged with remedying an impossibly broad set of challenges that go far beyond reading at grade level.
In New Orleans, this single-minded focus on school improvement has given new hope to many low-income families, but it has also destabilized the broader community in some unanticipated ways. Consider the cost to many veteran educators, who formed the core of the city’s black middle class. After the flood, officials fired 7,500 school employees. An unknown number were ultimately rehired by the reconstituted traditional and charter schools, but they often found themselves working in a very different environment.
The growth in charter schools has fostered an unrelenting focus on preparation for standardized tests and college. Some classes begin with students as young as 5 chanting: “This is the way — hey! — we start the day — hey! We get the knowledge — hey! — to go to college — hey!” At the end of the summer, this year’s incoming kindergartners will most likely be told that they are members of the class of 2030, for the year they will graduate from college.
The obstacles that stand in the way of this goal — poverty, trauma, parental ambivalence — are considered “excuses” that must not distract from the quest. Watching this mentality play out in the lives of families and educators can be both inspiring and frightening.
FOR teachers it has meant a bias toward a kind of youthful idealism that prevails in many New Orleans charter schools. The consummate teacher willingly works 70-hour weeks, consents to daily feedback on everything from lesson plan to tone of voice, and takes full responsibility for his students’ successes and failings. Young principals pump up their even younger teachers, telling them, “What you do is the most important work in the world.” Staff meetings can feel like a cross between summer camp and cult revival, as teachers gather in circles, praise one another for redirecting a wayward student or helping an overwhelmed colleague, and recite one another’s names in unison.
This mentality has attracted ambitious, talented young teachers from across the country. But it has also risked turning teaching into a missionary pursuit. At a few of the charter schools I have reported on over the last six years, less than 10 percent of the teachers came from New Orleans or were older than 35. “I think a lot of people who come to New Orleans want to change New Orleanians,” said Mary Laurie, a veteran school administrator and principal of O. Perry Walker High School.
Test scores might have risen, but fewer educators are considered part of the community fabric and understand the social and cultural context in which their students live. As Andre Perry, an associate director at the Institute for Quality and Equity in Education at Loyola University, put it, “Kids are smarter, but communities are weaker.”
This disconnect can manifest itself in ways both small (as when a teacher fails to recognize a popular New Orleans term, like “beaucoup” for “a lot”) and large (as when a teacher can’t grasp what students are going through at home).
Edward Wiltz, a truck repairman whom I met during the 2010-11 school year, sees both advantages and drawbacks to the new approach. He appreciates the energy and enthusiasm of the teachers at the charter schools his teenage son has attended, and loves the many out-of-town college trips (“They have more drilling — five, six, seven, eight! — on college than I had all through high school”). But he says some young teachers expect students to behave like robots (“go home, pass my test”) even as the teenagers grapple with hunger, homelessness and gun violence.
The most challenging students — those with severe special needs, a history of school expulsions or a criminal record — can also suffer disproportionately from a narrow focus on school improvement and test score gains. These are the students the schools have the least incentive to enroll (during my years reporting on New Orleans charters, I witnessed some cases where school leaders forced these students into withdrawing). Yet they are also the ones who must be reached if the city hopes to reduce its unconscionably high rates of gun violence and incarceration.
In 2011, I immersed myself in Sci Academy, an ambitious young charter school. One of the students at the school was a 16-year-old freshman who read at a second-grade level and performed math at a third-grade level. By the time he transferred to Sci Academy in the summer of 2010, he had very nearly been killed in a drive-by shooting, spent more than three months out of school on suspension, and changed schools six times in two years.
He was one of the plaintiffs in a federal discrimination suit alleging that many New Orleans schools deny admission to students with disabilities and fail to serve adequately those they do admit. Sci Academy would send nearly every member of its first graduating class off to college. But this student required more than the school could give him — even with a designated mentor on hand. “He needs and deserves a full-day therapy program that does not exist,” said Ben Marcovitz, the school’s founder.
He ended up being arrested on suspicion of armed robbery last year. His needs, like those of countless students, proved too complex for his teachers to address alone. It didn’t help that, in 2009, state officials closed the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, significantly reducing the treatment options for teenagers with mental health crises.
The focus on school improvement in New Orleans has succeeded in lifting the average student from a state of academic crisis to one of academic mediocrity; that’s not an insignificant achievement for a city where 42 percent of children live in poverty, nearly double the national rate. Yet as another summer begins, we should also reflect on a different lesson this experience has taught us: we can ask more of our public schools without asking them to save our cities all on their own.
Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom
By VIVIAN YEE
It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups.
Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use.
A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996.
“These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.”
The resurgence of ability grouping comes as New York City grapples with the state of its gifted and talented programs — a form of tracking in some public schools in which certain students, selected through testing, take accelerated classes together.
These programs, which serve about 3 percent of the elementary school population, are dominated by white and Asian students.
Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker who is running for mayor, has proposed expanding the number of gifted classes while broadening the criteria for admission in hopes of increasing diversity. (The city’s Education Department has opposed the proposal, saying that using criteria other than tests would dilute the classes.)
Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of ability and achievement.
When Jill Sears began teaching elementary school in New Hampshire 17 years ago, the second graders in her class showed up on the first day with a bewildering mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some children coasted through math worksheets in a few minutes, she said; others struggled to finish half a page. The swifter students, bored, would make mischief, while the slowest would become frustrated, give up and act out.
“My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out approximately two-thirds of my learners,” said Ms. Sears, a fourth-grade teacher at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, N.H. “I didn’t like those odds.”
So she completely reorganized her classroom. About a decade ago, instead of teaching all her students as one group, she began ability grouping, teaching all groups the same material but tailoring activities and assignments to each group.
“I just knew that for me to have any sanity at the end of the day, I could just make these changes,” she said.
While acknowledging that wide variation in classrooms poses a challenge, critics of grouping — including education researchers and civil rights groups — argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the practice inevitably divided students according to traits corresponding with achievement, like race and class. Some states began recommending that schools end grouping in the 1990s, amid concerns that teachers’ expectations for students were shaped by the initial groupings, confining students to rigid tracks and leading teachers to devote fewer resources to low-achieving students.
“The kids who are thought of as the least able end up with the fewest opportunities and resources and positive learning environments,” said Jeannie Oakes, author of “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality,” a popular critique of grouping. “The potential benefit is so far outweighed by the very known and well-documented risks.”
Though the issue is one of the most frequently studied by education scholars, there is little consensus about grouping’s effects.
Some studies indicate that grouping can damage students’ self-esteem by consigning them to lower-tier groups; others suggest that it produces the opposite effect by ensuring that more advanced students do not make their less advanced peers feel inadequate. Some studies conclude that grouping improves test scores in students of all levels, others that it helps high-achieving students while harming low-achieving ones, and still others say that it has little effect.
Proponents of grouping argue that without it, teachers are forced to teach to the middle, leaving out both struggling children and gifted learners. They also say there is a “peer effect,” in which high-achieving children do better if paired with other high-achieving students. Done judiciously and flexibly, they say, grouping can help all students. The reasons for the resurgence are unclear. Some experts attribute it to No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law that strengthened accountability standards for schools. By forcing teachers to focus on students who fell just below the proficiency cutoff, the law may have encouraged teachers to group struggling students together to prepare them for standardized tests.
Technology might have also played a role, Mr. Loveless said, with teachers becoming more comfortable using computers to allow children to learn at different speeds.
In interviews, several teachers said they believed modern-day grouping was not discriminatory because the groups were constantly in flux. But they acknowledged the additional challenge of tailoring instruction to different groups, as they must produce multiple lesson plans and keep closer track of students’ progress.
At Public School 156 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which enrolls mostly African-American and Hispanic children, many living in homeless shelters, Cathy Vail randomly sorts her fifth graders at the beginning of the year using lettered sticks. After six weeks of testing and observing them, she shifts them into “teams” of seven or eight.
Children may be assigned to different groups for reading and math, and can switch groups if they have shown progress, struggle to get along with other students in a group or need extra help with a particular lesson. Ms. Vail uses thrice-yearly reading assessments and a test before each math unit to make sure children do not remain in groups that are too advanced or too slow for them, she said; one student this year, for instance, has moved up two groups in both reading and math.
Ms. Vail teaches the same lesson, whether it is a math concept or a book, to the entire class, but gives each group a different assignment. Working on each week’s set of new vocabulary words, all four groups draw illustrations and write captions using the assigned words, but she encourages team C, her highest-achieving group, to write more complex sentences, perhaps using two new vocabulary words in the same sentence. She also asks children in team C to peer-teach students in the other groups.
“At the end of the day, they’re learning the same words, but just with different levels of complexity and nuance,” she said.
When she moves students to new groups, she tells them it is because she can best help them there, and she believes they see the grouping positively, she said.
“It has to be done properly — you can’t make a kid feel small because they’re in group A,” her lowest-achieving group, she said. “If you don’t have a stigma attached to the group, then I don’t see the problem.”
In Ms. Sears’s classroom at Woodman Elementary in Dover, the three or four groups of students rotate throughout the day, some being taught on the rug while others work in desk clusters. Before each unit, she groups the 26 children based on initial assessments, takes a few days to observe them in the smaller groups and revises the groups again, sometimes as often as every day.
In the decimal unit, one group might learn to add decimals using blocks they can manipulate with their hands, while another might be able to draw the models on their own. Yet another might practice using the algorithm for adding. The last group might be asked to analyze a word problem and apply the calculation.
“I can really hone in on their performance and see if they need to move up to a group that will help them access the same content in a way that works for them,” said Ms. Sears, who refers to the technique as dynamic grouping. “Are they an abstract learner, are they someone who needs to draw a picture, are they someone who needs to move their body, are they someone that likes to work alone?”
She said the minority children in her class were more or less evenly distributed among the groups.
African-American and Hispanic children make up about 15 percent of Woodman’s population, its principal, Patrick Boodey, said. More than half of the school’s students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Socioeconomic factors are a stronger indicator of where a student will end up than race, he said, with minorities spread among groups but with many poorer children congregating in lower-tier groups and remedial programs.
Ability grouping in reading has been a common practice at the school for at least a decade, and more teachers are beginning to group children in math as well, he said. The school has so embraced the practice that Ms. Sears will go to Maine this summer to train teachers in two districts in grouping.
“Dynamic grouping is the norm, and it’s going to continue to be,” Mr. Boodey said.
Who’s Minding the Schools?
By ANDREW HACKER and CLAUDIA DREIFUS
IN April, some 1.2 million New York students took their first Common Core State Standards tests, which are supposed to assess their knowledge and thinking on topics such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and a single matrix equation in a vector variable.
Students were charged with analyzing both fiction and nonfiction, not only through multiple-choice answers but also short essays. The mathematics portion of the test included complex equations and word problems not always included in students’ classroom curriculums. Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.
These students, in grades 3 through 8, are taking part in what may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history. By the 2014-15 academic year, public schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia will administer Common Core tests to students of all ages. (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have so far held out; Minnesota will use only the Common Core English test.) Many Catholic schools have also decided to implement the Common Core standards; most private, nonreligious schools have concluded that the program isn’t for them.
Many of these “assessments,” as they are called, will be more rigorous than any in the past. Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability.
It is the uniformity of the exams and the skills ostensibly linked to them that appeal to the Core’s supporters, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Bill and Melinda Gates. They believe that tougher standards, and eventually higher standardized test scores, will make America more competitive in the global brain race. “If we’ve encouraged anything from Washington, it’s for states to set a high bar for what students should know to be able to do to compete in today’s global economy,” Mr. Duncan wrote to us in an e-mail.
But will national, ramped-up standards produce more successful students? Or will they result in unintended consequences for our educational system?
By definition, America has never had a national education policy; this has indeed contributed to our country’s ambivalence on the subject. As it stands, the Common Core is currently getting hit mainly from the right. Tea Party-like groups have been gaining traction in opposition to the program, arguing that it is another intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans by a faceless elite. While we don’t often agree with the Tea Party, we’ve concluded that there’s more than a grain of truth to their concerns.
The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum — one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core.
WHAT became the Common Core began quite modestly. Several years ago, many organizations, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, whose members are top-ranking state education officials, independently noticed that the content and scoring of high school “exit” tests varied widely between states. In 2006, for instance, 91 percent of students in Mississippi passed a mathematics exit exam on the first attempt, while only 65 percent did so in Arizona. At the same time, students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress often differed from the state results.
This was not just embarrassing: it looked unprofessional. The governors and the school chiefs decided to work together to create a single set of standards and a common grading criteria. Private funding, led by some $35 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allowed the coalition to spread its wings. Aligning tests became an opportunity to specify what every American child should know.
In 2009, an education consultant named David Coleman was retained to help develop the program, and he and other experts ended up specifying, by our count, more than 1,300 skills and standards. Mr. Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and the son of Bennington College’s departing president, is known as a driven worker as well as for his distaste for personal memoir as a learning tool. Last year, he was selected to lead the College Board, which oversees A.P. exams and the SATs.
Of course, the 45 states that have decided to implement the Common Core did so willingly. While federal agencies did not have a role in the program’s creation, the Obama administration signaled to states in 2009 that they should embrace the standards if they hoped to win a grant through the federal program known as Race to the Top.
For all its impact, the Common Core is essentially an invisible empire. It doesn’t have a public office, a board of directors or a salaried staff. Its Web sitelists neither a postal address nor a telephone number.
On its surface, the case for the Common Core is compelling. It is widely known that American students score well below their European and Asian peers in reading and math, an alarming shortfall in a competitive era. According to the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, the United States ranks 24th out of 34 countries in “mathematics literacy,” trailing Sweden and the Czech Republic, and 11th in “reading literacy,” behind Estonia and Poland. (South Korea ranks first in both categories.) Under the Common Core, students in participating states will immediately face more demanding assignments. Supporters are confident that students will rise to these challenges and make up for our country’s lag in the global education race. We are not so sure.
Students in Kentucky were the first to undergo the Common Core’s testing regimen; the state adopted the standards in 2010. One year later, its students’ scores fell across the board by roughly a third in reading and math. Perhaps one cannot blame the students, or the teachers — who struggle to teach to the new, behemoth test that, in some cases, surpasses their curriculums — for the drop in scores.
Here’s one high school math standard: Represent addition, subtraction, multiplication, and conjugation of complex numbers geometrically on the complex plane; use properties of this representation for computation. Included on New York state’s suggested reading list for ninth graders are Doris Lessing, Albert Camus and Rainer Maria Rilke. (In many parts of the country, Kurt Vonnegut and Harper Lee remain the usual fare.)
More affluent students, as always, will have parental support. Private tutoring, already a growth industry, will become more important if passing scores on the Common Core are required for graduation. Despite worthy aims, the new standards may well deepen the nation’s social divide.
The Common Core is not oblique in its aim: to instill “college and career readiness” in every American teenager — in theory, a highly democratic ideal. In the past, students were unabashedly tracked, which usually placed middle-class students in academic courses and their working-class peers in vocational programs. New York City had high schools for cooking, printing and needle trades. (There was even one in Brooklyn called Manual Training.) Indeed, the aim of these schools was to prepare a slice of society for blue-collar life. Since the 1960s, this has been seen as undemocratic. Today, students are typically required to take algebra, so they will have more options upon graduation (should they graduate). The irony — and tragedy — is that students who don’t surmount these hurdles now fall even further.
Already, almost one-quarter of young Americans do not finish high school. In Utah and Oklahoma, roughly 20 percent don’t; the proportion rises to 32 percent in South Carolina and 42 percent in Nevada. What does the Common Core offer these students?
The answer is simple. “College and career skills are the same,” Ken Wagner, New York State’s associate commissioner of education for curriculum, assessment and educational technology, told us. The presumption is that the kind of “critical thinking” taught in classrooms — and tested by the Common Core — improves job performance, whether it’s driving a bus or performing neurosurgery. But Anthony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, calls the Common Core a “one-size-fits-all pathway governed by abstract academic content.”
IN sum, the Common Core takes as its model schools from which most students go on to selective colleges. Is this really a level playing field? Or has the game been so prearranged that many, if not most, of the players will fail?
Debate is now stirring within partisan circles. Glenn Beck sees the Common Core as “leftist indoctrination.” The Republican National Committee calls it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.” Republican governors and legislators in Indiana, Kansas, Georgia andseveral other states are talking about reconsidering their participation. Yet conservative scholars at the Manhattan and Fordham institutes laud it as promising “a far more rigorous, content-rich, cohesive K-12 education.” Some corporate C.E.O.’s favor it because they say it will upgrade the work force. Mr. Duncan is one of the lone liberal voices in support of the program. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, supports the plan, which she calls “revolutionary.” That said, she has called for a moratorium on judging teachers and schools by the first round of assessments, which she fears are sometimes being implemented hastily and without needed support.
For Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and former assistant education secretary, the program is predicated on “the idea that you can’t trust teachers.” If we want our children taught from standardized scripts, she told us, let’s say so and accept the consequences.
For our part, we’re tired of seeing teachers cast as scapegoats, of all the carping over unions and tenure. It is time teachers are as revered in society as doctors or scientists, and allowed to work professionally without being bound by reams of rules.
Still, there’s an upside to the Common Core’s arrival. As the public better appreciates its sweep, there is likely to be much discussion about schools and what we want them to do. Ideally, this will involve a reconsideration of the contours of knowledge and the question of how we can become a better-educated nation.
Hickenlooper and Johnston: Revamp teacher licensing in Colorado
Colorado has established itself as one of the national leaders in education innovation, and we continue to see encouraging results in schools and districts across the state. As a critical part of this development, we have focused on what it will take to attract, develop and retain a world-class supply of teachers and principals. The gate that regulates the flow of these talented educators is our state system of licensure, a system that has not seen a real upgrade since 1991. While innovative for that time, it was built for a vastly different labor market than the one we live in now.
To that end, we will convene a working group to engage all of the major stakeholders in helping us develop comprehensive and ambitious legislative recommendations for the 2014 session. We know that we will soon have a generation of teachers retiring, and that we currently lose 50 percent of our teachers in their first five years for reasons that include lack of opportunities for career growth.
We also know that today's young professionals are more mobile than ever: The average graduate of college in 2013 will have between eight and 10 different careers in his or her lifetime. And it is now common knowledge that teacher effectiveness is the most important school factor that determines a student's success; the second most important factor is the effectiveness of the school leader.
We must adapt and build a 21st century licensure system that recruits highly talented career changers and other non-traditional candidates and then provides the training and ongoing support that they need to be successful. We must ensure that our rural districts can take advantage of skilled and committed community leaders who want to serve their state by teaching, instead of letting important teaching positions go unfilled for weeks or months on end. At the same time, we must also take a hard look at the quality of teacher and principal preparation programs in our state and offer them more flexibility to innovate and adapt.
We have built a world-class teacher and principal evaluation system that links evaluations to student growth and observation, and yet we have a licensure system that routinely renews licenses regardless of performance and forces expert teachers and novice teachers alike to go through the same mandated professional development, regardless of their skills and needs. We should instead consider linking our evaluation system to grant professional licenses based on strong performance, allow those who are consistently effective to have their license automatically renewed, and ensure that teachers who need support get professional development targeted to their areas of growth.
Finally, we should identify excellent teachers and principals with the skills and knowledge to be outstanding coaches and peer evaluators who will help mentor and develop a new generation of educators. We propose developing a set of career pathways that will offer some of our best educators more responsibility and compensation to stay in the classroom while providing challenging opportunities for others to become school or district level leaders.
Reps. Millie Hamner and Carol Murray as well as Sen. Owen Hill have already stepped up to help lead this critical bipartisan effort. Over the coming months, the Donnell-Kay Foundation will support an inclusive stakeholder process that will gather feedback from all over the state and help make an update of educator licensure a top priority in the 2014 legislative session.
John Hickenlooper is governor of Colorado. State Sen. Michael Johnston is a Democrat from Denver.
Mmmmmmm.........could argue with some of this....
Few
professionals have suffered more
painfully or seriously from
'being done good at’ than teachers.
In
spite of the fact that they are the
ones who work day in and day out on
the
firing line, the definition of their
problems, of their roles, of their goals,
always seems to be someone
else's’
responsibility.
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