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HideWhile Elizabeth is enjoying a well-deserved vacation in the wilds of Wisconsin this week, take a look at what’s she’s been working on these last few months: A New York Times Magazine cover story about the building blocks of good teaching.
The story is centered on Doug Lemov, a founder of the Uncommon Schools charter chain who realized that no matter how much schools tinker with — or even fundamentally restructure — their curriculum, schedule, and use of data, they can still be left with mediocre teaching. So he decided to figure out how to make teachers great.
From Elizabeth’s article:
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. …
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
School districts should abandon lay-off policies that require principals to dismiss the newest teachers first and instead incorporate measures of teacher quality into firing decisions, a new report out today from The New Teacher Project argues.
The report proposes a scorecard that would rank teachers, weighing their classroom management skills, attendance, performance evaluations and length of service to the district to determine who should be laid off. Under the group’s proposal, a teacher’s performance rating would be given the most weight, while his or her number of years served would count for only a tenth of their score.
By doing so, the report argues, school districts can avoid laying off their best teachers who may not have worked in the system the longest. (more…)
More than a month after the citywide school board voted to close 19 schools, City Council and Comptroller John Liu are reexamining the criteria that city officials used to declare the schools failures.
Liu, who campaigned for comptroller on the promise of auditing the Department of Education’s data, announced today that his office is beginning an investigation of the DOE’s progress reports — the annual report cards that assign each school a letter grade, largely based on students’ test scores. Later this afternoon, the City Council’s education committee held a hearing where members accused department officials of targeting large, struggling high schools without considering what would become of their current students. Department officials defended the schools they chose to close, citing the schools’ abysmal graduation rate.
“This is not a random list,” said Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation, John White. “These are the lowest performers even considered among a set of schools where students are not achieving at acceptable levels.” (more…)
Diane Ravitch offered a first look at her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” at a GothamSchools event in December where she explained that seeing education theories play out in reality caused her to change her mind about standardized testing, school choice, and the entire notion of “accountability.”
Today, the book officially hit shelves, after receiving a spate of favorable reviews in major newspapers. People who have been following Ravitch’s transformation in recent years will find much of her argument familiar. Still, her book offers those who are new to the story a 240-page primer on major trends in education policy — trends that Ravitch says are undermining the country’s once-great schools.
While the book contains Ravitch’s take on New York City’s recent education history — hint: she’s not positive — it is by no means solely about New York. Ravitch also weaves tales from San Diego and Washington, D.C, where activist superintendents have pushed aggressive changes, into a big picture about the general direction of American education. New Yorkers did play a special role in helping Ravitch prepare the book for publication: Diana Senechal, a city teacher who has contributed to GothamSchools, was her research assistant.
Visit the community section to read an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Ravitch describes why her favorite high school teacher wouldn’t succeed in today’s data-driven teaching environment. Also, Queens teacher Arthur Goldstein, who received an advance copy, offers a glowing endorsement.
Here’s a sign that our reporting on a grade-changing scandal and the intense pressure on schools to perform or shut down have entered the public consciousness: Law & Order used the storyline last night.
Returning to NBC’s 10 pm spot, the series debuted “Boy on Fire” last night, a story that (judging by the sudden flood of emails I got) seemed to strike a chord with the city’s public school teachers. I didn’t catch the episode, but those who did report that it bore some similarities to the case of grade-changing at Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx, where the executive principal who was hired with a $25,000 bonus is still under investigation for changing grades in order to boost the school’s graduation rate. (more…)
Over in the community section, C. W. Arp just posted the conclusion of his three-part series about Ms. Stone and Ms. Fire, two contrasting teachers at the elementary school where Arp teaches.
In the first installments of the series, Arp questioned how two teachers with such different styles can be equally effective and explained how each teacher has a different powerful strategy for coercing students into completing their work. In the conclusion, Arp reveals that anxiety over having to deal with troublesome students has made him more like Ms. Stone than Ms. Fire, despite his intentions. He writes:
Philosophically, I think that I agree with Ms. Fire. Mistakes, frustration, jokes and play should be a part of every child’s learning experience. They should be a part of every day of their lives. But I am so afraid of Lucases, I am so conditioned by the explosions that I have had to quell, the fights that I have had to break up, that I act much more like Ms. Stone. And this is surprising, truly, because in my wildest dreams I never thought that I would be this kind of teacher.