Rep. Reuven Carlyle on Teach for America

Rep. Carlyle, out of Seattle's 36th legislative district, had a pair of posts here and here looking at a potential future for Teach for America in the Seattle Public Schools.

I'm not anti-TFA. Good for them for wanting to make a difference. The issue I have is that right now the certification process is far too onerous on everyone--ProCert is a damned nightmare--and it's fundamentally unfair to say that one group of teachers can come into the schools with only 5 weeks of training while another has to play the games that the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the State Board of Education, and the Professional Educators Standards Board have set up.

Part of this is on the feds, too--remember HOUSSE?--and this national schizophrenia we seem to have over what we want a teacher to be.

It'll be an interesting legislative session.

Read more here, if any.

The Best Thing the State Could Do Is to Stop Screwing With Certification

In the eyes of the state, I'm not a qualified reading teacher.

I've been teaching 1st grade for 8 years. For the last two years during our walk-to-read time I've taken on the lowest group, those kids needing the most remediation. I've planned before school intervention programs, after school programs, been trained in Read Naturally, DIBELS, and Reading Mastery, and I've got the test results to show that *it has worked.* I love, love, love working with developing readers, and I wouldn't trade for anything the feeling of seeing a kid turn on that light and become a capable, competent reader.

But in the eyes of the state, I'm not a qualified reading teacher.

In May I wandered up to Mead High School and took the WEST-E, which tests your teaching knowledge in a variety of subject areas. Passing is 240; I got a 288. By that measure, then, I'm amply qualified to teach reading.

But still, in the eyes of the state, I'm not a qualified reading teacher.

I can add an endorsement by doing the National Boards, which holds absolutely zero interest for me, enrolling in a program through one of the local colleges, which I don't have the money to do, or pursuing a Pathway II endorsement through one of the local colleges. If I did that, I'd pick Wazzu-Spokane. It'll cost me $1,600.

This is bullshit.





Reading around, one of the things that they say that you should do to make yourself useful to your employer is to have a varied skill set--don't be able to do only one thing, or when that one things goes away you're not needed any more. I've written about this before thinking about school psychologists and music teachers, but it holds true universally.

It used to be that with the Golden Certificate you could teach any subject, any time. That went away because of the stereotype of the ineffective teacher who was qualified in the eyes of the state but in reality sucked at their job.

So we substituted that for the initial/continuing paradigm, and added endorsements into the mix. Now the thought was that forcing teachers into getting continuing credits and clock hours would keep them fresh, keep them vital, keep them "in the game" in a way that would benefit kids.

Turns out, clock hours and continuing credits were often a joke. I've sat in the summer "workshops" filled with very honest, very cynical teachers who were there just so they could get their certificate renewed. So we threw away that system and piled on Professional Certification instead. Now, we'll be performance based! Portfolios! Evidence! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

By my math, how we "do" ProCert has changed at least 5 times since I was part of the first ProCert group to go through Eastern in 2004. Instead of actually paying attention to their students we have young teachers assembling binder after binder after binder to demonstrate their mastery of a profession that they shouldn't have mastered yet, usually putting out thousands of dollars that they don't have in the process.

The dream of a highly qualified and effective teacher in every classroom is a good one; it's where we should be. The certification process as we're doing it now, though, has become so divorced from that goal as to be totally irrelevent. Because "we" "can't" get rid of "bad teachers", the system has been constructed in such a way that good teachers can't get into positions that they would excel at, and at the same time people are faced with as steep an uphill climb as exists in any profession just to keep their jobs, and that's ridiculous.

What's the solution? Simple, to me: shitcan the whole set-up. Start taking power back from the Professional Educators Standards Board. Say a hearty "Hell no!" to the certification changes that were embodied in HB2261. Stop acting like National Certification is the be-all, end-all of teacher effectiveness, because the Board process was never intended to be for everyone.

There's more than compensation involved in job satisfaction. Want to make a teacher's job easier? Make it easier for them to actually be a teacher, without having to worry about 10 tons of crap falling from on high. The fixes to certification in Washington have broken the system even more--it's time to start over.

Read more here, if any.

The LEV Has BP

I had some free time today, so I finally was able to spend quality minutes with the 2009 Citizens Report Card on Washington State Education from the League of Education Voters. I like schools, and this is a mostly inoffensive read, but one part that jumped out at me (under our C+ grade for "Raising the bar--for everyone."):

Strategies:
*Expand alternative pathways for subject-area experts to become teachers.
...
*Revise and strengthen the state's definition of Highly Qualified Teacher to require an academic major in the subject area being taught.

Don't those seem kinda mutually exclusive?

Take the oft-cited theoretical engineer, who majored in engineering. She might be a math wiz, but if that wasn't her major it would seem that the LEV would deem her to be NOT highly qualified.

Similarly, the computer sciences. Most of your Microsoft engineers weren't math majors, even though they might be pretty sharp at it, but under what the LEV proposes here they wouldn't be HQ to teach math, either.

I'm not against alternate pathways; if they fill a need and they get good people into the classroom, that's a happy thing. But it's hard to see how you can promote both alternate pathways AND subject area degrees, because there's quite a divide between the two.

Read more here, if any.

Dust in the Wind, National Boards Edition

Want to know what happens if the bonus for getting National Board Certified goes away? This is what:

Just this month the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards announced that 1,826 Florida teachers had achieved National Board Certification after a grueling process that took a year or more. They were culled from 4,000 who sought the status, with Broward County alone having 358 who made the grade.

But this year only about 400 statewide are going after certification, with those achieving it next year expected to dwindle to a handful.

That's a 90% reduction. Why?

Cost-saving measures by the state have cut the program off at the knees. Last year's $100 million budget for the program was reduced to $55 million for this school year, with some educators fearful even more cuts may come.

In previous years the state paid 90 percent of the $2,500 fee to enter the program, which trains teachers to improve instruction and then judges what they have accomplished. The state also offered an annual 10 percent pay bonus for certified teachers, plus another 10 percent -- about $4,500 -- for certified teachers who agreed to mentor other teachers.

But with the state's economy collapsing in the face of the housing bust and reduced tax revenues, the Legislature axed the money to pay the initial certification fee. Only a few teachers in high-need schools qualify this year for partial-fee payment through a federal program.

I still feel good about the National Boards bonus here in Washington going forward, based on my reading of what legislators are saying, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see an attack on the bonus from some quarter or another.

As a local president, if my members asked if I thought the money was still going to be there if they went ahead, I'd give them a qualified yes.

Read more here, if any.

It's Only Tax Money--Who Cares How It's Spent?

Did you hear the one about the $50 million dollar federal program to make it easier to certify teachers?

So far, they've only gotten 200 folks certified.

As a return on investment, spending $250,000 per teacher doesn't seem very fiscally responsible.

Read more here, if any.