You Work Hard For The Money

From the January 2008 NEA Today:

Americans spent 1,080 hours actually teaching (not counting lunch duty or anything else). But the international average is much lower—803 for elementary schools, 707 for junior high, and 664 for high schools.

I’m not sure what to make of these numbers, or even if they have any meaning. Are teachers in other countries getting more collaborative time, therefore having less instructional time?

Also be sure to check out New York City Educator’s recent post on time. He has some frustrating stats on what Americans are doing that will make you think.

Read more here, if any.

The Nagging Question of Teacher Quality

If you set the way-back machine to October 2nd (yes, I'm a bit behind in my reading) you'll find this neat commentary by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. It's not the most ground-breaking article--pay enough attention, and you'll see 20 or more like it in a year--but there is some thought there that bears attention, particularly this:

Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

.....

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

Developing such a system would be difficult. But it’s both doable and essential. Getting serious about teacher quality as opposed to harping on tiny variations in test scores would be like moving from a jalopy to a jet.

These are the good intentions with which the road to hell is paved. Some thoughts:

1) The thought taht you can judge a teacher from their first couple years in the clasroom is a tough one for me to agree with. My first year was great; the kids performed at a high level, and I felt really good about what I was doing. My 2nd and 3rd years were terrible, and I seriously thought about leaving teaching. In my 5th year I was voted Teacher of the Year for my school and getting great results again.

It's a cycle, like many things in life. If you use results as a sole measuring stick in those first few years, you're going to run some people out of the profession who have a chance to make a real difference.

2) The idea that you can wed classroom performance and evaluation without impacting the tradition of tenure is a bit naive. If you look at how the kids do on their tests as an evaluation tool you're going reflect negatively on many, many teachers, fairly or not, and that will have an impact.

3) I wish I had a good answer for getting the best teachers to the kids who need them most, I really do. The pisser for the academics who think about these kinds of issues is that all the free-market, Taylorized incentives in the world aren't going to get the hueristic answer, for the simple fact that people change, their goals change, and how they teach changes. I might to a great job with the kids I have, but there's no way of knowing if I can replicate that with inner-city kids or not beyond experimentation that I don't want to be a part of.

I don't know what the answer to teacher quality is in the system we have now. Intuitively, I don't think that the recent NYC merit pay proposal is a step, for many of the reasons that NYC Educator discusses in the link. Intuitively, it feels like extending the school day should work, but as Ken over ad D-Ed Reckoning is fond of pointing out all the extra time in the world won't make a difference for the kids who get it if we keep on with the same lousy practices that have gotten the same lousy results.

Read more here, if any.

There was time now. There was all the time I needed....

I award 10 “I Thought a Think Points” to any of you who get that.

I got my new issue of the Harvard Education Letter in the mail a couple of days ago, and the back page article by Richard Elmore is an interesting one. He argues that nearly three thousand hours of instructional time is lost over the course of a student’s school career because of inefficiencies in how the school day and year are structured. Testing takes a hit because it’s not new instructional time; he similarly criticizes the “end-of-year letdown” for needlessly letting contact time go to waste.

He’s right, the time is wasted.

He’s hopeless, because there’s not a whole lot that can be done about the situation.

My kids start showing up in the morning at about 8:45; we walk out to the busses at 3:15. That’s 6.5 hours I have to use, but there’s an hour off of the top for the midday lunch and recess time. You can also assume 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day to either get the kids settled or get them ready to go. We typically take about a 15 minute break every morning, because I have no preps in the morning and they need the chance to cut loose. That’s 1 hour and 45 minutes of time gone, leaving 4:45 for teaching.

Except that I have an average of 45 minutes a day of prep time, so that knocks the total time down to four hours a day for teaching time. An educated guess would be that I lose another half hour a day through things like walking the kids to their specialist classes, transitioning between activities, and the like, so in a 6.5 hour day I really only have 3 hours of instructional time. Troubling? Perhaps, but it’s the way it is.

So how do we make more instructional time? Some schools are cutting recess and the arts, which is a profound mistake on either end, but I can understand the instinct. At my own school we’ve made a change from offering band AND music to 5th and 6th graders, to giving them a choice between band OR music. They still get something, just not as much as they used to. They were losing two hours a week of instruction because not every kid was in band, but you couldn’t teach new skills solely to the kids who were left behind when the band kids were gone, so it was wasted time.

But if you look at the time lost to processes, there really isn’t a way to get that back. My kids are going to take 15 minutes to get ready to go—that’s just the way it is with 6 year olds. At the beginning of the day the kids trickle in during a 20-minute window instead of all showing up at the same time, and there’s nothing I can do as a classroom teacher to fix that problem, either. I could try to shore up the 30 minutes of time that we lose over the course of the day during our transitions, but there really is only so much I can do there, too.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to think about extending the school day. It’s what they do in KIPP and a bunch of other charter schools, and it’s certainly what some kids need. This month’s issue of District Administration magazine has an article about the idea of IEPs for every child; imagine what we could do with all the kids from the highest to the lowest with one extra hour a day.

It can’t happen, because of finances.
It can’t happen, because of the contract.
It can’t happen, because of the kids.
It can’t happen, because of the parents.

But if it could....

Read more here, if any.