The Achievement Gap and Teacher Training
Note: The tone of this post is a little more serious and it has no very little swearing. I know that will turn some people off, and I apologize.
Under normal circumstances, analogies between teachers and doctors trigger in me a powerful, irresistible gag reflex. I hate reading about how we both have a practice, for example. However, I have found a place where the analogy between teachers and doctors makes sense, but only if we proceed seriously and follow where it leads.
Be warned.
It leads us to a very expensive, inconvenient and time-consuming place. It leads us to a disruptive place where the value of sloppy but lucrative teacher preparation programs is sharply questioned. It leads us to a place where teachers will be forced to invest more and be far more deliberate as they decide to take up this job. It’s a place where policymakers look forward, take risks, and commit. This place would probably annoy almost everybody.
But the entire business of preparing teachers in the United States begs for a fundamental rethinking and should, in fact, look more like that of doctors. I propose an approach that would take the two imperatives of training teachers and closing the Achievement Gap seriously. Two sides of the same coin.
As training doctors is to improving health outcomes.
Responding to Increased Diversity in the Classroom
In the recent book, The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present, and Future (Harvard, 2011), editors Darrel Drury and Justin Baer detail the “phenomenal increase in the diversity and inclusiveness of U.S. public schools” in the past 50 years. They note increases in violence, poverty and emotional, attention and behavioral disorders; as well as the erosion of discipline. They wonder aloud whether the largely white, middle-class teacher corps can effectively teach poor minority children. In 1979, 8 percent of children in the U.S. spoke a language other than English at home. Now it is 21 percent and rising. The elimination of tracking has led to a broader range of aptitudes, attitudes and abilities in every American classroom.
Whatever one thinks of these changes or their causes, there is no question that they have all added greatly to the complexity and difficulty of teaching as a job.
We continue to adjust to this still-changing reality in ad hoc ways, even as the costs of a system that is not reaching all children soar. It has become painfully clear that broken families in poor neighborhoods, incessant testing, accountability plans, catchy slogans, earnest wishes, raising the bar, good intentions and even high expectations are not going to close the Achievement Gap. After ten years, Congress is now in the process of declaring No Child Left Behind a failure.
Shit rolls downhill. One way or another, more pressure and blame is likely to continue falling to teachers. So, now what?
Teachers and Doctors
In his contribution to Drury and Baer, Joseph Aguerrebere, President and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, argues that what teaching needs is more uniformity in its training and preparation. Multiple paths to certification within states, good ones and bad ones alike, have left the profession without a solid center. He argues that the teaching profession might look to medicine as a model of what could be done in developing a core of agreed content knowledge and a skill set in order to enter the profession; a verifiable minimum that everybody would have to reach to teach. This is a start, but it does not go nearly far enough.
As the medical field has advanced, training for doctors has responded by becoming more specialized and diversified. One can no longer legally get one’s foot amputated by a barber, for example. After a general course of medical study, the modern medical student selects a sub-field and commits to specialized, intensive coursework and clinical study in, say, orthopedics or infectious diseases. Nobody calls a pediatric cardiologist or a dentist for a kidney transplant. Not anymore.
As much as there is a basic core of similarity to all teaching and doctoring jobs, there is perhaps just as much that distinguishes members of both groups internally. The diversity of our jobs as public school teachers is driven by the diversity of our student populations every bit as much as it is driven by our grade levels and content areas.
I would argue that teaching 4th grade language arts in an upper middle class suburb is actually a different job than teaching 4th grade language arts in an impoverished urban neighborhood. On average, children in the impoverished urban neighborhood will know many thousand fewer words than their suburban counterparts, have fewer parents, have poorer health and nutrition, and have less support for academics at home and in the neighborhood. The effect of these differences, begun long before the children enrolled in school, is magnified over time and is not being systematically, competently addressed in classrooms.
This IS the Achievement Gap.
If we aspire to close it, training all 4th grade teachers in the same way makes no sense. Either that, or teacher training is actually not important after all. I don’t see a third possibility. Do you?
But if the very essence of teaching has become more difficult and important over time, as I believe it has, then the preparation of teachers should reflect this. By failing to take seriously how the diversity of students imposes a diversity of challenges on teachers, we fail them both.
Outline of a Program
A teacher education program should take six years and end in a master’s degree. Period. In the end, this will be good for both teachers and students.
If you want to teach, you must complete a course of general education study that is more or less similar to everybody who hopes to teach. Perhaps this would look like the core of knowledge and skills suggested by Aguerrebere. At the end of four years, a student could gain a general education BA which would qualify him to be a teachers’ assistant or work in other capacities in the school or district. But he could not be a full-time classroom teacher. Perhaps assistant positions, which are greatly needed in any case, could be Teach for America’s true calling. ( Dear Lord, please think about this. Amen.)
In the final two years of study, the teacher candidate would declare a specialty that reflects the subject and student population the candidate expects to teach. Specialties might include rural education, vocabulary development for kids who were not read to at home, elementary math, Appalachian literacy, or science in the suburbs. These specialties would be constructed from rigorous courses in the discipline to be taught; the cognition and development of the appropriate age group; and the unique strengths and challenges of the relevant population. Courses addressing the needs of specialized student populations would be complemented by many hours of classroom observations, practice, and discussions with veteran teachers, peers, principals and parents.
Within each of these academic sub-fields, and many others, there already exist small armies of Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s and graduate students who would be delighted to develop curriculum to share what they have discovered. Academic work in education is one of a limited number of fields where such work could actually be useful to the general public in a very basic way.
This approach to teacher training would move us closer to three separate goals, all of which would positively impact the Achievement Gap and the way teachers experience their jobs. It would:
1) Better prepare teachers with knowledge and skills relevant to their specific student populations;
2) Lubricate the labor market for teachers and reduce teacher turnover;
3) Increase the overall prestige and selectiveness of teaching.
I discuss these goals next.
Goal #1: Better Prepared Teachers
We are reluctant to think too hard about how difficult some children may be to teach. (Actually, that’s a lie. Teachers think about it and talk about it all the time. As a society we are reluctant to talk about it publicly, is more accurate.)
Are students at Deal Middle School, a public middle school in the wealthiest ward of Washington, DC, easier or more difficult to teach than students at Johnson Middle School, a public middle school in the DC’s poorest ward? Which first-year teacher do you think is having an easier go of things so far this year, the one teaching at the school where 89 percent of students tested proficient or above in math last year; or the one teaching where 17 percent tested proficient or above in math last year?
Can you guess which school is which?
The answers are as obvious as they are impolitic to speak out loud. The questions immediately force us to confront issues of race and class; and we are not good at that.
However, I’ll remind you that we have an Achievement Gap. It is large, important, and persistent. And it is defined precisely by race and class. If we cannot talk about race and class in education, I’m not sure we will be able to fix this problem. We need to stop worrying about hurting people’s feelings and address these issues honestly in the training of those who are charged with fixing everything; the teachers. Anything less is simply unfair and dishonest.
We should stop creating programs to simply entice people to teach in “high needs” schools. Instead, we should work to prepare people to teach in high needs schools. We need to be more honest about what constitutes a “high needs” school. In a nutshell, it is a school in which a critical mass of students are academically far behind where they should be and are generally unwilling or unable to cooperate in correcting this. The reality is that this is the dominant vibe teachers in high needs schools face all day long, every single day.
For a teacher, it’s a very difficult spot to be in. Perhaps unreasonable. A teacher working in such an environment would benefit from serious, specialized training. Inadequate preparation for the apathy and discipline problems in such schools chews up hundreds of thousands of teachers every year; as do the bone-headed administrative mandates that coerce teachers into pretending there is no problem here that cannot be solved with an objective written just so-and-so and an interactive word wall. The teachers stay on, frustrated, embittered, and demoralized; or leave teaching; or move to a “low needs” school. This persistent pattern has thus far been ineffective in closing the Achievement Gap.
Implications of this for a teacher training program are almost certainly that someone teaching in a high poverty school should have a significantly different course of study than his counterpart in the affluent suburbs or the countryside. The poor kids in the city, in the trailer park or downstream from the coal mine all deserve a teacher who is ready; who has studied their challenges and is as prepared as possible to minimize the deleterious effects of student challenges on student learning outcomes.
It has been 10 years since No Child Left Behind and almost 30 years since A Nation at Risk. The usual comment about A Nation at Risk is something like can you believe how little progress we’ve made since then? Fair enough. But the nation did begin to take public education and its problems more seriously. And, though we are stuck now, the low-hanging fruit of the Achievement Gap has since been picked. We have learned a lot since 1983. Since that time, the volume of education studies and reports by government, academics and NGOs has been truly stunning.
What is the best way to put this knowledge to work?
Much of it looks at relatively narrow slices of the student population in terms of demographics and/or disciplines. As such, this work and its discoveries are generally far too narrow to be mentioned, much less thoughtfully considered, in teacher education curricula. But a real teacher’s day is generally spent working in two or three of these narrow slices of the global student population. Why not clue them in on what we know about their students? A teacher could be much better prepared if her graduate education work had required her to engage the core findings of research and practice pertaining to her students’ slices from the past three decades.
Goal #2: Lubricate the Labor Market for Teachers
Teachers often feel overwhelmed and under prepared. For many teachers, it is a short step from there to despair, hopelessness and then looking for a new job. Thus, we see a tremendous number of teachers leaving the field or switching schools every year. This constant churn in the teaching force is not good for anybody, students and teachers in particular. It makes it difficult for school administrators to grow and guide a steady, maturing teaching staff and for the teaching staff to genuinely feel and act as a team. This is particularly true in low-income, high needs schools, from which most of the churn arises and in which the Achievement Gap lives.
Imagine a prospective teacher is applying for a kindergarten language arts and social studies position. Imagine that the prospective teacher could tell a principal that he has taken 3 graduate seminars in early childhood literacy and vocabulary acquisition and spent 250 hours teaching and observing students demographically similar to those in this principal’s building.
Imagine the prospective teacher had completed a mini-residency of 60 hours in this very building (much like doctors and law students do). This would minimize uncertainty for both the new teacher and the principal. A program that includes more and better coursework coupled with extensive exposure to the type of environment the new teacher is likely to find himself in will reduce the likelihood that he will be surprised and overwhelmed by his new life in the classroom.
Time spent in the school will also give the teacher and administration a sense of how the other operates. I have had principals I’ve liked and others with whom I have had horrible personality conflicts and professional disagreements. I was hired in one school without ever having met the principal; who, it turns out, I couldn’t stand. Spending a little time in a few prospective schools would diminish this risk and lead to increases in job satisfaction and teacher retention.
Goal #3: Increase Prestige and Respect for Teaching Profession
In our collective consciousness, the competencies most associated with teaching are really not competencies at all. Rather, they are personality traits like patience and empathy. Teaching, of course, would be impossible without these. But it should require much, much more. At parties people will tell you they could never be a teacher because they don’t have enough patience. Or they hate kids or something like that. But, as far as I know, nobody has ever said they aren’t a teacher because they weren’t accepted to a good teacher education program; or they couldn’t pass the state certification test.
It’s not easy to be a teacher. But it might be too easy to become a teacher. Perhaps too many people have entered teaching by way of accident or whim. I include myself in this group. We’re not bad people and many of us are good teachers. (For the record, I do not claim to have the absolute truth about what is or is not a good teacher.)
But what if we put more effort into determining what knowledge and skills we would like people to have before they became teachers and made sure all teachers met this standard? Address it on the front end. What we’re doing now is a sloppy, unfair and chaotic patchwork retrofit on millions of teachers, school by school, district by district; while still creating new loopholes to circumvent and shorten teacher preparation and certification because we just need warm fuckin’ bodies to teach at risk kids in their high needs schools. Doesn’t that seem wrong?
And now, back to your doctor.
Nobody gets to perform surgery, make a diagnosis from your x-rays, or even remove a wart unless they are a doctor. And nobody accidentally becomes a doctor. Nobody becomes a doctor because something else didn’t work out. Nobody becomes a doctor because they “like working with sick people” or because having been an inner city anesthesiologist for two years will look good on their resume.
The decision to become a teacher should require great forethought and intent. You may have to move. If you want to be a math teacher in a high needs school in a big city, but you live in a soybean field in Nebraska, you might have to move. Maybe do the general education BA part of it locally while you consider your options and decide if you really want to be a teacher. (If not, take your BA and do something else. Most people do not work in the field of their BA.) Then apply to schools with strong urban education programs for your master’s work in cities where you hope to teach. This is where you should find the expertise you need. Your friend who wants to teach in a small rural district can go to school right there in Nebraska for six years.
Once you are both on the path, in Nebraska or the big city, it should be difficult. These should be tough programs to complete. If we force people take it seriously, we’ll get serious people.
At present, most education programs are not serious. Most every teacher knows that their education classes were mostly worthless; classes thrown together without much thought or consequence for anyone. Even in my M.Ed. program, at a top 25 education school in the country, my classes were almost all very easy and just plain bad. Many of the classes bordered on insulting and seemed to be mocking me because I was forced to take them. We all knew we were just putting in seat time. Nobody was going to fail this program as long as we all kept writing checks.
Imagine the buzz it would create if just 15 or 20 percent of applicants to graduate education programs were rejected. With a program that is more specialized, and more difficult to enter and complete, the professional/social prestige and respect problem of teaching would be greatly mitigated without all the whining by teachers which, so far anyway, is not working.
Conclusion
I understand this is a tall order with many forces arrayed against it. But the Achievement Gap is a pretty big national problem that is in no way being solved by what we are currently doing. Not only is the problem not being solved, but the current fad of reforms is alienating teachers and de-professionalizing their work. I cannot believe that this is the answer. Instead of investing money to discover new ways of using faulty data to humiliate and punish teachers, let’s acknowledge that their work is complex and important and give them the professional preparation they and their students deserve.
Mr. Teachbad
An interesting proposition, but I would say that specialized training might be better suited to post-employment professional development. Perhaps require school districts to train its teachers, especially the newer ones, for that district’s particular audience.
It seems difficult for someone in their undergraduate years to know where they want to teach, or even to predict where the jobs will be available when they finish their program. Also, is a person then trapped in that specialty for their career? If I chose an urban high-need school and trained for that, then am I stuck there until I have the time and money to retrain for another specialty? For more challenging areas, it seems like this will make it even more difficult to find the number of teachers to meet the revolving door nature of their need for new teachers.
I like that you are looking at different ways to both solve the problem of school needs and meaningful teacher training. Keep the conversation going!
I don’t know. But for the sake of discussion, let’s say that you have to complete a six year MA and teach that group. Let’s see if you survive there for 2 or 3 years. Then we can talk about moving you around. SO many people never make it to year 4 or 5 in the first place. If you have taught 3 years somewhere and done a good job and somebody wants to hire you to teach other kids, great.
I agree, Kim. It would be hard, job wise,–especially in the current teacher climate–to lock yourself in to a particular subculture of student to study. While I believe this is an excellent idea, I think it may be better suited for the particular school districts to train the teachers about their population of students. Hey, it’d be a hell of a lot better than the 8 hours I spent learning about fire drills and chemical warfare on my HR training day.
I agree. Many of us would find it hard to settle on a specialty without having had a few years in the classroom. As a graduate looking for my first job, I told people I’d never go higher than third grade. Now I teach seventh and know it’s my calling.
The points you make in this article are the points I have been desperate to make since I started my teaching program at a “prestigious” teacher-prep college. It was a mockery of education. The exact things they were teaching you NOT to do in a classroom (don’t lecture constantly, differentiate, engage students) were not done to me in my Master’s program. I believe that had I had more hands-on experience in a real school with real kids, time I feel I was not given in my “prestigious” program, I could have made a more level headed decision on teaching. AND I wouldn’t be having the worst year of my life as a first year teacher. I mean, the fact that I have a Master’s is crazy. I didn’t do a thesis, I didn’t research ANYTHING…I read a few articles from publications, wrote responses on Blackboard, and listened to lecture after lecture. Student teaching did nothing to prepare me for the discipline problems I’ve experienced this year. Having a rigorous program, similar to what doctors have, would have prepared me. Too bad everything you’ve said here (and every where else, frankly!) makes too much sense. It’s easy to keep those inner-city schools on the outside, to not give them a chance. At least we’ll still have someone to blame for the shittiness in this country. But, hey, that’s a whole different argument altogether!
Absolutely agree with making teaching programs thought provoking, specific, and useful. Every education class I have ever been in has been a gigantic waste of time. And why was I allowed to begin teaching on a whim without any education coursework or experience?
Additionally, states and districts need to do better supervising school’s leadership. I have encountered a much larger percentage of inept administrators, coaches, and leaders within schools than teachers. How does this go unnoticed?
I don’t see any problem with school leadership.
Psych!! I totally do. I worked for the biggest bunch of catch phrase spewing nimrods on the East Coast. Maybe we should look into New Leaders for New Schools to see where these poor people come from and what they learn.
I believe the proper spelling is “SIKE”. But in all seriousness, I think 10 years of teaching experience should be a minimum for administration.
I agree. I think the standard now is something like you must be able to act like an asshole while ramming a program down teacher’s throats that you haven’t ever used before and don’t understand.
I’ve had a very similar thought.
When I come to power, if you want to be a principal, great! Spend ten years teaching, and then go spend ten years running your own business (with employees). After which you are qualified to run a school.
I agree with your ideas, but I’m not sure they would work.
I love the comparison to doctors. With the increase in percentages of obese and overweight people in the past 20 years, are Americans yelling for “doctor reform” and an overhaul of the medical school curriculum? Are doctors being vilified as incompetent if their patients are still not at the desired weight? Are hospitals forcing doctors out of their jobs because too many of their patients cannot or will not lose weight? I am sure that there are incompetent teachers, just as I can count the number of overweight doctors that I know.
Here is another good teacher/doctor article by Shaun Johnson.
Don’t forget, doctors can drop patients that don’t follow their rules or instructions….
This is absolutely brilliant! I have been thinking these ideas aloud for years: I have frequently said that teaching is the same as brain surgery. We are dealing with brain development here, inasmuch as doctors deal with the physical aspect, as it were. Teaching is very much a PROFESSION, & in order to be accomplished professionals, the training must match the expected outcomes. This is a very serious professional endeavor, not something people should be allowed to do “on a whim.”
Please do us all a favor and send this on to Valerie Strauss to publish in “The Answer Sheet.”
Hopefully, others who are in positions to do something with your ideas will work with you on this one. Good luck!
I definitely agree with teachers not being prepared enough. I student taught all honors classes and only had to raise my voice once all semester. No detentions at all. Fast forward four years and countless detentions and referrals later. I believe i am a good teacher if that was all my job entailed. Now i am a teacher, babysitter, counselor, parent, janitor, etc., and have not received a pay raise and am getting furlouged three days. Oh, and i have a masters degree and bachelors in math education. I should of just left the education off my degree.
I don’t remember a DAMN thing from the yearlong credential program I went through 13 years ago. Actually, the name Piaget was used a lot. Something about languages.
Of course, making people want to go through a program as rigorous as medical training will require………….PAYING them like doctors. Which district wants to be first?
I remember a key part of my teacher training was learning about multiple intelligence surveys. That has been incredibly useful I don’t know where I’d be without them.
Sarcastic bitch…
3 points:
1) if you train teachers like doctors, you are going to have to pay them like doctors, and despite lip service to the contrary, districts clearly prefer cheap teachers to good ones.
2). The teachers you work with must be better than the ones I work with. I know multiple teachers that got canned for being unable to pass the praxis I.
3). Thanks for pointing out one of the biggest lies in Ed: “good instruction is good instruction”. The idea that I have the same job (teaching trigonometry and engineering to seniors) as a first grade art teacher is absurd, but taken in the ed establishment as gospel.
my teacher training program has been largely useless. until last night, when an actual professor said “i don’t give a shit if you’re using inquiry-based instruction or if you’re lecturing at the board – as long as your students are engaged in the material and learning, you’re doing it right.”
i would argue that instead of an education masters, HS content teachers would benefit from a content masters instead. i entered teaching after my PhD, and in my experience, having the deep content knowledge has not only made teaching HS content easier, but it’s helped me to create connections across different topics so that we’re always talking about some part of the “big picture”.
I liked your thinking on this one, but I’ve got some doubts.
First off, I am seriously against pigeon-holing anyone in a career specialty. Imagine for instance, getting your career specialty in a “high needs school” -and why everyone keeps referring to them as high needs schools is unknown to me, they should be referred to as “low parenting skills schools”- specialization, only to have to change specialties 3 or 5 or 7 years later because money got tight in the district and that high needs school closed. I’m not suggesting that there would only be one “high needs” school in town mind you, but I’m sure such places exist. Towards that end, would the teachers whose specialties were in the high needs field then all be out of a job? What if these teachers were significantly better teachers than those in the other schools in town? Still fired? What if we actually paid teachers in -for lack of a better term- “non-high needs schools” specialties, significantly less than those in high needs schools? Would the cream then sink to the bottom? Doubtful.
Secondly, until America addresses its current epidemic of classism, no serious discussion about any “reform” can take place. Here’s an example… Some teachers think they’re doing children a favor by becoming those students’ best friends. I’m talking about being way beyond empathetic here. A reason to act like that would be because that teacher thinks that they’re better than those students or those students’ families, and they therefore feel obligated -out of some self-imposed guilt trip- to baby said students. Babied students then get different teachers -in another grade or another school- and don’t know how to function when they aren’t being babied. Un-teaching learned helplessness is bad enough without having to un-teach learned AND rewarded helplessness. This is oversimplification I know, but I deal with this from students every day. What is best for the students is frequently not what is easiest for the teacher and vice-versa. The so-called middle class in this country –a fictitious place from which most teachers come- has become so out of touch with the so-called lower class that even their ways of thinking are polar opposites. I refer to it as an almost gang or prison or counter-culture mentality that frankly most middle class people are not prepared to deal with. How do prepare someone for either of these things? I don’t give shit how rigorous your teacher prep is, if you’re programmed to have middle class values, you will have battles with those who don’t share those values.
Oh crap. I actually know a brain surgeon. Never has to talk to his patients – they’re trauma victims. He never makes anything worse, and many of the people he “saves” have subsequent lives of possibly little enjoyment. But he doesn’t have to see them or meet them. In medicine, the highest paid doctors interact with patients the least.
I don’t know the stats on people who get accepted into medical school but then are kicked out – I suspect it’s just about as low as teachers. The sifting out takes place at the entry acceptance level, and is mostly defined by grades in math and science courses about material that they will never use again.
And,really? Can you see anyone actually signing up for a lifetime (40 years) of abuse as an inner-city low performance school math teacher? Anyone who does that needs serious psychological assistance. Even doctors who go to help at free clinics, or in 3rd world countries, don’t sign on for a life-long commitment. Hell, 3rd world doctors get trained and then refuse to go home. Their certification doesn’t restrict them to only deal with the poor and/or stupid, and they know it’s just too hard to look at a lifetime of that.
Beautifully put!
Re the specialized-training idea — What exactly would the curriculm for the inner-city/poverty teachers include?
Seems like a (the?) major problem is that we have not reliably identified what teachers/administrators in the inner-city schools can/should be doing differently to improve educational outcomes in the inner-city schools. Until we know what teaching/administrative techniques work in the inner-city schools, how can we effectively train teachers to teach in the inner-city schools?
Based on conversations with veteran inner-city teachers and ed blog comments, there are two problems (at least partially susceptible to school-based solutions) that are much more serious in the inner-city than the suburban schools:
1. Student behavior — chronic absenteeism, chronic tardiness, and minor but endemic classroom misconduct. This student behavior constantly disrupts instruction, increases peer pressure on other students to misbehave, and burns out teachers.
2. Many students reading far below grade level — It’s virtually impossible to teach academic subjects (except perhaps math) to students who cannot read near grade level and even harder if the class also includes a few students reading at or far above grade level.
Doubt that there’s a consensus regarding what school-based techniques are most effective in addressing these problems. If there is no consensus, how, exactly, would the specialized training for prospective inner-city teachers prepare these teachers more effectively than current generic training programs?
My layman’s impression is that most of our schools — inner-city and suburban — have relatively weak programs regarding student behavior and reading instruction. However, the suburban home environment compensates for the weak programs while the inner-city home environment does not. If so, the solutions to the student-behavior and reading-level problems involve developing new/better techniques for addressing these problems and applying these improved techniques in all the schools, not just the inner-city schools. Under this analysis, the teacher preparation weakness is not lack of specialized training but rather defects in the generic training.
In any event, completely agree with your suggestion that new teachers serve longer intensive hands-on internships before becoming independent teachers. Only an idiot would voluntarily consult an attorney or a doctor who had just graduated from law/medical school — it takes hands-on real-world experience to become an effective professional.
Great points, LaborLawyer-
I’m not sure what such training would look like. But I know that there is an enormous amount of energy and money being spent on the problem of inner city reading, for example. I would guess tens or maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 30 years. What I would like to see is some effort to collect whatever knowledge has been gained from this in one place. What works? What doesn’t work? Take a critical look at all of the research that has been done and all the data that has been collected and get that information in the same room with people who want to teach inner city kids who can’t read.
Either:
A) Nothing has really been learned about this problem that can be coherently integrated into a program; or
B) There are some things that have been learned about this problem that are not being systematically, efficiently relayed to teachers who teach in this environment.
If pressed, I guess I would say that teachers teaching in high need schools (i.e, schools with tons of kids who can’t read, don’t show up, don’t really have parents, and don’t give a shit about school) should have more training than teachers in Bethesda. MD. If you are teaching a bunch of upper-middle class and wealthy kids who’s parents are jumping all over their asses all the time because they have to be doctors or whatever, your job is a whole lot easier. Maybe all you need is a solid foundation in your discipline and a passing affection for children.
My layman’s thought re the reading-below-grade-level issue:
1. Teaching reading is probably harder than teaching any other K-12 subject. Reading is a process, not content. 2. It’s a process that is not easily demonstrated in concrete terms (unlike most math processes).
3. It’s a process that few adults consciously remember learning ourselves. For virtually all adults — particularly those who ended up with at least a 4-yr college degree — reading is something that we’ve always done instinctively.
For these reasons, it probably takes an unusually bright person to teach reading effectively and that bright person probably has to think pretty hard to do it correctly.
Our early elementary ed teachers largely self-select based on a strong love of working with young children. If these teachers are also very bright/hard-thinking, that’s a nice bonus but there’s little reason to expect early elementary ed teachers to be particularly bright/hard-thinking (on average).
Exactly!!! That’s why teachers who are charged with teaching reading to the disinterested and/or far behind should have specialized training in how to do so.
Agree — But, my more fundamental point is that we should be revising our collective view regarding what traits we want to see in our early elementary teachers, not just our reading specialists — at least in our low-income schools.
few comments.
first i couldnt tell if you were being sarcastic or not teachbad. you’ve probably read the article about how dentists should be paid based on the dental health of their patients and how upset and all the criticism the dentists gave in response to that idea.
and i thought what we need more training to have our students have whatever we want them to have (like we want dental patients to have good dental health)?
there are just so many things frustrating about the idea of more training and more demands placed on teachers. ill try to describe a few.
we train doctors like crazy. huge corporations pump out pills. money flows into programs and education campaigns. and ppl still sit on their asses on eating mcdonalds getting health problems.
at some point its up to THEM. THEY have to do something. their part. and no matter the training etc etc they still have their choice and they’re going to chose what we dont want. and what? we want to figure out a way to MAKE THEM,FORCE THEM to be more healthy? and it has to do with doctors being better trained? corps making better pills, etc etc?
see im not sure about all that.
learning is something i cant do for someone. it is impossible. completely. i can not learn math or language arts or social studies or whatever for someone else. they have to do that. i can not MAKE them. and i can go through all the training and whatshisname can make all his youtube videos and whatsthat school can literally hand out $5 bills to those who do whatever. i can go through 8 years of school. heck you could even pay me like a doctor. but guess what? you’ll still get a ton of kids doing squat just like you’ll get a ton of ppl sitting on their asses eating micky d’s.
and ppl may say well you can do things that make a difference. and this is true but at what point do you admit that you can’t make much a difference? where you’re getting severe limited returns? where you need to come at helping these kids from a whole other angle besides training teachers? and here’s the question, who is to say we haven’t already gotten to that point – where training isn’t the answer?
teachers haven’t changed over the years and if they have its been only for the better. they haven’t gotten worse but better. but then why if the teachers have gotten better have the grades gone down and the kids gotten worse?
its NOT THE TEACHER OR THEIR TRAINING BUT THE KIDS (and all that made them the way they are)thats made things worse.
ive said it before – we know what the problems are but we cant fix those. we cant fix the neighborhoods or parents or society or culture. we cant administrate that. (or maybe we can and we haven’t put enough research or resources into that.) BUT we CAN fix the teachers.
one last thing. weve known for YEARS what REALLY makes a difference. small class sizes. the answer is staring us right in the face. or at least an answer that gives us the most effective change we’re seeking – even over increased teacher training or pay – is right there but it seems we’d just rather keep pouring money into other solutions and making teachers do more – that doesn’t really change things as much or much at all.
i think the reading programs work mostly because of small class sizes and a focus on process rather than test scores.
THOSE are the answers more than increased training. but then again teachbad maybe you were being sarcastic.
If in doubt, I was being sarcastic.
well done then. seriously. because you parodied to a t the kind of reformers we see and the stuff they suggest.
you should get paid big bucks and your ideas turned into programs and reforms right away.
see you in the papers, reforming a school district and on the lecture circuit.
I went through an alternative teacher training program (not TFA but similar) focused on closing the achievement gap and I can say that the training I received was complete bull. It was a very competitive program to get into (accepts about 5% of applicants) and focuses on placing teachers in failing urban schools. The program was run in conjunction with a university, and those university courses were the only things that kept my cohort sane over the course of our training.
Overall, I lasted a total of 4 months in the classroom before I resigned and moved on to a much higher paying (double what I was making as a teacher) job where I am so much happier. I already had an advanced degree before I began my teacher training program but chose to teach because that is something I loved to do.
In this program I got 2 months of training teaching summer school with a class of 17 or so and with a total of 4 observations before I was dumped into a school were I had classes of 60+ students. The observations I got were highly insufficient and did not improve my teaching at all. All they would tell me are “you need to differentiate more” or “have higher expectations for your students because you said it was hot in here but try your best…you nee more than there best to close the achievement gap.” I got 2 observations on my first two days of teaching and then went 2 weeks without an observation before they reprimanded me and put me on probation. At the same time this was going on, I was getting stellar observations and notes from my university, with outstanding reviews and pages and pages of notes and useful ideas to try in the classroom. Often, it seemed like a power struggle since these reviews were so conflicting in terms of the feedback I received. I once asked for extra help from my training program to send 2 observers and both ended up coming at the same time. One observer rated me extremely proficient and the other rated me unsatisfactory. No action was taken, and no useful feedback was provided.
In terms of learning about teaching, the university program provided a much more realistic experience in terms of training. They set realistic expectations about our urban setting. My teacher training program did not take into account socioeconomic background or previous background of the kids we taught. It was extremely frustrating to see people in the program go work at gifted schools (it happened) and get great reviews because of how their classroom was behaved and how advanced their test scores were and see people get degraded by the program because their test scores were too low and their classrooms were unmanageable. Again, my university program happily gave appropriate comments for people working in a gifted school and gave appropriate actions for people to try who were working much different conditions.
Flash forward to the school year. My classes like I said were 60+ students and I was working in one of the worst schools in the state. It was tough going the first few weeks but I was eventually getting the hang of everything. My university program provided valuable feedback on a weekly basis with observations, while my teacher training program came once. The person who came literally told me he was afraid of my students, which I got a kick out of. All of these observations told me that I was heading in the right direction and I felt good about the impact I was making in my own classroom. My students were growing and I felt like I was helping them succeed.
However, the reason I quit was that I got forced out by my administrator. I constantly got speeches from him like “I never hire first year teachers.” I asked for help and tips for classroom management and instruction and he basically told me to ask my non-existent department chair. I exhausted all avenues of help. My principal pulled me out of the classroom for one day and let me see other teachers. Some were better, some were having much worse problems. It wasn’t only me having issues, veteran teachers were having so many problems with the students because the school had something like 8 principals in 5 years. There was no structure and no consequences. One girl (who wasn’t even in my class) once stabbed me with a pencil and she didn’t even get suspended for the incident. Only after I field a police report were appropriate actions taken. I kept asking my principal for support and did not get anything. One day he asked me what my worst class was and the problem students were. The next day he came to that class, and I thought he would give me help in terms of dealing with it. It should go with mentioning that I pulled veteran teachers out to help me with that class and I had 2 teachers helping me at that time because of my request. Overall, I think the class my principal observed was acceptable.
The administrator pulled me into his office and told me that my performance was unsatisfactory and that I would be terminated with no explanation of why. He explained that my being terminated would never afford me a teaching job ever again. I was appalled at the situation and quit without notice shortly after. From what I hear now, they have a veteran teacher in the classroom now that is having the same problems that I was having.
In summary, important points I found are:
1. Small class sizes – I had a class of 20 and students ended up being way ahead in this class because of more individualized instruction and less management issues.
2. Administrative and district support – I got so tired with how much the district belittled teachers (and I was even in a highly respected program with clout in the district)
3. Proper university training (I agree with the fact it should be geared towards who you will end up teaching)
4. Resources and technology in every classroom – I did not have any technology or enough books for my students which made things extremely difficult.
That’s just my story in a nutshell. And I’ve been reading your blog for a while now so keep the posts coming. I’ll still be reading even though no longer involved in education.