Smells like school spirit

Here is a NY Times/David Brooks Op-Ed that is well worth your time to read if you care at all about certain elements in the public school system who would mislead us about the need for real reform.

Teacher Professional Development: Not producing better education

At first blush, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Shouldn’t giving teachers more on the job training, called “Professional Development” (PD) in education circles, create better education programs?

Apparently, a new federally sponsored student concludes the answer is: NO, at least for seventh grade mathematics teachers.

The study was conducted by the American Institutes for Research and the MRDC organization.

Education Week says (subscription?):

“The focus of the training was to better prepare teachers to cover rational number topics, such as fractions, decimals, percent, ratio, and proportion, which are seen as an important foundation for learning algebra but also a common stumbling block for students.”

And, the PD program selected was supposed to be based on all the collective research on what works best.

So, the fact that the training failed to improve either teacher knowledge or student performance is especially troubling.

This certainly raises uncomfortable questions:

Clearly, this offers another example to support our long-raised concerns about the quality of research in education (such as in this blog).

It also raises concerns about the ability educators to even know what works.

Ironically, the new study indicates that recent cutting of funding for PD in Kentucky might not have been such a bad idea. If PD isn’t effective, we’d just have been wasting our money.

Poor performing teachers in DC fired

While Kentucky doesn’t even have a formal process to follow for revoking teaching certificates for poor performance and firing a teacher is a long and drawn out affair, in Washington, DC, they are getting serious about getting low-performing teachers out of the classroom.

The Washington Post reports that more than 200 teachers were just fired for poor performance in the classroom.

Apparently, the DC school system doesn’t have the same restriction on such action that is found in most states’ teacher tenure laws. Evaluation systems in the nation’s capital are exempt from collective bargaining.

It will be interesting to see how this action plays out in the chronically under-performing DC classrooms.

Getting serious about teacher quality in Indiana

Indiana is adopting a teacher evaluation system in six pilot programs that will link pay to student performance.

Meanwhile, Kentucky talks the talk, but isn’t even crawling as adults in the school system block all efforts to do the right thing for students.

How’s that again? Prichard Committee citing good example from a CHARTER SCHOOL!

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence has been notably quiet in the fight to get a decent charter school law in Kentucky.

That makes one of their new blog items especially noteworthy.

Can it really be? Prichard lauding practices of teacher evaluation from Pittsburgh's City High? A CHARTER SCHOOL!

Check it out for yourself here.

Of course, we have to look elsewhere to benefit from innovations from charter schools because Kentucky does not have any of these innovative schools.

And, so far, Prichard hasn’t been of any help in changing the law so we can fix that deficiency.