Welcome to the Tuesday Morning Feature Series: Things We Learned This Week, sponsored by your friends at the Blogistan Polytechnic Institute.
Different from those other groups you may visit on Tuesday mornings with a sponsor, but not too different, TWLTW is a place for sharing, caring, and learning—about ourselves and the world we inhabit.
This week, we’ll look at the plans for education reform Arne Duncan announced for schools of education as presented in his special lecture at BPI’s northeast satellite campus (Teachers College, for you "heatherns") It seems he's very excited about that $10 billion bank account he lucked himself into, for starters...
Then we'll take a look at flying planes, flying plane parts, and yet another fictional eggheady university...
I do not understand when college presidents and deans of the arts and science faculty ignore their teacher preparation programs—and yet complain about the cost of providing remedial classes to freshmen. -Arne Duncan Secretary of Education
Despite being relatively obscured by the health care developments of the past 72 hours, and even I admit understandably so, there actually has been a great deal of public conversation this week about the style and substance of federal education policy under the Obama administration. For example, Arne (like "barn," not "blarney,") Duncan made a special appearance at Professor Potts' own satellite campus to unveil new initiatives in teacher education. But, David Brooks also published a piece praising Jeb Bush's opinion on education (surprise!), and this week we lost one of the great pioneers of 20th century education reform.
First, what I learned from Arne Duncan's lecture (all quotes are from the speech as spoken, not the press-release version).
Statistics
- There are 1,450 "schools, colleges, and departments of education" in the United States, and "many if not most...are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom."
- 30% of American students drop out or otherwise don't finish high school. In raw numbers, 1.2 million students a year leave school before finishing. This is especially acute in minority communities:
Barely 60 percent of African-American and Latino students graduate on time—and in many cities, half or more of low-income teens drop out of school.
- Race is also a huge factor in the achievement gap, but today's discussion is about teacher education, so, more numbers to that effect:
35 percent of public school students are Hispanic or black, but less than 15 percent of our teachers are black or Latino. That's a problem that is not self-correcting—we must proactively work on it. It is especially troubling that less than two percent of our nation's teachers are African American males.
- Approximately 3.2 million teachers work in 95,000 schools. They are heavily skewed Baby-Boomer, so we may see up to 1/3 of them retire in the next 4 to 5 years. The problem here is not only replacing 1 million teachers, a 1/3 of the frontline workforce in education, but the loss of such a large number of experienced and veteran classroom leaders in exchange for new and untested ones.
- Schools of education produce nearly 220,000 certified teachers per year. Alternative programs do fewer than 10,000. [Before you do the math on that Baby-Boomer gap, consider that nearly 1/2 of these new recruits leave the profession before their 5th year.]
- Graduate schools of education award 30% of all masters degrees, more than any other single discipline.
- The federal govt. provides $4billion in grants and guaranteed loans to education students each year.
- Rod Paige had a $17 million discretionary fund as Sec. Ed., Arne Duncan has $10 billion.
Problems
The core problem facing education today, as I infer it from Duncan's speech, is that the education of generations past is no longer appropriate for today's children. What worked in the 50's or the 70's, or the 90's no longer works. We no longer live in those worlds. The 9 month school year is a holdover from America's agrarian past when children were required (the farm) to help harvest crops in the summer. The problem is, most children no longer work the farm in the summer, and most children suffer cognitive declines during the break months.
Another problem is the large proportion of students who are dropping out or not graduating. The sobering statistics are above.
New teachers consistently report inadequacies in teacher preparation programs in two areas: classroom management and the use of data to design instruction. Teacher education programs that focus on equipping teachers to deal with these twin realities of modern classrooms will be watched closely. Those that do not will be called out for their failure(s) to do so.
Strategies
America's university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering.
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation.
Solutions
- President Obama's stated goal of returning the United States to being the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. How to get there, well, that's less clear, but we do have some ideas.
- Focus on the quality of the teacher at the front of every classroom.
A great teacher can literally change the course of a student's life...studies repeatedly document that the single biggest influence on student academic growth is the quality of the teacher standing in front of the classroom
- Directly link the performance of students in schools to the preparation programs from which their teachers graduated. Louisiana was praised for being the one state in the nation taking this proposal seriously by tracking public school student performance to schools of education by tracing their test scores through their teachers as measurements of the effectiveness of the programs from which they graduate. Imagine medical schools having to publish the success rates of their graduates' diagnoses and surgeries in major medical journals each year and how that might effect how they prepare their students as an analogy to what this might mean for schools of education.
- Create national standards, or federal expectations of demonstrable learning. This one is very controversial, but he spoke to the problem of each state having the freedom to determine its own standard of excellence, resulting in some states having minimum standards that are barely above basic literacy. If other goals are to be met, that has to change. He was candid about NCLB being very strict about compliance (each state had to go through specific and massive documentation that they had established state standards) but very loose concerning capacity building (the actual standards were up to each state to decide for themselves). Duncan wants higher standards (greater capacity building) by loosening how states are able to go about meeting them (less focus on compliance). This effort is already underway, led by state governors, not Congress or the Dept. of Ed.
- The big one that really made me happy to be in the room. He repeatedly spoke of the need to model teacher preparation on what is called the "medical model." In medicine, doctors-to-be go through intense immersion in content (med school) then experience a residency where they experience a period of mentored skill acquisition. Teachers, however, finish an ed. degree (which includes, maybe, 3 months of student teaching, 2 years of pedagogy, and 2 years of content courses) and are given a full workload, right out of the gate. Induction is a huge issue for those of us who take this seriously, and Duncan's endorsement of Linda Darling-Hammond's advocacy for a medical model of teacher preparation and induction was a very welcome policy proposal.
TWLTW
- I doubt it was a coincidence that David Brooks published an op-ed in the NYT the same day as Duncan's speech, praising the Sec. Ed. for driving a "gritty" reform agenda that had lined up the likes of Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Al Sharpton behind it. Now, normally, I cringe at anything that comes out of Brooks' word processor (he mangles psychological science like none other, in my humble), so that he would assemble Jeb and Newt in support of Duncan makes me want to just run in the opposite direction from Duncan. Just on principle. But, I just saw Duncan speak, that same day, and I like much of what he said, and how he said it. Could it be that education reform really will be the bipartisan silver lining of this administration?
- "Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way." -Ted Sizer, deceased this week. Created the Coalition of Essential Schools, wrote a trilogy of books with "Horace" in the title, and promoted schooling based on something deeper and more meaningful than standardized test scores. An important voice that will be missed.
- "Leadership means not knowing what the polls say, but knowing what the polls are going to say, if you do your job right." -Alan Grayson
- The chances of dying by being hit by airplane parts falling from the sky is 30 times greater than dying in a shark attack. (From a study on availability heuristics.)
- Chances of dying on an airplane while your flight crew slept, or argued, their way hundreds of miles off course = 0%. This time. Thank God. Maybe they were inspired by the Heene's?!
- I know this sounds kinda-crazy, and what a coda to a hard-to-categorize-career, but Orson Welles' last paid acting role was as the voiceover artist for the Transformers cartoon series character 'Unicron."
- Great example of interrogating assumptions from a rec-list diary yesterday afternoon. Short, and very highly recommended.
- H. P. Lovecraft featured fictional Miskatonic University throughout his collection of short stories and novellas as a stand-in for Harvard, Brown, and other Ivy League institutions with which he was familiar. It is now a fictional university with a website.
- Thanks to NCrissieB, I also learned how to upload and insert photographs into diaries and comments. I've been exercising restraint thus far, but had to exercise this newfound ability just to make sure I could still remember how to do it. So, here you go:
Apple picking in upstate New York, about 3 weeks ago.
What have you learned this week?