It may sound like a platitude, but that doesn’t make it any less true: No factor is more important than a student’s relationship with his or her teachers. Nothing can spark an interest or light a fire more deeply inside a student than a teacher. While that relationship is a personal one, a simply friendly rapport has pretty limited educational value. It has much more of a master-apprentice feel—and that means teachers must have subject mastery. Simple mastery of a subject does not a great teacher make, but it sure sets down a great foundation to work from.
Here are three steps to ensuring that our teachers are fully prepared for the task:
Strengthen new teacher quality through strong course requirements for prospective teachers. Continuing education and remediation through professional development programs cannot ensure adequate subject knowledge, whether in STEM subjects or in English and History. The state should immediately increase the quality and number of undergraduate courses required in teacher focus areas, such that prospective teachers possess at least a college minor in their subject area, and within two years raise the minimum requirement of an undergraduate major in their subject area.
Objectively test prospective and current teachers, and increase the pass score for all subject area teacher tests on a regular basis. Massachusetts has some of the most academically rigorous teacher tests (the so-called MTEL tests) in the country. But just as with our MCAS tests, passing scores are not as high as they need to be. They were set by volunteer committees consisting chiefly of licensed teachers in each subject area, working in conjunction with a small number of faculty in higher education (usually from our schools of education, not the arts and sciences). Future committees should include representation of a full range of university faculty to ensure that teachers have the level of academic knowledge needed for students’ success in college and the workplace.
Focus professional development (PD) on academic coursework in relevant subjects. The state and local school districts should allow teachers to pursue PD in the form of authentic academic coursework in areas such as English, mathematics, science, and history. Too often PD is, if we are going to be honest, is not worth the time–or, worse, can be politicized. State-funded PD should be focused on the academic content areas that form the basis for the state curriculum frameworks. Teachers’ plans should be approved by the teacher’s principal, who should ultimately be held accountable for the academic growth and performance of his or her faculty.
When you spend $9 billion a year on schools, accountability must go beyond student performance. We must also manage money without fraud or waste, maintain our buildings, and fully implement state policies. The Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA) was an independent district and school audit agency established by the Legislature in 2000 as part of the accountability system required by MERA. From 2002 to 2006, EQA evaluated more than 175 school districts, most of which were urban districts, which spent about half of total education dollars in the state.
Opposition from teachers’ unions and urban superintendents led to EQA’s closure in spring 2008. A nascent accountability office designed to replace EQA delivered its first reports in 2009, and since then has not undertaken a single district review. Its reports have been focused on specific issues and have even, in the case of Fall River, whitewashed financial mismanagement within the school system. A simple look at the new accountability office’s two-page annual report gives you all you need to know about the new accountability system: It has no teeth, and it has accomplished next to nothing. (EQA annual reports were much longer and more detailed.)
Given its sizable commitment, the state needs an independent, fact-finding audit agency that evaluates the financial and educational return on that investment. The agency should be empowered to coordinate and streamline the school and district audit process, and also to work in tandem with a much strengthened technical assistance effort by the DESE. The DESE’s ongoing school accountability work needs to be integrated into the district review process, since individual schools do not function independent from the larger school district in which they reside. Given the current insufficient level of funding for audits, this action would like cost an additional million dollars.
This week, State House News broke a story on the “cozy relationship” between Health Care for All and the Patrick Administration. HCFA is an effective organization, but when an HCFA official writes to the state’s Insurance Commissioner: “If you expect to do anything ‘newsworthy’ [on insurance premium caps], can we be helpful with our blog or media at all?” well, then you have to take their positions with a brimming cup of salt.
Surrogate relationships are very much a fact of life in a state where one party is dominant, like Massachusetts. Next up to bat in this age-old game, Education Commissioner Mitch Chester and Secretary Paul Reville. In anticipation of the important debate over whether to adopt weaker K-12 national standards, they have to all appearances lined up their surrogates.
It [Gates] has influence everywhere, in absolutely every branch of education, whether you’re talking about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or think tanks. Their motives could be 100 percent pure. But any time you have one big player that is influencing all of these groups, it is cause for concern.
Indeed. And important to the Gates agenda was having the Obama Administration include adoption of national standards among the criteria for the feds’ $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RttT) grants.
Our analysis of the final (June 2010) proposed standards will be out soon and give a systematic judgment about whether the final Common Core standards provide a stronger and more challenging framework for the mathematics and English language arts curriculum than do those in California and Massachusetts. We not only engaged top academic experts in mathematics and English language arts, we protected our independence by taking no money from any government agency, the Gates Foundation, or any foundation or individual with a dog in the Race, if you will.
By contrast, Commissioner Chester and Secretary Reville have from the first RttT application made it clear that they were likely to adopt national standards to get the federal money. They included the weak initial January 2010 draft of the national standards in the RttT application. In the state’s second application for w $250 million in RttT funds, the Commish and Secretary explicitly committed to adopting national standards and assessmentsand outlined the timeline to get there. The MCAS, they noted, would go away in four years. Sec. Reville and Commissioner Chester need the $250 million RttT win badly, and politically they couldn’t satisfy the other federal priorities—e.g., the penalty for new strings on charter schools and the state’s lack of progress linking student performance with teacher evaluations.
The Commish and the Secretary are also leaning on the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE). I like MBAE (and especially admire Linda Noonan, their executive director). In theory, if MBAE does a comparison of MA’s to the national standards on their own, that’s great. Welcome to the debate. But the MBAE analysis is directly funded by the Gates Foundation and the analysis is to be done by West Ed in San Francisco. Yup, Gates funds West Ed, too. An “objective,” “independent” analysis? Then the history of MBAE itself brings conflicts of interest. MBAE was co-founded by Secretary Reville; their former Board chair is Maura Banta, currently chair of the state’s Board of Ed (and someone who actively supported the inclusion of softer “how-to-skills” in our standards and assessments and now the adoption of weaker national standards). This is akin to being judge and jury in its own case.
I have no problem with Gates funding whatever they want. But the money merry-go-round gets dizzying (see here) when you think about the conflicts. No amount of salt is going to make this taste like cotton candy.
It’s important to send as much money of our education budget to schools (and frankly to get superintendents to do the same). It is just as critical to ensure that the state office is supportive of reform and not simply a compliance office. The current state of play is this: We’ve created a web of nominal education jobs that are really just a bunch of adults pushing paper back and forth. New state regulations require new state positions to push the paper to the districts, and new local positions in the superintendent’s office to push the paper back to the state education offices.
To make progress in increasing positions that are actually teachers, we need leadership from the top and a transformation of the state’s education department from a compliance agency to one that supports local district efforts to improve performance.
The first step toward modernizing the DESE to support district and school level reforms is an external departmental audit that examines and reports back to the Commissioner on:
Management and financial practices at all levels of the department
Technical assistance to align local curricula with the state academic standards
Expertise(s) needed to provide solid technical assistance, and particularly the dissemination of a data system that makes accountability reporting easier and provides teachers easily digestible information is an unfortunate, missed opportunity
Positions no longer needed in the department
Non-accountability regulations and reporting requirements
Ways to combine all school and district audits to a single comprehensive exercise per year
Ways to administer the MCAS and reduce the time to report results to districts
Actions taken to address these issues would likely lead to a significant reduction in paperwork and in the DESE’s headcount.
A second important reform would be to eliminate the Executive Office of Education (EOE) and the Secretary position. The Secretary position did not exist during the period of reform that led to Massachusetts’ ascension to lead the nation in student performance. Since the advent of the Secretary’s position, we have seen no evidence of accelerated improvement; rather, student achievement on national assessments has flattened. Given the number of questions about how the Secretary has politicized the charter approval process and the education agenda broadly, elimination of this position would cause no harm.
A comprehensive audit of the DESE should carry one-time costs of no more than $200,000. Even viewing potential savings conservatively, it is reasonable to expect a 10 to 20 percent drop in dollars spent on state employee headcount, or roughly $1 to $2 million in savings. Redeploying any savings from the reform of DESE and the elimination of EOE to actual programs is a good start in focusing the Bay State’s education budget on schools not central state bureaucracies.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog.
When Governor William Weld signed the Education Reform Act, no one thought that within a short few years more than 90 percent of Massachusetts’ students would be passing the MCAS. Nor did anyone then believe that our 4th- and 8th-grade students would soon rank among the top-scoring nations on the Trends in International mathematics and Science Study exams.
Notwithstanding the state’s educational successes, critics of the MCAS—and of other elements of our accountability system such as a district and school audit system—remain. New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang castigates the MCAS for causing kids to drop out—wrongly, as can be seen in the percentage of dropouts [updated: in their senior year] who have already passed the MCAS and for reasons presented by former Senate President Tom Birmingham, a principal architect of the Education Reform Act of 1993.
If we are to spend $9 billion a year on education, we need to hold the schools accountable for student achievement. Here are four actions we can take which relate to the MCAS:
Objective testing must remain the primary way to signal growth in students’ academic achievement. That means maintaining the objectivity of the MCAS test and eschewing highly subjective and ill-defined ‘how-to’ skills in the academic frameworks. If teachers and principals want to utilize project-based teaching and test such matters, we welcome school-level efforts to do so. But the state needs a clear metric of content acquisition, as it is the most effective way to ensure success in college and the work place.
The state must now reinstate testing of the mastery of United States history as a high school graduation requirement ($2.5 million). This subject area requirement was to go into effect in 2011, but the state mothballed the effort for political reasons (first they needed to postpone it to include “soft skills”, then they cried poor mouth after receiving hundreds of millions of federal stimulus dollars). The fact is that history provides context as students observe how our nation, the world, and its leaders change. Thomas Jefferson noted that mastery of history is elemental to understanding how to learn from the vice and virtue of political leadership and human action, as well as how to navigate toward practical solutions. The late historian Paul Gagnon, a leader in standards-based education reform, wrote of education in history, saying that
“Nothing less than people’s freedom is at stake—freedom to choose their own way in politics, and to choose their own mode of private culture, not to be indoctrinated by the fashions of their moment and milieu.”
Now more than ever, our schools need to promote student mastery of the enduring historical skills knowledge already embedded in the state’s 2003 History and Social Science Curriculum Framework.
We need to reduce the time it takes to get MCAS results to teachers from the current four and a half months to two months. Ideally the MCAS test would be given in mid-June so we can capture the learning that occurred during a full school year. Changing the timing of the MCAS will require that results can be turned around between the end of June and the start of September.
We need to fully fund MCAS test remediation ($30 million). In recent years, state education officials have made drastic cuts to the MCAS test remediation program. As a consequence, the state has developed what Education Reform architect and former Senate President Thomas Birmingham has called “a triage system for students.” Money for MCAS test remediation should be restored substantially and directed towards students at risk of not passing the MCAS test and therefore not graduating. That funding should be disbursed starting in the ninth grade, with students selected through an objective risk assessment system.
Below is a video of an event, History and Civic Education, that we held with Brown University Professor Gordon Wood, the amazing historian of the American Founding.
The video starts with Charles White, the head of Project Civic Engagement in the School of Education at Boston University.
My introductory remarks begin at 3:30. They are part good ol’ patriotic rant, I suppose, but they give you a sense about how Pioneer sees itself in our community today.
At 9:15 Boston City Councilor Maureen Feeney, who so understands the importance of history instruction in our schools and the need for civic engagement informed by knowledge of our history and our institutions.
And then at 18:17 begins Dr. Wood–and he is always wonderful to hear.
What a wonderful history to pass to our children. What a shame that the Department of Education has been unwilling to move forward with the History MCAS requirement.
Here is a great outcome from the passage of the charter school cap lift in January: the Roxbury Prep charter middle school, which is a standout in raising student achievement is announcing that it is going to replicate! from the announcement passed on by Dana Lehman and Will Austin, currently co-directors at RP:
We plan to serve up to 2,000 children by 2020, playing a significant role in reshaping public education in Boston…
As of July 1, Dana will become Uncommon Schools’ Managing Director of the Boston network and begin the process of charter applications and planning for the opening the first new Roxbury Prep campus in 2011-2012…
Roxbury Prep is formally partnering with Uncommon Schools, Inc. Uncommon Schools, Inc. (Uncommon) is a nonprofit organization that starts and manages outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college. Currently based in New York and New Jersey, Uncommon has a national reputation for closing the achievement gap at scale…
Congrats to RoxPrep — and we look forward to seeing the new campuses, as do so many parents in Boston!
The Secretary and Commissioner of Education have repeatedly said that they would not adopt national standards if they were weaker than Massachusetts state academic standards. I long ago stopped believing, even as friends in the media and elected officials told me otherwise.
“There’s no plan whatsoever with how we’re going to proceed on this,” said Reville. “There’s simply an opportunity for us to play a national leadership role.”
He said the state had “absolutely no plan to replace MCAS.”
Our curriculum experts have worked closely with the developers of the Common Core Standards to ensure that the final documents are strong, challenging and bold. But while we have played a leadership role in their development, we have made no commitment to ultimately adopt these standards. Instead we have made clear that Massachusetts will do so only after conducting a comprehensive review of the final drafts to ensure they are as strong as—or stronger than—our current state standards.
Well, Massachusetts’ second round Race to the Top application has been submitted to the feds. I just looked at the home page for the MA Department of (Elementary and Secondary) Education and, at least as far as I can see there will be no public comment period on the question of whether the state adopts the Common Core’s standards.
With the date set by the Commissioner for the Board to adopt the proposed national standards (July 21, 9 am, Malden), there really isn’t room for a public comment period, which usually takes 60 days. Originally, because the Commissioner’s plan called for a special Board of Education meeting on August 2nd (60 days after the June 1 application submission date), we hoped they would allow a comment period. Nope. Nada.
So, we are taking one of the most important steps in education policy without any real vetting. I’ve heard that there may be an organization invited by the Commissioner or possibly the Hunt Institute to do a comparative analysis of the MA standards up against the proposed national standards. Interestingly, the Hunt Institute, which has received $3.8 million from the Gates Foundation to advocate for the national standards, is fishing around for a group in MA to do the analysis. The Gates Foundation will pay to do the work. Given that Gates has funded dozens of organizations across the country and specifically two trade organizations (the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers) to advance national standards, I think any even slightly skeptical person would ask if the conclusion of the report is pre-baked.
We plan to adopt the Common Core Standards by August 2, 2010, and have established a timeline that will make it possible for the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to meet this deadline.
That sure sounds like they are adopting the standards. The state officials put in some “wiggle room” language:
The Board will receive the final version of the Common Core Standards by June 2, along with a side-by-side analysis completed by our staff and Achieve, Inc., which compares the Common Core Standards with drafts of our own ELA and mathematics standards revisions (2009 and 2010 respectively). By June 21, an independent panel of educators from PreK-12, higher education, and business will review the Common Core standards and present a report to the Board to inform its vote on adopting the standards, which will be taken at a special meeting in late July 2010. This independent panel will validate that the Common Core is at least as comprehensive and rigorous, if not more than, our current standards. In addition, we will secure at least one expert reviewer to conduct a gap analysis of the Common Core and Massachusetts standards. These validations will ensure that by adopting the Common Core standards, Massachusetts will maintain, if not exceed, its high standards.
Note that Achieve has also received funding from Gates to advance the national standards (and that Governor Patrick is on the board of Achieve). Interestingly, only after the adoption of the national standards will there be a public comment period and it will only relate to whether the state should take advantage of the feds’ allowance of a marginal percentage of additional standard elements. Sentences like the following indicate a strong presumption that the state will adopt the standards:
Following the adoption of the [national] standards in July, our plan is for the Board to discuss the possible addition of Massachusetts standards in September.
And what to make of this language on page 49 regarding the end of the MCAS and the adoption of the federal assessments?
In four years we will be prepared to administer this assessment [the new national assessment] in place of our current state assessments in those subjects.
In the absence of language clearly stating that these national standards would be equal to or higher than what Massachusetts has set for itself, the Commonwealth is unfortunately forced to decline accepting these standards.
So, to all of you who have urged Pioneer to “trust” the intentions of the Secretary and Commissioner, sorry. We’ve done three analyses (1, 2, 3) of the various versions of the national standards. We have taken no Gates money and no money from anybody who has a position on the national standards. We call ‘em as we see ‘em.
You know the old adage: Trust but verify. I would urge our Congressional delegation to stop believing and start verifying.
Across the country, the NGA and the CCSSO will be using these talking points over and over again. They will say that the proposed national standards are:
1) Aligned with college and career expectations;
2) Internationally benchmarked against high performing nations;
3) Reflective of vital cross-disciplinary skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, logical reasoning, communication, and team work;
4) Fewer in scope and deeper in meaning; and
5) Clearly written and user-friendly to educators.
In Massachusetts, be prepared for them to focus on #4. Fewer they are right. Deeper they will claim.
As the National Governor Association and the Council of Chiefs (CCSSO) roll out the state-led, oops, sorry, national standards, they are distributing a sort of loyalty oath to a number of players in the industry. Remember that this is primarily about money, and the K-12 industry spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year in this country. Much of that is textbooks, and the reason the feds were livid with Texas is that it was a large buyer of textbooks and was uninterested in a centralized, national curriculum. So it decided not to participate. CA is not in yet either. Those are two mighty big prizes.
But the NGA and CCSSO can have a big impact, especially with the Gates Foundation bankrolling them. What interests would the Gates Foundation, Pearson, ETS and other testing companies have in this effort to create a uniform set of standards you ask?
So testing companies, publishing companies, and all the other participants in the industry have received an “Endorsing Partner” agreement, which says:
As an endorsing partner, we support the Common Core State Standards Initiative in its mission to ensure every American student graduates high school with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in the 21st century. We agree with the goal of the Common Core State Standards Initiative to produce a common core of voluntary state standards across grades K-12 in English/language arts, math, and eventually science that are:
o Aligned with college and career expectations;
o Internationally benchmarked against high performing nations;
o Reflective of vital cross-disciplinary skills such as critical thinking, problem
solving, logical reasoning, communication, and team work;
o Fewer in scope and deeper in meaning; and
o Clearly written and user-friendly to educators.
Then, very kindly the document tells each company what its responsibilities will be in supporting the effort and speaking nicely about it. In the 1990s, with the heyday of the cult of the CEO we had financial “masters of the universe.” The masters of the universe have migrated from Harvard and the law schools to DC now. They know all and will be obeyed… until, of course, they fail. And they will. The USED has never accomplished anything of substance.
Strengthen new teacher quality through strong course requirements for prospective teachers. Continuing education and remediation through professional development programs cannot ensure adequate subject knowledge, whether in STEM subjects or in English and History. The state should immediately increase the quality and number of undergraduate courses required in teacher focus areas, such that prospective teachers possess at least a college minor in their subject area, and within two years raise the minimum requirement of an undergraduate major in their subject area.
