ix on Schools: Why is accountability always about teachers?; Teacher Exodus, Plummeting Enrollments and Teacher License Dereg

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 Six on Schools: Why is accountability always about teachers?; Teacher Exodus, Plummeting Enrollments and Teacher License Deregulation: WI; Michael Mulgrew: Tip-toeing between Cuomo and de Blasio,; ‘It just hurts my heart’: Low pay, big classes are the plight of Oklahoma teachers; The Failure of Mayoral Control in D.C. (and Everywhere Else); Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills [memo to David Coleman];

Why is accountability always about teachers?

"The systems focus their measurement and analytic machinery on teachers, who have the least ability to improve what they do. Senior leaders make decisions that affect every aspect of life for teachers in schools. Senior leaders hire teachers, using criteria they’ve chosen. They give tenure to teachers using criteria they’ve chosen or agreed to. Senior leaders assign teachers to grade levels, give them textbooks and curricula, buy and set up their technology, lay out their schedules, create disciplinary policies they need to follow, and choose programs for how they will work with students learning English, and students with disabilities, and students with reading difficulties, and students who are homeless. And senior leaders decide to change these –they adopt new curricula, set up new testing programs, roll out new technology, change schedules for subjects, modify discipline policies."

Why is accountability always about teachers?

Why is accountability always about teachers? Mark Dynarski Dynarski makes the case that state accountability systems for K-12 education typically focus training and conseq...

Teacher Exodus, Plummeting Enrollments and Teacher License Deregulation: WI

"In Wisconsin we have a “teacher shortage” in some areas (rural, special education, tech ed).  However the crisis in Wisconsin is not this “shortage.”  The crisis is the number of teachers leaving the classroom, the number of licensed teachers who won’t go back to classrooms and the plummeting enrollment in teacher preparation programs—Exodus!

As a dean of a school of education I have watched our undergraduate enrollments take a nose dive (55%) in the last 3 years.  I meet with prospective students and parents who actively encourage their sons and daughters to avoid becoming a teacher.  I know teachers that actively advise their students to avoid teaching.  And I have talked to high school students who tell me they’ll never go into teaching.  When I ask why, I get this response, “I’ve seen what my teachers go through.  They’re not allowed to teach.  So many of them are miserable. No thank you.”

Shortage areas are one thing but mass demoralization that kills the desire to seek out teaching and/or quit teaching altogether is something totally different.  Here, listen to Doris Santoro (leading researcher and expert on teacher demoralization).  And this is where there is a distinction.  The fix—teacher license deregulation and privatization—will do nothing to stop the exodus, plummeting enrollments and mass demoralization brought on by years of “teacher accountability policy.”  In fact, Wisconsin’s new rules for teacher licensure will create a bigger exodus, exacerbate enrollment plunges in teacher education, and further demoralize the teachers that are barely hanging on."

Teacher Exodus, Plummeting Enrollments and Teacher License Deregulation: I don't feel fine. | BustED Pencils

Teacher Exodus, Plummeting Enrollments and Teacher License Deregulation:... In my last blog post I took to task Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction and its leadership for pushing ...

Michael Mulgrew: Tip-toeing between Cuomo and de Blasio, the Scylla and C[h]arybdis of Education Politics in New York

https://mets2006.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/michael-mulgrew-tip-toeing-between-cuomo-and-de-blasio-the-scylla-and-carybdis-of-education-politics-in-new-york/

‘It just hurts my heart’: Low pay, big classes are the plight of Oklahoma teachers

"Then a 25-year-old social studies teacher, inspired by what happened in West Virginia, began a Facebook group titled “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout — The Time is Now!” It has ballooned to 70,000 members, including educators from Oklahoma and West Virginia and supportive parents.

Educators — backed by the state’s teachers unions — demanded a $10,000 raise for themselves and a $5,000 raise for support personnel. They are also asking the state to restore budget cuts and boost spending on schools by $200 million over three years. If they do not get what they want by Monday, teachers in about 140 school districts — including some of the state’s largest — plan to walk off the job.

In 2016, Oklahoma ranked 49th in teacher pay — lower even than West Virginia, which was 48th. The average compensation package of an Oklahoma teacher was $45,276 a year, according to the National Education Association, a figure that includes a high-priced health plan and other benefits. That’s far less than educators in neighboring states, making it difficult — for many districts, impossible — to find and keep qualified teachers.

Oklahoma’s 2016 teacher of the year, Shawn Sheehan, decamped for Texas last year, joining many other teachers who sought higher-paying jobs.

Robert Bohn, an agriculture teacher in the small town of Cement, said he could make $20,000 more annually teaching in Texas. He pointed down the two-lane highway. “Texas is just an hour that way,” Bohn said."

‘It just hurts my heart’: Low pay, big classes are the plight of Oklahoma teachers

‘It just hurts my heart’: Low pay, big classes are the plight of Oklahom... Moriah Balingit Now, at a breaking point and inspired by West Virginia educators, they plan to walk out.

Diane Ravitch: The Failure of Mayoral Control in D.C. (and Everywhere Else)

The Failure of Mayoral Control in D.C. (and Everywhere Else)

The Failure of Mayoral Control in D.C. (and Everywhere Else) Peter McPherson writes here about the failure of mayoral control in the District of Columbia. He recites the pro...

Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills [memo to David Coleman] Love it [thanks Nancy]

"Since the early 1980s, however, schools have become ever more captivated by the idea that students must learn a set of generalised thinking skills to flourish in the contemporary world – and especially in the contemporary job market. Variously called ‘21st-century learning skills’ or ‘critical thinking’, the aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain; these are lauded by business leaders as an essential set of dispositions for the 21st century. Naturally, we want children and graduates to have a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. It’s a shame, then, that we’ve failed to apply any critical thinking to the question of whether any such thing can be taught.

As the 1960s studies on air-traffic controllers suggested, to be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about it: it’s not easy to translate those skills to other areas. This is even more so with the kinds of complex and specialised knowledge that accompanies much professional expertise: as later studies found, the more complex the domain, the more important domain-specific knowledge. This non-translatability of cognitive skill is well-established in psychological research and has been replicated many times. Other studies, for example, have shown that the ability to remember long strings of digits doesn’t transfer to the ability to remember long strings of letters. Surely we’re not surprised to hear this, for we all know people who are ‘clever’ in their professional lives yet who often seem to make stupid decisions in their personal lives.

This detachment of cognitive ideals from contextual knowledge is not confined to the learning of critical thinking. Some schools laud themselves for placing ‘21st-century learning skills’ at the heart of their mission. It’s even been suggested that some of these nebulous skills are now as important as literacy and should be afforded the same status. An example of this is brain-training games that claim to help kids become smarter, more alert and able to learn faster. However, recent research has shown that brain-training games are really only good for one thing – getting good a brain-training games. The claim that they offer students a general set of problem-solving skills was recently debunked by a study that reviewed more than 130 papers, which concluded:

[W]e know of no evidence for broad-based improvement in cognition, academic achievement, professional performance, and/or social competencies that derives from decontextualised practice of cognitive skills devoid of domain-specific content.

The same goes for teaching ‘dispositions’ such as the ‘growth mindset’ (focusing on will and effort as opposed to inherent talent) or ‘grit’ (determination in the face of obstacles). It’s not clear that these dispositions can be taught, and there’s no evidence that teaching them outside a specific subject matter has any effect."

Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills – Carl Hendrick | Aeon Ideas

Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills – Carl Hen... Being an air-traffic controller is not easy. At the heart of the job is a cognitive ability called ‘situational ...