Six on Schools: Financial Tsunami Heads Toward The Nation's Schools; Four New York teachers of the year push back at Gov. Cuomo; The University of California System Abandons the SAT/ACT; ‘I’m Teaching Into a Vacuum’: 14 Educators on Quarantine Learni
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"Due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all states have ordered or recommended school buildings stay closed for the rest of the academic year, according to Education Week’s most recent count, and “schools are likely to stay shut for months,” according to the New York Times. Teachers are responding to the crisis by continuing their heroic efforts to ensure students are getting fed, staying engaged, and receiving ongoing instruction via remote learning in some form.
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But instead of rushing to rescue schools from financial calamity, many government leaders—including U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—are using the pandemic to advance their personal agendas, whether it’s to privatize public education or balance budgets on the backs of school kids.
The predicted shortfalls will compound harm that’s been done to a public education system already in financial trauma.
Public schools haven’t fully recovered from the beating they took as a result of the Great Recession, argues a new report from the Albert Shanker Institute, a research center affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. The downturn in the nation’s economy that started in 2007 hit schools hardest in 2009 to 2011, after states had slashed education budgets and aid that came from the federal stimulus package had run out. The results were “fewer teachers and support staff, larger classes, and a narrower array of academic and extracurricular programs,” the report explains.
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The report’s authors, Rutgers professor Bruce Baker and Shanker Institute senior fellow Matthew Di Carlo, call on the federal government to respond to the pandemic with a large aid package for public schools and requirements for states to direct money where it’s needed most—to high-poverty communities in deepest distress and “according to student needs.” State leaders, the authors contend, must move to restore state funding levels to what they were before the recession hit.
Instead of taking this advice, what we see are political leaders in both parties going in the opposite direction."
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The governor recently started a conversation around reimagining education. In announcing his Gates Foundation-led effort to rethink the state’s schools, he mused, “The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom…and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why, with all the technology you have?”
To teach our students those kinds of skills, we recognize we can’t do it alone. We need more counselors and psychologists to help students address the stresses and pressures they bring with them to class. We need smaller class sizes. And if we are to use this opportunity to learn a lesson about how we can improve the way we deliver instruction digitally, we need to ensure there is equity in access to technology both at school and at home. ...
The biggest challenge of course is that these things cost money, and every school district across the state is now bracing to make cuts, not new investments. If there ever were a time for federal and state policymakers to deliver for schools, it’s now.
That’s how we want to start the conversation about educational innovation. It might not be easy. But it’s the right direction for our students."
Ferguson, Hysick, Murat and Susso are state teachers of the year from 2012, 2017, 2020 and 2019, respectively.
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"In a historic move likely to have national repercussions, the University of California Board of Regents voted … to stop requiring students to submit college-entrance tests the SAT or ACT for admissions purposes. The vote was a unanimous 23-0.
The system has given itself until the fall of 2025 to develop a bespoke standardized test for California residents. If the UC cannot create a new test that better aligns with what students learned in school, it’ll drop the testing requirement completely for Californians.
The debate over college admissions has been ongoing for years, many years: Are the current tests discriminatory? Can you create a non-discriminatory test? Are other methods, for example, class standing discriminatory to another class of students?
The Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT, has been around, in many forms, since the 1920s. The SAT (and the more recent ACT) have been the gatekeepers determining admission to colleges. Elite colleges have required higher scores and have made allowances for legacy students, students of alumni, commonly contributors to the school.
The research is overwhelming re the discriminatory impact of current “standardized” tests.
The evidence for a stubborn race gap on this test does… provide a snapshot into the extraordinary magnitude of racial inequality in contemporary American society."
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"In 2009, federal intervention during the last financial crisis gave rise to the Obama administration’s signature education initiative: the Race to the Top (RTTT). Created with $4.3 billion from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, RTTT weaponized its forerunner, the No Child Left Behind Act, and led to new levels of assault on unions, the teaching profession, and public schools, and to a decade of damaging privatization. Its two primary weapons of mass destruction were tests and charters.
It took years of resistance, pushback, and policy failures to turn the tide. NCLB and RTTT were ultimately unsustainable and failed to deliver on their promises. As the 2018 Red for Ed teacher strike wave and the early stages of the 2020 presidential campaign showed, resistance and activism helped shift the focus of national education politics from charters and tests to school funding and teacher salaries. Mobilized, militant teachers became the voices of communities digging out from decades of austerity, and support for public education was again on the rise.
But now the Trump pandemic, and the lethal fiasco of the response by U.S. economic and political institutions, has remade the education landscape again. We are back in shock doctrine, disaster capitalism territory and public schools are again in the crosshairs. Teachers are quarantined at home behind computer screens instead of mobilizing in the streets, and school communities are scattered, atomized, and struggling with uncertainty.
The Implications for Federal Education Policy
The emergency CARES Act, passed without a single dissenting vote and signed in March, was the first of several massive pieces of federal legislation rushed through Congress in response to the pandemic. While the CARES Act didn’t include the same kind of signature federal initiative that RTTT represented for Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, it did give Duncan’s successor, the wildly unpopular, right-wing billionaire Betsy DeVos, extraordinary powers in a host of important policy areas.
There will be additional federal action affecting schools in the months ahead, including attempts to address the financial tsunami that is already engulfing school budgets. But even a cursory comparison between the federal response in 2009 and the initial response to the current crisis provides some clues about the extended emergency ahead for public education.
The CARES Act included $13.5 billion for K–12 schools, $14 billion for higher education, and another $3 billion that governors can split between the two as part of $31 billion in “stabilization aid” for state budgets. But while the total $2.2 trillion legislative package was several times larger than the $800 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, the initial amounts provided for education in the CARES Act were much smaller.
The Recovery Act sent $54 billion in education aid to states primarily for K–12 programs and the implementation of RTTT. Moreover, as noted by Education Week, the “2009 stimulus didn’t just shore up education budgets; its unprecedented windfall of education aid also helped the Obama administration put financial muscle behind its priorities. Those priorities focused on areas like standards and accountability.” To promote those policies, the funds came with prescriptive regulations about their use, including provisions that drove an expansion of charters, standardized testing, and test-based teacher evaluation. States and school districts desperate for federal dollars had to commit to this agenda to receive RTTT’s “competitive grants.”
“The CARES Act doesn’t take the same approach,” Education Week’s analysis concluded. “It’s hard to see discrete elements of a Trump education policy agenda driving current coronavirus aid — although U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos indicated last week she wants to change that.”
DeVos Given Tools of Destruction
The CARES Act gives DeVos multiple tools to do so. It gives the secretary of education authority to waive many requirements outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the omnibus federal education legislation that replaced NCLB. The first — and undoubtedly most popular — use of this authority came when all 50 states sought and received in a matter of weeks a waiver to suspend federally required annual standardized testing for the current school year. The educational irrelevance of these tests and their existence as an obstacle to serving the real needs of students was one of the first lessons of the pandemic."
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Why School Climate Matters For Teachers And Students
by Matthew A. Kraft Grace T. Falken -- May 18, 2020Our guest authors today are Mathew A. Kraft, associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, and Grace T. Falken, a research program associate at Brown’s Annenberg Institute. This article originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of The State Education Standard, the journal of the National Association of State Boards of Education.
Over the past decade, education reformers have focused much of their attention on raising teacher quality. This makes sense, given the well-evidenced, large impacts teachers have on student outcomes and the wide variation in teacher effectiveness, even within the same school (Goldhaber 2015; Jackson et al. 2014). Yet this focus on individual teachers has caused policymakers to lose sight of the importance of the organizational contexts in which teachers work and students learn.
The quality of a school’s teaching staff is greater than the sum of its parts. School environments can enable teachers to perform to their fullest potential or undercut their efforts to do so.
When we think of work environments, we often envision physical features: school facilities, instructional resources, and the surrounding neighborhood. State and district policies that shape curriculum standards, class size, and compensation also come to mind. These things matter, but so do school climate factors that are less easily observed or measured. Teachers’ day-to-day experiences are influenced most directly by the culture and interpersonal environment of their schools.
School climates consist of a constellation of organizational features that shape teachers’ and students’ experiences. Strong school climates are characterized by supportive leadership, teacher collaboration, high expectations for students, and a collective commitment to support student learning. Teaching is a social career, and the relationships that teachers have with those who support their work in the classroom—administrators and colleagues—heavily influence teachers’ satisfaction and success.
Strong professional environments foster a virtuous cycle in which teachers develop skills faster, stay at a school longer, and improve student learning year over year. State education agencies and boards of education that are working to improve instruction across school systems would do well to recognize the interconnected nature of teachers’ work and the environments in which they perform their craft.
Teacher Development
Work environments can support—or hinder—effective instruction and teachers’ professional growth. Researchers and policymakers often talk about teacher ability as if it were fixed and fully portable across school contexts, but teachers’ performance depends on how well-matched their skills are with their students’ needs and the work environment. Teachers’ skills are multidimensional and do not always translate across student populations and school settings. Even the most talented and dedicated teachers will struggle to overcome a school culture that lacks a safe, supportive learning environment.
Strong work environments enable teachers to perform to their potential. Teachers are most effective in environments characterized by trust, respect, and a collective commitment to upholding school values and expectations. Organizational practices such as protecting learning time and restorative behavior policies can improve teacher effectiveness by creating conditions for success in the classroom (Papay and Kraft 2017).
Teachers also improve faster and continue to become more effective throughout their careers in schools with supportive professional environments (Bryk et al. 2010; Kraft and Papay 2014; Papay and Kraft 2017; Ronfeldt et al. 2015). Almost all teachers improve in their first few years on the job as they gain experience in the classroom and learn from their mistakes. However, some teachers plateau after their early career, while others continue to refine their craft (Kraft et al. 2019).
School environments can help promote rapid improvement and extend professional growth through formal and informal opportunities for on-the-job learning. Meaningful peer collaboration helps develop teachers’ skills, facilitates open feedback, and strengthens collegial relationships (Burgess et al. 2019; Jackson and Bruegmann 2009). Teachers get better when there is a school norm of continuous improvement that fosters innovation, collaboration, and the trust necessary to allow teachers to experiment with new instructional techniques.
Teacher Retention
Developing and retaining an effective teaching staff is among the most important avenues through which administrators can drive school improvement. Teachers disproportionately leave large, urban school districts that serve students of color for suburban, high-income districts that primarily serve white students (Lankford et al. 2002; Hanushek et al. 2002). Researchers and policymakers tend to ascribe teachers’ career decisions to the students they teach rather than the conditions in which they work. Evidence suggests, however, that poor working conditions in many large, low-income urban schools are the driving factor in differential turnover rates (Simon and Moore Johnson 2015).
Positive work environments promote teachers’ sense of self-efficacy, which contributes to increased satisfaction and retention (Chan et al. 2008; Moore Johnson and Birkeland 2003). Social characteristics of the school environment—such as principal leadership, collegial relationships, and school culture—have the largest effects on teachers’ satisfaction (Moore Johnson et al. 2012). When administrators collaborate with teachers, grant them autonomy, and create teacher leadership positions, teachers are more likely to feel successful and stay on the job (Moore Johnson et al. 2014).
Schools and students bear the cost of high teacher turnover. When teachers leave, less-effective novice teachers often replace them (Clotfelter et al. 2006; Rivkin et al. 2005; Rockoff 2004). Turnover creates organizational instability, which in turn disrupts teachers’ efforts to collaborate or coordinate instruction. Some organizational churn is normal and even healthy, but chronically high levels of turnover hinder student learning (Ronfeldt et al. 2013). Reducing turnover and retaining effective teachers will strengthen the school environment and improve education quality for all students.
Student Achievement
Better work environments foster teachers’ and students’ joint success (Papay and Kraft 2017; Bryk et al. 2010; Ladd 2011). School safety, order, and academic expectations affect teachers’ work and their students’ learning (Kraft et al. 2016). A safe environment enables students and teachers to focus on learning, and an orderly environment minimizes disruptions in class (Carrell and Hoekstra 2010). In Chicago, for example, the best-performing schools are more than twice as likely to have safe, orderly climates as low-performing schools (Bryk et al. 2010).
High expectations for students, combined with the relevant supports, also enable student success. When consistent throughout a school and coupled with academic and social-emotional supports, setting a high bar promotes student development (Dobbie and Fryer 2013). Teachers play an important role in creating a collective culture where students believe they are capable of meeting high standards. In this way, a strong professional environment for teachers facilitates a strong learning environment for students, and vice-versa. Cultivating environments where students feel like they belong and are valued members of the community further promotes both academic achievement and social-emotional development.
Directions for Policy
Efforts to strengthen school environments should begin with identifying school-specific structural or cultural weaknesses. Several state education agencies now administer annual climate surveys to teachers and students statewide to inform and track schools’ improvement efforts and allow for district-level comparisons across the state.
School climate surveys are effective diagnostic tools that assess a range of features important for school organizational contexts. With the right level of specificity, climate survey data can help leaders and teachers understand, more tangibly, the nuances of their work environment and construct targeted plans to strengthen it. Depending on the setting, initiatives might include fostering productive collaboration between teachers (Kraft et al. 2015; Papay et al. 2020), implementing social-emotional behavioral supports (Kraft et al. 2015), setting high expectations for learners (Raudenbush 1984), and engaging parents more directly in the education process.
Principals are key change agents in efforts to improve school climate (Boyd et al. 2011). Effective principals develop a collective commitment among their staff and a collaborative work environment. School leaders accomplish this by setting and consistently upholding school norms, providing opportunities for teacher leadership, and conducting rigorous screening processes for vacant teaching positions that seek to identify both strong teachers and those who are a good fit with the culture of the school. However, principals’ ability to select the best candidates for the job is often constrained by state laws and district policies. State policymakers have an important role to play in creating a legislative landscape that allows school leadership to have greater autonomy over hiring.
Creating positive school environments is the collective work of principals, teachers, and communities. Schools improve when principals facilitate an open-door culture committed to teacher development and provide teachers with specific, actionable feedback (Jackson and Bruegmann 2009). Similarly, creating social and behavioral supports for students allows teachers to focus more on teaching and less on counseling and behavioral management.
When schools raise expectations for students and provide the necessary organizational support to achieve those standards, high standards become both empowering and attainable. State policy should provide schools leaders with the budgetary flexibility necessary to staff their schools with an effective mix of student support positions.
Every school can improve its conditions for working and learning. For state education agencies and district leaders looking for further direction, we highly recommend Teaching in Context: The Social Side of Education Reform, edited by Esther Quintero and Susan Moore Johnson’s Where Teachers Thrive, Organizing Schools for Success. These books provide detailed case studies and evidence-based recommendations for strengthening schools as organizations.
State boards of education have the power to create policy and advocate for the flexibility and resources necessary to support strong school climates. There are no easy solutions, but dedicated and sustained efforts can make the difference between schools where teachers stay and thrive versus those where they struggle and leave."
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