Category Archives: Diversity & Equity

What the U.S. Can’t Learn from Finland

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Finland, with its high-achieving public schools, has been held up as a standard for the US as we slog down the path of education reform.  However, are there things we can’t learn from Finland’s model? Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?, recently wrote an article for the Washington Post on what lessons Finland is unable to teach the US.  Excerpts from his article are below.

“During the last decade, Finland has become the go-to place for education reformers all around the world. The main reason is its success in the international survey comparing 15-year-olds in reading, math and science learning called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Since that OECD report, I have been privileged to meet legislators, administrators, teachers, and parents here in the United States. Anywhere I go, people are eager to hear about Finnish education and its accomplishments. Especially, they want to know what they can learn from it.

What I have to say, however, is not always what they want to hear. While it is true that we can certainly learn from foreign systems and use them as backdrops for better understanding of our own, we cannot simply replicate them. What, then, can’t the United States learn from Finland?

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

  • Funding of schools: Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.
  • Well-being of children: All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.
  • Education as a human right: All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Second, school autonomy and teacher professionalism are often mentioned as the dominant factors explaining strong educational performance in Finland. The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students.

In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.

[…]

Teaching in Finland is, in fact, such a desired profession that the University of Helsinki, where I teach part-time, received 2,300 applicants this spring for 120 spots in its primary school teacher education program. In this teacher education program and the seven others, teachers are prepared to design their own curricula, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and their school. Until the United States has improved its teacher education, its teachers cannot enjoy similar prestige, public confidence and autonomy.

Third, many education visitors to Finland expect to find schools filled with Finnish pedagogical innovation and state-of-the-art technology. Instead, they see teachers teaching and pupils learning as they would in any typical good school in the United States. Some observers call this “pedagogical conservatism” or “informal and relaxed” because there does not appear to be much going on in classrooms.

The irony of Finnish educational success is that it derives heavily from classroom innovation and school improvement research in the United States. Cooperative learning and portfolio assessment are examples of American classroom-based innovations that have been implemented in large scale in the Finnish school system.

Those who are looking at Finland’s education system as a possible model for reform in the United States point out, quite correctly, that our two countries are very different. In these comparisons, one critical difference is often overlooked that is also essential to understanding what our two countries can or cannot learn from one another.

In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the ongoing school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners…The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity.

[…]

What Finland can show to others is how equity and equal opportunity in education look like. However, school reformers in the United States need to be careful when considering equity-based reform ideas to be imported from Finland. Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.”

To read the full text, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/what-the-us-cant-learn-from-finland-about-ed-reform/2012/04/16/gIQAGIvVMT_blog.html

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District Seeks Alternative Methods of Integration

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From the 1970s through the 1990s, Wake County Public Schools in North Carolina was known for its academic performance and dedication to racial integration of its schools.  However, since 2000, when the courts ruled race could no longer be a criterion in determining which school students attend, Wake county has had to look for other routes to promote equality.

The County is now one of the first in the nation to adopt a system of socioeconomic integration.   The idea was that every school would have a mix of children, with 60% not requiring subsidized lunch, while the other 40% did.  However, in 2009 a new conservative majority was elected to the Wake school board, and it has voted to dismantle the integration plan.  Families will now send their children to the closest neighborhood school.

This meant that students from poor areas will attend schools composed of mostly poor children, and wealthier children will attend wealthier schools.  However, Wake county is full of well-educated people (50% of employees are college grads) and did not take this decision lying down.  Two weeks ago, civil leaders proposed a “third generation” of integration:  integration by achievement.

Under this plan, no school would have an overwhelming number of failing students.  Rather, schools would have something like a 70/30 mix—70% students who score proficient on state assessments, and 30% who are below grade level.  This type of integration plan is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.  So far, the initial reaction to the plan has been positive.  Conservative and liberal school board members, as well as a former and the current superintendent have all expressed their satisfaction with this plan as a starting point.

To read more, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/education/28winerip.html?_r=1

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Teacher Characteristics and Class Assignments

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There is ample research on the differences in teacher distribution across schools vis-à-vis teacher demographics and experience, but what about teacher distribution within schools?  A paper published by the Urban Institute looks at this issue.

By comparing teachers within the same grade level and school in an urban district during a given year, the authors found that less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned students with lower and more variable prior achievement, more prior behavioral problems, and lower prior attendance rates; also, they are assigned more low-income and minority students.  Their more experienced, white and male colleagues generally have a lower proportion of the low-achieving, poor and minority students.

Furthermore, the authors found that the teachers’ human capital, which they measured by experience, highest degree earned, attendance at more competitive colleges, and effectiveness at raising student achievement, consistently correlates to the types of students they are assigned—in that, the more effective teachers are assigned higher achieving students with few behavior issues.  The authors propose that this may be because principals want to reward teachers they want to retain and punish those they want to get rid of via an informal method; however, other research suggests that this may not be the case.  Generally the argument is that teachers with more human capital are assigned more advanced courses because they are assumed to have a better grasp of the subject matter; students in these courses of course tend to be higher achieving.

The authors concede that this last explanation may be plausible at the high school level, but argue that it does not explain the patterns of assignment they saw at the elementary level.  Therefore, they are inclined to agree with the former argument that “good” classes are assigned as rewards.  Altogether, these practices are part of the complex leadership process in most schools, which tries “to balance both short and long-term goals as well as pressures from students, teachers and parents.” It suggests that one avenue for decreasing the achievement gap may be through the principalship, with a focus on class assignment.

To read the full paper, please visit http://www.urban.org/publications/1001530.html

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Six Ideas about Professional Growth for Teachers

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In a recent blog post for Education Week, educator Nancy Flanagan reflected on a recent encounter she had with a young teacher after a panel discussion.  The teacher described her loneliness at her school, which is focused on raising test scores and has an atmosphere of fear and bitterness among the teaching staff subsumed by the incredibly high stakes of the profession.  As a second-year teacher, she had no one to turn to for mentorship and felt disillusioned with the whole system, but had found the evening panel discussion (of which Flanagan was a key participant) uplifting and rejuvenating.  She told Flanagan, “You don’t know how much I needed this!”

Thinking back on this interchange, Flanagan developed six ideas on changing the conception teachers have about professional growth.

1.  Ask teachers what they need.  What do they want to learn?  What are their interests?  Teachers should be asked to help develop their own professional learning objectives, with principals acting as facilitators.

2. Keep working on the right descriptors.  We need to develop clearer terminology for the different types of professional growth opportunities for teachers.  Professional development, professional learning communities, professional conversation…

3. Get rid of the PD verb “present.”  Teachers should not be “presented” new instructional strategies, or listen to “presentations” on new techniques.  “The only productive thing listening to a pre-packaged instructional presentation will yield is a rough idea of how the material might be adapted to fit your particular class.”  Teachers need to share, discuss, and have the space to use their professional judgment.

4. Invest in teachers as valuable social capital.  There is value in professional networking, but are large conferences the best way to grow as a teacher?  Flanagan thinks the common format of professional development should be reconsidered, and activities viewed as “regenerative,” rather than remedial, and thus part of a long-term investment in teacher capacity.

5. Build more personal learning networking opportunities.  We should be encouraging all teachers to interact with educational digital networking communities, and provide a time for them to do so during the school day.  “It’s the most cost-effective professional learning available, and controlled by the teacher-learner.”

6. Demand that professional organizations give us what we want.  “We need to stop thinking of professional development as something done to teachers.”  In other words, we need to force unions and disciplinary organizations to focus on real professional learning goals, to provide viable alternatives to district-mandated PD.

To read the full post, please visit http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_in_a_strange_land/2011/11/you_dont_know_how_much_i_needed_this_six_ideas_about_professional_growth_for_teachers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TeacherInAStrangeLand+%28Teacher+in+a+Strange+Land%29

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Teacher Diversity Matters

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The Center for American Progress released two reports last week focused on the lack of diversity in the American school system and what might be done about it.  The first paper, Teacher Diversity Matters, by Ulrich Boser, reflects on the increasingly diverse public school population and the decreasingly diverse teacher population.

Using the 2008 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Boser found that almost every state has a large teacher diversity gap.  In California, 72% of students are “of color,” i.e., not white, yet only 29% of the teaching force is of color.  More than 20 other states have gaps of 25 percentage points or more.  Boser went on to study what factors might be leading to this gap and found that salary might play a big factor in recruitment and retention of teachers of color.  Only 37% of African-American, and 46% of Hispanic teachers indicated they were satisfied with their pay; on the other side, 52% of white teachers are satisfied with their salary.  Boser feels this is likely due to the fact that teachers of color are more likely to teach in poor, urban school districts where education budgets are tighter than that of the surrounding suburban districts.

The second report, Increasing Teacher Diversity, by Saba Bireda and Robin Chait, produces somewhat startling statistics: nationally, black and Latino teachers represent only 14.6% of the workforce, and in over 40% of public schools there is not a single teacher of color.  Even in urban, high-poverty schools where minority teachers are disproportionately represented, teachers of color are still outnumbered by their white colleagues.

Bireda and Chait reflect on the steps that have been taken in the past few years to improve teacher effectiveness and fairly distribute effective teachers across districts.  They argue that strategies to increase the number of minority teachers must operate inside this framework and “focus on developing training and tools to ensure that these teachers will be effective in the classroom.”

Both papers recognize that the recent efforts to increase recruitment of teachers of color have been successful, the very high attrition of these teachers should be taken more seriously.  To that end, the authors recommend improving the opportunities for professional development and support for teachers of color.  Bireda and Chait also argue for increased federal oversight of teacher preparation programs to ensure both the active recruitment, and the subsequent high-quality training, of teachers of color.  Both papers also advocate increasing the number of alternative certification routes that could offer other opportunities for low-income but high achieving minority students to enter the field.

To read Ulrich Boser’s report, please visit http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/11/teacher_diversity.html

To read Bireda and Chait’s report, please visit http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/11/increasing_teacher_diversity.html

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Is Teaching a Team Sport?

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John Merrow recently blogged about a comment made by the Center for Teaching Quality’s Barnett Berry:  “Teaching is a team sport,” he told Merrow.  Merrow was left wondering—is this true?  Baseball is a team sport, with everyone needing to work together for success, while at the same time allowing for individual statistics and honors.  But does teaching fit that definition?  He finds six elements that prevent a “yes” to that question.

First, “the ‘egg crate’ architecture” of schools keeps each classroom separated from others.  Also, school schedules do not support team play—most teachers spend their entire day inside their own classroom and have little opportunity to work together.  Third, the very language used in schools, such as “team teaching,” imply that only teachers who share a classroom are a team—everyone else is autonomous.  Teacher evaluations are also done on an individual basis, with few points given for if/how the teacher contributes to overall school culture or success.

School governance is another area where there is no sense of team.  “Often it’s ‘labor versus management,’ with teachers punching a time clock twice a day.”  Teachers are not asked their opinions on school or colleague performance, they are not given discretion to make decisions that might affect others outside of their classroom—in short, they are not treated as trustworthy partners in the school mission.  Finally, Merrow argues that the “emerging pay structure flies in the face of the idea that teaching is a team sport.”

Merrow believes that most teachers want teaching to be a team sport, but that the current system doesn’t allow for it.  He proposes that teaching should be recognized as a team sport, “and education as a team activity.  The ‘team’ is the school, and everyone in the school is on the team, including secretarial staff and custodians.”  Furthermore, education can’t have a simple win/loss record due to its complexity: it should include academic measures, attendance and turnover rates of students and teachers, community involvement, and more.  Merit pay could then be divided up when the team achieves the agreed-upon goals.

To read the original post, please visit http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=5402

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The Minority Teacher Shortage: Fact or Fable?

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Earlier this month, Richard M. Ingersoll and Henry May published a study through the Consortium for Policy Research in Education that addressed the long-held belief that the country is suffering from a lack of diversity in the teaching profession.  They synthesized their findings in a recent article for Phi Delta Kappan.  As an introduction, they discuss what conventional wisdom says about the minority teacher shortage:

–The teaching force has grown more white and less diverse.

–Minority students increasingly lack minority adult role models and qualified teachers of any race because white teachers avoid schools with large minority populations.

–The minority teacher shortage is a major reason for the minority achievement gap and therefore unequal occupational and life outcomes for disadvantaged students.

–The source of this shortage is due to few minority students completing college, and those who do seek professions other than teaching.

–When minority candidates do seek teaching positions, there are barriers (such as teacher entry exams, on which minority candidates have lower pass rates).

The end result is a minority teacher shortage and, it can be argued, a civil rights issue.  However, Ingersoll and May were not satisfied with the “conventional wisdom,” so several years ago they set about studying the data.

They looked at a series of data from a large national survey of teachers and administrators conducted by the Department of Education.  The data covered over two decades, from the late 1980s through 2009, and the researchers used it to determine the extent of the minority teacher shortage.  They looked at whether employment rates of minority teachers; the ratio of minority students and minority teachers versus white students and white teachers; where minority teachers tend to be employed and the comparison with white teachers’ employment; and the retention rate of minority teachers versus white teachers.

Their results showed that there has been a persistent gap between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers across the nation.  However, in recent years it seems that this gap has persisted largely because the number of white students has decreased while the number of minority students has increased, rather than a decrease in the number of minorities teaching.

Also, they found that since the late 1980s the number of minority teachers have almost doubled—from 325,000 to 642,000 in 2009.  This growth outpaced the growth in minority students and was over twice the growth rate of white teachers.  This illustrates that the teaching force has rapidly grown more diverse, and holds true for male minority teachers as well.

Minority teachers are “overwhelmingly employed” in high-needs schools; in fact, they are two to three times more likely to work in such a school as white teachers.  Therefore, it can  be concluded that efforts to recruit more minority teachers to teach in high-poverty, high-minority schools have been successful.

On the flip side, however, minority teachers’ careers have been less stable than white teachers.  In recent years particularly, minority teachers were more likely to change schools or leave teaching altogether than their white counterparts—and this trend is more pronounced with male minority teachers.  One consequence of such high turnover rates is that the effort to address the minority teacher shortage is undermined.  For example, in the 2003-04 school year, 47,600 minority teachers entered the profession; but the following year 56,000 had left teaching.

The largest consideration for minority teachers changing schools or leaving the profession appears to be working conditions.  High needs schools tend to have chronic staffing problems, and therefore less desirable working conditions.  Furthermore,

“[Most] striking was what we found when we looked at which conditions were most correlated with minority teachers’ departures. Salary levels, the provision of useful professional development, and the availability of classroom resources all had little impact on whether they were likely to leave. The strongest factors by far for minority teachers were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence in the school and the degree of individual instructional autonomy held by teachers in their classrooms. Influence and autonomy, of course, are key hallmarks of respected professions. Schools that provided more teacher classroom discretion and autonomy, as well as schools with higher levels of faculty input into school decision making, had significantly lower levels of minority teacher turnover.”

Therefore, it can be concluded that the problem with the minority teacher shortage is not a lack of minority teachers entering the profession, it is that there is an exceptionally high turnover rate.   Since the biggest factor in minority teachers deciding to leave the profession is a lack of autonomy and no voice, accountability measures need to be crafted so that teachers do not lose control over their classrooms and their opinions are heard and validated.  In other words, reforming school culture, policies, and working conditions could help keep minority teachers in the profession, and decrease the effects of the high turnover rates on high-poverty, high-minority schools.  “Unlike reforms such as teacher salary increases and class-size reduction, changing some conditions, such as teachers’ classroom autonomy and faculty’s schoolwide influence, should be less costly financially—an important consideration, especially in low-income settings and in periods of budgetary constraint.”

To read the full study, please visit http://www.cpre.org/images/stories/cpre_pdfs/minority%20teacher%20shortage%20report_rr69%20sept%20final.pdf

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Study Questions Whether “i3” Found Innovation

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A report released July 25 by Bellwether Education Partners sought to answer a crucial question:  Did the Investing in Innovation (“i3”) program successfully find truly innovative ideas to improve K-12 education?  The report is the culmination of interviews with dozens of i3 applicants, winners and philanthropists, plus a review of public documents about the program.

As the August 2 deadline approaches for the second round of i3 grants, the report acknowledges that in many ways, the competition itself was the most innovative part of the program, particularly since it was rolled out by a federal department used to giving grants based on formula funding, not competitions.

The first round competition for $650 million in prize money funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act resulted in 49 winners, with awards split into three tiers ranging from roughly $5 million to $50 million.  This year’s round will award only $150 million, but nearly 1,400 organizations have notified the Department of Education they intend to apply.

The report acknowledges some of the positive benefits of the program, such as increased partnership between the philanthropic sector and K-12 public education and the requirements for varying levels of evidence to be considered in each type of grant—those with larger bodies of research received larger grants.  This framework was “by far the most significant innovation that i3 brought to the table.”

This achievement is a double-edged sword, however.  Since greater amounts of research were required for larger grants, the program ended up favoring programs that had been around long enough and had enough financial backing to have such bodies of evidence. The result was a “pool of applicants and grantees made up of existing organizations that had already addressed K-12 schooling in some way.”  Winners included the well-known Teach For America and the Knowledge is Power programs.  One unnamed applicant is quoted in the report as saying that “neither the iPhone or iPad teams at Apple would have been able to meet this standard to get the funds to initiate these projects.”

The most interesting problem that researchers found with the program was its name.  Originally, the Department of Education called it the Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund, later shortened to Investing in Innovation, and from there given the nickname “i3.”  Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton acknowledged that taking the phrase “what works” out the title set up unrealistic expectations about the kind of innovation the department would fund, but he also pointed out that alongside the well-known winners were a good number of no-names, such as the highest-scoring winner, a school district in Colorado.

To read more about the report’s findings, please visit http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/07/25/37i3.h30.html?tkn=NWUF5%2FRp%2BUxtoIcaw%2BLaa%2BH1VMyeBAiwcpBU&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1

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Speaking of Salaries: A Report from the Center for American Progress

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The fact that well-qualified teachers are inequitably distributed to students in the United States has received growing public attention. Studies in state after state have found that students of color in low- income schools are 3 to 10 times more likely to have unqualified teachers than students in predominantly white schools.
In Speaking of Salaries: What it will Take to get Qualified, Effective Teachers in All Communities, by Frank Adamson and Linda Darling-Hammond, the authors examine how funding, salaries, and teacher qualifications vary across districts and how these variations affect achievement. The report explores whether and to what extent unequal salaries and the district revenues that underlie pay and working conditions are at the root of the teacher distribution problem and reviews the literature on these questions. In addition, the authors discuss strategies that have proven to be successful in recruiting qualified and effective teachers to high-need schools, and draw implications for federal policy that may finally resolve this dilemma that has for so long reinforced the achievement gap.
To view the report, see http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/05/teacher_salary.html

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Time for Deeper Learning

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Policy and practice at the local, state, and national levels should support the concepts of “deeper learning” to help all students meet higher expectations and be prepared for college and a career, according to a new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education. The brief, “A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World,” argues that deeper learning provides students with the deep content knowledge students need to succeed after high school and the critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills that today’s jobs demand.
 

According to the brief, today’s increasingly complex world requires that young people learn more, process more, and produce more, but the nation’s education infrastructure is not currently designed to support these increasing demands. As evidence, the brief points to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showing that American students trail their peers from other developed countries in using their knowledge to solve problems in key subjects like reading, math, and science.

“A Time for Deeper Learning” argues that American schools tend to offer a two-tiered curriculum in which some students-primarily white and relatively affluent-have had opportunities for deeper learning, while others-primarily low-income and students of color-have focused almost exclusively on basic skills and knowledge. It finds that the nation’s prosperity in the near future will depend more than ever on students from underserved groups.
The brief observes that the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind, presents a unique opportunity for federal policymakers to create opportunities for states and districts to put into place the kinds of policies and practices that a deeper learning environment requires. It outlines policy actions that support deeper learning in five different areas-standards, assessments, accountability, professional development and teaching practice, and state-level polices-and provides a picture of what deeper learning might look in the classroom.

The complete brief is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/DeeperLearning.pdf.

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