Executive Order Establishes Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans

Posted on July 30, 2012 by coreeducation

Last Wednesday, during his remarks at the National Urban League conference in New Orleans, President Obama announced he would sign an Executive Order to improve outcomes and advance educational opportunities for African Americans.

The President has made providing a complete and competitive education for all Americans – from cradle to career – a top priority. The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans will work across Federal agencies and with partners and communities nationwide to produce a more effective continuum of education programs for African American students. The Initiative aims to ensure that all African American students receive an education that fully prepares them for high school graduation, college completion, and productive careers.

In the less than 60 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision put America on a path toward equal educational opportunity, America’s educational system has undergone a remarkable transformation. Nonetheless, substantial obstacles to equal educational opportunity still remain in America’s educational system. African American students lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline and referrals to special education.

The President has set the goal for America to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. To reach this ambitious goal, and to ensure equality of access and opportunity in education for all Americans, the Obama Administration is dedicating new resources, through rigorous and well-rounded academic and support services, to enable African American students to improve their educational achievement and prepare for college and career.

To deliver a complete and competitive education for all African Americans, the Initiative will promote, encourage, and undertake efforts designed to meet several objectives, including:

Increasing the percentage of African American children who enter kindergarten ready for success by improving access to high-quality early learning and development programs;
Ensuring that all African American students have access to high-level, rigorous course work and support services that will prepare them for college, a career, and civic participation;
Providing African American students with equitable access to effective teachers and principals, and supporting efforts to improve the recruitment, preparation, development, and retention of successful African American teachers and principals;
Promoting a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools, and decreasing the disproportionate number of referrals to special education by addressing root causes of the referrals;
Reducing the dropout rate of African American students;
Increasing college access, college persistence, and college attainment for African American students;
Strengthening the capacity of institutions of higher education that serve large numbers of African American students; and
Improving the quality of, and expanding access to, adult education, literacy, and career and technical education.

To read the full Executive Order, please visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/26/executive-order-white-house-initiative-educational-excellence-african-am

Tips for Supporting, Preparing Culturally Diverse Teaching Force

Posted on June 18, 2012 by coreeducation

Rural administrators who want to better prepare and support a culturally diverse teaching force need to vary recruitment strategies, seek partnerships, and promote a culture of collaboration, according to a new study.

Those are among a list of suggestions in “Teacher Identity in a Multicultural Rural School: Lessons Learned at Vista Charter,” published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education. The study involved over two years of research at a high-poverty, bilingual, elementary charter school in rural eastern Oregon. Seven of the 12 teachers at the school (called “Vista Charter” in the report, though not the real name) are bilingual.

The report focuses heavily on the teachers’ backgrounds and exploring the five core beliefs they shared: all teachers were valued and valuable, all teachers expected to learn from the diverse student body and teaching staff, all expected to collaborate for professional development, that “we teach who we are,” and that the school was a safe place to grow as a teacher. In addition to these, the researchers also culled tips for both rural school administrators and teacher educators. Some of these tips include:

Vary recruitment strategies—try to “homegrow” diverse teachers, including targeting good second-career candidates from the local community, rather than pursuing more traditional routes for teacher recruitment.
Support teachers in the multiple roles they serve.
Evaluate the school mission so that it incorporates students’ multicultural competencies.
Provide teacher-selected professional development.
Know the community, the families, and get them involved. This includes tapping the vast knowledge of the paraeducator network established—many paraeducators have intimate knowledge of both the community and the students they serve.

To read the full study, please visit http://www.jrre.psu.edu/articles/27-5.pdf

Teacher Diversity Matters

Posted on November 17, 2011 by coreeducation

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

The Minority Teacher Shortage: Fact or Fable?

Posted on September 28, 2011 by coreeducation

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

N.Y. Thinks Outside Teacher Education Box

Posted on August 10, 2011 by coreeducation

Under a series of actions taken over the past year and a half by the New York State Board of Regents, the body that oversees P-12 education, higher education, and teacher certification, the doors have been opened for nonuniversity programs to prepare teachers at the graduate-degree level. Additionally, the first new graduate school of education in half a century has been approved, and financing has been awarded to a variety of “clinically rich” pilot preparation programs at traditional schools of education.

One of the most progressive moves the Board has taken is to give the American Museum of Natural History the authority to prepare secondary-level science teachers. Beginning next summer, participants in the program will earn their master’s degrees and be eligible for initial teacher certification. “Our role in science education and working with schools has become increasingly formal,” says museum President Ellen V. Futter, “There is a crisis in science education, and we have felt it incumbent on us, given the resources we have and the leverage we have, to play a prominent role in addressing that.”

The museum’s program includes a yearlong student-teaching apprenticeship in schools, and puts special emphasis on ensuring the candidates not only know science content, but also participate in the scientific process: they are required to work alongside scientists during one part of the program.

In addition to the museum program, the Board has also approved a new graduate school to train teachers: the Relay School of Education. This program focuses on the inculcation of specific teaching techniques and strategies, and in order to graduate candidates must demonstrate during student teaching that they helped their students gain at least a year’s worth of learning. Furthermore, rather than requiring the “usual” series of three-credit-hour courses, Relay focuses on 60 competencies that students must master.

Investments in traditional teacher prepration programs have also been made. Lehman College in the Bronx received a grant to support stipends for students enrolled in a fifth-year teaching-residency program. Grant money will also be used to assist the recruitment of ethnically diverse teacher candidates with high GPAs from the community in which they will serve.

On the teacher assessment side, New York is also in the beginning stages of tying a series of teacher assessments to its tiered-certification system. The new system will require all teachers to pass performance exams and demonstrate their impact on student learning (using a value-added metric) in order to receive a professional certificate.

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

Posted on June 21, 2011 by coreeducation

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

Student Subgroups and NAEP

Posted on June 1, 2011 by coreeducation

In a blog post written by Jack Jennings, Center for Education Policy’s president, Jennings discusses achievement gains of white, Latino, and African American students on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The blog points out that while general trends show a mixed picture of achievement gains over the last four decades, Latino and African American students have made great gains. Accompanying the blog is a table showing the changes in long-term NAEP reading and math scores since the 1970s for white, Latino, and African American students as well as for all students. Links to the blog and table are posted below.

Blog: http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Jennings%5FHuffingtonBlog%5F050811%2Epdf

Table: http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=NAEPTable%5FHuffingtonBlog%5F050811%2Epdf

Questioning the Effects of Bonuses for National Board Certified Teachers

Posted on April 3, 2011 by coreeducation

A $99 million teacher bonus program that Washington legislators designed to lure good teachers into high-poverty schools has not worked as intended, according to a new analysis from the University of Washington Bothell’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Washington State provides $5,000 bonuses to those teachers who undergo and pass the rigorous national board certification process, a credentialing program that marks its graduates as among the best teachers. In 2007, state legislators added a second $5,000 bonus for NBCTs who teach in a high-poverty school, defined as one where a large portion of students are on free or reduced-price lunches. But according to the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s report on this issue, ” . . . less than 1% of Washington’s NBCTs move from low-poverty to high-poverty schools each year.”

The report shows, “The proportion of NBCTs teaching in challenging schools is increasing, but only because teachers already in those schools are gaining certification and because the state’s challenging schools list has grown each year.” The report also notes that the number of NBCTs has tripled since 2007-2008 — a good thing in every aspect except budget. The cost of the bonus program is now almost $50 million a year.

In the context of the state’s ongoing budget crisis, Gov. Christine Gregoire has proposed suspending the bonus program in order to save $99.5 million over the coming biennium. Washington is not alone. Other states, including Georgia, Ohio, South Carolina, and Florida are also rethinking their NBCT bonus programs.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education’s brief can be downloaded at http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/download/csr_files/rr_12_NBCTs_mar11.pdf

I must disagree with some of the analysis within the report. Although the bonus program is certainly not successful in encouraging teachers to transfer to high-poverty schools, it is providing incentive for teachers within those schools to undergo a rigorous professional development process. And while the effects of teachers’ National Board Certification on student achievement are undetermined, positive effects have been documented with low-performing students (the very population being targeted in this incentive program). Perhaps the program could be modified to encourage more home-grown excellence within high-poverty schools at an overall cost savings to the state.

At Core Education, we are dedicated to improving the effectiveness of all teachers. See www.CoreEducationLLC.com/page3.php for more on the professional development services we offer.

Theories of Action for Teacher Effectiveness

Posted on March 30, 2011 by coreeducation

What makes teachers effective, and how do you measure and cultivate it, especially in high-minority, high-poverty schools?

At the recent Civil Rights Research Roundtable, convened by the Warren Institute, researchers proposed very different answers – and often viewed their theories of action as mutually exclusive. Two major theories of action emerged at the roundtable, as reported by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) executive director Warren Simmons:

Performance Management Theory of Action – This lens emphasizes the importance of teachers’ educational background (SAT scores, class ranking in college) and performance characteristics (e.g., value-added contributions to student achievement, based on standardized test scores and compensation and evaluation histories) to describe teacher effectiveness. Furthermore, the performance management perspective tends to treat effective teaching as an individual endeavor and thus seeks solutions focused on enhancing the identification and distribution of effective teachers in high-minority, high-poverty schools.

With this lens, the social, racial, cultural, cognitive, and linguistic histories and characteristics of students, practitioners, and communities are secondary, if not tertiary, considerations to understanding variations in teacher effectiveness. The reasoning of the performance management TOA goes something like this: If compensation and evaluation are tied to student achievement data, and schools are given the flexibility and authority to hire, assign, and fire teachers, and districts or systems are freed to reward effective schools and close low-performing schools, then teacher effectiveness will increase, along with student performance.

Capacity Building Theory of Action – The other research voice and TOA present at the meeting grew out of an emphasis on the importance of instructional capacity building and the use of practice-centered criteria grounded in research on teaching and learning to define the characteristics of effective teaching. This research underscores the importance of pedagogical content knowledge; classroom management skills; understanding of students’ social, cultural, and economic backgrounds; understanding of cognitive and human development; ability to collaborate with peers; and ability to cultivate partnerships with parents and the broader community as critical components of effective teaching.

The instructional capacity-building TOA reasons that if schools and school districts provide supports that build the capacity of teachers to address the elements of effective teaching, then student performance will increase and achievement gaps will narrow.

In an AISR commentary, Warren Simmons calls on education stakeholders to take a more nuanced view that evaluates the assumptions, strengths and weaknesses of each approach to create a new theory of action upon which consensus can be built. To read Simmons’ insightful article (from which I have borrowed heavily in this post), see http://www.annenberginstitute.org/Commentary/index.php

Core Education’s work with professional standards, educator evaluation design, professional development and educator effectiveness merges the two theories of action outlined above in an holistic way. For more about our services, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com

The "Core" of Education

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