New Accountability: SB 1 Amended in Committee

On Thursday, Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Senator Mike Wilson was approved by the Senate Education Committee with amendments in a committee substitute. On Friday, the bill passed the full Senate. House Committee consideration will be the next step.

Along with some smaller changes, the amendments:

• Removed a change to the arts-based high school graduation requirement  
• Deleted a requirement for the new accountability system to include a "band of schools" approach to school improvement
• Revised the rules for identifying schools for targeted support and improvement based on weak results for student groups

To reflect the amendments, the Prichard Committee has updated its bill summary. Key issues include:

• Standards for what students know and can do
• Assessments and approaches to meeting standards
• Accountability steps to ensure progress toward meeting standards
• Other changes (including certified staff evaluations, school council changes, and Department of Education changes)

You can download the complete summary here or the full bill in its current edition here.

Senate Bill 1: Changes from the Senate Committee (With A New Overview)

| By Susan Perkins Weston | 

Senate Bill 1 is the proposed legislation to revise Kentucky standards, assessments, and accountability rules.  Yesterday, the Senate Education approved a substitute provision of the bill, keeping many major features but making a number of changes as well. 

For those who liked the PrichBlog summary of the original language, here's a downloadable next edition in the same two-page format.

This post will give a quick tour of the changes, with one clarification about the original bill included at the very end.

GOALS AND STANDARDS
The arts language in the state law defining student capacities that schools must increase will not be amended. The original bill would have changed that wording to allow “application experience in coursework that incorporates design content, techniques of creativity, and interpretation” to be part of the arts expectation. That change has been deleted.

The Commissioner will participate in the standards revision process, presenting recommendations to the Interim Joint Committee on Education and serving as a non-voting member of the recommendations committee composed of legislators and members appointed by the governor.

Standards for arts & humanities and practical living/career studies will be revised in 2017-18 (and every six years after that). Those standards were not addressed in the original bill.

METHODS FOR CHECKING PROGRESS TOWARD MEETING GOALS & STANDARDS
Students with disabilities who spend more than four years in high school will not be exempted from testing during those added years.

An assurance form will require principals to describe how social studies, arts & humanities, practical living/career studies, and writing are integrated into the school curriculum. School council members will sign off on the form. Students, parents, and staff will be able to take concerns about those subjects first to the school council and (if needed) on to the Kentucky Department of Education for investigation. The form and the approach to concerns are new provisions.

ACCOUNTABILITY STEPS TO ENSURE PROGRESS TOWARD GOALS & STANDARDS
Graduation rates will include alternate diplomas. That is a new provision.

College admission and placement scores will be included using increases in percent of students earning composite scores that meet benchmarks. The original bill called for using the scores rather than change in scores.

Intervention schools will not be exempted from the vacancy definition found in KRS 160.380. The sentence on that has been deleted.

For priority schools, there are four new provisions.

• Audits done by the Kentucky Department of Education will be an option if a local board cannot find another outside team of educators.
• Turnaround teams will not have to have to be organized as nonprofit organizations.
• Turnaround plans will need approval from the Kentucky Board of Education as well as the superintendent and local board, but will not need Kentucky Department of Education review and recommendations.
• Superintendents will report to local boards and the Commissioner on turnaround plan implementation.

A CLARIFICATION ON FOCUS SCHOOLS
The original bill and the committee substitute both call for state-level intervention if schools fail to leave priority status or focus status for four years. The previous summary noted that provision for priority schools but not for focus schools.

To see PrichBlog's two-page summary of the complete provisions, click here.  To see the complete legislative language in the committee substitute, click here.

How People Learn: Synapse Building For Rats (And Humans)

Continuing in my summer book study...

In the book How People Learn, the chapter on "Mind and Brain" is heavy on neuroscience, starting with the essential process of synapse development.  Our synapses are connections between neurons, and substantial research shows that learning occurs through synapse development.  Much of the chapter is about studies of what does and does not produce rich synaptic development in lab animals.

One group of rats was taught to traverse an elevated obstacle course; these "acrobats" became very good at the task over a month or so of practice.  A second group of "mandatory exercisers" was put on a treadmill once a day, where they ran for 30 minutes, rested for 10 minutes, then ran another 30 minutes.  A third group of "voluntary exercisers" had free access to an activity wheel attached directly to their cage, which they used often.  A control group of "cage potato" rats had no exercise.

Researchers then examined the rats' brains, looking both for blood vessel development and for synapses per neuron, and found that both sets of exercisers had higher density of blood vessels than the acrobats and cage potatoes, but

But when the number of synapses per nerve sell was measured, the acrobats were the standout group.  Learning adds synapses; exercise does not.

What struck me in this was something I'm not sure the the authors meant me to notice: I heard the word "exercise" in its classroom context, as meaning an activity assigned by the teacher, often with repetitions and an emphasis on speed, like spelling lists and sets of arithmetic problems.

I wonder how many of our teaching traditions reflect the idea that the brain is like a muscle and will build through steady repetition that truly resembles physical exercise.

More than that,  I wonder how much we will need to change if we want learning that happens as developing sets of synaptic connections.  That understanding suggests that the some of the most important work comes in the opportunities to "put things together " and "see how it all connects."

It seems likely that learning of that kind will require fewer drills and more exploration, fewer lists and more reasoning about how different elements relate, fewer details and more depth on key organizing concepts than we have expected in the past.  That does not have to  mean no drills, no lists, and no details.  It does mean realizing that exploration, reasoning, and organizing concepts must be given a rich share of the time and energy students bring to their learning.  And it does mean that the number of drills, lists, and required details has to be restrained to allow the richer elements opportunity to occur.

Kentucky School Staffing (National Comparisons)

In the fall of 2012, Kentucky enrolled 1.38 percent of all students enrolled in public schools nationwide in pre-kindergarten through grade 12.

Our share of public school staff was at or below that 1.38 percent level in three categories, with Kentucky having:

• 1.02 percent of student support staff nationwide
• 1.21 percent of administrative support staff
• 1.36 percent of officials and administrators
• 1.38 percent of teachers

Our share of public school staff was above the nationwide level in the other categories, including:

• 1.46 percent of guidance counselors
• 1.48 percent of Instruction coordinators
• 1.87 percent of Instructional aides
• 1.94 percent of principals and assistant principals
• 2.09 percent of school and library support staff
• 2.10 percent of other support services staff
• 2.33 percent of librarians

If instead, Kentucky schools and districts had consistently had 1.38 percent of each kind of staff, we would have had:

• 1,021 additional student support staff members
• 325 additional administrative support staff
• 136 more teachers
• 10 more officials and administrators

• 7 fewer guidance counselors
• 69 fewer instruction coordinators
• 443 fewer librarians
• 955 fewer principals and assistant principals
• 2,028 fewer school and library support staff
• 3,560 fewer instructional aides
• 8,225 fewer other support services staff

Back in March 2009, I posted a similar analysis using Fall 2005 data. As I wrote then:

I’m not arguing that Kentucky should staff schools to those averages. There may be important benefits to what we do differently, and our students may have different needs. I do think, though, that this is an interesting mirror to look in, inviting us to think about how we currently staff public education.

Coming back to this analysis this time, I still see that issue, and I have these added thoughts:

• We have 1,087 librarians spread over more than 1,200 schools. That may be the starting example of where our added commitment is a good idea, especially as we ask students to go deeper on research, designing their own investigations, and learning through major projects. 

• We’re now asking our principals to do sustained observations and give thoughtful feedback for every teacher: for that big growth in responsibility, our added numbers may again be just right.

• Other support staff seem likely to include food workers, custodial workers, and bus drivers. In other states, that work is often handled by contracting companies, and it's possible that Kentucky isn't so much engaging more workers as engaging them in  a way that shows up under staff rather than service fees.

• I'd love to know what other states are doing (and Kentucky apparently isn't) in student support services!

Source note: the data for this analysis comes from the Digest of Education Statistics, using tables 203.40 and 213.20 The staff analysis is based on full-time equivalent positions.

How People Learn: Learning That Transfers To New Contexts

Continuing my summer book study...

"Transfer from school to everyday environments is the ultimate purpose of school-based learning."  That's the kind of statement that seems obvious and turns out to be important. In How People Learn, the transfer process gets close attention--and now it's got mine as well.

Here, transfer is about ability to use knowledge in multiple contexts. For example, veteran shoppers can be very good at figuring out cost per unit and identifying bargains, but struggle with related division when dropped into a formal classroom.  Conversely, most of us have watched kids part way through elementary school who aren't at all sure which bit of "school math" to use in stores. The studies in the book give examples like seeing if Latin or computer programming develops logical reasoning for other kinds of work and sorting out which kinds of simulations create lasting and useful understanding. If you've learned something that you can only used in the situations that are most like being in school, it isn't going to be a lot of help for other kinds of challenges.

With research citations for each claim, the chaper looks at what scientists know about when transfer is and isn't likely to succeed. Some major points:

• Time spent on understanding how a process works and when it matters yields better transfer than memorization.
• Teaching a set of knowledge in multiple contexts makes the learners more able to transfer it.  
• Transfer is also improved when students are equipped to monitor their own understanding and evaluate their own progress (with "metacognition" as the power word for that process of learning about their own learning.)

All through this section, I was haunted by images students doing worksheets and computer drills to prepare for a math assessment. 

The research in this study gives support to parent concerns that a certain kind of "teaching to the test" creates knowledge that will be only useful on the test. That can be learning for a single context, focused on procedural accuracy, with little insight into how or why the same knowledge could be put to work elsewhere.

Plus, what happens if the school's response to early difficulty is more of the same kind of drill, and more, and more and more again? On this understanding of learning, students may succeed on this year's test, but not be able to transfer that knowledge to next year's work or future challenges. 

That "learning that doesn't transfer" may be central to what's going on when middle school teachers say kids come from elementary school lacking key skills, and high school teachers say that about middle school, and college teachers and employers say it about high school graduates. The folks at the lower level know they worked on that exact skill, but don't know why kids can't put it to use as they move on. The issue may be quality of learning, with students needing to move well past memorization into understanding why the knowledge matters, using it in multiple contexts, and joining in evaluating their understanding as the work goes on. Adding to the quantity of work a student turns in may not change the long-term results much at all.

One final connection: Kentucky has committed to standards that are "fewer, higher, and deeper." Learning that can transfer may take more intensive study, and that's part of why it matters to have a shorter list of expectations with deeper demands about putting understanding to active use.  This chapter adds to my sense that we're on the right track in that approach, and we'd be moving in the wrong direction if we added lots of detailed demands to our standards documents.

2015 Working Conditions: Improving with Room to Improve More

The newest TELL results suggest that Kentucky educators are seeing improvement in their working conditions. TELL is short for  the Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning Kentucky Survey, taken this spring by nearly 45,000 school-based certified educators, asking them how much they agree with a series of statements about their own schools.

Compared to the 2013 results, teachers were more positive on all 80 items. The biggest change: 68% of teachers agreed that "professional development is evaluated and results are communicated to teachers," in 2015, up from just 61% two years back.  The smallest change: whether "teachers have sufficient access to instructional technology," with 82.1% agreeing now compared to 82.0% in 2013.

The greatest promise of the TELL survey is that it can help us figure out how to strengthen learning by supporting teachers, and to get those benefits, we need to pay extra attention to the weakest results.  So, here are the 10 items that got the lowest teacher agreement in 2015, with the 2013 responses included to show both that we've made some progress and that there's room for lots more work:

Much of the work to change these numbers will need to be done locally, so do check out the school-by-school reports available at www.tellkentucky.org/results, and think about what might be the best ways to make your own places stronger.

At the state level, these numbers may suggest that it's time for another, deeper search for great approaches to:

1. Freeing time for teachers to meet individual student needs, with that time spent both in classroom instruction and in non-classroom work spent analyzing evidence and ideas for making that instruction more effective for each child.
2. Making sure professional development matters –which may turn out to mean making it an embedded, connected part of that search for evidence and ideas" on how to serve each child.
3. Engaging parents and guardians more effectively –again with particular attention to collaboration on understanding and meeting individual needs.
4. Empowering teachers to have deeper, more effective influence on school decisions –especially those that effect items 1, 2, and 3 above.

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Ms. Lemily's Lesson: Looking Closer at Math Excellence (With Elves!)

Last week, PrichBlog shared some of the “Finding Solutions” account of Christa Lemily’s eighth grade students working on figuring out whether classic Corvettes make good investments. The question can be answered with several different mathematical strategies, so it's a great example of the fluent, flexible problem-solving called for by Kentucky's academic standards.

To explain that, let’s start by spending a minute with the Brothers Grimm and their tale of “The Shoemaker’s Elves.” The first night, the elves turned one piece of leather into a pair of shoes so fine that, after selling them, the shoemaker could afford to leather for two pairs. The second night’s two beautiful pairs brought in enough money to buy leather for four. The third night? You know the answer: enough for eight pairs.

So, how did you figure out that it was eight? Here are five respectable options:

1. Maybe you used addition.
2. Maybe you multiplied.
3. Maybe you’ve worked or played with numbers enough that you just know what happens as you double a small number. 
4. You probably didn’t use percentages, but you could. If the story was trickier, with two pairs yielding revenue to buy leather for three, multiplying by 150% each morning might be a good choice.
5. You probably didn’t use an exponential function either, but if the growth was 20% each night, and you wanted to know the result after 10 nights, you might end up using a formula like 
   

Fortunately, we don't need to unpack that formula to see the point about mathematical options.

Instead, let's swing back to Ms. Lemily's class at South Warren Middle and their question about Corvettes. If the shoemaker story is about growing (appreciating) value, the car story turns out to be about the opposite: depreciation or value going down. On average, Corvette convertibles lose 15% of their value the first year, and between 8% and 10% each year after that. With a $60,000 car, that’s going to produce values like this over time:

Under Kentucky's standards, Ms. Lemily’s students should be ready to work out those numbers by multiplying percentages, figure out that Corvettes are better as transportation than as investments, and notice that the graphed results do not look like a line. Kentucky's math standards for grade 8 call for students to be able to:

•  "Interpret the equation y = mx + b as defining a linear function, whose graph is a straight line; give examples of functions that are not linear.” [Emphasis added]

From the “Finding Solutions” description, Ms. Lemily's students may have reached that standard and also be closing in on some high school expectations, like being able to:

• "Recognize situations in which a quantity grows or decays by a constant percent rate per unit interval relative to another," and
• "Construct linear and exponential functions, including arithmetic and geometric sequences, given a graph, a description of a relationship, or two input-output pairs (include reading these from a table)."

Do notice that the standards are not asking students to remember every formula they see in a math class. The goal is for them to recognize the kind of change involved and construct a function that works for that situation. That's one reason the Prichard Committee report came with a subtitle about how “Standards Push Students Toward Real-Life Problems.”

Overall, South Warren Middle School's strong focus on the math standards seems to be paying off. With Ms. Lemily in the lead, South Warren was one of the first middle schools in the country to join the work of the Mathematics Design Collaborative, and as of last year, their K-PREP scores impressively outpaced the state average for most groups:

One more thought. An even deeper goal in our standards is for students to master these key mathematical practices:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

The work happening in Ms. Lemily's classroom embodies those practices, and equips her students to use all eight in high school, in college, and across their careers. It's an impressive step up in how Kentuckians teach and learn math!

Finding Solutions (New Prichard Report On Implementing Standards in Kentucky Classrooms)

Important news fresh from Tuesday's Prichard Committee press release:

A first-hand look at how Kentucky’s academic standards are spurring innovative teaching and learning in classrooms is the focus of a special report from the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

“Finding Solutions: Standards Push Students Toward Real-Life Problems” features eighth-grade math teacher Christa Lemily’s approach to introducing her South Warren Middle School students to mathematical formulas by determining the value of investing in a classic car. Such connections between challenging math and real-world situations have grown as a result of Kentucky’s academic standards.

“The standards focus not just on repetition, but on understanding and applying mathematic reasoning,” Lemily said. “These standards help teachers focus on how students are taught to reason and think through math as much as they focus on the skills that students are taught. The goal is math thinkers, not just math do-ers.”

Teachers at Pembroke Elementary and Millbrooke Elementary, both in Christian County, also share their experiences with the standards. Pembroke teacher Jettie Payne said the standards are prompting her fifth-grade math students to gain a solid understanding of fractions and decimals.

She also said her classroom represents a change from the way she learned to teach. “I remember sitting in class thinking, ‘When will I ever use this?,’” she said, adding that her lessons now draw clear connections between math and everyday application.

Millbrooke’s Cindy Wyatt said the standards have prompted her to select more challenging books for her second graders, leading to more interesting reflections and conversations in reading groups and stronger vocabulary development.

Kentucky's academic standards are also the focus of a second Prichard Committee report released today on “Progress in Kentucky Education: Higher Standards, Assessments and Teaching." Together, the reports provide an overview of progress in Kentucky education and how that is reflected in both policy developments and classroom practices.  Both are available at www.prichardcommittee.org.

New Prichard Report: Progress in Kentucky Education: Higher Standards, Assessments and Teaching

And more important news from Tuesday's release:

LEXINGTON, KY –Kentucky’s academic standards are the focus of a new Prichard Committee report, which shares additional information about the state’s assessment and teacher evaluation systems.

“Progress in Kentucky Education: Higher Standards, Assessments and Teaching” describes the interconnected elements of the state’s education system:

• academic standards that establish what students should know and be able to do as they move from grade to grade toward graduation
• an assessment system that measures how well students and schools are meeting those standards
• a professional growth and effectiveness system to ensure that educators are able to improve their skills every year and equip students for steadily higher levels of performance

The report points out that higher academic standards are critical because Kentucky’s students face a future where jobs will require that they can adapt and learn new skills on a continuing basis; in other words, they must learn how to learn. Kentucky’s state standards help them do that, the report notes.

Making sure schools and students are on the right track is essential, and Kentucky’s statewide assessments provide evidence about the learning that is taking place in schools. The report notes that assessments are particularly important for spotting and addressing achievement gaps between groups of students – a continuing, significant challenge for Kentucky.

The report also emphasizes the relationship between effective teachers and student success, pointing up the need to give educators ongoing feedback and opportunities to develop stronger professional skills. Kentucky’s new Professional Growth and Effectiveness System looks closely at both the quality of what teachers do and the learning that takes place in the classroom.

The system identifies areas where each teacher is already effective and where improvement is needed, and it promises consistent support for making those improvements, the Prichard Committee report points out. It also sets clear criteria and quick timelines for ineffective educators to improve their practice or move out of the profession. A matching system is in place for principals, and similar approaches are being developed for counselors, librarians, instructional supervisors, and other professional education positions.

“It’s clear we are on the right track in Kentucky. Our students are performing at higher levels and teachers are meeting the standards by providing deeper learning opportunities in the classroom. Staying the course and working together will ensure continuous improvement for our students and for our state,” said Stu Silberman, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

“Progress in Kentucky Education” was released today along with a special Prichard Perspectives report on  implementing the standards in Kentucky classrooms: “Finding Solutions: Standards Push Students Toward Real-Life Problems.” Together, the reports provide an overview of progress in Kentucky education and how that is reflected in both policy developments and classroom practices.

Both reports are available at prichardcommittee.org.

Department Rethinking Its Teacher Tech Platform

What is CIITS?

CIITS is short for the Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System (CIITS), Kentucky's online technology platform for improving teaching and implementing our statewide push toward college and career readiness.

From its launch in 2011, CIITS has been billed as a new and better way to:

• share education resources for classroom use
• provide online professional development for teachers, principals, and other educators
• develop and implement school and district improvement plans
• gather and track evidence for PGES (our new Professional Growth and Effectiveness System, designed to replace older approaches to evaluating individual educators)

CIITS has been an ambitious statewide investment, featured heavily in Kentucky's applications for Race to the Top funds and for waivers of No Child Left Behind requirements.

And CIITS may be in some trouble.

According to Kentucky Teacher, the Department of Education is now consulting education leaders around the state about which parts of the system are worth keeping and which should perhaps be dropped.  

The biggest frustrations has been over the PGES-related tools, known as the Educator Development Suite or EDS. There, recurring software problems have added technical challenges to a process that was already complicated and potentially stressful for participants. The Department has already agreed to reduce the data entry requirements. Now, the state may drop the statewide platform entirely, which would give each district responsibility for creating its own record-keeping system.

The professional development component seems never to have been a big draw. Long known as PD360 and now called Edivate, it has only attracted 9% of CIITS users over the last two years--and that one component carries a $4 million annual price tag.

The teaching resources have gotten greater attention: 66% of teachers have used the IMS (Instructional Management System) part of CIITS to develop and share at least some of their own lesson plans.  The Department publishes reports on the number of IMS log-ins for each school, so there has definitely been strong encouragement to explore that part of the platform

The final element, known as ASSIST, is a format for improvement planning by schools and districts.  Kentucky Teacher mentions that element, but does not offer a summary of what's being said about its effectiveness. (From my own limited experience studying the planning documents, ASSIST-based plans seem to include a wide array of objectives, but offer limited clarity about implementation or follow up and some definite difficulties with making and publicizing annual revisions. I cannot tell how ASSIST has been working for principals, and I especially don't know whether the online approach has made it easier or harder for school leaders to think through and act on worthwhile changes to teaching and learning.)

A CIITS decision is scheduled to be finished by May 30, according to the article. The outcome may be an important milestone in Kentucky's current work to equip our next generation for success, so stay tuned.

Big New Idea: Next Generation Instructional Design

Next Generation Instructional Design (abbreviated as NextGen ID or NGID) is an ambitious new education effort underway in Kentucky, and I've spent part of the morning reading up.  Here, I'll offer short basics gleaned from the project webpage, followed by my own italicized notes on why each element seem important.

In daily student experience, NGID learning units will provide new opportunities for "project-based and problem-based learning," designed to develop high levels of knowledge, skill, and understanding and meet Kentucky's academic standards.  

The project/problem part means students themselves will be actively figuring out how to use what they learn, and they'll do the learning in ways that make its usefulness clear from the beginning.  The standards part means it will be the right kind of challenge, equipping them with capacities they can use for further achievement in college, careers, and community participation. Overall, this is a new push toward learning approaches that students often find meaningful, engaging, effective, and (dare I say it?) fun.

In daily teacher experience, these units will provide useful tools and common assignments for helping students learn, designed with built-in ways to check whether the learning is on track.

That's also great.  It's a plan to help educators with the demanding new expectations we've asked them to take on.  "Common assignments" also means they're designed for teachers to be able to collaborate with one another on development, implementation, and examining the resulting work to think about best next steps for students.  And, of course, engaged students are far less likely to cause  behavioral problems, so this sort of approach can also promises help with the whole discipline/classroom management challenge that teachers must address in order to support student learning.

Meanwhile, data on student growth is going to be essential for Kentucky's new Professional Growth and Effectiveness System. The NextGen ID effort will also examine how "student work samples and other artifacts may provide information related to educator effectiveness to complement, supplement or provide alternatives to existing test-based measures of student performance."

 In other words, there's hope that the work students turn in can be used for teacher evaluations.  If this succeeds, it will mean that judgments don't have to rely solely on assessments that measure only a fraction of what we really want students to know and be able to do: it'll be possible to look at fully-applied, hands-on, very-nearly-real-world use of students' knowledge and skills. It's a chance to get most closer to what students have really learned and much closer to what teachers have really achieved.

The work is also new and starting quite small.  Coordinated by the Fund to Transform Education, it involves about 60 Kentucky educators working to think through how the units can be used and what kind of impact they will have, while developing the skills to lead the development of additional units and help colleagues put the units to work across the state.

The good news there is that the plan is to move at the pace that allows deep work and lay good foundations for effective expansion in the years ahead.  The limiting factor is that moving at that pace means this exciting effort launch in all schools right away: it'll take patience and commitment to see how richly we can put it to work statewide.

For added information on NextGen ID, check out the Fund's webpage and press release, and for a livelier idea of the kinds of work these units may involve, check out this recent Kentucky Teacher report on the common assignment work begun in 2013.

Puzzling Losses: National New Teacher Study Looks Different Than Kentucky

A new federal study of 2007-08 beginning teachers shows that 12% were not teaching in 2009-10. That's a sharp contrast to Kentucky data discussed in Friday's PrichBlog post, showing that 30% of teachers who began in 2009-10 were not teaching in 2011-12. The big difference in two-year losses seems worth puzzling about.

The Great Recession probably played a role in the story. If you started work in 2007, the options at the end of your first and second school years may have seemed bleaker than for any class in a long time, perhaps leading the teachers in the national sample to hold on tight. In contrast, Kentucky teachers beginning in 2009 likely saw improving job markets as they made their choices about whether to continue: moving to another field may have seemed much more possible.

The data gathering methods may also play a role. The federal study tracked a sampling of teachers, surveying the same individuals each year except for those who could not be reached. An obvious risk there is that the people who could not be found again were heavily people who left teaching –maybe yielding too low a report of leavers. The Kentucky numbers reflect "3,452 traditional school teachers with teacher job codes" using data from the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics.  A risk there is not knowing about people who moved to other states but are still teaching –maybe producing too high a report of those no longer teaching.

On the other hand, the difference between 12% leaving (calculated one way) and 30% leaving (calculated another way) may partly be a reflection of other differences in new teacher experiences. The data may partly be a signal that Kentucky has room to improve our new teacher retention rates.

The new federal data and the state numbers discussed last week do not offer answers about what kinds of improvements would be helpful to teachers or to students, but they do clarify some questions that may be deserve systematic attention.

Astonishing Losses: What Happens To Our New Teachers

From last month's Kentucky Board of Education meeting, the slide below deserves some attention.

It shows that for every 100 teachers who were new hires of the 2009-10 school year:

• 18 were out of Kentucky teaching by the next year
• 12 more were gone by the year after that
• 7  were teaching in a different district by their second year
• 7  were in the same district, but at a different school
• 56 were still at their original schools

That's a huge dropout rate and a huge amount of moving around for those who stay in the profession!

For teacher preparation programs, it brings up questions like these:

• Do we equip our graduates with the best skills for a sound start in teaching careers?
• Do we give them a meaningful understanding of the work they'll be taking on, so they aren't surprised and and disappointed by the actual experience?
• Do we recruit students with a deep capacity to engage children and learning with passion and effectiveness, or are we just taking everyone who knocks on our door?
• Do we ask students and new graduates what parts of our program are helpful, and take action to improve the things that don't work?

 For school leaders, it raises other issues, including:

• Are we giving our new teachers the best support we can provide?
• Are we offering the kind of working environment and professional community that makes them want to stay on our team?
• Are we asking our recent hires (both those who stay and those who leave) what we can do better?

For Kentuckians generally, the overarching puzzle may be:

• What must we change in order to attract and keep young people of energy and talent in this important work?

Source note: the slide is from the Kentucky Teacher Equity Plan Power Point that was part of the April 1, 2015, KBE Agenda.

Most districts losing educators, even as state total grows

From 2004 to 2014, most Kentucky school districts reduced their certified staffs, even as the statewide total increased by 2%. Certified employees include teachers and other educators whose positions require state certificates, including librarians, counselors, principals, superintendents, and some other positions.

The changes can be seen in more detail in this table:

 Thus, three important patterns:

• The growth tilted toward the larger districts, with smaller districts on average seeing declines and the medium-sized districts taking the greatest losses.
• The growth was heavily concentrated in the county systems, rather than independent districts.
• Appalachian districts took heavy losses even as the others grew.

The Appalachian situation is arguably even tougher than these numbers show.  They reflect Appalachian Regional Commission's designation of 54 counties and their 18 independent districts, but a handful of the included locations had very different experiences.

Madison County added 73 certified employees for a 13% growth rate. A set of seven districts (Bath, Clark, Corbin, Laurel, Madison, Montgomery, and Pulaski) together added 247 teachers and 10%.  If those seven were left out of the regional count, the remaining districts would show an 11% decline.

What unites those districts that have been able to add educators over the last decade?  For six of them, you can exit an interstate highway and your off-ramp will put you inside the county seat.  Pulaski doesn't fit that category exactly but it's already at the junction of major east/west and north/south routes, and there's steady campaigning to extend I-66 along that same path.  Roughly, this means the growth zones are in the places most connected to other regions, and the losses deeper in the Appalachian part of the state are heavy indeed.

Here's a second table counting the districts seeing the various kinds of changes:

 

Over this same period, Kentucky schools saw a 5% increase in the number of students in average daily attendance, so a 2% increase in certified staff falls clearly short of keeping pace.

The New/Old Challenge of High School Relationships

The New York Times is reporting on three-minute parent-teacher conferences at some New York City schools, because that's all that's possible on the limited conference days at schools where many parents actually ask for the meetings and teachers can have up to 150 students at a time. 

I'm sure that Kentucky high schools have very few parents asking to meet with every teacher, and I'm fairly confident that Stuyvesant High is atypical for New York as well. But even so, the article describes a challenge that's worth some Kentucky reflection.  

Here's why.  In our new Teacher Professional Growth and Effectiveness System, we've defined exemplary teaching to include elements like these:

• "Teacher actively seeks knowledge of students’ levels of development and their backgrounds, cultures, skills, language proficiency, interests, and special needs from a variety of sources. This information is acquired for individual students."
• "Teacher’s communication with families is frequent and sensitive to cultural traditions, with students contributing to the communication."
• "Response to family concerns is handled with professional and cultural sensitivity."
• "Teacher’s efforts to engage families in the instructional program are frequent and successful."

And yet, that's patently impossible for a teacher who works with 150 students a day.

If we seriously want our teachers to work with students on a personal basis and make connections with their families as well, something will have to change.  Twenty years ago, Kentucky was seriously discussing high school restructuring, including schedules that gave each teacher responsibility for just 80 students at a time.  Those changes could have opened doors to deeper learning and deeper relationships, but most schools backed away from those ideas as too disruptive.  Maybe it's time to dust off those old reports and think again about what we want for learners, for teachers, and for families and what transformations we'll need to get there.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

(Source note: Quotes come from the Framework For Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson and adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education.)

The Internet Can't Replace Great Teaching

"When kids can get their lessons from the Internet, what's left for classroom instructors to do?"  I read that provocative question at the start of a recent Atlantic piece on "The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher", and I was, in fact, provoked.

Michael Godsey, the California English teacher who wrote the piece,  is bedazzled by the potential of videotaped lectures and downloaded lesson plans, to the point that he doesn't see how future teaching will require much more than fairly limited (and perhaps quite poorly paid) facilitators and cheerleaders.

I'm provoked because I think he's missed the most exciting current thought about teaching and learning.  Everything I'm hearing in Kentucky education says that live adults, actively engaged with students as individuals and team participants, will always be essential to the kind of learning that matters most.

For example, I've been listening to teachers who are participating in the work of the Mathematics Design Collaborative and using the MDC tools known as "classroom challenges" or  "formative assessment lessons."  Each challenge starts with a rich math task and organizes a learning process that draws students into "a productive struggle with the mathematics essential for college readiness."  There are standard handouts and tools, and the lesson follows a carefully designed set of directions, and yes, all those items are downloaded from a website.  The main steps work like this:

1) Students are given an easily administered initial assessment task. This provides teachers with a qualitative sense of their students’ grasp of the targeted mathematics, and that evening, the teacher uses the student's first responses to decide which activities will be most appropriate for the net day's work.

2) Students are immersed in the mathematics of the initial assessment task through a set of collaborative activities. This part is designed as a guided inquiry. Students work in small groups, engage in discussion, take responsibility for their own learning, and learn from each other, often by examining one another’s work. Teachers circulate as the students work, asking questions or offering small suggestions when needed, deciding minute by minute which help can best move their students’ learning forward.

3) Students are engaged in a whole-class discussion. This is designed to pull the lesson together. Students get to strengthen their understanding while teachers get to deepen their insights into their students’ learning. It provides another opportunity to structure discussion, provide feedback, and allow students to learn from each other.

4) Students return to improve their response to the initial assessment. This gives students a look at what they’ve learned as well as more feedback, while providing teachers perspective on the effectiveness of their teaching.

Here's the important point for thinking about the Atlantic column: teachers say they're working at the top levels of their content knowledge and capacity for rapid decision-making all the way through the process.  For this kind of teaching, deep content knowledge is essential, and deep engagement with each student is essential, and the two have to be combined with great flexibility right in the moment.

Now, to be sure, if we only needed students to do accurate addition, computers probably can drill kids often enough and precisely enough to get us that limited (though important) skill. But we don't just need that.  We need students who can grab a mathematics challenge, try an approach, think through its effectiveness, talk with colleagues, revise their approach, and struggle productively to an answer that works well.  And we need students who will do that, because they have learned that they can in a setting with meaningful support and meaningful challenges.

To learn all of that, students need teachers who know them, engage them, work with them, share deep expertise in the content and practices of their academic field, and help students move one by one and step by step to becoming expert practitioners in their own right.  It's personal, humane work, and it will always be done best by personal human contact.

Program Reviews as the Newest Accountabilty Element

Program reviews are a new indicator of the quality of student learning opportunities in subjects that Kentucky no longer tests.  For accountability, there are three reviews, focused respectively on writing, arts & humanities, and practical living & career studies.  And, as you can see,when the school scores submitted by all districts are combined into statewide numbers, they average out very high.

It's worth unpacking those results from the statewide briefing packet on the new results a little more.  Individual program review rubrics use a 0 to 12 scale, with 8 being the score for a proficient program.  To get numbers like the ones shown above, the scores on all three reviews are added together and divided by 24 (equivalent to three proficient scores).  Scores above the 100 level are rounded down to the 100 maximum allowed by the state scoring system.

So, the graph above shows that statewide, districts on average are rating their schools proficient or higher on their program reviews.  Individual schools had higher and lower scores, but the averages came out at or above 100 on all three levels.

Below, you can see the results for each subject for the two available years, all using the 0 to 12 scale that applies for individual reviews.  There, too, it's clear that the averages are now at or slightly above the proficient level for all three programs at all three levels.

In 2008, the discussion about program reviews included clarity that the Kentucky Department of Education would need to play a major role in ensuring consistent scoring, along with consistent refusal to estimate the costs.  In 2009, Senate Bill 1 specified "Each local district shall do an annual program review and the Department of Education shall conduct a program review of every school's program within a two (2) year period," again without frank engagement about the price tag.    Since that point, the Department has had no resources to carry out that scale of review, and many discussions have fallen into saying that schools score themselves, even though state law makes the reviews a district obligation. 

Whoever has been leading the process and whoever has been monitoring, I think these results will move us quickly to a serious discussion about what it will really take to ensure that program reviews reflect consistent scoring against high expectations.  That discussion is at least six years overdue.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Professional Growth and Effectiveness System: Some Basics

Across Kentucky, schools are moving rapidly to implement of our new statewide approach to teaching quality.  The new Professional Growth and Effectiveness System will replace past evaluations and provide a much deeper attention to feedback and support for individual teachers to grow steadily stronger in their craft.

The new approach will look at teaching from two different angles:

First, professional practice will matter, using evidence from multiple sources, including:
■ Observations of the teachers work by administrators and peers
■ Student voice surveys
■ Professional growth plans and self-reflection
■ Possibly, additional district-determined sources of evidence.
That evidence will be used to identify each teacher’s practice as being at one of four levels-- exemplary, accomplished, developing, or ineffective practice....

Second, student growth will also matter, looking at how students improve from year to year in each subject. For most teachers, that evidence will all be gathered locally, using student growth goals, professional judgment, and district-defined rubrics. For those who teach reading and mathematics in grades 4-8, some evidence will be gathered that way and added evidence will come from state assessments of those two subjects. Depending on the evidence, each teacher’s student growth will be rated at one of three levels: high, expected, or low growth. 

Those two sources of understanding will be combined to identify next steps for each teacher's further development as a professional.  You can learn more about the teacher system and the related system for principals from the Kentucky EdGuide on "Educator Growth and Effectiveness" (quoted above), and you can learn much more from the Kentucky Department of Education's PGES webpage.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

U.S. Chamber Grades for Kentucky Education

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The map above rates states on achievement, one of 11 grades given by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in its newest report on Leaders and Laggards: A State-By-State Report Card on K-12 Educational Effectiveness. Here come the full set of Kentucky ratings from that report, annotated with definitions from the report and a variety of quick reactions from my first reading of the document.

C in Achievement

• Definition: Student performance on NAEP, including gains from 2005 to 2013.
• Clarification: The ratings use reading (where Kentucky is relatively strong) and mathematics (where we are less strong), but leaves out science, where we have shown signal successes.
• Celebration: Kentucky did receive an A for “Progress made from 2007 Leaders and Laggards.”

C in Academic Achievement for Low-Income and Minority Students

• Definition: Student performance on NAEP, including gains from 2005 to 2013; disaggregated for African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students.
• Dejection: For these students, Kentucky only received a C for"Progress made from 2007 Leaders and Laggards.”

C in Return on Investment

• Definition: NAEP scores divided by state education expenditures, adjusted for cost of living.
• Fascination: The Chamber has made an adjustment for regional cost of living, reporting that its method “was derived from the work of the Missouri Department on Economic Development.” In principle, I agree that Kentucky should acknowledge some of the lower costs faced by our families, and I hope to study this approach a bit to see if it seems like a sound way to consider that factor.

C in Truth in Advertising: Student Proficiency

• Definition: State-reported proficiency rates compared with NAEP proficiency rates.
• Frustration: The analysis comes from 2011 data, meaning it’s still reporting on Kentucky’s old tests based on our old standards.  A repeat of the same study would surely show Kentucky as notably stronger.

C in Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness

• Definition: Advanced Placement (AP) exams passed by the class of 2013, high school graduation rates, and chance for college at age 19.
• Anticipation: The second two numbers are based on estimates of the number of students starting grade 9, reflecting some of the last years the estimation step will be necessary.  Soon, soon, we'll be able to discuss these questions on the basis of much firmer actual numbers. Just as a sample of why this matters, the report shows a Kentucky 82% graduation rate, but our first graduation report tracking a full cohort shows us at 86%: better numbers will give us a better sense of where Kentucky and other states really stand.

C in 21^st Century Teaching Force

• Definition: Preparing, recruiting, and evaluating the teacher workforce
• Modification: In this list, a C does not mean a score between 20^th and 30^th.  The grades come straight from the National Center for Teaching Quality, which sets a high bar and did not give any A grades at all the most recent report.   
• Amplification: Kentucky’s C actually puts it in a three way tie for 20^th among the 50 states.

F in Parental Options

• Definition: The market share of students in schools of choice, and two rankings of how hospitable state policy is to greater choice options.
• Confirmation: Yes, this one is about Kentucky not having charter schools.
  

A in Data Quality

• Definition: Collection and use of high-quality and actionable student and teacher performance data.
• Exploration: Kentucky has implemented 9 of 10 steps recommended by the Data Quality campaign—and only two states have all ten.  The one we haven't fully applied is the one that calls on states to "Implement policies and promote practices, including professional development and credentialing, to ensure educators know how to access and use data appropriately."

D- in Technology

• Definition: Student access to high-quality computer-based instruction.
• Irritation: This rating is not about the learning technology available for students to use in varied classes across the state, and it's not about students' opportunities to use advanced technological stills. It's only about whether students can step away from existing classrooms to take classes on-line.  It’s about a second form of options for parents and students, like the Parental Options entry above. It's reasonable for to value that kind of option, but less reasonable to treat it as the main issue in technology in education.

D in International Competitiveness

• Definition: State scores on NAEP compared with international benchmarks, and AP exams passed by the class of 2013 on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and foreign language exams.
• Recognition: This measure is one Kentucky should value, moving beyond AP opportunities in general to a look at AP courses in fields where we definitely need to expand our workforce capacity. 

F in Fiscal Responsibility

• Definition: State pension funding.
• Consternation: Kentucky is hit hard, for long-term failure to fund our pension obligations to educators and also for more recent failure to take big enough steps toward resolving the problem.  

 --Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Learning at Higher Levels: Active Learning Raises College Results, Closes Gaps

Here's a great New York Times report on how "Active Role in Class Helps Black and First-Generation College Students":

The trend away from classes based on reading and listening passively to lectures, and toward a more active role for students, has its most profound effects on black students and those whose parents did not go to college, a new study of college students shows.

 Active learning raised average test scores more than 3 percentage points, and significantly reduced the number of students who failed the exams, the study found. The score increase was doubled, to more than 6 percentage points, for black students and first-generation college students.

For black students, that gain cut in half their score gap with white students. It eliminated the gap between first-generation students and other students.

As summarized by Richard Pérez-Peña, the study looked at students in introductory Biology classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and compared classes taught using traditional lectures and others using methods that "demanded more participation by students," including on-line exercises to complete before and after class.

This sort of finding will be no surprise to fans of the Gates Foundation's math and literacy investments or the K-12 research behind those strategies.  Deep learning comes from wrestling knowledge hands on, in a productive struggle that lets each learner assemble a clear picture of how the content fits together and the skills can be combined to solve problems.  Lectures, even brilliant ones, rarely engage students at the level that creates strong understanding.

--Posted By Susan Perkins Weston