Top systems and pre-service teacher training

Worldwide, some of the systems with the strongest results are pushing hands-on, practice oriented approaches to preparing teacher-candidates for their careers. How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top offers examples:

On the one-year Teacher Residency program in Boston, for example, trainees spend four days each week in a school. IN England, two thirds of the time on one-year training courses is devoted to teaching practice. In Japan, teachers spend up to two days a week in one-on-one coaching in their classrooms, during their first year of training.

Especially noteworthy is the aggressive approach taken in England:

England has placed all funding for teacher training under the control of a new agency, the Training and Development agency for schools (TDA). The TDA set strict standards for teacher training institution, including a minimum of 24 weeks of practical experience on most courses (two thirds of the total course time on one year programs) with the requirement that this classroom experience provide a good learning environment for trainee teachers. Providers are inspected by an independent inspectorate; the TDA reduces funding or closes down providers which do not meet the standards. England has also introduced an induction year, during which new teachers are given increased support and supervision, a reduced teaching load that allows extra time for planning and training, and a regular performance review to highlight areas requiring improvement.

Kentucky's Education Professional Standards Board has struggled with limited results to change how Kentucky's teacher programs equip their students, though our internship for first-year teachers is an important plus.

Senate Bill 1 demands that EPSB do more, with special emphasis on "use of the academic standards in the pre-service education programs and ... experience planning classroom instruction based on the revised standards."

To my mind, that's the second most-vulnerable, least-resourced element of the new legislation. It's not as worrisome as the required professional development for current educators, but it's close. But it's not at all clear that EPSB has the leverage to create meaningful change at the pace our students need.

Perhaps it's worth a closer look at the scale of power granted to England's TDA?

How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top is available here, and earlier PrichBlog posts on the report are here, here, and here.

$350 million for new tests

One of the best things about the multi-state push for common standards is the possibility of sharing test development. Here's reporting from Politics P-12 of planned federal support for stronger testing efforts:

The U.S. Department of Education will use a portion of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund to help states work on developing assessments, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told governors in North Carolina tonight.... The details are still being worked out, but he said $350 million of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top money set aside for states will go to the project.... And it sounds like Duncan is hoping that at least some states will work together on creating the tests.

Really good tests will cost more than the fill-in-the-bubble variety, Duncan told the governors, and it'll be too much money for any one state to do on its own. So the feds are going to put up part of the funding and Duncan is hoping that states will choose to collaborate with one another.

Top systems, learning communities, and SB 1 standards

“The notion that external ideas by themselves will result in changes in the classroom and school is deeply flawed as a theory of action.”

Richard Elmore in School Reform from the Inside Out, quoted in How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top.

Teacher development methods are a central part of what the world's best-performing school systems do well. After discussing initial training for new teachers, the McKinsey analysis identifies three major strategies for strengthening current educators:

• Providing one-on-one coaching where expert teachers observe in classrooms, model strong instruction, and help teachers reflect on their own practice.
• Making instructional leadership the core role of principals by changing recruitment, training, and work expectations for that key role.
• Creating a collaborative culture in which teachers regularly learn from one another, sorting through data, revising strategies, and planning lessons in teams

In essence, these highly successful systems rely on versions of professional learning communities. We know that from Kentucky and national research (including blog posts here), and this report adds international confirmation. Teachers change their practice when they receive coherent support on an on-going basis from colleagues, coaches, and school leaders. In contrast, shorter "set-and-get" sessions and "drive-by" workshops do not change results.

As Kentucky moves to higher and clearer standards, how will we equip teachers to meet those standards? Senate Bill 1 says KDE must provide professional development, but it does not offer methods or funding or staffing or vision for that work.

This global report thus offers us an important warning: without school-level, sustained coaching, leadership, and collaboration for our teachers, our students will not meet the new, ambitious standards we are about to create.

McKinsey & Company's report on How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top is available here, and earlier PrichBlog posts on the report are here and here.

Local moment: Go Kaitlin!

Here is how dominant a season Kaitlin Snapp had: The Danville freshman did not even get to finish her spring sport, and was still good enough to be named the 2008-09 Kentucky Advocate Female Athlete of the Year.

Full report here.

Monitoring schools in top performing systems

How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top has chapters on recruiting teachers, training and professional development, and then ensuring "the best possible instruction for every child." In the middle of that third chapter, the report notes that:

The high-performing systems use two mechanisms for monitoring the quality of teaching and learning:

• Examinations: Examinations test what students know, understand and can do, providing an objective measure of actual outcomes at a high level of detail. Examinations also have a powerful effect in driving the performance of any school system. In the words of one Australian educationalist, “What gets tested is what gets learnt, and how it is tested determines how it is learnt.”

• School review: School reviews, or inspections, assess the performance against a benchmark set of indicators. Unlike examinations, they measure both outcomes and the processes that drive them, and as a results, can help schools and systems identify specific areas that are in need of improvement. School reviews also enable systems to measure some of the more subtle and complex desired outcomes of a school system, which are difficult or impossible to measure in examinations.”

Under Senate Bill 1, Kentucky is moving to a similar combination. The accountability system that launches in 2011-12 will combine assessments of student work in reading, mathematics, science, social studies, and on-demand writing with program reviews of arts & humanities, practical/career studies, and portfolio writing.

For Kentucky, the arts really have been an area where performance is "difficult or impossible to measure in examinations." In writing, the big issue has been about the process schools used, too often creating exhausted students without nurturing increasingly skilled writers. This international analysis shows that other school systems with some strong results have found inspections a useful strategic tool in similar circumstances.

Meanwhile, I would love to see the standards other countries use for their inspections, and to know about the time, staffing, and funding those systems think are required to get good results. Our new reviews can be a big improvement or a giant fraud depending on whether we invest in them properly. Looking at these other nations is one way we can benchmark what serious inspections look like.

I introduced this important report and outlined its overall approach here.

Top-performing systems (worldwide)

Here's a 2007 publication from McKinsey & Company with potent lessons for Kentucky.

The full World's Best Performing School Systems report is available here, reflecting analysis of school systems across the globe with top scores on the PISA assessment, adding in Singapore for top TIMSS results, and also looking at a set of systems with strong improvement results.

That research found a set of key things those systems did more often than lower performing schools, with these main headings:

Getting the right people to become teachers:
• Mechanisms for selecting teachers for teacher training
• Good starting compensation
• The importance of teacher status

Developing them into effective instructors:
• Building practical skills during the initial training
• Placing coaches in schools to support teachers
• Selecting and developing effective instructional leaders
• Enabling teachers to learn from each other

Ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child:
• Setting high expectations for what students should achieve.
• Monitoring and intervening at the schools level.
• Monitoring and intervening at the students level.

Some of the key ideas are familiar ones we're ready to apply more systematically. Others may be difficult to apply here or even not quite right for us. I plan to wrestle them over the next week, not quite in the original order, but connect all the elements to Kentucky's current efforts and future options.

Teacher-vision

Inside School Research reports on work comparing the eye motions of new and experienced teachers:

The newcomers, for instance, tend to engage more often in "cognitive tunneling." That is, they focus longer and more often on a single student. The veterans, in contrast, tend to take in the entire room most of the time. In one such pair of expert-novice teachers, the younger teacher spent 20 percent of her time focusing on one of the 27 children in the class. The more experienced teacher, in comparison, never focused on a single student more than 9 percent of the time.

I'd love to know a bit more, especially about how the researchers handled differences between teachers standing traditionally at the front of classrooms and teachers circulating among smaller groups of students.

And yet, what leapt to mind for me was on-line teaching. If classroom experience builds up the ability to take in quick visual indications of how students are doing, what changes when all that visual information is replaced by e-mail and completed classwork?

Fiscal stabilization quick update

The federal stimulus legislation makes Kentucky eligible for $651 million for fiscal stabilization, with most of that money slated for public schools and public postsecondary education.

Kentucky is one of fourteen states that have not yet filed initial applications for those dollars, along with Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Here, you can see the approved applications of 27 states and Puerto Rico, plus the initial applications of nine states and the District of Columbia.

Revenue shrinks (a bit less than expected)

From the May revenue announcement:

The Office of State Budget Director reported today that May’s General Fund receipts were down 2.7 percent compared to May of last year. Total revenues for the month were $617.4 million, compared to $634.3 million during May 2008. Through the first 11 months of the fiscal year, receipts are down 1.7 percent.

The official revenue estimate calls for a 2.1 percent decline for the entire fiscal year. To meet the revenue estimate, receipts would need to decline 6.0 percent or $52.1 million, over the last month of the fiscal year compared to June, 2008.

To review the story to date:

• The 2008-09 budget was written using based on forecasting general fund revenue to grow compared to 2007-08.
  
• The November forecast said revenue would shrink by 2.1 percent.
• This report saying revenue shrank by 1.7 percent for the year.
• In short, the decline is both bad and not quite as bad as the forecasting group predicted.

High school rankings (Go Holmes!)

Newsweek has published its 2008 data analysis of public high schools by the college-level work they offer. Their headlines focus on what they see when they divide Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge tests given by of seniors graduating, with their full lists available here. Those results puzzle me because they count tests taken but not passed.

The chart above draws on another part of the Newsweek data, showing the percent of all seniors who had at least one score of 3 or above on at least one AP test sometime in high school. As is my habit, I looked first to see which schools with high poverty were producing important results, and Covington's Holmes High School definitely stands out this time.

Newsweek's discussion how and why they did their analysis is here, along links to a variety of supporting articles about the schools and their strategies.

National work on college remediation

Helpful news from EdWeek's Inside School Research Blog:

Along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Carnegie is investing $2.5 million to form a research network focused around a single educational problem. The problem the foundation wants to solve is how to improve the success rates of community college students in remedial, or developmental, math courses. Taken by 60 percent of community college students, the noncredit courses are designed for students whose academic skills are not up to par. Students have to take and pass them before they can enroll in the courses that count toward their degrees. The problem is that many students get stuck there, with some taking as many as four or five courses before giving up on college altogether.

Garden State Pie (with a big problem)

In EdWeek's new Dropout Counts, New Jersey is projected to have the highest graduation rate of any state this year. I'm comfortable with the public graduates, but I think the nonpublic slice above simply will not do.

The 2008 Digest of Education Statistics has 2004-05 as its most recent year for private school graduations. It reports 12,810 private school graduates, and there must be home school graduates and at least a few private and home-schooled nongraduates beyond that.

Accordingly, I'll venture an informed guess: 15,700 nonpublic graduates and nongraduates. That's the Digest private school graduation number, increased one-sixth for home-school completions, plus nongraduates based on assuming a 95 percent nonpublic graduation rate. Here's how that bakes up:

Once again, my argument is that most graduation reports assume that an impossible number of young residents is missing from each state's public graduation total. By trying to fit public numbers, nonpublic estimates and total population figures into a single crust, I'm working to correct that.

P.S. My mouth now waters for coconut custard pie, one of the finest treats offered in the New Jersey diners of my youth. If anyone's spotted that option on a menu in the greater Bluegrass, please do let me know.

The graduation pie bake-off (updated)

Public and nonpublic graduates and nongraduates, when combined, should add up to a credible estimate of that year's eighteen-year-olds. Starting today, I plan to use pie charts to push that point. On finding fresh counts or estimates of public graduates and nongraduates, I'll combine them in a single graph with total eighteen-year-olds and private-school and home-school figures. All numbers will be rounded just enough for easier consumption.

My first pie comes from Education Week's 2009 Dropout Counts report, being released this morning, which estimates Kentucky will have 41,556 public school graduates and 16,193 public school nongraduates in 2008-09. Here's the resulting pie:

That tiny nonpublic piece isn't one I'd want to serve to company. The last estimate I saw had close to 3,800 private school graduates, and I saw no sign that home-schoolers or nongraduates were included. I think EdWeek included far too many public nongraduates in its recipe.

EdWeek's national estimates offers 2,889,430 graduates and 1,286,915 nongraduates, which I'm trying to match to a Census count of roughly 4,344,000 reaching age 18 at the right time. Again, the nonpublic slice seems highly unlikely: the most current private-only, graduates-only number I can find is over 300,000.

Finally, here's my own 2007-08 pie, using ingredients from the Department's most recent nonacademic briefing. This one leaves a credible helping for the nonpublic sector.

Why am I spending all this time in a hot kitchen? I'm doing it because I think most approaches to public school graduation rates make the same big mistake. Specifically, they assume that many students who spend two years in ninth-grade can across the stage with their first freshman class and with their second freshman class, collecting diplomas both times.

Those approaches either result in implausibly low nonpublic school numbers or implausibly high numbers old enough to graduate. The pies are my way of pointing out which numbers come out of the oven making sense, and which ones seem, even on brief inspection, to be half-baked.

Update: below is the pie I originally included above. It uses the EdWeek 2009 graduation estimate and the Census Bureau's estimate of 2008 17-year-olds. I regret the error. The pie now shown above is the one I should have displayed originally. I apologize for the error.

SB1 in a nutshell

Here's a one-page summary of the main provisions of Senate Bill 1, Kentucky's new legislation calling for major changes in Kentucky standards, testing, accountability, teacher preparation, and professional development.

To go with it, here's a roundup of my posts about SB 1 since the bill was voted out of the legislature:

• SB 1 interim testing provisions (March 14)
• Arts, practical, writing programs under SB 1 (March 14)
• 38 months to new student tests (March 15)
• SB 1 accountability under the new test (March 16)
• SB 1 transition accountability (before 2012) (March 17)
• Great questions: SISI, NAPD, parents, low-performing schools (March 18)
• SB 1 in a nutshell (March 19)
• Viewpoint: the ten best things about Senate Bill 1 (March 20)
• Viewpoint: SB 1 is a step forward (April 7, 2009)
• The Chamber's take on SB 1 (April 13)
• Shared standards: SB 1 meets stimulus funding (April 17)
• Viewpoint: SB 1 and raising standards (April 26)
• Senate Bill 1 timetable reminder (April 27)
• Index results to be calculated by CBE, KASC, and Prichard (April 28)
• Transition testing (again) (May 4)
• Arts, practical, portfolio transition (May 4)
• Raising state standards (with other states) (May 6)
• Raising standards (state schedule) (May 6)
• Program reviews: the design schedule (May 7)
• Program reviews: the arts pilot version (May 7)
• Program review: pilot standards (May 7)
• SB 1 and CPE discussion (May 18)
• Transition index details (May 28)
• Raising standards (with 46 states) (June 2)
• Viewpoint: The genius of common standards (June 3)

IQ and education

Nicholas Kristof argues here that "what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics." The NYT column draws on Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, a recent book by Richard Nisbett that looks at the cultural heritage and learning strategies of three immigrant groups that frequently out-achieve their peers.

Kristof takes this message away from Nisbett's analysis:

What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

You can "look inside" the Nisbett book here.

Thinking about taxes

Kentucky schools need stable funding, and funding requires a healthier tax system. So, where my brain refused to pay attention to taxes a few years ago, articles are starting to catch my eye.

This piece in the Herald-Leader has an extra short, extra clear description of the challenges:

Kentucky has an income tax, but its limited range reflects 1950s income levels. That means low-income people pay too much and high-income people pay too little. Kentucky has a sales tax, but it covers mostly goods and not services, the fastest-growing part of the economy.

It's also got a sharp statement of two proposals from tenacious legislators, worth everyone's attention, and the author's view of how to choose between them.

More degrees (again)

In the statewide growth in bachelor's degrees, here's the recent breakdown by school:

What did the Governor just say?

Today's budget press release from the Governor's office includes highlights that begin with:

Preserving the same amount in the coming year as last year in per pupil spending in classrooms across the state – the basic formula known as SEEK -- and funding for higher education at the same levels as the 2009 budget. “I’ll say it again and again – we cannot move forward if we take significant steps backward in spending in our classrooms,” Gov. Beshear said of his proposal.

I read that as saying the Governor is prepared to cut education funding at least four ways compared to the 2010 budget currently in place.

1. In the two-year budget enacted last year, higher education was scheduled to receive $1,303 million for FY 2009 and $1,324 million for FY 2010. Sticking to FY 2009 will be a $21 million cut.

2. In the same two-year budget, SEEK funding for P-12 education was scheduled to receive $2,958 million for FY 2009 and $2,974 million for FY 2010. There, sticking to FY 2009 total SEEK funding will be a $16 million cut.

3. The total education budget for P-12 education is more than $4 billion dollars. SEEK is close to $3 billion of that, but education also gets funding for preschool, textbooks, school technology, ESS tutoring, teacher professional development, testing, and other needs. The failure to mention those other P-12 dollars is likely to be a signal that some of them are also in danger.

4. Some state money slated for P-12 and postsecondary in the 2010 budget will be replaced with federal fiscal stabilization funds. For the coming year, the source may not matter much. For future years, though, when the stabilization funds are gone, it means there may be a major struggle just to get state funding back up to recent levels.

Sources: Today's press release is here. Here, the CPE budget is in volume 1d and the KDE budget in volume 1b.

Viewpoint: The genius of common standards

The new NGA/CCSSO approach to academic content standards has truly impressive possibilities. Voluntarily, forty-six states have agreed to ask a team of recognized experts to draft strong math and language arts standards, with a commitment to make that "common core" central to their own state standards. EdWeek offers project details here, and Kentucky will be an active partner in the work.

With many states working together, we can greatly reduce the inefficiency of separate state standards, and yet not risk the gridlock so common to federal efforts.

Once the standards are defined, other benefits seem nearly certain to follow.

For example, groups of states may be able to share a single accountability test if their standards fully match. Even if they have a few differences, they may be able to share a pool of well-crafted test items. Overall, states may be able to get something close to the "off-the-shelf" price for assessments that fit their expectations as well as current customized editions that often cost noticably more.

As related possibilities:

• Excellent approaches to teacher preparation and professional development may find a wider market and attract more innovative providers.
• Technology applications to teach key concepts should also grow more quickly when designers can see which topics many states want to address at each grade level.
• Classroom assessment methods--so important for guiding students' learning and teachers' planning--may also develop in stronger directions once a single design can fit the goals set in many different jurisdictions.

If this project works, it may well be a positive turning point of historic proportions for American education, with Kentucky as a charter participant.

Raising standards (with 46 states)

The multi-state effort to develop common academic standards aligned with college readiness is picking up steam. Organized by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the plan now has 46 states on board with commitments from their own governors and chiefs. Kentucky committed early and will use the mathematics and language arts standards as the foundation of our new SB 1 standards.

According to new reporting in Ed Week:

The groups plan to pursue their aggressive timeline of getting college- and career-readiness standards—those things students should know by the time they finish high school—in draft form for states and eventually the public to review in July. Grade-by-grade standards—which the organizers are also calling “learning progression standards”—are set to be done in December.

Working groups composed of representatives from the Washington-based group Achieve, the New York City-based College Board, and ACT Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based organization that administers the college-entrance test of that name, will develop the standards.

Both the NGA and the CCSSO plan to create a “validation” committee made up of independent national and international experts in content standards to review and comment on the drafts. The experts will be nominated by states and organizations, but ultimately chosen by those two organizations.

Once the standards are agreed to, it will be up to the states to get them adopted. The signed memo stipulates that the common core must represent at least 85 percent of a state’s standards, and that the common core needs to be adopted within three years.

That method, starting with achievement and testing experts and then bringing in a validation committee, looks great to me. When practitioner committees have advocates for many different details, they far too often settle for including everything, producing lists that are unmanageable at the classroom level. The NGA/CCSSO approach seems far more likely to produce something lean, clear, and capable of supporting rich instruction and balanced classroom assessment.