With all the buzz about the District Race to the Top and jockeying to fit it into differing agendas, you might miss its simple premise: “There are great teachers … who have figured out how to personalize education and we are asking our districts to identify them and amplify their reach and impact,” Secretary Arne Duncan said in his remarks announcing the competition.
What’s Happening
Opportunity Culture® News and Views
Expanding the Impact of Excellent Teachers
If you are a teacher who helps students learn exceptionally well, this is your moment—schools and policymakers must vastly expand your impact, now. Today, our nation is at a crossroads; we simply cannot fall short educationally for another decade as other countries surge.
Why is this time unique? Two crucial trends are at play. First, the United States has begun to act on the compelling data showing great variation in teachers’ success in helping students learn, as well as the monumental impact this variation can have on the life chances of students. As states and districts work to build better teacher-evaluation systems, schools will have increasingly accurate and useful data to identify which teachers are exceptionally effective.
How to Pay Teachers Dramatically More, Within Budget
There’s been a lot of chatter about increasing teacher pay—even doubling it. With the release of TNTP’s The Irreplaceables, talk about paying teachers more and retaining the best will likely increase. Whether or not your political perspective leaves you thinking this is necessary, most people assume it’s a pipe dream given budget and political realities.
Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture team ran the numbers to determine how much more schools could pay teachers—within budget—just by putting excellent teachers in charge of more students’ learning. We found that schools could free funds to pay excellent teachers in teaching roles up to 40 percent more and teacher-leaders up to about 130 percent more, within current budgets and without increasing class sizes. In some variations, schools can pay all teachers more, while further rewarding the best.
Ed-Tech Innovators: Get Results Now by Leveraging Great Teachers
We’re excited about the prospects, but we all know it will take time for digital learning to transform education. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of teachers will continue to be the single most important school factor in student learning.
That doesn’t mean innovation isn’t important. On the contrary, it’s vital for moving from today’s reality–in which only a fraction of students have excellent teachers–to what students need: consistent access to excellence. Here’s a prediction: Digital developers whose products are used to enable excellent teachers to reach more students successfully will be rewarded with positive results and avoid the dreaded “Cheaper but No Better” headlines.
Teacher Evaluation Outside the One-Teacher-One-Classroom Mode
As more schools use technology and new staffing models to reach more students with personalized learning and excellent teachers, how will evaluation systems keep up? It’s been a heavy lift for pioneering states and districts—examples here—just to begin measuring the basics in a one-teacher-one-classroom mode. What can schools do to select, develop, and evaluate teachers in new roles—such as those working in elementary specialist teams, blending technology and face-to-face instruction, leading other teachers, or using any of these models while reaching students in remote locations via webcams?
Financially Sustainable Career Paths for Teachers
Follow the money. Usually good advice to find out what’s actually important—or not—to people or organizations, regardless of the values they profess. In education, what’s most striking is where the money doesn’t go: to a variety of engaging roles and opportunities for education professionals, and expanded impact and opportunity for those who demonstrate excellence. In everyday lingo, that’s called “career paths.”
Redesigning Schools for Financially Sustainable Excellence: Infographic!
Everybody loves a good infographic (even you wonky researchers – just wait ‘til nobody’s looking), and we hope this one will change how you view education reform efforts.
For word nerds, here’s a summary:
- Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly rigorous and widespread education to their people. No surprises there.
- It’s not hard to see why: In contrast to educationally high-performing nations, ours is not selective about who teaches our children. As a result, schools cannot provide the kind of autonomy that great teachers crave. They just can’t have confidence that most teaching professionals will self- lead the rigor-and-innovation infused school cultures great teachers want and students need.
Reformers: We Must Be Much Bolder to Reach Every Child with Excellent Teachers
As ESEA talk heats up, reform groups are tossing ideas on the table (e.g., see here and here). We can debate the details, but most have some merit. Here’s the problem: even if our nation fully implemented most of the recommended legislation in the next decade, we still would be far behind other nations that made bolder changes years ago. In contrast, of course, many conservatives want to leave education up to state legislators, on whose watch K-12 education has plateaued and declined.
Is there a bolder alternative that might actually induce our nation to achieve widespread learning excellence?
How digital learning can (and must) help excellent teachers reach more children
Thanks to Michael Horn for letting us add onto his noteworthy post “Why digital learning will liberate teachers.” Here we want to second his point and add another: schools – and nations – that excel in the digital age will be those that use digital tools both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.
And not just in the obvious ways. Yes, directly through digital instruction. But also by freeing excellent teachers to reach more students in-person.
Today, only about 25 percent of U.S. classrooms have teachers whose students learn enough to close achievement gaps in a few years and make further progress like the world’s top students. Another 25 percent have lagging teachers whose students end up further behind. The rest have solid teachers – students on track stay on track, but students starting behind stay behind, and few get ahead. Overall, U.S. students end up pretty much where they started out in life, the antithesis of the American dream.
Khan Academy: Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
Rick Hess was right to question the simplistic hyping of Khan Academy’s online video lectures in this Straight Up post. But we think he’s only got it half-right: it’s less a matter of OVER-hyping than MIS-hyping the true potential of what Khan is doing. Just to summarize, Khan Academy offers short, engaging tutorials in math, science and other subjects and is experimenting with having kids use these during homework time, freeing up school time for problem solving and collaborative work – a concept commonly called “flipping.”
We’ve written here and here about the importance figuring out as a nation how to “extend the reach” of great teachers to more students, since great teachers accountable for student learning are the one “intervention” we know can close achievement gaps and raise the bar for all students.