my life to live

kateoplis:

For the past decade, 15-year-old Finnish students have consistently been at or near the top of all the nations tested in reading, mathematics, and science. And just as consistently, the variance in quality among Finnish schools is the least of all nations tested, meaning that Finnish students can get a good education in virtually any school in the nation. That’s equality of educational opportunity, a good public school in every neighborhood.

What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission.

Their own teachers design their tests, so teachers know how their students are doing and what they need. There is a national curriculum — broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education — but it is not prescriptive. Teachers have extensive responsibility for designing curriculum and pedagogy in their school. They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.

Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10 — or even fewer — qualify for teacher preparation programs. All Finnish teachers spend five years in a rigorous program of study, research, and practice, and all of them finish with a masters’ degree. Teachers are prepared for all eventualities, including students with disabilities, students with language difficulties, and students with other kinds of learning issues.

The schools I visited reminded me of our best private progressive schools. They are rich in the arts, in play, and in activity. I saw beautiful campuses, including some with outstanding architecture, filled with light. I saw small classes; although the official class size for elementary school is 24, I never saw a class with more than 19 children (and that one had two assistant teachers to help children with special needs).

Teachers and principals repeatedly told me that the secret of Finnish success is trust. Parents trust teachers because they are professionals. Teachers trust one another and collaborate to solve mutual problems because they are professionals. Teachers and principals trust one another because all the principals have been teachers and have deep experience. When I asked about teacher attrition, I was told that teachers seldom leave teaching; it’s a great job, and they are highly respected.

And by the way, the Finnish teachers I saw — those heaped with laurels as outstanding professionals — didn’t look or act differently from many, many teachers I have seen in the United States, even in so-called “failing schools.”

Finland has one other significant advantage over the United States. The child-poverty rate in Finland is under 4 percent. Here it is 22 percent and rising. It’s a well-known fact that family income is the most reliable predictor of academic performance. Finland has a strong social welfare system; we don’t. It is not a “Socialist” nation, by the way. It is egalitarian and capitalist.

Read on.

Finland is on the right track by prioritizing teacher quality and development.  You can’t have a school without a teacher.  In every country, in every era, the one constant in every classroom is that there is a teacher, and there are students.  That policymakers would rather find silver-bullet solutions to our growing education crisis through throwing more money at schools, through giving out free iPads, through scripted programs, through thoughtless implementation of merit-based pay, through smaller class sizes, etc. boggles the mind.  Not that these ideas are without value—but without an excellent teacher who, say, knows how to use the free iPads and scripted programs in a smart way, those solutions become an empty waste of money.  How many times have I seen piles of forgotten technology and discarded teacher’s guides in a school storage area?  And it’s not just well-funded schools with these graveyards of resources—my first school, with its missing ceiling tiles and half-lit hallways, had several distant rooms which looked just like this.  

So teacher development is the right path.  Vehemently believing this is why I left the classroom to become a teacher coach.  (I say “left the classroom,” but in reality, that’s probably not so accurate—I’m still in the physical classroom, but these days I spend less time standing in front of it as I do sitting in the back.)  I can tell you that so much goes into being an excellent teacher, and those qualities are not always easy to define or measure.  That’s one of the biggest struggles of my job.  

But another, bigger struggle of my job is that a lot of times I have to share data with teachers which is not always favorable.  And that leads me to a question which often goes unasked whenever I read articles on this newly hot topic of teacher development, which is—are our teachers ready to be held to such high standards?  Sometimes I have to tell teachers things like this:

• “Three students were asleep in your class for ten minutes.”  
• “At the end of class, I asked five students what you were learning about that day, and three were not able to give me an answer.”  
• “You told a student that if you heard talking a second time, he would receive a demerit.  He continued talking, and you told him to be quiet and did not give him a demerit.”  
• “I looked over your unit plan and 70% of the lessons are driving at lower-order skills.  When I looked over your data, nearly all of your students scored proficient or advanced on the most recent test.”
• “Last period you told a student that a cookie wasn’t really a solid, and that’s actually incorrect.”  

Lest you think otherwise, I actually don’t relish these moments in my job, because I’ve been there as a teacher and it’s hard to hear these things.  I remember being proud of my classroom management skills and my ability to build rapport as key factors in R. never being disruptive in my class the way he was for other teachers, and then sitting in an IEP meeting with his mother and case worker and hearing the psychologist share that he had only participated 65% of the time when she observed him.  Just because he behaved the best for me didn’t mean that I was serving him as best I could.  

So I know what it’s like to have people reveal to you that you’re not reaching kids as much as you thought.  I realize classrooms don’t exist in a vacuum.  That kid who was sleeping?  When he’s awake, he’s usually incredibly disruptive and he’s on his way to the disciplinary program in a week anyway.  That time you forgot to give a consequence?  Sometimes it’s really hard to simultaneously keep track of all of those things and teach a lesson to the kids who want to learn.  That other time you told a kid something which was incorrect?  Well, you’re a human being, you make mistakes, and the fact is your administration asked you to teach a subject in which you’re not that well-versed, and it’s been hard.  

These are common teacher pitfalls, ones which result from inadequate teacher training and certification routes and a system which allows people to teach subjects and students which they probably shouldn’t, at least not yet.  It’s going to take a lot more than just more technology, or eradicating all standardized tests, or smaller class sizes or higher salaries to save our schools; it’s going to take a massive overhaul of how we train teachers.  In the meantime, we can focus our efforts on more clearly defining the skill set of an excellent teacher, and investing in more appropriate, effective professional development to ensure that our teachers hone that skill set.  

However, I think it’s going to require our current and aspiring teachers to have even tougher skins than they already have, and it’s going to take our culture to reconsider the condescending, often degrading view we have of teachers.  Not just anyone should get to be a teacher.  Certainly not everyone who wants to be a doctor gets to be a doctor.  Some don’t do well enough on the MCAT.  Some don’t get accepted into medical school.  Some fail their tests while in medical school.  Some don’t pass board exams, or perform well enough when they’re actually on the job.  And even with all those hoops, some doctors still end up losing patients, or engaging in malpractice for whatever more or less ill-intentioned reasons.  Doctors are compensated comfortably because, as in education, there will always be a demand for healthcare, but it’s also because you can generally trust that if an individual has gotten to the point where they’re giving you a physical, they’ve probably already undergone some arduous training.  

Similarly, Finland seems to have the right idea in that their teachers ostensibly get put through some rigorous training as well.  But in Finland, as in South Korea (another country with a very successful, albeit entirely different, type of school system), only the very best and brightest get to be teachers.  Whether this is because the structure of their training weeds out less desirable candidates, or if the prestige and challenge of the job attracts the highest performers, is unknown to me.  I do wonder, though, that if we had a teacher training system similar to Finland’s, how many of our current teaching force would have ever been given their own classroom?  

I think of all the teachers who interview for positions at my school, desiring to become better teachers and receive more intense professional development and more meaningful feedback.  But it’s a lot of work.  I think my school is an amazing place to be an employee, but it is hard work, often the hardest work some of our teachers have ever had to put into their career, and we are very transparent about that from as early on as the initial interview.  

Anyway.  I’d be interested in knowing more about Finland’s ongoing teacher evaluation process, and what their professional development programming looks like beyond the initial training program.  That might be even more valuable than knowing about the latter.  Anyone got any links?

Hey Philadelphia residents,

Turn on NBC at 1pm today—you just might catch a peep of me in the audience :)  I will be there with other people from my school.  One of them will be on a panel!

girlwithalessonplan:

positivelypersistantteach:

thingsforteachers:

world-shaker:

A new report released yesterday from a panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) says teachers need to be trained in a model more akin to doctors going through residency—a sort of collaborative apprenticeship with more experienced instructors that offers clinical experience to better prepare them for the rigors of their actual classroom.

This this this this THIS.

I think this is a very interesting thought, and perhaps would have better results than handing a first year teacher the classroom keys and wishing them luck.

I completely agree with this, but how would such a program be paid for?

And would you pay those in training?  A semester-long student teaching experience is essentially paying for your own slave labor.  You pay for 12 hours of college credit, and work for 40 hours + a week, doing all a regular teacher would do.  Some schools even require additional, night-class time.  (Fortunately, Indiana State didn’t require such of me, and I had a great student teaching experience, except for the fact I was POOR AS HELL AND HAD TO ASK MY PARENTS TO BANKROLL ME. [thanks mom and dad])

This is a valid point.  I look at it like this:

Doctors are seen as having an extremely important job, one which comes with towering responsibility, and so they undergo appropriately arduous training for their profession.  Their skills are generally high in demand, as there will always be a dire need for a doctor somewhere, so they are compensated comfortably.  It’s common knowledge that a doctor’s salary tend to place him or her in the higher income brackets, which no doubt is part of the appeal, so although med school is still expensive, that doesn’t prevent admission from being rather competitive.  Which is exactly how it should be: if I’m going to let someone perform open-heart surgery on me, I’d rather that person have been a fixture as his or her college library and not the campus bars.  

What if teaching was regarded in the same way?  Like doctors, we are also tasked with incredible responsibility, and there will always be a need for teachers.  But there is also a general disrespect, a certain dismissiveness, of teachers as well—at least in Americans, I think.  Teachers are lazy.  Teachers are overpaid.  Those of us who work in the “real world” don’t get summers off.  A parent questioning me about my techniques when her perfectly capable son has routinely neglected his (instructional-level) homework week after week.  Those who can’t do, teach.  Our culture may make a big show about how much we love our teachers and how they shape children’s lives, but underneath it all, our culture doesn’t really value a teacher’s particular set of skills. 

I have to say—on one hand, it’s hard to fault them.  Everyone knows that in med school, students spend hours upon hours internalizing large amounts of content and practicing on real bodies.  I’m willing to bet that if you asked any person on the street what a teacher learns in ed school to prepare them for their profession, I think they’d be a little lost.  Most people think that to be a teacher, one must merely possess nebulous qualities such as being “good with kids”, “patient” (in what scenarios? with whom?), “entertaining”, “strict”, and “able to explain stuff.”  All these qualities are great in a teacher, but then again, these are more personality traits than skills picked up in school.  

A teacher’s skills are not so soft as this list might lead one to believe.  A teacher must be able to quickly gather data and make snap decisions.  A teacher must be able to take difficult material and break it down into digestible chunks, based on the way the brain processes new information.  A teacher must have a keen understanding of child and human development, and be able to use this understanding to greenlight, modify, or rule out an activity for a particular academic level or age group based on X, Y, and Z.  A teacher must organized.  A teacher must be able to keep a juvenile audience in mind when crafting directions or explanations.  A teacher must be able to devise systems and procedures which will ensure maximum efficiency with minimum maintenance.  All of these skills could be taught and sharply honed in a residency program, but mastery of these skills depends on the aptitude of the student teacher.  

In conclusion, to reform education, I think we need a simultaneous four-pronged approach.  Each of these four factors needs the other three in order to be workable or feasible.  

1. Develop a clear set of data-informed guidelines which prove exactly which teaching techniques an effective teacher must master and how she or he will know when the technique has been mastered.  (This would help the non-teaching public demystify the craft of teaching, which might possibly inspire more parents to take interest in the quality of their child’s teacher, and in general come to respect the profession a bit more.)  So once these guidelines are established, one could then go on to create…
2. Rigorous training to ensure that only the best and most-prepared individuals are in charge of our children’s education.  However, this kind of training would be costly, so in order to make sure that people are still going to flock to teaching we need to…
3. Pay teachers handsomely.  I think a lot of teachers under a huge amount of pressure would be much more likely to persevere if they were getting paid six figures a year to do it.  I’m not talking about merit pay, here—I’m talking about paying teachers the amount of money they deserve.  A higher salary would raise the prestige of the profession, which would then attract more people to teaching.  However, if we are going to put forth this amount of taxpayer money, we need to ensure the public that it’s being used wisely, so we should launch…
4. Comprehensive, truly purposeful and ongoing professional development and evaluation.  All this goes toward accountability to the public.  Much easier to accomplish once a general guideline for teacher effectiveness has been establish.  See?  It all comes full circle.  

adventuresinlearning:

JBoudrye wrote: We need to be careful not to vilify charter schools with a similarly broad brush as public schools are experiencing. Some charter schools fill a much needed void. In my county we have no secondary school for the arts, so I’m hoping to start one and charter may be the best path for a variety of reasons. Bottom line - there is NO single approach that will work for all. True Ed reform requires valuing each child’s gifts and strengths and providing the necessary support so each child can succeed - at life, not just in the school building. All educators need to be accountable – teachers, administrators, parents. 10/12/2010 10:55 AM EDT on EdWeek

A thousand times yes!  

marco:

“It’s pretty hard to teach a kid who has been raised by the television, when he hasn’t eaten breakfast, when the family has been kicked out of their home, when he has to work a job to help feed the siblings, when the parents have just gotten divorced or lost both of their jobs, when…

Sigh.  The Attack of the Evil Charter School.  

Listen.  I left a profoundly broken public school system, which was doing a pretty stellar job of failing thousands of children every day, to teach in a charter school which had proven results.  I had zero support at my old school, whereas in my current one, I became a much better teacher than I ever would have been had I never left the district.  

So in short, I traded failing thousands for helping hundreds.  It’s a small step, but it pays off.  People often talk about these big, sweeping changes in education, and that’s great, but those changes tend to take a while to implement, right?  And that’s someone’s child who, every day, every minute, is losing out on a great education while all the adults try to figure out these big, sweeping changes.  What I like about working in a charter school is that these changes happen quickly.  A book on the reading list isn’t working for your group of kids?  Out it goes.  Kids aren’t doing homework?  Great, let’s create a 30 minute all-school study hall in the middle of the day.  Kids need a longer school day?  Done, for next year.  Oh wait, we should go back to a shorter day so that teachers—and students—don’t burn out?  Also done for next year.  

I’m not saying that charters are the best option or a silver bullet solution for all of our problems.  Some charters are even worse than some terrible public schools.  So I’m not really for charters so much as I am for good schools.  My school doesn’t do anything that a public school district couldn’t do itself—our charter requires us to take a sizable majority of our population from the surrounding neighborhoods, and the only reason we have an enrollment cap is because of our charter.  (In the rare event where a student withdraws or is expelled, we’re racing to fill the spot with a student from our waiting list.)  So not every charter school is fantastic, but in everyone’s haste to demonize charters and anything incongruous with teachers’ unions, we are forgetting that places like Achievement First, KIPP, Green Dot, etc. are doing some pretty amazing things with students who might have otherwise been written off.  

Education reform fails when the debate forgets about the children.  

(Source: commondreams.org)

adventuresinlearning:

When people talk about problems with our schools, I hear a lot of blame: blaming, teachers, blaming parents, blaming kids. And when they talk about how to reform schools, I hear a lot of “get tough” measures: get tough on schools, get tough on teachers, get tough on kids.

What I don’t hear are the sort of obvious, logical reforms that educators – people who have the most direct experience in education – advocate.

None of my ideas are original, but I have compiled them here to give you a sample of what what one teacher, one person who actually works with students on a daily basis, strongly believes would make a difference.

1. Small Class Size. I am fortunate to have one class of just six students. That class gets three times as much work done as my other classes and has three times as much time left over for fun and games. That’s a happy and productive class. Until this semester, my idea of a dream class size was 16 students. But from this year’s experience, I see that a class of 6 students can easily soar way beyond what a class of even 16 can accomplish.

I have taught a class with upwards of 30 and a class of less than 20.  Both were just as efficiently run.  I have pretty good classroom management skills.  This has more to do with a teacher’s ability to plan according to the group s/he has and to facilitate these activities accordingly than class size.  Also, study after study shows that class size has minimal, if any, impact on student learning (I’ll let you Google the research yourself, because it’s not hard to find).  Finally, I’ve seen what happens when schools make a big deal about this, and the money spent on hiring more teachers generally leads to the budget getting cut in other ways which are far more detrimental to kids.  What’s the point in having a low student-teacher ratio if have those classrooms don’t have enough books, calculators, etc.?  

2. Small School Size. In his book, the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s refers to Dunbar’s number, the maximum number of people in an organization that can form a cohesive group.  This number is approximately 150. At six students per class, that would be about two classes per grade from kindergarten through eighth grade, along with teachers and support staff. I have worked in schools about that size (although the classes were larger), and they feel more like a community than larger schools. This decreases student alienation, and strengthens relationships. To further strengthen relationships, teachers should stay with the same cohort of children for multiple years. This can help to create an emotionally safe and secure environment for learning. It also reduces the time students need to adjust to a new teacher so they can more quickly allow themselves to open up and fully participate.

I agree with this, but I think there are ways to create these benefits without making a smaller school.  I also agree that cycling through the grades with the same group of kids is amazing—I taught my same group of kids from 7th to 8th grade, and I have a few friends who have done this for several years in a row—but then again, there are drawbacks.  If a teacher does this, it means that every year s/he is making brand-new lesson plans, unit plans, etc. instead of being able to create materials to reuse/polish again for the next year, and this can be stressful.  

3. Goodbye Summer Vacation. Come on – we all know that the school calendar in the United States is antiquated. We spend 180 days of the year learning and the entire summer trying our best to forget everything we just learned. When school starts up in fall, we play catch-up to make up for all the backsliding that’s occurred over the summer. School calendars should be year-round and have their vacations timed to meet the local climate demands. So, in the North East, there should be a vacation scheduled in the dead of  winter, when people take their lives in their hands to brave the treacherous roads to an expensively heated school. And, in the South, a vacation would make sense when students risk heat stroke on their way to an expensively air-conditioned school in the height of summer.

Can’t argue with this.  I have another friend who teaches at a year-round school, where every few months there is a break lasting 2-3 weeks.  I think this would probably be ideal for students and teachers, who might need a little recharging every now and then.  I do think that if we continue to stay with the “summer vacation” model, then we should create more opportunities for learning in the summer which are available to all students.  And I think this would be a great time to offer teachers more free professional development opportunities.  

4. Reinstate P.E. and Recess! Physical education is good for brain development, and students consolidate learning while they are playing at recess. Plus, as a teacher I can tell you that students who get a chance to run around are much more able to focus in class. It’s unnatural, and counter-productive, to force children to sit still all day.

Agree with this as well.  On another note, I think physical education teachers should be held to as high a standard as academic teachers.  I think their influence could go a long way in staving off the obesity and physical problems in our country.  A friend and I were talking about how we hated gym in school; neither of us were athletically inclined, and recalled gym teachers who did not really do much to work with the students who weren’t already naturally athletic.  This is the equivalent of a math or reading teacher only working with the on-level or advanced students in a classroom and ignoring the ones most in need. 

5. Utilize Multiple Intelligences. Music, visual arts, kinesthetic learning, and exposure to nature should all be fully incorporated into the curriculum. Right now, we are so focused on the laudable goals of improving math and reading skills that we forget that those skills will more easily be improved if we accommodate different learning styles. There should be dancing in math class and nature walks in English class.

Yes—but only if it serves a purpose.  If dancing in math class gets a student to learn a particular concept, wonderful.  But dancing in math class for the sake of the teacher being able to say s/he is trying to access multiple intelligences?  No.  The multiple intelligences theory of learning, like any other suggested fix for schools, can sometimes be taken to an extreme.  I do think multiple intelligences should be actively accessed when students are younger and gradually decreased as students get older, and this is because this type of teaching style does not happen in college.  Students need to learn to adapt to different styles of teaching, and I don’t think we prepare students for college otherwise.  Now, an emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum—that I can get behind.  Teachers who frequently show the connection between reading and math and science and history and etc. etc. etc. are going a long way to increasing the rigor of their classroom, while also preparing students for the real world and how these skills are used.  

6. Emotions and Logic are not Mutually Exclusive. Affective thinking should not be separated from cognitive thinking. To put that in more universal language, our feelings help us learn. This isn’t just a made up notion. Learning is deepest when contains an emotional component. We should be aware of how we feel about what we are learning.

Agree with this, but I think I’m going to need more concrete examples here.  This is the kind of fuzzy language which is common in teaching, and which is why people have struggled for so long to define the specific skills which make someone a good teacher.  Fuzzy language is problematic because it is interpreted in so many different ways, some good and some bad.  

7. Social and Emotional Learning. We also need to teach children the social skills necessary for successful interactions in school and in life. One thing I’ve noticed is that the inability to deal constructively with conflict and emotion interferes with the student’s ability to focus on learning in school. Conflict resolution and the repairing of relationships are skills that should be consistently taught from early ages, and schools are the perfect social environments to teach them. Relatively unstructured times such as recess are the best opportunities for children to learn how to navigate interpersonal conflict. And since cooperative learning has been shown to be more effective than individualistic learning, students need to be taught group learning skills before they are thrown into groups and expected to work together.

I can’t disagree with this.  My school has a whole class dedicated to this which students take almost every year, and when it’s taught well, you can see the impact it has.  (Key words: when it’s taught well.  There was a visible difference in behavior between the 7th grade classes who had a good teacher for this particular class and the ones who had a bad teacher for it.)  

8. Get rid of homework. Homework is bad. It stresses out children and their families. Studies show it does not improve academic performance or retention of knowledge. Some adults believe that homework will help teach responsibility. But, we generally think it a bad thing to take our work home with us as adults. We understand that there should be a separation of work and home life. We need time to relax and recharge. Many teachers only give out homework because they are expected to by other adults: administrators and parents. And, those adults expect homework because when they were children they had homework. Even those teachers who know enough to be opposed to homework will generally give it to children to prepare them for… homework! That’s right. You get homework in 5th grade so you’ll get used to it because you are going to have it in 6th grade. It’s a pointless, self-perpetuating system. In my current school, there are students who would be passing their classes – they do well on classwork and tests – but they are failing because they don’t get their homework done. In other words, there is clear evidence that they are learning yet they may have to repeat a grade of school because they aren’t going along with homework oppression. In the end, it’s a form of violence against children. It’s child abuse. Stop it.

This is ridiculous.  Homework is a way to extend learning after school hours; it exists because of the same logic behind a longer school day or longer school year.  The reason why homework is largely ineffective is because the work assigned is not meaningful.  Kids need to learn how to study and read on their own because they’ll be expected to do it in college.  They need to develop this work ethic.  I think homework is valuable, finally, because of the lessons it teaches kids in personal responsibility and time management.  

9. “Our Schools Are Not Enclaves of Totalitarianism.” Those are the wise words of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. And yet, the adults who run many of our schools spend much of their energy trying to control students in meaningless ways. For example, it’s almost universal that kids aren’t allowed to wear hats in school. Why not? Apparently, it was considered rude some time in our culture’s past. But look around – adults wear hats indoors!  I’ve seen teachers grab the hats off children who are on their way outside. Kids get yelled at for wearing hats. How can anyone learn in such an oppressive environment that feels like the adults are just waiting for them to make a mistake with arbitrary rules? Educator should also be clear about what the reason is behind their efforts to control children’s behavior. We need to ask ourselves, “Am I trying to control this child for the benefit of the child, of the class, or for my own benefit?” I once shadowed a 5th grade student for a day and counted how often she was told to be quiet by adults. About 20 times per hour hour, she or the whole class was told, in one way or another, to shut up. Imagine being told by people in charge of your life to sit still and shut up every three minutes, all day, every day. Now imagine being a kid, with the energy of a kid, and enduring your days like that.

When people say things like this, it makes me wonder what kind of teaching environment they’re in.  My school is fairly strict—airtight uniform policy, no gum, no cell phones, students can get demerits for putting their heads on the desk in class—but because of the structure, we don’t have security guards or school police officers, which is an anomaly in Philadelphia.  Most of my students are coming from schools where crime was high, dangerous incidents in the building were high, etc. and I can tell you from personal experience that the smaller things were not being addressed either.  It’s the broken windows theory.  Kids need, and appreciate, more structure than less.  Obviously, this type of strict environment is not necessary everywhere, or even at every age—ideally, I’d like to see us gradually relax some rules with each successive grade—but there’s a reason it happens.  

10. Siestas. OK, this one may seem silly at first, but hear me out. Half-way through the school day, kids (and adults) get sleepy. We have our lowest energy  about 12 hours from our deepest sleep. When I taught 2nd grade, the kids were always asking me for a nap, but I felt obligated to forge ahead even though I felt like taking a nap, too. There should be a nap period for kids over kindergarten age. Alternatively, some people benefit from exercise, instead of sleep.  If you would like to be a part of the North American Siesta Movement, join my Facebook group.

Ha.  I don’t disagree with this.  

11. Fund Schools Fairly. School funding should be taken out of the property tax base, which is inherently unequal. Every student deserves the same educational resources regardless of where their parents happen to live. For an example of how uneven funding hurts children, see my post about two adjacent high schools in Providence, Rhode Island.

Fund schools fairly—and then monitor schools to make sure the money is getting appropriated wisely.  I taught at a public school managed by Edison Schools, Inc.; I had way fewer resources than my friends who taught at non-EMO public schools in the same district, even though we received a few thousand more per student.  The charter network for whom I work currently actually receives even less per student than the school district, yet during the years I taught with them, I maybe set foot inside a Staples only few times as I wanted for nothing.  

12. What About Teacher Pay? Although teachers are woefully underpaid, I don’t think that increasing teacher compensation will lead to better teaching. Good teachers don’t do it for the money. If anything, adequate pay would attract some people for the wrong reason. Don’t get me wrong – teacher should be paid more, in fact, I think that as long as pay in our society is unequal, teachers deserve more of it than anyone else, except maybe fire fighters. But that’s not an education reform, that’s just a matter of valuing teachers.

Some of these reforms require adopting a new ideology, some mean relinquishing a bit of control, and at least one costs money. It’s difficult for adults to change their ways of being, and people, especially those without children in public school, don’t seem willing to invest more of their own money. It’s always easier to find someone or some group of people to blame for a problem, but the truth is that the problems of education in the United States are structural, and we won’t solve them by focusing on the players instead of how the game is played.

Y’ALL.  WE NEED TO PAY TEACHERS MORE.  ”Good teachers don’t do it for the money.”  This may be true, but in not paying teachers more, we’re scaring away good teachers who do need the money.  This is the real world, where teachers often have loans, mouths to feed, mortgages/rent, bills, etc.  We need more smart people in the profession, because we need students to learn from the way they think.  A teacher with a high vocabulary is going to have a bigger impact on his or her students than one who does not.  (Studies are available for that as well.)  If you get a 1600 on your SAT, and you know that you can go into engineering and start at 75K right out of college, or be a teacher and start at 35K, which are you generally going to choose?  I have a roommate in college who wanted to be a teacher, but his own father—a teacher!—told him not to do it, because of the pay.  That roommate is an attorney now, and he earns a healthy salary and is good at what he does, but I imagine he would have been an amazing teacher.  And every now and then he gets an urge to make a career change, but, in his words, “it’d be a huge lifestyle change” as well.  

Higher earnings will increase the prestige of the job.  Pay your damn teachers!