When it comes to the role of teachers in stemming the nation’s dropout crisis and crisis of educational failure, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and their allies in traditional public education tend to argue that they play no part in either solving the crisis — and that low-quality teachers and the system of teacher benefits and compensation that helps aid and abet them plays no part in fostering the problem in the first place. But, as Steve Peha argues in this Voices, such statements are, well, not exactly so. In light of the Los Ange;es Times’ report on the low quality of teaching in L.A. Unified Schools, Peha shines light on the role of teacher quality in solving the dropout crisis:

In her response to a recent speech on education by President Obama, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, used what has probably become the greatest cliché in all of education reform: “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”

This is a self-serving fallacy. There is a silver bullet and we all know what it is: competent teachers. Not rock stars. Not geniuses. Not Rafe Esquiths or Jaime Escalantes. Not carefully recruited, alternatively certified, finely tuned specimens of human capital. Not former four-star generals or ex-Fortune 500 CEOs. Not Six-Sigma-superstars or Seven-Habits-heroes. Just competent teachers acting in the best interests of the children and families they serve.

This works every time. In fact, it’s the only thing that seems to work. So why do we say out of one side of our mouth that teaching quality is the most significant influence on student achievement and then, out of the other side of our mouth, we say that, “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”

Teaching is a complex enterprise, but being a competent teacher is not. Being responsible for our competence can be challenging at times, but most of us get the hang of it after a while. If we don’t, we never grow up. And if we never grow up, it really doesn’t matter if we ever become competent. We’re the adults in the room. If we don’t act like adults, there’s no point in being in the room.

Teaching is hard. No argument there. But one advantage of its difficulty is that it’s not hard to figure out if you’re any good at it. Competence—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—is easy to gauge. Being responsible is how you become competent if you’re not, and knowing whether you’re being responsible is easy to gauge, too.

We could fix the competence problem if we applied the following principals of responsibility:

1. If you know what to do, do it.
2. If you don’t know what to do, learn.
3. Iterate through challenges quickly.
4. Assess your progress often and honestly.
5. Apply Principal #1 or Principal #2 as needed.

This is exactly what we ask of small children, so we can be certain that we all understand it. Acting the same way we expect others to act is called modeling in the classroom. Another thing every teacher is familiar with. It’s called integrity in life. Integrity is easy to gauge, too. When we say that there are no silver bullet-solutions for our schools, we are out of integrity with what we know to be true.

I do not mean to trivialize the challenge here. But neither will I support the oft-repeated position that education is too complex to be tamed or that straightforward approaches can’t be implemented. How complicated is it to ask that adults who care for children take it upon themselves to be competent, and if they are not competent, to be responsible about achieving competence?

If you think you detect a lack of compassion in my tone, I encourage you to detect again. I know as well as anyone the pain of incompetence when the well-being of children for whom I am responsible is at stake. Few things I have experienced in my life have ever felt as awful, day after day, and for many days thereafter, as letting a group of struggling elementary school students go an entire year without learning a thing about learning to read. But over the ensuing summer, I read books on reading instruction, practiced on a few patient kids, and became a competent reading teacher—not a great reading teacher, just a competent reading teacher. And when September rolled around, I felt like a human being again. My own experience, and that of many teachers whom I have trained, leads me to believe that supporting every teacher in achieving competence is one the most compassionate gestures we can make on behalf of people who devote so much of themselves to what is often a very unforgiving vocation.

We must also have compassion for children, of course, especially for those who are most sensitive to poor learning conditions at school because they may not have the support at home that we would wish for them. The most compassionate gesture we can make on behalf of our children is the guarantee of a competent teacher in every classroom. It’s hard to live a good life these days without a good education. And every teacher I know— competent or not—feels the pain of poorly educated children as they head out of school, ill-prepared for the world that awaits them.

Competence is the “silver-bullet solution” for our schools. Any time we say it isn’t, we lie to ourselves and to our country. Competent teachers provide quality educations to the children they serve. This is a research-proven fact and an empirically tested hypothesis in our own personal lives. Tens of thousands of these people exist across our land. We all know at least a few of them. Some were our teachers.

Competent teaching is not a mystery. The mystery is why more of us don’t take ownership of our competence. Again, the word is “competence”. Not “excellence” or “perfection” or “greatness” or “self-less saintly sacrifice”. Just competence.

Every teacher working in every school today is either competent or has within his or her sole power the social, emotional, intellectual, financial, and temporal resources to become competent. Many of us may have to get a little training, we may have to read a book or two, we may have to practice a bit, and mess up a few times before we get our act together. But competence is within our grasp.

Don’t even try to tell anybody it isn’t, least of all yourself.

There have been many times when I wasn’t competent. Incompetence stalks me even fifteen years into this work, when situations arise that are new to me and for which I am not well prepared. Recently, for example, I realized I didn’t know nearly enough about helping kids with ADD and ADHD. I am not competent in this regard. So I e-mailed a few smart people, read a couple of good articles on the web, purchased a highly recommended book on the subject, and started to learn. I’m not competent yet, but I will be soon enough. Probably just in time to be faced with another situation in which I am not competent.

School is like that. It encourages us learn. Yet some of us manage somehow to avoid learning at school. That’s when the responsibility part kicks us in the ass. If we can feel the pain of our own failure, we can heal ourselves and move forward. If we can’t feel the pain, it’s time to welcome someone else up to the front of the room.

There is very little about competent teaching that is not stored somewhere ready for anyone to access, often for free. Some of it is in books. Some of it is on the web. Some of it is on DVD. Some of it is in training. Some of it is inside the brains of competent teachers and teacher trainers across our nation. But it’s all there somewhere.

In my personal quest to understand education, I have, in pursuit of competence, posed a seemingly endless stream of questions, few of which have remained unanswered for very long. The answers haven’t always been right for me or for my situation. But other answers have usually been available as long as I have been willing to look for them. The amount of knowledge we have about education is overwhelming. But no one needs to know it all; not even close. We just need to know enough—enough to be good enough. That’s what being competent means, being good enough. We don’t have to understand the universe of education, just our tiny part of it. And there’s nothing overwhelming about that.

We can say all kinds of things about how hard teaching is. No one’s going to disagree with us. But we can’t say we can’t all become competent because that’s just as much of a lie as saying there are no silver bullets. We’re the silver bullets, ladies and gentlemen. Competence is the gun. Responsibility pulls the trigger. Integrity holds us together and attracts into our lives other people who share our values and lend their support. In a spirit of community and compassion, we teach our way toward competence, and improve our education system one silver bullet at a time.

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As disappointing as the Washington, D.C. school district’s contract with its American Federation of Teachers local may be, the fact that the district’s performance management system — the first in the nation that uses test scores as a dominant factor in teacher evaluations — remains intact is a great victory for efforts to reform teacher quality. This Dropout Nation report and video from this past January, which features the man at the heart of this effort, offers some insight on why D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s push to improve the quality of education in the district has come under such fire.

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As D.C. Public Schools and the American Federation of Teachers’ Beltway local continue to spar over competing contract proposals — and Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s school reform plans — the district’s teacher quality czar continues to implement IMPACT, the performance review program that features the use of student test score data in evaluating teacher performance.

Jason Kamras may be the most-important person in education today. Yes, more important than Arne Duncan or Joel Klein or any of the two national union heads or even Rhee herself. On Rhee’s behalf, he is overseeing the most-comprehensive reform of teacher evaluation and performance management going on today. More importantly, he is already saying that the results he sees from this effort may be used in wide-ranging ways, from rewarding the best teachers to deciding which ed schools are deserving of D.C.’s patronage.

At a meeting with education professionals last night, Kamras admitted that the plan still needed some work. Although D.C. held a mass professional development session early in the school year, along with other meetings, Kamras said the district needed “to do more communication [with teachers]. We can never do enough of that” He also noted that the student benchmark tests given throughout the year aren’t fully included in the value-added analysis used in evaluating teachers; the final value-added assessment isn’t completed and delivered to teachers for their evaluations until July, just when they have to decide whether to stay and go through the remediation (if they are lagging) or quit. That said, Kamras notes that the rest of the evaluation scores, which are given in June, should give teachers more than enough info on where they are likely to stand; especially if their performance is in  the proverbial red.

Kamras notes that there is still more work ahead. D.C. Public Schools is working with its test provider on delivering the final standardized test data in time so all the information can be used to fully evaluate teachers in a more-timely manner. There is also some discussion on how to use technology to conduct teacher observations; but, as Kamras noted in response to one question, cameras in the classroom aren’t comforting to teachers (who often prefer in-person observations) and given D.C. law (which requires a person to give permission to being taped on camera), it may not be worth it. Kamras notes that if a teacher rejects the use of cameras, then “we’re back at square one.”

The biggest impact may come in terms of choosing which ed schools from which D.C. and its sister traditional districts and charters schools they choose. Kamras said last night that if an ed school produces far too many laggard instructors, he will tell them that he’s not recruiting from their schools — and will tell his colleagues throughout the D.C.-Virginia-Maryland region as well. He will likely tell those districts about the successful ed schools as well. This could actually result in improvements in teaching quality throughout the area — and ultimately, the nation.

The efforts in D.C. are certainly interesting to watch. Whether or not other school districts will follow its model will largely depend on the willingness of school chief executives to take on the lax performance management cultures and servile relationships districts often have with their union locals. As you can see below, here is a short clip of Kamras’ response to a question about how he thinks performance pay will shake up teaching.

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Charters are on her mind -- and in more ways than one.

The dropout nation in the news today:

1. For the past three decades, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers has regarded the charter school movement as the worst of the elements in the overall school reform movement. From efforts to restrict establishment of charters in statehouses and school boards to efforts to use preliminary National Assessment of Educational Progress results to sway federal education policy, the nation’s two primary teachers unions have failed miserably in attempts to stall the growth of charters. But over the past couple of years, the NEA and AFT have focused on organizing teaching staffs within these schools. Why? Read more in my latest Labor Watch report and drop by Dropout Nation for more commentary on the strategies and the likelihood of success in their organizing efforts.
2. As I noted last week in The American Spectator, the closing of Catholic schools in Baltimore should prompt alarm among school reformers interested in expanding the availability of high-quality educational options for the most-under-served children. This doesn’t just apply in Baltimore. As the New York Post reports today, parents and children attending two New York Archdiocese schools slated for closure are none too happy about this prospect. Certainly the traditional model of financing and operating Catholic schools is uneconomic; some closing may need to happen. But figuring out ways to support these choices should figure into the minds of all reformers.
3. This week’s Headshaker comes courtesy of Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, who echoes complaints from Diane Ravitch and others that teacher quality reform efforts (along with the outlier that is the firing of 93 teachers at the high school in Central Falls, R.I.) are signs that reformers are becoming bloodthirsty and overly blame-gaming. Her position: Parents and children need to take responsibility for their own academic failures. The fact that children already bear the brunt of poor academic instruction in the long run through poverty, chronic unemployment and incarceration fails to figure into her thinking. So does the reality that teachers have long been insulated from performance management thanks to a lack of strong human capital management by districts, bans on the use of student test scores in evaluating teacher performance and state laws that make teacher dismissals expensive, cumbersome and difficult to undertake. And the fact that teachers are protected by unions that use their war chests and lobbying heft to influence education policy also doesn’t figure into her discussion. Oh, and she uses too many anecdotes instead of facts.
4. In Detroit, several foundations are looking to launch 70 new charter schools, according to the Detroit Free Press. If these charters do the job, this could mean more opportunities for high-quality education for the Motor City’s poorly-served children. It also comes for Detroit Public Schools at the least-opportune time: It is attempting to bolster its declining enrollment. (HT for the latter link to Steve Moore, who Dropout Nation readers should also follow on Twitter, along with yours truly.)

Check out today’s Dropout Nation report on the U.S. Department of Education’s renewed civil rights enforcement efforts and what this could mean for school equity/advocacy tort lawyers, states and districts. Also listen to today’s Dropout Nation Podcast on what President Obama and Arne Duncan should do in expanding Race to the Top.

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Photo courtesy of the New York Times

What’s happening today in the dropout nation:

1. President Barack Obama’s further declaration of the administration’s efforts to turnaround failing schools — including a program called Grad Nation — is gaining the usual amount of coverage. Andy Rotherham and one of the other Ed Reform Andys (Smarick) each have their own thoughts. Let’s just say no one thinks school turnaounds are the sole silver bullet (if at all). Meanwhile, you can watch Obama’s speech on video and visit America’s Promise’s Web site for more information on Grad Nation
2. In the HuffPo, Trish Williams discusses how to develop indicators that show how turnaround academic performance in America’s middle schools, which help foster the nation’s dropout crisis. Tom Vander Ark already has his own answer: Get rid of them.
3. Speaking of graduation rates, Alabama is finally revising its calculation in order to better-reflect reality, according to NBC’s Birmingham television affiliate. And the reality? Just 65 percent of the state’s freshmen graduate in four years (instead of the 85 percent rate it currently reports).
4. And speaking of Obama, the Washington Post reports that the president annoyed the American Federation of Teachers with his remarks in support of the firing of 93 teachers in Central Falls, R.I., after they failed to get in line with a much-needed school turnaround program. AFT President Weingarten, whose Rhode Island affiliate is defending the teachers, argues that Obama’s views “don’t reflect the reality on the ground.” She’s right. It’s even worse: Most laggard teachers keep their jobs. They shouldn’t. Same for central office administrators, who, in most cases, negotiate teachers union contracts that don’t allow principals to remove poor performers (or keep tenured laggards out) of classrooms.
5. Doctoral candidate (and former administrator) Eric L. Waters — whose Twitter feed is a must-follow in my book — looks at the underlying causes of low graduation rates among young black women. As with black males, this is an important issue to address as part of solving the dropout crisis

Check out the Dropout Nation Twitter feed for constant news on the reform of American public education. Also listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on fostering “impromptu leaders” for school reform.

And for your first week of March, enjoy a little Dave Matthews:

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What’s happening this weekend in the dropout nation:

1. New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein has instructed principals to use student test score data in evaluating probationary teachers on their fitness for tenure, reports the New York Post. The AFT’s New York City local is, as you would expect, displeased. Given the past battles — including the move by the AFT to outright ban the use of test data in evaluations two years ago — expect this battle to get nasty. And, just as likely, Randi Weingarten to back further away from her announcement last month that she would back the use of tests in evaluations. But, as Gotham Schools points out, most of the 7,000 teachers being evaluated for tenure won’t be affected by the move because they teach subjects not covered on state assessments.
2. The bigger uproar is in Houston, where the school district’s board unanimously enacted a measure under which test scores would be used in teacher evaluations. Weingarten has already offered her support for the local’s opposition to the plan, according to the Houston Chronicle. Stephen Sawchuck notes that the AFT may now find itself on a losing end of a battle to control the level to which test scores are used. I’d say the AFT and the NEA are already losing. The traditional teachers compensation system could exist unchanged so long as there was no objective data for measuring performance and the system wasn’t too costly to maintain. Neither of which is the case anymore.
3. On the matter of teachers, read Kevin Carey’s 2004 report for the Education Trust on the importance of using data in evaluating and ultimately, finding, high quality teachers. Also, Martin Haberman offered thoughts on how better teacher preparation can help address achievement gaps. And Chad Ratliff notes his 2009 post on the need to revamp teacher compensation in Virginia (and taking advantage of federal Race to the Top and i3 dollars to do so).
4. Also, the Wallace Foundation releases a brief on how states and districts can work together on improving school leadership. In particular, the report notes that strong political backing for school administrators and superintendents — along with keeping those folks in the job for a long time — can help improve the quality of administration and sustaining reforms.
5. Kevin Carey, by the way, also looks at Trinity Washington University, which gets dinged by U.S. News & World Report‘s annual survey because it serves poor minority women and charges modest tuition to boot. Which could explain why so many state universities give merit scholarships to wealthier families (and devote less aid to their poorest students). Maybe Neal McCluskey has a point after all (of course he does).
6. In City Limits, Geoffrey Canada offers his thoughts on why the Harlem Children’s Zone is succeeding and whether its model — now embraced by the Obama administration through its proposed Promise Neighborhoods — may succeed outside of New York City (and the financial and talent resources Canada can tap). Sample quote: “can put together a team down here and we can do it. That is not a huge lift. And that’s one of the most exciting but little-understood aspects of this.…. That’s mostly what this problem looks like across America. It’s not Chicago or Detroit or New York. Mostly it’s the [smaller towns]: You’ve got 1,500 kids in trouble and nobody with a strategy for how to save them. Now, you don’t need 50 people from elite colleges to do that.”

Check out the Dropout Nation Podcast on civil rights activists and school reform. The next podcast, on the need for school reformers to build bridges to parents and grassroots activists, will be available on Sunday.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss what will likely be the most-important driver for reforming how teachers are evaluated, compensated and given tenure: The high costs of traditional teacher compensation being borne by America’s taxpayers — including more than $367 billion in unfunded retirement healthcare liabilities for teachers and million-dollar lifetime retirement payouts — as seen in battles in Vermont, Pennsylvania and Indiana.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

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