As you will see in this video, improving teacher quality isn’t just a business for Avila. It isn’t for me either. And it definitely shouldn’t be for you.

Watch more videos at Dropout Nation’s YouTube page.

What the dropout nation is reading about:

1. John Fensterwald notes some new teachers union antics on the Race to the Top front. The NEA’s California affiliate and its locals are intoning to districts that they shouldn’t sign the memorandums of understanding required to receive Race funds. Other NEA and AFT affiliates will likely take similar steps — or even offer their own alternate visions (as seen in Pennsylvania) as other state legislatures ignore their lobbying and entreaties.
2. Meanwhile in Tennessee, outgoing Gov. Phil Bredeson is pushing to use student test score data in evaluating teacher performance in a special session. The state’s largest teachers union has its own thoughts. Of course.
3. By the way, my American Spectator colleague, Joseph Lawler, offers his own skeptical thoughts about Race to the Top, looking at Massachusett’s reform efforts (which may soon sit on Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk).  In Kentucky, the Bluegrass Policy Institute takes aim at state legislators for offering a Trojan Horse version of Race reforms (HT to EducationNews). And Jamie Davis O’Leary looks at what he describes as Ohio’s embarrasing Race reform plans.
4. James Guthrie takes some time at Education Next to assess whether school reform is actually happening. He has his answer. I would say that it is happening, but still incomplete.
5. Monise Seward is none too pleased with the results from the Southern Education Foundation’s report on public education in the southern states. Her biggest issue: “the correlation between minority status and/or poverty with low academic expectations by the ‘experts’ and public education institutions.” The lack of discussion about over-diagnosis of black and Latino males (along with white males) is particularly jarring to her.
6. At the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow read over the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ report on sex abuse in juvenile prisons and jails. Let’s just say that they are more shocked by the evidence than yours truly. If anything, America’s juvenile justice system is sometimes even more shameful in the pervasive neglect, abuse and denial of due process rights to children than the woeful public schools this publication covers.
7. EdTrust releases their report on addressing achievement gaps in the age of Race to the Top and No Child. From its perspective, it isn’t enough to just close the gap. More thoughts from yours truly this weekend.
8. Mike Antonucci notes that the president of the AFT’s California affiliate has some choice thoughts about parents who support the newly-enacted “parent trigger” in the state’s Race to the Top-driven school reforms passed yesterday. No comment.
9. This headshaker of the week comes from the News Leader in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. And the lack of thought starts at the headline: “We can’t let charter schools steal funds from public education.” Pardon me, but public charter schools are part of the public education system, right? Or am I — and virtually everyone else covering education — just dreaming?
10. While Michigan politicians aren’t even considering handing over control of Detroit’s traditional district to Mayor Dave Bing, Wisconsin is still picking over whether Milwaukee’s mayor will gain control over that city’s public schools. As reported in the Journal-Sentinel, one parent opposed to mayoral control asks: “How in the world does excluding parents from selecting their school leadership encourage them to participate in the education of their children?” Everyone in the hearing savvy about the politics of school boards elections likely laughed under their breath and paid him no more mind.
11. And finally, the debate between education civil rights activists such as Gary Orfield and the charter school movement over diversity in charters is the subject of my latest National Review report. As I hinted at in the piece, it’s easy for those in the ivory tower to go on and on about diversity when they have the choice to not send their children to the nation’s worst dropout factories and academic failure mills. Integration only works if the schools are of the kind that all children can achieve their respective educational destinies.

Cartoon by Gary Varvel

What’s happening in the dropout nation:

1. How many teachers — and schools — use the Internet to engage with parents? Jay Mathews notices that many teachers stubbornly won’t do so. Unfortunately, as with much with the use of technology and data in education, this isn’t so shocking. It would be great to have a technology argument in education similar to what’s going on in the media business.
2. Julia Steiny on the overuse of harsh school discipline: “Schools banish kids often and self-righteously.. It’s barbaric.”
   
3. Big Ed Reform Andy #1 provides a round-up of Race to the Top news out of the Wolverine State. As I had mentioned in October, for many states, it is as much a pursuit of the dollars as it is about achieving substantial education reform. This isn’t a bad thing if the correct results are achieved.
   
4. Tom Vander Ark wants the nation’s dropout factories to be fixed or replaced. Who can disagree? This should also apply to the schools that serve as feeders into them.
5. Mark Kleiman thinks the No Child Left Behind Act’s focus on testing all students at just one point in a school year is rather inefficient; according to him, management guru W. Edwards Deming would be “appalled” by it. Maybe. But it doesn’t have to be an either-or. All students need to be tested in order to assure that each child gets the highest-quality education possible based on his needs. At the same time, sampling would also make sense to do in order to see the long-term results of broad-based reforms. How about that.
6. School reform isn’t about popularity. Judging by the protests over the closing of Jamaica High and a few other New York City schools, Joel Klein and company know this all too well.
7. Meanwhile in New Jersey, Gov.-elect Chris Christie is looking to expand a limited public school choice program, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. If successful, New Jersey would be following up on California’s recent expansion of a similar program.
   
8. Want to learn more about how many California students aren’t making it from high school into college. Check out Measuring Success, Making Progress, which is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (hat tip to The Educated Guess).
   

Subscribe to Dropout Nation’s Twitter feed to get up-to-the-minute updates.

Every child can learn. Even if their parents have just arrived to this country.

Especially if they are offering just one solution to the Latino achievement gap. Read more in my latest piece in The American Spectator.

How to pay for teachers? Certainly not by maintaining the status quo.

My recent report on the high cost of teacher retirement packages definitely struck a cord with some folks. Reason‘s Brian Doherty notes that the teacher pension and healthcare deficits are part of an even-larger problem of funding civil servant retirements. Neil McCluskey at Cato offer their own thoughts, based in part on his own fine study of teacher compensation.

Meanwhile a couple of readers didn’t fully understand the argument being made — that teachers, for all their complaints about low play and demands for “respect” (i.e. money) — are among the best-compensated and best-protected professions. Think about it: The average teacher in TK states will

All that said, teacher compensation is out of whack: The lack of strong, objective annual evaluation of performance means that highly-effective teachers are paid as well as teachers lagging in subject-matter competence and instructional talent. The compensation system rewards veteran teachers, regardless of their ability, even though teachers are most likely to be effective during their early years in the classroom.

Or should she?

Should he be ignored by his teacher?

Although one can appreciate Mike Petrilli’s argument that school systems should focus more on developing strong systems of academic instruction over finding talented aspiring collegians to teach (I’ll explain more of this tomorrow, with the help of The American Spectator), the reality is that the quality of instructor matters as much as the quality of instruction.

As pointed out so often by teaching guru Martin Haberman, it is important for a teacher to care about the children in his care as it is for that teacher to have strong instructional skills and subject-matter competency. All the instructional systems won’t matter if the teacher doesn’t know his subject and doesn’t care as much about the children lagging behind — either because the student’s learning style doesn’t

match the teacher’s instructional style or because of poor academic instruction before he reached that particular classroom — as for those landing on the student honor roll.

Exemplifying this reality is the poor advice given to teachers by Huston over at Gently Hew Stone, who tells teachers to not bother thinking about improving the performance of the laggards in their classroom. From where he sits, Huston thinks that “we can’t afford to dwell on those who choose to fail.”

And this teacher is absolutely wrong.

The teacher should especially care about the laggards — most notably the ones that are dramatically failing class — because they are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine: They alert teachers to the other students that are lagging behind, but aren’t given much attention because they aren’t misbehaving or they are barely skating by with Cs and Ds. Given the reality that a quarter of America’s students are failing to graduate from school — and that a large portion of those who do graduate will need remedial math and science once they reach college — the need to pay attention to every early warning indicator is crucial to keeping kids in school and on path to graduation.

The failure isn’t always the fault of the instruction given by the particular teacher (although, along with weak curriculum, is often part of the problem). The kids may need different kinds of instructional methods — and instructors — in order to get back on track. Or may need to be held back and given new settings in order to improve their performance. The kids may be struggling with Dyslexia or another learning disability and therefore, needs a new academic setting. Or the kids may come in from atrocious schools and are struggling in better-performing settings. And if the problem lies with the teacher’s instruction, then he — along with the principal — can take the steps needed to improve his methods or core subject knowledge.

What is needed — and the improvement for which Huston and Petrilli or should advocate — is expanding the amount of individual student data available to teachers. This can help them — and administrators — tailor instruction and lessons for each student. As I have discovered as part of another project on which I am working, school data systems often don’t extend beyond the central offices of school districts; even when schools are connected to the systems, access to information is limited to the clerical personnel and administrators charged with data processing work. As a result, teachers at the elementary level know little about their students save for the information they gather during the time the student is with them and the gossip shared with them in the faculty lounge. States should follow the path of Florida, which is now attempting to allow each teacher to access individual student data as part of the expansion of its school data system.

Collaboration at the middle- and secondary-school level is also key. A student’s academic problems are often not limited to one subject or teacher. Schools are attempting to do more of this, but it will take time to become a wide-spread — and well-done — practice.

Either way, a teacher should pay attention to those falling behind. Because it is a sign of deeper problems among the student body that aren’t always manifested in flunking out.

(Photos courtesy of Adobe Systems)

1. Surprise, surprise: Poor black and other minority students in Texas are less likely to get highly-qualified teachers than students of all races in wealthier parts of the state, reports Gary Scharrar of the Houston Chronicle.
2. Spend, spend, spend: The Wall Street Journal looks at spending by the national operations of the NEA and AFT. Given that teachers generally don’t have much choice but to join the unions — either on their own or agency fees that they pay even if they aren’t members — it is important to think about how the NEA and AFT spends the money of its rank-and-file. Especially — and more importantly — as the state and local affiliates lobby state legislators and policymakers for more favorable governance rules.
3. Mike Antonucci has his own thoughts.
4. Liam Julian on Affirmative Action: “Affirmative action hasn’t just somehow changed, somehow morphed, into a policy by which privileged whites can expiate past wrongs and rid themselves of guilt… These are what affirmative action has, in fact, always been about.” Credit Kevin Carey for this discussion.
5. Is education devalued by rhetoric: So asks Mike Petrilli at Flypaper in a discussion about why education doesn’t always grab the attention of the average voter as other issues do. From where I sit, the problem lies in the reality that education is one of the few government goods everyone uses and therefore, each person thinks their experience is the norm. Suburban students who graduate from school, make it to college and succeed in the workforce, therefore, have difficulty understanding why their counterparts in urban schools don’t do so. Or why their parents keep them in those schools in the first place. Thus adding to the difficulty of selling the value of concepts such as vouchers and charters schools to suburbanites. And proving the point that people only know what they see and don’t care about what they don’t.
6. Of course, it doesn’t help that some people think schools aren’t the problem: Just read the declaration of the Broader, Bolder Coalition, which proclaims that poor-performing schools aren’t the problem. Then read this polemic by Michael Holzman of the Schott Foundation for Public Education — who just oversaw the release of its latest annual report on low graduation rates for young black men — in which he declares that such schools are the problem. One of these folks knows better. The others, well, ignore most of the problem, thus weakening their argument altogether.
7. Speaking of Schott: Joanne Jacobs offers some thoughts on the report, while commenters offer their own explanations for the academic woes of black males.
8. In charts: Ken DeRosa explains the correlations between school spending and academic performance.
9. Suburbia and School Reform, Part MMM: Chicago Public Radio takes a look at one effort to start a charter school in a suburban community — and why the effort is not taking hold. Until suburban parents recognize that their schools are often no better than some average-performing urban high schools, they will not embrace reform.
10. Self-promotion, as always: The real reason why so many Americans aren’t reaping the benefits of free trade and globalization can be seen not in NAFTA, but in L.A.’s Hollywood High School and other schools in which academic failure has become the norm. Check it out today at The American Spectator.