Over the past year I have learned quite a bit more about the influence of a few foundations in the sphere of education. As I've posted before, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put a lot of emphasis on the topic and has surveyed teachers about what we think our needs are. In Philadelphia we have also seen the rise of the William Penn Foundation in its support of the Boston Consulting Group.

Another major foundation has been in the background, however, garnering little press but influencing policy more than many think: The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Their stated mission is to "drastically transform urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations, and competition." A noble goal, to be sure, but it is important to identify how it is implemented to really understand their influence. 

One of their main projects is the Broad Superintendent Academy, a program devoted to focusing people's energies on the business side of education. This Academy has supported and influenced numerous individuals who have become leaders across the country (a list can be found on this website). Philadelphia just ousted one of the graduates from its school system (Dr. Arlene Ackerman) and just hired one (Dr. William Hite). The Academy prides itself on being a disruptive influence in education systems and promotes turnaround schools in which staffs are completely (or mostly) reconstituted, or for a school to be turned over to a charter manager. And now it plans to expand its influence.

The reason I bring this up is not to say that all Broad Academy superintendents are going to destroy school systems. My main focus here is to question the impetus of this organization - that business and competition are more useful to transform the education system than knowledge of how kids and schools work. Writing this blog over the past year and a half has made me think about how to positively influence schools on a larger scale and leadership is the key.

I think business savvy is important to have. Knowledge of budgeting, influencing people, managing - these are all important. But without some knowledge of what it's like in the classroom, these people are forgetting what their end goals are. For all the visits a superintendent can have to classrooms, they do not really know what it is like right now to be in front of 30+ students at a time. I do not know what the true solution will be. All I can advocate is for people who are in the classroom to stick it out and find opportunities to influence their Districts in positive ways. And if you want to gain leadership skills at the same time, please don't forget what you are doing that for: the kids.

I spent the last week at the National Havurah Committee's Summer Institute, an opportunity for reflection on community, Jewish learning, exploring my own values, while making new connections (and friends) with people across the country. I had heard of this summer opportunity a lot over the past few years but was always working at camp or traveling across the globe. This year I had no such excuse and I was happy to spend seven days creating an intentional space for learning.

One of the most amazing parts of this week was a class I took entitled "Teaching as a Spiritual Practice." I really appreciated the group of educators who met and discussed how and why they do what they do. We had representatives from K-12 education, higher ed, Hebrew schools, and more, all discussing the decisions we've made to affect the next generation. 

There were two particular passages I would like to emphasize here, both from traditional Jewish texts. I will do my best to cite my sources but please correct me if I make a mistake in translation.

          "The Torah teaches you: if you are a man of learning, do not be so arrogant as to say something in front of an assembly 
          before you had made the matter clear to yourself by going over it two or three times."  - Tanhuma Yitro 15.

As I have mentioned on this blog before, experience matters. Apparently the Rabbis from centuries past agreed with that statement. The only way to truly master something is to practice over and over again. A recent post on Dianve Ravitch's blog cited an article by Rachel Levy on Teach For America and focused on the misplaced rhetoric on experience versus enthusiasm. If the data shows that regularly-certified teachers and TFA teachers are gaining skill by years 2 and 3 in the classroom, but TFA teachers are leaving in droves at that point, perhaps we should put funding elsewhere.

          "A man does not fully understand the words of the Torah until he has stumbled over them." - Talmud Bavli Gittin 43a

This passage is referring to making mistakes and being corrected. Many teachers understand that making a mistake is a part of the learning process. Unfortunately, the testing mindset of society emphasizes the "right answer" over the process. As a high school math teacher I try to train my students to recognize mistakes, learn from them, and build a knowledge base to recognize them in the future. I get very upset when I see students throw away tests/homework/assignments they did not feel were up to snuff. I think we need to do a better job at educating students on the real life procedures of fixing your work.

Overall this past week has been illuminating to me in regards to my own practice of Judaism and teaching and I hope to share more anecdotes as the weeks pass by.

The New Teacher Project, a non-profit founded by Michelle Rhee in 1997 to end the achievement gap by fostering great teachers, released a new report on the issue of teacher retention. As a national non-profit, many people across the country are reading this report and taking it into consideration, especially at the policy level. While it does make some interesting and important points about teaching, unfortunately I do not agree with a lot of its premises and its recommendations, especially because it is very much not a peer-reviewed research piece in a journal. 

Implicit in a lot of the report was that the "Irreplaceables," or high-performing teachers, are the young, motivated ones while the low-performing teachers are the older, experienced ones. On page 14 it cites issues like, "compensation systems that pay the least effective teachers more than the most effective" as major factors in the high-performing teachers leaving. Certainly this was written by people who know that seniority is usually the basis for salary, therefore this line is directly implying that experienced teachers are less effective overall. I understand that motivation is an important drive for an effective teacher, but a first-year Teach For America student is almost definitely not going to be as skilled as a 10-year experienced one. 

Moreover, the conclusions drawn in this report are based on only one year of data. I am by no means an expert on educational research but knowing that measurement of an effective teacher can change quite a bit over two years means they should not draw any major conclusions from this information.

A related study (which was in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis in 2004) based on four years of randomized classrooms and teachers pointed out that, "in low-SES [socioeconomic status] schools, it matters more which teacher a child receives than it does in high-SES schools." According to this research, teacher effects are different based on the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood in which they teach. If this is true then it is truly difficult to measure teacher effectiveness overall (something that has been pointed out a lot recently) and we should really focus more on poverty's effects on schools.

The report does point out something quite important: "Less than 30 percent of Irreplaceables who plan to leave their school do so for personal reasons beyond their school's control, and principals hold significant sway over the decisions of the other 70 percent" (p.16). If these good teachers were given regular feedback, given time to identify areas of development, put in charge of something, or provided with additional resources, potentially they would stick around.

Additionally, if there were alternative pathways for career advancement, some teachers would stick around in the classroom longer. Potentially these individuals could share their time between teaching children directly or leading parts of the school. A lot of this I've mentioned earlier in posts about the RESPECT project coming out of the US Department of Education.

I think this report touches on important points but in a very politicized (and unscientific) way that is not really helpful in the long run.