God Bless America(n Teachers)

After the sixth time that my mother asked me to describe exactly what type of volunteer work I was doing on my careerbreak, I decided I needed to simplify the message. My Mom is a very talented teacher – substantiated by the holiday cards she would receive after years of teaching a first grader, receipt of the Teacher of the Year award for her school district, and perhaps most poignant for me the countless hours she spent crafting the perfect lesson plan, perusing children’s books, grading papers, tutoring students, calling parents - all while miraculously being “mother of the year” to her kids.

I don’t know how she did it. And after 6 years spent researching US teacher psychographics, behaviors, challenges and needs – I don’t know how any of them do it. And some of them, like my mother, do it brilliantly.

Teaching today in the US is fraught with complexity. There are three factors, which, when combined, make teaching the perfect storm – Federal Teaching Mandates, Reality of the US Classroom and Availability of Quality Learning Resources. (Hint, the only thing we can affect is the “Availability of Quality Learning Resources” but I think its important to get a grasp of the bigger picture before we dive into the solution.)

First, there is the bi-partisan supported mandate passed in 2001 – No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I’ll leave my own opinions on NCLB out of the mix for a moment as I could be here all night. Just the facts. The 1100 page document boils down to a few rules:
1. All students must reach a level deemed adequate by the state in 180 days – for short, we call this Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Simply, the teacher needs to make sure all 30ish of her students – despite language level, special needs, or socio-economic background get a sufficient score on their standardized test taken for one day towards the end of the school year. And its not just the three smarty-pants pulling up the average. AYP is measured by subset – so ELL (English Language Learners), Special Needs and Title 1 student test scores are disaggregated and measured as distinct groups. And as we know Genius George and Smarty Susan usually aren’t part of these student populations. I promised no opinions on NCLB in this post, but you can draw your own conclusions as to how this changes the Teachers approach to teaching.
2. All teachers must teach to the standards developed by their state (or in some cases by their district) as this is what is measured on the standardized test. This follows the belief that all states, and in some cases school districts and even schools approach learning and teaching differently. This is all well and good if the tools they used in the classroom aligned perfectly to the state standards….stay tuned on this topic.
3. All schools and districts (if using federal education funds) must purchase scientifically researched instructional tools. This means that publishers must invest heavily in developing a sound research approach to testing a control group and test group to prove their product increases test scores. Good in theory, but in practice. Oops, I slipped up, no opinions.
Simply, according to the Fed, on day one of the school year the teacher and the students are on a single mission - to ensure all the kids score well on the one day test at the end of the year.

Now, let’s apply the Fed’s vision to the realities in the classroom today:
Over twenty percent of all school-age children will come from homes in which the primary language is not English (with few ELL prepared teachers)
In the 2003–04 school year, almost half of all students with disabilities were in regular classrooms 80 percent or more of the day
US Teachers put in more planning hours than their counterparts in Japan and Germany –working most evenings and weekends
Teaching salaries have remained flat for the last few years, with starting salaries hovering at $30,000
No wonder 16% of teachers turned over during the last year of measurement. Here’s why they left: The five most commonly reported sources of dissatisfaction among teachers who transferred out of the profession were lack of planning time (65 percent), too heavy a workload (60 percent), too low a salary (54 percent), problematic student behavior (53 percent), and a lack of influence over school policy (52 percent)

Finally, lets take a look at the “access to quality learning resources” factor. First is access. This is less of a challenge in the US than it is in developing countries (see next blog), but the funding for instructional materials does vary dramatically by district and even school.

Next is quality – is it appropriate, proven, engaging and relevant? Appropriate - so back to that “must be aligned to the standards” rule. Most publishers do a good job covering the standards, but even the best sometimes can’t figure out what chapter aligns to what standard. And even those publishers that do provide a scope and sequence usually don’t provide a clear alignment to the standards. And even those very few that do align their instructional materials to the standard usually are outdated by the next school year when the standards change. I won’t accept the illusion that “proven” is only defined by scientifically-based evidence that it raises test scores. There are hundreds of high quality materials out there that didn’t undergo a rigorous (read expensive) academic study that improve test scores. The problem is they are often times difficult to learn how to use and deploy quickly in a classroom to make a difference in 180 days.

And finally – are they engaging and relevant. I want to work in this industry again so I’m not going to give my opinion on the $6.5 b publishing industry controlled by the “big 4 publishers.” We can all go back to Econ 101 to learn that disaggregating a monopoly improves quality (I mean how is it possible that over 95% of the funding goes to print and when we hit the “real world” over 95% of our time is usually spent in a digital world?). I’ll leave it at that. Bottom line, “access to quality learning resources” does happen in pockets across the country – but it is far from the norm.

As you can see, this perfect storm is not for the faint of heart. There are heroes out there every day sailing the stormy seas and landing their students perfectly on that warm sandy beach of AYP. But what happens to all of the knowledge these teachers have when they decide to retire like my Mom did? And what about those heroes still in the profession – how do we open up the binders on their desks and start sharing their magic? And what, if we could dream, would happen if those heroes were able to start sharing their best practices with each other and start brainstorming on the perfect way to teach the Pythagorean theorem? And what if any teacher with access to a computer anywhere in the world could get access to this?

So I now understand why my mother keeps asking what this volunteer stuff is. I haven’t even gotten to the solution yet and I’m ready for bed…Curriki will have to wait until tomorrow’s post.