Hey Jose,
Last week I had the high privilege of attending the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. You might think the honor due to the company of excellent teacher preparation professors I was able meet and talk to but, it wasn’t. The honor was due to the opportunity to see Renee Moore rock the federal education policy boat. It was a beautiful thing to see truth spoken to power so elegantly. The gentleman on Renee’s left is Michael Dannenberg a representative from the ED. Next to him is Donna Wiseman and Barnett Berry. Barnett’s speech was just at forceful. I will try to upload it soon. Teacher prep seems to be exceptionally interested in Teaching 2030.
Overall, the conference was a highlight of my career since becoming a child development specialist.

John,

You bring up really good points about attribution error in your latest. Realistically, anytime you have a system of accountability, you have to wonder who benefits from that system of accountability. Without more involved parties in the decisions, you end up with a plethora of one-way mandates and little discussion. It brings me of this new byproduct of President Obama’s Race To The Top: The Common Core Standards. I’m not sure where we’re running in this race, but I’m somewhat intrigued by these new learning standards. It certainly has its flaws; critics have called many of the standards vague, and people who haven’t read it immediately dismissed it as prescriptive. One of my blogger friends, JD, said that we should disregard the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) because of the current myopia with accountability and test scores. I agree to a certain extent: if people think that a test at the end of the school year can accurately determine the breadth and depth of knowledge my students know about any standards, that’s dangerous for the execution of any mandate, no matter how well-written.

Yet, I look at our state’s current batch of standards and see a huge opportunity for all involved to transform the idea of accountability that benefits all involved. For one, after several reviews of the document, I prefer this for a couple of reasons:

• It’s better designed / suited for classroom teaching.
• There are less standards to cover.
• Simultaneously, we’re asked to cover the few topics we have in more depth.

Bonus points for the multicultural contributions of the reading lists in the literacy standards. As a math teacher, I’m ecstatic that I’m only covering about 2/3rds of the material currently covered. As someone who’s tired of following pacing calendars to a tee when I know my students still struggle with topics from 2 grade levels earlier, I clamor for and appreciate getting more time to expound on topics important for success in future levels of math. I love showing multiple approaches to topics so I can develop deeper understanding for the students who don’t get it the minute I put the topic on the board.

Yet, under this climate of skewed accountability, we risk losing that richness of understanding by determining that the assessments for these standards will function in the same capacity as the ones given by the test, as one-dimensional gauges for student and teacher performance.  Anyone with a basic knowledge of schools knows the three pillars for teaching: standards, pedagogy, and assessment. The standards and the assessment are book-ends to the complex experiment of teaching. Yes, external factors matter (poverty comes to mind immediately). Yes, people outside of the parent-teacher-student paradigm matter.

But everyone involved has a stake in mitigating the factors that prove destructive for our young children, and much of that is systemic. Here are three quick cultural things we can fix that policymakers should know before we arrive at the 2014 mark for Common Core accountability:

1. Give us time, and lots of it. When education policy leaders first announced the Common Core Standards, the messages traveled at light speed through district leaders and superintendents that principals, teachers, and coaches needed to integrate the standards into the curriculum well before even the individual states had ratified the document and revised it under their auspices. It’s a helpful exercise for some of us ed-geeks, but the average teacher gave a collective shrug because it came in the middle of the school year … while we’re still under the old standards. Under this, we should also include granting us liberty from current accountability systems in this transition period.
2. Let us figure it out first internally. Time and again, the most powerful experiences for teachers don’t come from higher-ups telling us what to do: it comes from people within our PLN demonstrating for us the processes behind the standards. Let us ask ourselves “What’s the difference between our old standards and our new ones?” or “How does any of this transform my teaching? What’s my focus now?” These questions come better from the people we know still breathe the air of the collective student body, not people who occasionally drop by. Speaking of which …
3. Walkthroughs should be put on hold until 2013, and be given new rules to boot. The #1 weapon outsiders use to criticize a school is the walkthrough. After a few minutes in a building, they believe they have a pulse of the entire school systemically. Maybe some people do, but the majority of us don’t. Thus, it’s important for people who decide to walk through to make careful observations, and ask careful questions without judging them subjectively.

Regulation is important to any institutions’ vitality, but if we regulate the wrong facets of the institution, we create chaos within it. Let’s make the Common Core standards mean a new face for how we view teaching. Flaws and all, the standards represent a means for us to grade against the standard and not based on arbitrary political whims.

In many ways, John, the Common Core Standards represent a shift in national education discussion. If we carry the same biases we had before, we might as well show the groundhog his long, overarching shadow, cast over another long season of excessive focus on bubble sheets.

Teacher Ariel Sacks blogs at the TLN website under the banner "On the Shoulders of Giants." In a recent post she identifies the top five reasons teachers avoid contact with education policy -- and refutes each one. Here's the first:

* * * * *

Recently on the Teacher Leaders Network, I landed in a discussion about the many great teachers we know who, for a variety of reasons, stay far away from education policy.  In this post, I'm trying to respond to what I see as the top five reasons teachers tend not to get involved.

One: It's not my job to be involved in education policy.  

My Response: While it's not in our job description to be involved in education policy, it is in our best interest to voice our perspectives, because policies directly affect the conditions of our work, our ability to do our best for our students, and our willingness to stay in teaching. 

Historically, teachers have been the recipients of policies written by outsiders, higher up on the ladder than we are. We experience the results of decisions and usually have plenty to say about how they play out in our schools.  How many times have you issued some choice words about the latest education legislation at lunch with a group of colleagues?  Why not hone that message and share it with a wider audience?  Also, if the policy makers are at the top of the education pyramid, who does that leave at the bottom?  Students and parents.  And that's just not right.  We need to challenge the current hierarchy so that the people who matter most in American public education, students, parents, and teachers, have a bigger voice. Teachers, especially, who are most directly responsible for the' education of students, need to be heard on the issues. 

via teacherleaders.typepad.com

They're still NSDC to us (smile) but we're beginning to adjust to the new name of the National Staff Development Council: Learning Forward. At their annual conference in Atlanta this week, the professional development association honored TLN  charter member Bill Ferriter and co-author Parry Graham with their award for Staff Development Book of the Year.

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: The First Year is — as Bill says in this blog post commenting on the award — "a practical book designed to support schools in their first year of PLC implementation by sharing stories, approachable research and a heaping cheeseload of handouts." And that's so true - the book is supported by 30 reproducibles that any teacher or principal can download free from the website. You don't even have to buy the book.

Bill, by the way, is a middle grades teacher in the Wake County (NC) Public Schools, where he and his principal Parry Graham led the development of a high-functioning professional learning community at newly opened Salem Middle School. The resulting book from Solution Tree (publisher of the DuFour series on PLCs) grows out of that authentic experience. Or, as Bill might say, it has cred. The folks at Learning Forward obviously thought so.

To achieve the goal of quality education for all of America's children will take more than one good idea or initiative. There is important work to be done on many fronts and involving many groups: students, parents, educators, legislators, researchers, businessess, and others.  But I want to focus on just one of those groups and our unique role in American public education.

Taking Charge of Our Profession  is a post I shared back in 2007. I still believe one of the most powerful education reforms we could have in this country is real teacher leadership in education.  So, for the Day of National Blogging for Real Education Reform, I'd like to revisit that idea.

As I stated in the orginal blog, "

Few other professions have their internal workings so externally dictated. Classroom teachers have very little (in some places, no) input into the policy decisions that govern what we do. To sit at the policymaking table, we must show that we are the education experts by making the complex work of quality teaching more understandable and visible to those outside the classroom.

This continues to be true; if anything, it's gotten worse. The stereotype of widespread incompetency among educators has almost reached the level of urban myth. As a result, much wisdom and human potential is being wasted on a variety of quick-fix solutions, while some of our best teachers are being pushed out of the classroom or out of the field entirely by illogical and unethical educational policies.

As of today, for example, over 90,000 teachers have earned National Board Certification by demonstrating that they are capable of highly accomplished teaching with real students in real schools. This is a powerful, and widely untapped source for education reform in the U.S.  Yet, sadly, many of my fellow NBCTs report being thwarted in our attempts to use our highly accomplished teaching methods by policies imposed upon us and our students in the name of raising student performance (aka--raising test scores). Instead, our best teachers should be leading the way within their schools and districts as pacesetters, mentors, and team-builders for school and district wide strengthening of teaching quality.

In many quarters, teacher unions and tenure agreements have been blamed for sheltering incompetent teachers by forcing adherence to due process. In reality, teachers and their organizations have been systemically deprived of one of the most fundamental duties of a profession: the obligation to hold one another accountable.

If we want to be treated as professionals, then we must do what professions do—and that includes holding each other to commonly agreed upon standards of practice and ethics. Teachers are accountable to the various other stakeholders in public education, but most of all, we should be accountable to one another for upholding the highest professional standard.

Ultimately the communities in which our schools are rooted determine and enjoy our success or failures. As one writer said, “we inhabit the consequences of our work.” The degree to which we are held accountable for our professional work is the degree to which we should control the conditions of that work. Such empowerment helps transfer respect for individual teachers to support for the entire educational enterprise.

Real education reform will require many things to be done differently; one of which is for those who have demonstrated the ability to teach well to assert more decision-making power over the policies which directly affect our work.