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This cross-posted item is from a piece I wrote for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation's TOP-Ed blog . ----------------------------------------------- Amid the current flurry of state policy reform activity around teaching, I've been thinking about what's missing. My conclusion: A focus on teachers as learners.... ---------------------------------------------- To read more, visit the TOP-Ed blog post .

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day? , Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of. The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week . In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign , retain , evaluate , and pay educators" and to " teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.) The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's ( StudentsFirst ) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers...

Proposed education reforms that do not imagine that current and beginning teachers can become more effective while on the job should be considered null and void. This postulation, if accepted, would direct Michelle Rhee's new StudentsFirst agenda to the nearest paper shredder. To be blunt, it is just plain naive and short-sighted to think that we can maximize teacher effectiveness purely by firing more teachers and marginally changing the cadre of incoming teacher candidates. Is supporting and strengthening the teaching practice of our veteran educators not worthy of our focus and investment? StudentsFirst's "Elevate Teaching" policy objectives are limited to evaluating teachers and principals, reforming teacher certification laws, reforming teacher compensation, "exiting" teachers, and eliminating teacher tenure. Specifically, the objectives are: State law must require evaluation that is based substantially on student achievement. Evaluation tools sho...

Today, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. released the final report of its IES/U.S Department of Education -funded randomized controlled trial (RCT) of comprehensive teacher induction. It shows a statistically significant and sizeable impact on student achievement in mathematics (0.20 standard deviations) and reading (0.11 standard deviations) of third-year teachers who received two years of robust induction support. That's the equivalent of moving students from the 50th to 54th percentile in reading achievement and from the 50th to 58th percentile in math achievement. As a basis of comparison, I note that in 2004, Mathematica conducted a RCT of Teach for America (TFA). In that study , it compared the gains in reading and math achievement made by students randomly assigned to TFA teachers or other teachers in the same school. The results showed that, on average, students with TFA teachers raised their mathematics test scores by 0.15 standard deviations (versus 0.20 standard d...

I am deeply troubled to read columns like this ( "Improve education, fire bad teachers" ) -- both the title and the content -- from a reputable source like the Center for American Progress (CAP). Much as the likes of FOX News are in desperate need of balance and breadth of perspective, so is this column. Where is the discussion about the need to support teachers to become more effective through improved preparation, stronger induction and mentoring, and job-embedded professional development? What about more than a throwaway line about the role of teacher evaluation systems to provide constructive feedback to help teachers identify strengths and weaknesses and help them become more effective? I don't mean to pick on CAP too harshly, for some of its prior reports (such as this one ) approached the teacher effectiveness issue more comprehensively and accurately. But if all we do is focus on firing teachers, without addressing other elements of teacher quality policy, we'...

I'm sure glad that Kate Walsh and company weren't my professors in college. Damn! They are tough graders! With the exception of eight southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas) that received a 'C' and three northern states (Maine, Montana, Vermont) that received a 'F', every U.S. state received some version of a 'D' in the latest edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's State Teacher Policy Yearbook . In grading the states, the authors look at five broad teacher quality areas (and numerous metrics within them): teacher preparation, expanding the pool of teachers, identifying effective teachers, retaining effective teachers, and exiting ineffective teachers. While it is easy to poke holes at some of the National Council on Teacher Quality's seemingly ideologically-driven work (such as, I believe, its excessive focus on teacher pensions), much of its state policy analysis has a st...

New research led by Tony Milanowski of the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides more evidence that increasing teacher pay may not be the best approach to attract new teachers to high-need, hard-to-staff urban schools. A key finding of the study -- published in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership -- which explored job factors important to pre-service educators was that " working conditions factors , especially principal support, had more influence on simulated job choice than pay level." 'Policy implications' include: "[M]oney might be better spent to attract, retain, or train better principals than to provide higher beginning salaries to teachers in schools with high-poverty or a high proportion of students of color." "[I]nduction programs and curricular flexibility are important to new teachers. The finding that induction programs are attractive, combined with evidence that such programs can be effective in reducing tea...