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I am a tenured professor, and this is July of my first-ever sabbatical.  According to many critics of higher education, I am currently sunning my buns on the shores of Bermuda, sipping cocktails and snacking on brie while the taxpayers labor at home to pay my salary. On the contrary. I've just returned from a three-day trip to Indianapolis, where I joined more than 85 members of the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County spending their unpaid time participating in AVID Summer Institute. Furthering their effort to get more students on track to college and career, these teachers and administrators spent their days actively focused on learning new pedagogical practices and acquiring new tools to bring home and put into place by fall. They are nothing short of remarkable. As we traveled to and from Indianapolis on a couple of big busses, sat in school team meetings around big conference tables, shared breakfast, lunch and dinner together, and wa...

I received the following letter this morning from a colleague, and with her permission I am reprinting it because  the message it contains is a critical one for our community to hear and discuss.   Dear Sara, First, thank you sincerely for your courage to stand up for your convictions, and to air them at the Faculty Senate and in your blog. Please allow me briefly to share my personal experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concerning attitudes toward undergraduate education and inequity in faculty salaries, and how, from my perspective, these affect the budget of the university, the future of our children, and the economics of our State/country. I have been on the UW-Madison faculty of the School of Medicine and Public Health (Medical School) for twenty years.  The Medical School employs scientists with expertise found nowhere else on the campus (or even the world) and pays salaries that are considerably higher than those of faculty in many other school...

Last night Liam and I attended a talk by Derek Bok , Harvard's president emeritus, hosted by the Spencer Foundation at the meetings of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver.  Due to a lack of Wifi and data service, I couldn't tweet the speech, which was probably good because we both got a little worked up. Here's a bit about why. Bok is a thoughtful, experienced leader in higher education and I have long appreciated his efforts to get colleges and universities to pay attention to undergraduate education.  He's written a book on the topic, and found a set of Bok Centers on many campuses to try and get faculty involved (unfortunately, as he admitted last night, engagement in the centers is often low). The main thrust of his speech was that professors need to get focused on rigorously improving undergraduate education because policy changes are bringing a reform agenda focused on student outcomes, and we'd best get prepared. We ought to do this, h...

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...

The chatter among the education cognescenti this week is about what is and what isn't in the bipartisan ESEA draft released by Senate education chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-WY). Let me repeat my prior contention that, politically, ESEA reauthorization is an issue for 2013 -- not 2011 or 2012. The Republican-led U.S. House is not going to give President Obama any kind of a political victory, despite the solid compromise put forth by the Senate HELP Committee. For that reason, the work currently underway is in part about laying the groundwork for a future compromise, in part a genuine attempt to get something done (despite the House), and in part political cover. The bill itself represents a sensible step back from a pie-in-the-sky accountability goal of 100% proficiency in favor of annual state data transparency, continued data disaggregation among subgroups, and greater state flexibility over educational accountability. Personally, I am not an accountabi...

UPDATED, 8/11/2011, 1:10 pm Thursday morning in Washington DC -- the only city that could host such a vacuous, inane event -- the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is hosting (the hopefully one-off) "Education Reform Idol." The event has nothing to do with recognizing states that get the best results for children or those that have achieved demonstrated results from education policies over time -- but simply those that have passed pet reforms over the past year. It purports to determine which state is the "reformiest" (I kid you not) with the only contenders being Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin and the only judges being: (1) a representative of the pro-privatization Walton (WalMart) Family Foundation; (2) the Walton-funded, public education hater Jeanne Allen; and (3) the "Fox News honorary Juan Williams chair" provided to the out-voted Richard Lee Colvin from Education Sector. With the deck stacked like that, Illinois is out of the running im...

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests. I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change. In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 p...

If you haven't been reading the excellent "Building A Better Teacher" news series in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel , you should be. It really doesn't matter whether you're from Wisconsin or not, or particularly interested in this state's policy context. The series is taking an expansive look at the various issues related to human capital development, teacher effectiveness and teaching quality. And it's not quoting the same overused Beltway prognosticators to drive its points home. The fourth installment in the eight-part series, funded by Hechinger, ran this past Sunday and was entitled "Trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools." My main quibble with this particular article was that it gave short shrift to one of the most effective answers to the question posed: How do we steer strong teachers to weak schools? The answer: Improve the teaching conditions at those schools. Here's the extent of what the article offered on this issue: So ...

On Friday, I wrote a blog item ( 'Misleading Manifesto' ) chiding a group of urban superintendents for misstating educational research in a 'manifesto' published in Sunday's Washington Post . Teacher quality *is* important -- but it does not matter MORE THAN family income and concentrated poverty. I am convinced that too many educational reformers are happy to 'spin' the truth for rhetorical purposes. I think this is exactly what we saw in this manifesto. While this may help to simplify messaging, target solutions at a more narrowly construed problem, and focus in on what education leaders have direct control over, it carries an inherent policy danger along with it. That danger is two-fold: (1) teacher policy reforms may be set up for failure by overstating their potential impact; and (2) more comprehensive strategies desperately needed to combat rising income inequality and growing poverty in our nation may be discounted and ignored. For me, this isn't...

The Los Angeles Times editorial page gets it mostly right today on the value-added issue ( "Good teachers, good students," September 3, 2010). It says a number of smart things that I agree with, such as: "Test scores are indeed just one indicator of a teacher's performance." "But it's revealing, and disturbing, to read the comments of some teachers who don't seem to care whether their students' scores slide. They argue that they're focused on more important things than the tests measure. That's unpersuasive." "This page has never believed that test scores should count for all of a teacher's evaluation — or even be the most important factor. But they should be a part of it." "Right now, the "value-added" scores The Times has been reporting are more useful for evaluating schools than teachers. Many factors can throw off the data at the classroom level." "That's why we think the Obama...

Here is additional smart and pithy commentary on the current value-added conversation that I wasn't able to incorporate into yesterday's post or have only discovered since. Dr. Douglas Harris - "Not By Value Added Alone" (The Blog of Harvard Education Publishing) Dr. Aaron Pallas - "Value-added measures: The cardinal rule and the cardinal sin" (A Sociological Eye on Education) Stephen Sawchuk - "Some Scholars Slam Value-Added for Teacher Accountability" (Teacher Beat/ Education Week ) Jay Mathews - "America's Best Teacher and the L.A. Times" (Class Struggle/ Washington Post ) Dr. Daniel Willingham - "3 Key Factors in Teacher Evaluation" (The Answer Sheet/ Washington Post ) Sherman Dorn - "Please leave your magic numbers on the magic carpet with your magic wand" (Sherman Dorn) Bill Tucker - "My Value-Added Number" (Quick and the Ed) John Thompson - "High-Ranking Teachers Ignore Pacing Standard...

An important survey was released this week that captures teachers' perceptions of their professional working environment. The national study of 900 teachers by Public Agenda describes educators as falling into one of three groups: "Disheartened," "Contented," and "Idealists." It also raises some serious policy implications for the placement, retention and longevity of teachers based on teachers' perceptions about working conditions, why they entered the profession, and their opinions about proposed policy reforms. But as useful as this survey may be in defining these issues at a 30,000-foot level, it does not approach the power and utility of teacher surveys that offer entire populations of educators in individual states and districts the opportunity to share their voice about working conditions, leadership support, resources, opportunities for professional learning, etc. In turn, these anonymous surveys also provide contextualized, customized s...