Indeed, it is vitally important to have a teacher-evaluation system, but also a system that teachers help to design and believe is fair. The Colorado evaluation process will include some combination of student survey data, principal reviews, and test results, and could include master-teacher reviews or peer-educator reviews, along with a chance for teachers to show themselves at their best—not just on surprise visits by inspectors.
Second, said Johnston, “we establish career ladders for teachers and principals who are identified as highly effective. We say to them, ‘We want to learn what you are doing, and we will pay you a stipend on top of your salary to document and share with other teachers what you are doing that is making you successful.’ So we might identify the twenty best math teachers in the state and would then pay them a stipend to video their classrooms when they are teaching a lesson and to upload their lesson plans onto a website. Then, if I am a new seventh-grade teacher, I can go on to the Web, click on ‘seventh-grade math,’ click on a specific standard, and see how our most effective teachers teach that particular standard. Or I can use the same website to identify master teachers and sign up to actually go visit their classrooms, where I can sit in the back and watch them practice in real time in front of students.”
This not only gives all teachers a chance to learn from their best colleagues but also, added Johnston, creates “an incentive for our best teachers to stay in the classroom. Right now, as a teacher, the only way to get substantially more pay is to leave the classroom and become a principal. Now you have another career ladder.”
In China, for instance, there are four levels of proficiency in the teaching profession, and in order to move up a level, teachers have to demonstrate their excellence in front of a panel of reviewers. The highest level is called “Famous Teacher.” It is a hugely prestigious position in China.
Third, tenure in Colorado will be based on performance rather than seniority. That is, tenure, while not eliminated, will have to be earned and re-earned. Rather than being granted permanent tenure on the first day of his or her fourth year, now a teacher will have to earn tenure by producing three consecutive years of being rated an “effective” teacher. That teacher will then have to continue performing effectively to keep that status. If you are rated “ineffective” for two years, you lose your tenure. That does not mean you lose your job; it just means you are on a one-year contract.
That leads to the fourth principle: In Colorado the old law for teachers stipulated that in the event of cutbacks, the last hired were first to be fired, even if that was not in the best interest of the school or the students. Not anymore. “Now,” explains Johnston, “the law says that whenever principals have to make reductions in force, the first criterion is ‘teacher effectiveness.’ You have to keep your most effective teachers. And only in the event of a tie does seniority kick in. An effective second-year teacher trumps an ineffective twentieth-year teacher.”
The fifth principle gives principals the power to hire their own teachers. That is, the school district cannot take ineffective teachers, whom no school wants to hire, and force them on a school. Teachers who are not hired by any school on their merits after one year get released.
How in the world did they get this bill passed, given all the oxen it gored? “We made the case to all the groups involved as to why this was really in their interest,” said Johnston. He and his political allies showed the NAACP how school systems were dumping their worst teachers in predominantly black and Hispanic schools. They showed business leaders and the chamber of commerce how subpar students were leading to subpar employees. They went to the two big teachers’ unions in Colorado, said Johnston, “and we said, ‘You all know that you have some great colleagues and colleagues that you have been carrying for years. There is no reason to do that anymore.’”
The key breakthrough for Johnston, though, was getting the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by Randi Weingarten, to support the legislation. Weingarten staked out a gutsy position. The National Education Association, the other big teachers’ union, opposed the law, although a number of NEA union representatives in Colorado broke ranks and testified for the bill.
Weingarten, the president of the 1.5 million–member AFT, explained to us why her union supported the Colorado reform. For her and her union members, she said, the key question was how teachers get evaluated. They understood that the old system of granting automatic tenure was not sustainable. But some of the new systems—in which, for example, a teacher has five unannounced evaluations of thirty minutes each by a master teacher or principal, and virtually their entire evaluation is based on those brief visits and the students’ standardized test scores—are too limited, she argued.
“We need evaluation systems based on multiple measures of both teacher practice and what students are learning,” said Weingarten. In Colorado, she added, teachers and administrators “spent a lot of time talking to each other about how to make this evaluation system about continuous improvement, and that was why at the end of the day we supported the legislation.” In that Colorado bill, “there was a teacher voice in how to make schools better,” she added. “There was a lot of flexibility in what constituted acquisition of student learning—so it was not just test scores—and there was a lot more due process ensuring that teachers had a fair shake put into that law.”
As Johnston put it: “What we got is a bill that requires multiple measures of student growth, that allows teachers multiple opportunities to improve, and doesn’t ever force-fire anyone but always leaves that decision to principals and superintendents.”
Johnston said that when he thinks about the change that he and others are trying to effect in education, he thinks back to attending President Obama’s inauguration in Washington. What impressed him most was seeing a platoon of wheelchairs parting the crowd on the Mall after the president took the oath. Sitting in them were the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American aviators in the United States armed forces, who flew many successful missions in World War II.
“What I realized was that they lived in a moment when people didn’t believe it was possible—they didn’t believe that a black man had the courage or intelligence or stamina to fly one of America’s most expensive warplanes,” Johnson recalled. “So they said, ‘Put me up in the air and let me show you,’ and they became one of the only air squadrons in World War II who never lost a bomber.” And of course they could and did become successful pilots. “And when they did, the world changed—because the argument about whether or not we were all created equal was once and for all over, and nothing else could have happened but that Truman would eventually integrate the air force, or that Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act, or that sixty years later we would inaugurate the first black president.
“Education needs its own Tuskegee moment. One reason we have not been able to galvanize the whole community for educational reform,” Johnston concluded, “is that some people still don’t believe that every one of our kids can compete with the smartest kids from Singapore and China. It’s our responsibility to get up in the air and prove them wrong. Then the whole world changes.”
No Teacher Is an Island
As we noted earlier, if we want to make every teacher more effective, the rest of us need to be more supportive. This is not an argument for going easy on teachers. It is an argument for not going easy on everyone else. We must not do to teachers and principals what we did to the soldiers and officers in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11: put the whole effort on their backs while the rest of us do nothing except applaud or criticize from the sidelines. Here is how everyone has to contribute.
Communities: If we want teachers to raise their effectiveness, communities not only have to create an effective reform process that all the key players want to own; they also have to find ways to reward teachers through nonmonetary means. Teaching is a hard job. Unions or no unions, we’d bet that most teachers work more hours for no pay than any other professionals. No one g
oes into teaching for the money, and thousands of teachers every year dig into their own pockets to buy classroom materials. If teachers are so important—and great teachers are—how about recognizing and celebrating the best of them regularly in your community with something more than a $50 gift certificate from the PTA?
How? Here’s an example. On November 1, 2010, the D.C. Public Education Fund, the nonprofit fund-raising arm of the Washington, D.C., public school system, organized “A Standing Ovation for D.C. Teachers” to honor the 662 instructors judged “highly effective” under the city’s new IMPACT evaluation system, to which teachers had agreed. The tribute was produced by George Stevens Jr., producer of the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and had all the glitz of an Academy Award ceremony for teachers. Those 662 teachers had been singled out from their schools as highly effective. It was clearly a special evening for all of them. Before he sang, one of the performers, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, recalled the teacher who had most influenced his life: his mother, who had taught in a Virginia public school for thirty-five years. “She was up before the sun every day, grading papers, and every night when it went down,” said Grohl. Seven teachers, nominated by their principals, were singled out as All-Stars. Each came onstage to receive a plaque and a $10,000 award (all 662 got performance bonuses), and to deliver an acceptance speech. Kennedy Center chairman David Rubenstein was so moved by the event that he donated twenty more $5,000 awards on the spot. Not every community has access to the Kennedy Center, but every community can do more to make teachers feel appreciated and to inspire excellence.
For instance, every year, in addition to granting honorary degrees, Williams College in Massachusetts honors four high school teachers. But not just any high school teachers. Williams asks the five hundred or so members of its senior class to nominate the high school teacher who had the most profound impact on their lives. Then each year a committee goes through the roughly fifty student nominations, does its own research with the high schools involved, and chooses the four teachers who most inspired a graduating Williams student. Each of the four teachers is given $3,000, plus a $2,500 donation to his or her high school. The winners and their families are then flown to Williams, located in the lush Berkshires, and honored as part of the college’s graduation weekend. On the day before graduation, all four of the high school teachers, and the students who nominated them, sit onstage at a campuswide event, and the dean of the college talks about how and why each teacher influenced that Williams student, reading from the students’ nominating letters. Afterward, the four teachers are introduced at a dinner along with the honorary-degree recipients. Morton Owen Schapiro, now the president of Northwestern but formerly the president of Williams, recalled that every time he got to preside over these events one of the high school teachers would say to him, “This is one of the great weekends of my life.” When you get to work at a place like Williams, Schapiro added, “and you are able to benefit from these wonderful kids, sometimes you take it for granted. You think we produce these kids. But as faculty members, we should always be reminded that we stand on the shoulders of great high school teachers, that we get great material to work with: well educated, well trained, with a thirst for learning.”
A variation on this theme that has been running since 1978 is the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute, directed by James R. Vivian. It brings together Yale faculty members and New Haven public school teachers for seminars in the faculty members’ subjects of expertise. In the seminars, which meet regularly for several months, the teachers work with a faculty member to prepare curricula on the subject they are studying, which they then teach in their schools during the following school year. The seminars thus give the teachers the opportunity both to learn more about a subject of interest—chemistry, mathematics, literature, American history, or another of many different offerings—and to prepare strategies to teach it to their elementary or secondary school students. They also receive a modest honorarium for participating. The program has enjoyed such success that twenty-one different school districts in eleven states are now participating in the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools, which the Institute launched in 2004. The Initiative is a long-term effort to establish similar Institutes around the country and to influence public policy on the professional development of teachers.
Teachers’ institutes differ from most of the programs of professional development that school districts provide and from outreach and continuing education programs that universities typically offer in that schoolteachers and university faculty members work together as professional colleagues, in a program that is led in crucial respects by the teachers themselves. This not only improves the teachers’ classroom performance; it also serves a purpose as important as recruiting and training good teachers: keeping them.
At the Annual Conference held at Yale on October 29, 2010, James Toltz, who teaches English at Middletown High School in Delaware, said this about participating in the Institute: “Recently my wife asked me, ‘How long do you think you can keep teaching?’ If she had asked me this one year ago, my answer might have been a few more years, maybe five at the most. My answer is just a little bit different now, and it extends from my experience here at Yale … We talk all the time about how we need to inspire our students, and we do, but once in a while we forget that we also need to inspire our teachers.”
By the way, very few people go into teaching for the money, but many people leave teaching because of the money—especially men. If we really want to show our appreciation for teachers, we need to find innovative ways to pay them more.
Politicians: If we want better teachers, politicians will have to become better educators. They have to educate the country about the world in which we’re living, about the vital role education now plays for our economy and our national security, about why raising standards is imperative, and about the skills that students need to acquire. They need to understand that part of their job is traveling around the country, and even the world, to understand the best practices in education so that they can both lead and inform the debate about these issues in their communities. It is vital to our economic growth.
State officials should be competing with one another to raise their educational standards and to demonstrate creativity in using education dollars. For a while, just the opposite was going on. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, it mandated that students had to achieve certain standards each year for their schools to benefit from federal funding, but it left it to each state to determine those standards. In recent years, as those standards remained unmet, many states simply lowered them to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools to avoid the penalty of lost funding or being labeled a “failing school.” Nothing could be more dangerous in today’s world.
In response, in 2009 the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers initiated a nationwide effort to set common standards, enlisting experts in English and math from the College Board and the ACT, and from Achieve, Inc., a group that has long pushed to firm up high school graduation standards. This effort was reinforced by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states were invited to compete for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money by showing a path to raising academic achievement. States competing in Race to the Top earned extra points for participating in the common effort to establish national standards and then adopting them.
Arne Duncan often complains that one of his biggest challenges as secretary of education is that too many Americans believe that their local schools are basically fine and that it is someone else’s school that needs fixing. One reason people feel this way is that they are comparing their school with the one in the neighborhood or district next door. The relevant comparison is between their school and P.S. 21 in south Taipei or north Seoul or west Shanghai. This will become apparent when their children apply to college and find themselves competing with the grad
uates of those schools. Good enough is just not good enough anymore.
“One thing that has been missing is honesty,” said Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware, which was one of the first two states to win Race to the Top funds (Tennessee was the other) and has been a leader in the national standards-writing initiative. “When you tell the kids they are proficient based on a test that is administered within their state borders, while in the real world they have to compete for college and for jobs with kids who are not within their state borders, you are not being honest with them. In our old test, 76 percent of Delaware fourth graders were judged to be proficient in reading. With our new test and scoring, that will be 48 percent, because we are being more honest with the kids about what it means to be more proficient.”
How does he sell this reform to skeptical Delaware residents? He does it by connecting education with jobs. “I went to Taiwan a month ago,” Markell told us in January 2010. “We have two Taiwanese companies in Delaware with 250 employees between them. One of the companies makes solar panels. At the same time that they started in Delaware, they started a factory in China. There is only one thing I am asking myself: ‘Where are they going to invest their next dollars?’ And you have to put yourself in their shoes. It is going to go where it will have the best return.” And part of that, added Markell, will depend on where they find the most productive workers. This is not just about cheap labor. It is about skilled labor.
Neighbors: The role of neighbors today is to appreciate the importance of the public school down the street, even if their own children have long graduated or they have no children at all. Good schools are the foundation of good neighborhoods and communities. Money may be saved in the short term by voting down tax increases to fund schools. But if that results in higher dropout rates and higher unemployment, the overall cost to the community will certainly be higher. When the performance of local schools drops, it usually is not long before the value of nearby houses drops as well. In March 2010, Tom attended the Intel Science Talent Search, a national contest for high school students designed to identify and support the nation’s next generation of scientists. “My favorite chat was with Amanda Alonzo, a thirty-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California,” he wrote at the time. “She had taught two of the [Intel] finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely ‘supportive parents,’ and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose Realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to ‘buy a home’ in her Lynbrook school district because it produced ‘two Intel science winners.’” While every child’s educational experience should matter to everyone as a matter of principle, good education is also good economics—for everybody.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 15