We must do more to recognize best teachers

Washington, D.C. has the right idea tonight.

If you want to turn around a school system you can not only focus on the worst - you must seek out, recognize and retain the best teachers. Tonight the DC Public Education fund will recognize some of the best teachers in the city. Seven teachers will each receive an award of $10,000 during a reception at the Kennedy Center. Further, to their credit the front page of the DC Public Schools website publicizes the event (to which every teacher rated "Highly Effective" by the IMPACT system is invited as a guest of honor).

This is just the latest in a series of right steps DC is taking.

Over the last two years with a new collective bargaining agreement taking effect DC's best teachers have seen substantial pay bumps - some collecting bonuses over $10,000. As a side note, teachers opt-in to this system. Otherwise educators follow the routine raises that come with years of service and tenure like most cities current contracts.

Do I point to DC as a perfect model? No. But they have the right idea here: recognize the best teachers. Pay them more.

There have been other small steps forward recently - the Fishman Prize from the New Teacher Project  awards $25,000 for some of the best teachers nationally. The Fund for Teachers gives recognition through competitive grants for teachers seeking out professional development. Here in Illinois the Golden Apple seeks to recognize great teaching. The White House's Champions of Change - Educators event was as good a use of the bully pulpit as I have seen. But it is not enough.

Other professions have lists like, "Top 100 Super Lawyers of Pennsylvania", or "best doctors in Chicago", or "best dentists in Chicago" or "best lawyers of Chicago" and on and on.

Nationally we are losing great urban teachers at alarming rates. Locally, here in Chicago we are losing all teachers at staggering rates as well (fewer than 50% of teachers remain at their current school more than 4 years).

This, regrettably is not a new topic of discussion; here is Nick Kristof in March 2011:

Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them. (link)

That advice was evidently not taken by most.

Take a cursory glance at the web sites for a few major urban school districts - Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City. Not only is it difficult to find information about or announcements of celebrations of the best teachers - it is difficult to find information about any teachers. How does that make sense?


CPS central office, further, is not the only culprit in this failure to recognize the best teachers. The Chicago Teacher's Union website is similarly lacking information about the organization's finest teachers. Large and leading charter management organizations in Chicago are in the same boat - the only information about teachers are on bio pages or in the context of recruiting teachers to apply. This doesn't have to be so.


Every district in America should have regular, genuine and very public efforts to recognize the best teachers in their system. Events like DC's Standing Ovation for Teachers tonight need to be institutionalized and widespread. I hope that Chicago can take a page from DC before this school year is out.

We can, and will, and should haggle over how best to determine which teachers are the finest. But, perfect should not be the enemy of good here.

There are many things in education and ed reform that are contentious to discuss and difficult to do. This is not one of them - that the best teachers deserve our recognition.

I have been disheartened lately that the entirety of the ed reform conversation in Chicago seems centered around the worst schools, the worst teachers, the worst districts. I can't help but think that if we  continue to seek the worst, we will find the worst.  Chicago Public Schools needs to start looking for its best.




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A Post Script - DC's policies and climate seem to be not only aimed at retaining the current excellent teachers but also attracting some of the best from around the country:

• Katie Lyons won the Fishman Prize this year. At a recent Teach+ event she announced she was moving to DC.
• Julia King was a national Sue Lehman Award winner (recognizing the best teaching nationally for Teach For America corps members) when she taught in Gary, IN. She has since moved to DC and was named the DC Teacher of the Year.

I don't know either personally well enough to say that DC IMPACT or the sort of recognition above led directly to their decisions to move there, but I can't imagine it hurt.

I would love more anecdotal evidence about teacher experiences with the new DC contract, or moving to DC as a result of the contract.




Links:
- DC Teaching Excellence Award winners - http://www.standingovationfordcteachers.org/about-standing-ovation/2012-excellence-award-winners/
- DC teaching contract - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/education/big-pay-days-in-washington-dc-schools-merit-system.html?pagewanted=all
- 2012 Fishman Prize - http://tntp.org/fishman-prize
- Kristof: Pay teachers more - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html
- McKinsey study: http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf
- Whitehouse Champions of Change - http://www.whitehouse.gov/champions/educators

CPS Teacher Mobility

I've been taking a look into this 2009 University of Chicago teacher mobility study over the last few days:

http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/CCSR_Teacher_Mobility.pdf

A few of the highlights (lowlights):

• Only 9 high schools were characterized as "high stability" in '05-'07 (retaining 90%+ of teachers year over year)
• Less than 50% of CPS teachers stay in their school for 4+ years.
• In '98-'99 39% of teachers left their schools within 5 years
• In '01-'02 a separate study found that 31% of teachers left within first two years.
• The most unstable schools (highest amount of turnover) tend to be the lowest performing, with the highest minority populations.

Certainly some unfortunate statistics. It should come as no surprise then that other professional development efforts within CPS consistently fail so miserably. On a yearly basis most schools are trying to get a considerable portion of their staff adjusted/oriented, leaving little room/effort/time for improvement true professional development and craft improvement. Institutional knowledge, community relationships are consistently in turmoil. To be sure this problem is not isolated to traditional schools in the slightest, by some measures charter schools have even higher levels of turnover. Unfortunately the University of Chicago study doesn't have a breakout between charter and traditional.

Also, and very importantly the Chicago study above did not have access to teacher performance data (of any sort - observations, lesson plans, test scores, student surveys etc). So, not only are we losing a considerable number of teachers to a highly mobile and chaotic system, we don't know which teachers are leaving their classrooms: the best? the worst? the average?

Coupled with the findings of TNTP's The Irreplaceables, recognition and retention of Chicago's best teachers is a critical part of the education reform conversation moving forward. Interestingly though it is a topic that has received little or no comment from CPS or CTU. I hope that changes.

Hechinger Report Op-Ed

As part of my Teach+ Policy Fellowship I wrote the op-ed below for the Hechinger Report, I figured I would re-post here as it speaks to the purpose of starting this blog as a venue for discussion.

Improving education should be a common challenge—not a tug of war

By Matthew McCabe

CHICAGO — Luis* was struggling in his sophomore year. His grade-point average was dipping lower; he had missed multiple homework assignments in the past week. Luis said he didn’t have the resources—time, energy, materials—necessary to meet the academic performance I expected of him in my world history class.

So, we sat down side by side and faced the problem before us. We gathered as many data points as possible—grade reports and test scores, teacher feedback, information from his family and home life—and we started to look for solutions.

Every teacher knows this process. We understand that if we are to make an impact on the habits of and outcomes for a student, our tactics matter. Relationships matter. Tone matters. The data points on which you base your discussion matter.

And so it is with education policy writ large. In Chicago these past few months, negotiators for the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools came to the table—an admirable first step. But, unfortunately, they sat facing each other rather than facing the challenges at hand. Each side argued from a mentality of winning and losing, thinking chiefly of gains and losses. Each side wrongly assumed a lack of common purpose. And so, despite the dust settling on a historic strike, major challenges remain for the Chicago public-school system as a whole.

The author speaking this fall at a parent night at Pritzker College Prep, where he teaches world history. (Photo courtesy of Matthew McCabe)

This cuts to the core challenges at the heart of the education reform debate, both here in Chicago and nationally. The debate’s current paradigm is not centered on the end goals that both sides share, as division rather than collaboration is the focus.

All parties—teachers, parents, policymakers, district and union leaders—share an interest in high-quality school facilities, getting greater numbers of social workers in the schools and the like. All sides want to recognize and retain good teachers and support those who are struggling. All sides want better outcomes for children. And yet despite this, the debates tend to be handled as tugs of war—at the end of which the rope has moved little and common interests remain neglected.

So, the question shouldn’t be, “Did Chicago provide an example of principled negotiation in the past few months?” It did not.

A more productive question is, “Can Chicago move forward and provide a model for nuanced, respectful dialogue among stakeholders?” On this point, there are glimmers of hope.

Here’s one.

In August, more than 1,200 Chicago teachers gathered for a professional development conference on the Common Core State Standards. The conference, called Collaborate Chicago, engaged educators from both the elementary and high-school levels in sessions geared toward seamlessly integrating the new standards into our classrooms. On the surface this doesn’t seem all that special—teachers, like all professionals, seek out ways to improve their practice. But in this case it was special, because the conference was jointly sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools.

There are lessons here. First, there’s common ground. CTU and CPS both acknowledged a need for further professional development around the Common Core. Both organizations, despite other tensions, wanted teachers to be able to implement the new standards as soon as possible and as effectively as possible. (Bear in mind that this conference took place at a time when negotiators for both CTU and CPS said they remained “far apart” in contract negotiations.)

The second lesson is that we can accomplish more together than we can separately. The CPS central office provided institutional backing for the event and got the word out to charter school teachers, too. And the union promoted the event at the grassroots level and mobilized its teachers to attend. Absent either party, the conference wouldn’t have been as successful.

Lastly—and unsurprisingly—the conference was effective because it was planned and led by teachers. Uniquely situated at the nexus of policy and practice, teachers were not only able to assess the need for further training on the Common Core, but also to develop solutions to the challenges and implement them effectively.

When it comes to systemic education reform, there are no doubt delicacies of implementation, and differences of opinion about the relative importance of various initiatives. But these differences are surmountable as long as there is a shared end goal: improved outcomes for children.

For true—and substantial—education reform to happen, stakeholders must embrace nuance and face the challenges at hand with a common purpose. Labeling sides as “money-grubbing,” “corporate reformers” or “lazy, ineffective union slackers” is counterproductive.

This moment of new leadership for the Chicago Public Schools should be treated like the opportunity it is—a chance for a fresh start, a chance to rekindle the idea that there’s common ground.

My goal with Luis wasn’t to “win.” It was to change the situation. I wanted to see increased performance. I had to engage in a discussion with Luis, not against him. I had to involve him in the process. I had to believe, before we even began our conversation, that he wanted to improve, too—otherwise we weren’t going anywhere.

Education leaders should follow the same model: assume good intentions, embrace nuance publicly and attack challenges collaboratively. Otherwise, we aren’t going anywhere.

*Luis is a pseudonym, used here to protect the student’s identity.

Matthew McCabe is a World History and AP World History teacher at Pritzker College Prep in Chicago. He was a 2012 Leadership of Educational Equity Policy Fellow and is a current Teach Plus Policy Fellow in Chicago. Formerly, McCabe was a third-grade teacher and Chicago Teachers Union member at George B. Swift Elementary.