Some Ideas on Confronting the Teacher Shortage

I was happy last Friday (Feb. 26) to serve on a panel for a seminar of The Louisiana Education Policy Fellowship. The participants in the fellowship program are individuals who serve in various leadership positions in education or education related fields.

The purpose of the panel discussion was to examine the future of the education profession through the lens of different teacher preparation models and support organizations. I was representing the perspective of the Louisiana Association of Educators substituting for LAE President Debbie Meaux. Other panel members included Alice Thomas, Center for Development and Learning, 
 representatives from Teach for America, and the Leading Educator group.

Some of the key questions posed to the panel were the following:

1. What accounts for the teacher shortage in the U.S.?
2. What is the best avenue for teacher preparation today? Are alternative pathways effective?
3. How can we retain teachers?

Here are my observations of developments of the past few years that have had a very negative impact on the teaching profession.

     Claims of guaranteed dramatic improvements in student test performance based on replacement of ordinary teachers with "miracle teachers" have done a serious disservice to the profession. (See this New York Time article about The Myth of the Hero Teacher). The problem is that self serving reform organizations have used junk science assumptions to  mislead charitable foundations into making huge contributions to promote reforms that focus on schemes like the eradication of "bad" teachers.  Such misguided school reform has resulted in the teaching profession being targeted and punished for supposedly holding children back with their "low expectations".

     There is zero real evidence for example, that verifies that "three great teachers in a row can close the achievement gap". Entire faculties have been fired and replaced to try to prove this theory only to produce exactly the same or worse results in student test scores as before.  Exceptions are often based on instances of rampant cheating. 

     All the takeover schools in the Baton Rouge area and Shreveport have failed dismally and have been repeatedly reorganized. In some of the takeover schools, so many parents pulled students out that the  schools had to be closed. The New Orleans RSD, the poster child for the success of takeover schools, have the highest dropout rate in the state and test scores are in the bottom 20th percentile of a state that ranks 48th in the country.

I offered participants the following 7 recommendations for dealing with those issues and for beginning the process of saving the teaching profession:

1.      Stop doing those things that are driving good educators out of teaching. That means stop requiring teachers to do almost nothing but rehearse students for state tests, and stop blaming and shaming teachers for students who have excessive absences, and who fail state tests because of parents who don't care, and stop evaluating teachers using student test scores and stop canceling teacher step increases to fund defective merit pay plans.
2.          Develop strategies for keeping quality teachers in the at risk classrooms where they are most needed. That means start providing incentives to teachers who teach the most at-risk students. Stop rating schools as "D" or "F" because high poverty students generally perform at lower levels than more privileged students. 
3.      Insist on a true 5 year professional teacher education program producing college of education graduates including a supportive internship/mentoring program for their first year of teaching.
4.      Allow teachers, not politicians and testing companies to enforce education standards. Do away with excessive emphasis on annual testing and the tyranny of testing companies over our schools. Standards are lower now that state tests have secret, extremely low cut scores and students are allowed to be coached to pass bogus credit recovery courses even though they have learned almost nothing.
5.      Provide equal support, respect ,and recognition for all areas of teaching; not just two subjects. Math and English are important, but we should not sacrifice arts, music, social studies, and vocational studies so that students can be rehearsed for only math and English tests. Students should be encouraged to excel and succeed in other important areas, and the system should equally respect all teachers.
6.         Build healthy teamwork in our schools rather than unhealthy scapegoating of teachers for factors over which they have no control. Merit pay and tenure cancelation based on VAM is flawed and ignores the skills of our best teachers and should be scrapped. The most successful business models emphasize team building instead of test based shaming and blaming. 
7.      Provide attractive salary and benefits for all qualified and effective teachers. Treating teachers as professionals means a professional salary, good health insurance and an attractive retirement system. That's how Louisiana should attract and retain high quality teachers.

Another Study Exposes Voucher Failure

If the legislature continues to fund this failed voucher program we will know that legislators care nothing about proper use of our tax money. It would mean that their votes have been bought with a portion of our tax money that was supposed to have been spent on children! That is because voucher schools hire the cheapest, least qualified teachers, skimp on materials of instruction, shortchange our teacher retirement system, and spend some of our money on buying legislators & BESE members.

Voucher Lottery Losers Win on Getting a Better Education

Desperate to save the sub-standard voucher program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars, John White's crack public relations specialists have put out a highly misleading press release claiming that the voucher students are really improving more than regular public school students on state tests. But White's friend, Will Sentell of The Advocate refused to give him the usual biased reporting on this privatization scheme.

You see, even with all this alleged improvement in test performance, the voucher schools perform just a smidgen above the performance of the Baton Rouge RSD charters and the Louisiana RSD charters that are the lowest performing schools in the state! So for children to transfer from mostly C or D public schools to go to a private school scoring at a D- level is not anything to brag about. But White's PR experts are under orders to always try to slant the reports to somehow portray almost total failure as dramatic progress!

Here is the truth: Research scientists from Berkeley, Duke and M.I.T. did a comparison of all students who asked to transfer to voucher schools in Louisiana in the past year. Since there were not enough seats available, a lottery was held and some students were denied access to the voucher schools completely at random. Then the researchers averaged the scores on state tests of the students who missed out on being selected for vouchers and who remained in public schools with the students who won the voucher lottery. What they found is that on average, the students who stayed in public schools, performed better on state tests than did the voucher students. There is no amount of spinning of this data that can show that the voucher schools were a better choice for those children.

But here is one other important fact that is often overlooked by the media in reporting the small amount of progress of voucher students over a few years. Voucher schools have the same special privilege afforded to most charter schools of culling out the worst performing students using their discipline policies. Each year right after the October student count which starts the flow of state money going to vouchers and charters, the real public schools are forced to absorb a wave of rejects from the choice schools. Now that's not because of parental choice, but because the real choices are made by voucher and charter administrators who reject any kids that may be harder to teach or that may pose discipline problems. The real public schools have no such choice. In fact state law now requires that even extremely disruptive students whose dangerous behavior requires them to be removed from school must still be provided with educational services even if teachers have to go to their homes to try to teach them. But even though serving as a dumping ground for voucher and charter rejects, the real public schools still manage to produce better results on state testing.

So while some of our tax dollars continue to go to sub-standard voucher schools, at least the kids who lose the voucher lottery get a better education!