You never know when and where the connections can come, but there is definitely something resonant between these particular worlds–of professional sports and education–in this Fox sports article about LSU football player (and top NFL prospect) Morris Claiborne.  Apparently, as part of the NFL Combine experience, where NFL hopefuls demonstrate their particular sets of athletic and intellectual skills, there is also something called the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test that all prospects need to take.  It was leaked that Claiborne supposedly got a basement-level score of 4 out of 50 correct–prompting internet buzz of the least flattering (and in some cases ugly) sort.

Morris Claiborne of LSU

Column author Peter Schrager takes issue with it in his article below.  He points out quite gracefully Claiborne’s own gifts as well as the fact that he has a learning disability, through which he worked with tutors and accessed university programs to maintain his grades for eligibility.  A ‘feel-good story that should be celebrated,’ Schrager explains.

So of course, most of us don’t know Claiborne personally, or the courses that he took, or even the measure of his character.  But isn’t there something to this story that rings familiar?  High stakes test prompting a particular level of anxiety, generalized interpretation and in the worst cases, a public shaming?  Tests and assessments do matter, high stakes or not.  But they shouldn’t be, and clearly aren’t, everything.

The time that President Obama spent on the theme of education during the recent State of the Union address was admittedly short–which is why this article by the current Teaching Ambassador Fellows based in Washington DC (with BPS’s own Shakera Walker among them) was so refreshing to read.

Let me admit my bias upfront:  I think this piece situates teachers in the swirl of education reform and education policies exactly right.  Feel free to share your own thoughts at the end of the blog article below.

Teachers Want to Lead the Transformation of their Profession

“Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal.  Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility:  To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

– President Barack Obama, January 24, 2012, “State of the Union”

Tuesday night President Barack Obama said what many teachers in America have been yearning to hear from their president: teachers matter, we change lives, and we do this hard work to make a difference in the lives of students.

He also acknowledged what every good teacher knows: that an accountability system that puts too much emphasis on test scores undermines a well-rounded education. But implicit in his speech was a challenge to America and to teachers to rebuild and strengthen the profession – a challenge that teachers are more than eager to accept.

As 2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellows, we have heard from many teachers that the field has lost its luster. In our role as Teaching Ambassadors, we have talked with teachers in many groups, and we have heard real despondency over the constraints of NCLB that have caused schools to focus on testing and teacher evaluation in ways that are oppressive and rob our profession of much of the joy of teaching and learning.

We’ve listened to countless stories about a law that has raised standards without providing support for schools to meet them. And we have cringed when some of our most effective colleagues acknowledged that they can no longer afford to stay in a difficult profession that asks so much of them but barely affords a middleclass lifestyle. “We didn’t get into teaching to be millionaires,” they say, “but we have to be able to feed our families.”

What we like about the President’s speech is not that he acknowledges our grievances though, admittedly, it feels good to be heard. What appeals to us is that the President understands that as a country we must do much more than simply tweak a structure that is not working. Educators want to lead the transformation and rebuilding of teaching so that our work improves students’ lives and restores pride in our profession.

Teachers welcome this transformation. Neither students nor teachers are served by a structure that treats some teachers like interchangeable cogs in a machine. We long to lead our own profession because when we drive our craft, we will see huge shifts in the responsibility, leadership, pay and respect. As NEA President Dennis Van Roekel describes in the NEA’s December 8, 2011 Action Agenda to Strengthen Teaching, “The true essence” of our work “is putting teachers in charge of the quality of their profession.”

What would teachers do if they ran the schools? We would raise the bar for membership in our profession, recruiting the best candidates and insisting that teacher preparation programs become more rigorous and relevant. About 62 percent of all new teachers—almost two-thirds—report they felt unprepared for the realities of their classroom. As Secretary Duncan has said, “Imagine what our country would do if 62 percent of our doctors felt unprepared to practice medicine—you would have a revolution in our medical schools.”

A transformed profession would give teachers much more responsibility and flexibility to make decisions that meet their students’ educational needs–allowing access to and training with technology, shifting class sizes, and restructuring the school day so that they have time to collaborate with colleagues and engage in professional learning and problem-solving.

We would offer teachers a professional salary and career pathways that acknowledge their skill and commitment in one of the most complex, demanding, and important jobs in the world. We would insist on great school leaders, with principals who have high expectations, develop all teachers as lifelong learners, and create positive school cultures where students and teachers succeed.

As the President acknowledged, teachers are creative and passionate. But like workers in many other professions, we expect to be held accountable for results. We yearn to help create fair and thorough teacher evaluation systems and have access to data to make informed decisions about what is working and what isn’t, to direct our professional learning, and to help decide who stays in our profession. President Obama was right when he said, “That is a bargain worth making.”

Now more than ever, teachers long to lead their profession so that we finally resolve the important educational challenges in this country. A quarter of our children fail to finish high school on time and barely four in ten earn any type of post-secondary degree. For children of color, outcomes are even worse. When we see the statistics–that 7,000 students drop out of school every day–we feel pain for those teens and shame and guilt that we were not able to prevent this tragedy.

On top of that, school districts are getting ready to slam into an awful reality, that before the end of the decade, more than a million Baby Boomer teachers—fully a third of America’s teachers–will retire or leave the teaching profession. To recruit and retain the best teachers, we need to offer rewarding jobs and competitive salaries.

We were especially pleased to read in the Blueprint for an America Built to Last, released yesterday with the speech transcript, that the President plans to ask Congress for funding that will “challenge states and districts to work with their teachers and unions to reform the entire teaching profession – from training and licensing to compensation, career ladders and tenure.”

Educators want to take on this work. As highly skilled specialists, we are not afraid of owning our profession. We are not afraid of being held accountable for results when we are given the responsibility and flexibility to craft our profession. We are confident that the President understands what it will take to transform teaching to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century, and we are eager to join with our colleagues across the country in moving the profession forward.

2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellows Geneviève DeBose, Claire Jellinek, Greg Mullenholz, Shakera Walker, and Maryann Woods-Murphy.

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I had the unique opportunity to attend a convening of the twelve Race to the Top state teams in Washington DC this past week.  In case you haven’t heard, Race to the Top is the federal competitive grant program that incentivizes participating states to either build or accelerate school reform efforts around a few key, identified areas:  college and career ready standards, teacher and leader effectiveness, data systems to improve instruction and turning around struggling schools.  There are sizable dollar amounts behind the RttT program– four billion dollars.  That’s right.  Bil-lion.

I learned quite a lot, along with some other dynamic teacher colleagues from the Teaching Ambassador Fellowship.  And while I do hear and understand the vocal criticisms to the program, namely the continued emphasis on testing and unknowns related to creating ‘value-added measures’ in teacher evaluation, we can’t ignore the opportunity (and urgency) of getting thoughtful teachers in on the conversation now to shape and inform its ultimate policies.  Massachusetts is one of the RttT states and decisions and policies are being made real-time.

There was one particular theme of the RttT convening, however, that continues to run through my head.  It relates to the emphasis, whether intentional or subliminal, on the individual teacher as the most important factor in the efforts to improve learning outcomes for students across the nation.  I raised some of these issues in the context of a focusing illusion a few weeks ago. And this op-ed piece by a Los Angeles charter school teacher does a compelling job laying out her complex feelings around this same emphasis.

Take a moment to read it and consider leaving your own comments/thoughts at the end of this post.  What messages are you getting around the levers that are most important for improving our schools and closing achievement gaps?  Do you agree or disagree with those emphases?  Do you understand the evolving policies at the federal, state and local levels and how they could potentially impact your work as a teacher?  How can extraordinary and hard working teachers organize and contribute to the improvement of our public schools in a meaningful and sustainable way?

Extraordinary isn’t enough.

Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

July 31, 2011|Ellie Herman | Ellie Herman is a teacher at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in South Los Angeles

The kid in the back wants me to define “logic.” The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn’t done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I’ll never know. I’m trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote “clarify your thinking” on his essay, but he’s still confused.

It’s 8:15 a.m. and already I’m behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.

The class, one of five I teach each day, has 31 students, including two with learning disabilities, one who just moved here from Mexico, one with serious behavior problems, 10 who flunked this class last year and are repeating, seven who test below grade level, three who show up halfway through class every day, one who almost never comes. I need to reach all 31 of them, including the brainiac who’s so bored she’s reading “Lolita” under her desk.

I just can’t do it.

I’ve been thinking about the challenges of teaching a large and diverse class in a new context lately. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said that, in his view, the billions spent in the U.S. to reduce class size was a bad idea. Many countries with high academic achievement, he noted, have accepted larger class sizes to pay talented teachers more and concentrate larger numbers of kids with the best teachers. “The best thing you can do,” he said recently in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, “is get children in front of an extraordinary teacher.”

That’s a common viewpoint at the moment. Every day I see data showing that in countries such as Japan and South Korea, students score higher in reading and math, often with larger classes, and that the U.S. has spent a tremendous amount of money reducing class size to little effect.

But a huge percentage of students in Japan and South Korea pay for after-school tutoring to make up for a lack of individualized attention at school. Finland, with the best scores in the world, has average class sizes in the 20s, and it caps science labs at 16. Still, it’s become a popular fantasy that all you need is a superstar teacher, and that he or she will be just as effective even as budget cuts force us to pack more kids into each classroom.

I’ve taught for the last three years at a charter high school in South-Central Los Angeles where all the teachers are excellent. Our test scores are high. We have terrific administrators, and because teachers are a priority, unlike almost any other LAUSD school, we haven’t had layoffs; even so, our school has had to allow enrollment to rise to stay on budget. My largest class last year was 34. My smallest was 20. And I can assure you I was a whole lot more “extraordinary” in my smallest than in my largest.

I’m not sure what the breaking point is, but once you get much above 25 students, providing individual attention becomes difficult. To keep my English class of 31 under control, I have to rely on high-energy routines and structured group activities. In place of freewheeling discussion, I pepper the room with rapid-fire questions. To respond to their essays, I use a rubric emphasizing the four or five qualities I’m targeting for the whole class, and then write one or two short individualized sentences at the bottom of the page.

With more than 150 students in my classes, I don’t have enough time to spend more than five or 10 minutes on each essay.

Do students really learn best this way? A whole chunk of my students are alienated by this highly structured environment: the artists, the rebels, the class clowns — in other words, some of my smartest kids.

On a good day, about a fourth of my students don’t do the reading or the homework; if I set up a conference after school, they might show up and they might not. Why? Because one kid thinks he has an STD, and another girl’s brother just got out of juvie, and another guy wandered to the ice cream truck and forgot. Because they’re teenagers. Because they’re human.

And that’s my biggest problem with the myth of the extraordinary teacher. The myth says it doesn’t matter whether the crazy kid in the back makes me laugh so hard I forget what we were talking about, or two brilliant kids refuse to accept my rubrics, scrawling their long-winded objections as a two-part argument that circles over every square inch of the backs of their essays — the makeup of the class, the nature of each student and the number of students are immaterial as long as I’m at the top of my game.

But nobody talks that way about the children of the wealthy, who can pay for individual attention in tutoring or private schools with small classes. I understand that we need to get rid of bad teachers, who will be just as bad in small classes, but we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

Our children — even our children growing up in poverty, especially our children growing up in poverty — deserve to have not only an extraordinary teacher but a teacher who has time to read their work, to listen, to understand why they’re crying or sleeping or not doing homework.

To teach each child in my classroom, I have to know each child in my classroom. We teachers need to bring not only our extraordinariness but our flawed and real and ordinary humanity to this job, which involves a complex and ever-changing web of relationships with children who often need more than we can give them.

I’m willing to work as hard as I can to be an excellent teacher, but as a country we have to admit that I’ll never be excellent if we continue to slash education budgets and cut teachers, which is what’s actually happening in California despite all our talk of excellence, particularly in schools that serve poor children. Until we stop that, we’ll never have equal education in this country.

Copyright 2011

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You might have seen the recent series of Boston Herald articles focusing on what the paper called BPS School Success stories.  These pieces were also highlighted on the Boston Public Schools website.

So how to describe the mixed feelings reading them?  Because for sure, no one wants to hear that a school is doing poorly and it’s certainly important to rally around success stories of school leaders, teachers, parents and students doing well in a school community.  But when simplistic articles like these reinforce the divisive dichotomy between ‘good’ schools and ‘bad’ schools, and ‘good’ kids and ‘bad’ kids, particularly by often roundly associating charter schools and ‘mid-20 something teachers’ with the good, and the unnamed and undifferentiated mass of district, unionized schools and their teachers with the bad, it just rings terribly, terribly wrong.

Other thoughts and reactions to the article series, including the one on UP Academy below?

Rejuvenated school helps kids reach new heights

By Jessica Heslam  |   Tuesday, November 29, 2011  |

UP Academy photo

The Herald is showcasing four standout Boston public schools that are operating largely under the radar with a five-part series on innovative efforts to boost urban education. Yesterday, the Herald profiled TechBoston Academy, which President Obama visited in March. In the second part today, the Herald visits South Boston’s UP Academy.

School cop Victor Ortiz was the only familiar face from the former Gavin Middle School who was still in the building when it reopened as UP Academy this school year. Ortiz, who has been at the South Boston school for seven years, says he already sees a difference.

“The kids have more structure in place,” Ortiz said. “Overall, there’s a very positive vibe. It’s a good change.”

The academically floundering Gavin was shuttered last June. Unlocking Potential — a nonprofit, Boston-based organization that whips failing schools into shape — was tapped to reopen the building as a semi-autonomous in-district charter school that serves grades 6 to 8.

Teachers from the Gavin were invited to reapply. Five did, but none were re-hired. More than 4,000 people from around the globe applied for 57 teaching and administrator jobs.

Over the summer, the building underwent a massive clean-up, with more than $150,000 in renovations, including money spent on new furniture and technology.

The new teachers — mostly mid 20-somethings — showed up Aug. 1. Students returned on Aug. 29. The school year is longer and so is the day, which starts at 7:30 a.m., with dismissals at 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.
Students wear name tags because all their teachers are new.

At age 33, principal Amanda Gardner had already spent seven years as founding principal of Boston Preparatory Charter Public School before coming to UP Academy.

Students just took their first round of math and English interim assessments, given by the nonprofit Achievement Network. Gardner said they were at the network’s average or right above it.

“Given the schools that are in this network, that’s a really powerful sign,” Gardner said. “That was a pretty substantial improvement from where Gavin had been performing on those assessments in years past.”

This is Unlocking Potential’s first school. Gardner said UP Academy’s ability to hire its own staff and choose curriculum — as well as the longer school day and year — are major factors for success.

“We sweat the small stuff all the time,” CEO Scott Given said. “We consistently hold our students to very high expectations, both behaviorally and academically.”

Every classroom in the pristine school is named after a college attended by teachers and staff members. And when the bell rings, students don’t pour into the hallways in a massive mob — the teachers change rooms. When youngsters do switch rooms or head to lunch, they walk in single file, eyes focused straight ahead.

So far, overall, Gardner said her sense is that students are “really happy,” getting to class on time and respecting their teachers.

“We all know that people are watching us to see how it goes,” said Gardner, “and we’re excited about that.”

Tomorrow the series continue with a focus on Orchard Gardens in Roxbury, a turnaround school that is already making strides.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1384488

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Congratulations to Waltham history teacher Derek Vandegrift for his selection as a Milken Educator!  I think we all know colleagues or have had teachers who distinguish themselves quite simply, as excellent educators.  These are the individuals who just have that particular mix of passion, gift, knowledge and skill to make the classroom come alive.

I’m reminded by one particular trajectory that can trace the development of successful teachers into four phases.  Check them out and let me know if they ring true to you.

Vandegrift, Milken Educator Award Winner

Stage 1:  Unconsciously unskilled.  Here’s where you begin.  You simply don’t understand (or underestimate) all the skills involved in teaching and teaching well.  This stage helps to describe the attitude represented by the quote ‘those you can, do, those you can’t teach’ or those starry-eyed idealists who are going to immediately transform all the kids who are in front of them a la Dangerous Minds.

Stage 2:  Consciously unskilled.  Are you in your first few weeks (or years) in the classroom?  Here’s where after a bit of experience, you quickly understand how many skills you don’t have and need to development to survive, let alone thrive.  There is a constant struggle and work to identify and develop those skills.

Stage 3:  Consciously skilled.  After some time, hard work, reflection and experience, you develop specific skills and strategies that are very consciously and deliberately researched, implemented and refined over time to improve the quality of instruction in your classroom.  Think late nights, long conversations with fellow teachers and those sweet episodes of success when all that hard work and planning pays off in a killer lesson.

Stage 4:  Unconsciously skilled.  Ultimately, over time and with increasing experience and expertise, you ‘just teach,’ with so many skills, actions, and interventions implemented at once, that they happen almost automatically.  And then you do it again, and again, and again.

Mr. Vandegrift?  I think we know what stage he’s in.

An ‘Oscar’ for Waltham teacher:  National Award Cites Vandegrift’s Compelling Style

By Lisa Kocian
Globe Staff / November 10, 2011

“That’s what you give me?! I’m holding a dramatic moment here, people.’’

In a voice that is one part smooth radio announcer and maybe three parts dynamic stage performer, Waltham High School teacher Derek Vandegrift is giving his students a hard time, and they are giggling and – most importantly – responding.

He is asking what the “Iron Horse’’ nickname for baseball great Lou Gehrig might mean. Students throw out a couple of synonyms for iron but he’s jockeying for more, trying to convey the emotional contrast behind Gehrig’s rise to fame as fearsome hitter followed by his sudden decline from the illness that now bears his name.

Vandegrift’s style is compelling. So much so that last month, he was among 25 educators across the country, and the only one from Massachusetts, to receive one of the so-called “Oscars of Teaching’’ from the Milken Family Foundation so far this year.

The Milken Educator Award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 check with no restrictions on its use, is shrouded in secrecy. The foundation does not accept applications, and does not identify the people who recommend recipients in each state. The criteria for winning include an “engaging and inspiring presence’’ and an “exceptional educational talent.’’

That means the foundation looks for elementary and secondary school teachers, principals and other educators who know how to make content “jump off the page,’’ said Jana Rausch, spokeswoman for the Milken Family Foundation, which is based in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Vandegrift, 33, was chosen, in part, because he shows students that history is a continuum, she said.

“He makes them think,’’ said Rausch. “He relates the lessons to real life.’’

Vandegrift, who has been teaching in Waltham for 11 years, said he hasn’t fully decided what he’ll spend the award money on, but some of it will likely go toward paying off student loans from his alma mater, Boston College.

Waltham High junior Michael Gelineau, 17, is in Vandegrift’s modern US history honors class, which is studying Gehrig and other personalities of the 1920s.

“Clearly he’s the man of the school right now; he’s pretty humble about it though,’’ Gelineau said of his teacher. “He makes the class fun. You still learn, but you have a good time.’’

Class may start with a brief YouTube video made by one of Vandegrift’s former students summarizing 1920s pop culture, or “The Age of Ballyhoo,’’ the subject of the day’s lecture.

It’s the age of Steamboat Willie and jazz and, inscrutably, goldfish swallowing. Vandegrift takes his students through a lecture and slideshow that touches on some key historical events, like the Scopes Trial, where a teacher got in trouble for teaching evolution.

But one of the first stops is sports, and – in addition to some light teasing for the only admitted Yankees fan in the room – Vandegrift has his students talking about recent events (think Theo Epstein and chicken and beer in the Red Sox clubhouse) before taking a look at the 1920s. He calls on Gelineau, who plays golf, to talk about Bobby Jones, the most famous golfer of the era.

This is a traditional lecture, but Vandegrift is also known for getting students up and moving. And he is a performer.

When talking about “island hopping’’ in World War II (when the Allies strategically took only certain Pacific islands from the Japanese), Vandegrift likes to throw old textbooks around the room and hop from one to another in a demonstration. The students love to root against him if his book hopping gets too ambitious, he said, and they loved it when he once slipped and hit his head.

“If it’s them thinking I’m nuts that keeps their attention – fine,’’ he said. “A perfect class is an engaged class.’’

Vandegrift said he is humbled by the award and hopes it will also shine a spotlight on his talented colleagues.

“We’re all very proud of him here,’’ said Stephen Goodwin, the director of history and social sciences for the Waltham school district. “He’s an excellent teacher. He believes in interactive education. Students in his classes are up and participating in the lessons . . . his classes are in great demand by students.’’

Rausch, from the Milken foundation, emphasized that the award is not for lifetime achievement, but instead goes to educators early or midway through their careers and who show promise for attaining even more success with their students.

And the surprise element is fiercely preserved – recipients are always revealed in a schoolwide assembly that is arranged without the winner’s knowledge, Rausch said. There will be up to 40 recipients nationwide this year, she said, but not all have been announced.

“The idea is to really excite young people and have them see if their teacher can be honored and revered in that very public way, that will then inspire them to want to be a teacher also.’’

Lisa Kocian can be reached at lkocian@globe.com.

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This isn’t a news article exactly, but it’s a compelling piece of writing by my friend Steve Owens who is an elementary music school teacher and union president for the Washington Central Educators Association (VT-NEA).  It certainly speaks to one of this forum’s guiding questions on fostering more collaborative relationships here in the Boston Public Schools.  (Mona, I think your recent comment to the October column also aligns interestingly with this piece.)  For discussion, consider the question that Steve poses at the end of his post below.

The Meaning of Collaboration: Power, Security and Control

Posted Saturday October 1st by Steve Owens at http://educationworker.blogspot.com/

Sixty five years ago collaboration was a dirty word.  Collaborators were traitors, like the Vichy French or Vidkum Quisling, who materially assisted the Nazi repression.  Suddenly in the 21st century collaboration is all the rage in labor-management relations.  How can union leaders avoid becoming little quislings and selling the rank and file down the road?

In a word, expectations.  A willingness to collaborate with management doesn’t mean we are lowering our standards.  In fact, it means we are raising them.  In the modern collaborative labor management relationship, the end goals of the mutual enterprise must be placed first by all parties.

In education, this means fantastic student learning is the most important outcome.  Any adult interest that does not in some small way promote this outcome is excluded from the conversation.  Student learning becomes a gateway to the discussion.  In a broad sense, the adults trade their power for influence over student learning.

In a more fine grained sense, the equation looks like this: labor gives up security, management gives up control.  In exchange, teachers gain control of their professional lives, and administration gains the flexibility to manage for maximum student benefit.

To understand why this is important, we need to bring it down to the classroom level.  Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham speaks of the conundrum that while progressive teaching techniques are universally regarded in the profession as the best way to educate, some 90% of the time educators actually use lectures, worksheets, etc – techniques that are the diametric opposite of the things we supposedly value.

Willingham attributes this to the fact that educators, like all human beings, have cognitive limits.  This doesn’t mean we’re stupid, it simply means we can’t know everything.  Cooperative group work, Responsive Classroom, project based learning, service learning, and similar techniques are cognitively demanding – in short, exhausting.

This is an interesting argument, but I believe there is another reason that teachers eschew progressive techniques in the classroom.  These techniques are deeply collaborative in nature; they rely on rich and delicate social relations.  There is this expectation that teachers will create these deeply collaborative classroom environments, because this is considered the best way to teach.

How can such classroom environments thrive in school systems which are hierarchical, in which top-down decision making is the rule, and in which adversarial labor-management relationships are the norm?  These are systems in which administrators micromanage classroom practice from afar, yet lack the information to make grounded decisions.  Teachers become subject to arbitrary and nonsensical administrative fiat, which dis-empowers them, abrogates their professional judgment, and demoralizes them.  How can people working under the thumb of these quasi-military command hierarchies reasonably be expected to educate students in progressive ways?

That teachers manage this feat at all in the face of systems designed to defeat them is a testament to  the collective excellence of the profession.

In order to guarantee the best possible educational experience and outcomes for students, there needs to be symmetry of expectations up and down the hierarchical food chain.  If you want collaboration at the classroom level, it has to be present throughout the system.  This is where a collaborative labor management relationship can turbocharge education.

In a true collaborative relationship, administrators drive down the decision making to level of implementation, where the information actually exists to make decent decisions.  In so doing they build the overall decision making capacity of the organization.  They are facilitators of the professional work and strive to empower the professionals in their care.  This is giving up control.

Peer assistance and review systems (PARS) are often found where collaboration has taken root.  PARS is designed to take the arbitrariness out of personnel decisions by creating a professional consensus in the community.  When the consensus leads to non-renewal  of non-performing individuals, the process is expedited.  This is giving up security.

Contrast this with the current cat and mouse scenario in so many places where adversarial relations rule.  Labor and management play a game of chicken, each side playing legalistic levers to see what it can get away with.  Adversarial relationships add no value to the student experience – in fact they degrade it.

Collaboration in 2011 means something considerably different than it did in 1946.  It means much higher expectations for all: a democratically empowered workforce willing to take a chance on its own professionalism facilitated by an enlightened administration willing to trade desultory power games for influence over student learning.  All of this paid for by political leaders with a genuine interest in excellent policy.

But that’s another blog.

What examples can you imagine, of teachers giving up security and administration giving up control, which would promote excellent student learning?

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Take a look at this article that was just published in Education Week.  How about we invite thoughts and reactions about its premises?  Some possible questions that come to mind:

What is the ‘traditional teacher union?’  Do they work and if not, what should they be about?  What are the best ways for teachers to learn about and shape education policy?  Do organizations like Teach Plus provide opportunity for the ‘new majority’ to get involved or do they draw these teachers away from traditional union leadership roles while isolating the ‘new minority?’

Weigh in with comments and thoughts at the bottom of this post.

New Groups Giving Teachers Alternative Voice