The Teacher Wars (38 page)

An obvious benefit of taking classroom observation seriously is that once a supervisor or peer coach has identified the strategies of the most effective teachers, he or she can teach them to other teachers. “
If all you do is judge teachers by test results, it doesn't tell you what you should do differently,” says Charlotte Danielson, the observation pioneer.

Watching a great teacher at work can feel like watching a magic show.

Lenore Furman's seventeen kindergarteners at Abington Avenue, a high-poverty, largely Latino public elementary school in Newark, were rapt as they sang along with Furman's guitar in English and Spanish, then settled into a circle for story time. Furman had selected
Time to Sleep
, by Denise Fleming. The lushly illustrated book is about how animals experience the transition from fall to winter, a perfect topic for a chilly November day. As Furman read, she stopped to review some difficult vocabulary words related to animal hibernation: “burrow,” “perch,” “trudge,” and “slither.” “The turtle trudged up the hill,” she said. “That means he kind of walked slowly. It was hard for him. Turtles have little legs. He trudged.” On another page, she called attention to the difference
between “worm” and “worms.” The children practiced the two different pronunciations as Furman pointed at the words. In the middle of the book she paused for a “turn and talk,” in which each student discussed with a partner what had happened in the story so far, and what he predicted might happen next.

After story time Furman asked who would like to tell the class a personal story. Hands shot up. There were five weekly vocabulary words, all very simple, that the kids were supposed to practice using in spoken and written sentences:
mom, dad, me, go
, and
this
. One little girl said she banged her foot and her dad put a Band-Aid on it. The class then worked independently to write two full sentences each as Furman and a teacher's aide circulated, working with students one-on-one.

It is rare for a kindergarten classroom to feature such a strategic balance between teacher-led instruction, peer dialogue, and individual work. And it was magical how Furman seemed to be simultaneously teaching at two levels—an advanced level, with the hibernation vocabulary, and a basic one, with the emphasis on learning one-syllable words. Her expertise displayed just how complex good teaching is. But her practice is not magic, nor does it rely solely on some innate talent for teaching. What I saw was a set of research-based early childhood reading strategies developed by the Children's Literacy Initiative, a Philadelphia nonprofit. The underlying methods are simple: Children need to encounter a new word three times before they learn it. Not only are singing and chanting fun; they are also proven to help kids remember vocabulary. The “turn and talk” is meant to take advantage of what researchers call “peer effects,” the fact that discussing a new idea with a peer is often a more effective learning strategy than hearing a teacher repeat it over and over. Content-related vocabulary—words that describe concepts in social studies and science, like hibernation or metamorphosis—are the ones that most grow a child's academic potential. While teaching is often characterized as a field in which there are few broadly agreed-upon best practices, early childhood reading is an exception. “
Teaching reading is a science,” says Caryn Henning, who directs CLI's work in Newark. “You need specialized training.”

The Children's Literacy Initiative used a $26 million grant from the Obama administration to provide teachers in fourteen of Newark's forty-nine elementary schools with three years of training in how to teach kindergarteners through third graders, including English-language learners, to read. At each school, one expert teacher, like Lenore Furman, was identified as a “model” whose classroom door would always be open for observations, and whom other teachers could go to for coaching. Furman has taught at Abington Avenue for thirty years, and has been playing that role informally for a very long time. She stays current on teaching strategies by visiting high-achieving classrooms in other districts, a practice CLI supports.

The organization's theory of change—teachers teaching teachers, outside formal evaluation systems—works.
An initial study of the program released in 2014 found kindergarteners in schools with CLI model classrooms in Newark, Philadelphia, Camden, and Chicago outperformed their peers in reading.
A 2010 randomized trial showed that over the course of the kindergarten year, students in Philadelphia schools with CLI model classrooms gained an average of 8.3 percentage points more on reading assessments than did demographically similar students in schools without model classrooms. These are large gains. Most of the education research cited in the news is based on test scores in math. In part, that's because it is easier for schools and teachers to increase math achievement than it is for them to increase reading achievement, since most children learn math only at school, while reading ability is closely tied to the books and vocabulary children are exposed to at home. The problem with basing so much education policy making on math test scores is that reading skill is more closely tied to life outcomes than math skill is. The
Raj Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman study confirmed that—by showing that teachers with high value-added scores in reading had more of an impact on their students' future well-being than teachers with high value-added scores in math. That backs up what education researchers have known for a long time: that a child who ends third grade below level in reading will likely never catch up to his peers, and has a disproportionate chance of dropping out of high school. Reading is the foundation
for almost every other type of learning a child or adult will do, from word problems in math, to learning tough new scientific vocabulary, to comprehending a history textbook or even a medical consent form.

One of the frustrating things about programs like CLI, which focus on empowering teachers to share effective instructional practices, is that so few people have heard of them. I visited Furman's classroom in October 2010, just a few weeks after
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
that he was making a $100 million donation to the Newark public schools.
^*3
Zuckerberg's donation, alongside matching funds from other philanthropists, has supported mostly familiar policies. About half the money was spent on a three-year merit pay plan to reward teachers rated “highly effective.” The money also went toward building a student data tracking system, opening new charter schools, and hiring more TFA teachers. A relatively small grant—$100,000—was used to develop a new “early literacy initiative” through BRICK, a school turnaround group. But none of the millions went to expand the nationally recognized early literacy program that was already operating successfully in fourteen Newark schools.

It is difficult to achieve policy or instructional coherence in a school reform climate in which priorities are constantly changing with each new governor, superintendent, or big donor. Evidence-backed programs, like CLI, are rarely replicated so they can reach every school in a district. “
Too much school reform is about blowing up systems,” says Jen Weikert, CLI's director of communications and giving. “What we know is that no matter how many systems you blow up, you can't charter-ize everything. We feel like by helping teachers in the classroom, particularly within the public school system, we serve a major need. Unfortunately, we haven't gone to scale in any district that we're in.”

During President Obama's second term, standards and accountability reformers like Kati Haycock of Education Trust began focusing the kind of sustained attention on teachers colleges that they had once devoted to overhauling teacher evaluation and tenure.
They urged Congress to pull federal funding—essentially, to shut down—teacher preparation programs whose students have SAT or ACT scores in the bottom third of the national distribution and who go on to have low value-added scores in the classroom, or who can't find jobs at all because they are underprepared. The concern about teachers colleges is not unwarranted. The nineteenth-century common schoolers, the founders of the Teacher Corps in the 1960s, and the authors of A
Nation at Risk
had all acknowledged
major problems with teacher education in America. Today only half of teacher candidates undergo supervised student teaching in a real classroom, and most teacher education programs have no mechanism for making sure mentor teachers are themselves successful or trained in how to coach an adult peer. Undergraduate education majors often take few college-level courses in the subjects they will actually teach—an especially big problem for the elementary grades, which tend to attract prospective teachers who are personally hesitant about math and science, yet who are not required by their colleges to beef up their skills. Education classes for trainee teachers are often taught by PhD academics, who may or may not have firsthand experience in K—12 classrooms. These courses can focus more on theories of child development or multicultural education than on practical ways to deal with student discipline problems or offer feedback on kids' writing. And teachers colleges are overproducing elementary, English, and social studies teachers, while underproducing those ready to teach underserved students, like those who are learning English or are autistic.

Of course, the vast majority of teachers working today—including a majority of celebrated, excellent teachers—are alumni of teachers colleges or graduate programs in teaching. Yet a widely cited 2013 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality carried a damning conclusion: that the ideology of teacher “autonomy”
in the classroom had diverted traditional teacher education programs from the hands-on skills teachers must build to help students learn. “
Many in the field do not believe that training will arm novice teachers with skills that might make them more effective, as specific surgical methods are taught to medical students,” the NCTQ researchers wrote. “Instead, the belief is that training only creates automatons, so it is better to instill in new teachers the ‘professional mindset' that theoretically allows them to approach each new class thoughtfully and without any preconceived notions, much like a blank page that's been carefully bleached of any prejudices.”

Teach for America offers one model for challenging the status quo in teacher education, by quickly providing its corps members with an intensely practical and prescriptive set of classroom strategies. But there are other alternative pathways into the teaching profession, too.

One of those models is the urban teacher residency. In 2010 Marcus Clark was a twenty-seven-year-old IT manager in Houston, working at a small business that made software for oil companies. His job was to manage computer hardware, including every employee's PC. “But I felt kind of frustrated, because I was living two lives,” he said. “My professional life had nothing to do with what I was doing at church.”

On weekends and after work, Clark, who is black, was leading a youth ministry at the Friendship Community Bible Church, work he loved. In the summer he volunteered to take students from the program to Kids Across America, an evangelical Christian camp in Missouri for urban youth of color. That's where he heard a presentation about the Memphis Teacher Residency (MTR), which recruits career changers into high-poverty classrooms. Unusual among programs attached to public schools, MTR specifically looks for people of faith. Its mission is not to proselytize to public school students, but to support teachers “in a Christian context,” according to the group's Web site. “Teaching is a vocational response to the Gospel and an active participation in the work of the Church to glorify God by bringing justice to the poor and oppressed.”

The Memphis Teacher Residency is about as competitive as Teach for America. Each year, only 13 to 18 percent of applicants are
accepted. It allows aspiring teachers to enter the classroom before they have a teaching degree. And, like TFA, MTR is driven by the belief that high academic expectations can transform poor children's lives. But MTR and the eighteen other urban teacher residencies across the country (most of which have no faith component) differ from TFA in their conception of what makes an excellent teacher. First, residency programs favor candidates who are eager to commit to a longer career in public education, and who understand the community in which they are applying to work. Second, instead of giving recruits just five weeks of summer training, residency programs require them to spend one school year working full-time in a mentor teacher's classroom, while studying education at a local graduate school. They are paid a modest stipend ($12,000 in Memphis). Most first-year teachers say classroom discipline is their biggest challenge. Residents get to watch how a veteran teacher establishes discipline from the first moments of the first day of school. They then build their skills slowly, learning how to plan a lesson and deliver it effectively, while their mentor teacher and outside coaches critique their practice. In Memphis, residents wait until January of their first school year to do a three-week “lead teach,” in which they take over full responsibility for the classroom. Residents' graduate classes and a weekly seminar they attend are designed to link theory and teaching strategies with their classroom experiences in real time.