CURMUDGUCATION: TNTP: Why Does Professional Development Suck?

CURMUDGUCATION: TNTP: Why Does Professional Development Suck?:

TNTP: Why Does Professional Development Suck?

TNTP has released a new report-ish papery thing addressing the state of teacher professional development in the US. Their conclusion? It sucks.

To their credit, they're apparently unhappy with those results. I'm not sure they need to be quite so discouraged; as with most TNTP researchy products, this one has some problems. Still, if you think I'm going to stick up for the awesomeness of professional development, I do hope you have another think coming. But let's go ahead and take a quick look at The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth about Our Quest for Teacher Development.

Do we know how to help teachers get better? 

I confess that I find this particular reporty thing oddly fascinating, because at its root it is a slow-motion collision between a fundamental reformster flaw and reality. So what we're looking at is TNTP trying to jump their unicorns over an existential chasm while trying not to look directly into the abyss.

The intro is almost plaintive-- we were so sure that if we could just figure out what teachers should be doing and then train them to do it, students would start racking up the big test scores (I'm paraphrasing, but only a little). I want to feel bad for these guys, because right out of the box they are designing a whole study based on fundamental misunderstandings of how teaching works, what teachers do, and what student success looks like. Really, we've driven right past the unicorn farm to a special lab where scientists are trying to make kumquats produce better pork chops by developing techniques for making the number nine smell more like lilacs.

I'm not entirely sure how to address the issues here, but let's start by looking at what they think they've learned.

Districts are spending big bucks

Well, they can't screw this up-- it's just running the numbers, right? TNTP found that districts are spending astronomical funds on teacher development, including the district that spends more on PD than on transportation. Okay, then.

Despite the buck spendage, most teachers do not appear to improve from year to year

How would you even measure something like that? TNTP went with just looking at the districts' own ratings of teachers, and discovered that "the difference in performance between an average first-CURMUDGUCATION: TNTP: Why Does Professional Development Suck?:

Putnam: Social Capital and Children

If Robert Putnam had never done a thing in his life except write Bowling Alone, he would have done more than enough to justify his taking up space on Earth. The work looks at the collapse and rebuilding of the American community, pairing sharp insight with exhaustive and clever collected data. It is required reading. But Putnam has just released another work entitled Our Kids, and in its own way it is just as important as his earlier work.

The book sets out to answer a particular question:

Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?

Well, spoiler alert: the answers are “no” and “yes,” respectively. It’s the details and the explanations that make Putnam’s book worth reading. You should read the whole thing, because I am not going to cover everything. But let me give you some tidbits while I hit the broad strokes.

TIDBIT #1

Income inequality has risen within each major racial/ethnic group between 1967 and 2011. In other words, rich blacks have pulled away from poor blacks. The Great Recession stymied the growing gap briefly, but recovery has brought more of the same.

TIDBIT #2

When considering the debate about social mobility, it’s useful to remember that “conventional indicators” are generally three or four decades out of date.

TIDBIT #3

For those who believe that the fabled welfare mother is behind the growth in single-mom 

Putnam: Social Capital and Children