Does Teaching Experience Matter? Let's Count the Ways

Does Teaching Experience Matter? Let's Count the Ways:

Does Teaching Experience Matter? Let’s Count the Ways

One of the most popular pieces of conventional wisdom in the national debate over education is that teachers lose the capacity to further improve student achievement after only a few years in the classroom – their effectiveness plateaus early in their careers. This perception has framed debates on everything from teacher quality, professional pay, due process, and teacher retention and recruitment.

But is it supported by research? The Learning Policy Institute recently dove into existing data, surveys and reports to shed some light on the relationship between teaching experience and student outcomes.

The verdict: experience matters – even in the second decade of teaching and beyond.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? “We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Based on their analysis of 30 studies published over the past 15 years, Kini and Podolsky find that:

• Gains in teacher effectiveness are most striking during the first five years in the classroom, but continue to increase – albeit at a slower pace – during the second, and often third, decade of a career.
• As teachers gain experience, students’ academic gains are not the only benefit. School attendance also improves.
• For teachers to be effective at any point in their career, they must be a part of a supportive and collegial school environment. Stability in teaching assignments is also key. Teachers are most effective in the same grade level, subject, or district.
• More experienced teachers support greater student learning for their colleagues and the school as a whole, as well as for their own students. Novice teachers, in particular, benefit most from having more experienced colleagues.

Why take this issue on now? Aside from the fact that recent research uses more precise and accurate methods (see figure below), Kini and Podolsky say that the Does Teaching Experience Matter? Let's Count the Ways:

SHOCKER: Walton Funds Illinois State Charter Commission, Which Blocks Closure of Failing Charter Schools Funded by Walton | Diane Ravitch's blog

SHOCKER: Walton Funds Illinois State Charter Commission, Which Blocks Closure of Failing Charter Schools Funded by Walton | Diane Ravitch's blog:

SHOCKER: Walton Funds Illinois State Charter Commission, Which Blocks Closure of Failing Charter Schools Funded by Walton

 The Chicago Sun-Times reported on a startling conflict of interest.

The rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation has been funding the Illinois State Charter School Commission, a state agency, as well as many charter schools in Illinois. When the Chicago Public Schools recommended closing two charter schools because of their poor performance, the Commission blocked the closing. The two failing charters were also funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

Have you ever heard of a public agency that relied for funding on a private foundation with a political agenda of privatization?

Reporters Dan Mihalopoulos and Lauren FitzPatrick write:

A private foundation started by the late Walmart mogul Sam Walton and his wife has contributed heavily to the Illinois State Charter School Commission and to two charter operators whose schools the state agency has blocked the Chicago Board of Education from closing over poor student performance, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Even in the complex history of public education in Chicago, the situation involving the two charters, the Chicago Public Schools, the charter commission and the Arkansas-based Walton Family Foundation is unusual.

Unusual is an understatement.

For years, CPS has faced criticism for allowing the expansion and taxpayer-financed funding of privately run charters even as it shut down traditional public schools over low enrollment and bad test scores.

Aiming to show it expects charters to meet the same standards as CPS schools, the Board of Ed moved last November to cut off funding for three schools — including the Amandla Charter School in Englewood and Lighthouse Academies’ school in Bronzeville — over poor student performance. The charter commission overruled the Board of Ed and, in March, blocked CPS from closing the schools.

Beside Amandla and the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School, the commission also saved the Betty Shabazz International Charter School’s Barbara A. Sizemore Campus in Englewood from being closed. The Walton foundation hasn’t donated to Shabazz.

CPS responded later in March by suing the state agency over its ruling, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools chief, Forrest Claypool, called “ill-advised and destructive.”

Over the past 20 years, the Walton foundation has given more than $45 million to educational groups in Illinois, including charter schools and the SHOCKER: Walton Funds Illinois State Charter Commission, Which Blocks Closure of Failing Charter Schools Funded by Walton | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Just Published! A Revised Edition of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Just Published! A Revised Edition of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Just Published! A Revised Edition of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education”

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education: Diane Ravitch: 9780465025572: Amazon.com: Books - http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465025579

 I am very pleased to let you know about the publication of a newly revised edition of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

Perhaps you read it when it was first released in 2010. It was big news at the time, because I broke ranks with the conservative think tanks and policymakers who had once been my allies. I spoke out against the misuse of testing and the dangers of privatization. This was unexpected from someone who had been an Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, who served as part of three conservative think tanks, and who had written many articles about the “crisis” in American education.

I thought I had made a clean break with the Bush-Obama agenda. But in time I realized that I had not completely escaped the old, failed way of thinking (like a state, tinkering with people’s lives from afar). The book continued my longstanding support for a national curriculum and predicted that it would be smooth sailing now that the culture wars were over. I was wrong again!

In this new revision of the book, I have removed any endorsement for a national curriculum or national standards or national tests, and I explain why. The controversy over the Common Core standards taught me that the U.S. will never have a national curriculum, and furthermore, should never have one.

I also explain why a national curriculum and national examinations will not reduce the achievement gap among different racial and ethnic groups and will not reduce poverty. The advocacy for them–from the same people who support privatization–continues to be an excuse for avoiding the issue of poverty. And I rewrote the chapter on “A Nation at Risk,” showing how it dodged the most important issues in our society, which were economic and social, not educational.

Yes, there is a “crisis” in education, but it is not a crisis of test scores or failing schools. The crisis is caused by policymakers, federal officials, foundations, and business leaders who are imposing failed ideas on the schools. These impositions are hurting students, teachers, principals, communities, and public education itself. They have failed and failed, again and again, but those who support the Bush-Obama agenda of competition, choice, testing, and accountability refuse to re-examine their assumptions. Their inability to recognize their own failure has created disruption (which they admire), turmoil, and massive demoralization among educators.

I hope you will consider reading the book. I think that D&L continues to speak with passion to the terrible and real crisis in American education, a crisis caused by non-educators who want to turn our schools into job-training units, who want to emphasize standardized testing to the detriment of students, educators, and public schools, and who foolishly think that privatization will improve education.Just Published! A Revised Edition of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” | Diane Ravitch's blog:

6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical

6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical:

6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition

In the spirit that feels appropriate in the wake of the death of Muhammad Ali—and the concurrent failure of mainstream reflections ignoring or whitewashing the real history of his life—I offer below a collection of education-related links that can serve as powerful mythbusters for the ongoing false claims common in the mainstream media and among political leaders as well as edureformers.

Charter Schools

Failing The Test Series

Regardless of motives, the charter initiatives in Oakland and Los Angeles together signal a significant watershed in the growth of a statewide movement that was birthed by California’s Charter Schools Act of 1992 to create classroom laboratories that might develop the dynamic new curricula and teaching methods needed to reinvigorate schools that were failing the state’s most underserved and disadvantaged children.

How that modest experiment in fixing neighborhood public schools could morph in less than 25 years into the replacement of public schools with an unproven parallel system of privately run, taxpayer-funded academies is only half the story of California’s education wars that will be examined in this series, much of which is based on conversations with both sides of the charter school debate. Over the next few days Capital & Main will also look at:

• The influence wielded by libertarian philanthropists who bankroll the 50-50 takeovers.
• How charter schools spend less time and money on students with learning disabilities.
• The lack of charter school transparency and accountability.
• How charter expansion is pushing Oakland’s public school district toward a fateful tipping point.
• The success of less radical yet more effective reforms that get scant media coverage.
• Nine solution takeaways for struggling schools.

(from Failing the Test: A New Series Examines Charter Schools, Bill Raden)

Charters and Access: Here is Evidence, Julian Vasquez Helig

No, Eva, You Can’t Do Whatever You Want, Jersey Jazzman

Teacher Effectiveness/Experience

Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?: A Review of the Research, Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky

Based on our review of 30 studies published within the last 15 years that analyze the effect of teaching experience on student outcomes in the United States and met our methodological criteria, we find that:

1. Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with 6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical:

CURMUDGUCATION: System

CURMUDGUCATION: System:

System

One of the dreams of ed reform has been to come up with a system that is teacher-proof, a program or script or curriculum that works exactly the same way no matter what carbon-based life form you have propped up in front of the classroom.

Systems are particularly appealing as a method of controlling "bad" actors, with "bad" defined as "does not do what I want them to do." This is a false hope, a snare and a delusion. Systems rarely fix bad actors, and frequently hamstring your best people.

You have a troupe of dancers, some of leap and soar and move with grace and beauty, and a few of whom dart around the stage like spastic rhinos. So to get the rhinos slowed down and under control, you put everyone in the company in forty-pound cement shoes. The rhinos are now chastened and restrained, but your best dancers can no longer leap and soar and move with grace and beauty.

You worry that the cooks in your restaurant have too much variety, some producing genius blends of flavor and texture and culinary awesomeness, while others can barely make meatloaf. So you create a menu system with easy instructions that anybody can follow that will always result in a predictably consistent product. Congratulations. You are now McDonalds, and nobody is ever going to go to your restaurant because they are in the mood for excellence.

You want your students to write with structure and organization, so you teach the five paragraph format. In fact, you strictly enforce the five paragraph system so that nobody wanders off the farm CURMUDGUCATION: System:

CURMUDGUCATION: Remedial Baloney http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/06/remedial-baloney.html

Big Education Ape: CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: June Is Busting Out http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/06/curmudgucation-icymi-june-is-busting-out.html

 

Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue

Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue:

Who Uses Educational Research? And How?

By John Thompson.

My first response to “The Push and Pull of Research: Lessons from a Multi-site Study of Research Use in Education Policy,” by Christopher Lubienski, Elizabeth Debray, Janelle Scott, was clichéd. Being an optimist, I’ve kept asking why education research is misused so badly, and when smart and sincere scholars will revise their methodologies to something more reality-based than the regression studies used to justify corporate school reform. So, my response to the reality-slap in the face that is “The Push and Pull of Research” was “thanks, I needed that.”

Lubienski, Debray, and Scott “conducted scores of interviews with individuals from organizations that play a brokering role between research producers and users (policymakers), including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and media outlets.” They were particularly interested in how advocacy groups and think tanks, known as intermediary organizations, “conveyed research evidence that would illuminate policy discussions.” It is bad enough that these powerful people seem to merely assume that policy must be based on incentives and disincentives, as opposed to more comprehensive and coordinated, holistic policies. I was still dismayed to read, however, that they found philanthropies to be “largely inert ‘consumers’ of research,” while intermediary organizations (IOs) were very active in “brokering or selling particular versions of research evidence to them.”

Lubienski, Debray, and Scott asked whether these IOs gained influence because of “pull factors,” or the desire of big philanthropists to make evidence-based decisions in regard to social policy and solutions. Or, did the IOs get access through “push factors,” such as their abilities in self-promotion and the cultivating institutional “brand?”

Sadly, Lubienski, Debray, and Scott discovered that “research played virtually no part in decision making for policymakers, despite their frequent rhetorical embrace of the value of research.” Instead, they documented “a remarkable amount of ‘pushing’ of research to policymakers by IOs.” They then asked “an interesting question as to why so much in the way of time and resources would be devoted to getting evidence to Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue:

Jersey Jazzman: No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want

Jersey Jazzman: No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want:

No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want

When Eva Moskowitz doesn't get exactly what she wants she stomps her feet, takes her ball and goes home:

Success Academy Charter Schools won’t offer pre-kindergarten classes next year after losing a high-profile fight with city and state officials.

The charter network has refused to sign the city’s pre-K contract, arguing that it includes inappropriate regulations about how charter schools manage their time and design their curriculum. But neither Mayor Bill de Blasio nor State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has allowed Success to bend the rules, and both have insisted that Success sign the contract or lose funding. 

In recent months, Success officials have continued their fight in court. But with no resolution in sight, the city’s largest charter-school network will close its three existing pre-K programs and will not open two more planned for next school year, CEO Eva Moskowitz announced Wednesday.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” Moskowitz said.

There are two issues here: first, does the city have the right to demand that Success sign a contract before it gets funding for its Pre-K program? Reading Elia's decision in the matter - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/06/no-eva-you-cant-do-whatever-you-want.html

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29:

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007

In the summer of 2015, the board of the Latin Academy Charter School (Atlanta)reported that over $600,000 was missing from school accounts.

In April 2016, the school’s founder and leader, Chris Clemons, was arrested in his hometown of Denver and sent back to Atlanta to face charges not only related to the missing $600,000+ from Latin Academy Charter, but also for $350,000+ missing from two other Fulton County (Ga.) schools formerly overseen by Clemons.

Clemons apparently ripped off his own schools to the tune of roughly one million dollars.

However, in September 2007, when Clemons was enrolled at MIT for his MBA and featured in this News@MITSloan article, entitled, “Back to School for Schools,” no one would have guessed that less than a decade later, the same guy would be facing charges for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money entrusted to him for the education of hundreds of Georgia students.

Below are excerpts that read ironic in 2016 from the 2007 MIT feature on Clemons:

Chris Clemons was stunned when he learned that authorities often plan prison space based on how well kids read in the fourth grade. The 28-year-old earned a political science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and had aspirations of law school, until he discovered that his real calling in life was advocating for impoverished children in urban areas. “I knew I was going to go into education. I wanted to have an impact,” he says.

To boost his teaching experience and see how the other half lived, he took as a job as a middle school teacher at the Germantown Friends School, a posh 

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29:

What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic

What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic:

How Much Testing Is Too Much?
Eight in 10 teachers think their students spend too much time taking government-mandated tests.

It’s not hard to find a teacher willing to bend your ear about the volume of standardized testing in schools today, and the pressure for “test prep.” But how widespread are such concerns among educators? And what’s the on-the-ground reality they experience?

New survey data suggest these impressions about over-testing and test prep are more than just anecdotal: They are the norm for the majority of public-school teachers.

Eighty-one percent believe their students spend too much time taking tests mandated by their state or district, according to the study by the Center on Education Policy, based at George Washington University.

How much time is too much? On average, students spend 10 days taking district-mandated tests during the school year and nine days taking state-mandated tests, the teachers estimate. But underneath these averages are wide variations, from less than a week (the most popular response in both cases) to more than a month, the survey finds.

When it comes to test prep, 62 percent of teachers say they spend too much time readying students for state-mandated exams. And 51 percent feel that way about district-mandated tests, according to the nationally representative survey conducted in late 2015.

On average, teachers estimate spending 14 days preparing students for state-mandated exams, and 12 days for district-mandated exams.

Of course, not all test prep is created equal. It can mean many things, some good, some not so good. The CEP report defines it as “drilling students on specific content and skills covered on the tests, using practice tests, and/or teaching test-taking skills like time-management and pacing.”

Test prep is especially prevalent in high-poverty and medium-poverty schools, according to the survey. Thirty-six percent of teachers spend at least a month on test prep for state-mandated exams, for example. By contrast, the figure is 23 percent in low-poverty schools.

* * *

These are just a few of the findings from the Center on Education Policy report, conducted with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s based on a survey of more than 3,000 teachers. The data, issued last month, offer fresh insights into the views of classroom educators on testing, standards, Common Core implementation and more.

Others have reported on important findings regarding declining teacher morale, including USA Today and Education Week. The short version is that many teachers are losing a commitment to their field amid multiple frustrations, including pressures around testing.

“While the teaching profession in the U.S. may not be in full blown crisis, … forces outside of teachers’ control may be taxing their good will and dedication,” the report says. “The most notable stressors revealed by the survey are the time What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic:

The Color of School Reform: New Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it.

New Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it. Why is progress so slow?:

The Color of School Reform
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans fired its mostly black teacher corps. Now its charter schools are trying to convince black educators that there’s a place for them.

 NEW ORLEANS—Throughout her first year at KIPP Central City Academy, Raven Foster heard the kind of compliment every educator loves to receive from students: that she was their favorite teacher. The reason, however, wasn’t because her kids loved her science class, or because they liked her sarcastic sense of humor, or because they appreciated her no-nonsense attitude. One after another, they told her they liked her because she’s black.

Foster knew she’d be one of just a few black teachers when she started working at this New Orleans charter school in 2012. While the overwhelming majority of the student body is black, nearly two-thirds of the teachers were white when she took the job. But her first year of teaching was hectic, filled with home visits, grueling lesson planning, and a schoolwide move to a brand new building. The racial makeup of the staff wasn’t a concern she had time for—until she realized that her kids were noticing it.

“I heard a student say, ‘Ms. Foster, I can’t get away with stuff with you because you’re black, but I can with this teacher because she’s white,’ ” she says.

Even innocuous interactions, like taking students to lunch or giving them rides home, came to be characterized by students racially. If a white teacher did something nice for a student, the student might muse, “Why isn’t the person that looks like me nice to me?” Foster says. “To me, that was them telling me, ‘I wish I had more.’ ”

Efforts in New Orleans suggest that charter leaders are still struggling to hire more black and local teachers.

What the students wanted more of was teachers who looked like them and came from a similar background, teachers who understood how they talked, behaved, and lived. And increasingly, Foster agreed: More teachers like her—black and from New Orleans—was exactly what schools like KIPP Central City Academy needed.

That realization has spread among charter school and school reform leaders nationwide in recent years as they have increasingly recognized that neglecting the racial composition of their ranks could stunt their attempt to reach and serve students of color. Charter school teachers, like the teaching profession nationally, are predominately white. And in post-Katrina New Orleans, they are more likely to be white than traditional schoolteachers are.

This new focus on recruiting minority teachers hasn’t met immediate success. Teach for America has signed up significantly more teachers of color, and charter networks around the country have kicked off similar recruiting campaigns. But the New Orleans experience shows how challenging the work can be: Charter leaders there still struggle to hire more black and local teachers—and to convince veteran teachers that they, too, are needed in the school-reform movement.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans school system boasted a significantly higher share of black teachers than most urban districts. In 2003, just 15 percent of teachers in large cities across the country were black. In New Orleans, where nearly all students are black, that figure was 72 percent.

In the aftermath of Katrina, the school board fired the district’s thousands of teachers en masse as it reconstituted the system as one largely composed of charter schools. Many educators weren’t rehired; some left teaching, or the city, for goodNew Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it. Why is progress so slow?:

A MUST READ: Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life

In 1940, a white developer wanted to build a neighborhood in Detroit.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What racist policies caused
2. Nothing has changed
3. Is it that bad?
4. Brain, health, and happiness
5. Experiment: Let them move
6. Solutions

So he asked the US Federal Housing Administration to back a loan. The FHA, which was created just six years earlier to help middle-class families buy homes, said no because the development was too close to an "inharmonious" racial group.

Meaning black people.

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information:

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools

The state’s eight charter schools are not technically charters right now. The state Supreme Court invalidated the original charter law last year.

Since then the schools have either operated independently or as part of a district near Spokane – even if they’re located across the state.

Thanks to a new law, the schools will be charters again this fall and can still call themselves charters in the meantime.

These publicly-funded, privately-run schools were promised to Washington voters as a way to serve at-risk students who struggle in traditional public schools.

As they wrap up their first year, KUOW Education Reporter Ann Dornfeld is taking a look at who enrolled in charters and how that compares to those promises.

TRANSCRIPT

Walking through the halls of Excel Public Charter School, you’ll see that most of the students are children of color.

Founder Adel Sefrioui says that’s no accident. When he scouted sites for the school, he looked for a location in the south end of Kent – a diverse part of town and home to many low-income families.

Adel Sefrioui: “We really wanted to serve a population of students that was representative of the Kent community. We set out from the very get-go to serve students who were historically underserved.”

Excel has a lot more black students than the surrounding school district. That’s true for most of the state’s charter schools. According to enrollment data the schools gave KUOW, some average two or three times as many black students compared to the districts in which they’re based.

That’s significant because black students tend to lag behind white and Asian students academically.

Sefrioui attributes much of the black enrollment at his school to the fact that the charter is based at a largely African-American church.

Adel Sefrioui: “Although we are not affiliated with the church as a public school, I think the members of the congregation saw a lot of value in signing their kid up in a public school that happens to be in their building.”

Poor students also tend to struggle in school, so the state’s charters promised to target kids from low-income families. For the most part, they also met that goal.

Bob Bifulco: “That general pattern seems consistent with what’s seen in a lot of other places – often low-income and students of color compared to the districts they’re serving in.”

Bob Bifulco is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. He’s studied the demographics of charter schools in other states. Bifulco says there are a lot of ways that charters end up with a particular student population.

The schools often appeal to families who don’t feel the nearby public schools serve them well. Charters might also do as Excel did: Locate in a neighborhood that’s home to their target demographic and market to those families.

But there are also areas in which Washington’s first charter schools appear to be falling short. 

Two major groups of students who often struggle in traditional public schools are kids who need special education services and English Language-Learners students. State law lists kids who need ELL and special ed services as particular focus areas for charters. Most of the state’s charter schools enrolled fewer special education and ELL students than the district average.

Bifulco says that’s a trend he’s seen nationwide.

Bob Bifulco: “Charter schools are often set up for a specific mission and serving Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information: