How Small is Small Enough?

I'm short on time today, so I'm allowing Mike Petrilli to do my thinking for me. He asks a very good question:

"Will teachers ever think their classes are small enough?" (to which his answer is "Doubtful.")

When I was teaching, my classes ranged from 23-29 students over the course of the year (due to student mobility). And, yes, I thought they were too large -- if for no other reason than because it was quite difficult to effectively monitor that many students at the same time. I was pretty convinced that my classes would have been fundamentally different if I had 10-15 students.

I don't know of any feasible way to fund a 50% reduction in class size, but let's say it happened. If I were teaching a class of, say, 13 students would I think that my class was small enough? I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. I have little doubt that I could teach 13 students more effectively than 26, but I also have little doubt that I could teach 6 or 7 students more effectively than 13 -- so I'm not sure I'd have a strong incentive to think my classes were small enough even with only 13 students. Even if I had two students, I'm not sure that I would say that my class was small enough because I might be able to do a lot more good with only one of the students at a time.

So maybe he's right, maybe teachers would never say that classes were small enough.

But maybe that's not quite the right question. I can't imagine not wishing for fewer students in my class, but I can imagine thinking that other policy ideas would do more good than reducing class sizes. Let's say, for example, that somebody provided me a list of 10 reforms and asked me to rank them in order of which reforms might do the most amount of good. I could imagine "reducing class size" falling down that list as the size of my class shrunk.

Then again, my perception of the size of my class would probably rely largely on the size of other classes that I saw and experienced. If I had 13 students and the average class size in the country was 8, I'd probably still complain.

Anyway, enough rambling. Back to the question. At what point would class sizes be small enough?

Teaching and Barriers to Entry

Depending on whom you ask, there may or may not be a teacher shortage. I think everybody would agree, however, that there is a shortage of quality teachers and that there are certain positions that go unfilled each year. My school, for example, was short 2 science teachers, a special ed. teacher, and a Spanish teacher my second year -- and a Chorus teacher (after the original teacher and her replacement both quit in the first two months) for most of the year during the second year I taught.

So, in some way, shape, or form, more teachers are needed. What's interesting is how this problem has been addressed. A variety of strategies have been tried: bonuses, fellowships, cutting red tape on hiring, etc. But the most prevalent one seems to be simply lowering the barriers to entry. In other words, making it easier to become a teacher.

I, personally, would not have started teaching if the policy hadn't been in place. Even though I had no training in education, I was allowed to spend one intense summer (supposedly) learning the basics and then jump right into a classroom. Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, and who knows how many other local, regional, and national programs have popped up as alternative routes to certification.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with this strategy, you have to admit that it's interesting. And I wonder what it says about the field of teaching. What if we had a shortage of doctors; would we address that by lowering barriers to entry? I can't imagine we would b/c nobody wants a doctor operating on them who is smart but knows little about the human body. What if there was a shortage of lawyers; would we shorten law school? If we had a shortage of bus drivers, would we let them finish the training courses while driving routes full-time? If we had a shortage of police officers, would we give people temporary badges while they figure out how to do their job?

I don't know the answers to above questions. I guess people used to be temporarily deputized in order to form posses to track outlaws in the old days (at least in books and movies anyway), so maybe there is some precedent for this. But I wonder which fields we'd be willing to lower entry requirements for and which we wouldn't. And why.

Someone Asked What Teachers Think?

As a former teacher, it is my personal bias that teachers are not frequently enough included in the policy-making process. It seems like we often analyze everything except for what teachers think. Meanwhile, it seems like an awful lot of reforms fail b/c teachers don't adopt them.

Well, a team from Education Sector just released the results of a national teacher survey. More than one blog post will be devoted to this, but for this one I'd like to look at the opinion questions that resulted in the most lopsided responses (>70% agreeing with one side). For the sake of brevity, I'll summarize each question, but I'll put the actual number from the survey next to it and you can read the full question from the report if you want more information (and let me know if my summary is unfair).

-81% of teachers agree that negative press coverage prevents the most talented people from entering teaching (9)

-80% agree that teachers are "rarely consulted about what happens in their school" (6)

-86% agree that teachers are required to do too much paperwork

-85% say that more prep and planning time is a good or excellent idea to help recruit better teachers into the field (14)

-78% of teachers say the same about easing rules on coming out of retirement (15)

-71% say that offering "substantially higher starting salaries in exchange for smaller pensions when they retire" is only a fair or poor idea for helping to recruit better teachers (16)

-80% strongly or somewhat favor giving "Teachers who work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools" financial incentives (23)

-79% said the unionization of the teaching force was not a consideration in choosing a career (37)

-84% say the same about the considerable job protection in teaching (38)

-75% agree that "Teachers facing unfair charges from parents or students would have nowhere to turn without the union" (46)

-75% agree that "Without collective bargaining, the working conditions and salaries of teachers would be much worse" (48)

-77% agree that "Without a union, teachers would be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power" (49)

-76% say that unions "Effectively negotiate contracts, salary, and benefits on behalf of teachers"(54A)

-84% say that unions "Protect teachers through due process and grievance procedures" (57A)

-79% say that unions "Regularly inform teachers about their benefits, rights, and responsibilities" (60A)

More on this later but, at first glance, it appears that teachers think that:

1. they aren't given enough respect
2. their time isn't allocated in the best way possible
3. unions are doing some good things

Who Should Evaluate Teachers?

A lot of ideas that make sense on paper (especially regarding teacher pay and teacher training) rest on being able to accurately (and fairly) evaluate teachers. This leads to two major questions: who should evaluate teachers and how should they do it?

The how is a more complicated question than I care to address right now, but I've frequently thought about the who last couple years, particularly given the problems I noticed with evaluations while I was teaching. The issue also came up in my last class -- where it was essentially batted around by a lot of former teachers. Based on previous thoughts, current practice, and recent discussion, these seem to be the options:

-An Administrative Supervisor (e.g. Principal or Asst. Principal)
-A Non-Administrative Supervisor (e.g. Dept. Chair)
-Other Teachers
-An Outside Expert (like in Martinique)
-A Mentor or Coach
-Some combination of the above

If you're a teacher (especially if there's a lot riding on the evaluation), you want to be evaluated by somebody who:

1.) Is an expert
2.) Knows you/your teaching well
3.) You can trust to be fair and impartial

The problem is that none of the options (save possibly the last one) meet all three of these criteria.

Administrative supervisors might meet all or none of these criteria depending on the situation. For example: a former English teacher who becomes a principal would not likely be an expert in teaching physics (and vice-versa). Whether your principal knows you well or is trustworthy depends on the circumstances.

I don't think there are many non-administrative supervisors. How many department chairs really count as supervisors? I'm sure exceptions exist, but the question then becomes what responsibilities these people have other than evaluating and if any of these are conflicts of interest.

I'm also not sure that I've ever heard of teachers bearing responsibility for evaluating other teachers (other than faculty making tenure decisions). I think there's some merit to this idea, but the largest problem is that it could negatively affect teacher communities, or at least make them artificial (e.g. people only say good things about themselves).

The outside expert could be both knowledgeable and impartial, but how well will they actually know the teacher?

The mentor or coach may best know your abilities, can they really be an effective source of guidance if they're also in charge of evaluating somebody (e.g. why would somebody come to them with their problems?).

Do we pick what we think is the best of these options, come up with something else, or combine these? Why not have an evaluation committee made up of some people from all walks of life? Imagine a committee made up of some teachers, administrators, and experts who were in charge of evaluating a number of teachers. Would this work? Would this be too cumbersome? Would it be worth it?

Teachers in Martinique

On Friday I attended a conference for graduate students at Harvard. The conference was run quite well -- if any grad students are reading I'd encourage you to go and present next year -- and the amenities were quite remarkable given the unbeatable $0 registration fee. I saw a number of interesting presentations, but have been quite busy (I'm now in NYC for another conference) so I'm just going to mention one that I found even more interesting than others.

During the last session of the day Nick Gozik, a student from NYU, spoke about his research (I'm quite sure it's his dissertation) that he conducted in Martinique. Martinique is an island in the Caribbean (somewhat near Venezuela) that was a French colony and their education system is still under the control of France. He spent most of a year on the island and says he spoke with half of the high-school teachers in the system, so you can imagine how much information he collected.

Given that this will take him hundreds of pages to explain, I'm just going to briefly summarize two points I found interesting.

1.) He said that teachers repeatedly emphasized that they followed the curriculum because they were professionals (history teachers identified themselves as "historians," etc.) rather than due to any external forces. The current trend here right now is to essentially punish those who don't follow the curriculum by "holding them accountable." Teachers are different in the two different countries, but I found this contrast fascinating.

2.) Even more interesting is that principals were not responsible for evaluating teachers in their schools because they were not experts in most of the fields (e.g. when a math teacher becomes a principal they do not feel prepared to evaluate a history teacher). Instead, inspectors came to the schools occasionally and both trained and evaluated teachers. I do wonder if this model might actually be better than our current model in the U.S. where principals are essentially expected to both know how and actually do everything. We read an article in a class last week about educational administrators lacking deep knowledge of many subject areas and ways to address this. Our class was divided over whether attempts should be made to intensely train principals in all subjects or if instructional leadership should be ceded to an expert in each field (we were thinking perhaps a revision of the dept. head role, but an outside inspector is another interesting idea).

More on Business-Style Management of Education

I offered some thoughts the other day about business-think in schools, and I noticed this post by Diane Ravitch in the blog she shares with Deborah Meier on EdWeek. It's extremely thoughtful, quite short, and very worthwhile reading.

I share her aggravation over the notion that only people who are not involved with schools are able to fix them and that running schools like businesses is the magic bullet. Not that outsiders and business practices can't offer some valuable insight, but I hardly think that they offer all the answers.

Who's Asking What Teachers Think?

This piece in EdWeek caught my eye yesterday: Margaret Spellings is recruiting a team of teachers (5 full-time and 20 part-time) to help refine proposals for changes in education policy at the Dept. of Education starting in the fall. Two thoughts:

1. Wow. Seems like a great idea. Though, to be cynical, anybody could find 25 teachers that agree with their favorite policy proposal if they wanted to (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not what they're doing until I hear otherwise).

2. What momentous changes, exactly, is the Bush administration planning on making in his last few months in office? It's great that they have current teachers to comment on the feasibility of their ideas, but it's hard to believe that they'll have time to implement many of their ideas.