Innovation teams can build bridges to schools of future

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• Paul 11 years ago11 years ago

  AYP, which I was referring to, is a pretty standard measure. I looked at results for racial subgroups such as African Americans and Latinos, not only for the socio-economically disadvantaged umbrella group. Are we to assume, given San Francisco Unified's use of Teach for America teachers (holders of intern credentials, rather than preliminary or clear credentials) -- in Superintendent's Zone schools (the district's lowest-performing schools, so grouped because the district has acknowledged the magnitude of its … Read More

  AYP, which I was referring to, is a pretty standard measure. I looked at results for racial subgroups such as African Americans and Latinos, not only for the socio-economically disadvantaged umbrella group.

  Are we to assume, given San Francisco Unified’s use of Teach for America teachers (holders of intern credentials, rather than preliminary or clear credentials) — in Superintendent’s Zone schools (the district’s lowest-performing schools, so grouped because the district has acknowledged the magnitude of its achievement gap) no less — that San Francisco Unified is violating the legal hiring priority? If not, then it is a factual matter that SFUSD is (still) having trouble recruiting teachers.

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• Paul 11 years ago11 years ago

  Hello again, CarolineSF. I was actually looking a little deeper than the district-wide API number. I used the Ed-Data "Tests" tab, at the district level, to view AYP per cent proficient by subgroup. If you do this for SFUSD, you'll notice that the district was far, far below the targets for most subgroups. OUSD and SFUSD look pretty similar in this view, with OUSD ahead in some categories, SFUSD in others. So that we don't get completely … Read More

  Hello again, CarolineSF.

  I was actually looking a little deeper than the district-wide API number. I used the Ed-Data “Tests” tab, at the district level, to view AYP per cent proficient by subgroup. If you do this for SFUSD, you’ll notice that the district was far, far below the targets for most subgroups. OUSD and SFUSD look pretty similar in this view, with OUSD ahead in some categories, SFUSD in others.

  So that we don’t get completely off-topic, my point was that school districts have trouble recruiting talent. I used SFUSD as an example, as the New Teacher Project had studied its HR practices and found that the best-educated candidates were simply going elsewhere (for various reasons).

  I posited that districts with low-performing schools are especially in need of talent. I said of San Francisco, “Here we have an example of a school district with … large numbers of low-performing schools.” This is borne out by the district’s own press release, which says, “44 percent (45/102) of the schools ranked in the below average category, the lowest 40 percent of the state, with a statewide ranking of 1 through 4. There were 19 schools in the bottom 10 percent of the statewide ranking system with a rank of 1.”

  The whole point of the exercise was to say that it’s good to have external innovators at the table when you have such a mess, though they shouldn’t just be voices from Silicon Valley, and some people from the district school word should be included.

• Richard Moore (@infosherpa) 11 years ago11 years ago

  San Francisco and Long Beach both have outstanding school libraries — staffed with school librarians….just sayin’.

  Patrick — it would do you good to wander down those foothills to the local public school and ask if you could visit their library. Ask who runs the place. Talk to them. Ask them what they do. Let us know what you find out.

  • Richard Moore (@infosherpa) 11 years ago11 years ago

    By the way — LAUSD is the place where they put their librarians on “trial” where they had to prove they were teachers — in a basement downtown — or they would lose their jobs.

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• el 11 years ago11 years ago

  Heh. Love ‘Too little practical experience, too much glitter.’

  Piggybacking on the money part…

  Let’s say you do attract the top graduates of the top schools in the country, and let’s pretend they did make the very best teachers. When their children get to be college-aged, how the heck will they be able to afford to send them?

• Gary Ravani 11 years ago11 years ago

  Paul:

  “the public sector has difficulty attracting and retaining talent”

  What do you base that on? beginning teachers have a very low retention rate, but there is no indication “talent” per se is driving them out.

  • el 11 years ago11 years ago

    "talent" in this case is a synonym for "people" and although it implies high quality people, it only has an echo of that. But it's meant to imply skilled people - like teachers - rather than say jobs that are considered to be low skilled, interchangeable, and easily taught, like say, delivery workers. The reality is that in many venues that teaching does not pay enough to own a home within that district's boundary, which does … Read More

    “talent” in this case is a synonym for “people” and although it implies high quality people, it only has an echo of that. But it’s meant to imply skilled people – like teachers – rather than say jobs that are considered to be low skilled, interchangeable, and easily taught, like say, delivery workers.

    The reality is that in many venues that teaching does not pay enough to own a home within that district’s boundary, which does in fact make it very difficult to retain younger teachers. Older teachers often bought before the California housing market skyrocketed, and so we as a state have been able to ride that for some time.

    • Gary Ravani 11 years ago11 years ago

      El: I am certainly not going to argue that teachers don't deserve to be paid as professionals. I've spent some 25 years negotiating and arguing to support improved teacher compensation. That being said, let's not forget that teachers are also not primarily motivated by dollar issues. They enter and remain in the profession, not to make huge amounts of money, but to make a difference in kids lives. There is real empirical information on why teachers … Read More

      El:

      I am certainly not going to argue that teachers don’t deserve to be paid as professionals. I’ve spent some 25 years negotiating and arguing to support improved teacher compensation. That being said, let’s not forget that teachers are also not primarily motivated by dollar issues. They enter and remain in the profession, not to make huge amounts of money, but to make a difference in kids lives. There is real empirical information on why teachers leave the profession in droves in the first five years, and the two primary reasons are: 1) lack of resources available to do their jobs; and, 2) poor leadership. Debate on the schools struggles mightily to avoid actual discussion of real causes and real effects and wallows in cliches about “accountability,” “no excuses,” “powerful teachers’ unions,” etc., but can’t seem to wrestle with poverty, resources (who is to be held accountable for CA being 49th in the nation in funding per child? teachers? unions?), or leadership for that matter.

      • el 11 years ago11 years ago

        I agree with you, but there is a floor, and part of that floor is "enough money to comfortably pay the bills and have ordinary housing nearby." It is part of the "and I'm supposed to do science labs with these kids for $1/kid/year" problem. I don't think teachers feel the need to make Wall Street salaries but they also don't want to have to worry about whether they're buying too many groceries this week … Read More

        I agree with you, but there is a floor, and part of that floor is “enough money to comfortably pay the bills and have ordinary housing nearby.” It is part of the “and I’m supposed to do science labs with these kids for $1/kid/year” problem. I don’t think teachers feel the need to make Wall Street salaries but they also don’t want to have to worry about whether they’re buying too many groceries this week or if they’ll be able to send the kids to college.

        When someone comes in here talking about “peace corps” salaries we’re talking single people who will eventually want to grow up and get a real job, and who are learning on the job the whole time they serve. It’s not a sustainable way to build a skilled workforce.

        My area tends to be lower paid than others which reflects my comment. Probably in the central valley there’s a better match of salaries to housing cost.

  • Paul 11 years ago11 years ago

    Hello, Gary. I mean that school districts -- particularly ones with patterns of low student performance -- have trouble hiring teachers with strong academic backgrounds, http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_SFUSD_Full_Report_020509F.pdf and that people who choose a teaching career tend to have been average academic performers. http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf#page=22 Recently, I've found some analyses that measure lifetime earnings for various professions. Though the technical quality varies, with some analysts naively adding nominal yearly incomes, others at least discounting the yearly incomes for inflation, and the best ones, … Read More

    Hello, Gary.

    I mean that school districts — particularly ones with patterns of low student performance — have trouble hiring teachers with strong academic backgrounds,

    http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_SFUSD_Full_Report_020509F.pdf

    and that people who choose a teaching career tend to have been average academic performers.

    http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf#page=22

    Recently, I’ve found some analyses that measure lifetime earnings for various professions. Though the technical quality varies, with some analysts naively adding nominal yearly incomes, others at least discounting the yearly incomes for inflation, and the best ones, creating comprehensive net present value models, the conclusion is always the same: among professionals with the same level of education, teachers have the lowest lifetime earnings. This no doubt influences the availability of talent.

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• el 11 years ago11 years ago

  Let me try to clarify my comment a bit. It's not that people in schools don't have ideas and don't have smart, capable people. What they don't have is resources to try something that costs even ten bucks more than the status quo nor do they have any leeway to fail (I will stipulate here that by "fail" I mean "show any decline on standardized testing". One of the reasons the startup culture is very successful is that … Read More

  Let me try to clarify my comment a bit.

  It’s not that people in schools don’t have ideas and don’t have smart, capable people.

  What they don’t have is resources to try something that costs even ten bucks more than the status quo nor do they have any leeway to fail (I will stipulate here that by “fail” I mean “show any decline on standardized testing”.

  One of the reasons the startup culture is very successful is that there is a lot of room to fail. You get a pot of money, an idea, some smart people, and you make a go of it. The hope is that there will be a big payoff. If the whole venture fails, generally all the staff can find other work, and the money has typically come from a group that has enough other projects that one will pay off. No one walks away broken and ruined, and anyone who does consented beforehand.

  We don’t really have that luxury with kids, especially not someone else’s kids, and we have no resources to “repair” the situation if it doesn’t work out. For example, let’s say we try a 100 kid lecture situation – and at the end of the semester we realize that none of the kids learned a thing off the syllabus. With resources and cooperation, it might be possible to make that up over the summer or provide some intensive tutoring to get those kids back on track. Schools don’t have that. And unlike the workers in our startup example, teachers and students from failing schools may not be able to just pick up and continue without lasting damage. If this was an A-G class for UC admission, the kids’ records are permanently affected.

  This is one reason that summer programs may be the best way to innovate, because attendance is optional and the risk, should there be total failure, is less.