A great article on education reform

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120364195876084617.html?mod=opinion_journal_federation

I found this one on the Wall Street Journal this morning. It proposes a mixture of business type school reforms, as well as instructional/curriculum based reforms. In other words, you can use "business" strategy to reform schools- fix the hiring process (end tenure!!!) and offer school choice (the author is a big believer in this system- I haven't thought about this enough to comment, but do wonder in inner-city schools- how much choice is there if there aren't many private/parochial schools to turn to?)- as well as fix the curriculum- stop using trendy methods that are marketed as the "answer" to teaching students, and work on figuring out what really works (brain based research as well as maybe creating tests that actually test something- can you read? can you write? can you do basic math and apply logical thinking? do you have a grounding in principles of science?). The "figuring out what really works" is the hard part (who does it, how do they do it, etc.)- but the author of this article looks at the Massachusetts school system (but does a lousy job actually explaining what they do right- he gives them about two paragraphs at the end!), which seems to be a success where it matters- in the classroom and in the lives of students.

There was one new point that the author brought up that I have not thought too much about- teacher education. I never took any education classes in undergrad and only took a crash course at the grad level, to achieve certification in an alternate route program. I did not realize that much of the bad practices in education are taught to education majors, since schools of education have not really looked at their curriculum to see if what they teach really works for students. I have noticed that the strongest teachers at my old schools were the alternate route teachers- those with little "indoctrination" from an education program. They had great success with students and were willing to try any method that worked with their group of students. In my own classroom, I never really used "educational theory" as anything other than a tool- MI theory, Bloom's, etc. were all useful at certain times. I learned my methodology from my own research in language acquisition (my area) and from my students. At the end of each lesson, I would have "Student Satisfaction Surveys"- I asked my students to identify strong and weak spots in my teaching and give me ideas for how to help them. Some kids wanted more groups, some wanted more one-on-one with me, some wanted less homework but more work in the classroom, and the list goes on. I used this information to modify my teaching for each class as well as for each student. Again, I have not taken the traditional education classes, so maybe this is where some of the bad teaching comes from?

Last point- the author of the article also talks about teaching certification- a process that does need some revamping, just as the hiring-retention-training process does. To be certified, you have to have the paperwork (courses, tests, degrees), but to retain your certification, you have do not much of anything. You have to teach, but then do something like 100+ hours every five years of "professional development." Now, this "development" can be utterly ridiculous- you can take stupid seminars on how to use Microsoft Word and get 10 hours of credit. Why not actually keep this requirement, but give it some teeth? Every field has national associations, all of which have national conventions. Why not put aside some money to send people to these conferences, instead of hiring people to give "professional development" seminars to schools on certain days of the year (as someone who experienced these "professional ed" days- they are worthless, especially the generic ones for the whole school- and they aren't cheap for school districts- you can pay thousands of dollars to presenters who add nothing to a teacher's ability to teach)? Why not ask many of the national associations to put on web classes (which are cheaper than flying people to conference at one particular point) for their fields? Why not have teachers work over the summer to do professional development- as a department, as a county, as a state?

The problem with this last point is who will pay for it- my husband finds it amazing that I have to do these hours for my certification, but have to pay for all of it (well, some schools offer "tuition assistance," but they have arcane rules for what they will pay for. They also pay for things not related to education- if you have a MA, then they will pay for you take classes in any field you want, even if it is not related to what you teach. This needs to go and money needs to go for developing what you do in the job you are paid for). He finds that strange- I find it typical in education. The money is the issue- I just wish that doing best for the students would be more of the issue, and then managing the money to reach that goal.