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The Common Core Tests: A Test of Adult Integrity

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The Common Core challenge this year is not for children taking the new academic tests aligned with the Core but for parents and teachers and politicians who must consider what the “re-centered” test scores say about students and education in the United States. Are the adults in our nation up to the task of academic honesty or will they buckle under and blame the Core and its tests should student achievement not meet their preconceptions? Implementing and living with the Common Core really is a test of adult integrity in the United States.

Why is there an onus on adults to understand and honestly respond to the anticipated angst that will rise when student scores on the Core tests are made public? Simply put, the lowered test scores are what honest adults should have expected when education standards and expectations in this country were adjusted to improve the competitive achievement of our children with their international peers. The honest appraisal is that a score of proficient on a traditional academic test in the United States was not equal to a proficient score on an international test. The academic performances of many children will not match the image that uninformed adults have of our school children. What will the adult response be? Will it be Horatio Alger redux – commitment to future success through hard work – or will it be a damning of the new data with an homage to Lake Woebegone?

Let’s examine the world of educational achievement that led to the Common Core State Standards. “For years, the academic progress of our nation’s students has been stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Particularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.

Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states, in 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collaboration among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts, the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators.” These were the words and actions of the collective governors and state school superintendents of our nation. And, forty-three states concurred by adopting the Core as their new state standards.

http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/

What were the governors and state school superintendents thinking? Actually, they did nothing more than listen to and respond to the roused finger pointing of American business interests and politicians. The United States lost the historic economic advantage it had held over the rest of the world due to the success of public education in this country. Education in the US was universal and focused upon college or the industrial skills of pre-World War Two. Education in the rest of the world was for privileged children only. When European and Asian leaders observed the connection of a rigorous education system to economic growth, they quickly reformed their national school systems and their academic performances climbed above the academic achievements of the United States which languished with a 1950s educational system.

Specifically, what was this data? “Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 27th (this is the best estimate, although the rank could be between 23 and 29 due to sampling and measurement error). Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 20 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.

Just over one-quarter (26%) of 15-year-olds in the United States do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency, at which level students begin to demonstrate the skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life. This percentage is higher than the OECD average of 23% and has remained unchanged since 2003. By contrast, in Hong Kong-China, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, 10% of students or fewer are poor performers in mathematics.

While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.

The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.”

http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf

So, how should the use of Core-aligned tests be viewed by honest adults? Adults need to understand the changes in academic expectations that require a more rigorous test. And, adults need to be honest in understanding that when children are given a more rigorous test, their initial achievement results will not resemble their results on the former, less rigorous tests. Adults accustomed to inflated pre-Core test results will be dismayed with their children’s performances on the new tests. This happens whenever large scale tests are “re-centered”. It is similar to the problem that the College Board faced with the national results on the SAT in 1995.

“The primary problem with the pre-1995 scale is that test scores are still linked to the 1941 and 1942 reference groups of students, and the test-taking population changed significantly in the decades after World War II.”

In the post-World War years, the annual average on the SAT slowly crept higher and higher. This was not the result of changes in educational quality but rather the result of using outdated reference points in determining test scores. The SAT suffered from score inflation or scores that did not clearly represent academic performance. As a result, the College Board re-centered its testing reference points in 1995. This resulted in a new scoring system that was different than the 1995 system.

http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history.html

In 2015 we face another re-centering event. The systems of labeling educational performance will change and scores before 2015 that were in the mid to lower ranges of proficiency will no longer be proficient. The same will be true of scores in the advanced range. Or to say it differently, children who were considered academically proficient or advanced before 2015 may not be academically proficient or advanced in 2015 and beyond.

How do we know this? Two states already have experienced re-centering. “In New York and Kentucky, two states that adopted Common Core tests early, the percentage of students considered proficient in reading and math plummeted. In New York, about two-thirds of students were proficient on both on pre-Common Core tests; after the new tests were introduced, fewer than one-third were considered proficient.

Results in Kentucky were similar. And the same thing is likely to happen nationally. Seventeen states worked together on a new standardized test as part of a coalition called Smarter Balanced. In November, Smarter Balanced predicted that less than half of students will be considered proficient in reading and math this year.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/1/7477495/common-core-2015

What should we expect when the 2015 scores on Core-aligned tests are released? It is too easy to anticipate the response of those without integrity. They will complain that the fault is in the Core and the tests. The tests are too hard. They are not the tests we want for our children. They do not represent education in our state or community.

However, unless our states and communities have seceded from the United States or the world, the 2015 test scores will clearly represent a more honest appraisal of local, state and national academic performance than the pre-2015 scores. And, the 2015 scores will point to the areas of improvement that will be necessary if the adults of our nation really want their children to be academically competitive internationally.

This also has historic precedents. When the Russians launched their Sputnik in 1957, leaders in the United States were dismayed at how the Soviet Union had beaten this country into space. “American concerns that they had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the race to space led quickly to a push by legislators and educators for greater emphasis on mathematics and the physical sciences in American schools. The United States’ National Defense Education Act of 1958 increased funding for these goals from childhood education through the post-graduate level.

U.S. citizens feared that schools in the USSR were superior to American schools, and Congress reacted by adding the act to take US schools up to speed.

In 1940 about one-half million Americans attended college, which was about 15 percent of their age group. By 1960, however, college enrollments had expanded to 3.6 million. By 1970, 7.5 million students were attending colleges in the U.S., or 40 percent of college-age youths.”

http://www.ask.com/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act?qsrc=3044

Historically, education systems in the United States have responded to national challenges with improved results. One response to the challenges posed when we again re-center education in the United States is to understand the dynamics of change and allow schools, teachers and students to successfully adjust to new academic standards and tests. This is the Horatio Alger tradition, a story of success that the people of the United States have lived over and over again.

Of course, there is another recourse. We can ignore the disconnection between what adults want from their schools and what they are willing to do to achieve what they want. We can warm ourselves with the words we love to say and hear. Thank you, Mr. Keillor, and I paraphrase:

“That’s the way it is in these United States where all women are strong, all men are good looking and all children are above average.”

Leadership Longevity Is Tenuous

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Leaders, who are not self-employed, live in a fragile world of employment security made increasingly more tenuous with each passing year. Making a career as a leader is a role to which many aspire but few will achieve longevity. Their reality is that leadership is the art of swimming in deep water while carrying the weight of their decisions. The sign on the leader’s office door says, “No lifeguards on duty.”

In The Anguish of Leadership (2000), Jerry Patterson describes a leader as a person always swimming in deep water. At the beginning of his tenure, a leader swims quite well. He enjoys the honeymoon of employment when his employers and most employees wish him well and their support gives him buoyancy. Also, his pockets are empty. He has no experiential record, good or bad, in this employment.

I paraphrase Abraham Lincoln with “You can be successful with all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot be successful with all the people all the time.” Every time a leader is unsuccessful, a rock is placed in the leader’s pocket. Events that are hugely unsuccessful load in larger and heavier rocks. And, rocks in the pockets make it increasingly more difficult to swim in deep water. On the positive side, rocks may be taken out of his pockets by professional successes. Interestingly, there is no correspondence between the rocks taken out for a success and rocks placed in for a failure; the rocks of failure are heavier and more numerous than the rocks of success.

Adding a second paraphrase, this from John Wayne in Big Jake, “ … my fault, your fault, nobody’s fault, I am going to hold you responsible.” Patterson believes that a leader’s professional well-being is affected by the successes and failures of everyone in the business for whom he is responsible. When a subordinate is unsuccessful, rocks may be placed in that person’s pockets but always some rocks will be placed in the leader’s pockets. When President Truman placed his famous “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his White House desk, he also was saying “This is my rock pile – all grievances, disagreements, and disenchantments with my leadership go here.”

Eventually, Patterson writes, the total weight of the rocks in his pocket will pull almost every leader under the water. Or, the constant burden of swimming with heavy rocks in his pocket wears down the leader and he succumbs. Few leaders escape significant drowning as they work through their careers. Some leaders will re-emerge in a similar leadership position in a different organization and many may enact a resurrection several times over the length of their career, but almost all will drown once.

Head coaches for professional sports teams are a case in point. As the person leading a professional team, the coach is ultimately responsible for the success of the team as expressed in the team’s win and loss record. Wins are good and losses are “rocks”. Too few wins and too many losses creates a heavy pocket of rocks. On Monday, December 29, the day after the final game of the 2014 National Football League season, four head coaches and two general managers were fired. Each had accumulated too many rocks in their pockets. 2014 is not unique. The average tenure of a head coach in the NFL is 2.39 years. The average tenure in the National Hockey League is 3.0 years, 3.03 in the National Basketball Association and 3.8 years for Major League Baseball head coaches. Leaders drown in the deep water of professional sports every year and sometimes at mid-season.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-02-29/managers-coaches-tenure/53376918/1

Public education is no different. The keeping of wins and losses is not as dramatic in education as it is in sports, but school leaders are handed rocks just as often as head coaches. The average tenure of a school district superintendent is 5.5 years. The rocks for urban, super-large districts are heavier. Their average tenure is 3.3 years. Approximately 15% of all superintendents professionally drown each year.

http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=740

Superintendents are hired and drown in the shadow of the Lincoln paraphrasing. Few are fired due to a criminal act or professional malpractice. These do happen, but they are rare. The great majority of drownings are the result of a general loss of confidence in the superintendent. A loss of confidence make occur with major stakeholders in the school district, such as parent groups or special interest groups. These groups control large piles of rocks. Local religious and business leaders have their own stockpile of rocks. Students, the most important group of people in a school district, also control rocks albeit smaller rocks. And, of course, the confidence of the Board of Education is essential. When the Board loses confidence in the superintendent a professional drowning is soon to follow.

A superintendent making important decisions for a school district will inextricably offend some rock holders even with the best of decisions. It is a fact of life for a leader. Creating smaller class sizes is a good thing for students, teachers and most parents, but it stirs the rocks of taxpayers who object to increased costs. Cutting costs is a good thing for taxpayers, but diminishing the resources for schools and classrooms stirs the rocks of the teacher’s union and PTAs. Allowing school events on Wednesday evenings wins the admiration of sports and fine arts fans who enjoy more games and concerts, but it raises the rock throwing ire of church leaders who lose time for religious education generally held on that night of the week. No matter, rocks find their way into the pockets of every school leader and even the best eventually sink lower and lower into Jerry Patterson’s deep end of the pool.

So, knowing the reality of a leader’s professional world, those who aspire to be leaders, those who are still above water in the deep end of the leadership pool, and those who employ leaders should honor Robert Herrick’s verse to The Virgins. Leaders must lead as well as they are able to and for as long as they are able to remain above water because no leader survives the eventual weight of the rocks in his pockets.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day

Tomorrow will be dying.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/virgins-make-much-time

If You Point Fingers, Point to a Better Solution

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When a problem arises in the US count on two phenomena to follow: 1. public outcry with its omnipresent indignation leading to 2. finger pointing. When a problem involves any aspect of governmental oversight count on one more unfailing phenomenon: regulations will fly! Is this true? Follow the cries and finger pointings of these current problems –

  • Children in the US are not academically competitive with children in other nations.
  • There is a gap in academic achievement between white children from middle class and affluent families and the achievement of children of color and children living in poverty.
  • As a profession, teacher candidates graduating from college represent the lower 50% of undergradate GPAs.
  • Higher education is unable to correct or strengthen its failed teacher preparation programs.
  • If nothing is done to correct the above problems, the economic power of the US will deteriorate even further from its glory as world leader.
  • And, the USDE is releasing a 400+ page set of regulations that, in a nutshell, apply No Child Left Behind strategies to teacher preparation programs.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2014/11/ed_dept_teacher-prep_regulatio.html?intc=es

And, as a result of the work results of this dotted line scenario, the academic competence of all school children in the US will be significantly improved.

Hide the spoons to prevent self-gagging! Einstein’s bones are bouncing in his box as once again we apply our usual and failed strategies expecting successful results.

When so many turn their heads with educational jealousy to the new leaders of international academic competitions, namely Finland, Singapore, Shanghai, and the Netherlands, why aren’t we also turning our eyes for solutions to the international leaders in vocational training? We read of the poor comparisons between our teachers and those in Finland, between the spoiled work ethic of children in the US compared with their peers in India and China, and failure of US schools to prepare high school graduates for trades-work that is an economic mainstay in industrialized nations. Now, we read of the US Department of Education’s indictment of teacher preparation programs to be improved by high stakes, performance for federal grants regulations. If, as the USDE asserts, this national problem can be remedied with better teacher preparation, why don’t we look to the German apprenticeship program for a better idea? The training system that creates the skill sets to design and produce Porsches and BMWs must be doing something right!

http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/A-Bud/Apprenticeship-Programs.html

Using a backwards design approach, applying the German apprenticeship approach to talented teacher development would look like this.

7. All children are taught by highly qualified teachers using the best of teaching practices.

6. A school district hires a highly trained, job-proven teacher with whom the district is professionally invested – district success and teacher success are inexorably tied to each other.

5. The apprentice-teacher learns teaching practices from a combination of college courses and on-the-job instruction and applies and refines these practices as a classroom teacher in the school district.

4. The school district and college preparation program co-opt each other. The district will pay a salary to the apprentice-teacher to learn on the job and the preparation program will dually credit the student-apprentice for learning on the job and in the program.

3. An apprentice teacher simultaneously is a full-time teacher-in-training working in the school classrooms and a full-time student in a college teacher preparation program.

2. The school district creates contacts with potential teacher candidates during their freshman and sophomore years in college for the purpose of pre-screening and building future working relationships.

1. The school district begins a teacher candidate recruitment strategy five to six years in advance of hiring a new teacher.

Now, in a forward design mode. The inculcation of a highly trained and job ready first-year teacher into a school culture and its educational expectations is too important to languish with the educated “hunches” of HR personnel and school administrators. Their track record is too much like a baseball scout trying to divine the productivity of a hot prospect who appears to have all of the baseball skills. In truth, neither the HR people and administrators nor the scout know if they have picked a winner.

So, why guess at the success of a new hire? Instead, hand train your successor teachers through an apprentice program. Every apprentice cum teacher will be classroom-proven in the district’s own schools for employment in those schools.

There is a second level of benefit to an apprenticeship approach to teacher development. A school district expends considerable time and resources in recruiting, orienting, providing initial educator mentoring, and supervising through a probationary period. Too often, as national statistics prove out, a high percentage of new teachers leave teaching within the first three years of their early career. Teaching is not what they expected it to be. Or, children and classroom management is more difficult than imagined. It is probable that the cost of constant teacher replacement offsets much of the cost of an apprentice’s on-the-job salary.

Why isn’t your local school district using an apprentice program already? That’s a simple answer. Because no one else is. Apprenticeships break the mold of past and current practices. They disturb the age old system that the USDE says is not working but wants to fix through sanctions. If some school district instituted an apprenticeship program, it would be difficult to contain the good news.

However, apprenticeship-teacher preparatory programs require time, money and commitment. Because they are by their structure a work in progress, a school district and teacher preparatory institution would need to commit to a five or six year scheme. This is not easy for either party that has operated for decades if not centuries on “you accredit your undergraduate, we’ll recruit and hire them.” And, how has that worked out?

Additionally, apprentice-teacher programs are not easy because the school district must pay an apprentice a salary for on-the-job training. In a world of taxpayer oversight, levying for apprenticeship funding would make the program a year-by-year proposition.

Finally, the district, teacher preparatory program and apprentice must make a commitment to each other. The culture of young adults in the US is even less commitment oriented than our institutions. Most undergraduates change their major at least once while in college. Most undergraduates take five or six years to complete a four-year degree program. And, contemporary thinking is that a young adult will change vocations at least six times before retirement. From the institutional side, new standards or educational mandates will be implemented during the apprentice’s on-the-job training years. How can the district be sure that their trained apprentice will match with as-yet-unknown mandates of the future?

All this said, is what the USDE proposes a better solution? Only if you believe that hitting a frog with a stick will turn it into a prince (or princess)! Let’s create a United States teacher apprenticeship program and produce academically successful graduates prepared to drive equally well produced Porsches.

The Unbelievably Essential Principal

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How essential is a principal to the educational enterprise of a school today? Unbelievably essential! The Effective Educator era reinforces the principal as the person responsible for leading a successful school. Not only is the principal the chief leader of all that happens in the school, Educator Effectiveness in Wisconsin places 50% of the overall evaluation of every teacher in the hands of the principal. For everything and everyone, principal leadership is unbelievably essential.

Historically, the principal was the “principal or lead” teacher of a school faculty. Over time the principalship was formalized and legally recognized as the leader of a school. Educational statutes in most states recognize four entities in a school district: Board of Education, superintendent, principal, and teachers. Almost all statutes relating to the supervision of children and the employment supervision of teachers refer to the school principal as the supervisor. Research abounds regarding the role of a school principal. Effective School Research in the 1980s affirmed that “if the principal is not engaged in an initiative, the initiative fails from the beginning.” Although recent Essential Schools’ research attempted to replace principal leadership with collegial and collaborative leadership spread out among teachers, the need for “chief” leadership has remained immutable. There is theory and there is reality.

http://www.mes.org/esr.html

http://www.essentialschools.org/resources/92

A test for identifying school leadership can be derived from Hollywood’s Miracle on 42nd Street. Send a letter to any school addressed to the “Person in Charge of the School” and the letter will wind up on the principal’s desk, or with a chuckle, on the principal’s secretary’s desk. There is a Santa and there is a school principal.

There are many ways in which a principal is the school’s “chief”. I like two recent pieces aired on NPR’s Marketplace. Kai Ryssdal and NPR reporters asked, “What does a CEO do all day?” and “What is the point of a COO? A CEO? A CVO? A CKO?” They provide us with several insightful examples of the importance of the “chief.”

The common denominator in the workday of any chief is meetings. Meetings are the way in which the chief keeps groups inside and outside the organization focused on the organizational mission. Meetings are the inter-relational connecting point between the leader and the people being led. Meetings clarify and transmit a common understanding of information and organizational objectives. “He (or she) is in a meeting” is what most people hear when they attempt to contact the chief.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/ive-always-wondered/what-do-ceos-do-all-day

There are many areas of expertise that a chief must possess in order to be an effective leader. The NPR report labeled five areas using very unique yet highly informative descriptors. I find that the NPR descriptions also are apt illustrators of a school principal. These are:

Chief Agility Officer. Schools no longer are the monoliths of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this century, school leadership and school faculties must be highly adaptive to constant change. Government, business, and local communities do not hesitate to forcefully legislate or subtly redirect a school’s educational programs. Special interests rule in all too many discussions of how schools are failing and what they must do to create success for the future. An agile leadership is necessary for schools to interpret and respond to incessant change.

Chief Knowledge Officer. The principal is seldom the most intelligent or intellectual member of the faculty but always is the person who is “supposed to know.” If there are two questions that a principal hears more than any others they are “What do you want me to do now?” or “What are we supposed to do with or about …?” Leadership resides in the knowledge of what do or in the connections to the sources of that knowledge. This is different that an Information or Technical Director. Those are specialties and provide definitive and short-term answers. The CKO responds to the now and future issues as they reflect the educational mission of the school.

Chief Networking Officer. A school no longer operates as an island in the educational sea. Parents “helicopter” in and out of school. Local industry wants school graduates trained and ready for immediate employment. Governors want a world class education that will energize a state’s economy. Children want to learn and be happy. There are ways in which these seemingly disparate needs and wants fit together and the principal must be able to connect the dots and tie the laces.

Chief Visionary Officer. As interested as a teacher may be in the future of education, the teacher’s focus circles around lesson plans, unit designs and the next “big” test. Someone in the school must constantly steer the school toward a picture of what the future looks like. Principals must work in the today while looking well beyond tomorrow.

Chief Electrification Officer. This is not just the person responsible for turning on and off the school’s lights. The Electrification Officer pushes the “go” button for everything in the school from the annual school calendar, assignment of the faculty and staff, student schedules, clock and bell schedules, athletic and arts events, and recesses and vacations. Like an old time wagon master, the principal says “Head ‘em up and roll ‘em out” every school day.

These five descriptors are categorical. A principalship may also be painted by function and one of the most significant functions has recently jumped from the many to #1 in Wisconsin schools. The principal is responsible for assigning a numeric value that represents 50% of a teacher’s professional employment evaluation. The responsibility for a teacher evaluation is not new; it is described in the educational statutes. In the pre-Effective Educator era, a school district or school or principal formulated an idiosyncratic definition of an effective teacher. That definition usually referenced a set of teacher standards and assessed a teacher’s professional work through the lens of research or an instructional model. For a decade or more, Madeline Hunter’s Instructional Design, was the basis for examining a teacher’s instructional competence. There were other models used, but there was not a statewide, mandated template for assessing educator effectiveness.

Today a school district and its schools use a single model for evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness. And, the principal is the sole person holding up that template to see how a teacher’s instructional practices match with that model. At the end of an assessment, the principal will assign a single numeric value to represent the quality of the teacher’s educational effectiveness.

Perhaps we should add a position to the NPR list of what a chief does.

Chief Deciding Officer. This role sounds like President G. W. Bush when he proclaimed, “I’m the decider.” The principal must decide whether or not a teacher is an effective educator and assign a number to distinguish that level of effectiveness.

In his History of the World, Part 1 (1981), Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king” as he reveled in his life as the one and only Louis XVI. It also is good to be the principal, the one and only chief of a school. The singularity of being the chief also carries much responsibility. Knowing that a principal today is unbelievably essential to the success of a school and the professional life its faculty, I amend the Brooks’ quote, “It is hard to be a good king (chief).”

All Star Teachers: You Know Who They Are

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Someone always stands at the pinnacle. You name the endeavor and a ranking will exist somewhere and someone is at the top of that ranking. Call it human nature to always seek out the best or at least what we think is the best. Or, call it a flaw in our character that causes us to give everything an ordinal number. But, we do it. Afterwards, if we stand back and reexamine the ranks, what is it that distinguishes the very best from the very good and these from the rest? And, as this is a blog about teaching, what is it that distinguishes the best teachers?

We gain insights about the very best from the mechanisms that are used to create rankings. Sorting through data and making a simple analysis is okay, but not very discerning. We can rank by wins and losses or successes and failure. This is easy to do when competition is involved, but more difficult to do in complex endeavors. College sports teams are ranked nationally by games won and lost in a sports season. These are simple and objective numbers. Colleges are ranked as educational institutions by measures of their academic rigor and the prestige the world conveys to their graduates. These are complex and subjective values.

Let’s consider a non-educational ranking system. US News and World Reports annually ranks almost everything of significant importance to the American consumer. Their evaluative techniques are honed over time. For instance, their evaluation of “The Best Hospitals” considers four areas of interest – structure of hospital resources, processes for delivering care, outcomes as measured by risk-adjusted mortality, and patient safety. They combine these four criteria with the professional reputation of the hospital as judged by physicians to create a national ranking.

http://www.usnews.com/pubfiles/BH_2014_Methodology_Report_Final_Jul14.pdf

Placing a value on the work of a teacher also is a complex and subjective determination. Few organizations rank teachers publicly. One of the few rankers, the University of Illinois, reduces its valuation to consumer/student ratings. The University of Illinois uses student ratings to create a “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students” at the close of each academic term. Students rate the overall teaching effectiveness of the instructor as well as the overall quality of the course. This combination recognizes that effective teaching is pedagogical and curricular – know how to teach and know how to make what is taught important to the student.

http://cte.illinois.edu/teacheval/ices/pdf/Summer14List.pdf

US News and the University of Illinois want their consumers to use their ratings as a basis for making future decisions.

Often it is easy to perceive that someone is very good at something but not as easy to discern who is better than others, especially when being a professional in that occupation already is the result of a highly selective process. People don’t get to be professional athletes or acclaimed surgeons or nationally-known lawyers or award-winning architects by just showing up. Professionals are already exceptions to the general population. Being one of the best in their profession means that they have demonstrated that their work is superior to the usual work of others in their field.

This is an important concept – work that is superior to the usual in their field. As most things that people do can be measured, I like measurements that indicate an added value due to personal performance. I like the baseball statistic “on base percentage plus slugging percentage” or OPS+ to understand which players make the fewest outs when at bat and reach the most extra bases for each hit they make. The higher the OPS+ ranking, the greater an individual is separated from the average. I like strokes gained by putting to identify golfers who are most efficient on the green, the place where a high percentage of all strokes taken is needed to get the ball in the hole. This stat separates great professional golfers from the rank and file of the PGA. And, I like QBRAT or the quarterback rating system to understand which passers are most efficient in gaining yards and scoring points against the inevitable incompletions and interceptions. In Wisconsin, we certainly like Aaron Rogers, as his QBRAT is often the best in the NFL. These statistics provide a qualitative analysis of a professional based upon how their personal performance differentiates them from an average baseball player or PGA golfer or NFL quarterback. Using these statistics, one can differentiate the best from the rest based upon professional work.

http://www.sportingcharts.com/dictionary/nfl/quarterback-rating-qbrat.aspx

http://www.golf.com/tour-and-news/strokes-gained-putting-behind-newest-pga-tour-stat

To date, education has not generated much comparative data. US News and World Reports annually publishes its “Best High Schools in the US” based upon standardized school data, often found in each state’s department of public education or on school web sites. When these reports become public, schools that are acclaimed attach the “Best” recognition to their web sites and school publications and schools that aren’t recognized proclaim that such rankings do not capture the essence of good schooling.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools

Education is, perhaps, a softer, gentler profession that does not seek ranking or want to single out the best. Perhaps it is because education is about children and we do not want to market a school using the qualities of its student learning. Perhaps it is educator’s normally humble countenance. Or, that a local school is a reflection of its community, especially the community’s socio-economic status, and this is not a basis for discerning the relative quality of a school.

More likely, ranking teachers is difficult because successful student is not as cleanly defined as a batter hitting a triple or a touchdown pass or a 27 foot putt that finds the cup. The mind of a child and the dynamics of a school classroom are two very messy places for discerning the differences in teachers.

The one exception in the desert of teacher recognitions is the national Teacher of the Year Award. Each year one teacher is named as their state’s Teacher of the Year in each state TOY is a candidate for the national Teacher of the Year.

Is it fair to say that teachers in a school that is highly ranked by US News are by their employment in that school superior teachers? Yes, once we accept two pieces of educational research. First, parenting and home conditions make a difference. Teaching in school must both take advantage of these differences and more quickly overcome the deficits of disadvantageous homes. Second, “…the research does show a strong rela-tionship between parental influences and children’s educational outcomes, from school readiness to college completion. Two compelling parental factors emerge:

1. Family structure, i.e., the number of parents living in the student’s home and their relationships to the child, and

2. Parents’ involvement in their children’s schoolwork.

Consequently, the solution to improving educa¬tional outcomes begins at home, by strengthening marriage and promoting stable family formation and parental involvement.”

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/09/academic-success-begins-at-home-how-children-can-succeed-in-school

Once we account for the child’s readiness or lack of readiness for learning given their out of school backgrounds, we can point at the relationships between good teaching and success learning. “Research consistently shows that teacher quality—whether measured by content knowledge, experience, training and credentials, or general intellectual skills—is strongly related to student achievement: Simply, skilled teachers produce better student results.”

http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Teacher-quality-and-student-achievement-At-a-glance/Teacher-quality-and-student-achievement-Research-review.html?css=print

The Center for Public Education’s listing of effective teacher qualities, however, resembles an assemblage of neutral data, like at bats, runs scored, runs-batted-in, games played, years in professional baseball that appears on the back of most professional athletes bubble gum/collector cards. These data do not reflect the essential value added information like OPS+, strokes gained, or QBRAT.

I propose that the best of the best do the following on a regular and constant basis and these seven criteria can be used to identify value added teaching. Teachers everywhere approximate these measures now and again. The best of the best do these constantly, almost intuitively and certainly with both a knowledge that good teaching is not a fluke but a sustained use of best practices.

1. Advance their own teaching skills and content mastery to the point that they are experts. By law, teachers must engage in professional development for re-licensure. Some do so because they must and others because they enjoy professional learning. The best are constantly engaged in the study of and experimentation with pedagogy that reaches the hardest to teach children and advances the learning of the most talented. They are constantly building their own academic expertise in the curriculum they teach.

2. Cause student academic growth measurements greater than 1.0 per year. Most children do not achieve a full academic year’s growth as measured on standardized tests. On the 2013 NAEP reading test, 80% of fourth graders were below grade level and 74% of 8th graders were below grade level. That does not mean all children were below grade level, some were at or above grade level. So who were the teachers of children who were at or above grade level? After we discount for the home differences of children, what did these teachers do to cause at least a 1.0 annual growth in measured growth in reading?

https://www.studentsfirst.org/pages/the-stats

3. Regularly use sustained active engagement of children in extend learning outcomes beyond the usual. “Teaching that emphasizes active engagement helps students process and retain information. It leads to self-questioning, deeper thinking, and problem solving. Engagement strategies like repetition, trial and error, and posing questions move the brain into active and constructive learning. And such activities can lead to higher student achievement.” A teacher’s extended engagement with a student is what raises the achievement of a student who has been an underachiever as well as a student who has been an outstanding achiever. Extended engagement is the “push” that makes a difference. Ironically, the presence of engagement is as readily observable as the lack of engagement and the latter is to frequently observed, especially by children.

 http://www.nea.org/tools/16708.htm

4. Constantly instill persistence and growth mind-sets in student instruction. Talent and favorable conditions are not enough. “Children must be taught to persist over time to overcome challenges and achieve big goals.” This is preparing children for success in life, not just school. Children can be taught that problems and challenges are part of a life and that they can forecast and plan how they will meet these. They can be taught a mind-set of goal setting and perseverance. Children who do so achieve higher grade points than children who do not. Persistence is not the result of the academic push that is associated with engagement. Persistence is the pull of a constant encouragement.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept13/vol71/num01/Grit-Plus-Talent-Equals-Student-Success.aspx

5. Regularly pose significant problems and help children to create unique and creative solutions. Problem solving “presupposes that students can take on some of the responsibility for their own learning and can take personal action to solve problems, resolve conflicts, discuss alternatives, and focus on thinking as a vital element of the curriculum. It provides students with opportunities to use their newly acquired knowledge in meaningful, real-life activities and assists them in working at higher levels of thinking.”

https://www.teachervision.com/problem-solving/teaching-methods/48451.html

6. Provide an accurate and provocative modeling at the right time to raise a child’s performance. This characteristic is pronounced in the teaching of art, music, dance and technical education. It also appears in the teaching of writing, math problem solving and science. Some of the greatest instructors are in the arts where, as they sit beside a student, they are able to model the fingering of a clarinet or the brush stroke on a canvas or the pace for pushing an arc weld. But, it is not just their presence or their personal skills. It is their sense of the right modeling at the right time that causes significant learning.

7. Create a permissive opportunity for creativity in which the child is her own best judge of successful learning. Creativity is a process and product that is greatly desired. In most instances is not taught, but nurtured in a setting that overtly permits creativity and covertly dissuades non-productive criticism. The best teachers know how to structure and sustain this opportunity and not let it become instructional anarchy.

These characteristics of best teaching are found in schools recognized by US News and in schools well outside of that recognition. They are characteristics that children know and love, usually after the fact. They are characteristics that parents appreciate in their children’s teachers without being able to label what exactly it is the teacher does. These are characteristics that principals and supervisors do identify and label, but seldom acclaim publicly. And, these are characteristics that teachers quietly recognize within their peers. However, recognition of the best teachers has not become professionally, economically or politically compelling. So, today we do not publicly rank teachers.

Teacher ranking is more covert. In almost every school, assertive children and parents press their counselor and principal for placement in their preferred teacher’s classes. Informal parent networks know that students taught by certain teachers score better on PSAT/NMSQT, ACT and SAT tests that students taught by other teachers. One school’s choral program is better than another and another school’s math department is the best in the county. These distinctions are not published; they are just known and in the knowing represent an informal ranking of teachers.

Someday the best teachers will be publicly recognized for the excellence of their ability to all cause children to achieve exceptional learning. Wouldn’t it be something if children posted photos of All-Star teachers next to their photos of All-Star athletes, big name rock stars, and the other adults that children admire and esteem. Until then, pay attention to the flurry of activity when children are annually assigned to teachers and when high stakes test results are published when class reunions are held. Names of the best teachers won’t be shouted but they will be spoken.