A parent recently asked me, “Which of the reading programs being used in the county will best teach my daughter to read? As a retired superintendent and elementary school principal, you know what is good and bad about reading programs? Which school will do the best job of teaching my little girl to read?”

In the new era of parental choice, this young mother was doing exactly what school choice wants her to do. She was investigating the educational options available in order to choose the best school for her child. But, what should inform her choice?

To paraphrase Dickens, this was “the best of questions and the worst of questions.” Finding the best reading program has been public education’s never ending quest for more than a century. In many school districts, the search for “the” best reading program results in the adoption of the “next” best program every eight to ten years or whenever a drop in state or local reading achievement data causes politicians and pundits to ask “why Johnny can’t read.” Most schools and school districts change reading programs as often as they change high school football uniforms – programs and uniforms change frequently and each new design is meant to look like a reading program or a uniform that is successful somewhere else.

So, what question(s) should help to formulate an answer for this earnest parent? Is this a question about the quality of a school or the quality of a teacher or the quality of a reading curriculum? School, teacher and curriculum each are part of the answer.

Reading programs are complex because they have floating variables. There is the reading curriculum – the collection of reading materials, the embedded instruction of reading skills, and the sequencing of when students are challenged with reading materials and skills that cause individual student growth in reading. There are the teachers at each grade level and their various levels of instructional expertise. There is the degree of school focus on reading within the context of all of the school curricula. There is the support for reading that each child has at home – this can make a significant yet difficult to assess difference in annual reading growth.

Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel examined more than seventy reading programs used in early and upper elementary education. (Selecting a Basal Reading Program: Making the Right Choice, Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel, R & L Education, 1989.) Their study found three persistent elements that exist in effective reading programs. Although their study is not almost 25 years old, I find their results to be persistent. These are:

1. All of the beginning reading programs found to be effective or promising in qualifying experiments have a strong focus on teaching phonics and phonemic awareness. However, an emphasis on phonics did not guarantee positive effects. It clearly matters a great deal how reading is taught, and an emphasis on phonics may be necessary but it is not sufficient to ensure meaningful reading gains.

2. Successful programs almost always provide teachers with extensive professional development and follow-up focused on specific teaching methods.

3.  The research supports the use of well-developed programs that integrate curriculum, pedagogy, and extensive professional development.

This helps. I want this inquiring parent to examine the amount of time the school dedicates to early reading instruction in grades 4K, kindergarten and first grade and in the primary years of second and third grade. She should look for at least 90 minutes dedicated every day to reading and 90 minutes dedicated to English/language arts instruction. The commitment of time is highly indicative of district commitment because instructional time in the school day is finite and highly competitive. If reading and literacy receive three hours every day, the school is committed to teaching students to read.

This parent should be able to see a commitment to phonics and phonemic awareness in the first three years of school. She may say, “but I don’t know what phonics is,” and I will tell her that she does. She should see and hear consistent and explicit instruction in how letters of the alphabet are linked to sounds or phonemes to cause the child to form letter-sound correspondence and spelling patterns and to apply this knowledge to reading. Phonics and phoneme awareness should be happening every day and across the grade levels.

Balanced with phonics, the parent should be able to see that each child has a wide variety of reading materials that are examined and used daily. And, that the teacher and children talk a lot about vocabulary and what words mean in the context of these different reading materials. The talk about language should include student-to-student talk as children work to create their understanding of what words can mean in the different ways they are used. Best programs in reading instruction include student collaborative activities.

Lastly, this parent should be able to observe that each teacher spends time frequently dedicated to the professional development of reading instruction. For too many decades, a teacher with ten years of teaching experience had as much continuing education in reading in her tenth year as a first-year teacher. School districts believed that undergraduate training in reading was good enough – it is not. If the school district is not investing continuously in professional development in reading instruction, it is not a school district for this inquiring parent.

In 1978, Shirley Jackson raised criterion-based questions about reading programs and her inquiries remain perfectly valid today. In “The Quest for Reading Programs That Work” (http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_197812_jackson.pdf) Ms. Jackson asked many questions, but the most significant question was “which program is most successful in causing all children to make annual growth in reading.” Some children enter school as readers and others are ready to read, but there also are children who have not received any preparation for reading. School data should indicate that all children, including children receiving special education and ELL instruction, those from impoverished homes, and those with other socio-economic distractors, achieve the school’s goals for annual growth in reading.

Having thought through these questions and examined what I knew about each school’s commitment of in-school time and to professional development to reading instruction and what I knew about school achievement data, I told my inquiring parent which school I would recommend for her daughter. I also told her why I would choose that school. Most importantly, I helped her to understand what to look for in subsequent years to assure that this school remained her choice. If reading instruction is her criteria for choosing a school, and there can be many valid reasons for choosing a school, then she should examine reading achievement in that school over time to assure that an informed choice remains an informed choice. This is what school choice should be about.

Read Jennie Magiera’s words aloud and imagine they are your words.

“Differentiated. Relevant. Engaging. These are all words used to describe quality instruction. Yet how ironic is it that they so rarely describe the professional development of teachers. Most of the time we are talked at for several hours on a Saturday morning, or in the afternoon after a long day in the classroom, with nothing to engage us but a conciliatory bowl of candy. This would not stand in our classrooms, so why does it with teacher PD?”

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_ahead/2012/05/the_bionic_pd_half_live_-_half_digital.html

Weren’t you about to say the same things as Ms. Magiera? Too often, professional development for classroom teachers is not a best practices event, but demonstrates an expectation that “do as I say, not as I do” is good enough for educators who know better. This is hypocrisy personified.

Ms. Magiera makes a compelling argument for “bionic PD.” She exemplifies a generation of teachers who use social media, on-demand digital information, and continuous and spontaneous interactive communications to share thoughts with their peers. She values real as well as virtual “in-person interactions” through which she can actively engage in advancing her personal learning.

“So what I propose is for districts to consider a hybrid approach: a differentiated, relevant, and engaging live PD to whet teachers’ curiosities and ignite their passions, then an online platform for teachers to continue to learn and pursue their new thirst for knowledge.”

So, what might this look like.

Differentiated professional development should acknowledge that each adult learner has similarities to each child learner in a classroom; each will respond positively to quality instruction. Best practice does not treat all learners the same. We do not lecture large groups of K-12 students in a sterile environment expecting each child to develop her own connections to the presentation. Differentiated PD connects with , creates professional learning communities, and treats each community effectively.

Relevant PD assesses the needs of each professional relative to the goals of the organization and builds an extended design for each learner. Best practice instruction blends readiness to learn with required to learn.

Fisher and Frey write about the gradual release of responsibility for learning. Like a classroom teacher, the professional has a responsibility to teach not just to present. At the same time, teacher/learners have a responsibility to engage with the PDer making a commitment to integrate and apply what they learn.

http://www.glencoe.com/glencoe_research/Jamestown/gradual_release_of_responsibility.pdf

The release of responsibility for learning looks like this.

https://www.mheonline.com/_treasures/pdf/douglas_fisher.pdf

Effective professional development is not about telling learners what they should know, accepting applause at the end of the session, and sending learners back to their work place to make progress independently. Effective PD assumes initial responsibility for instruction/learning and assists the professional learner to responsibly use and integrate new learning. As the Fischer and Frey models are being applied to student instructional practices related to the Common Core Standards, does it not make sense that it also should be applied to PD for teachers learning to teach the Core?

And, the concept of a professional meeting should be completely rethought. A PD meeting(s) that is about causing professionals to develop would:

1. Provide professional learners with the meeting objectives and all information that would be non-interpretatively presented at the meeting prior to the meeting. Information should be shared digitally and through social media. Learners can profitably ingest this material before attending the meeting.

2. Use the meeting for an interactive discussion of

a. what does the information mean and

b. why does the information matter.

Use professional learning communities within the meeting to raise and answer questions that clarify learners’ understandings of “meaning and matter.”

3. After the meeting, use social media to share the escalating understanding and application of presented and shared information among members of a PLC and between PLCs.

 4. Assertively push for mastery of professional learning. If the goal of professional development is not mastery, then the goal is not worth a professional’s time.

The reform of K-12 education should be paralleled by a re-development of the professional training required for those reforms.

When educational reform is in the air, some organizations make strong, positive adjustments and others spin their wheels in the bog of indecision. Teach For America has read the wind and is making the right adjustments so that TFA teachers are able to cause children to succeed in a performance-based world that demands increased academic performance. Teach for America infuses growth modeling into its teacher preparation and teacher supervision practices and is moving the metrics of student learning.

Growth models for improving student learning are a significant tool for planning, monitoring and evaluating the cause and effect relationships between instruction and learning, according to a Pearson white paper. Growth models

• “conceptually align well with one of the fundamental goals of education – student learning,

• provide richer information on student learning than a single score at one point in time because they connect scores from multiple assessments, and

• focus on the educational development of individual students.”

http://www.pearsonassessments.com/hai/Images/tmrs/Student_Growth_WP_083111_FINAL.pdf

A general rule states that if you always do what you always have done, you only will get more of what you always have gotten. Educational reforms demand improvements in student learning achievement. Improvements typically are not achieved through typical and usual efforts, but require commitment to and intentional execution of actions focused on desired results. Getting schools and school districts to adopt new strategies has not been easy.

“Since 2005, 15 states have been approved (by the US Department of Education) to implement a growth model pilot. The states adopted one of four distinct models—Trajectory, Transition Tables, Student Growth Percentiles, and Projection—each with some drawbacks,” reports the American Institute for Research in their study of the effects of the No Child Left Behind legislation. The report says that each model has drawbacks as well as virtues. However, the data derived from these pilots have become bogged with comparisons of incomparable models, a federal definition of school proficiency based upon the percentage of students passing a single test, the inadequacy of state tests, the inadequacy of state academic standards, and the politicization of public knowledge of a teacher’s record in causing assigned students to achieve proficiency on state tests. The result is a general understanding that growth modeling can validate changes in educational achievement if policymakers can settle upon a clean set of rules. In the absence of correlated policy and program, individual organizations have had to find their own way forward.

http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/GrowthModelsAndAccountability_Release%20.pdf

“Teach For America now unabashedly defines effectiveness in terms of how its teachers’ students perform. All corps members are expected to reach at least one of these goals: move student learning forward by 1.5 grade levels, close achievement gaps by 20 percent, or ensure that 80 percent of students have met grade-level standards.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/09/11/03tfa_ep.h29.html

Taken separately, the TFA expectations for what quality teaching should do are wholly aligned with most school district goals.

1. Moving student learning forward by 1.5 grade levels understands that typical regression from the previous summer vacation means that a gross growth of 1.5 grade levels per school year nets at about 1.0 grade levels of growth. Setting the metric for growth in student learning at 1.5 years fits into the reality of a child’s educational experience.

2. In addition, past learning achievement has not moved most children forward at 1.0 grade levels per school year. In fact, by the time most children reach sixth grade their tested achievement levels typically are still in the fourth grade. By the time children reach tenth grade, their tested achievement levels are still in the middle of middle school. Setting the metric for growth in student learning at 1.5 can counterbalance underachievement in prior school years.

3. Achievement gaps are closed over time by combining growth models instruction with instruction that strengthens vocabulary, background information, and developmental skills sets. This is not accomplished in a single school year or, in fact in several. Achievement gaps that derive from learning disabilities, non-English backgrounds, and poverty and its educational distractions require many years of consistent and constant work.

4. In combination with 1 – 3, ensuring that 80 percent of children successfully can perform grade-level standards keeps a forward instructional press for quality instruction. To restate this TFA expectation, at least 80 percent of children in a grade level will be able to successful perform all of the learning standards relevant to that grade level.

The Teaching for Leadership Comprehensive Rubric combines many aspects of the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching. Dr. Danielson is a nationally-recognized leader in identifying and validating effective instructional practices of classroom teachers. Many school districts have adopted the Danielson Framework in their professional development programs. TFA moves beyond teacher knowledge of effective teaching practices to evaluating teachers on student learning growth based upon quality teaching practices.

http://www.teachingasleadership.org/sites/default/files/TAL.Comprehensive.Rubric.FINAL.pdf

http://www.danielsongroup.org/userfiles/files/downloads/2013EvaluationInstrument.pdf

The TFA improvement strategy will not immediately reverse the history of under- or poorly-achieving schools. As Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of the National Staff Development Council, states “If you build the strongest possible induction model for people that come with this background, and equip them with the technology of teaching, will that help individuals improve? Yes, and I think TFA shows evidence of that.” TFA assures that teachers trained under its design have the skills to be effective teachers, but TFA does not address the professional development of veteran teachers. TFA leadership believes that, “Ultimately, our schools and districts should be taking that on.”

The common denominator in developing educational accountability systems is an annual measurement of student learning growth. Teach For America is demonstrating that criterioned-teaching focused upon criterioned-learning growth is a very viable strategy for causing improvements in student learning.

When something changes the world, do we recognize what is happening at the time?

When did you buy your first cell phone? If your purchase was ten or more years ago, on that day did you imagine a future when the entire world would be cellular? Did you envision all of the applications that could be spawned from a telephone in your pocket? Cell phones not only changed the ways in which we communicate, cell phones changed the ways we live.

Now and again we experience an event or a product or a person and that experience seems to be just a passing moment in time. Sputnik. Desk top computing. Steve Jobs. 9/11. Genetic engineering. Martin Luther King. Repeat any of these six to another person and they readily will identify the year, the event, the model and make and the life story or signature work of the individual. Spend a bit longer in the conversation and you will be into a more lengthy description of the effects of a world changer.

In the universe of public education, the adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards is that kind of a seminal event. On their own, the Core represents a groundbreaking list of educational standards in reading/English language arts and mathematics education. Initially, they are derived from an intriguing ménage a trois comprised of the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers (state superintendents of education), and a group of Fortune 500 executives. As an event/product, the Core will cause a reform of classroom instruction greater than New Math, phonics or whole language.

However, as a game changer, the Core is not THE reform, as in a one-trick pony. The real changes in K-12 education are blossoming everywhere as a result OF the Core. The Core is driving changes, just as the cell phone caused industrial, cultural, and political changes.

Sean Cavanaugh, assistant editor for Education Week, writes, “The market for testing products and services is booming and could continue to surge over the next few years, according to industry analysts and company officials, who say that growth is being fueled by the shift toward common-core tests across states and the use of new classroom assessments designed to provide timely and precise feedback for teachers and students.

Demand for testing resources tends to be driven by major changes in state or federal policy affecting schools, and the current environment is reflective of that connection.

Changes in testing policy with nationwide implications are invariably ‘good for any provider of testing materials,’ said Scott Marion, the associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a Dover, N.H.-based nonprofit organization that consults with states on assessments. ‘You knew the common core was going to be a big change from what [we] had before.’”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/02/06testing_ep.h33.html?tkn=PSVFKHcN8KakBJQr1YgONoG3PmkTwT2wVDR%2F&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS1

The educational assessment market is not limited to the summative tests being written by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or the Partnership for Assessment Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The greater demand will be for diagnostic, formative assessments that will help teachers to measure short term gains in student learning – what is working and what is not. These will be needed by every K-12 school district, in multiple languages, and adapted to multiple learning modalities.

One of the characteristics of a world changer is that it causes people to look more deeply into what the changer (the Core) means, how it works, and its effects upon the world. “Common-Core Rollout Ripe for Studying, Experts Say” appeared in Education Week (10/8/2013). http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/09/07core.h33.html?tkn=ONQF0ED54LaTmusvQK4lV%2BLqz6Oa0VZ%2BQqeY&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS2

“The creators of the Common Core State Standards purposely set out what students should know in mathematics and reading without laying out how teachers should meet those requirements. That creates a rare opportunity—but also requires a massive lift—for K-12 education research to fill in the blanks.

‘Standards are necessary but they aren’t sufficient to improve student learning,’ said Pascal D. “Pat” Forgione Jr., the executive director of the K-12 Center at the Educational Testing Service, during a meeting on research in the common core held here by the Center on Education Policy and George Washington University. ‘We need significant R&D work.’

‘There’s a consensus that research as a whole has to be research for improvement; it can’t just be documentation of what worked and what didn’t,’ said John Q. Easton, the IES’ director. ‘There’s ‘no grand [randomized controlled trial] that anyone will conduct that will give us yes or no in eight years.’

Janice M. Earle, a senior program director for K-12 STEM education at the NSF predicted there may be staged cycles of research to support the standards in their first years of implementation, with deeper studies and evaluations six and 10 years out. If researchers and educators begin developing partnerships to implement the standards now, they will be in a better position to collect information and understand earlier indicators of problems or success.”

There is no pedagogy related to the Core. In order for all children to successfully achieve the content, skills and processing expectations of the Core, there will be hundreds of studies of the cause and effect dynamics of instructional strategies. The Core are not aligned to a specific textbook or publisher; publishers are rushing to align their products with the Core. Every school will be examining publisher samples to find materials appropriate for grade levels and the variety of learning needs of children at every grade level.

A third arena for enlarged industry lies in the need to expand every school’s technological infrastructure. Instruction as well as assessment will require every school district and school building to beef up.

“Widespread technical failures and interruptions of recent online testing in a number of states have shaken the confidence of educators and policymakers in high-tech assessment methods and raised serious concerns about schools’ technological readiness for the coming common-core online tests.

The glitches arose as many districts in the 46 states that have signed on to the Common Core State Standards are trying to ramp up their technological infrastructure to prepare for the requirement that students take online assessments starting in 2014-15.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/05/08/30testing-2.h32.html

“Districts need to have a punch list and make sure they have everything they need to be ready,” said Keith R. Krueger, the CEO of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, or COSN, a professional association for school district technology leaders. “But they also have to understand that high-stakes testing is a complicated environment. They’re not going to be able to control everything.”

“Though more breakdowns likely are inevitable given online testing’s relatively new place in schools, the ability to protect the validity, integrity, and security of the process is increasingly crucial as districts in 46 states—those that have adopted the Common Core State Standards—gear up for mandatory online assessments starting in 2014-15.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/02/06el-assess.h33.html?tkn=NLUFB5kVoocreDs3kDDXp5Z9JQsOnci3j5tO&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS2

Research, instructional material development, and technological support pale to the great demand the Core will cause for the professional development of classroom teachers.

“The implementation clock is ticking,” says a Center on Education Policy report, which was released yesterday. “If changes in instruction are to occur on schedule and if students are to be well prepared to master the standards, then teachers and principals must receive effective professional development to aid them through this transition.”

“And that doesn’t mean drive-by PD, either, according to the CEP.”

“One of the most urgent challenges is to not only provide an adequate amount of CCSS-related professional development, but also ensure these services are of high quality,” the report says.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/08/many_teachers_need_common_core_professional_development.html?qs=common+core+and+professional+development

It would be wonderful to “beam” ten years into the future to learn what educators and the public in general will be saying about the Common Core and the many peripheral changes the Core will have caused in public education across its first decade. I can only speculate that, like Sputnik or laptop computing and the cell phone, the Core will have blossomed fully from a set of standards into a powerful engine for far-reaching educational reform.

Superintendents and school boards, regarding how well children are achieving in your schools today, you are as fully clothed as the undressed emperor who walked down the village street in his skivvies believing that he was regally garbed. (Read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson to refresh the image.)

The terms and reality of “informational transparency” are applied to almost all school data today. The public has relatively easy access to the educational performance of the school district as a whole as well as each school individually. The informational display of achievements of children at specified grade levels focuses the expose’ from district to school to the classroom and even to clusters of teachers. If a school district has a small enrollment, transparency can be an expose’ of each teacher’s instructional effectiveness.

Is this new? You bet it is. For decades, too many decades in fact, the work of effective teachers masked the ineffective instruction of other teachers whose employment was maintained because the poorly performing teacher coached a sport or directed a play or was a favorite friend of children and parents. Or, the status quo was maintained because the legal system and union contracts made disciplining an ineffective teacher a monumental ordeal. Just as the emperor had a very sobering moment when he learned that he was not clothed, school leaders are having sobering moments as they learn that disaggregated data strips the luster from what was believed to be a school district or school where all children were successful learners.

School data transparency starts with public access to school information. In Wisconsin, transparency is accessed through the Department of Public Instruction’s new public portal. This web site (http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp) opens WISEdash, the new Data Dashboard for driving through the layers of information. Data can be “mined” to understand the performance of children in each school within a school district and to compare performances school to school and school district to school district.

“So?” may be the response of yesterday’s educational leader. Today’s leader understands that in the era of accountability, low performance indicators must be investigated and strategies must be found to improve those performances. Interestingly, low reading scores in 3rd grade usually have two dimensions. There is a need to improve instruction in Kindergarten, first and/or second grade. There also is a need to remediate reading abilities of children in third and fourth grade.

Once upon a time, causation for low performance scores was attached to individual students or a group of students in a grade level and shrugged off year after year until those children graduated or left the school(s). Accountability today has no shrugs.

If school was professional baseball and the shortstop made chronic fielding errors, a general manager would schedule a lot of extra fielding practice until the shortstop became “sure gloved.” If the shortstop could not stop bobbling the ball, the GM would look for a new shortstop, because the team’s overall performance cannot abide the chronic errors of a regular player. In school, the education of children cannot abide the chronic ineffective instruction of a teacher for a full school year. High performing school districts and schools are the result of all teachers providing effective instruction that causes all children to learn successfully.