Call Me Suspicious: Ravitch, Chap 3

I get so frustrated with educational research where the results of a study seem to show one thing, only to be refuted by another study.  Is it the nature of education, is it because of poorly designed studies, is it all idealogically slanted from the get-go?

In speaking of gains in District 2 in NYC  Ravitch says “little attention has been paid to the remarkable economic boon and demographic changes in the district during the 1990s.  These shifts surely influenced the district’s educational gains.”  She goes on to say there were demographic changes in district 2 that were only revealed in a census several years later,  and that the proportion of white students went up and African American and Hispanic went down, and suggests that these changes were the cause of reported educational gains.

While the census may not have documented a demographic change till years later, the schools certainly knew it immediately.  Schools know how many kids are coming in each day, and they collect and know the demographic groups.  When Alvarado’s statisticians went to calculate the average test scores in various demographic groups (which surely they did) they knew how many were in each group in 1987 and how many there were in 1995. 

So did Alvarado and the original District 2 researchers suppress the demographic differences in their reports?  Or is Ravitch casting doubt by “revealing new information,” though the information surely wasn’t new to the school district.

Respect

I was thinking about Wednesday's discussion about how little respect teachers get, and realized that there is a sliding scale.  PreK get the very least, elementary get a little bit more, middle a bit more than that, high school more than that, and then university professors quite a lot.  So what's different about elementary teachers and college professors?

Certainly when I meet a tenured college professor, I feel like they will be better educated than I am.  They will have spent more time in school, they will have focused on a subject and learned it thoroughly.  They will be doing research and staying up-to-date in their field.  They will make a decent salary and job security.  They will have been put through the vetting process by the university and proven themselves worthy of tenure by a combination of good research and proven teaching skill.  Their students will be paying to be taught be them. 

That's my perception, and it may certainly be out-of-date or just plain incorrect, but respect is based on perception.  So can elementary schoolteachers make progress on any of these points?  Yes.  In the current system, I think the two that could be changed are education and research.

When I was at college, the people who were getting their degrees in education got little respect and those studying architecture or pre-med got a lot of respect.  No one failed out of education and lots failed out of the bio and architecture classes.  Someone in class Wednesday mentioned a 100 level economics class which weeded out students.  It flies in the face of what we're learning to think of deliberately failing some, but a reputation as a hard major would surely increase the respect for it.  Perhaps education programs could require that their graduates were true renaissance women and men, by requiring that the they take college level classes in a wide range of subjects in addition to education classes.  A heavy courseload would reflect a hard major.

I have myself thought it would be fun to do research projects in elementary schools, and one of our readings talked about a private pre-schools informally doing research to keep the teachers focused and engaged.  I will be curious to read the mood at the elementary schools that the UW partners with; I would think that the partnership would promote a great deal of respect from the parents there.  Could all schools partner with universities, and have teachers work with them to carry out research?  How cool it would be to have schoolteachers among the co-authors on professional papers, and have school websites include that information in their staff biographies, along with liking cooking and scrapbooking with friends.

Rewarding teachers without promoting them

Sometime in the past year (recent enough to remember the gist, too long to remember the source) I read an article about how in the regular business world promoting your best employees to new positions was detrimental to a company.  Your best employees have established their skill at the old “lower” job, which might not share any skills with the new ”higher” job, and so success in the old job didn’t predict it in the new job.  Better to keep them in the old job where they are outstanding, and find someone with proven skill for the “higher” job.  But the trick is to figure out how to reward and recognize the employee, and to encourage their professional growth without promoting them.

                From Biklen’s article “School Work,” it seems like this is where schoolteachers find themselves, but “the company” hasn’t figured out how to reward and recognize and grow teachers while keeping them in the classroom.  There’s some irony in schoolteachers chasing or envying the idea of promotion from other professions, when it is an idea which doesn’t necessarily serve those professions well.    

                When I try to think of how to reward and recognize teachers while keeping them in the classroom, I don’t have many ideas beside salary.  In a business, you could throw the thornier clients or harder problems to an skilled employee, which would bestow prestige, but I can’t imagine that a teacher would want the prestige of being given all of the challenging students.  The best teachers could be asked to coach other teachers, or their lesson plans could be used in other classrooms, but the article also makes it clear how important autonomy is to all the teachers.  It’s a hard problem.  When teachers do figure it out, maybe they can teach it to the business world.