Teachers don't need surveillance -- they need support

Jeff Johnson's Teacher Task Force was suppose to be about supporting excellence in teaching, but it has become nothing more than another layer of bureaucratic surveillance that will ultimately undermine public confidence in Alberta's already excellent teachers.

If Jeff Johnson's Task Force had done their job properly, they would have made a critically important recommendation: Teachers don't need surveillance -- they need support. 

But if I was Jeff Johnson, I may want to distract the public from funding cuts in public education by creating my own Task Force that focuses on teacher quality.

For this school year, the Alberta Government cut school board budgets by $14.5 million even though 11,000 new students entered Alberta's schools. This will lead to all sorts of problems for teachers' working conditions including larger class sizes. Alberta Teachers' Association President Mark Ramsankar describes the problem aptly when he said, "a Ferrari still can't perform on a gravel road." Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society.

Now Johnson is saying that the status quo with the Alberta teacher discipline process is not an option. This comes before the Task Force has even finished collecting input -- which leads me to wonder why the Task Force is even bothering with collecting input when it would appear that Jeff Johnson's mind is already made up. It also has me questioning the independence of Jeff Johnson's Task Force.

Education policy expert Michael Fullan writes about Jeff Johnson's Task Force:

You don't develop a profession or an organization by focusing on sticks and carrots aimed at individuals. All high-performing entities develop the group to focus collectively and relentlessly on quality work linked to high expectations and standards. If you don’t base policies and strategies on purposeful group impact you inevitably end up with low yield results along with gross distractions.

Take the recommendation that has drawn the most press, implementing a process that would require teachers to be assessed to maintain their certification. Of course the intent is to get rid of incompetent teachers, but the action is akin to scorching the lawn to get rid of weeds. 

It is disingenuous to say you put students first and then put teachers last, and yet that is exactly what Jeff Johnson and his Task Force are doing with their misinformation campaign.

Ultimately, Jeff Johnson and his Task Force get it wrong because they see teachers as a problem when they should be seen for what they truly are: an opportunity.

Teachers Are Not a Problem. They Are an Opportunity.

This was written by Andy Hargreaves who is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education, in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Andy tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Andy Hargreaves

Woody Allen quipped that when we face a crossroads in life that leads to utter hopelessness or total extinction, we should choose wisely between them. Yogi Berra said that if we come to a fork in the road, we should take it. When Eric Clapton went down to the crossroads, he just fell down on his knees.

In 2014, the future of teaching is at a gigantic global crossroads, but the choices need not be as oddball as the ones that the ABC's of Allen, Berra and Clapton offer us! This week, the Unite for Quality Education movement, organized by the global teachers' union organization, Education International, met in Montreal to advance its campaign of providing universal and free access to quality teachers to all students. This is a bold goal - not just access to education, good or bad, in huge classes or less, with properly qualified teachers or not; but access to quality education and quality teachers for everyone.

Are current trends in their favor or against them? Let's look at some of the most developed economies, including our own - because if we cannot provide quality teachers for everyone here, there is little hope for anyone else.

Some of the signs are not encouraging.

In March, in my home state, a report commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education set out an educational vision for the state in 2030. Although Massachusetts ranks Number 1 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and is one of the top-performing systems on a range of international assessments, the report's leading author, Sir Michael Barber, former adviser on education to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and now Chief Education Adviser to global educational sales giant Pearson unconvincingly portrayed this leading state as suffering from "complacency".

In response, the report recommends two strategic directions for teacher reform that are the opposite of what the highest performing countries are doing - opening up more routes of teacher preparation outside universities, and offering incentives to new teachers to take more pay earlier in their career at the expense of pension stability and security further down the line. What will be the result? A flexible, more easily qualified and more inexperienced profession who will take the money now before they move on to something else.

Now let's turn to the Canadian province of Alberta - consistently one of the highest English and French language performers on OECD's international PISA tests of student achievement. Part of this success is a strong teachers' association that includes principals and superintendents and that has historically worked closely with the province's 40-year Conservative government. This cooperation includes a recently concluded 14-year program to support teacher-designed innovations in 95% of the province's schools with 2% of the education budget. The Alberta Teachers' Association spends around 50% of its budget on professional development, research and policy advocacy, compared to the low single digits in US teacher unions.

This May, an Alberta Task Force for Teaching Excellence, assembled by the relatively new Education Minister, and without involvement from the Alberta Teachers' Association, laid out 25 recommendations for improving teacher quality. The most controversial of these is to impose a bureaucratic system for assessing teacher competence that will be linked to periodic re-certification.

If this can't be done with the existing teachers' association, the report warns, then principals may be separated from it so they will have the line authority to undertake the evaluations themselves. Of course, there are bits of incompetence in any system, but remember: Alberta is already one of the highest performing systems in the world. As international change expert Michael Fullan has put it in Canada's leading national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, to impose this change across the whole system would be like scorching the lawn to get rid of a few weeds.

So, ironically in some high performing systems that have succeeded in part due to their highly qualified, high status and stable teaching professions, there is a movement, against all the international evidence, to weaken the teaching profession in the name of economic "flexibility" and external accountability.

By contrast, a number of educational systems that have been declining or struggling seem to have grasped the significance of Joni Mitchell's old lyric "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? So they are pushing the teaching profession the other way.

Take one of the biggest basket cases of urban educational reform: New York City. After years of unnecessary upset and upheaval in the Bloomberg years that had no overall positive impact on student achievement, the city has come to an agreement to end a 9-year dispute with its unions. Under Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city's Chancellor and lifelong educator, Carmina Farina, the agreement has taken pay off the table until 2018 by making a reasonable and very modest settlement that now enables teachers and schools to focus on improvement. It has created a Union-Department panel to review and approve innovative and flexible ways to figure out how to improve student learning in 10% of the city's schools. It is establishing pilot programs to increase parent-teacher interaction (as well as time for teachers to engage in these interactions), and also scheduled in-school time for teachers to engage in peer-to-peer professional development. This recognizes the fact that US teachers currently spend less in-school time away from their own classes than almost all other nations, especially the highest performing ones.

The agreement will also streamline teacher evaluations by almost two-thirds - from 22 components down to 8 - and it will balance this with an expedited process to remove teachers who demonstrate unprofessional behavior. New York City is giving up on the one-size slams-all strategy of standardization and the war of all against all of charter school competition to embrace a more professionally inclusive approach.

Then there is Sweden. Once the poster child for social democratic excellence and equity, in the past decade, since its aggressive introduction of market-driven educational reforms, Sweden has experienced the greatest deterioration in PISA scores out of all OECD countries who were performing above average in 2003. Sweden also shows the greatest deterioration in educational equity between these dates. Sweden's educational reforms, especially its profit-based "free" schools (many of them owned by hedge fund companies) are modeled on the Anglo-American reforms of England and the United States. So it is not surprising to see that Sweden's educational performance is falling further and further behind the other high performing Scandinavian countries and moving more towards the low performers of England and the US, whose strategies it has adopted.

With an election looming in September, major political parties are responding to public unrest with Sweden's educational decline in a number of ways. Elevating the status and quality of teachers is one of them. Proposals include raising teachers' salaries, reducing the administrative burdens on teachers, and raising the bar for teacher qualifications so teachers do not come from the lowest ends of the graduation range as they do now.

One more country that is educationally endangered is Wales. Despite its exemplary record in educational equity in a fully comprehensive public school system, Wales is in the bottom third of all the countries who participate in PISA, it is the lowest ranking of all the four UK countries, and it is the only one of these to differ by a statistically significant degree. Last Fall, the Welsh Government invited the OECD to undertake a visit to review its improvement strategy and I was one of two experts who served on the five-person team that did this work.

Our report was published in May and included a number of recommendations on building the professional capital of the teaching profession. This included provisions to attract higher quality individual human capital into the profession, not by setting up a market of providers of teacher preparation outside the university system as the country's English neighbors had done, but by strengthening the existing system of university-based teacher education.

Our report also recommended extending a very promising government-funded program to encourage recently qualified teachers to acquire Masters' degrees. We also stressed that social capital (how well teachers work together) is as important as the human capital of what teacher are able to do alone - and to this extent we advised that a nationwide commitment to building strong professional communities among teachers should be strengthened by giving these communities a clearer focus and by supporting them with government funding so they could occur in school time.

Last - as the BBC and other media highlighted - we said it was important for the government not to get sidetracked by raising its scores on PISA, but to establish a compelling and uplifting vision of what it wanted Welsh learners to be. This, we said, would not only provide a direction for teaching and learning, but would also raise the status of Welsh teachers as the people who would have to realize this vision for their nation.

So whether we are Massachusetts or New York; in Canada, Scandinavia or the UK, when we stand at the crossroads of teacher quality, which path should we take - to build teachers up or break them down? The answer isn't in the earlier ABC's of forking paths.

Instead, we could do no worse than revisit the educational achievements of LBJ - Lyndon B Johnson: 36th President of the United States. After the life-shaping influence of being a public school teacher at the start of his career, Johnson built and left an immense educational legacy in the early childhood education reforms of Operation Headstart and in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that assigned Federal resources to offset local inequities.

Standing at his own crossroads of educational and social change, Johnson was clear about the path that America should take. "Education is not a problem", he declared. "Education is an opportunity". It's time we said the same about teaching and teachers.

Teachers are not a problem. They are an opportunity.

Carrots and sticks are wrong way to motivate teachers

This was written by Michael Fullan who is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. This post was originally found here.

by Michael Fullan

When education task forces are formed to address the question of improving the teaching profession it seems that they are required to take a superficiality pill. They then focus almost exclusively on human capital in order to improve (or remove) each and every teacher, one by one. The Alberta Task Force, with its 25 recommendations, is no exception. It is not that the recommendations have no merit; they just entirely miss the point.

You don’t develop a profession or an organization by focusing on sticks and carrots aimed at individuals. All high-performing entities develop the group to focus collectively and relentlessly on quality work linked to high expectations and standards. If you don’t base policies and strategies on purposeful group impact you inevitably end up with low yield results along with gross distractions.

Take the recommendation that has drawn the most press, implementing a process that would require teachers to be assessed to maintain their certification. Of course the intent is to get rid of incompetent teachers, but the action is akin to scorching the lawn to get rid of weeds. Try doing the math. There are not enough hours in the day to do all this work that has little chance of being effective anyway, and diverts principals from doing things that have much higher impact. What starts out as a reasonable goal (identify weak teachers and reward good ones) ends up becoming an overbearing, odious task. This micromanagement madness creates a massive bureaucracy that has zero chance of working, which is precisely the track record of its impact in other political systems that have tried it.

Similar developments currently underway in the U.S. are ruining the principalship, as I write in my book The Principal. There is an alternative. Focus, deliberatively and specifically, on the Professional Capital of Teachers– not just the individual human capital of bright and skilled people (that too), but especially social capital (the quality of the group, or how people effectively work together), and decisional capital (the capacity, over time, to develop and make expert decisions individually and collectively that benefit all your students).

We can take some of the ideas in the task force but we need to re-constitute them with an entirely different philosophy. The elements include:

1. High standards for teachers and school leaders which top-performing countries like Singapore, Finland and, yes, Canada, already have.

2. Transparent practice and monitoring of progress.

3. A growth oriented culture geared to the integration of professional standards and school goals.

4. Strategies for teachers to work together and for schools, and districts to learn from each other.

5. New opportunities for the more effective teachers to play leadership roles.

6. Learning partnerships between and among students and teachers aimed at deeper goals (such as the three Es in Alberta’s Inspiring Education – Engaged thinker, Ethical Citizen, Entrepreneurial spirit)

7. Alliances between the teaching profession and the community including parents, families and businesses.

8. Merging internal (within the group), and external accountability aimed at the very small number of teachers who don’t develop under the above conditions.

These elements reflect what high performing organizations embody in any sector. Do the first seven right and you’ll just be cleaning up the margins with Number 8, internal accountability. Put accountability first and you’ll undermine the other seven.

When employed, these strategies work – within short periods of time and deeply. The power of professional capital is identified in the findings of my work with colleague Andy Hargreaves:

- Talented schools improve even weak teachers. Talented teachers leave weak schools. Good collaboration reduces bad (ineffective) variation in the quality of teaching. Principals who help develop the group have the greatest impact on student learning.

- Superintendents who develop partnerships with their schools, and who foster schools in networks get the best district-wide results.

- Well-supported collaborative and transparent work (not just talk) among teachers is what gets the best results.

In short, if you know that growth and development of teachers is critical what strategy would you lead with: teacher evaluation, professional development or collaborative cultures? I know where I would put my money, and so does every other successful leader in organizations faced with challenging goals. Develop the culture and encompass evaluation and professional learning within it.

New GERM outbreak in Scotland

This was written by Niall MacKinnon who is a Scottish school principal Niall MacKinnon highlights the need for rigorous GERM infection control measures in education reform programs. You can read Niall MacKinnon's extended version on this article here.

By Niall MacKinnon

In his speech to the Scottish Learning Festival this September, cabinet secretary Michael Russell claimed that GERM is not for Scotland. The Global Education Reform Movement is a concept of Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg, presented in his recent book Finnish Lessons. The features of GERM are standardizing teaching and learning, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching a prescribed curriculum, management models from the corporate world and test-based accountability and control.

Scotland’s recent tightly controlled educational landscape of attainment targets, performance indicators and inspection judgements was an example of GERM. But Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) opened up a different pathway in the central “four capacities” concept, emphasizing and integrating wider focuses of linkage and personal development in revisioning pedagogy. CfE showed close affinity with the Finnish Way, outlined by Sahlberg as the antidote to GERM.  Finland encouraged risk-taking, learning from the past, owning innovations, shared responsibility and trust through professional dialogue. A central feature of decluttering for CfE was to focus on innovative approaches, emphasizing practice innovation and local professionalism, termed ‘building the curriculum’.

But just as this was coming together, linking proactive innovation, evaluation, and school systems to CfE, it fell apart. This was because of layers of prescription to different performance criteria in new multiple audit schedules, inspection templates and standards and quality reporting, to non-CfE criteria. The main emphasis was not exploring pedagogy, but micro-specification to serve the needs of external control and standardized calibration of schools. Then came hundreds of  “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes) as a curriculum specification ‘painting by numbers’ kit. CfE was further lashed down to seven “required characteristics of successful implementation” framed in a product model of curriculum, delivery model of schooling and behaviorist model of audit. Self-evaluation split two ways, one as evaluation taking the concepts, principles and purposes, applying them evidentially yet discursively – GERM-free. The other, calibrating audit prescription to fixed, outdated notions and applying these in absolutist terms – GERM. This set up a huge conflict within CfE in Scotland, one which Sahlberg took from me in the chapter defining GERM in Finnish Lessons:

“Niall MacKinnon, who teaches at Plockton Primary School, makes a compelling appeal for “locally owned questions and purposes in realising practice within the broader national policy and practice frameworks.” He gets right to the point of how GERM affects teachers and schools: “There is the real practical danger that without an understanding of rationale and theoretical bases for school development, practitioners may be judged by auditors on differing underlying assumptions to their own developmental pathways, and the universalistic grading schemas come to be applied as a mask or front giving pseudoscientific veneer to imposed critical judgments which are nothing more than expressions of different views and models of education. Through the mechanism of inspection, a difference of conceptual viewpoint, which could prompt debate and dialogue in consideration of practice, is eliminated in judgmental and differential power relations. One view supplants another. Command and control replaces mutuality, dialogue and conceptual exploration matched to practice development. Those who suffer are those innovating and bringing in new ideas.” ” (p 104)

The paragraph came from my 2011 paper ‘The Urgent Needs for New Approaches in School Evaluation to enable Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ in the international journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. My argument there was that specifications, grading and judgementalism destroy conceptual innovation and local practice professionalism, thereby negating CfE. Torridon Primary School and its headteacher Anne Macrae was my inspiration for that paragraph, now the case exemplar of GERM worldwide in Finnish Lessons.

Sahlberg shows how Finnish education placed central focus on professional dialogue, enabling pedagogy to link modern innovations to a long history of educational ideas. The central conceptual genius of CfE was the “four capacities” concept. It is not a slogan but a clarion call to get to know our pupils, and construct learning pathways by reaching out and revealing the dispositions latent in their potentials. These extend in so many ways out beyond conventional notions of learning, set in terms of delivery, targets and specifications.

We need to unpack learning, garner systemic understanding and enable formative development progression, for pupils, educators and institutions working together, not a “clear plan from A to B” as the Scottish schools’ inspectorate currently mandates. Scotland is now in the midst of GERM warfare between specifications compliance and pedagogic innovation, fought out over the morale and professionalism of Scotland’s teachers. As Dr Sahlberg said of GERM on his blog (30 June) “As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less”.

Sadly GERM is for Scotland, and the case study of GERM is Scotland. But it could so readily not be, once this is ‘seen’ and something done about it, or rather undone, simply by removing the specificatory shroud and control freakery of judgmental absolutism to outdated notions. Let us ‘build the curriculum’ as intended and envisaged.

The central lesson from Finnish Lessons is not what Finland did, but rather what Finland did NOT do to its education system. “Transformational” change in the nature of curriculum and its realization in school education, which Scotland “says” it is undertaking, is not going to come about without similarly transformational change in the means of getting there.

The 25th International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement

Niall MacKinnon is headteacher of Plockton Primary School, Highland, Scotland and attended ICSEI 2012, Malmö, Sweden.

by Niall MacKinnon

A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it. This was the key message of linked keynotes at the 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden. 

Pasi Sahlberg outlined how Finland set its own course for education, termed The Finnish Way, whose success offers profound lessons for the world. For Andy Hargreaves the Finnish phenomenon is part of a wider shift of approach, The Fourth Way, one necessary for school education to engage with the vast global economic, social and technological changes underway.

Both agree that most countries have been locked into models of education practice, management and evaluation not suiting today’s needs. 

Sahlberg urges new participatory, learner-led approaches, away from standardized testing and the privatisation of education. He views the conventional notion of a lesson as a ‘dead horse’. Though it cannot be revived, education policy makers are driven to try. This forms part of the GERM, or Global Education Reform Movement, a virus of prescription and control infecting and reinfecting national education systems, outlined in his recent book Finnish Lessons.

Certainly new policy shifts in England – no notice ‘morning raid’ OFSTED inspections, one term teacher competency dismissals, grading of teachers and teaching, lambasting ‘coasting’ schools – echo this view, spreading distrust and despondency. But unattainable perfectionism also contains its own danger. From the Scottish angle there was barely trace of talk of ‘excellence’, and certainly not as central imperative. Indeed the term was not mentioned in the congress review report. That gives global perspective from a key international congress on educational change held by a near neighbor. Perhaps the challenges to be grasped and the responses needed are more profound than mere exhortation.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading.

The official theme of ICSEI 2012 was the interplay between policy, research and practice in education. Each annual congress presents a ‘State of the Art’ review, and this year’s was entitled ‘Lost in Translation’, noting that policy makers and the educational research community have drifted apart, with those responsible for policy taking insufficient heed of the accumulated findings of international research.

As a headteacher – and a class committed one – it was refreshing to find many present were practitioners, or liasing directly with them. A group of teachers from Vancouver Island, Canada gave an interesting presentation Walking along the Difficult Path of Education Change, displaying approaches of inquiry-based learning, away from overly fixed pre-determined learning progression. From the other end of the telescope, the Brunei School Inspectorate were keen to bridge gulfs of understanding, searching out commonalities and differences of meaning, seeking to penetrate them in discourse, through stronger working relationships with schools.

The means to establish and enable effective collaboration through professional learning communities was covered by many presentations. The need to grasp new concepts and let go of old ones was a theme throughout. Hargreaves spoke of the fallacies of educational reform, warning against those of speed, substitution (seeing people as the problem), standardization, competition and a ‘fallacy of extremes’ achieved “by remedying or removing defects at the bottom and replicating excellence at the top”.

The pervading themes of the conference stood very much against the prevailing orthodoxies of educational administration, encapsulated in Sahlberg’s GERM. A need for new approaches, methods, concepts and a new participatory bridge between all those involved in education was perhaps the dominant message of the conference.

Next year’s ICSEI will be held in Santiago, Chile, with the theme Educational Systems for School Effectiveness and Improvement: Exploring the Alternatives. Will policy, discourse, research and practice move closer together this coming year? Which countries will embrace and explore genuine alternative approaches, as Finland’s case study was celebrated at this year’s ICSEI? Or will education policy continue to wield the ‘wrong drivers of change’ identified by Michael Fullan, a keynote speaker for ICSEI 2013? Certainly much hangs on the outcome. There was common agreement that through effective educational change the economy, society and culture necessary to establish a new benign internationalism may work in partnership to meet the global challenges of this century, already very different to the last.

This was not a national agenda, but an international one. The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise.

http://www.icsei.net/icsei2012/