Teacher Pay Advancements in the Bay State

Massachusetts' incoming education secretary Paul Reville supports higher salaries for those teachers who take posts in the most challenging schools, such as teaching hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, and special education and working in schools with dramatically improved performance:

"The larger challenge is to take on the monolithic pay notion and differentiate pay based on skill, knowledge, and assignment, and establish a concept that everyone doesn't have to be paid in the same lock step and lanes."

I am heartened to hear that Reville has recognized the importance of providing teachers with opportunities for better pay that other professionals enjoy. Even leaders at the national level are recognizing the need for reforming teacher pay. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings stated during her visit to Massachusetts, "If schools are to improve the achievement of their lowest-performing students, they should get the best teachers into the neediest schools by rewarding them with higher salaries."

And, most importantly, teachers in Massachusetts who have taken part in grant programs that award teacher bonuses based on performance say the program makes them feel more like a professional.
One teacher quoted in the Boston Globe article said that the extra money, "shows that they respect and value us, and that helps motivate us to keep doing it."

Teachers have a bigger impact on student learning than anything else in schools. They are the single greatest "natural resource" in education and we must begin treating them as so.  I look forward to reading more about the reforms in teacher pay taking place in Massachusetts.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day

We all have them -- those special teachers from school that we'll always remember. It might be the teacher that taught you how to read, or the one that mentored you in choosing which college to attend. Whoever it may be -– teachers affect the lives of our students everyday. We know, and research even shows, that teachers have the biggest impact on student learning.

Over the next eight years, the United States will need to recruit nearly 3 million new teachers due to teacher turnover, retirement and increased student enrollment. However, this task will be nearly impossible if we don't start to treat teachers like the professionals they are. As we celebrate National Teacher Appreciation day today, there are three major approaches we need to take to successfully recruit and retain our teachers:

• We need to give teachers the same opportunities for advancement and better pay that other professionals enjoy.
• We need to offer higher salaries to compete with other professions for adults who have strong math and science backgrounds.
• We need to pay teachers more when we ask them to take on harder jobs.

It's imperative that we have an effective teacher in every classroom and to do this we need to start appreciating our teachers more than one day a year. Take some time today to use the comments section of the blog to tell me about your favorite teacher.

We’re Still at Risk

This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the landmark education report A Nation at Risk and education analysts are offering their own perspective on where America is in regards to education. I wrote about Secretary of Education Spellings yesterday and wanted to mention one other issue from her remarks today. 

She said:

Many of the actions that A Nation at Risk recommended in 1983 continue to be largely ignored: raising standards, making coursework more rigorous, and using classroom time more effectively. These proposals were not unreasonable then, and they’re not unreasonable now.

Our campaign has put together our own analysis of the last 25 years and we’ve concluded similar results with respect to common, rigorous standards, expanding time for learning, and teacher compensation.

The Christian Science Monitor and Seattle Times also agree.

Waiting another 25 years before we act to solve this crisis is unacceptable:

• We cannot afford to fail in our mission to provide students with a world-class education.
• We cannot afford to graduate millions of high school seniors who lack skills in reading and math that they should have learned in middle school.
• We especially cannot afford to continue slipping farther and farther behind the other nations of the world.

Our students deserve better, and our nation’s economic security is at greater risk now than ever before.

Reflections on Slate

This past Wednesday, I blogged about the importance of tackling dropout prevention in a comprehensive manner. While I was thinking about the new America’s Promise report and the new NAEP writing results, a colleague of mine gave me a copy of a recent article on educational reform from Slate magazine. From the looks of it, the writer and I have some things in common.

First, we both agree that we need to raise our education standards. By having rigorous common standards, we will be able to guarantee that our children are receiving a world-class education. Currently, students and their parents are being misled about the skills students will need after graduation, and they are being given a false sense of security about how well prepared they really are. For example, although every state requires high school students to take tests, only a handful make sure those tests measure readiness for college and work. With standards like that, it should come as no surprise that the United States is currently ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in Math and 21st in Science.

Disturbing News on Dropouts

Yesterday was a busy day for the campaign. In the morning, I was on a panel at America's Promise's dropout prevention summit. The event focused around a new report that the Education Research Center released on high school graduation rates. The report details that only about one-half of the students in the 50 largest cities graduate with a high school diploma.

It is these school districts that account for nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of the 1.2 million students nationwide who fail to graduate with a diploma each year. As all eyes are on Pennsylvania – I wanted to point out that the Philadelphia City School District has a 49.6 precent graduation rate – 20 points below the national average.

This number is disturbing.

Teaching and Learning Celebration in NYC

I have a busy day ahead of me in Los Angeles, but I'm already looking ahead to tomorrow in New York City. I will address channel Thirteen's Teaching & Learning Celebration conference during the panel discussion "Where We Stand: America's Schools in the 21st Century." The panel will examine where American schools stand in the world, global competitiveness in science and math, and what we can do to strengthen American education.

The High Cost of Losing Teachers

Money is a powerful motivator, and a new study showing just how the staggering rate of teacher turnover affects the bottom line may be the incentive districts need to take a long hard look at how to keep teachers in their classrooms.

Earlier this week, the Alliance for Excellent Education released a new brief, What Keeps Good Teachers in the Classroom?: Understanding and Reducing Teacher Turnover, that examines the causes and implications for the hundreds of thousands of teachers who leave their schools each year.

Performance Pay at the Highest Levels

Last week, Adam Thibault, ED in '08's senior policy analyst, attended a panel on NCLB reauthorization up on Capitol Hill and returned with some interesting perspectives about steps that individual districts have been taking to make school reforms and accountability work. A lot of important figures in American education were present, including Secretary Tommy Thompson and Governor Roy Barnes, Co-chairs of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, and several key congressional staffers.

Reaching out to Teachers

We've got many current and former teachers who work with us here at ED in '08, and they are always quick to remind us that teachers can be powerful voices for change, perhaps even more so than the unions that represent them. ED in '08 is reaching out to teachers in a couple different ways today.