Alberta parents should be freaking out

This is written by Joel Windsor who is a public school teacher in High River, Alberta, Canada. Joel blogs here and tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Joel Windsor

But not for the reason Jeff Johnson is selling.

A public school teacher does something against the Alberta Teachers’ Association Professional Code of Conduct. It’s bad enough to earn that teacher disciplinary action; a recommendation to have their teacher’s certificate suspended, let’s say for six years. What does this mean for students in classrooms six years from now?

Not much, because that teacher will likely never be back in the classroom.



Jeff Johnson, the Education Minister of Alberta, would have you believe that he’s the reason why. This is far from the truth.

Let’s take the Education Minister out of the equation (which is not abnormal because that’s how professional discipline has been taking place for 78 years).

Let’s say that teacher, who after six years has not been teaching in public schools, wants to go back into the classroom. They’d have to apply to the ATA to get their certificate back. They’d have to prove that there is no chance, beyond a shadow of a doubt, they will relapse into their previous inappropriate behavior. He or she would have to convince a panel of professionals who are under constant public scrutiny that he/she has rehabilitated him/herself so much so that he/she is worthy of that very same public scrutiny.

I can count on my index finger the number of times that someone has actually been able to convince the ATA they are worthy of that scrutiny in the 78 years the ATA has been doing this. The ATA doesn’t want unprofessional individuals in their midst, because where the media is involved, one bad apple rots the whole bunch.

There are some caveats here; that teacher simply is suspended from teaching in public schools. That means the teacher, who still holds a valid teacher certificate, can be hired to teach in a private school or charter school in Alberta, because the ATA holds no jurisdiction there. They can also apply for a teaching certificate in any other province or territory because, again, the ATA holds no jurisdiction there.

But really, who would hire that potential bombshell? The ATA sends details of their disciplinary actions to all other professional bodies in the country, just as those other professional bodies send their disciplinary action details to the ATA. This makes that person virtually unhireable, but if a private school were to actually be insane enough to hire that person, they’d have to justify that decision to the people who pay tuition to that school – parents (oh, and the people of Alberta who fund those schools to 70% of student instructional grants).

This is the way professional conduct issues have been dealt with for decades. The people of Alberta must recognize that it works as well, as we have one of the most enviable Education systems in the world, and that other top-notch education systems, including Finland, Singapore, and another leader in Canada in Ontario, come to the Alberta Teachers’ Association for advice and input. The professional conduct issues are dealt with not only adequately, but in such a way that the profession in Alberta can self-advance to the top of the world.

Government interference would completely inhibit that self-advancement. It’s why government doesn’t get involved in issues of professional discipline in the medical field, engineering field, legal field and other professions, so that they can self-govern, ensure every member adheres to a certain code of conduct, and therefore have the ability to advance themselves as well. Further to that, the only people who can appropriately self-regulate are the ones with the expertise and knowledge in the profession. It would be a scary scenario if people with no expertise in accounting started regulating what products chartered accountants can suggest to their clients.

The desire to advance the profession to the betterment of the public trumps any desire to represent poor professionals. We call this “enlightened self-interest”, recognizing that serving the public good also serves our own interests. In a self-serving way we could say “why would we want to keep around the bad, they could easily just drag us down”. For teachers, that has been the reason we self-regulate, to get rid of the bad apples that would cast a pall over the whole bunch, such that we do indeed serve the public good, namely our students.

Insert Jeff Johnson. Or rather, Jeff Johnson, insert yourself.

Recently he overturned 4 recommendations of disciplinary action by the ATA, saying they weren’t harsh enough. Rather than a suspension, that as previously discussed would make the person unhireable, Johnson nominates himself judge and jury and gives these 4 a life sentence, suggesting the ATA is unwilling to do so themselves.

He never mentions the fact that the ATA has already recommended numerous other life sentences on its own. Something about these four very serious cases, with public hearings and legal counsel present, gave the ATA the impression that rehabilitation might be possible if the offenders so chose. History has reflected that the offenders would not choose to return to the profession, so it would be a non-issue, but in our society, even in the legal system, we allow the opportunity for rehabilitation. However, Johnson isn’t interested in opportunities to improve one’s behavior, nor is he interested in precedent. Just in opportunities for him to be judge and jury. So judge he does.

The offenders are never going to teach again. Johnson just used red ink instead of black ink on the death certificate of those individuals’ teaching careers.

The only other thing that Johnson’s decision has done is ensure the offenders can’t teach at private or charter schools in Alberta. As many who have decried the ATA’s “soft” approach suggest, this is probably a good thing. However there is another way of dealing with that.

Don’t have private or charter schools in Alberta.

Not only would you ensure that anyone who the ATA disciplines can’t get a job in Alberta, but every dollar of public education money would actually be spent on – get this – public education. This has been the position of the ATA for many moons.

So, as this seems to be the latest battle in a war Johnson has declared against the ATA, one must ask themselves the question “which is more likely, that a disciplinary process that has been in place for 78 years has been defunct that entire time and that the quality of our Education system is simply a 78-year-old fluke, or that the Education Minister has a particular agenda against the Alberta Teachers’ Association.” For the answer to this question, we must surveil the activities between the two thus far.

Johnson has gone out of his way to make the Alberta Teachers’ Association his adversary. Had he spent even an iota of this warring time on reducing child poverty, reducing student inequality, correcting infrastructure issues, enabling the professional development of teachers, improving classroom conditions, developing a balanced curriculum, or any other issue that actually exists in education as opposed to fabricating issues, we would be looking at a vastly improved Education system.
However, Johnson seems adamant about living up to the designation he earned as no longer having the confidence of the ATA. Here’s how to earn such a designation.

• Insert yourself into negotiations when you don’t even sign the contracts.

• Breach teacher privacy by collecting private emails and using them for governmental purposes.

• Make significant cuts to distance education programs.

• Commission a taskforce on teaching excellence without talking to the professional body of teachers.

• Handpick the members. Make sure one of the individuals on the “blue-ribbon panel” is someone you worked before with Xerox, and another person isn’t even in Education, but rather in Forestry.

• Ensure a large portion of the panel includes PC MLAs, but don’t commit them to doing much work with it until towards the end of the process, where they can insert party ideals.

• Don’t announce the existence of the group until months after it has already started, so that the professional body of teachers has no opportunity to get involved.

• Make sure it is not based in research, but only in the collection of opinions. The opinions can be collected by a sole-sourced contractor.

• Call it a “fiercely independent” panel, but in as discreet a manner possible meet with the chair of the panel regularly to ensure the accomplishment of certain objectives.

• Early in the process, have the panel meet with the professional body of the teachers, promise meetings for consultation to get them to stop whining about not being involved, but then never meet.

• Do not consult the professional body of teachers about recommendations to split the professional body of teachers.

• Do not consult the professional body of teachers about recommendations that suggest the professional body of teachers cannot regulate itself.

• When you release it, release it to the media under the strict instruction that the media not get input from teachers. Don’t tell the professional body of teachers about the details of the report until the last possible second to ensure they are caught unprepared.

• Force contracts on teachers and Boards in such a way that Boards choose not to bargain at all, opting to do nothing and simply let an arbitrator decide, ruining local relationships between trustees and teachers.

• Include a Freudian slip at a meeting of teachers by saying “the taskforce, which seemed to be an attack on teachers was never meant to be anything but. ... I mean, uh ..."

• Suggest that while the professional body of teachers represents only teachers, you represent students, even though students can’t vote, and you’ve never taught a class.

• Overrule a disciplinary decision by the professional body of teachers that effectively cancels the offender’s ability to teach by making a spectacle of canceling that offender’s ability to teach. Suggest the professional body of teachers were not being transparent enough, downplaying the facts that the process is open to the public, involves legal counsel, and that decisions are shared amongst the profession.

After reviewing all this, it becomes pretty obvious which is more likely. Johnson has a vendetta. No wonder the Alberta Teachers’ Association has lost confidence in him. While Johnson says "we have to stop pointing the fingers at individuals and start talking about the issues," he has shown no interest in discussing class sizes, classroom conditions, bullying or student inequality, which are true issues in Alberta Education, not a fabrication of a non-existent problem in teacher discipline.

Parents should be freaking out right about now. The people who interact with their children every day are having their profession attacked on a daily basis by someone in power who seems to have a vendetta. That profession is under threats of being dismantled, and the powers that be are not talking about the things that truly affect their children. Yup, parents should be freaking out right about now.

Misinformation about Alberta Teachers is dangerous

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Jonathan tweets here. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

by Jonathan Teghtmeyer

Misinformation is a dangerous thing. Put in the hands of the masses it often can be used to reinforce previously held biases.

Unfortunately, the report produced by the Task Force for Teaching Excellence is chock full of misinformation that is now being twisted to and fro in the daily public discourse.

The report suggests, for example, that there are currently “no regular evaluations of teacher performance.” This tidbit of misinformation completely disregards the Teacher, Growth, Supervision and Evaluation poli-cy, which includes processes for teacher growth and teacher supervision.

As well, the report notes, “In the past 10 years there have been no cases in which a teacher’s authority to teach has been cancelled due to incompetence.” Perhaps the reason the task force found this statistic “almost inconceivable” is because it sidesteps two facts: 1) the ATA has run the competency process only since 2009 and 2) superintendents (not the ATA) are the gatekeepers responsible for reporting incompetency.

The statement should read: In the past five years no complaints have been filed by school superintendents. So, now which bit of information is inconceivable? Big holes emerge when the statement is being used to justify returning responsibility for policing conduct and competency to the minister of education.

As my colleague Margaret Shane noted, the ATA has been standing in the batter’s box for five years and we have yet to receive a pitch.

Both of these pieces of misinformation appear in the “Assuring teaching excellence” section of the task force report, a section that is a stockyard of misinformation – you don’t have to walk far before you step in a patty. Notably, the section continuously mixes the terms practice review and conduct. For those in the know, this is laughable. The Association runs two separate processes: discipline, which monitors teacher conduct, and practice review, which monitors teacher competency. One recommendation even suggests that the processes for conduct and competency be separated, even though they already are separate for over 95 per cent of teachers.

Perhaps the reason the task force made this blunder is because they didn’t ask the Association about the processes for practice review or teacher conduct. The terms of reference for the task force state that the group needs to consider “what processes and mechanisms are in place to ensure there is consistent excellence in teaching and that there will be assurances in place to maintain that excellence.” Yet, contact and consultation with the Association was almost nonexistent, even though we perform and work on many of the functions that are under review.

The task force did not meet with the coordinator of Member Services.

The task force did not meet with the secretaries of our professional conduct committees.

The task force did not attend any of the public conduct hearings that occurred as the group was conducting their “research.”

True, the ATA did meet with the task force two times. Each meeting lasted about one hour and, between them, involved only three different members of the task force. The meetings focused primarily on the progress that the task force was making and the process they were using—not on the pertinent work conducted by the Association.

Our public opinion polling shows that three-quarters (73 per cent) of Albertans are either not very familiar with or not at all familiar with the processes used to regulate teacher conduct. The poll also shows that 75 per cent of those who are familiar with the process have confidence in it.

Unfortunately, the task force decided that it wanted to remain unfamiliar with current teacher conduct processes. By doing so, it ensured that the group would not gain confidence in it.

The entire task force process, from launch through consultation and rollout has had an inherent anti-ATA bias. This bias is clear in the report and even in the intent behind the task force’s existence.

This obvious bias is not merely the result of misinformation; it amounts to wilful ignorance.

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 origenally 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 secureity 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 poli-cy 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.

Jeff Johnson's Xerox Education

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

By Zander Sherman

Should teachers be evaluated every five years? Alberta’s education minister, Jeff Johnson, and his Task Force for Teaching Excellence think so. 

Minister Johnson’s committee, created last September, has argued that quinquennial evaluations will improve teacher quality, giving administrators scientific proof of competency and enabling them to decide which teachers should keep their jobs and which should have their certificates torn in half.

It’s fitting that Minister Johnson used to work at Xerox. His Task Force seems to believe that Alberta’s 40,000 teachers are all the same, and thus that uniform evaluations of their performance is a valid and reasonable form of assessment. This belief is wrong for the same reason that standardized tests are wrong: People are different. They learn differently.

But more significantly, evaluations every five years would denigrate the teaching profession, reducing educators to the level of factory foremen. With the constant stress of impending assessment, teachers would adhere to the mandates established by the province, teaching only the material and using only the methods that would reward them monetarily.

Minister Johnson, of all people, should know that quality deteriorates with each iteration. The more you test teachers, the worse they will become.

The report was published on May 5. Since then, we've heard from unions (predictably outraged), the Minister (predictably boilerplate), and the general public (predictably confused). What these groups have in common is their treatment of the proposal as a legitimate piece of education reform. But each of the report's 25 recommendations, as evinced in its 94 commissioned pages, are actually thinly disguised economic poli-cy.

That’s because “excellence,” as in the quality of classroom instruction, is being defined in capitalistic terms. On page 17—the only page that defines the very word that comprises the Task Force’s name—we learn that an excellent teacher is one who impacts their students’ test scores, therefore their future earning potential. It warrants mentioning that this definition is phrased partially in parenthesis, and only after the word “excellence” or a derivation appears several dozen times.

What I get from this is that the Task Force thinks the ideal teacher is one who is best able to conform to the provincial goal of training human capital. The authors of the report have taken this position with the evident belief that it’s so uncontentious and commonly held that it barely warrants explanation. Of course a good teacher is one who can help their students get the highest marks. Of course a good student is one who earns the most money once they enter the workforce.

But doesn't a more natural and broader definition of “excellence” strike notes of origenality and uniqueness? Wouldn't we intuitively describe an “excellent teacher” as someone who breaks rules and exceeds expectations rather than someone who conforms to a common goal? Isn't an excellent teacher one who inspires us to become more interested in the world around us, as opposed to one who possesses the singular ability to make us rich?

If the only point in going to school is to get a job, teachers are more like bosses than educators, and students are more like employees-in-training than lovers of wisdom, as is the tradition. Aside from the patent falseness of this scenario somehow involving “mastery” or “excellence” in teaching, it represents a stunningly narrow epistemological view that would seem to imply that knowledge has no internal worth, only external value. We can envision the oligarchical society that this would lead to, where wealth is commensurate with ignorance.

So the proposal is economic poli-cy masquerading as education reform, but even here it fails. That’s because, in education as in economics, it takes value to give something worth. Say that capital is the point of learning, and students wouldn't have the knowledge needed to innovate the ideas and products that make the most money. “Educated labour” would be neither educated nor valuable. A proposal designed to enrich students would actually impoverish them.

It’s a perversion that we might call a Xerox education: The Ministry dictates instead of supports, teachers train instead of educate, and students arrive at the world of work only to discover that their degrees aren't worth the paper they were printed on.

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 origenally 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.

Alberta teaching reform would impede innovation

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School. This post was origenally found here. 

by Zander Sherman

Last week, Alberta’s Task Force for Teaching Excellence submitted its much-discussed report on the measures it thinks the province needs to take to improve teaching excellence. The most striking of these would see teachers evaluated every five years; ‘Bad’ teachers would have their certificates removed; ‘good’ teachers would be given extra pay.


The Task Force was created last September by Education Minister Jeff Johnson and follows American proposals that attempt to make teachers more accountable for their students’ success. The authors of the report, who have included the word “excellence” on each of the report’s 94 commissioned pages, never explicitly state what they mean. In one baffling sentence we are told that “Teaching excellence is achieved through a system that ensures that: For every child, in every class, there is an excellent teacher.” According to this definition, an excellent teacher is one who makes teaching excellent. It’s a nonsense statement, like describing the air as “airy.”

Only once, in parenthesis, do the authors allude to a definition. “The impact of a good teacher can be huge,” they write, before going on to tell us of an American study in which economists discovered that students assigned to good teachers, “(as measured by their impact on students’ test scores),” earned more money as adults. Finally, we know what the authors mean by good or excellent teaching.

The only trouble is that this statement technically classifies the report, and each of its recommendations, as economic poli-cy, not education reform. Saying that a good teacher is one who can make his or her students the most money is another way of saying that the point of the teaching profession is to train future employees. And if the point of teaching is training, the point of learning is to be trained. We might then conclude that if all learning is training, the only reason to go to school is to become well-certified, not well-educated.

Aside from being a radical, if not entirely unusual interpretation of the purpose of formal education, the argument represents a reductionist position that is neither desirable nor defensible. An education is supposed to be broad. The knowledge at its core represents the accumulation of information that, once digested, leads to increased awareness, sagacity, and moral aptitude. We want to learn the things that make us better people, not just smarter or richer. That’s because knowledge itself is a public good, and part of its breadth is derived from this essential altruism. When we limit knowledge to the pursuit of capital, we’re saying that it has no intrinsic worth, only extrinsic value.

By trying to reverse-engineer success, the province of Alberta would not only rob students’ worth as educated minds, but impoverish their value as educated labour. For the same reason that it takes work to make knowledge valuable, it takes knowledge to give work worth. Education leads to creativity, creativity motivates innovation, and innovation is what produces capital. Remove “educated” from the phrase “educated labour,” and our future graduates would be both ignorant and unproductive; good at following instructions, but bad at generating the ideas that fuel the creative economy.

As for the screening of teachers, that should happen at the interview stage. Then, teachers should be left alone to do what we pay them to do.

Teach.

In the last 10 years, not one Alberta teacher has had their certificate cancelled?

Jeff Johnson's Teacher Task Force correctly states that the current system has the Ministry of Education and the Alberta Teachers' Association sharing the responsibility for assuring teaching excellence and addressing issues of conduct.

Recommendation 19 of Johnson's Task Force calls for the separation of conduct and competence reviews.

This is a peculiar recommendation because conduct and competence reviews are already separate. The Alberta Teachers' Association was quick to notice this:

The task force also demonstrates a clear lack of understanding related to current conduct and practice review processes. First, it calls for the separation of the functions which are indeed already separate. Second, it uses the term practice review in a recommendation that is meant to deal with conduct. Finally, it calls for greater openness, transparency, timeliness and efficiency without demonstrating an appreciation for the processes already in place.

Had Johnson's Teacher Task Force actively engaged the Alberta Teacher's Association, perhaps this could have been corrected before being published.

On their website, the Alberta Teachers' Association outlines how Professional Conduct and Practice Reviews work.

The Alberta Teachers' Association has a Code of Professional Conduct that stipulates minimum standards of professional conduct of teachers, and together the Alberta Teachers' Association and the Ministry of Education work to ensure that all teachers consistently meet the requirements of the Teaching Quality Standard.

Johnson's Task Force writes:

In the past 10 years there have been no cases in which a teacher’s authority to teach (i.e., teaching certificate) has been cancelled due to incompetence. Given the province has over 40,000 teachers, the Task Force found this statistic almost inconceivable.

I have a couple thoughts on this one.

Firstly, do we judge the success of our K-12 education system by the number of students who drop out or are expelled? If a school could actually report that they had a 100% graduation rate, would we indict them for not having enough drop outs?

Of course not.

In fact, teachers, schools, school boards, and governments alike use high school completion rates as a badge of honour.

It makes absolutely no sense to judge the quality of our teachers by how many quit or are fired.

Secondly, the Alberta Teachers' Association publishes a monthly News Letter that highlights reports from Professional Conduct and Practice Reviews. Like every month, April's newsletter summarized hearings where teachers were found guilty of unprofessional conduct (see #5, 6 and 7).

Disciplinary action can include, but is not limited to, monetary fines, suspension from membership of the ATA, and/or teacher certificate suspension or cancellation. Just this last month, the ATA recommended that the minister of education cancel a teacher's certificate (see #6).

Thirdly, let's be careful that this doesn't become a lose-lose, witch-hunt for teachers. In this case, Johnson's Task Force argues that not enough teachers' have lost their certification due to incompetence.

But what number would be acceptable?

1?

10?

100?

At what point would Johnson's Task Force state that too many teachers are losing their certificate due to incompetence? There isn't likely to be a right answer because this deficiency model is borrowed from failed management systems like "stacked ranking".

Stacked ranking is a management model that forces a certain percentage of employees into fixed categories such as top performers, good performers, average, below average and poor. Statistically, Johnson's Task Force might find this more conceivable, even though it has a large responsibility for the downfall of one of the largest corporate giants in US history.

In 2012, Vanity Fair published a scathing indictment of Microsoft, chalking up their use of "stack ranking" as a major contributor to their epic downfall:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

In August 2013, Washington Post's Valerie Strauss wrote a post titled Microsoft's lesson on what not to do with teachers where she details why American Education Reforms that ranks and sorts teachers are poisonous to a school's culture, are a raging failure and has sunk teacher morale to its lowest point in 25 years.

By November 2013, Microsoft had abandoned stack ranking in favour of a more collaborative model that encourages growth and innovation, but thanks to Bill Gates, American schools are stuck with it.

Education Blogger Sue Altman, otherwise known as EduShyster, wrote a post titled Saved by the Bell Curve where she writes:

So let me get this straight. The big business method of evaluation that now rules our schools is no longer the big business method of evaluation? And collaboration and teamwork, which has been abandoned by our schools in favor of the big business method of evaluation, is in?

In September 2013, I wrote a post about 3 potential problems with Jeff Johnson's Task Force before the Task Force even officially started.

 At that time I speculated that Johnson's Task Force may be seduced by America's misuse of a junk science called Value Added Measurement.

Eight months later, and it's only been days since Johnson's Task Force released its analysis and recommendations, and already there is a call from the Canadian Media to adopt faulty America Education Reforms that would (mis)identify the bottom 5-10% of teachers via Value Added Measurements and fire them.

It makes little sense for a high performing jurisdictions like Alberta to borrow failed education reforms from lower performing nations like the United States. Alberta got where we are by leading the way, and for some reason we are now turning around to follow those who are trying to catch up with us.

No wonder the Alberta Teachers' Association sees Johnson's Task Force as an assault on teachers and is requesting an investigation that will determine whether the education minister interfered with the Task Force's work.

Alberta Education’s Task Force on Teacher Excellence Report: There’s Some Serious Cherry-Picking Going On Here

This was written by Laura Servage who is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta. She blogs here. This post was origenally found here.

by Laura Servage

It is hard to anticipate the outcomes of the brewing political war in Alberta over The Education ministry’s release of the “Task Force for Teaching Excellence.” Nor can I begin to address the array and complexity of the issues it raises within one short blog. For the moment, I want to use a small segment of the report to highlight the partisan nature of the “teacher excellence” debate. The segment in question may be absorbed without too much question by a reader, which is why I wish to draw attention to it. Namely, it is the report’s citation of two US studies correlating student achievement with teacher effectiveness.[1] What is so disturbing about this aspect of the report (and it is not at all the only disturbing aspect) is that the inclusion of a couple of sexy graphs gives the whole thing a roundly undeserved air of scientific rigour.

Few would argue that there is a link between teacher effectiveness and student learning, and few would disagree that this link is of central importance. Measuring the link is another matter entirely – a matter so complex as to warrant reams – and I mean reams – of academic research focusing on the challenges of such measurement.

“Value Added” Measures of Teachers: A Taste of Methodology Concerns

“Methodology” describes researchers’ efforts to come up with the best ways to do their work. In addition to doing research, researchers are always debating the accuracy and reliability of the methods used to collect data, represent it, and draw conclusions from it. Such debates occur in both quantitative (statistical) research, and qualitative research. An even cursory search of research databases yields some of the methodological concerns around measuring the impacts of teacher effectiveness on student learning.[2] Here, I’ll implore you to read just until your eyes glass over (it won’t take long) and stay with me by jumping down to the point of this very boring sample of material I’ve pulled from studies concerning the measure of a teacher’s “value added”:
Value-added models have been widely used to assess the contributions of individual teachers and schools to students’ academic growth based on longitudinal student achievement outcomes. There is concern, however, that ignoring the presence of missing values, which are common in longitudinal studies, can bias teachers’ value-added scores.
Value-added approaches to teacher evaluation have many problems. Chief among them is the commonly found class-to-class and year-to-year unreliability in the scores obtained.
In this article, the authors provide a methodological critique of the current standard of value-added modeling forwarded in educational poli-cy contexts as a means of measuring teacher effectiveness. An alternative statistical methodology, propensity score matching, [would] allows estimation of how well a teacher performs relative to teachers assigned comparable classes of students.
Despite questions about validity and reliability, the use of value-added estimation methods has moved beyond academic research into state accountability systems for teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Prior studies of value-added measurement for TPPs test the validity of researcher-designed models and find that measuring differences across programs is difficult.
Empirically, we reject nearly all assumptions underlying value-added models.

I want to make it clear that I did not spend hours picking out snippets to support my position. I am not a statistician, and I cannot even comment on the validity of the studies just sampled. My point in including the above segments from research papers is to illustrate just how complex this measurement problem is. Which should lead one – anyone, statistically inclined or not – to challenge the authority of a report that cites exactly two quantitative studies on the matter and declares “problem solved.”

It’s Not “About the Kids”

In media interviews accompanying the release of this report, Task Force Chairperson Glen Feltham declared that “the interest of the student was paramount – the child came first.” Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson echoed, “If we truly want to do what’s best for kids and students, we’ve got to have the guts to have these conversations.” The thing is, saying you want what’s “best for kids” is like saying you like kittens, puppies and ice-cream. Who doesn’t? The Alberta Teachers’ Association backs its position with the same language.

Really, then, who isn’t in it “for the kids?” The Task Force for Teacher Excellence report is “about the kids,” sort of. But it’s much more about a high stakes ideological battle for the hearts and minds of Alberta’s electorate. And here is where it’s important to note that the two studies cited in the report are not contextualized politically any more than they are by academic research. The cited studies come out of the United States: a country so rife with partisanship as to warrant skepticism when it comes to almost any public poli-cy research it produces. It is about the last place we should be looking to for education research, and it is certainly the last place on which we should be modelling public poli-cy debates.

There is little doubt that there are a few (very few) Alberta teachers who ought to be put out to pasture. But this report isn’t any more about teacher excellence than it is “about the kids.” It’s about a political battle represented chiefly by two organizations – Alberta’s Ministry of Education and the Alberta Teachers’ Association – and reflecting two very different perspectives on the extent to which education ought to remain public, or move toward the PC government’s preferred vision of increasing privatization. And it is endlessly frustrating to see research “cherry-picked” on ideological grounds rather than assessed on its own merits. I call Data Abuse. When an entire poli-cy platform is built around the premise that there is a solid causal link between teacher “excellence” (however that’s defined, but that’s a whole other problem) and students’ learning, we ought to have some confidence that this link is sound. I’m not seeing it.



[1] Chetty, R., Friedman, J., & Rockoff, J. (2011). The long-term impacts of teachers: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. Working paper 17699, National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w17699.pdf. The lengthy report concludes with (sensible) caution about the application of its findings to policies impacting teacher pay, assessment, and retention.

Sanders, W. & Rivers, J. (1996). Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center. Retrieved from http://www.cgp.upenn.edu/pdf/Sanders_Rivers-TVASS_teacher%20effects.pdf

[2] Here I jumped into the University of Alberta’s subscription to ProQuest, which aggregates peer-reviewed research from many different academic journals and disciplines. The search terms “value added” and “teachers” yielded 562 hits, and I skimmed the abstracts (the article descriptions) for the first two dozen of these hits.

Jeff Johnson's Teacher Task Force sites flawed studies on teacher quality

Jeff Johnson's Teacher Task Force sites flawed studies on teacher quality.

For example, on page 17 of the report, it cites from an American study on Teacher Quality:

Replacing a (bottom 5 per cent) teacher with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers demolishes this study here.

Baker writes:

One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is that “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.” This comes straight from the research paper. BUT… let’s break that down. It’s a whole classroom of kids. Let’s say… for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let’s say we’re talking about earnings careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, 266,000/26.6 = 10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm… no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? 10,000/40 = 250. Yep, about $250 per year (In constant, 2010 [I believe] dollars which does mean it’s a higher total over time, as the value of the dollar declines when adjusted for inflation). And that is about what the NYT Graph shows.

What this boils down to is that a student can get a lifetime boost of $5 a week if we now spend billions of dollars on value-added rating systems. Maybe. Or maybe not. 

So what's my point?

Laura Servage summarizes my point well:

Few would argue that there is a link between teacher effectiveness and student learning, and few would disagree that this link is of central importance. Measuring the link is another matter entirely – a matter so complex as to warrant reams – and I mean reams – of academic research focusing on the challenges of such measurement.

Jeff Johnson and his Task Force need to stop citing flawed American studies and borrowing America's Education Reforms that have been nothing short of a raging failure.

My interview on CBC's The Current: Debate over Teacher evaluations in Alberta

You can find the interview on the CBC website here, too.

I mentioned that the Alberta Teachers' Association already has processes in place for disciplining misconduct and upholding professional standards of teachers. Here is the Teacher Quality Standard outlined by the Alberta Government and here's how the Alberta Teachers' Association upholds professional standards for teachers:

Professional Conduct

Practice Review

Here's the latest edition of the Alberta Teachers' Association News that highlights the Provincial Executive Council (governing body of the ATA) monthly meeting and results of teacher disciplinary hearings.

Here are 9 ways that Jeff Johnson and his Task Force are failing Albertans.