The Education Gadfly Weekly: How to improve retention and job satisfaction: “Let Teachers Teach”
The Education Gadfly Weekly: How to improve retention and job satisfaction: “Let Teachers Teach”
How to improve retention and job satisfaction: “Let Teachers Teach”
Last month, Louisiana issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report hasn’t received nearly enough attention. It deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction, effectiveness, and raising student achievement.
How to improve retention and job satisfaction: “Let Teachers Teach”
The latest math fad is another excuse to teach nothing
Why were schools closed so long during the pandemic?
The effects of expanding computer science in high school
#926: What “Young Sheldon” teaches about parenting, with Alina Adams
Cheers and Jeers: June 27, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 27, 2024
The latest math fad is another excuse to teach nothing
Why were schools closed so long during the pandemic?
The effects of expanding computer science in high school
#926: What “Young Sheldon” teaches about parenting, with Alina Adams
Cheers and Jeers: June 27, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 27, 2024
How to improve retention and job satisfaction: “Let Teachers Teach”
Last week, I was honored to be invited to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on issues of teacher salaries, school funding, and staff shortages. The committee chairman, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, introduced a bill last year that would set an annual base salary of $60,000 for public school teachers. In my remarks, I said no one will reasonably begrudge paying teachers more. But if the goal is to keep good people in the classroom and raise outcomes for students, higher pay is unlikely to get the job done. Teachers are just as likely to cite student behavior, job-related stress, and feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the job as their reasons for leaving. The simple fact is we’ve made teaching an impossible job for the majority of the nation’s four million full-time teachers to do well and sustainably. A RAND survey of teachers released on the eve of the HELP committee meeting largely echoed all this.
In my testimony, I quoted Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, who said in a recent interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, “Students who are habitually ungovernable should be removed from teachers’ classrooms so teachers can actually teach and students can actually learn.” It was refreshing to hear a state superintendent say such a thing when teachers are more likely to be asked what they did to trigger the disruption, or told dismissively that students don’t act out when lessons are relevant and engaging.
Brumley’s remark wasn’t merely a casual observation. Last month, he and the state’s Department of Education issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report hasn’t received nearly enough attention, and apparently none at all outside of Louisiana. It deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction and effectiveness and raising student achievement. In retrospect, I should have attached a copy of it to my Senate testimony.
Running just three brisk pages, it features eighteen bullet points aimed at fixing professional development, changing approaches to student behavior and discipline, improving curriculum and instruction, and taking non-academic responsibilities off teachers’ plates. This includes abolishing antiquated lesson planning requirements, limiting cellphone use in schools, and either paying teachers for non-academic work or putting an end to it altogether. “Teachers are asked to be mental health professionals, social workers, and nurses on top of their instructional duties,” Brumley told me this week. “It’s too much. It’s not fair to teachers or the students.”
Brumley began the project earlier this year by pulling together a work group comprised of two dozen teachers, led by Louisiana’s Teacher of the Year, Kylie Altier. “This is not a check-the-box exercise,” he told them; he promised to take on the issues they raised and push their recommendations with the state board of education, the legislature, school board presidents, and district superintendents. Last month Brumley stood alongside Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry at a press conference touting the report and its recommendations. “There is not a job more fulfilling or better in the world, all because of children,” Altier said at the event. “However, the reality is that many teachers don’t feel they have the time, capacity, or autonomy to do this important work in a sustainable way.” Hear, hear.
Five of the report’s eighteen recommendations concern student behavior and discipline, including decoupling student behavior from school accountability systems. Currently, suspension rates can negatively impact a school’s performance metrics, discouraging administrators from removing disruptive students from the classroom. “Teachers are telling me they have habitually disruptive students, and some administrators are leaving these students to disrupt classroom,” said Brumley. That feedback was critical to recent passage of a state law to expel such students from the classroom after three suspensions. “Not expelled to go home,” Brumley explains, “But expelled to alternative sites where they can get the support that they need—academically, behaviorally, socially, mentally—to eventually return to the general school setting and function among their peers.”
Rather than putting the responsibility on teachers, the report says students should have access to trained mental health professionals. And parents’ rights advocates will be cheered by the recommendation that “families should approve and be fully engaged if students are recommended for professional support.” Still another recommendation is limiting cellphone use in schools. Devices should be off and stored away during instructional time.
If there was any doubt about how well the report’s recommendations would play with front-line educators, it was erased when Brumley presented them to 7,000 teachers at the state’s annual teacher summit in New Orleans a few weeks ago. “After sharing the first recommendation, I struggled getting to the next recommendation due to teacher applause,” he said. It took several minutes to get through the list.
Brumley is vowing to continue to press the teachers’ recommendations. “I am over disruptions in the classroom preventing teachers from teaching and children from learning. I’m over excessive bureaucracies, trainings, and paperwork on our teachers. I’m over the art of teaching being taken away from our high-quality, professional educators,” he told me. “It’s time to take back this profession, allowing teachers to be successful, while keeping an eye on the purpose—stronger academic outcomes for students.”
I’ve long argued that if we’re serious about improving student outcomes at scale, then education reform needs to evolve from its technocratic fixation with pulling policy levers to a movement focused on improving instructional practice and getting better results from the workforce we have. Louisiana’s “Let Teachers Teach” is a good place to start.
The latest math fad is another excuse to teach nothing
Peter Liljedahl opens his wildly popular book on mathematics instruction, Building Thinking Classrooms, with a bold gambit. He tells the story of one teacher whose students do well on end-of-course exams and standardized tests and who receives high marks from parents, administrators, and students. Despite such success, Liljedahl thinks that everything she does has to change. If it ain’t broke, break it, I guess.
Liljedahl—who has come to these conclusions after visiting forty classrooms, he reminds us several times—believes these students aren’t thinking. There was plenty of activity, as students were “taking notes, answering questions, filling in worksheets, and starting on their homework.” But apparently none of this activity classifies as thinking. It’s only mimicry. Instead, to Liljedahl, thinking only occurs when students are fumbling to solve problems for which they receive little instruction or guidance. It’s only swimming if Uncle Joe pushes you into the deep end.
In place of traditional instruction and practice, Liljedahl envisions a classroom where the walls are whiteboards and the teacher sets students to solve increasingly complex tasks in small groups. In his ideal environment, schools would “shed the burden of curriculum” to instead busy students with various mind games, brain teasers, and even card tricks (he’s very excited about the card tricks). But alas, abolishing curriculum is a political nonstarter, so teachers must muddle through.
He implements such a scheme in a number of classrooms and declares success because students are thinking more, which he defines as working on problems at wall-mounted whiteboards. This shouldn’t surprise us. If you don’t teach students how to complete a problem, they’ll spend more time trying to figure it out. Whether they actually learn the content is apparently a secondary concern to engagement.
With school-level book clubs, fawning profiles in education media, and conference presentations dedicated to it, Liljedahl’s scheme is popular in itself, but also a piece of a broader movement in mathematics education away from direct, explicit instruction. Invariably called discovery, inquiry, experiential, or constructivist learning, this student-directed philosophy of mathematics instruction is common at the district level—and most influentially, forms the basis of California’s recently adopted mathematics framework.
The fundamental misconception to this approach is that mimicry, memorization, and structured practice somehow constitute lower-order thinking. Liljedahl includes a staircase diagram that proceeds from doing to justifying, explaining, teaching, and creating to demonstrate his point. Merely doing math problems isn’t thinking in his framework.
This hierarchy of thinking almost perfectly mimics (I thought mimicry was bad) the ubiquitous “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” which similarly ranks types of thinking from remembering and understanding up to evaluation and creation. But in the 1956 Handbook where he introduced the topic, education professor Benjamin Bloom created his taxonomy simply to help teachers discuss classroom activities “with greater precision,” not to rank or judge them.
In fact, he refers to knowledge acquisition as the “primary” objective in education. Knowledge and comprehension are the bases of far more complex thinking. If students are busy counting out basic math facts on their fingers, they can’t attend to more difficult math problems. If they’re busy sounding out words, they can’t attend to higher-order thinking, such as evaluating the text in hand or creating their own poems. Factual knowledge, memorization, and comprehension facilitate and allow robust analysis, synthesis, and creation.
Moreover, both mimicry and explanation are the primary means through which we learn. At the edges of human knowledge, we must rely on experimentation and discovery, but these processes are incredibly inefficient. Instead, for everything that society has already learned, we have language to communicate these ideas and models to follow. It took humanity thousands of years to discover algebra, calculus, and geometry. Why expect students to repeat that process when we can just teach it to them?
From these fundamental misconceptions, ineffective classroom practices develop. In a telling passage, Liljedhal lets slip the truth: “The lessons where direct instruction was used allowed more students to successfully complete the task at hand.” I’d encourage him to read that sentence slowly in the mirror and reflect on what he just said.
And decades-worth of research vindicate direct instruction as the most effective model for student learning. In a seminal article on cognitive science and education, three cognitive scientists summarize the research: “The past half-century of empirical research on this issue has provided overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning.”
Look closely at one such study and the reasons grow apparent. Researchers split students struggling in math into either an inquiry or explicit instruction group. In the inquiry group, the teacher presented a problem and relied on group discussion to develop solutions. In the explicit instruction group, the teacher presented a problem, demonstrated how to solve it, and then had students practice numerous problems of a similar type. In the end, those who learned from a more formulaic lesson demonstrated greater proficiency. The researchers posited that the students in the inquiry group encountered both correct and incorrect solutions, and so these methods simply confuse students.
The What Works Clearing House, a research consortium housed within the federal Institute of Education Sciences, published a 2021 practice guide on the most effective, research-backed methods for math instruction. It includes systematic instruction, representation and models, and timed activities, all of which Liljedhal denigrates for no other reason than they don’t constitute “thinking”—which by the end of the book, in a textbook example of circular logic, he seems to only define as activities that he already approves of.
When put into other contexts, the silliness of this approach is self-apparent. Over at Education Next, Ryan Hooper asks us to apply this discovery-approach to other tasks:
What if I told you that lifeguards have a new method for teaching toddlers how to swim by throwing them in the deep end of a swimming pool without supervision, in hopes that they will learn from their productive struggle? Or that grandma’s cookbook would be thrown out because of its limiting step-by-step approach to baking a pie? Or that sixteen-year-olds should discover how to drive from their peers or, better still, on their own?
I call it silly, but it’s an unfortunately serious matter. In the previous half-decade, American education has had to reckon with the reality that generations of students struggled to read because pseudoscientific approaches to early literacy proliferated; teachers just didn’t vibe with the explicit nature of phonics instruction. We’re about to repeat those same mistakes in with math instruction, and the Pied Pipers leading us astray are applauded for it.
Why were schools closed so long during the pandemic?
You remember the six-foot rule. How could you forget?
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) told us during Covid that social distancing—which it defined in July 2020 as a minimum of two arm lengths between oneself and other people inside and outside—was “the best way to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease.”
Not an “advisable approach.” Not a “precaution.” The best way. Grammar nerds note immediately that “best” is superlative, indicating that this method of Covid mitigation was weighed against other options and declared optimal.
Many of us took this guidance very seriously. We locked ourselves in our homes for months. We stood in line at the grocery store—tightly masked—on giant floor decals stuck six feet behind their predecessors.
And most importantly, we stood by as schools in large swaths of the country remained closed in fall 2020 because it was logistically impossible to fit a whole school’s worth of kids into a building while keeping everyone six feet apart. We were doing our bit for the cause. Patriots, we were.
Imagine our surprise when the Washington Post recently reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci—the adult in the room during pandemic—testified to Congress in January that “it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” and the rule was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”
I’m sorry. What? Just sort of appeared? Not based on data?
That wasn’t what we were told at the time. We heard—over and over—that six feet was the standard.
Here are two examples:
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom released his July 2020 reopening plan, it said the state health department “requires that all adults stay six feet from one another and six feet away from children, while students should maintain six feet of distance from one another as practicable.”
He said “six feet” three times in one sentence.
The American Federation of Teachers, in its own reopening guide, stated: “CDC guidance remains clear: There must be a physical distance of at least six feet at all times among students and staff,” and added that “some have been pushing to allow for a distance of three feet for cost reasons, but cost should not outweigh public health guidance.”
Perhaps you find this Monday morning quarterbacking tedious. It was the early days of the pandemic, after all. We were trying to save lives. The overwhelming medical consensus, at that time, favored six feet.
Except that’s not accurate
The American Academic of Pediatrics (AAP) was never onboard with six feet of distancing in schools.
In June 2020—well in advance of the 2020–21 school year and before the statements made above—the nation’s leading organization for pediatricians released guidance saying “evidence suggests that spacing as close as three feet may approach the benefits of six feet of space, particularly if students are wearing face coverings and are asymptomatic.”
Three feet? Wait, there’s more.
According to the AAP, “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” which meant that available measures must “mitigate, not eliminate, risk.”
Translation: Reopening schools for in-person learning was more important than driving Covid transmission to zero. The AAP explicitly said six feet of distancing should not be adopted if it resulted in limits on the number of students permitted to attend each day.
Yet six feet of distancing is what many schools believed they had to provide to prevent outbreaks. As a consequence, most students were kept home for the new school year. In mid-September 2020, about 60 percent of U.S. schools were fully virtual and only 20 percent were operating a traditional in-person schedule. (About 20 percent were hybrid.)
[figure 1]
It wasn’t until March 2021 that a majority of schools returned to full in-person operations. A few districts—such as San Francisco—did not welcome all students at the same time until the 2021–22 school year.
Now, in 2024, we’re seeing a belated acknowledgment that we got it wrong. As three New York Times reporters put it:
A variety of data—about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19—has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
It sure seems like students nationwide should have returned to school—with robust mitigation protocols and serious adherence to them—in fall 2020. Failing to reopen schools wasn’t just a misstep we can spot with the benefit of hindsight; it looks increasingly ill-advised based on what leaders in government and public health knew at the time.
How did reopening go off the rails?
We needed a unifying effort to ensure the pandemic didn’t spoil childhood for our kids. Instead, we got a politicized food fight.
Weeks after the AAP issued its guidance, then-President Trump threatened to “cut off” money for schools that did not reopen. Not helpful.
The pediatricians soon distanced themselves from the Trump administration in a joint statement with the nation’s largest teachers unions reiterating that efforts to resume school must prioritize safety and health. Notably, the statement did not back away from AAP’s position that three feet was sufficient for distancing.
But the damage was done. That was July 10, 2020, pretty much the day reopening fell apart, as AFT President Randi Weingarten later said to reporter Alec MacGillis: “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe. Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.”
Whether you believe Weingarten or not—and many argue she had already been looking for justifications to defend continued school closures—it’s undeniable that reopening became politicized. Subsequent studies found that reopenings were strongly associated with the share of the local vote that had gone to Trump compared to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. It was a Rorschach test.
CDC guidance was not updated to allow for three feet of distancing until March 2021. By then, states like Massachusetts had engaged in their own health research and concluded that three and six feet offered similar protection. The CDC’s voice was almost irrelevant.
While writing this piece, I contacted a number of school and district leaders who braved the reopening process. Not one of them was aware that pediatricians had called for three feet in summer 2020. All they’d heard was six.
Why does this matter? Shouldn’t we move past it?
No. We need to mine the past to handle crises better in the future. Our uneven, divisive reopening—and the massive learning setbacks that came with it—exemplify some of our biggest challenges in education.
This was not an anomaly. We struggle to make good decisions more broadly. We pay lip service to doing things that are “data driven” and “evidence-based,” but our track record suggests we rely more on vibes.
Research had shown for decades that there were problems with balanced literacy as a strategy—particularly for struggling readers. But districts adopted it in huge numbers and made heaps of money for publishers and celebrity academics. Why? Vibes.
Vibes told us to take a hands-off approach to student absenteeism following the pandemic—we didn’t want to come down too hard on anybody—and it bit us hard when missing school became broadly normalized.
I think it’s inaccurate to say our reopening process was guided by science. Our North Star was vibes. Kids went back to school when the local political landscape allowed them to—not when it was safe to go.
Why?
Extreme voices dominated key moments
When one side was saying all schools should reopen immediately without any mask mandates or protections for vulnerable teachers and the other was saying schools should stay closed until everyone had taken a vaccine that had not yet been invented, it wasn’t easy to hear the voices of pediatricians, who were saying: Reopen schools with as many reasonable protections as you can implement.
We can’t silence the extremes. Everybody should have their say. But we need to stop listening to them when it comes time to make decisions.
Need an example? Consider this exchange between Alec MacGillis and NEA President Becky Pringle published in September 2020:
I asked Pringle why her union, like others, had put such emphasis on the virus’s health risks to children, and she said, “When we look at the data and they say only 0.1 percent of kids will contract it and get seriously ill and die, that’s actually around 50,000 children.” I noted that the number of children known to have died of Covid-19 nationwide was around 100. She said her estimate was what could happen if kids did go back to school.
Our institutions lack credibility
We’re at historic lows. Finding out that there was little evidence to support keeping kids six feet apart didn’t help. As Zeynep Tufekci wrote recently, if officials misled people about Covid, “why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?”
Lack of clear communication left communities to slug it out locally with misinformation, partial understandings, and fears driven by pre-existing politics.
It’s time to give the public a full, unsparing accounting of how pandemic guidance was formulated and why something as consequential as the six-foot rule could simply “appear.”
Kids aren’t as high a priority as our rhetoric suggests
Bars and restaurants reopened in many communities before schools, to our lasting shame. The issue was always whether reopening was imperative. If it was, we would have accepted some risk to make it happen. But in many communities, any risk of Covid was determinative. In-person schooling became a nice-to-have. We were told the harm of remote learning would be minimal and that opening schools would harm low-income communities because of the increased Covid transmission that would occur. That was wrong.
States should consider amending their emergency protocols to elevate students and schools above other considerations in future scenarios. How many of the states that delayed reopening too long—and there are more than a few—have ensured it won’t happen again?
Yes, the pandemic was overwhelming. Yes, we did our best under stressful circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes. Now’s the time to own them.
The effects of expanding computer science in high school
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the importance of digital literacy can hardly be overstated. But what can schools do to help students acquire these skills? And how does access to computer courses impact students’ futures? A new working paper from researchers at the University of Maryland, including Professor Jing Liu, sheds light on this very question, offering new evidence that expanding computer science courses in high schools influences students’ choices of college majors and their earning potential once they enter the workforce.
Over the past decade, Maryland has made a concerted effort to broaden access to computer science education in high schools. Between 2013 and 2020, the proportion of high schools offering computer science courses in Maryland climbed from 80 percent to nearly 100 percent. Even more impressively, the share of high schools providing what the researchers classify as “high-quality” computer science education rose from 60 percent to over 90 percent. Although the definition of “high-quality” remains somewhat ambiguous, the trend is clear: More students are gaining exposure to computer science. The researchers utilized this unique context to explore the long-term effects of such an expansion.
The researchers identify a significant uptick in the number of students opting for these classes as computer science courses were introduced in their high schools. In 2010, less than 5 percent of Maryland students enrolled in a high-quality computer science course. By 2017, that figure exceeded 20 percent. This expansion disproportionately affected lower-income students and students of color, who were less likely to have access to computer science education in the early years of the study.
As students were exposed to more computer science course options, their college majors shifted: These students became more likely to pursue and persist in computer science majors in college. This shift, however, seemed to come at the expense of other STEM fields, which saw a slight decrease in enrollment.
One might assume that students shifting from other STEM fields to computer science would not influence student labor market outcomes, since these students might have been likely to eventually earn good incomes regardless of which STEM field they concentrated in. In fact, computer science seems to have benefited students’ later incomes. The researchers identified modest positive effects of exposure to high school computer science on employment and earnings at age twenty-four, with these benefits being particularly pronounced among female students, lower-income students, and Black students.
The nuanced findings suggest that the advantages of computer science education may extend beyond merely obtaining a degree in the field. While male students showed stronger effects in choosing and graduating with a computer science major, the positive workforce outcomes were more significant among women. This indicates that the skills acquired through computer science courses may be providing broader career benefits that aren’t solely dependent on earning a computer science degree.
The paper concludes with a cautious endorsement of the benefits of expanding computer science coursework in K–12 schools. The authors note that their findings support claims that such expansions can boost digital skills, increase the receipt of computer science degrees, and augment the supply of computer science professionals.
However, the study also raises important questions about the underlying mechanisms driving these outcomes. Are there other, unmeasured benefits of computer science education that are helping students succeed in the workforce? How do these benefits vary across different student demographics? These are questions that future research will need to address.
SOURCE: Jing Liu, Cameron Conrad, and David Blazar, “Computer Science for All? The Impact of High School Computer Science Courses on College Majors and Earnings,” Annenberg Institute, Brown University, EdWorkingPaper No. 24-904 (January 2024).
#926: What “Young Sheldon” teaches about parenting, with Alina Adams
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Alina Adams, a New York Times best-selling author, joins Mike and David to discuss the parenting lessons she learned from watching “Young Sheldon.” Then, on the Research Minute, Adam examines a new study investigating the rigor (or lack thereof) of online credit recovery courses.
Recommended content:
- “I watched the parenting on ‘Young Sheldon’… and did the exact opposite” —Alina Adams, Education Next
- “Fun fact: ‘Young Sheldon’ provides insight into parenting bright children” —Jonathan Plucker, Education Next
- “Time to press ‘pause’ on credit recovery” —Adam Tyner, Fordham Institute
- Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Carolyn J. Heinrich, Jeremy Noonan, Jialing Wu, and Kathryn Enriquez, “Failing to learn from failure: The facade of online credit recovery assessments,” Education Finance and Policy (March 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: June 27, 2024
Cheers
- “LAUSD approves cellphone ban as Newsom calls for statewide action.” —Los Angeles Times
- Cities across the country are passing legislation to ban phones in schools. New York City should be next. —Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg
- A new report from FutureEd outlines five ways that school can support advanced students. —Peg Tyre, The 74
Jeers
- Popular curricula in New York City do not require students to read full books. —Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic
What we're reading this week: June 27, 2024
- Oklahoma’s supreme court blocked what would have been the nation’s first religious, charter school. —New York Times
- A record number of children required special education services last year, and schools are scrambling to hire staff to meet that need. —Wall Street Journal
- A new Arkansas law raised starting teacher salaries, which disgruntled a surprising number of veteran teachers. —Hechinger Report
- A law student attended a technical school and was struck by the complexity of the work and shortage of students. —Darnell Epps, Washington Post