The Education Gadfly Weekly

Educrats have long warned of the perils of rote and repetition, lamenting that students can’t learn “how to think” if they’re forced to memorize facts or repeat skills to automaticity. This pedagogical method hamstrings great teachers, too, they argue. But they’re wrong. In his seminal first book, Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov explained (based on thousands of hours spent observing outstanding teachers in action) that great teaching requires the mastery of seemingly mundane but crucially important knowledge and skills. His newest book (coauthored with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi) builds upon these insights. Drawing on their own experience working to ingrain practice into both school culture and teacher professional development, Practice Perfect offers forty-two rules designed to help people “get better at getting better.” Like the techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, these rules are simple, practical, and grounded in common sense, as well as respect for the practice and repetition that we need to help teachers (and students) achieve mastery. They also present a damning critique of the multi-billion dollar teacher professional-development industry. By shying away from skill repetition, most PD programs offer the equivalent of art-appreciation courses and then ask teachers to paint masterpieces. They simply do not give teachers—eager to learn new skills—the tools to become better educators. Properly conceived, rather than merely giving teachers time to “listen, reflect, discuss, and debate,” professional development would have teachers practice (and hone) newly learned skills with one another—with coaching and feedback—before debuting them in the classroom. This insight may mark the biggest impact of Practice Perfect. Let’s hope that more use this as an opportunity to rethink the role of practice in teacher development and the importance of repetition to the artistry of teaching.

A version of this review was published on the Common Core Watch blog.

SOURCE: Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, a Jossey-Bass imprint, September 2012).

Schools are comprised of teachers, students, and principals…and nurses, speech therapists, paraprofessionals, and librarians…and administrative assistants, reading specialists, transportation coordinators, and other central-office staffers. This Friedman Foundation report (building off the work of others) analyzes the  ballooning of these “other” education jobs—individuals employed by school districts (and paid with taxpayer dollars) who do not directly instruct children. And the numbers are eye-opening: Between 1950 and 2009, the number of K-12 public school students increased by 96 percent. During that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew by 386 percent. Of those personnel, the number of teachers increased by 252 percent, while the ranks of administrators and other staff grew by 702 percent—more than 7 times the increase in students. Though this trend has abated somewhat in recent years, these increases remain dramatic. From 1992 to 2009, for example, the bump in school FTEs was 2.3 times greater than that of students, with forty-eight states upping the number of nonteaching personnel at a faster rate than their increase in students. Even where student populations dropped over the past two decades, public school employment increased. Maine, for example, lost roughly 11 percent of its pupils, yet saw a 76 percent increase in the number of non-teaching personnel. Ohio schools saw a 2 percent increase in student population coupled with a 44 percent increase in non-teaching personnel. These numbers are jaw-dropping when they stand alone. Attach them to salary and benefits costs and they become jarring. Based on back-of-the-napkin calculations, analysts find that if student growth had matched that of non-teaching personnel from 1992 to 2009 and if the teaching force had only grown 1.5 times faster than the pupil enrollment, American public schools would have an additional $37.2 billion to spend per year—the equivalent of an $11,700 a year increase in salary for every American public school teacher. Report author Benjamin Scafidi offers a predictable Friedman-esque solution for this budgetary quandary: Direct funds toward school vouchers. Gadfly offers another fix for district leaders: Slim down your workforce, especially by eliminating ancillary positions—including those in special education—that don’t directly affect real students in real classrooms. The American public is behind you.

SOURCE: Benjamin Scafidi, The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools (Indianapolis, IN: The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, October 2012).

Intelligence, curiosity, and grit: important traits for success in school and life. But so is popularity, argues this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tapping Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data for 4,300 males from 1957 (the year they graduated high school) through 2005, authors evaluate characteristics associated with “popularity” and the effects of being well-liked on lifetime incomes. To gauge one’s popularity, authors tallied “friendship nominations,” both the number of friends a student lists and the number of times he is listed by his peers. Overall, authors found that students who are older than their grade-mates and have higher IQs are more popular. (Strong maternal and sibling relationships are also closely connected to social status; so is exposure to larger peer groups, as experienced by increased extracurricular activities.) But one’s family income had no effect on popularity. Linking these findings to one’s own lifetime income data, the analysts report that men in the top quartile of high school popularity have a 10 percent earnings premium over those in the bottom quartile. Moreover, increased social skills (by one decile, based on author calculations) are associated with a 2 percent wage advantage thirty-five years later—roughly 40 percent the return accrued from an additional year of schooling. The authors speculate why: High school “social interaction…provides the bridge to the adult world as [students] train individual personalities to be socially adequate.” There’s much to unpack in this short paper—including its dense methodology. But it does provide a boost for the benefits of extracurricular activities—and the adolescent social interactions they foster.

SOURCE: Gabriella Conti, Andrea Galeotti, Gerrit Mueller, Stephen Pudney, “Popularity” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).

For much of the 1970 and 80s, the educational future for black students looked bright: The gap between white and black students’ graduation rates was closing rapidly, dropping from 9.2 to 4.4 percentage points over nineteen years (and due mostly to a rise in black attainment). Had this rate of convergence continued, the black graduation rate would have been level with that of whites by the mid-1990s. But everything changed in 1986. Why? Authors of this recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper blame the “stalled progress” on one social phenomenon: the proliferation of crack-cocaine markets. The authors examine the impact of crack-cocaine markets in fifty-seven metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on the black-white achievement gap, with a specific focus on the male achievement gap. Crack markets, the authors find, account for between 40 and 73 percent of the decline in achievement among black males by catalyzing a higher murder rate, a greater chance of incarceration, and more opportunities for employment outside of the “formal” sector (reducing the value of their education). Why, then, have achievement gains among black males not rebounded after the decline in crack cocaine-related violence in the early 2000s? The authors speculate that there may now exist a perverse relationship between prison-intake rates and lower educational attainment: while the former originally caused the latter, the latter could now be driving the former by pushing students to crime due to lack of opportunity. Heady research, fodder for much debate, and another example of the social constraints that schools and teachers face.

SOURCE: William N. Evans, Craig Garthwaite, and Timothy J. Moore, “The White/Black Educational Gap, Stalled Progress, and the Long Term Consequences of the Emergence of Crack Cocaine Markets” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).

Mike and Kathleen wonder why education can’t stay out of the debates and pick the top edu-initiatives on the ballot. Amber describes the spectacular growth in non-teaching staff.

Amber's Research Minute

The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools by Benjamin Scafidi (Indianapolis, IN: The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, October 2012). - Download PDF

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America's high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

Authors Finn and Hockett will be joined by a pair of educators instrumental in the creation of two of the "exam schools" profiled in the book: Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University and a key player in the establishment of D.C.'s selective School Without Walls, and Geoffrey Jones, founding principal of Alexandria's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

There’s been much twittering, tweeting, debating, and general obsessing in education-land about this year’s presidential election and what difference it will make whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney occupies the Oval Office after January 20, 2013.

In reality, however, while the outcome of this hard-fought contest matters greatly to the nation in many crucial realms, it doesn’t really make much difference for K-12 education. Nor do the parallel races to control Congress.

The presidential election isn't the education race that matters most this fall.  Photo by Joe Hall.

There are, to be sure, nontrivial differences between the candidates regarding future federal education policy, programs, regulations, and budget levels, and they have occasionally tried to underscore these during the campaign (not including Monday evening’s smarmy cries from both that “I love teachers!”). Yet even if those differences are substantial, it still won’t really matter much. Because federal policy, beloved though it is by those inside the Beltway and associated echo chambers, doesn’t really determine much about the conduct of our primary-secondary education system.

Even with his recently enlarged appetite for spending on education and attempts to call more of the shots, Uncle Sam kicks in only about ten percent of the money and has little to do with who teaches what to whom; who leads our schools and school systems; how much choice there is; what happens to good schools, dreadful schools, and middling schools; how teachers are trained; what gets crunched in times of tight budgets; what role technology will play; whether the social studies curriculum emphasizes content or feelings; whether math instruction is fuzzy or traditional; what foreign languages (if any) are offered and learned; and who gets hired or promoted or tenured or laid off.

All those crucial matters, and a thousand more, are chiefly determined at the state and local levels, not in Washington. Which isn’t to say they’re unaffected by what happens on November 6. They’re powerfully affected. But not by the presidential election. Or the congressional.

No, they’re mainly shaped by whom the voters choose for governor and legislator, mayor and county-council member, state superintendent and school-board member, and by how the electorate handles myriad ballot initiatives, levies and bond issues, constitutional amendments, and more. Thousands of separate outcomes of the 2012 election will determine the future course of American education. But mostly those are the races that nobody (except, sometimes, those who the races immediately affect) is paying much attention to.

I recently filled in my (absentee) ballot and found on it a bunch of races and issues about which I knew next to nothing. For example, I found contested elections for three seats on the Montgomery County (Maryland) Board of Education. That’s three of the Board’s seven adult members (there’s also a student member).

This is the kind of election that really matters for American education and it’s being repeated all over the place on November 6. Yet it’s getting almost no attention whatsoever—not even locally where I live. Indeed, in upscale, generally prosperous Montgomery County, it’s bloody hard to obtain enough information about the school-board candidates to make competent choices among them.

Two of the three contests involve incumbents; the third is an open seat. But whom to vote for? Prudently deciding takes effort—and time. If you have plenty of the latter, you can track down the candidates’ own websites. (Four of the six have such websites, with varying degrees of useful information. The other two do not.) Or you might examine their responses to questions posed to them by a small coalition of activist parents—but as of October 22 just two candidates had bothered to respond. Or you could take my shortcut and check out the teacher union’s recommendations—and then vote for the other guys! It’s a simple way to get just enough data to make choices without spending hours doing research, but it’s also a painful reminder that the local NEA affiliate is the one group that is truly informed, motivated, and engaged with elections like this—and its influence is amplified by everyone else’s ignorant apathy.

Let’s face it. All of these are lousy ways to make important decisions about key roles in education—and I wonder how many voters bother to investigate at all.

Ed Reform Idol-champion Tony Bennett faces a tough re-election race.  Photo by Joe Portnoy.

They likely know more about higher-profile contests, such as governors’ races. These, at least, get into the papers and you might even hear about them on the radio, perhaps see some campaign ads on the tube. But you’re not apt to encounter a great deal of well-informed debate or commentary on the candidates’ education views and intentions. Yet nobody matters more in education policy than states' governors, and eleven such contests are being held this year. Five of those seats are open, the others occupied by incumbents seeking re-election. Two of the former are in bellwether “education states”: Indiana and North Carolina. Both places will also be electing, or re-electing, their state superintendents—as will Montana, North Dakota, and Washington. Imagine the education stakes in Indiana, say, without Mitch Daniels or—should he lose his hard-fought contest to remain in office—Tony Bennett as state supe.

Hundreds of other influential-for-education positions are up for grabs in state legislatures, state boards, and more.

Then there are the ballot issues, of which Wall Street Journal reporter Stephanie Banchero found “a slew” this year at state and local levels. Most involve taxes (and related revenue raisers such as casinos) and spending. Prominent examples today include Denver and Cleveland, as well as rival budget measures in California. Yes, these will get argued over in the community or state that’s affected, but more as a debate over taxation (or the morality of gambling) than the education policies and programs that are on the line.

Other ballot initiatives speak directly to policy issues, sometimes the hot-button kind. Idaho, for instance, has a measure on the November ballot to undo the state’s new shackles on collective bargaining by teachers, while Washington State voters are asked whether (finally) to permit the creation of charter schools, and Georgians must decide whether to (re)establish an independent statewide authorizer so that chartering decisions are not entirely within the control of local school districts.

Who is paying attention to the merits of such measures? Directly affected adult interest groups are on the case, for sure, but is anyone attending to which outcomes would be better for the kids?  

If you’re lucky, your state has a PIE-Network-style “education-advocacy organization” that’s engaged on behalf of the public interest—at least as perceived by reformers. Such outfits are spreading, but none was around to help me decide whom to vote for in Montgomery County. Perhaps DFER, StudentsFirst, or Stand for Children has endorsed candidates in your local or state races. Check it out. But don’t even dare to dream that these state and local ballot issues will make their way into the national media, prominent education blogs, or Washington powwows. There you’d barely know that any of this is happening, much less be reminded of how much more it matters to the future of our K-12 system than the choice between Messrs. Obama and Romney.

The Los Angeles Times is suing the Los Angeles Unified School District for access to its teacher ratings in an effort to continue its controversial practice of publishing teacher-effectiveness rankings; even at the risk of inviting a bit of bad press, reform groups should make clear that public shaming of individual teachers isn't a path to educational improvement.

Last week, the Department of Education followed through with one of the most asinine attempts at improving special education that Gadfly can recall, finalizing $36 million in penalties for South Carolina. The state’s crime? Making tough but necessary cuts to all school spending in the midst of the Great Recession, special education included. The perverse lesson for states? Finding ways to boost efficiency in special education literally may not be worth the trouble. The feds will kill you.

Education couldn't stay out of Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy, to Wendy Kopp’s delight. Unfortunately, we'd all be better served by a genuine discussion of why the U.S. continues to drop relative to its international peers rather than bland agreement that "we all love teachers."

Teachers are backing Obama over Romney but aren't enthusiastically rallying around the cause as the election nears. Can we expect any last-minute bones thrown to the union base to get teachers to the polls?

Online lessons can increase school efficiency and expose students to new worlds of knowledge, but the question of how well a computer screen can truly replace a real, live teacher has been tough for digital-learning evangelists to answer. Blended learning, Tom Toch points out in The Atlantic, provides a powerful rejoinder: Splitting students’ time between computers and face-to-face instruction actually allows them extra individualized attention that translates into more-engaged teachers and parents.

As Election Day hurtles towards us, it has become all too clear that as Ohio goes, so goes the nation—and the national media are consequently bursting with reports from the Buckeye State. Here’s the story of one Ohio city that carries a lesson for the rest of America: Dayton has a long tradition of innovation (think airplanes, pull-tabs, electric starters, cash registers, and even teacher unions). Yet, as the innovations of one era slip into obsolescence in the next, the Gem City has struggled economically and demographically. The hope for Dayton’s revival comes from innovation. And this time the innovation is in education—how we prepare people for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

By 2018, almost two-thirds of American jobs will require at least a sub-baccalaureate credential, (post-secondary certificate, associate’s degree, state-issued education credential, corporate certificate, or badge among others). Dayton, according to a fine piece in the Lumina Foundation’s fall edition of Focus Magazine, is quickly becoming a national leader in preparing “sub-baccalaureate graduates.”

Dayton’s economic struggles peaked in 2009. That’s when the New York Times reported that the city and its surrounding area faced a vortex of “economic and social change.” Specifically,

the area’s job total has fallen 12 percent since 2000, while about half of its factory jobs—38,000 out of 79,000—have disappeared this decade. Not only have large G.M. and Delphi plants closed, but NCR, long the city’s corporate jewel, recently announced that it would move its headquarters to the Atlanta area.

In a true Midwestern can-do spirit, a coalition of business leaders, higher-education institutions, nonprofits, K-12 institutions, local governments, and the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (the Dayton area’s largest employer) have mobilized to help the area’s citizens transition to the changing job opportunities of the twenty-first century. That meant changing the preparation and credentialing system which, as in so many places, had long been bifurcated. A small percentage of Ohio students would go to four-year colleges and beyond (often leaving the state); but most area high school graduates would move into well-paying factory or service sector jobs without further education.

But the world has changed. As Stefanie Sanford recently told Tom Friedman, “the high-wage, medium-skilled job is over.” Or as Lumina reports, “The widely held, almost reflexive definition of college – four-year, on campus, residential experience leading to a bachelor’s degree – is no longer sufficient. It’s not broad enough, not flexible enough, just not good enough to work for millions of people, or for the nation as a whole.”

According to Tom Lasley, former dean of education at the University of Dayton and now head of Dayton’s Learn to Earn initiative (an umbrella organization coordinating the city’s education- and workforce- development efforts), “new pathways are a necessary alternative to the all-or-nothing thinking that has persistently defined postsecondary success as bachelor’s attainment.”

The anchor organization leading the movement towards a more targeted and work-based education in Dayton is Sinclair Community College (long headed by Fordham board chair David Ponitz). With more than 22,000 students, Sinclair is the state’s largest community college. More than half of all adults in the Dayton area have enrolled there at some point in their lives. Current Sinclair president Steven Johnson argues that “society has been calling for modularization education for a couple of decades…That’s what certificates are.”

Sinclair awarded about 4,300 degrees and certificates in 2011-12, and it offers 172 different degree and certificate programs. Sinclair adjusts its offerings to the needs of the local economy, so its students can find meaningful work, raise families, and pay taxes. Just this week, Sinclair and two partner colleges were awarded a $12 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to “create a revolutionary change in how information technology training is conducted.”

The president of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, Phil Parker, shared with Lumina how businesses see education. “To business leaders, education is a means to an end,” Parker explained. “It provides a capable, qualified workforce. Ultimately, it’s about people getting a job, being successful and having a great quality of life they can share with their family…That’s a different mindset from education being the end product.”

Dayton has been knocked down, but it is certainly not out. It is a community undergoing a revitalization, driven by reconceptualization of what it means to be educated.  Dayton’s efforts surely warrant the Lumina Foundation’s attention—but they’re also something the rest of the country should pay attention to.

A version of this editorial appeared on the Ohio Gadfly Daily blog.

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America's high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

Authors Finn and Hockett will be joined by a pair of educators instrumental in the creation of two of the "exam schools" profiled in the book: Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University and a key player in the establishment of D.C.'s selective School Without Walls, and Geoffrey Jones, founding principal of Alexandria's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America's high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

Authors Finn and Hockett will be joined by a pair of educators instrumental in the creation of two of the "exam schools" profiled in the book: Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University and a key player in the establishment of D.C.'s selective School Without Walls, and Geoffrey Jones, founding principal of Alexandria's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

For much of the 1970 and 80s, the educational future for black students looked bright: The gap between white and black students’ graduation rates was closing rapidly, dropping from 9.2 to 4.4 percentage points over nineteen years (and due mostly to a rise in black attainment). Had this rate of convergence continued, the black graduation rate would have been level with that of whites by the mid-1990s. But everything changed in 1986. Why? Authors of this recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper blame the “stalled progress” on one social phenomenon: the proliferation of crack-cocaine markets. The authors examine the impact of crack-cocaine markets in fifty-seven metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on the black-white achievement gap, with a specific focus on the male achievement gap. Crack markets, the authors find, account for between 40 and 73 percent of the decline in achievement among black males by catalyzing a higher murder rate, a greater chance of incarceration, and more opportunities for employment outside of the “formal” sector (reducing the value of their education). Why, then, have achievement gains among black males not rebounded after the decline in crack cocaine-related violence in the early 2000s? The authors speculate that there may now exist a perverse relationship between prison-intake rates and lower educational attainment: while the former originally caused the latter, the latter could now be driving the former by pushing students to crime due to lack of opportunity. Heady research, fodder for much debate, and another example of the social constraints that schools and teachers face.

SOURCE: William N. Evans, Craig Garthwaite, and Timothy J. Moore, “The White/Black Educational Gap, Stalled Progress, and the Long Term Consequences of the Emergence of Crack Cocaine Markets” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).

Intelligence, curiosity, and grit: important traits for success in school and life. But so is popularity, argues this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tapping Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data for 4,300 males from 1957 (the year they graduated high school) through 2005, authors evaluate characteristics associated with “popularity” and the effects of being well-liked on lifetime incomes. To gauge one’s popularity, authors tallied “friendship nominations,” both the number of friends a student lists and the number of times he is listed by his peers. Overall, authors found that students who are older than their grade-mates and have higher IQs are more popular. (Strong maternal and sibling relationships are also closely connected to social status; so is exposure to larger peer groups, as experienced by increased extracurricular activities.) But one’s family income had no effect on popularity. Linking these findings to one’s own lifetime income data, the analysts report that men in the top quartile of high school popularity have a 10 percent earnings premium over those in the bottom quartile. Moreover, increased social skills (by one decile, based on author calculations) are associated with a 2 percent wage advantage thirty-five years later—roughly 40 percent the return accrued from an additional year of schooling. The authors speculate why: High school “social interaction…provides the bridge to the adult world as [students] train individual personalities to be socially adequate.” There’s much to unpack in this short paper—including its dense methodology. But it does provide a boost for the benefits of extracurricular activities—and the adolescent social interactions they foster.

SOURCE: Gabriella Conti, Andrea Galeotti, Gerrit Mueller, Stephen Pudney, “Popularity” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).

Schools are comprised of teachers, students, and principals…and nurses, speech therapists, paraprofessionals, and librarians…and administrative assistants, reading specialists, transportation coordinators, and other central-office staffers. This Friedman Foundation report (building off the work of others) analyzes the  ballooning of these “other” education jobs—individuals employed by school districts (and paid with taxpayer dollars) who do not directly instruct children. And the numbers are eye-opening: Between 1950 and 2009, the number of K-12 public school students increased by 96 percent. During that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew by 386 percent. Of those personnel, the number of teachers increased by 252 percent, while the ranks of administrators and other staff grew by 702 percent—more than 7 times the increase in students. Though this trend has abated somewhat in recent years, these increases remain dramatic. From 1992 to 2009, for example, the bump in school FTEs was 2.3 times greater than that of students, with forty-eight states upping the number of nonteaching personnel at a faster rate than their increase in students. Even where student populations dropped over the past two decades, public school employment increased. Maine, for example, lost roughly 11 percent of its pupils, yet saw a 76 percent increase in the number of non-teaching personnel. Ohio schools saw a 2 percent increase in student population coupled with a 44 percent increase in non-teaching personnel. These numbers are jaw-dropping when they stand alone. Attach them to salary and benefits costs and they become jarring. Based on back-of-the-napkin calculations, analysts find that if student growth had matched that of non-teaching personnel from 1992 to 2009 and if the teaching force had only grown 1.5 times faster than the pupil enrollment, American public schools would have an additional $37.2 billion to spend per year—the equivalent of an $11,700 a year increase in salary for every American public school teacher. Report author Benjamin Scafidi offers a predictable Friedman-esque solution for this budgetary quandary: Direct funds toward school vouchers. Gadfly offers another fix for district leaders: Slim down your workforce, especially by eliminating ancillary positions—including those in special education—that don’t directly affect real students in real classrooms. The American public is behind you.

SOURCE: Benjamin Scafidi, The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools (Indianapolis, IN: The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, October 2012).

Educrats have long warned of the perils of rote and repetition, lamenting that students can’t learn “how to think” if they’re forced to memorize facts or repeat skills to automaticity. This pedagogical method hamstrings great teachers, too, they argue. But they’re wrong. In his seminal first book, Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov explained (based on thousands of hours spent observing outstanding teachers in action) that great teaching requires the mastery of seemingly mundane but crucially important knowledge and skills. His newest book (coauthored with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi) builds upon these insights. Drawing on their own experience working to ingrain practice into both school culture and teacher professional development, Practice Perfect offers forty-two rules designed to help people “get better at getting better.” Like the techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, these rules are simple, practical, and grounded in common sense, as well as respect for the practice and repetition that we need to help teachers (and students) achieve mastery. They also present a damning critique of the multi-billion dollar teacher professional-development industry. By shying away from skill repetition, most PD programs offer the equivalent of art-appreciation courses and then ask teachers to paint masterpieces. They simply do not give teachers—eager to learn new skills—the tools to become better educators. Properly conceived, rather than merely giving teachers time to “listen, reflect, discuss, and debate,” professional development would have teachers practice (and hone) newly learned skills with one another—with coaching and feedback—before debuting them in the classroom. This insight may mark the biggest impact of Practice Perfect. Let’s hope that more use this as an opportunity to rethink the role of practice in teacher development and the importance of repetition to the artistry of teaching.

A version of this review was published on the Common Core Watch blog.

SOURCE: Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, a Jossey-Bass imprint, September 2012).