Hutchinson's list of issues included the need for effective teachers, the lack of good data collection, the need for teacher training institutions to set high standards for teachers with a follow-on commitment to stay involved with the graduate who begins teaching....
Punch Line: “It is all about teaching. We have tried every other experiment in the world. It is time to focus on teaching. It contributes most to achievement.”
Bush Foundation agenda: Bush Foundation is making a 10-year commitment to improving student outcomes in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Goals: By 2018, the percentage of students who are on track to earn a degree after high school will increase by 50 percent, for all students Pre-K to college. Disparities among different student groups will be eliminated.
Student achievement data: Hutchinson gave a series of grim statistics on student achievement: Half the kids come to school ready; 50-70 percent of kids learn a year’s worth for a year in school; 37 percent are proficient at reading in grade 8; 84 percent graduate from high school; and 38 percent take remedial courses once they get to college (they are essentially taking high school over again). About 26 percent earn degrees. Disparities by race, ethnicity and income are significant. We have among the largest gaps in achievement in the country.
Effective teachers: Hutchinson defined effective teachers as ones who could deliver at least a year’s worth of learning to their kids every year, regardless of who the kids are, regardless of where the kids come from.
Lack of data: Hutchinson said the education system doesn’t collect data in a way that measures a child’s progress in a given year. That would show whether or not teaching is effective. “We keep measuring whether kids can pass a test,” he said. “We refuse to ask ourselves, how far are those kids moving? It is the movement that matters.”
♣ Based on Dallas Public Schools data, if children had three effective teachers in a row, they had nearly 100 percent odds of passing a statewide math test, regardless of where they started academically. For students with three ineffective teachers in a row, the lowest performing students got hurt the most. That means teaching matters the most to kids who are furthest behind.
♣ Minneapolis schools have tracked students’ relative academic gains during the course of a year. Beyond Minneapolis few school districts in the state have invested in measuring the growth of youngsters.
♣ We should be measuring regularly how far kids are progressing, and we should expect regularly that every youngster would improve at least a year’s worth, regardless of where they start. Why are we holding back? If we knew the differences were this big, wouldn’t we want to do something about it?
♣ If you want to close the achievement gap, make sure every child has effective teachers every year. If you put effective teaching in front of kids, kids learn. If you believe otherwise, you fundamentally don’t believe that all kids can learn.
Numbers of adults in schools are up, but achievement is flat: Nationally, the percentage of 4th graders read proficiently as measured by the NAEP test virtually has not changed since we started measuring. It is around 38 percent. The right question is why? We have certainly been working at it. Why hasn’t it changed? Here are some possible answers:
♣ Answer 1: Kids are worse off than they used to be. (Hutchinson said poverty data doesn’t back that up.)
♣ Answer 2: We haven’t tried hard enough. (Yet in schools we have increased the ratio or adults to kids by 50 percent in the last 30-40 years with no change in outcomes.)
♣ Answer 3. Teacher effectiveness has dropped. The average aptitude test scores of new teachers have fallen by almost 30 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s, if you were a woman you had two career choices: teaching or nursing. That cohort is 70 years old. Women now have many, many more choices. Education has been unable to compete for that human capital. Or for men or person of color. It seems to me what we have been doing for the last 40 years is increasing the input, but decreasing the capabilities of those inputs and we are darn lucky that reading scores didn’t get worse.
Teacher preparation: We are not doing a brilliant job at recruiting, preparing and placing and supporting teachers. When we fail to do those things, we are failing the kids. Improving new teacher effectiveness is the thing that we are choosing to focus on.
♣ Bush will focus on the 25,000 new teachers that we will need in these systems in the next 10 years. These new teachers will represent half of the teacher core.
♣ In Minnesota, we train twice as many teachers as we hire and newly minted teachers have a one-in-four chance of still being in teaching 5 years later. “You are paying the system to produce four teachers but you are only getting one,” Hutchinson said. “That isn’t a very good investment. The pay they get is lousy. The support they get is lousy.”
♣ We screen potential teachers after they come out of an education program instead of before they enter the program. “It seems to me it is wasting a hell of a lot of human potential to be training four to get one,” Hutchinson said. “Why not get the best group you can from the beginning and keep them together all the way through?”
Bush Foundation’s initial thoughts on a solution: Hutchinson said to consider the following as an idea, not a proposal. Think of a teacher preparation system where:
♣ We teach half as many students, raise admissions requirements and recruit top students.
♣ K-12 schools guarantee jobs to program graduates from these high-standards programs and better pay. (By one estimate it costs $12,000 for a school district to replace a teacher. We need to reduce the turnover rate.)
♣ Teacher preparation programs focus on content and pedagogy and the use of data.
♣ Teaching students remain enrolled in the program four years after they graduate. They get coaching, support and mentoring from the school. They return for summer programs. They intensely review their classroom data. (Teacher effectiveness improves the most in the first five years of teaching. Let’s have the colleges accountable for that piece of the job so they experience the success or failure of the teachers they are preparing.)
♣ Colleges guarantee teacher effectiveness. They say to the schools if you promise our teacher grads a job, we guarantee they will be successful.
Seeking partners: The Bush Foundation is looking for people who have “the naivety, the recklessness, or the courage” to try to do this, Hutchinson said. We need higher education systems willing to change the way they think about their work. We need philanthropic partners. We need school districts willing to say, we will hire teachers and only teachers who meet these expectations. And we need a public policy environment that supports this kind of stuff. The board of teaching is going to have to make some changes. The board that deals with principals is going to have to make some changes. The way we budget for teacher preparation is going to need to change.
Q&A
[Listening to a tape of the meeting, many questions were inaudible or barely audible.]
Q: What is the impact of the ethnicity of teachers on student achievement?
A: There are very strong data that indicates that the teacher’s ethnicity affects effectiveness, not just their cultural connection. “One of the challenges we are going to have if we really rebuild this system is to alter the ethnicity of the young people who are becoming teachers, and then assuring that they are in the place where they can do the most good,” Hutchinson said.
Q: What about higher education teachers?
A: We should alter all of it. If you take this seriously, you are talking about shaking up the way we do stuff. Not tinkering, shaking. That is why this is going to be hugely controversial. Places that don’t want to do this are going to have a million reasons why it is not a good idea.
Q: (From a long-time teacher) I agree. We have to move the quality of teaching. That is a no brainer. But teachers are only as good as the system in which they work. We are expecting that one person to do it all. There has to be more people involved in supporting kids. It is a bigger picture than what we are hearing today.
A: Here is my hang up. I hear these lists of all the factors that matter all of the time. We went out and worked on all of those factors. For 30 years, we gave up the opportunity to recruit the very best into teaching. And we were wrong. That is not to say that whether parents read to their kids doesn’t count. It’s not to say that the neighborhood doesn’t matter. But what goes on in classrooms is what this is about. When we take our eye off of that, we get what we got. We have to get our eye back on it.
Q: [Inaudible]
A: You raise an important point about how quick we are to change curriculum. From my point of view that is a huge issue. The “curriculum of the year” is not what we need. We need something we believe in that we will support over the long term. When we do make the curriculum changes, we need to make sure the materials are available for all kids—language issues, sight issues, hearing issues, all need to be thought about before we say, Let’s try this. When we don’t prepare the teachers to deliver that curriculum correctly, we get nothing. We probably have made things worse.
Q: Parents have a responsibility to send children to school ready to learn. Part of your teaching is that parents need to see themselves as teachers…
A: I couldn’t agree more. Effective teachers do that.
Q: We need a new approach in higher education. We need to have high quality teachers training them, coming down to the actual field.
A: The first reaction from higher education when Bush started talking about this proposal was what one might expect. When you run a foundation, you are everyone’s best friend. So I got a whole new collection of best friends. And everybody wants to be part of this. Then I say let me describe this partnership. “Imagine us locked in a room, and we are literally challenging each other and neither one of us can get out,” Hutchinson said. “That is what we are talking about. If you don’t want to do that, don’t be my best friend.”
A whole bunch of people are likely to drop away. I am not being critical. If they don’t want to change, no one should make them. We are looking for three or four partners who are willing to do this. In many cases, it means starting over. We are talking about trying to create a new design for teacher preparation.
The most important challenge in the higher education system is that they don’t know how their students are doing. If they accept this approach it says, these students are your students for four years after they graduate, that means they can’t avoid being in the field. They can’t avoid experiencing the challenges back in teaching. That to me is the most powerful piece of this approach. It keeps the system close to the ground. As you know, they are very far away from the ground. It pushes those professors in direct contact with the actual teaching that is going on, so they can learn about what is working and what isn’t working. The key thing is, you have to get those profs out of their classrooms, and get into your classroom and see what is actually happening, so they can figure out, "Why didn’t that work?"
Q: Would you consider identifying three or four of the most effective Minnesota public schools, district or charter, that are making the biggest difference for kids, and empowering them to be in charge of teacher preparation?
A: Our deal is straight forward: How will we get 25,000 really effective teachers in front of our kids in the next 10 years? I will work with anyone who can help us get to 25,000—schools, churches, businesses, I don’t care. They have to commit to being accountable for whether or not the teachers they turn out can deliver. If they don’t want to be accountable, that is the system we have today. We don’t need to replicate that.
Q: How will this fit into the larger scheme. It sounds like what Gov. Pawlenty is saying: Focus on the teachers. But schools are closing. Districts won’t get money. There isn’t funding at the state level. How does this great pot you have fit into the bigger scheme of state funding?
A: In the next 10 years, we are still going to have kids to teach. If state government can’t figure out how to support the single most important institution in the state, kids are still going to show up for school. And there are still going to be adults there to teach them Our deal is, they ought to be the very best, regardless of what the situation is.
Q: Will they have the materials?
A: They will have what they have, but they ought to be the best, regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves. When the conditions are the toughest is when you really want the best. We are not even close to that point today. Our board has chosen to focus on this one thing. It leaves out a lot of other stuff. A lot of my friends are on my case about that. All I can say to them is, this is the one thing we believe has very high leverage and deserves a lot more attention.
Q: Do you have partners at the state level?
A: We want them and I think they want us. Do I think the state is going to want to participate in these conversations? Darn right. I think we are at a time of great opportunity to get some of the policy changes that we need to try to effectuate some of this stuff. They are not going to have money to spend, so policy is about the only thing they are going to get to do.
Favorite story from his days as superintendent:
He went to Anderson school and sat down with kids for breakfast. He met a little girl and asked her if she liked school. “Oh, yeah, I love school,” she said. He asked what she liked so much? The girl said, “Oh, my teacher. I love my teacher: So what was it about her teacher that she loved so much. “She said she’s proud of us.”
Hutchinson posed the question to other teachers later that day. Did anyone ever tell you it was important to be proud of kids? The answer was no, he said. “It needs to be.”
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