This is an abstract of our editorial. For the full article, please click the link below:
schoolsnapshots.org/ace/story.pl?a=2334
Earlier this month, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a speech about the teaching profession, saying, “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
That’s Race to the Top in a nutshell: including the idea of evaluating teachers based at least in part on student test scores. The idea of judging (and paying) teachers based on student outcomes instead of what degrees they have and how many years they’ve been serving our nation’s children has certainly shaken up the teaching profession.
Furthermore, as Mr Duncan pointed out in his speech, countries that are passing us up — Finland, South Korea, Singapore — put much more value on the teaching profession than we Americans do. They recruit, for example, only the top third of their college graduating class as teachers, and they pay them well. The situation is different in America, with many college students seeing education as a fall-back major, after they tried but failed to make it as a symphony trumpeter, a mechanical engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, and so on.
That whole attitude about the teaching profession needs to change if we are to see the kind of change that we would like to see, that we write about, that we need in order to maintain our national security interests abroad. The three big 21st-century skills we’re talking about here are critical thinking and problem solving, communication, and collaboration. We need teachers who are skilled in these areas, so our kids can become skilled in these areas.
How Voxitatis can help with bringing critical 21st-century skills to students
Critical Thinking … Our homework help site is revolutionary in that we don’t simply answer students’ questions. We ask them to help us help them, showing us what progress they have made along the way by back-and-forth communication over email.
Communication … In new media and Web-based communication products, Voxitatis offers schools a chance to publish online in an environment similar to that of local newspapers and wire services. Schools can set up their own publication schedules, sell advertising, and edit and review content published by other schools and by Voxitatis. For more information, send an email to editor@schoolsnapshots.org.
Collaboration … Voxitatis has developed math demos, for use by teachers across America, demos based on the work of master teachers with whom we have collaborated. Some of our most recent demos are available on this blog. Furthermore, all content created by Voxitatis is published under a Creative Commons license, which releases certain rights and makes collaboration easier, for example, on our Journal of Illinois Lab Reports, published three times a year, beginning in February, and highlighting some of the outstanding work done by Illinois students in science classes.
Conclusion
Although I do not believe building longitudinal data systems is the answer, building such systems at least gives notice that we are shaking up the teaching profession. I believe it says very little about a fifth-grade teacher’s quality if I can track her students through 10th grade or even into college and the workforce. There are simply too many variables that affect student learning in between fifth grade and 10th grade. Heck, there are too many variables that affect student learning from the beginning of fifth grade to the end of fifth grade.
Tests are highly flawed measures for student success, but when it comes to measuring teacher quality, well, they aren’t even close to reliable instruments. A kid who doesn’t do his homework is not going to test well, no matter how good the teacher is. And, the factors that influence whether or not a kid does his homework are things like poverty, whether his mom lets him sit mindlessly in front of the TV or at a video game console, how much sleep he gets, how much nutrition he gets, whether he’s being bullied but can’t tell anyone who can help, and hundreds of influences not just about the kid himself but about his life at school, in his family, and in his community.
But what is important is the training of teachers in the 21st-century skills mentioned above, especially at the high school level, where one fourth of our students drop out of the learning institutions we have built for them in America. We can help. Give us a try.
