Christi’s Blog

            Once the national standards are written and released, states, districts and teachers will need time to adjust their instructional goals. The second phase of creating a new education system begins within three after the initial proposal.  Educators will have time to adjust their instructional goals.  As educators work to incorporate new national standards in the classroom, the department of education will put together a national testing system to assess student mastery of the standards.  Two years after the standards are released students will begin to be assessed on these standards through internet based tests.  Allowing students to take the tests through the internet, will significantly reduce the cost of the testing, instances of cheating, and speed up the reporting of scores.  The data from these tests will allow educators and policy makers to analyze the progress of the system and focus support where it is most needed.

            Results from the first year of testing will only be broken down to the state level.  This will reveal the states who have not effectively implemented the national standards.  District leaders from these states will need extensive training on what the national standards are and how they should be taught at each level.  They will need to provide extensive training to their teachers throughout the next few years.  The department of education will work with these states to establish yearly goals so that they will perform as well as the rest of the country within three years.  Every few months the department of education will follow up with the state board of education to ensure the states have the resources necessary to achieve success.

            Results from the second and third years will be broken down to the district and subpopulation level.  Any district in which most students are not able to master the educational standards will need remediation of teachers and district leaders.  Just like the department of education did for the state, the state leaders will meet with the districts to establish goals that will lead them toward success and then help them meet these goals. 

            By the time we develop a national assessment system, government officials on the state and federal levels will have worked out most funding issues.  Most states will save millions of dollars in developing and reporting on state developed tests, much of which can now be spent helping districts adjust to and meet the national standards.  Strict oversight is necessary to ensure that money designated for education is spent on education.  Like most government run programs education has become full of pork.  In the United States, 52% of education dollars reach the classroom, and only about 43% of education staff members are classroom teachers.  In other industrialized nations, about 75% of education resources are spent directly on instruction and classroom teachers represent from 60%-80% of all staff members (Darling, 2005).  If our students are going to be competitive in a global market, there must be firm requirements set on education funding to ensure the dollars designated for our children actually reach them.  The fluff and wasteful spending must be cut from national, state and local education budgets.  Before any expenditure is approved it must pass the litmus test of, “Will this allow students to be more successful?”

            A major consideration in the budget discussions will be providing teachers with highly effective and consistent professional development.  Researchers agree that teacher learning communities are an effective method of professional development.  Teachers should be required to have at least one class period a day, in addition to their conference period, to meet with their same course colleges.  Not only is this difficult on a school’s master schedule, because all biology teachers must have the same period for professional development, but it is also very expensive.  For every five teachers, who currently teach six classes, another teacher will need to be hired so each teacher only teaches five classes and has a period for professional development.  Elementary schedules will be even more complicated as the entire first grade will need to be working in other areas so their teachers can work together.  Just providing this time is not going to be effective because most teachers have never experienced or heard of learning communities.  They will need to be trained on expected outcomes of professional development and how to use the time most effectively.  The teachers’ learning groups will need to produce some documentation or log of their experience so that administrators can assess how things are going and identify what specific areas or groups need additional training.  

As part of the national transition to teacher learning communities, teachers need access to professional journals.  Educational research can not have any impact on education if it can not be accessed by educators.  Teachers should be able access to this research through the libraries of state universities.  Most teachers will not have any idea of how or what to look for in these articles at first, but if each learning group reads and discusses one article a semester, teachers will begin to become acquainted with the style of research articles and hopefully come to appreciate the vast amount of information that is available through them.  In order to completely bridge the research-to-practice gap, districts should provide bonuses for teachers who write articles and are published in professional journals.

Once the system is in place, the department of education and state boards of education can identify areas of low student performance.  As it stands, these children have the most inexperienced and under qualified teachers in the United States.  It is obvious that this is a self perpetuating cycle.  These schools are where we need to have the most effective teachers.  In order to encourage teachers to accept positions in these schools, a significant financial incentive must be offered.  We need to create a climate where being offered a position working with the students who struggle the most is considered an honor.

Robert Marzano did a meta-analysis of in-school factors that affect student achievement.  Coming in at the top is what he calls a “guaranteed and viable curriculum.” (Marzano, 2003).  We currently have a very broad set of national standards that each state board of education interpreted differently.  Thus each state developed its own set of standards to guide the local school districts.  Individual state standards vary greatly in the content and depth at each grade level.  As a result, there is a huge discrepancy in achievement standards for students from state to state.  The current national standards were an excellent first step, but they are useless in helping teachers determine what to teach each day.  First and foremost, the department of education must have teachers from each grade level and subject areas convene and develop specific standards to align the curriculum across the nation.  Many states have good documentation that could prove to be an excellent resource, but the true credibility of the new standards will come from the fact they are written by teachers who actually work in the classroom.  It would take less than a summer for a qualified group of teachers to develop an aligned set of standards for each grade level.  The standards could be released for peer review over the next 7 months and the original group of teachers could reconvene the following summer to make necessary changes.  As long as the teachers selected are trained curriculum writers, and their identities are kept secret so that they are not influenced by the unions and lobby groups, they will develop a sound and developmentally-appropriate document that teachers around the country can use to teach effectively.

            While teachers establish useable education standards, governmental leaders can create a modern funding system for education.  People who live in America expect to feel safe.  They have no problems with the government spending billions of dollars on developing the strongest military in the world.  Education is another key to the safety and security of our country.  Through education, our children will develop the skills they need to lead our country into the future.  If our country is going to thrive, education must be our top priority and as such, it should be the most expensive thing in the federal budget.  Currently, the United States is the only developed country where the amount of money spent per student can vary by as much as $11,000 (Biddle, 2002).  To add insult to injury, the most impoverished students typically get the least money for education and the most economically advantaged students who get the most money.  There are many different systems in place around the world to eliminate the discrepancy in funding and ensure the students who need the most actually receive the most funding.  It will take time for policy makers to sort through these and create a system that will work in the United States.  There will also be much input from local and state governments who will not want to lose control over the tax dollars.  Although finding a way to effectively fund education will be the most difficult part of creating a public education system for our country, it is a task that must be done well.

The quality of teachers in public schools across the United States must improve.  For us to provide our students with the most capable teachers, we will have to pay these people more than they could make outside the educational system.  In the state of Texas, a teacher with a graduate degree earns $1000 more per year than a teacher with the same experience who does not have a graduate degree.  The $1000 increase is divided among twelve pay periods.  All in all, it takes over 15 years for a teacher to pay for the graduate degree with their $1000 raise.  There must be a federal standard of compensation for teachers with advanced degrees.  Every teacher with an advanced degree should receive a significant stipend from the federal government in addition to what states or school districts provide.  Instead of constantly reports of teacher shortages, teaching should be a highly competitive field.  This would ensure all students are taught by only the most capable teachers.

     The educational system in the United States was revolutionary.  It played an important role in the country’s emergence as a world superpower.  But the system did not adapt to the changing needs of a growing nation in an increasingly global stage.  In the beginning, the educational system was much like a beautiful house with a strong foundation.  As a nation, we put tremendous effort to keep the house looking nice.  We repainted, redecorated, landscaped, and updated all the appliances.  Yet we neglected the foundation – classroom teachers.  Over the years the foundation weakened and cracked.  A cracked foundation resulted in cracks in the walls and ceiling, putting enormous pressure on the beams that supported the entire structure and kept the house together.  When people or organizations saw the cracks, they patched them and painted over them without ever addressing their cause.  Hundreds of men and women spent millions of dollars and countless hours making the house, the educational system, look wonderful, while the cracks in the foundation grew to a point that children began falling through them.

            The time has come where the nation must face the fact that the educational system in the United States no longer works.  The house is structurally unsound and although it has a lot of history and good memories, it must be torn down so that we can build a place that can meet the needs of our children.  Our education system was one of the first public education systems in the world.  As with any pioneering venture, we made mistakes and we need to learn from those mistakes.  Countries that established their educational systems after we did studied our system and learned from it.  As a result, many of those countries designed excellent and efficient systems to educate their children.  Their consistently higher test scores make this fact apparent.  Now we can benefit from the extensive research on these systems and design the greatest educational system in the world.

            Change is rarely easy.  Big changes are never easy.  Completely restructuring the education system will be the most difficult task facing our country in the 21^st century.  So much time and energy has been spent covering over the problems and minimizing the significance of the short comings that most people have no idea of the true state of education in this country.  The general public must be made aware of the true state of education and all the areas in which our system does not measure up to those of other countries.  This information could create a huge backlash from parents, teachers, state boards and lobbyists.  Parents will demand vouchers to send their children to private schools and everyone else will point fingers and call each other names.  As long as educational leaders stand firm through the initial firestorm, they will be able to move forward and create the system of education we need to deal with the challenges our children will face in a global society.

            The system will need a foundation of three inter-related support networks.  The first is a strong system of national standards to ensure all children have the chance to learn everything they need to know. Secondly, we must create a system for funding public education that addresses the needs of all students.  The third, and possibly most important, is a system to ensure that students are taught by the best trained and most effective teachers in the world.  Due to the scope of changes that must be made to establish a new system for education, each part will need to be implemented in stages to allow teachers and students to understand the new system.

             The Fourteenth Amendment mandates that “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Section Five of this amendment assigns the responsibility of enforcing it to the Congress (LII, n.d.).  Liu (2006) argues, “If the citizenship guarantee means full membership, equal standing, and effective participation in the national polity, then it cannot be squared with a federal education policy that relegates schoolchildren to the uneven distribution of opportunity resulting from highly varied state effort and fiscal capacity”.  The Fourteenth Amendment elevates “national citizenship” over “state citizenship.” However our educational policies relegate children to being citizens of the state.  Full membership in a democratic society requires a person’s education to give them the ability to make informed decisions on voting, participate in community affairs and to be productively employed.

            Biddle and Berlinger (2002) report that few students in the United States attend public schools where funding is set at $15,000 or more per student, while some American schools make do with less than $4000 per student.  Disparities such as these are not tolerated in other developed countries where public schools are funded equally from national taxes.  The Netherlands uses a national funding system with allocates money to all schools based on the number of enrolled students, but for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child (Biddle). As illustrated in Appendix A, funding in the United States is the opposite, because lower-class and minority children typically receive less than middle-class white children.  This funding gap created an achievement gap between states.  Biddle and Berlinger discovered that students from well funded schools, when compared to students from other countries on the TIMSS report, performed as well as their peers in Hong Kong and Japan.  Students from underfunded schools, using the same report, performed at the same levels as students in Jordan and Iran.  Better funded schools attract teachers with higher levels of education, more experience, and higher scores on competency tests.  These teachers in turn generate better achievement scores among students (Biddle). 

In the 2006 report by Liu, he points out that the discrepancy between educational funding across states is not a new or unknown issue in Congress.  Congress considered a series of proposals to narrow these funding gaps during Reconstruction.  After each World War, Congress debated proposals on educational funding.  In 1972, President Nixon’s Commission on School Finance recommended that the federal government equalize resources among the States for elementary and secondary education.  In 1979, a committee of the National Academy of Education emphasized that reducing inequities in educational opportunity, should be a key priority for the federal government. Even though the issue of educational funding has been discussed many times in Congress little has ever been done to close this funding gap. 

Currently, federal spending on public elementary and secondary schools comprises 7.9% of total education revenue in 2001-02 (Liu, 2006). Teacher shortages are a common problem in the United States but rare in counties where teacher salaries are competitive with those in other professional occupations (Darling, 2005).  The United States has the resources to fund improve the quality of teaching in our schools.  However, some of the 92.1% of the federal education revenue will need to be redirected toward this end if America is to achieve its education goals.  The federal government cannot buy much equality when they only provide eight cents of every education dollar.

            Most people in the United States would never consider treatment from a doctor who does not keep up with current medical research.  The same people never questions the fact that teachers who never read any educational research teach their children everyday.

            Several studies reveal huge gaps between educational research and the actual practice of education (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001; Heibert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Kang, 2007; Ruthven, 2005).  In education, there is no mechanism for the efficient implementation of research.  For example, research done in the 1970’s showed that following a specific set of standards improved student achievement.  In the 1990’s, state governments actually adopted standards.

            Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003) identified five barriers in education that prevent research from impacting classroom practices.  First, no individual or group is responsible for applying research to the classroom.  Second, there are not enough resources allocated to adequately test research in the classroom.  Third, educational researchers do not have built in incentives within the culture of research to encourage collaboration – the higher the number of people that work on a project, the less credit any individual receives for the results.  Fourth, education is not a research-based industry.  Evaluations of curriculum effectiveness almost never involve performance data.  Fifth, there is no commercial data for implementing change (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld).

            The problem as stated by Hargreaves is, “educational researchers write mainly for one another in their countless academic journals, which are not to be found in a school staffroom.” (as cited in Joram, 2007). Teachers do not have access to professional journals and do not pursue access because they simply do not have the time required to weed through to the technical jargon of the vast amounts of reports on any given topic to find something that might apply to their classroom.  A study conducted by Landrum, Cook, Tankersley, and Fitzgerald examined practicing teachers’ assessments of the trustworthiness, usability, and accessibility of information from four sources: colleagues, workshops, college courses, and professional journals.  Teachers rated professional journals as the least trustworthy, and usable sources of information and only slightly more accessible than college courses.  Teaching will not truly be considered a profession until these hurdles are overcome and teachers become both effective producers and critical consumers of educational research.  As Elmore (2005) points out, teachers can not become more effective by applying knowledge and skill they already have.

Most teachers want to be better teachers, but they have limited resources to rely on in order to actually fulfill this desire. Educational research is supposed to help teachers improve their practice.  Yet it will never achieve this end if it is not made available to teachers in a context they can understand and easily apply.  Most educational research is not readily useful to most teachers because it is the product of isolated studies rather than groups of studies designed to address the complexities of actual classrooms.  Cocoran, Fuhrman, and Belcher (2001) found that even when districts encourage the use of research in decision making, school staff members pay lip service to the merits of research but value the actual experience of teachers in the classroom more.  Teachers state that research is difficult to access and even harder to interpret.  Teachers felt they were ill prepared to sort out significant discoveries from the copious data (Cocoran, et. al., 2001).  Consequently, the knowledge that guides most classroom teachers comes from years of trial and error within the education system.  As much as they might benefit from the knowledge of their colleagues, most teachers cannot access the experiences of others and must create their own pool of knowledge from scratch.  Heibert, Gallimore, and Stigler (2002) believe teachers must have a means of storing knowledge in a form that it can be accessed and used by others if it is to take on a life of its own.  This system would allow teachers to treat ideas for teaching as objects that can be shared and examined publicly.  

Ruthven (2005) argues that teacher research provides a bottom-up means of developing prototypes of good practice, and of doing so in a way which promotes deeper thinking by participating teachers, stronger commitment from them, and more far-reaching changes.  Combining the roles of teacher and researcher eliminates the problems with accessibility and contextualization of research for the teacher.  Kang (2007) confirms the productive nature of action research as professional development.  The teachers’ experiences with action research connect their knowledge with classroom actions which transforms the teaching practices they use with students (Kang).  Although most teachers claim their informal research is motivated by “professional development,” it can have the dual purpose of generating a “public knowledge base” if teachers were given a common forum to post and discuss their findings.

      Realizing that teachers have more power over student achievement than any program is a recent development in the history of education.    Up to this point it was thought that an increase in student achievement could be reach, by simply providing teachers with a better program.  For decades, teachers had new concepts and methods thrown at them with the expectation that they incorporate them into the classroom with little or no training.  Most studies show that this approach to professional development results in teachers adapting new programs and initiative to fit their needs, thus defeating the purpose and undermining the new program’s effectiveness (Supovitz & Turner, 2000). In the book Results Now, Schmoker (2006) cited a recent study based on 1,500 classroom observations which found: “Classrooms in which high-yield strategies were being used = 0.2%, Classrooms in which there was evidence of higher-order thinking = 3%, Classrooms in which fewer than one-half of students were paying attention = 85%.”  Such statistics point to how even fairly obvious research strategies fail to impact the actions of teachers.  Johnson, Kahle, and Fargo (2006), in a three year study, found that students with effective teacher performed significantly better on achievement tests than students in classrooms with neutral or ineffective teachers.  While students are often blamed for poor achievement on state assessments, it is possible that the teacher may not have the training required to teach the necessary subject material effectively.

            Many nations focus their educational reforms on improving teacher education.  These nations realize that the economic and political survival of their country depends on their ability to produce teachers who effectively teach a wide array of learners to meet a high standard.  Many European and Asian nations, for example, routinely prepare teachers more extensively, pay them more compared to other competing occupations, and provide them with time for joint planning and professional development.  In the last two decades, many countries moved teacher education to the graduate level, adding in-depth pedagogical study and an intensive internship in schools to a base of strong undergraduate preparation in the discipline (Darling, 2005).  Entrance into teacher education programs in these countries is also highly competitive, making well trained teachers more widely available.  By contrast, the United States spent the last two decades lowering requirements for teacher certification and many states face a teacher shortage.  Many alternative certification programs do not require participants to work in a classroom before certification.  As a result, the public believes anyone can teach.

According to Elmore (2005), the logic of NCLB seems to be: “If schools are threatened with closure and other sanctions, they will figure out how to improve themselves.  Schools that are unable to meet state standards are aware of their deficiencies; however, virtually no infrastructure exists to provide support to these failing schools.”  Elmore goes on to argue, “if we don’t provide school staffs with what is necessary to make these leaps, that is, the knowledge and tools they need to raise student achievement, we will not only assure that schools don’t improve substantially, we will increasingly sow cynicism and resistance toward the law.”             Additionally, NCLB requires a much greater amount of data collection and disaggregation than ever before.  Unfortunately, the demand for data evaluation created by NCLB did not lead state governments to train teachers in data disaggregation so they could effective use the data they have now.  Nelson and Eddy (2008) conducted a case study focusing on improving teachers’ skills in data-driven decision making.  They analyzed student work and the teachers’ own professional practice and found that once teachers understood how to examine student work and plan on the basis of that examination, they maximize their effectiveness as teachers.  Only after a collaborative teacher group masters these skills can they develop meaningful interventions to improve Annual Yearly Progress as required by NCLB. 

            In the United States very little time in the standard teaching year is dedicated to training teachers.  Teachers often seek training at night and on weekends: whenever they can work them around busy family schedules.  Yet this system does not effectively provide teachers the training they need to handle day-to-day problems in their classroom.  A study by Supovitz and Turner (2000) shows that teachers require at least eighty hours of professional development before they use inquiry-based teaching practices more frequently.  Additional blocks of professional development result in a more investigative classroom culture (Supovitz & Turner).  Johnson, Kalhe, and Fargo’s (2007) study confirms that the time teachers have for professional development directly impacts student achievement.         

Johnson, Kalhe, and Fargo (2007) established a system of whole-school, sustained professional development which provided opportunity for collaboration between teachers over time, within community.  The school that received the professional development time in the study did not experience any turn over in their science teaching staff in over six years.  This speaks to the power of professional development, collaboration, and camaraderie to retain teachers.  Considering the enormous cost of teacher attrition – an estimated $300 million to $2 billion per year in Texas alone – the value any type of professional development that significantly reduces the number of teachers is tremendous (Darling, 2006).  Mike Schmoker (2004) points out professional learning communities are arguably the best, most agreed-upon means by which to continuously improve instruction and student performance.  They succeed where typical staff development and workshops fail due to the ability of such groups to respond to current classroom issues.  More stunning yet is how rare such learning communities are in our schools and districts, although this concept is now embraced in virtually every other industry and profession.

         The phrase, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” reflects the long-held public view of education.  In the eyes of parents and other community members, teachers are glorified babysitters who get way too much time off.  Unfortunately, this perspective became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the educational system developed.  Like manufacturing industries modern schools were designed to help, schools developed as increasingly specialized organizations.   Because decisions are made at the top of the educational hierarchy, there is no rationale for substantial teacher preparation or salary.    Teachers receive less pay than equally educated professionals (Darling, 2001).  Consequently, there are shortages of qualified teachers across the country.  These shortages drove school districts to lower standards for new applicants – they had to fill the vacancies.  The lower standards attract people to the field who are trained to do little more than babysit. 

            Teachers have a tremendous influence in their students’ lives.  Teachers can make students feel like failures or successes.  Teachers influence whether a student gives up or has a drive to success that lasts a lifetime.  Sanders, William, and Rivers found that fifth grade students are still affected by the quality of their third grade teachers (as cited in Haycock).  Many researchers now hypothesize that the achievement gap in the United States is not due to inequalities in race, economics, or ability, but is in the inequalities found in skills of teachers (Darling, 2006; Haycock, 1998; Johnson, Kahle, & Fargo, 2007; Schmoker, 2006; Stigler & Heibert, 1999).  Haycock found a direct correlation between a teacher’s score on their certification exam and ACT and their students’ test scores.  This study also revealed that a teacher who majored in the content they teach routinely have higher student performance scores than teachers who do not.  As this research has shown, the only lasting way to improve student achievement is to focus attention on developing competent teachers.

            Federal, state, and local governments force educational policies on teachers.  These programs promise great gains in student achievement for teachers who can follow their mandated and complicated stipulations.  Unfortunately, these policies rarely produce the promised leaps in student achievement.  Over the years, teachers became jaded to the promises of these policies and take a passive-aggressive approach to new reforms.  By ignoring them – or meeting the minimally acceptable requirements – teachers do not have to deal with the disappointment of another failed program.

            While many might see this passive-aggressive behavior as non-compliance, research allows a deeper understanding of teachers’ behavior.  For years, teachers poured tremendous effort into implementing reforms.  Rothbaum, Weisz and Snyder (1982) say this is a teacher’s attempt to exert primary control of their environment.  In other words, teachers originally believed that if they worked hard enough, that they could make reforms work and help students excel.  When attempts at primary control do not work, however, this forces people to use secondary methods of control.  In this situation, the disappointed teacher does not fully implement reforms because they do not believe reforms work anyway.  So, when the reform does not work, the teacher feels in control of their environment because they ‘knew it wouldn’t work anyway’ (Rothbaum, et. al. , 1982).

            Carol Dweck identified two basic mindsets in her book, ‘Mindsets,’ published in 2003.  This book, a summary of twenty years of research, explores the difference between the fixed mindset and growth mindset.  A fixed mindset believes that your qualities are carved in stone, creating an urgency to prove yourself continually throughout life.  The growth mindset, on the other hand, believes that your basic qualities are things you cultivate though effort, leading people to strive for improvement even when they fail (Dweck).  Because state governments did not include teachers in the reform process, teachers felt out of control.  An extended history of failed reforms instilled a passive aggressive survival attitude in experience teachers and, over time, cultivated a fixed mindset. 

            In ‘The Teaching Gap,’ Stigler and Heibert (1999) indicate several areas where the fixed mindset of teachers in the United States negatively impacts student achievement.  Teachers in the United States who have fixed mindsets often misunderstand students’ confusion and frustration in the classroom and step in to correct a perceived problem with content mastery.  In Japan, where teachers have more of a growth mindset, they would allow students to work through confusions and frustration on their own, as a natural part of the learning process.  Additionally, the average classroom in Japan contains about forty students.  In the United States, the average classroom is about twenty-five students.  In Japan teachers do not complain about class size, believing each student learns something by struggling with the lesson.  In the United States, on the other hand, teachers constantly look for ways to reduce class size because their fixed mindset does not believe that a student’s effort is part of the learning process.  Consequently, teachers in the United States spend a lot of time tailoring lessons to the learning styles and needs of the students and have little actual student achievement to show for it.

            Marva Collins’ success with students from inner-city Chicago is an amazing example of the power of a growth mindset (Collins, n.d.).  When you look at her methods, and the methods of other great teachers, they all focus on helping students develop a growth mindset.  Once students accept that they alone control their ability to grow, they readily accept the challenge, work hard, and ultimately excel.

            Recognizing that teaching is a cultural activity explains why it has been so resistant to change.  But it also gives insight into what will be required to improve it.  In order to transform the culture of education, the mindset of the teachers must be changed.  Our culture does not usually recognize small changes as progress.  The reforms that have been implemented up to this point have focused on quick results, but have failed to change the system as a whole.  When evaluating reforms, we must ask ourselves, if the tortoise wins the race then, maybe we should stop trying to imitate the hare. 

            The lowest performing students in Japanese schools consistently outperform the highest performing students in the United States.  This reality rocked educators in the United States.  As a result, educational reformers hit the educational system with a myriad of reforms.  Teachers taught more information to stricter standards.  Students endured more tests to ensure they remained competitive.  After they spent millions of dollars reforming the system, educators expected a change.  Much to their chagrin, students performed no better on international tests than before.  Stigler and Hiebert (1990) propose that the problem is not a learning gap between nations, but a teaching gap.

Robert Eaker characterized the traditional school as a collection of independent contractors united by a common parking lot (as cited in Schmoker, 2006).  The isolation of teachers makes it easy to hide ineffective or non-compliant practices, as teachers can go an entire day or, for some, an entire week without speaking with a colleague or administrator.  Despite having a shorter school year, teachers in the United States work more hours per day and per year than teachers in any other country (Darling, 2001).  Most elementary school teachers in the United States have 8.3 minutes to prepare for every hour they spend in the classroom.  Secondary teachers have 13 minutes to prepare per teaching-hour (Darling, 2001).  Most teachers only have 50 minutes per day to prepare an engaging lesson, modify the lesson for various students, grade 150 or so papers from the previous lesson, give the students feedback on their work, record grades, stay in touch with parents, and complete state-mandated paperwork.  Consequently, Linda Darling-Hammond (2001) found, the average American teacher works an additional 15 hours per week outside of school.  Unfortunately, teachers do not have time to learn and implement reforms designed by people who most likely never taught in a classroom.  Before reforms can impact the educational system, the culture of isolation must be removed and teachers must have time to collaborate and learn from each other.

           Teachers in the United States spend more hours teaching than teachers from Japan and Germany.  Yet students in Japan and Germany consistently outperform students in the United States.  Much of the gap in United States’ students on international testing is a result of the limited amount of time teachers have to plan with their colleagues (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).  Robert Marzano (2003) did a meta-analysis of in-school factors that affect student achievement.  At the top of his list is what is actually taught.  He refers to this as “guaranteed and viable curriculum”.  Despite the volumes of curricula guides on the shelf, teachers ultimately decide what they actually teach.  Unfortunately, teachers do not have enough time to plan and confer and this directly impacts what teachers teach in the classroom.

            The culture is not learned in education courses, it is absorbed during the formative years people spend in the educational environment created by this culture.  And, while there are many positive aspects of this culture, (working long hours, taking work home, attending trainings on vacation days and putting the needs of the students first) there are many which undermine attempts at reform.  Teachers, for example, work in isolation, making it almost impossible for reformers to know what actually occurs in the classroom (Supovitz & Turner, 2000).  Additionally, teachers have a strong suspicion of anyone outside the profession because of constant public criticism of their calling.  Advice from outside the profession is suspect, because teachers tend to discount educational research.  Overall, the deeply entrenched culture of education resists change and is a significant barrier to reform.  Educational reformers must understand this culture if they hope to shift it and significantly impact education in the United States.

Systematic

           By definition, a system is any group of parts that can do more than any of the individual parts.  As such, the system of teaching works well.  Systems, however, evaluate new additions according to how well they work within the system as a whole.  If a change works well within the system as a whole, it becomes part of the system.  If it does not benefit the whole, the system rejects it.  Historically, education reform focused on adding strategies to one part of the system without considering how those strategies affected the entire system.  Consequently, the system rejected the reform and the system of education did not change.  Thus, even with a vast history of reform, education has not changed much since its inception. 

            Effective educational reform must address the whole system.  Since teachers control the system, they have to be convinced of the need and effectiveness of reform strategies - before implementation - if those strategies are to work.  Research on human behavior provides exhaustive evidence that people strongly value, and are reluctant to relinquish, the perception of control (Rothbaum, Weisz & Snyder, 1982).  Teachers control what happens within the classroom.  Consequently, reform strategies forced on teachers that do not address this control will fail. Reformers must consider what each classroom teacher needs to do and then identify the school, district, state and federal policies most likely to cause these things to happen, without discounting the importance of the teacher who then decides if they will implement the policy (Slavin, 1996).  System-wide reform is impossible unless it impacts the daily classroom practices of every teacher in the system.  

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