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.