How to Treat a Middle School Child

This poem, whose author is anonymous, really speaks to me as the new school year begins with my eighth graders:

How to Treat a Middle School Child

Love me when it's hardest to do,

Love me when I don't like you.

Give me, but with restraint,

Never let me say, "I can't".

Support me no matter what,

But recognize when it's my fault.

Accept me whenever I dare,

Always show me that you care.

Guide me without a fight,

Hug me every time I'm right.

Warm me when you think I'm wrong,

Help me always be strong.

Understand when I'm difficult,

Or hostile, angry, rude & abrupt.

If you can do this when I'm thirteen,

You'll be proud of me when I'm eighteen.

It's hard to be the kid in between,

If you'll remember, you'll know what I mean.

So help me through this trying time,

And one day soon, I promise, 

I'll shine.

The Gift that Lives On

As a new school year begins, teachers everywhere could use an inspirational story to get them motivated and thinking about the best needs of their students. The following is a true story shared to me at a Comprehensive Behavior Management class last week that I shared with my eighth grade team of teachers on Friday. Get the tissues ready!

The Special Story of Miss Thompson 

I know of a schoolteacher named Miss Thompson.  Every year, when she met her new 

students, she would say, "Boys and girls, I love you all the same. I have no favorites." Of 

course, she wasn't being completely truthful.  Teachers do have favorites and, what is worse, 

most teachers have students that they just don’t like. 

  

Teddy Stallard was a boy that Miss Thompson just didn't like, and for good reason. He 

just didn't seem interested in school. There was a deadpan, blank expression on his face and 

his eyes had a glassy, unfocused appearance.  When she spoke to Teddy, he always answered in monosyllables.  His clothes were musty and his hair was unkempt.  He wasn't an attractive boy and he certainly wasn't likable.   

Whenever she marked Teddy's papers, she got a certain perverse pleasure out of 

putting X's next to the wrong answers and when she put the F's at the top of the papers, she 

always did it with a flair.  She should have known better; she had Teddy's records and she knew more about him than she wanted to admit. The records read:  

1st Grade: Teddy shows promise with his work and attitude, but poor home situation.  

2nd Grade: Teddy could do better. Mother is seriously iII. He receives little help at home.  

3rd Grade: Teddy was a good boy, but too serious. He is a slow learner. His mother died 

this year.  

4th Grade: Teddy is very slow but well-behaved.  His father shows no interest.  

Christmas came, and the boys and girls in Miss Thompson's class brought her Christmas 

presents. They piled their presents on her desk and crowded around to watch her open them.  

Among the presents there was one from Teddy Stallard.  She was surprised that he had brought her a gift but he had.  Teddy's gift was wrapped in brown paper and was held together with Scotch tape.  On the paper were written the simple words, “For Miss Thompson from Teddy.”   

When she opened Teddy's present, out fell a gaudy rhinestone bracelet with half the stones 

missing and a bottle of cheap perfume.   

The other boys and girls began to giggle and smirk over Teddy's gifts, but Miss Thompson at least had enough sense to silence them by immediately putting on the bracelet and putting some of the perfume on her wrist.  Holding her wrist up for the other children to smell, she said, “Doesn't it smell lovely?"  And the children, taking their cue from the teacher, 

readily agreed with “oos" and “ahs”.   

At the end of the day, when school was over and the other children had left, Teddy 

lingered behind. He slowly came over to her desk and said softly, “Miss Thompson...Miss 

Thompson, you smell just like my mother .... and her bracelet looks real pretty on you too.  I'm 

glad you liked my presents."  

When Teddy left, Miss Thompson got down on her knees and asked God to forgive her.  

When the children came  back to school, they were welcomed by a new teacher.  Miss 

Thompson had become a different person.  She was no longer just a teacher; she had become an agent of God.  She was now a person committed to loving her children and doing things that would live on after her. She helped all the children, but especially the slow ones, and especially Teddy Stallard.  By the end of that school year, Teddy showed dramatic improvement. He had caught up with most of the students and was even ahead of some.  

She didn't hear from Teddy for a long time.  Then one she received a note that read: 

Dear Miss Thompson: 

I wanted you to be the first to know, I will be graduating second in my class. 

Love, 

Teddy Stallard 

Four years later, another note came: 

Dear Miss Thompson: 

They just told me I will be graduating first in my class.  I wanted you to be the first to 

know.  The university has not been easy, but I liked it. 

Love, 

Teddy Stallard 

And four years later: 

Dear Miss Thompson, 

As of today, I am Theodore Stallard, M.D.  How about that?  I wanted you to be the first 

to know.  I am getting married next month, the 27th to be exact.  I want you to come and 

sit where my mother would sit if she were alive.  You are the only family I have now.  

Dad died last year. 

Love, 

Teddy Stallard 

Miss Thompson went to that wedding and sat where Teddy’s mother would have sat.  

She deserved to sit there;  she had done something for Teddy that he could never 

forget. 

Real school choice for Big Apple students??

Published Online: August 19, 2011

COMMENTARY

NYC Program Means Real Public School Choice for Students

By Thomas Toch and Neil Dorosin

In a few weeks, 98 percent of New York City’s 79,000 rising 9th graders will be entering public high schools that they’ve selected from more than 650 options throughout the city’s five boroughs.

New York’s ambitious high school selection system isn’t perfect. But it has liberated thousands of students from failing neighborhood high schools, transformed the city’s high school principals from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, improved the perception of public schools among middle-class families, and helped raise the city’s graduation rates. At a time of renewed advocacy of private school vouchers, New York’s choice system is a model strategy for harnessing the power of the marketplace to better serve students and stimulate improvement through competition within public education.

Of the small number of cities that permit students to select their public schools, most make school choice optional and relatively few families participate. New York City has taken the bold step of requiring rising 9th graders to select their high schools, a strategy that has created a far more vibrant public school marketplace than exists anywhere else in the country.

As one measure of the scale of the system, over a single fall weekend last year, more than 32,000 families attended an annual citywide school fair at Brooklyn Tech to talk to representatives of hundreds of high schools.

The number of New York high school options has tripled in a generation, thanks in part to former Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s replacement of many of the city’s dysfunctional comprehensive high schools with smaller alternatives, and today students are able to select schools with themes ranging from animal science to architecture, hands-on engineering, film, Latin, and expeditionary learning.

Some of the schools are selective. According to The New York Times, about 30 percent of city high schools screen students using grades, test scores, attendance, and other measures. Some give preference to in-borough residents. But half the seats in many high schools and all of the slots in others are open to any student, making New York’s choice system more egalitarian than many. (There’s a separate system for admission to Brooklyn Tech and seven other elite magnet high schools, as well as auditions for the city’s famous performing-arts high school.)

And New York’s brand of public school choice is fairer, less bureaucratic, and more transparent than other models, thanks to the introduction of a new school-selection system in 2004. School choice started in the city in the 1970s as a way to counter middle-class flight from public schools. But the school-selection process dragged out over three rounds of bidding over many months (sometimes into the beginning of the following school year), gave the final say in admissions to principals (thereby opening the process to political influence), and left 35,000 students in schools they hadn’t selected, damaging the district’s reputation among the very middle-class families it sought to recruit.

"New York’s brand of public school choice is fairer, less bureaucratic, and more transparent than other models."

But in 2004, school officials launched a new choice process featuring a computerized matching model designed by Harvard economics professor Alvin Roth. (Alvin Roth and Neil are co-founders of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, a nonprofit organization.)

Derived from matching markets in medical residencies, kidney donations, sororities, law clerkships, and Internet auctions, the new system requires students to select a dozen schools; the mathematical formula behind the system eliminates waiting lists and the opportunity for favoritism (the school system’s computer rather than principals now has the final say on where students go) and greatly increases students’ chances of attending schools they’ve selected.

The number of students attending schools they hadn’t chosen plummeted from 35,000 in 2003 to 790 in 2009. This past spring, more than 65,000 of the city’s rising 9th graders were granted one of their top five choices for 2011-12, and after the completion of a supplemental-selection round, only a small fraction had to be administratively placed because they couldn’t be matched with schools they wanted.

The percentage of students placed in a top-five choice in the first round was down a bit this year—for a good reason. Choice officials included graduation rates in school profiles for the first time, and students applied in greater numbers to schools awarding more diplomas. That’s no surprise. Markets with informed consumers tend to work more efficiently, rewarding the best products and providing buyers with the most value.

Measures such as the “A-F” school rating system introduced under Chancellor Klein give New Yorkers information that’s often lacking in other cities. And the annual extravaganza at Brooklyn Tech is part of a larger communications strategy that includes boroughwide fairs, parent workshops, a 531-page guide, and an extensive website.

But the city’s education department needs to continue to expand information on schools and improve its performance in helping students navigate the high school selection process. The system currently relies heavily on undertrained and overextended middle school counselors who often work with 350 students each. Strengthening the counseling corps and launching a broader communications campaign about the choice system would reduce students’ missteps under the program, including applying only to a handful of schools or to selective schools beyond their reach.

A core challenge is ensuring that there are enough strong high schools in the city for every student. Klein’s efforts to close failing comprehensive high schools (using the results of the annual high school selection process to both target failing schools and create popular alternatives) helped on this front. But there are more dysfunctional neighborhood high schools to close, and a number of the city’s new, smaller options aren’t yet rigorous enough.

Still, New York City has demonstrated that there can be a vibrant marketplace of schools that leverages choice and change—within the public school sector.

Thomas Toch is a co-founder of Education Sector, a Washington think tank, and co-author of “Matchmaking,” a report on the New York City public school choice system. Neil Dorosin is a co-founder and executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, a nonprofit consulting company that helps school districts design choice systems; Dorosin was the director of the New York City high school choice program from 2004 to 2007.

WEB ONLY

New Bill to Help Increase Funding for Special Education

Education Week's blogs On Special Education

New Proposal Emerges to Boost Special Education Spending

By Nirvi Shah on August 17, 2011 1:00 PM 

Another bill that would task the federal government with spending more on special education is in the works.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Colo., said Tuesday he will soon introduce a bill that would eventually require the federal government to pay for 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities. The money would come from cuts to defense spending.

"This legislation keeps our promise to special education students and families and provides much needed fiscal relief to cash-strapped states and local school districts," Mr. Polis said in a statement. "Rather than wasting taxpayer dollars on costly and ineffective defense programs, this legislation reinvests in America's children and our economy."

When the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was first passed in 1975, Congress was authorized to spend up to 40 percent of the cost of teaching students with disabilities. But the federal government has never come close. This year, Congress contributed 16.5 percent, or about $11.5 billion.

Mr. Polis' Defending Special Education Students and Families Act would boost spending by cutting $18.8 billion in defense spending during the next five years, including measures such as replacing projected purchases of Navy and Marine Joint Strike Fighters with cheaper options, canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and reducing the number of aircraft carriers and Navy air wings by one.

His approach is different from a Senate bill introduced earlier this year by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that also would boost special education spending. That bill proposes boosting the federal contribution $35.3 billion by 2021, mostly through the doubling of taxes on cigarettes and small cigars.

Rep. Polis' bill was a surprise to some members of the IDEA Full Funding Coalition, a group that includes the American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council for Exceptional Children, the Council of the Great City Schools, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Education Association. The group has been working on another bill that would be a companion to the Harkin bill.

An aide to Rep. Polis said the congressman did not work with any one particular group, but did work closely with Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who has introduced a similar bill for several years.

Do all teachers need coaches?

Check out this commentary written by a friend:

Education Week's blogs > Teacher Beat

Teacher-Coaching Boosts Secondary Scores, Study Finds

By Stephen Sawchuk on August 18, 2011 2:00 PM | 4 Comments | 154 Recommendations

Teacher-coaching linked to a well-known teaching framework paid dividends for student achievement in the secondary grades, according to a study published today in Science magazine.

In all, the study found a 0.22 standard deviation increase in the scores of students taught by teachers who received a special form of teacher-coaching—roughly the equivalent of an increase from the 50th to the 59th percentile—relative to the students taught by teachers in a control group.

"This study shows dramatically, clearly, when you implement a [teacher] measure rigorously and couple it closely to a PD system, you get dramatic improvements in student achievement," said Robert C. Pianta, a professor at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

For the study, Pianta and four colleagues, all psychology researchers, randomly assigned 78 middle or high school teachers to participate in the special coaching intervention, or to their regular in-service training. There were no significant differences in the characteristics of the treatment or control group or in the population of students they taught. The study covered some 2,200 students in all.

Professional development was keyed to the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary, or CLASS-S. It is essentially a modified version of Pianta's well-known CLASS framework.

The key aspect of CLASS is that it focuses heavily on specific observable interactions between teachers and students, such as behavior management, productivity, and conceptual development. Originally designed for P-3 teachers, the researchers modified and tested CLASS for teachers of secondary students. In particular, they tailored it to respond better to research on adolescent learning needs, which include opportunities for them to make decisions about what they're learning and chances to work with their peers, according to Joseph P. Allen, a psychology scholar at UVA and one of the study's authors.

The training was delivered via a Web-based approach called My Teaching Partner, again devised by Pianta and team for use with CLASS. Under the system, each teacher taped his or her instruction and then uploaded it to an online portal. The tapes were then viewed by "coaches" trained on the CLASS-S domains. Then, the coaches would discuss particular interactions with teachers in phone conversations, including how they aligned to the CLASS-S framework and ideas about how to improve those interactions.

The study found that, while there was no effect on student scores in the first year of the intervention, students taught by the teachers receiving the CLASS-S support outperformed those who received regular in-service training in the following year. Further, the study found that some of the improvement could be directly linked to changes in teachers' behavior caused by the extra support.

There are a few reasons to pay attention to this study. For one, effective professional development, in general, remains a very tough education nut to crack. A random-assignment study such as this is important because it demonstrates not only that the PD is linked to student achievement, but also that it caused some degree of that achievement. It is especially noteworthy at the secondary level where research on effective professional development is quite sparse.

As I reported last year, rigorous studies of PD approaches are generally few and far between. Professional development is challenging to study. There are all kinds of potentially confounding factors, like differences in funding and implementation. And professional development is inherently a complex endeavor. Any teacher training affects students only indirectly, after it is filtered through a teacher's own practices.

It's important to note that the My Teaching Partner approach is a very specific way of analyzing and discussing teaching practices. The lesson here is that educators must devise an effective way to help teachers embody new practices and behaviors; merely selecting a set of teaching standards is not enough on its own.

"It is a model for coaching that is different from a lot of other models in that it's very prescribed, very focused on a way of constructing the coaching session, and what the coach does to identify behaviors they work on, and how the coach gives feedback," Pianta said.

Second, the study also tells us a bit more about teaching frameworks, which are being used as the basis of new teacher-evaluation systems. (CLASS is one of several models now being used.)

Scholars have been exploring whether teachers ought to be coached and/or assessed using a general teacher-behavior rubric, like CLASS-S, or one that's customized for each teacher's specific discipline or content area. This study found that the improved teacher-student interactions predicted student achievement regardless of the content area in question.

Pianta told me teachers in the study taught in four different content areas and gains were seen in all of them. Again, this is an interesting finding, especially in light of debates about whether secondary professional development should focus on additional content acquisition or on ways of better teaching content.

A variety of other scholars are also exploring this issue. At the University of Michigan, researchers are looking at math-specific teaching frameworks, while others at Stanford University are reviewing English ones. Much of the study is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching Study. (The nonprofit that publishes Education Week is a former recipient of Gates Foundation funding.)

Finally, the UVA study also raises some interesting conceptual questions about the very nature of professional development that are worth outlining. The CLASS-S approach here was purely a professional-development tool and not linked to any evaluative purpose.

Some of the most recent research on teaching frameworks, however, have been in districts such as Cincinnati, where the framework doubles as part of a formal teacher-evaluation system.

I bring this up merely to point out that the line between professional development and evaluation is not one that's been well defined or illuminated in current discussions about teaching. But it's poised to emerge as another tension point for the field, especially as more time and energy are spent on teacher evaluation.

Take the case of the District of Columbia, for instance. There, the teachers' union insisted on a formal separation between "master educators" who do some of the conversations in the teacher-evaluation system, and the district's professional-development coaches.

In general, Pianta said he thinks that much more attention needs to be paid to studying teacher-evaluation frameworks and ensuring a good link between what teachers are evaluated on and what supports they receive.

"We should be treating performance assessment with the same rigor that we treat assessment of student achievement," he said. "The risk here is that there's too much looseness on these assessments of teacher performance."

Can we trust our teachers....and unions?

Published Online: August 17, 2011

Poll: Americans Trust Teachers, Split on Teachers' Unions

By Alexandra Rice

Governors and teachers' unions are going head-to-head in several states across the country, and the public feels caught in the middle, a new survey on the public’s perception of U.S. schools finds.

When those polled were asked how teachers' unions have affected the quality of U.S. public education, 47 percent said unions hurt it. But even so, 52 percent said they side with unions in disputes with governors over collective bargaining.

This year’s annual poll by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Washington-based Gallup Organization, released Wednesday, digs deep into the issues surrounding teachers, including unions, salaries, hiring/firing practices, and curriculum flexibility.

In a statement regarding the poll results, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten highlighted the public’s siding with unions over governors. But she, like others who weighed in on the survey, expressed concerns about the way questions regarding the unions were phrased. William J. Bushaw, the executive director of PDK, which is based in Bloomington, Ind., addressed those concerns in a conference call with reporters.

“Whenever we want to use or show longitudinal change, we absolutely have to ask the question in the same way it was asked originally,” Mr. Bushaw said.

Job Review on Teachers

How important do you think each of the following factors should be in determining a public school teacher’s salary: level of academic degree earned, years of teaching experience, scores the teacher’s students receive on standardized tests, evaluations conducted by the principal?

SOURCE: 2011 PDK/Gallup Poll

In 1976 and in 2011, the question was phrased: “Has unionization, in your opinion, helped, hurt, or made no difference in the quality of public school education in the United States?” Back in 1976, a smaller percent of those polled, 38 percent, felt that unions hurt education, compared to today. Teachers' unions were also far less influential then, and a much higher percentage of people polled said they were undecided on the issue of how teachers' unions affect education. In 1976, 13 percent didn’t have a strong opinion on teachers unions’ impact on education quality, whereas today only 2 percent didn’t know or refused to answer where they stood in regard to unions.

Barnett Berry, president and CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality, based in Carrboro, N.C., said it was not surprising how the public feels about teachers' unions, given that both the unions and the policymakers are locked in a 20th century debate over education while the public is waiting for 21st century education reform. But the teachers' unions and their state and local affiliates, he said, are not all the same, and they can do bad as well as good.

“The unions are not monolithic in this country, and there are a number of them, though not enough, that are the harbinger of reform,” Mr. Berry said.

The poll was conducted June 4-13, using a nationally representative sample of 1,002 adults, ages 18 and older. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4 percent.

Recruitment and Investment

Looking past the unions to the individuals themselves, the survey shows the public has a generally positive view of teachers. Nearly three out of four of those surveyed said they had confidence and trust in teachers today, and two out of three said they would be in favor of their child becoming a public school teacher. It wasn’t just their own children they wanted to become teachers—they wanted the highest-achieving high school students to be recruited for the classroom.

“It’s clear that Americans recognize the importance of getting quality students to become the next generation of teachers,” Mr. Bushaw said.

The poll, in this way, points out some of the areas where current policy and public opinion don’t match up, said Thomas Toch, the co-founder of the Education Sector think tank and the currrent executive director of Independent Education, a Washington-area private school consortium. The public wants to find and retain the highest-quality teachers, and it wants to compensate them based on a number of factors, with student test scores being the least important. Experience, academic degree, and principal evaluations all ranked higher than test scores in the survey. Merit-pay, an important element of the Obama administration’s education agenda, calls for great emphasis to be placed on student test scores when determining teachers’ salaries.

“This poll today shows a much more sophisticated public that is willing and ready to invest in teachers,” Mr. Berry said.

Politics of the Poll

Despite the discrepancy between the public and federal officials over merit-pay policies, the public’s rating of President Barack Obama’s performance in support of public schools shot up seven points from last year. ("Fewer Americans Back Obama’s Education Programs," August 25, 2010.) This year, 41 percent of the survey’s respondents gave the president an A or B, with most votes falling along party lines.

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Mr. Toch said this finding shows people are looking less at what the president has done and more at who he is. Only 2 percent of Republicans gave him an A, even though many of his initiatives, such as merit pay and charter schools, are reforms long embraced by their party, Mr. Toch said.

The administration has also taken strong stances on the issues of school choice and private school vouchers. While vouchers continue to lose popularity among those polled, approval of school choice, in general, and charters has steadily climbed. Survey results show that 70 percent of Americans approve of charters, part of a 10-year-long upward trend.

“This poll suggests charter schools have established themselves as a significant and permanent fixture on the education landscape,” Mr. Toch said.

Vol. 31, Issue 01