Tag: Teacher residency programs

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Latest Edu-Reads

In a new piece for The 74, I argue we know a fair amount about how students learn to read, but much less about how to deliver reading instruction. That’s an important distinction and has implications for how we think about fixing the problem. I conclude:

Another lesson might be that reforms focusing on individual teachers aren’t the right lever to change reading instruction. It seems at least plausible that improving the instructional materials schools use to teach reading might be more effective than trying to shift the opinions and lesson plans of millions of individual classroom teachers.

On that front, this new deck from Bellwether synthesizes a broad body of research on the science of learning and takes a deep dive into what it would take to put that research into practice. I can’t do it justice here, so please go read it.

This Jill Barshay piece on critical thinking skills strikes a similar chord. People don’t just think critically; they have to think critically about something.

Teacher residency programs face unique financial and programmatic challenges. Read how Bellwether supported Kansas City Teacher Residency through a strategic planning process.

There’s a cottage industry of think pieces about a coming “retirement security crisis,” but the truth is that as a group the elderly are doing comparatively well. In contrast, Matt Bruenig writes that, “when looking at disposable income, children are the largest group of poor people in the country.”

Paul Tough on the welders versus philosophers debate. He writes, “The [welder] salaries that make headlines in The Wall Street Journal are somewhere between rare and apocryphal.”

A new study on the Tennessee pre-k expansion found important differences across participants, concluding that, “Among children living in high-poverty neighborhoods, those who took up an experimental assignment to attend preK scored over half a standard deviation higher on average than the control group in third grade. In contrast, preK enrollment had, if anything, a negative effect on third-grade reading achievement among children living in low-poverty neighborhoods.”

Sarah Whiting reflects on pledges as a way to extend internal practices around diversity, equity and inclusion.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Latest Edu-Reads

“The mantra of “all kids can learn” is, in fact, a way of upending the racism and classism that undergirds the educational system. If we didn’t have racism or classism, we wouldn’t need to declare this at all.” That’s Heather Harding on racial equity and justice in school reform efforts.

Ashley LiBetti suggests that New Mexico should look to para-professional and educational assistants as a way to diversify its teacher workforce.

This new research on Chicago’s exam schools runs almost exactly opposite to the public debate about them.

Neil Campbell and Abby Quirk look at student mobility and backfilling in charter and traditional public schools in Washington, D.C. schools.

“…the average community college student who successfully transfers to a public four-year institution loses an average of 20 percent of their credits. This loss of credits is equivalent to almost an entire semester of credits and would delay the student’s time to graduate.” That’s John Mullane on what we know about transfer students in higher ed.

Finally, is anyone else confused about the recent stories in The 74 and Chalkbeat about Democratic proposals to increase federal spending on K-12 education? The federal Title I program has its flaws, but on the whole it’s a moderately progressive investment that awards more money to schools with higher concentrations of poor students. As my colleague Max Marchitello has noted, doubling or tripling Title I would instantly provide more money to low-income students. The Title I program is composed of four distinct formulas, and if we were even moderately careful about which of the four formulas the money went through, we could make federal dollars even more targeted, while simultaneously encouraging states to make their formulas more progressive as well. More money is by no means a panacea, but given the latest research on school funding, boosting Title I seems like a no-brainer to me.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Busy, Busy Bellwether

My Bellwether colleagues have been busy putting out some awesome new content recently. Some highlights:

Julie Squire, Melissa Steel King, and Justin Trinidad have a new deck on private schools and the “microschool” movement. Justin takes a deeper look at two low-cost private school models, Cristo Ray and Build UP.

Ashley LiBetti has advice for what would be the nation’s largest teacher residency program, and interviews Kathy Glazer, the President of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation (VECF), which is bringing the apprenticeship model to early childhood.

Jennifer Schiess argues that North Carolina lawmakers missed an opportunity to increase their investment in early childhood education.

Bonnie O’Keefe and Brandon Lewis write about four ways states can improve their assessments.

And in conversations about juvenile justice facilities, Max Marchitello wishes we spent more time talking about the educational services provided to students in those facilities.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Thoughts on Recent Edu-Reads

A typical teacher pension formula multiplies some factor (usually around 2 percent) times the employee’s salary and years of experience. It might look like this:

Pension = 2 percent X salary X years of experience

In the education context, we know that high-poverty schools tend to employ teachers with lower salaries and fewer years of experience. Pensions literally multiply those problems together. Max Marchitello explains and gives an example from West Virginia.

Technically speaking, Ohio school districts aren’t contributing toward teacher retirement benefits.

Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew M. Chingos have new work out on the intersection of charter schools and school segregation. They find that charters do contribute to segregation, a bit, but charters are not the primary driver and there’s wide variation across states and geographies. Here’s the Matt Barnum write-up or the Education Next version from the authors.

Even as someone with concerns about private school choice programs, I was reluctant to tout research showing that private school choice programs seemed to have a negative effect on student achievement in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana. I wondered if those results were driven more by alignment issues than quality ones. That is, it may be the case that private schools were no better or worse than public schools, but public schools were simply more focused on preparing students to pass state achievement tests. The Urban Institute is out with a new study this week supporting this theory. They found that private school choice programs in Florida and Milwaukee improved college enrollment and graduation rates (although not in Washington, D.C.). Personally, I think the debate over private schools comes down to a values question rather than being resolved by purely objective outcomes data.

Cara Jackson on how teacher residency programs can improve the diversity of our teacher workforce.

For-profit colleges have “got a friend in Trump.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Weekend Edu-Reads

Jason Weeby on school boards, charter schools, and democratic control of schools. Ashley Jochim’s response is also worth checking out.

Josh Mitchell and Michelle Hackman take a look at the Kalamazoo Promise program for the Wall Street Journal. The entire piece is worth your time, but this graph really tells the story:

Ashley LiBetti interviews Kelly Riling, the manager of the AppleTree Early Learning Teacher Residency program in Washington, D.C. Unlike other residency programs, they make it work…  and offer residents a salary with benefits!

Matt Kraft, John Papay, and Olivia Chi look at teacher development through the lens of teacher performance ratings from principals. Like with value-added, teachers tend to improve over time, but the most promising early-career teachers make even faster improvements.

Conor Williams neatly summed up this week’s Democratic debates. With respect to education, “Precisely zero of the current Democratic candidates for that party’s presidential nomination believe that public education is the primary cause of American inequality.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman