Education News for 04-04-2013

Local Education News

• Toledo Public Schools audit identifies $100M in savings over 5 years (Toledo Blade)

A private consulting firm that conducted a performance audit of Toledo Public Schools recommends moves the firm says would save the district about $100 million over five years…Read more…

• State Auditor: Noncompliance Findings For Columbus City Schools (WBNS)

State Auditor Dave Yost released documents overnight detailing findings from an annual audit of the Columbus City School district.…Read more…

• Strongsville Strike: Negotiation meeting ends with no deal (WOIO)

A federal mediator met with both sides in the ongoing Strongsville teachers strike Wednesday morning. But after 14 hours of negotiating, no deal was made.…Read more…

• Assaulting bus drivers, passing school buses could bring stiffer penalties in Cleveland (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

City Council's Public Safety Committee approved two ordinances this morning that would stiffen the penalty for passing school buses and add assaults on a public transit worker to the list of misconduct on a public bus or train.…Read more…

• Left behind? (Marietta Times)

Some local school officials are concerned about having the hardware and capacity to administer new computer-based state tests set to debut in 2014-15.…Read more…

• Monroe approves superintendent contract (Middletown Journal)

The Monroe school board in late March approved a two-year contract for Dr. Phil Cagwin as superintendent, confirmed district treasurer Holly Cahall.…Read more…

• Schools face up to $1.3M cuts (Springfield News-Sun)

Federal sequestration budget cuts could cost Clark and Champaign County schools up to $1.3 million for tutors and other staff members that help disadvantaged students, at the same time that districts are facing new state reading requirements.…Read more…

• Preschool project hinging on quality (Cincinnati Enquirer)

“A chair for every child in a quality preschool.” That’s the mission of Preschool Promise, an ambitious plan to expand preschool access to 1,000 more children from low- and middle- income families annually in Greater Cincinnati……Read more…

• Mock school shooting gives true experience in Boardman (Youngstown Vindicator)

Two Boardman High School students lay helpless, one in a first-floor hallway bleeding from her arm, one on the stairs missing half of his leg.…Read more…

• Activists complain of inaction by Youngstown school board (Youngstown Vindicator)

A group of activists and city school parents, frustrated with what they see as a lack of response to its concerns from the school board, is launching its own action plan to improve the quality of education.…Read more…

Are you an entertainer?

As we seeing an explosion of technology both in our personal lives and being pushed into the classroom, studies like these are important, and interesting.

There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus.

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.
[...]
Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention.

“I’m an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention,” said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

You can read the entire study from Common Sense Media, here, titled "Children, Teens, and Entertainment Media: The View from the Classroom."

Certainly provocative.

Teacher attrition and education policy

One of the genuine major issues facing education is one of teacher attrition. Each year significant numbers of teachers leave the profession. From a human capital perspective, this is hugely expensive and impacts education delivery. A large number of studies have been performed to asses this problem. A recent study, published by the american Education Research Association looked at all the major studies in this area. The study can be found here (pdf). What follows are come of the concluding remarks.

This literature review provides a summary and critical evaluation of the recent published research on the topic of teacher recruitment and retention. We reviewed studies that examined (1) the characteristics of individuals who enter teaching, (2) the characteristics of individuals who remain in teaching, (3) the external characteristics of schools and districts that affect recruitment and retention, (4) compensation policies that affect recruitment and retention, (5) pre-service policies that affect recruitment and retention, and (6) in-service policies that affect recruitment and retention.

The reviewed research offered several consistent findings. The strongest results were those relating to the influence of various factors on attrition due to the widespread availability of longitudinal data sets that track the employment of teachers. Below, we summarize the findings that emerged in the recent empirical research literature.

1. Results that arose fairly consistently regarding the characteristics of individuals who enter the teaching profession were as follows:
• Females formed greater proportions of new teachers than males.
• Whites formed greater proportions of new teachers than minorities, although there is evidence that minority participation rose in the early 1990s.
• College graduates with higher measured academic ability were less likely to enter teaching than were other college graduates. It is possible, however, that these differences were driven by the measured ability of elementary school teachers, who represent the majority of teachers.
• A more tentative finding based on a small number of weaker studies is that an altruistic desire to serve society is one of the primary motivations for pursuing teaching.
2. Several findings emerged with a strong degree of consistency in empirical studies of the characteristics of individuals who leave the teaching profession:
• The highest turnover and attrition rates seen for teachers occurred in their first years of teaching and after many years of teaching when they were near retirement, thus producing a U-shaped pattern of attrition with respect to age or experience.
• Minority teachers tended to have lower attrition rates than White teachers.
• Teachers in the fields of science and mathematics were more likely to leave teaching than teachers in other fields.
• Teachers with higher measured academic ability (as measured by test scores) were more likely to leave teaching.
• Female teachers typically had higher attrition rates than male teachers.
3. Regarding the external characteristics of schools and districts that are related to teacher recruitment and retention rates, the empirical literature provided the following fairly consistent findings:
• Schools with higher proportions of minority, low-income, and low-performing students tended to have higher attrition rates.
• In most studies, urban school districts had higher attrition rates than suburban and rural districts.
• Teacher retention was generally found to be higher in public schools than in private schools.
4. The following statements summarize the consistent research findings regarding compensation policies and their relationship to teacher recruitment and retention:
• Higher salaries were associated with lower teacher attrition.
• Teachers were responsive to salaries outside their districts and their profession.
• In surveys of teachers, self-reported dissatisfaction with salary was associated with higher attrition and decreased commitment to teaching.Teacher Recruitment and Retention
5. Rigorous empirical studies of the impact of pre-service policies on teacher recruitment and retention were sparse. In general, few results emerged across studies, and the following findings were therefore not particularly robust:
• Graduates of nontraditional and alternative teacher education programs appear to have higher rates of retention in teaching than national comparison groups and may differ from traditional recruits in their background characteristics.
• There was tentative evidence that streamlined routes to credentialing provide more incentive to enter teaching than monetary rewards.
• Pre-service testing requirements may adversely affect the entry of minority candidates into teaching.
6. Findings from the research on in-service policies that affect teacher recruitment and retention were as follows:
• Schools that provided mentoring and induction programs, particularly those related to collegial support, had lower rates of turnover among beginning teachers.
• Schools that provided teachers with more autonomy and administrative support had lower levels of teacher attrition and migration.
• A tentative finding was that accountability policies might lead to increased attrition in low-performing schools. The entry, mobility, and attrition patterns summarized

One can see from the results of these studies, creating a lower paid, less secure profession as some current corporate education reform policies would do, would create a situation of worse renention, to the determiment of students. The importance of workplace conditions, classroom resources, and support are also critical, and may be lost without the ability to bargain for them.

Clearly, delivery of high quality education at an affordable cost is a complex subject with many complex variables at play. SB5 and HB153's highly prescriptive, and simplistic appoaches to reform without any broad expert consultation are bound to produce sub-optimal results. Ohio should take advantage of it's localized control and delivery of education, and its vast expert resources in education and pedagogy to experiment in reform before committing to a one size fits all simplistic approach.

A second literature review on teacher attrition an be found here.

PROFILE OF TEACHERS IN THE U.S.

A Fascinating survey of the demographics and beliefs of US school teachers, from the National Center for Education Information.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

K-12 public school teachers in the United States are amazingly similar over time. They constitute a unique profession that has self-propagated itself for at least the last half century. But, due to an influx of individuals from non-traditional backgrounds entering teaching through non-traditional preparation programs, the teaching force may be changing.

One-third of first-time public school teachers hired since 2005 entered the profession through an alternative program other than a college campus-based teacher education program.

The findings throughout this survey illustrate striking differences between this non-traditional population of new teachers and teachers who enter teaching through undergraduate and graduate college campus-based teacher education programs, especially in attitudes concerning current proposed school reform measures and ways to strengthen teaching as a profession, such as:

• Getting rid of tenure for teachers
• Performance-based pay
• Market-driven teacher pay – paying teachers more to teach in high needs schools and high demand subjects
• Recruiting individuals from other careers into teaching and school administration
• Using student achievement to evaluate teacher effectiveness

The findings also show amazing similarities among all teachers surveyed, regardless of their backgrounds, how they prepared to teach, their age, how long they’ve been teaching and other variables we analyzed the data by. Public school teachers surveyed:

• Strongly support getting rid of incompetent teachers regardless of seniority
• Are generally satisfied with their jobs and various aspects of teaching
• Think they are competent to teach
• Rate their teacher preparation programs highly
• Consider the same things as valuable in developing competence to teach – their own teaching experiences and working with other teachers/colleagues top the list
• Plan to be teaching K-12 five years from now

PROFILE OF TEACHERS IN THE U.S. 2011