Tutors to Teachers: Could a National Tutoring Corps Help Hard-to-Staff Schools?

We are continuing to work with colleagues to propose to the incoming Biden administration a plan to fund tutors to elementary and secondary schools to work with students who are far behind in reading or math. Today, I wanted to expand on one aspect of our proposal.

As it currently stands, we are proposing that the federal government provide Title I schools with funds to hire tutors, who will be required to have a college degree and experience with children. If this proposal becomes reality, it would include a plan to help schools identify particularly effective tutors and offer them a rapid path to teacher certification.

One assumption behind this part of our proposal is that most tutors will be recent college graduates who do not have teaching certificates, most probably majoring in something other than education. Many of the tutors are sure to discover the joys of teaching. At the same time, school leaders are sure to notice that many of their tutors are doing an exceptional job. Our proposal is simply to facilitate a process in which excellent, successful tutors can become teachers.

There are several important advantages to schools and to society of this new source of teacher candidates. First, tutors would be concentrated in high-poverty inner-city or distant rural Title I schools. Such schools typically have difficulty recruiting top candidates. Often, the top candidates they do get are from the local area, often graduates of the very schools in which they hope to teach. We have noticed that tutor applicants (with college degrees) usually come from the local area.

Second, schools often struggle to find as many minority candidates as they would like. Tutors, in our experience, better represent the demographics of their schools than do teachers. Among the many college-graduate applications we typically get to work in Baltimore, about 80% are Black, and about 80% of hires have also been Black. This matches the percent Black of Baltimore City Public Schools students, but not of its teachers, 40% of whom are Black. If our Baltimore experience is typical, hiring tutors and then encouraging and supporting them to go for a teaching certificate may be one way to bring talented Black teachers into teaching.

We have seen a similar dynamic in majority-Hispanic districts and in rural districts. Local tutors with a strong tie to a local area, who have demonstrated their skills as tutors, may be an ideal group from which to recruit applicants whose commitment to teaching in that place is strong, and likely to be lifelong.

Many years ago, we were working on a study of our Success for All program in Baltimore, and in one inner-city school we noticed an extraordinary Black teacher. We got to know her, and discovered that she grew up near the school she taught in, and attended that very school. As a teacher, she could have chosen to live almost anywhere, but she chose to live in the house she grew up in, in an inner-city neighborhood. This was where she wanted to teach, where she wanted to make her contribution to her community. We’ve encountered many amazing teachers in rural places who are also teaching in the schools they attended. I cannot say exactly how this part of our tutoring plan will be accomplished, or what its effects might be on the teaching staffs of high-poverty schools. But bringing local college graduates into local schools as tutors and then helping the best of them to become teachers would be an important additional outcome of our National Tutoring Corps plan.

Photo credit: Shenandoah University Office of Marketing and Communications, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

What Works in Professional Development

I recently read an IES-funded study, called “The Effects of a Principal Professional Development Program Focused on Instructional Leadership.” The study, reported by a research team at Mathematica (Hermann et al., 2019), was a two-year evaluation of a Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) program in which elementary principals received 188 hours of PD, including a 28-hour summer institute at the beginning of the program, quarterly virtual professional learning community sessions in which principals met other principals and CEL coaches, and 50 hours per year of individual coaching in which principals worked with their CEL coaches to set goals, implement strategies, and analyze effects of strategies. Principals helped teachers improve instruction by observing teachers, giving feedback, and selecting curricula; sought to improve their recruitment, management, and retention strategies, held PD sessions for teachers; and focused on setting a school mission, improving school climate, and deploying resources effectively.

A total of 100 low-achieving schools were recruited. Half received the CEL program, and half served as controls. After one, two, and three years, there were no differences between experimental and control schools on standardized measures of student reading or mathematics achievement, no differences on school climate, and no differences on principal or teacher retention.

So what happened? First, it is important to note that previous studies of principal professional development have also found zero (e.g., Jacob et al., 2014) or very small and inconsistent effects (e.g., Nunnery et al., 2011, 2016). Second, numerous studies of certain types of professional development for teachers have also found very small or zero impacts. For example, a review of research on elementary mathematics programs by Pellegrini et al. (2019) identified 12 qualifying studies of professional development for mathematics content and pedagogy. The average effect size was essentially zero (ES=+0.04).

What does work in professional development?

In sharp contrast to these dismal findings, there are many forms of professional development that work very well. For example, in the Pellegrini et al. (2019) mathematics review, professional development designed to teach teachers to use specific instructional processes were very effective, averaging ES=+0.25. These included studies of cooperative learning, classroom management strategies, and individualized instruction. In fact, other than one-to-one and one-to-small group tutoring, no other type of approach was as effective. In a review of research on programs for elementary struggling readers by Inns et al. (2019), programs incorporating cooperative learning had an effect size of +0.29, more effective than any other programs except tutoring. A review of research on secondary reading programs by Baye et al. (2018) found that cooperative learning programs and whole-school models incorporating cooperative learning, along with writing-focused models also incorporating cooperative learning, had larger impacts than anything other than tutoring.

How can it be that professional development on cooperative learning and classroom management are so much more effective than professional development on content, pedagogy, and general teaching strategies?

One reason, I would submit, is that it is very difficult to teach someone to improve practices that they already know how to do. For example, if as an adult you took a course in tennis or golf or sailing or bridge, you probably noticed that you learned very rapidly, retained what you learned, and quickly improved your performance in that new skill. Contrast this with a course on dieting or parenting. The problem with improving your eating or parenting is that you already know very well how to eat, and if you already have kids, you know how to parent. You could probably stand some improvement in these areas, which is why you took the course, but no matter how motivated you are to improve, over time you are likely to fall back on well-established routines, or even bad habits. The same is true of teaching. Early in their careers teachers develop routine ways of performing each of the tasks of teaching: lecturing, planning, praising, dealing with misbehavior, and so on. Teachers know their content and settle into patterns of communicating that content to students. Then one day a professional developer shows up, who watches teachers teaching and gives them advice. The advice might take, but quite often teachers give it a try, run into difficulties, and then settle back into comfortable routines.

Now consider a more specific, concrete set of strategies that are distinctly different from what teachers typically do: cooperative learning. Teachers can readily learn the key components. They put their students in mixed groups of four or five. After an initial lesson, they give students opportunities to work together to make sure that everyone can succeed at the task. Teachers observe and assist students during team practice. They assess student learning, and celebrate student success. Every one of these components is a well-defined, easily learned, and easily observed step. Teachers need training and coaching to succeed at first, but after a while, cooperative learning itself becomes second nature. It helps that almost all kids love to be noisy and engaged, and love to work with each other, so they are rooting for the teacher to succeed. But for most teachers, structured cooperative learning is distinctly different from ordinary teaching, so it is easy to learn and maintain.

As another example, consider classroom management strategies used in many programs. Trainers show teachers how to use Popsicle sticks with kids’ names on them to call on students, so all kids have to pay attention in case they are called. To get students’ immediate attention, teachers may learn to raise their hands and have students raise theirs, or to ring a bell, or to say a phrase like “one, two, three, look at me.” Teachers may learn to give points to groups or individuals who are meeting class expectations. They may learn to give students or groups privileges, such as lining up first to go outside or having the privilege of selecting and leading their favorite team or class cheer. These and many other teacher behaviors are clear, distinct, easily learned, and immediately solve persistent problems of low-level disturbances.

The point is not that these cooperative learning or classroom management strategies are more important than content knowledge or pedagogy. However, they are easily learned, retained, and institutionalized ways of solving critical daily problems of teaching, and they are so well-defined and clear that when they have started working, teachers are likely to hold on to them indefinitely and are unlikely to fall back on other strategies that may be less effective but are already deeply ingrained.

I am not suggesting that only observable, structural classroom reforms such as cooperative learning or classroom management strategies are good uses of professional development resources. All aspects of teaching need successive improvement, of course. But I am using these examples to illustrate why certain types of professional development are very difficult to make effective. It may be that improving the content and pedagogy teachers use day in and day out may require more concrete, specific strategies. I hope developers and researchers will create and successfully evaluate such new approaches, so that teachers can continually improve their effectiveness in all areas. But there are whole categories of professional development that research repeatedly finds are just not working. Researchers and educators need to focus on why this is true, and then design new PD strategies that are less subtle, more observable, and deal more with actual teacher and student behavior.

References

Hermann, M., Clark, M., James-Burdumy, S., Tuttle, C., Kautz, T., Knechtel, V., Dotter, D., Wulsin, C.S., & Deke, J. (2019). The effects of a principal professional development program focused on instructional leadership (NCEE 2020-0002). Washington, DC: Naitonal Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Inns, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2019). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Available at www.bestevidence.org. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Jacob, R., Goddard, K., Miller, R., & Goddard, Y. (2014). Exploring the causal impact of the McREL Balanced Leadership Program on leadership, principal efficacy, instructional climate, educator turnover, and student achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 52 187-220.

Nunnery, J., Ross, S., Chappel, S., Pribesh, S., & Hoag-Carhart, E. (2011). The impact of the National Institute for School Leadership’s Executive Development Program on school performance trends in Massachusetts: Cohort 2 Results. Norfolk, VA: Center for Educational Partnerships, Old Dominion University.

Nunnery, J., Ross, S., & Reilly, J. (2016). An evaluation of the National Institute for School Leadership: Executive Development Program in Milwaukee Public Schools. Norfolk, VA: Center for Educational Partnerships, Old Dominion University.

Pellegrini, M., Inns, A., Lake, C., & Slavin, R. (2019). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. Available at www.bestevidence.com. Manuscript submitted for publication.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

What Kinds of Teacher Knowledge Matter Most?

James Herriott was a veterinarian who wrote very popular books about his experiences in a small town in Yorkshire, England. In his first book he described his veterinary education at the University of Edinburgh, in the 1930s. One day, he came out of class and saw an old, sway-backed horse hitched to a cart. Proud of all he was learning in his program, he decided to check out the horse. He located all of its major muscle groups, identified some old injuries, and thought what he might recommend if he were the horse’s vet. In the midst of his happy explorations and daydreaming, however, the horse unexpectedly whipped around and grabbed him by the shoulder, hoisting him two feet off the ground. Herriott was completely helpless, flailing around ineffectually to try to get free. He was also mortified by this comical predicament, which drew a crowd. Finally, the horse’s owner came running up, cursed out Herriott for disturbing his horse, and finally commanded the horse to put him down, which he did.

James Herriott learned an important lesson that day. There is a big difference between knowing things and knowing how to do things. Herriott could know absolutely everything about every aspect of equine anatomy and function. But none of this was of much help unless he also know how to manage horses in real life, not in books.

I was reminded of this story when I read an article in Education Week about a recent report, “What Teachers Know About the Science of Learning,” by my friend Ulrich Boser of The Learning Agency. The main point of the report was that teachers believe in a lot of long-debunked ideas, such as the concept that there are “left brain” (e.g., good at math) and “right brain” (e.g., good at art) learners. The report focused on a survey of 200 educators about these and other mistaken but widely held ideas.

If you want to be appalled, there was plenty in the report that was appalling. 77% of educators believed that “right brained” and “left brained” people exist, and that they learn differently. A whopping 97% believe that students can be categorized by their learning styles (e.g., auditory, visual, and kinesthetic), which has been soundly debunked for decades.

Because of these kinds of misconceptions, a substantial enterprise has grown up around debunking them. In many universities, it is possible to take a whole course in “neuromyths.” However, I have to admit, I have trouble getting too excited. For teachers, I wonder how much it really matters whether or not they believe in right/left brain or learning styles. Every teacher is aware of the fact that students learn differently, and have various learning strengths and difficulties. As long as teachers believe that these learning differences in no way limit student learning, then how much does it matter if they believe in right- or left-brained people? As long as teachers do not try to match their instruction with students’ supposed “learning styles,” who cares if they think learning styles exist? Whether or not you believe in learning styles, it is surely beneficial to teach using visual, auditory, and tactile methods, to all students, whatever their supposed learning styles.

Imagine for a moment that every teacher disavowed every neuromyth, and learned how brains truly functioned. Learning the truth is always a good thing. But would their students actually learn more?

What really matters is what teachers do. Give me a teacher who knows how to make content exciting and comprehensible, one who knows how to manage diverse classrooms so that students are eager to learn, self-motivated, productive, and able to work effectively with peers. Give me a teacher who models curiosity, kindness, and flexibility, one who accepts and builds on student errors, one who helps all students believe in themselves and their potential, whatever their backgrounds. If a teacher can do all of these things, do we really care if they think there are learning styles? All of the attributes of this ideal teacher can be taught, practiced, observed, and learned by ordinary teachers. Given a fixed amount of time and money to provide professional development and coaching, should we be worrying about the language teachers use to describe student diversity, or should we be working to enable teachers to use proven approaches to enhance their effectiveness?

What James Herriott learned hanging from the jaws of a draft horse is that he wished that in addition to all his science courses, someone had thought it worthwhile to teach him how to manage horse behavior. Children are a lot more forgiving than draft horses, but to succeed with them, teachers must know how to create effective environments for children and respond to their behavior in productive ways. Learning this takes outstanding, ongoing professional development and a whole career of practice. Do we truly have time for neuromyths, or even for their correction?

Reference

Boser, U. (2019). What do teachers know about the science of learning? Retrieved September 9, 2019 from https://www.the-learning-agency.com/insights/what-do-teachers-know-about-the-science-of-learning

Picture by Henry Walter, 1822 via Wellcome Library [CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)]

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Rethinking Technology in Education

Antonine de Saint Exupéry, in his 1931 classic Night Flight, had a wonderful line about early airmail service in Patagonia, South America:

“When you are crossing the Andes and your engine falls out, well, there’s nothing to do but throw in your hand.”

I had reason to think about this quote recently, as I was attending a conference in Santiago, Chile, the presumed destination of the doomed pilot. The conference focused on evidence-based reform in education.

Three of the papers described large scale, randomized evaluations of technology applications in Latin America, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Two of them documented disappointing outcomes of large-scale, traditional uses of technology. One described a totally different application.

One of the studies, reported by Santiago Cueto (Cristia et al., 2017), randomly assigned 318 high-poverty, mostly rural primary schools in Peru to receive sturdy, low-cost, practical computers, or to serve as a control group. Teachers were given great latitude in how to use the computers, but limited professional development in how to use them as pedagogical resources. Worse, the computers had software with limited alignment to the curriculum, and teachers were expected to overcome this limitation. Few did. Outcomes were essentially zero in reading and math.

In another study (Berlinski & Busso, 2017), the IDB funded a very well-designed study in 85 schools in Costa Rica. Schools were randomly assigned to receive one of five approaches. All used the same content on the same schedule to teach geometry to seventh graders. One group used traditional lectures and questions with no technology. The others used active learning, active learning plus interactive whiteboards, active learning plus a computer lab, or active learning plus one computer per student. “Active learning” emphasized discussions, projects, and practical exercises.

On a paper-and-pencil test covering the content studied by all classes, all four of the experimental groups scored significantly worse than the control group. The lowest performance was seen in the computer lab condition, and, worst of all, the one computer per child condition.

The third study, in Chile (Araya, Arias, Bottan, & Cristia, 2018), was funded by the IDB and the International Development Research Center of the Canadian government. It involved a much more innovative and unusual application of technology. Fourth grade classes within 24 schools were randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions. In the experimental group, classes in similar schools were assigned to serve as competitors to each other. Within the math classes, students studied with each other and individually for a bi-monthly “tournament,” in which students in each class were individually given questions to answer on the computers. Students were taught cheers and brought to fever pitch in their preparations. The participating classes were compared to the control classes, which studied the same content using ordinary methods. All classes, experimental and control, were studying the national curriculum on the same schedule, and all used computers, so all that differed was the tournaments and the cooperative studying to prepare for the tournaments.

The outcomes were frankly astonishing. The students in the experimental schools scored much higher on national tests than controls, with an effect size of +0.30.

The differences in the outcomes of these three approaches are clear. What might explain them, and what do they tell us about applications of technology in Latin America and anywhere?

In Peru, the computers were distributed as planned and generally functioned, but teachers receive little professional development. In fact, teachers were not given specific strategies for using the computers, but were expected to come up with their own uses for them.

The Costa Rica study did provide computer users with specific approaches to math and gave teachers much associated professional development. Yet the computers may have been seen as replacements for teachers, and the computers may just not have been as effective as teachers. Alternatively, despite extensive PD, all four of the experimental approaches were very new to the teachers and may have not been well implemented.

In contrast, in the Chilean study, tournaments and cooperative study were greatly facilitated by the computers, but the computers were not central to program effectiveness. The theory of action emphasized enhanced motivation to engage in cooperative study of math. The computers were only a tool to achieve this goal. The tournament strategy resembles a method from the 1970s called Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT) (DeVries & Slavin, 1978). TGT was very effective, but was complicated for teachers to use, which is why it was not widely adopted. In Chile, computers helped solve the problems of complexity.

It is important to note that in the United States, technology solutions are also not producing major gains in student achievement. Reviews of research on elementary reading (ES=+0.05; Inns et al. 2018) and secondary reading (ES= -0.01; Baye et al., in press) have reported near-zero effects of technology-assisted effects of technology-assisted approaches. Outcomes in elementary math are only somewhat better, averaging an effect size of +0.09 (Pellegrini et al., 2018).

The findings of these rigorous studies of technology in the U.S. and Latin America lead to a conclusion that there is nothing magic about technology. Applications of technology can work if the underlying approach is sound. Perhaps it is best to consider which non-technology approaches are proven or likely to increase learning, and only then imagine how technology could make effective methods easier, less expensive, more motivating, or more instructionally effective. As an analogy, great audio technology can make a concert more pleasant or audible, but the whole experience still depends on great composition and great performances. Perhaps technology in education should be thought of in a similar enabling way, rather than as the core of innovation.

St. Exupéry’s Patagonian pilots crossing the Andes had no “Plan B” if their engines fell out. We do have many alternative ways to put technology to work or to use other methods, if the computer-assisted instruction strategies that have dominated technology since the 1970s keep showing such small or zero effects. The Chilean study and certain exceptions to the overall pattern of research findings in the U.S. suggest appealing “Plans B.”

The technology “engine” is not quite falling out of the education “airplane.” We need not throw in our hand. Instead, it is clear that we need to re-engineer both, to ask not what is the best way to use technology, but what is the best way to engage, excite, and instruct students, and then ask how technology can contribute.

Photo credit: Distributed by Agence France-Presse (NY Times online) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

References

Araya, R., Arias, E., Bottan, N., & Cristia, J. (2018, August 23). Conecta Ideas: Matemáticas con motivatión social. Paper presented at the conference “Educate with Evidence,” Santiago, Chile.

Baye, A., Lake, C., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (in press). Effective reading programs for secondary students. Reading Research Quarterly.

Berlinski, S., & Busso, M. (2017). Challenges in educational reform: An experiment on active learning in mathematics. Economics Letters, 156, 172-175.

Cristia, J., Ibarraran, P., Cueto, S., Santiago, A., & Severín, E. (2017). Technology and child development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child program. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9 (3), 295-320.

DeVries, D. L., & Slavin, R. E. (1978). Teams-Games-Tournament:  Review of ten classroom experiments. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 12, 28-38.

Inns, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2018, March 3). Effective programs for struggling readers: A best-evidence synthesis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Washington, DC.

Pellegrini, M., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (2018, March 3). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Washington, DC.

Teachers’ Crucial Role in School Health

These days, many schools are becoming “community schools,” or centering on the “whole child.”  A focus of these efforts is often on physical health, especially vision and hearing. As readers of this blog may know, our group at Johns Hopkins School of Education is collaborating on creating, evaluating, and disseminating a strategy, called Vision for Baltimore, to provide every Baltimore child in grades PK to 8 who needs them with eyeglasses. Our partners are the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Wilmer Eye Institute, the Baltimore City Schools, the Baltimore City Health Department, Vision to Learn, a philanthropy that provides vision vans to do vision testing, and Warby Parker, which provides children with free eyeglasses.  We are two years into the project, and we are learning a lot.

The most important news is this:  you cannot hope to solve the substantial problem of disadvantaged children who need glasses but don’t have them by just providing vision testing and glasses.  There are too many steps to the solution.  If things go wrong and are not corrected at any step, children end up without glasses.   Children need to be screened, then (in most places) they need parent permission, then they need to be tested, then they need to get correct and attractive glasses, then they have to wear them every day as needed, and then they have to replace them if they are lost or broken.

School of Education graduate student Amanda Inns is writing her dissertation on many of these issues. By listening to teachers, learning from our partners, and trial and error, Amanda, ophthalmologist Megan Collins, Lead School Vision Advocate Christine Levy, and others involved in the project came up with practical solutions to a number of problems. I’ll tell you about them in a moment, but here’s the overarching discovery that Amanda reports:

Nothing can stop a motivated and informed teacher.

What Amanda found out is that all aspects of the vision program tended to work when teachers and principals were engaged and empowered to try to ensure that all children who needed glasses got them, and they tended not to work if teachers were not involved.  A moment’s reflection would tell you why.  Unlike anyone else, teachers see kids every day. Unlike anyone else, they are likely to have good relationships with parents.  In a city like Baltimore, parents may not answer calls from most people in their child’s school, and even less anyone in any other city agency.  But they will answer their own child’s teacher. In fact, the teacher may be the only person in the school, or indeed in the entire city, who knows the parents’ real, current phone number.

In places like Baltimore, many parents do not trust most city institutions. But if they trust anyone, it’s their own child’s teacher.

Cost-effective citywide systems are needed to solve widespread health problems, such as vision (about 30% of Baltimore children need glasses, and few had them before Vision for Baltimore began).  Building such systems should start, we’ve learned, with the question of how teachers can be enabled and supported to ensure that services are actually reaching children and parents. Then you have to work backward to fill in the rest of the system.

Obviously, teachers cannot do it alone. In Vision for Baltimore, the Health Department expanded its screening to include all grades, not just state-mandated grades (PK, 1, 8, and new entrants).  Vision to Learn’s vision vans and vision professionals are extremely effective at providing testing. Free eyeglasses, or ones paid for by Medicaid, are essential. The fact that kids (and teachers) love Warby Parker glasses is of no small consequence. School nurses and parent coordinators play a key role across all health issues, not just vision. But even with these services, universal provision of eyeglasses to students who need them, long-term use, and replacement of lost glasses, are still not guaranteed.

Our basic approach is to provide services and incentives to help teachers be as effective as possible in supporting vision health, using their special position to solve key problems. We hired three School Vision Advocates (SVAs) to work with about 43 schools entering the vision system each year. The SVAs work with teachers and principals to jointly plan how to ensure that all students who need them will get, use, and maintain their glasses. They interact with principals and staff members to build excitement about eyeglasses, offering posters to place around each school. They organize data to make it easy for teachers to know which students need glasses, and which students still need parent permission forms. They provide fun prizes, $20 worth of school supplies, to all teachers in schools in which 80% of parents sent in their forms.  They get to know school office staff, also critical to such efforts.  They listen to teachers and get their ideas about how to adapt their approaches to the school’s needs.  They do observations in classes to see what percentage of students are wearing their glasses. They arrange to replace lost or broken glasses.  They advocate for the program in the district office, and find ways to get the superintendent and other district leaders to show support for the teachers’ activities directed toward vision.

Amanda’s research found that introducing SVAs into schools had substantial impacts on rates of parent permission, and adding the school prizes added another substantial amount. Many students are wearing their glasses. There is still more to do to get to 100%, but the schools have made unprecedented gains.

Urban teachers are very busy, and adding vision to their list of responsibilities can only work if the teachers see the value, feel respected and engaged, and have help in doing their part. What Amanda’s research illustrates is how modest investments in friendly and capable people targeting high-leverage activities can make a big difference across an entire city.

Ensuring that all students have good vision is critical, and a hit-or-miss strategy is not sufficient. Schools need systems to bring cost-effective services to thousands of kids who need help with health issues that affect very large numbers, such as vision, hearing, and asthma. Teachers still must focus first on their roles as instructors, but with help, they can also provide essential assistance to build the health of their students.  No system to solve health problems that require daily, long-term monitoring of children’s behavior can work at this scale in urban schools without engaging teachers.

Photo credit: By SSgt Sara Csurilla [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

New Findings on Tutoring: Four Shockers

One-to-one and one-to-small group tutoring have long existed as remedial approaches for students who are performing far below expectations. Everyone knows that tutoring works, and nothing in this blog contradicts this. Although different approaches have their champions, the general consensus is that tutoring is very effective, and the problem with widespread use is primarily cost (and for tutoring by teachers, availability of sufficient teachers). If resources were unlimited, one-to-one tutoring would be the first thing most educators would recommend, and they would not be wrong. But resources are never unlimited, and the numbers of students performing far below grade level are overwhelming, so cost-effectiveness is a serious concern. Further, tutoring seems so obviously effective that we may not really understand what makes it work.

In recent reviews, my colleagues and I examined what is known about tutoring. Beyond the simple conclusion that “tutoring works,” we found some big surprises, four “shockers.” Prepare to be amazed! Further, I propose an explanation to account for these unexpected findings.

We have recently released three reviews that include thorough, up-to-date reviews of research on tutoring. One is a review of research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools by Amanda Inns and colleagues (2018). Another is a review on programs for secondary readers by Ariane Baye and her colleagues (2017). Finally, there is a review on elementary math programs by Marta Pellegrini et al. (2018). All three use essentially identical methods, from the Best Evidence Encyclopedia (www.bestevidence.org). In addition to sections on tutoring strategies, all three also include other, non-tutoring methods directed at the same populations and outcomes.

What we found challenges much of what everyone thought they knew about tutoring.

Shocker #1: In all three reviews, tutoring by paraprofessionals (teaching assistants) was at least as effective as tutoring by teachers. This was found for reading and math, and for one-to-one and one-to-small group tutoring.  For struggling elementary readers, para tutors actually had higher effect sizes than teacher tutors. Effect sizes were +0.53 for paras and +0.36 for teachers in one-to-one tutoring. For one-to-small group, effect sizes were +0.27 for paras, +0.09 for teachers.

Shocker #2: Volunteer tutoring was far less effective than tutoring by either paras or teachers. Some programs using volunteer tutors provided them with structured materials and extensive training and supervision. These found positive impacts, but far less than those for paraprofessional tutors. Volunteers tutoring one-to-one had an effect size of +0.18, paras had an effect size of +0.53. Because of the need for recruiting, training, supervision, and management, and also because the more effective tutoring models provide stipends or other pay, volunteers were not much less expensive than paraprofessionals as tutors.

Shocker #3:  Inexpensive substitutes for tutoring have not worked. Everyone knows that one-to-one tutoring works, so there has long been a quest for approaches that simulate what makes tutoring work. Yet so far, no one, as far as I know, has found a way to turn lead into tutoring gold. Although tutoring in math was about as effective as tutoring in reading, a program that used online math tutors communicating over the Internet from India and Sri Lanka to tutor students in England, for example, had no effect. Technology has long been touted as a means of simulating tutoring, yet even when computer-assisted instruction programs have been effective, their effect sizes have been far below those of the least expensive tutoring models, one-to-small group tutoring by paraprofessionals. In fact, in the Inns et al. (2018) review, no digital reading program was found to be effective with struggling readers in elementary schools.

 Shocker #4: Certain whole-class and whole-school approaches work as well or better for struggling readers than tutoring, on average. In the Inns et al. (2018) review, the average effect size for one-to-one tutoring approaches was +0.31, and for one-to-small group approaches it was +0.14. Yet the mean for whole-class approaches, such as Ladders to Literacy (ES = +0.48), PALS (ES = +0.65), and Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (ES = +0.19) averaged +0.33, similar to one-to-one tutoring by teachers (ES = +0.36). The mean effect sizes for comprehensive tiered school approaches, such as Success for All (ES = +0.41) and Enhanced Core Reading Instruction (ES = +0.22) was +0.43, higher than any category of tutoring (note that these models include tutoring as part of an integrated response to implementation approach). Whole-class and whole-school approaches work with many more students than do tutoring models, so these impacts are obtained at a much lower cost per pupil.

Why does tutoring work?

Most researchers and others would say that well-structured tutoring models work primarily because they allow tutors to fully individualize instruction to the needs of students. Yet if this were the only explanation, then other individualized approaches, such as computer-assisted instruction, would have outcomes similar to those of tutoring. Why is this not the case? And why do paraprofessionals produce at least equal outcomes to those produced by teachers as tutors? None of this squares with the idea that the impact of tutoring is entirely due to the tutor’s ability to recognize and respond to students’ unique needs. If that were so, other forms of individualization would be a lot more effective, and teachers would presumably be a lot more effective at diagnosing and responding to students’ problems than would less highly trained paraprofessionals. Further, whole-class and whole-school reading approaches, which are not completely individualized, would have much lower effect sizes than tutoring.

My theory to account for the positive effects of tutoring in light of the four “shockers” is this:

• Tutoring does not work due to individualization alone. It works due to individualization plus nurturing and attention.

This theory begins with the fundamental and obvious assumption that children, perhaps especially low achievers, are highly motivated by nurturing and attention, perhaps far more than by academic success. They are eager to please adults who relate to them personally.  The tutoring setting, whether one-to-one or one-to-very small group, gives students the undivided attention of a valued adult who can give them personal nurturing and attention to a degree that a teacher with 20-30 students cannot. Struggling readers may be particularly eager to please a valued adult, because they crave recognition for success in a skill that has previously eluded them.

Nurturing and attention may explain the otherwise puzzling equality of outcomes obtained by teachers and paraprofessionals as tutors. Both types of tutors, using structured materials, may be equally able to individualize instruction, and there is no reason to believe that paras will be any less nurturing or attentive. The assumption that teachers would be more effective as tutors depends on the belief that tutoring is complicated and requires the extensive education a teacher receives. This may be true for very unusual learners, but for most struggling students, a paraprofessional may be as capable as a teacher in providing individualization, nurturing, and attention. This is not to suggest that paraprofessionals are as capable as teachers in every way. Teachers have to be good at many things: preparing and delivering lessons, managing and motivating classes, and much more. However, in their roles as tutors, teachers and paraprofessionals may be more similar.

Volunteers certainly can be nurturing and attentive, and can be readily trained in structured programs to individualize instruction. The problem, however, is that studies of volunteer programs report difficulties in getting volunteers to attend every day and to avoid dropping out when they get a paying job. This is may be less of a problem when volunteers receive a stipend; paid volunteers are much more effective than unpaid ones.

The failure of tutoring substitutes, such as individualized technology, is easy to predict if the importance of nurturing and attention is taken into account. Technology may be fun, and may be individualized, but it usually separates students from the personal attention of caring adults.

Whole-Class and Whole-School Approaches.

Perhaps the biggest shocker of all is the finding that for struggling readers, certain non-technology approaches to instruction for whole classes and schools can be as effective as tutoring. Whole-class and whole-school approaches can serve many more students at much lower cost, of course. These classroom approaches mostly use cooperative learning and phonics-focused teaching, or both, and the whole-school models especially Success for All,  combine these approaches with tutoring for students who need it.

The success of certain whole-class programs, of certain tutoring approaches, and of whole-school approaches that combine proven teaching strategies with tutoring for students who need more, argues for response to intervention (RTI), the policy that has been promoted by the federal government since the 1990s. So what’s new? What’s new is that the approach I’m advocating is not just RTI. It’s RTI done right, where each component of  the strategy has strong evidence of effectiveness.

The good news is that we have powerful and cost-effective tools at our disposal that we could be putting to use on a much more systematic scale. Yet we rarely do this, and as a result far too many students continue to struggle with reading, even ending up in special education due to problems schools could have prevented. That is the real shocker. It’s up to our whole profession to use what works, until reading failure becomes a distant memory. There are many problems in education that we don’t know how to solve, but reading failure in elementary school isn’t one of them.

Practical Implications.

Perhaps the most important practical implication of this discussion is a realization that benefits similar or greater than those of one-to-one tutoring by teachers can be obtained in other ways that can be cost-effectively extended to many more students: Using paraprofessional tutors, using one-to-small group tutoring, or using whole-class and whole-school tiered strategies. It is no longer possible to say with a shrug, “of course tutoring works, but we can’t afford it.” The “four shockers” tell us we can do better, without breaking the bank.

 

References

Baye, A., Lake, C., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (2017). Effective reading programs for secondary students. Manuscript submitted for publication. Also see Baye, A., Lake, C., Inns, A. & Slavin, R. E. (2017, August). Effective Reading Programs for Secondary Students. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Research and Reform in Education.

Inns, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2018). Effective programs for struggling readers: A best-evidence synthesis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Washington, DC.

Pellegrini, M., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (2018). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Washington, DC.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Photo by Westsara (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

How Classroom-Invented Innovations Can Have Broad Impacts

When I was in high school, I had an after-school job at a small electronics company that made and sold equipment, mostly to the U.S. Navy. My job was to work with another high school student and our foreman to pack and unpack boxes, do inventories, basically whatever needed doing.

One of our regular tasks was very time-consuming. We had to test solder extractors to be sure they were working. We’d have to heat up each one for several minutes, touch a bit of solder to it, and wipe off any residue.

One day, my fellow high school student and I came up with an idea. We took 20 solder extractors and lined them up on a work table with 20 electrical outlets. We then plugged them in. By the time we’d plugged in #20, #1 was hot, so we could go back and test it, then #2, and so on. An hour-long job was reduced to 10 minutes. We were being paid the princely sum of $1.40 an hour, so we were saving the company big bucks. Our foreman immediately saw the advantages, and he told the main office about our idea.

Up in the main office, far from the warehouse, was a mean, mean man. He wore a permanent scowl. He had a car with mean, mean bumper stickers. I’ll call him Mr. Meanie.

Mr. Meanie hated everyone, but he especially hated the goofy, college-bound high school students in the warehouse. So he had to come see what we were doing, probably to prove that it was dumb idea.

Mr. Meanie came and asked me to show him the solder extractors. I laid them out, same as always, and everything worked, same as always, but due to my anxiety under Mr. Meanie’s scowl, I let one of the cords touch its neighboring solder extractor. It was ruined.

Mr. Meanie looked satisfied (probably thinking, “I knew it was a dumb idea”), and left without a word. But as long as I worked at the company, we never again tested solder extractors one at a time (and never scorched another cord). My guess is that long after we were gone, our method remained in use despite Mr. Meanie. We’d overcome him with evidence that no one could dispute.

In education, we employ some of the smartest and most capable people anywhere as teachers. Teachers innovate, and many of their innovations undoubtedly improve their own students’ outcomes. Yet because most teachers work alone, their innovations rarely spread or stick even within their own schools. When I was a special education teacher long ago, I made up and tested out many innovations for my very diverse, very disabled students. Before heading off for graduate school, I wrote them out in detail for whoever was going to receive my students the following year. Perhaps their next teachers received and paid attention to my notes, but probably not, and they could not have had much impact for very long. More broadly, there is just no mechanism for identifying and testing out teachers’ innovations and then disseminating them to others, so they have little impact beyond the teacher and perhaps his or her colleagues and student teachers, at best.

One place in the education firmament where teacher-level innovation is encouraged, noted, and routinely disseminated is in comprehensive schoolwide approaches, such as our own Success for All (SFA). Because SFA has its own definite structure and materials, promising innovations in any school or classroom may immediately apply to the roughly 1000 schools we work with across the U.S. Because SFA schools have facilitators within each school and coaches from the Success for All Foundation who regularly visit in teachers’ classes, there are many opportunities for teachers to propose innovations and show them off. Those that seem most promising may be incorporated in the national SFA program, or at least mentioned as alternatives in ongoing coaching.

As one small example, SFA constantly has students take turns reading to each other. There used to be arguments and confusion about who goes first. A teacher in Washington, DC noticed this and invented a solution. She appointed one student in each dyad to be a “peanut butter” and the other to be a “jelly.” Then she’d say, “Today, let’s start with the jellies,” and the students started right away without confusion or argument. Now, 1000 schools use this method.

A University of Michigan professor, Don Peurach, studied this very aspect of Success for All and wrote a book about it, called Seeing Complexity in Public Education (Oxford University Press, 2011). He visited dozens of SFA schools, SFA conferences, and professional development sessions, and interviewed hundreds of participants. What he described is an enterprise engaged in sharing evidence-proven practices with schools and at the same time learning from innovations and problem solutions devised in schools and communicating best practices back out to the whole network.

I’m sure that other school improvement networks do the same, because it just makes sense. If you have a school network with common values, goals, approaches, and techniques, how does it keep getting better over time if it does not learn from those who are on the front lines? I’d expect that such very diverse networks as Montessori and Waldorf schools, KIPP and Success Academy, and School Development Program and Expeditionary Learning schools, must do the same. Each of the improvements and innovations contributed by teachers or principals may not be big enough to move the needle on achievement outcomes by themselves, but collectively they keep programs moving forward as learning organizations, solving problems and improving outcomes.

In education, we have to overcome our share of Mr. Meanies trying to keep us from innovating or evaluating promising approaches. Yet we can overcome blockers and doubters if we work together to progressively improve proven programs. We can overwhelm the Mr. Meanies with evidence that no one can dispute.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

How Is Standards-Based Instruction Standard in Classroom Practice?

Education policy, goes an old saying, is like a storm at sea. Crashing waves, thunder, lightning, and cross-currents at the surface, but 10 fathoms down, nothing ever changes.

In our time, one of the epic storms in education relates to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and other college- and career-ready standards that resemble CCSS. Common Core was intended to move instructional practices and student outcomes toward problem-solving, higher-order thinking, and contextualized knowledge, and away from rote learning, memorization, and formulas. We are now five years into this reform. How is it changing what teachers actually do in the classroom?

Fortunately, there is a research center working to understand this question: the Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) at the University of Pennsylvania. C-SAIL, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education, is carrying out several studies to examine how state policies more or less aligned with Common Core or college- and career-ready standards are changing teachers’ instruction.

Recently, C-SAIL researchers Adam Edgerton, Morgan Polikoff, and Laura Desimone, published an article on representative state-wide surveys of teachers in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas. Kentucky and Ohio were early, enthusiastic adopters of Common Core, while Texas was one of just two states (with Virginia) that have always refused to adopt Common Core standards, giving up a shot at substantial Race to the Top grants for their obstinance. However, Texas has its own standards intended to be college-and career-ready.

In all three states, teachers reported teaching many objectives emphasized by their states’ standards, but a roughly equal number of objectives de-emphasized by the standards. This was true in reading and math and in elementary and secondary schools.

C-SAIL is doing studies in which they will obtain logs and other more detailed information on daily lessons. Perhaps they will find that teachers are increasingly teaching content aligned with their state standards. But from the C-SAIL survey, it seems unlikely that these differences will be profound enough to greatly affect students’ achievement, which is, after all, the ultimate goal.

There is a lot to admire in the Common Core and other college-and career-ready standards, and perhaps the best parts are in fact changing practices. However, turning around a country the size of the U.S., with 50 states, 14,000 school districts, 120,000 public schools, and a tradition of local autonomy is no easy feat. One big problem is that issues that rise to the stormy surface are buffeted by political currents, so they often don’t last long enough to make widespread change.

C-SAIL provides a useful service in monitoring how policy changes practice, so we can at least learn from the college-and career-ready standards movement (within which Common Core plays an important part). Journalists love to write about the crashing waves at the surface of education reform, but we need independent, scientific organizations like C-SAIL to tell us what’s really happening 10 fathoms down, where the kids are.

Teachers’ Roles in Evidence-Based Reform

Long ago, I was a special education teacher in Oregon. Someone at that time came up with the idea that since learning was harder in the earlier stages of a skill than it was later on, progress on advanced levels of a skill should be more rapid. They gave us teachers “six-cycle graph paper” to graph individual children’s progress on each skill we taught them. The graph paper was marked to show logarithmic growth, where the units were large at the low levels of a skill and small at the high levels, so a progress chart would show as a straight line.

Does this make any sense to you? Well, it did not make any sense to me and my fellow-teachers, either. Yet it was presented to us as mandatory, a state or district requirement.

We tried, but we just couldn’t make the six-cycle graph paper work. It required a massive amount of paperwork and calculation, taking us away from teaching. We staged a small revolt, and within less than a month, as I recall, six-cycle graph paper was only used for kids to color on.

Six-cycle graph paper was a foolish idea from the beginning. Every teacher in my school, and (I’d guess) in every school could see that it was unworkable and hopeless. But nobody asked us. No research supporting its use was even presented to us, if it existed (which I very much doubt). Further, and perhaps most damaging, the six-cycle graph paper experience eroded our faith in our own school administration and in innovation itself, and it made us less likely to implement other innovations that might be more promising.

After my time as a teacher, I went to graduate school, and then I began working on development, evaluation, and dissemination of cooperative learning strategies in elementary and middle schools. My colleagues and I began our dissemination efforts by doing large, voluntary workshops for teachers. Any teacher of any subject or grade level could attend, so we were usually working with just a few teachers from any one school. We rapidly learned that this kind of scattershot professional development was extremely popular, but it did not stick very well in the schools. The problem was that isolated teachers had difficulty maintaining an innovation without the support of their administration and peers.

Nell Duke, today a well-known researcher, tells a story that perfectly illustrates the problem. As a young elementary teacher, she read about cooperative learning and implemented it in her class with great eagerness and success. However, her principal was not amused. “Miss Duke,” he said, “what in blazes are you doing in there?” She enthusiastically explained cooperative learning, told him about the research on it, and explained how excited and productive the students were.

“I suppose that’s all right,” he said. “But can’t you get them to do it quietly?”

Having individual teachers be the unit of innovation or dissemination made it difficult to ensure that teachers had understanding and supportive administrators, coaching, or other ongoing support, and many of them either failed due to implementation problems that could have easily been remedied, or they succumbed to pressure from the administration or peers over time to conform with what the rest of the school was doing.

From my experience, widespread and impactful use of proven programs is not likely to succeed if it is imposed upon teachers or if it is sprinkled across the landscape as Johnny Appleseed did. How could the whole school become the unit of dissemination with the active participation of the teachers?

When we began Success for All in 1987, my colleagues and I hit upon a formula that we still use today with great success. Success for All (SFA) is a whole-school approach, intended to work in schools that serve mostly disadvantaged elementary and middle schools. Such schools can be assumed to have already tried and failed with many innovations, and they may be suspicious that this is just one more.

Our solution, starting with our very first SFA school in Baltimore, was to introduce the program to the administration and teaching staff and then let them vote by secret ballot as to whether or not they wished to participate. A positive vote of 80% was required for us to enter the school.

The voting does many things. First, it convinces the whole staff that they truly have a choice, and that for once they are not being pushed into something they did not select. Second, the process leading up to the vote already helps to get teachers thinking about how they can work with peers to improve the whole school, not just their personal classroom.

Votes are usually positive, but the voting process may reveal issues teachers want resolved before they take on an innovation. For example, teachers may say, “We’ll support this program, but we’ll need additional planning time. Can you promise that?” If the principal agrees, the vote is likely to be positive. When a school cannot arrive at a positive vote it is usually the case that there are serious problems in the school, such as a lack of trust between teachers and administrators. It is probably a good idea to delay starting a major innovation until such problems are worked out.

When starting a schoolwide innovation in a given district or region, it makes a lot of sense to start with schools that eagerly adopt the model. The vote helps identify such schools. Other schools that are less eager can then see how things go with the early adopters and come into the project later on. Within schools, the few reluctant teachers (less than 20%), seeing their peers voting in favor of SFA, are usually willing to give it a try, and may gain enthusiasm over time.

Beyond the voting itself, treating schools as the unit of implementation provides schools with new strategies for improving their whole teaching staff. It gives all teachers a common language, common tools, access to joint training and in-class coaching, and peer assistance. Principals may use distributed leadership, involving teachers and other staff in committees to plan school strategies to solve common problems (such as behavior/attendance, parent/community involvement, onboarding of new teachers, and teaching strategies for particular topics and grade levels). Instead of just one or two leaders in a school, every teacher becomes a leader in some area of expertise or interest.

A school that has chosen a proven program and is implementing it with understanding, enthusiasm, and the participation of all school staff is a fun, satisfying place to work. It can retain its teachers, instead of seeing them “promoted” to less challenging parts of town, because teachers prefer to work in supportive, successful environments in which their ideas and leadership are sought after and appreciated.

In addition to voting, teachers can play a key role in adapting the program to meet local circumstances, needs, and resources. They may introduce innovations after they have mastered the basics, and these innovations may catch on in the school, district, or the entire network of SFA schools nationally. Further, schools often pilot new strategies or materials and provide feedback to program developers.

I believe that whatever innovations developers are trying to disseminate, teachers should have the opportunity to choose (or not choose) them as a total school or distinct section of a school, such as the math department or the primary team. This mode of dissemination preserves teachers’ rights to participate in essential decisions about their own school without requiring that each school or teacher reinvent the wheel.

Or the six-cycle graph paper.

This blog is sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Making Teaching and Teacher Education Respected Professions

I had an interesting conversation at the recent AERA meetings with the editor of my Pearson educational psychology text, Kevin Davis. He posed a question to me: “How can we convince school leaders, politicians, and the public that schools of education provide something of value to future teachers?”

I’ve thought a lot about this question, and about an even broader question: How can we increase respect for the teaching profession itself? These two questions are closely linked, of course, because if teachers were respected, the schools that produce them would be respected, and vice versa.

My answer, you may not be surprised to hear, drew from the history of medicine. Long ago, doctors were little respected because few of their treatments actually worked. My own grandfather, an immigrant from Argentina, believed that doctors had nothing to offer, and he refused to go to a doctor or hospital unless absolutely necessary. “Hospitals are where you go to die,” he always said (Note: he was healthy into his nineties and died at 96. In a hospital.).

However, physicians gained in status as their profession gained in proven treatments. In the 19th century, doctors could set bones, help in childbirth, administer smallpox vaccines, and prescribe various treatments that were mostly useless. However, in the 20th century, there was progress in what doctors could do. In mid-century, discovery of sulfa drugs, penicillin, a polio vaccine, and many other advances truly made medicine, physicians, and schools of medicine respected. Since 1962, when federal laws began to require randomized experiments for medications, the pace of discovery and application of effective treatments has exploded, and as physicians can reliably treat more and more diseases, respect for them and the schools that produce them has grown apace.

In education, this is how our profession and our schools of education will grow in status. As in medicine, this change will not happen all at once or overall, but it will happen as schools and teachers increasingly embrace and apply proven approaches.

Imagine, for example, that primary teachers were universally trained to use programs capable of ensuring reading success for their children. That secondary math teachers could ensure an understanding of algebra for every student. That science teachers could make American schools competitive with those in East Asia. Each of these accomplishments would be hugely beneficial for students, of course. But think what it would do for our profession. Picture this. A first grade teacher walks into a party. The room falls quiet. Parents meekly approach her to ask how they can help, or supplement her efforts with their children. Others are impressed by the school of education she attended. She gets this respect because everyone knows that she can teach every child who enters her class to read, no matter what. She has proven skills and knowledge that the world at large does not possess.

That’s how our profession must earn its respect. When every teacher has knowledge and skills that are proven effective and learned in schools of education, we’ll be respected. And we’ll deserve it.

This blog is sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation