Schools
Students Won't Be World's Best if Teachers Don't Get Best Support
Doug Paine: "The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District and ... Teachers Association are good examples of how this type of cooperation can improve student learning."
To the editor:
A lie oft-repeated can gain the status of a perceived truth, and so it is with the currently common idea that our schools are “failing our children.” This idea gained popularity when the TIMSS reports, which started in 1999, showed our student scores in math and science were lagging behind those of some other industrialized nations, most notably Japan, Taiwan and Korea
In the 1999 report, the U.S. was ranked 18th in math and 18th in science of 34 nations tested. The TIMSS of 2007, the latest version of the report, showed that our eighth-grade students had risen to the ninth position in math, and had gained the 11th position in science. And while these 2007 rankings put our children in the upper third of the tested industrialized nations, we all certainly want our children to be the best.
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So is it poor schools and incompetent teachers that are keeping us from achieving that position?
To answer this question accurately, we certainly need to look at the schools. But we also need to look at the educational attitudes and norms of the society that surround those schools.
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Some comparisons will illustrate this point. The average Japanese student attends school for 220 days a year while the U.S student has an average year of 180 days (recently cut in many California districts to 175 days). In addition, the Japanese student is very likely to attend a second tutorial school, called a Juka or Cram School.
For a Japanese high school student, a 12-hour school day is not uncommon, and that 12-hour day takes place before any additional hours are spent on homework.
Taiwan had the largest number of yearly instructional hours at 1,177 per year and holds the highest rankings in the TIMSS report. The trend is really quite clear: more school days and more instructional hours tend to produce greater learning.
Yet, our current tend in the U.S. is to cut days and to fire teachers to save money. Clearly this is incompatible with our expressed desire to achieve greater educational parity with the world’s top students.
A look at what our children do doing their hours away from school is also informative. The average person in the U.S. actively or passively watches eight hours of TV a day, according to the New York Times. According to the Nielsen Wire, the majority of households in the U.S. have more than three televisions. In fact, Nielsen reported that many households had more televisions than people.
Americans spend an additional 27 hours a month on the Internet, the majority of which is spent playing games or social networking. In Japan, the average daily TV viewing is under four hours. The Japanese average two televisions per household and the Taiwanese average less than one television per household.
To a significant degree, our children watch television and play computer games while our educational competition is hitting the books.
Is it a surprise then to anyone that those countries that structure their societies to provide their students with the maximum possible learning time and a higher degree of support to their educational process, both in school and outside of school, are the most successful?
A second socially determined factor that effects educational success has to do with a child’s perseverance when faced with a challenging problem. A number of studies have shown that Japanese students are willing to spend more time attempting to solve a difficult problem than U.S. students.
In a study by Priscilla Blinco of Stanford University, a large sample of Japanese and American first-grade students were given a challenging math puzzle. The average U.S. student attempted to solve the problem for 9.47 minutes before quitting, while the Japanese students averaged 13.94 minutes of effort before they gave up.
That means that even at that early age, the Japanese were willing to work 40 percent harder than the U.S. students to solve a problem. Erling Boe of the University of Pennsylvania observed a really fascinating second trend while he was analyzing the abovementioned TIMSS report.
Prior to taking the actual math and science knowledge parts of the TIMSS test, the students were asked to fill out a 120-question demographic questionnaire. The information requested included the parent’s educational level, their views on math, etc. Many students chose to skip questions on this questionnaire.
The ranking of the completion rates on the questionnaire correlated perfectly with the actual rankings that were based on the results for math and science.
Shocking as it is, the completion rates for the questionnaire could just as accurately been used to rank the educational achievement of the participating countries as was achieved by the actual math and science scores.
In short, students that showed the most focus and dedication when filling out the questionnaire had the highest scores in math and science. Even as early as the first grade, the level of perseverance a student exerts when challenged has been socially determined, and this level of perseverance has a very direct effect on student learning.
And what of our teachers? In Japan, and in most Asian countries, teachers hold a highly respected position in society often akin to doctors and other top professionals. As such, they attract many of the most talented college graduates.
In our country, by contrast, we are firing our teachers, attempting to drop teacher salaries and benefits, working to compromise the teachers’ ability to negotiate their working conditions, and creating a very insecure and a highly criticized working environment.
The overriding economic assumption in the U.S. is that the best talent follows the best money and the best benefits. We hear that it is necessary for CEOs to be highly paid in order to attract the “best and the brightest.” Is it really fair or realistic then to expect that the “best and brightest” should accept less for their talent so that they can teach?
The national average salary for an individual with a master’s degree is $62,300, according to the Census Bureau. While not all teachers hold a master’s degree (41% do), teachers typically have had to do a graduate program of one or more years to qualify to teach.
The nation’s teachers earn an average of $49,720. If we take the 180-day per year average, and add the extra days teachers work on campus without students, the on-campus work year runs close to 185 days. The hours spent outside of the contracted six classroom instructional hours (activity supervision, running clubs and tutorial time, correcting papers, IEP and other meetings, etc.) bring the average teacher day closer to 10 hours per day.
Using those numbers, and plugging them into the Work Hour and Equivalent Pay Comparison at the Political Calculations website, you get an “equivalent” salary of $48,430 for a teacher working a standard 40-hour week. This “equivalent” is close to $14,000 less per year than their equally educated counterparts in other professions.
If we further cut salaries and benefits (and most teachers have taken cuts at least once in the past few years), can we really expect the highest caliber of aspiring professionals to enter the teaching profession?
Teachers unions are also under a great deal of criticism for “protecting bad teachers.”
This frequently voiced accusation, while politically useful to some factions, is just plain false. Unions serve the same function with respect to disciplinary actions against teachers that public defenders serve in the court system—they work to ensure a fair process.
The union’s function in a disciplinary hearing is to ensure there is just cause for a disciplinary action and that the disciplinary procedures are fairly followed.
Teachers are drawn to the profession because they want to help children create a positive future for themselves and their society. They are serious professionals who take pride in the work they do. Incompetent teachers run counter to this goal and this pride; no teacher wants incompetent teachers in the profession. Incompetent teachers can be, and usually are, removed.
Another accusation often heard is that that unions create systems that can limit innovation. This is often true, but it need not be.
To begin with, these contracts are all negotiated by the administrators of the school systems and then are approved by the locally elected school boards. All the parties—administration, teachers unions and the school boards—participate in the creation of these contracts.
If there is an overly rigid structure in these agreements, all the parties share in that responsibility. The unions, the school administrators and the teachers need to be more open to creative improvements in the quality of their instruction.
The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District and the La Mesa-Spring Valley Teachers Association are good examples of how this type of cooperation can improve student learning (as demonstrated by improving CST scores at many sites).
By allowing site-based decision-making, flexibility with respect to the contract, cooperative and collaborative teaching (similar to Japan’s approach, in fact) and visionary leadership, the schools have significantly improved, most notably the low socioeconomic areas.
The final frequently repeated, and again politically useful, misrepresentation with respect to our schools concerns teacher accountability.
In the La Mesa district, of which I’m an employee, the majority of teachers are formally evaluated every two years (a few highly experienced teachers of high quality are given a five-year evaluation cycle).
This evaluative process involves multiple classroom observations, written evaluations by both the administrative evaluator and the teacher and multiple face-to-face meetings between the evaluator and the teacher to discuss the observation results and to set goals for the coming year(s).
It is the administration’s job to ensure that the school has high-quality teachers and that the schools are providing quality instruction. If an administrator has questions concerning the competency of any teacher, they have the right to evaluate that teacher at any time and to initiate any action they deem appropriate, including the above-mentioned process leading to dismissal.
But that evaluation process is by far the easier of the evaluations a teacher experiences. Teachers daily face an even more demanding set of evaluators—the student’s parents.
A middle school teacher is likely to see more than 150 students in their teaching day. The teacher is responsible to, and informally evaluated by, each of those parents on a daily basis.
One of the most important functions a teacher performs during their day is to continually provide information to the parents. This information is vital to the parent so that they can support their child’s educational growth.
The teacher must respond to parent inquiries, provide supplemental support to their students outside of the normal classroom hours, and meet with the parents and other educational professionals to design and adapt unique educational plans to serve an individual student’s needs.
A failure to fulfill these functions in the eyes of the parents will most certainly bring critical communications to the teacher—and to the teacher’s supervising administrator, district administration and ultimately the Board of Education.
It would be difficult to find a student whose parents had not interacted with their child’s teacher on at least one occasion.
And yet but by far the most demanding evaluations of a teacher usually comes from the teachers themselves. The majority of teachers are constantly evaluating their effectiveness and—in the most effective educational environments—working with their peers to review and refine their teaching.
Teachers tend to be their own most critical evaluators and feel a great responsibility toward the children in their care.
Are our schools failing our children? I think the answer to that question is that they really are doing a very good job given the resources and the social support their society provides to them.
American society allows children to spend a larger amount of time on activities that do not promote educational advancement than the countries we hope to compete with.
We provide less time for them to learn in class during the year. We pay our teachers less than competitive wages and are currently making the teaching career less and less attractive to our most capable young professionals.
Yet even given our inferior logistical and societal support, we are still in the top third of the world’s students in math and science.
Are our schools failing our students? There is always room for improvement and better educational practice, but we are currently getting a good return from our schools given what we are investing.
If we want to be at the top of the international rankings, we have to be willing as a society to make education one of our highest priorities in a real way—not just with noble sounding verbiage or self-serving political sound bites.
We need to turn off the TVs and PlayStations, pay the cost of extending our teaching year, teach our children to persevere in the face of challenges, and take the actions that will attract and keep the best and the brightest in the teaching profession.
If we are not willing to take these actions, we will have to be content with our schools and our students doing well, but not being the best.
Doug Paine
Math Teacher
Parkway Middle School
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