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March 14, 2007
Talking with Sen. Alexander
Earlier today I participated in an edublogger conference call with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) on his proposed America COMPETES Act. Here's a press release on the bill. I can't find any backgrounder on it, but I was given this PDF. An upshot on the education portion of the bill: it calls for state grants for elementary and secondary education alignment, beefed-up science teaching, and expanded AP and IB programs.
From what Alexander said, there's a good deal of bipartisan support behind the bill, which he's been promoting for two years; he's hoping to get enough sponsors on the bill so that it can bypass committee and go straight to the Senate floor (and also keep the amendments to a minimum). And to be clear, this is independent of NCLB, so I think he's trying to distance the bill as much as possible from all that hoopla.
But given all the chatter today on No Child, the topic naturally took up a good deal of time on the call. Alexander is clearly a big proponent of merit pay and said he wanted it expanded under the new version of the law. In response to a question on teacher retention and the $2.6 billion presently spent to improve it: "The way to retain teachers is to pay them well. We can reduce money spent on teacher retention by spending that money on merit pay."
As to the COMPETES bill, one timely aspect of it is Math Now, a grant program for improving math instruction modeled after Reading First. As to whether there were any lessons learned from the RF controversy, his education staffer David Cleary responded that the problems with Reading First were due to implementation rather than with the actual statute.
My favorite question was from Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant, which went something like this: "I think there's one fatal flaw with this bill: it doesn't address school leadership. Lots of pressure to change is coming from above through the federal government and from below through teachers. But nothing is being done to change the principals who have to implement this stuff. Few principals really get it in terms of global change and competition."
Alexander agreed, but said that this sort of reform would be most likely to occur through NCLB. Hmmm...is merit pay for principals on the horizon?
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Comments
Thanks, Ryan. This was a good summary of the conference call.
As I noted to the Senator, principals, superintendents, and other school leaders are really struggling when it comes to transitioning our schools for a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected world. I think it's a much larger issue than simply giving principals merit pay. They need LOTS of training regarding how the global economy really works these days; what kind of skill sets kids need to survive and thrive in this new economy; how to appropriately plan for, fund, staff, support, and facilitate technology usage in schools; etc. We must pay attention to the leaders. Substantive, long-lasting change never happens in schools (or any institution) without good leadership.
FYI, if you haven't yet seen this, you might be interested in the following (particularly the Did You Know? video in Step 2):
Posted by: Scott McLeod | March 15, 2007 04:13 AM
Thanks for your report about the call. I have heard from others who were on the call. I was invited as well, but could not attend. From what I understand "technology" is a big ticket item as it usually is, and the word usually flows seamlessly from the other over-used phrase "21st century". The premise is that without technology in the schools, somehow we are not preparing students for the 21st century. The fact of the matter is, thanks to various NSF-funded math programs that have been spreading to schools and school districts like an unstoppable strain of avian flu, we have students who have trouble adding and multiplying (though they can write essays about what these terms mean), who are totally dependent on calculators, who have no conception of fractions, decimals, or percents, and believe that all of math consists of sorting through data and finding a line of best fit.
So all the talk about technology in the classroom and boosting the number of students taking AP classes in high school to 70,000 in the next few years is akin to giving a car without an engine a new coat of metal flake paint.
The bill does call for improved instruction in mathematics for students in K-9 via "best available evidence of effectiveness". This is better than "best available research" but not by much. There needs to be criteria for what "evidence of effectiveness" means. At a minimum, the effectiveness of a math text or program should be based on scores attained by students in such programs on nationally normed tests such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or comparable assessments. In evaluating such scores, it is imperative to determine to what degree students have received supplemental help such as outside help from learning centers (e.g., Sylvan, Kumon, Huntington or tutors), or have been taught from supplemental material that their teachers provided. Without such information, test scores may reflect the effectiveness of the supplemental programs and not necessarily the text or program being evaluated.
It would also be nice if such evaluation could include, at a minimum, some programs which have been proving to be effective in various schools across the US, including but not limited to Singapore's math programs, the Saxon Math program, Sadlier Oxford's math series, algebra texts by Dolciani, geometry text by Jacobs, and others.
I suspect, however, that in the end, the call for more technology will prevail. And even though the Math Now program will revolve around the recommendations of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, I suspect that even if that panel's final report states that "discovery learning" is an ineffective way to teach math, that the "new world order" will be the same as the "old world order" to paraphrase the Who. That is, we will be a nation of math and science dummies except for those who benefit from Kumon, Sylvan, Huntington, tutors, and teachers smart enough to use effective texts and proven teaching methods. Oh, and of course, the usual slew of people from Asia.
Posted by: Barry Garelick | March 15, 2007 06:00 AM
