Welcome to the Jungle: The First 100 Days of a Superintendency

The new superintendent’s transition can build a platform for later success while avoiding pitfalls — but there’s no guarantee 

by ART STELLAR

Presidents, governors and mayors are often publicly assessed on what they accomplish in their first 100 days in office. This is a traditional measuring stick for public officials. Starting off on the right foot also is viewed as a factor in how superintendents are remembered or whether there will be sufficient reasons for being remembered at all.

When I became a superintendent for the first time 25 years ago, the superintendent’s first project was getting to know the community and building relationships and district teams to develop five-year plans. Some communities now rush to judgment. In fact, the joke is some newly arriving superintendents have no honeymoon period, just a one-night stand.

After my first 100 days in one community, I was proud of what had been accomplished and felt good about sharing what were quite impressive results. I believed everyone would be pleased.

Most of the school board, staff and community were satisfied. The hitch was that two former superintendents, still active in the community, took offense at my “bragging at their expense.” I should have anticipated this and framed everything as building upon the foundations constructed prior to my arrival. I revised my approach from then on, but the public relations damage had been done. This experience added, albeit belatedly, to my learning about transitions.

Due Diligence
A few years ago, a friend with strong opinions and a quick temper accepted a superintendency with a board president with all the classical “superintendent wannabe” tendencies. Six weeks later, this district was again searching for a superintendent. This was predictable from the interview.

A superintendent’s transition starts as soon as he or she is being considered for a new role. While initial thoughts may be focused on selling oneself, it is important to keep the interview consistent with what is real and what your message is going to be months downstream if you land the position.

With seven superintendencies on his vitae, Art Stellar strongly believes an entry plan ought to serve as a reality check.  If the school board and search consultant are good at this process, you will be offered the job only if you are a positive match for the kind of superintendent that is truly wanted. Every candidate should be doing the same due diligence on the board members, organization and community.

Before accepting an offer, you should find out exactly why the job is available. Then you can decide if the risk is acceptable, career threatening or insurmountable.

How should you prepare for the first 100 days?

First Impressions
Joining a school system from the outside enables you to position yourself in a fresh way. Being promoted from within the school district carries unique challenges.

Manage the internal announcements and impressions others have of you in your new role. There will be no grace period, so round up your supporters and the rest of the team and do something. Internal candidates are expected to produce in short order because they already know the organization.

As soon as you are selected for a superintendency, there will be a public announcement that you should help shape. Be prepared to make a statement that will let the public and your new associates see a glimpse of what to anticipate.

Sometimes you have limited control over events and announcements, and you have to adjust. In my most recent district, my predecessor had been popular, which created a public firestorm when his contract was bought out by a board disgruntled with his direction and leadership style. The night of my appointment, while the board of education was in executive session, I tried to be inconspicuous in the rear of an auditorium packed with mostly angry citizens. It didn’t take long to be discovered, and for the next hour, I was peppered with pointed questions and comments as people vented their frustrations upon the superintendent-to-be.

The front-page photograph in the local newspaper the next day had a man pointing his finger at me shouting, “We’re going to run you out of town!” When the board voted 5-2 to approve me as the superintendent, a couple hundred individuals stood and turned their backs. This was not in my entry plan, although it did later bring on an exit plan.

Review the research you did during the selection process and organize it for your initial foray into the school district. What was in the job announcement? What about the last superintendent was appreciated and what were the criticisms? What were the news stories about over the last year? What did you learn from board members or others you met? Anything interesting from prior board meeting minutes?

Most importantly, determine whether a community survey or focus groups identified desired characteristics or goals for the next superintendent. Create a list of the most prominent words, phrases or ideas. Organize this information into usable categories such as finance, curriculum, personnel, community relations, extracurriculars, etc.

One purpose of this compilation is to start assessing how to outline your entry plan, to market yourself and to identify what actions are needed shortly after your arrival. How do you want to be perceived? What is the community expecting? Do you want to start out being seen as strong and decisive or collaborative and incremental? Should you position yourself as a superintendent with an open-door policy or one who spends time out of the office at community activities and schools? You have a choice on where to place your attention.

Major Caveats
Just as you may have glossed over your own blemishes, the board members who hired you may have done likewise. Without totally discounting all you were told, take everything with a grain of salt and check it out. 

An entry plan becomes a reality check.

You may assume you were selected to replicate your former successes. Prior glories undoubtedly contributed to your selection, but your new situation is different. The same traits that led to your past accomplishments might lead you over a cliff if you haven’t done some advance scouting.

New leaders can assimilate, adapt and evolve, or shock their new system. Assimilation is the safest method as you conform to the organizational norms. Adapt and evolve is a relatively safe middle ground. Start where the organization is and attempt to move the culture slowly.

Shock is the riskiest approach and only recommended for an organization needing a quick turnaround. While the school board may have expressed the need for a hard-charging superintendent, they probably didn’t mean it. Principals have a better chance of using the shock style when a school is declared at-risk. Superintendents can back up a principal using shock therapy, but who is going to back up a superintendent who tries shock techniques?

A Fuzzy Period
After the acceptance of the job offer, what you do or don’t do will send a powerful message to your new school district well before you sit in the superintendent’s chair.

Embracing the extra time before physically being there increases your chances of success. A tendency exists to spend too much time and effort on winding up the old job. That is no longer your long-term responsibility. Going on a vacation or unwinding to clear your head may be appealing, but it fails to give you a head start.

One of your first tasks is arranging with the outgoing superintendent about how key decisions will be made until you arrive. Some superintendents reward favorites with long-term contracts or make other decisions that may tie your hands. Of course, this discussion can be delicate. Assume that what you suggest and how you propose it will be added to the folklore of your transition. Follow the lead of the current superintendent who is still in control.

Overall, seven activities ought to be addressed during the time between selection and start:

• Identify key stakeholders
• Craft your initial message
• Manage your office set up
• Manage your personal/family set up
• Conduct pre-start meetings and phone calls
• Develop an information-gathering and learning plan
• Plan your first 100 days

Some activities bleed into the actual first few weeks. The more you finish early on, the more time you have later for building relationships.

Opening Signals
While your message will evolve over time, you still need early themes. Think of this as your initial brand identity. Everything you do or say communicates and will be part of your message.

In one school system, upon making the rounds as the new superintendent, I encountered some teachers dressed in jeans and informal attire for an outdoor picnic. I made a joke about the need for a teacher dress code and everyone laughed. By the time I arrived at the next school, two teachers had gone home to change clothes.

By the end of the day, the word had spread like wildfire to the extent that a message from the teachers’ association on my desk demanded to discuss my directive that all teachers, male and female, wear suits. My message had become corrupted, although it did open up conversations about professional dress.

Some superintendents make mistakes over the setup of their offices by spending too much time or money buying furniture and redecorating. Renovating during the first week on the job sends the wrong message.

While you cannot meet with everyone at the same time, you should recognize that your order of contact is taken as a sign of relative importance. Some people will boast of talking with the new superintendent. Be cautious of those who seek you out, as they may have a hidden agenda or wish to get a decision by the prior administration overturned. Once you are on duty, the order of whom you meet is indelible. Opinions are a bit more open and flexible prior to your official start date.

Reaching out ahead of time can reap fantastic information if you only identify the sacred cows and people who are untouchable. To be successful, especially early on, you have to avoid these landmines. Who has to be handled with kid gloves because of bloodlines or because they are the town gossip? You don’t have to vow never to address these areas or people, but you should probably wait until after your first 100 days.

A Typical Plan
Many superintendents think of entry plans as tools for learning about the organization and community. Most plans actually are completed by a task force of local administrators. This strategy can be problematic, as these individuals have their own biases and departmental interests.

A better approach to information gathering, as part of the entry plan, is to hire a consultant. An independent professional or team will not be influenced by local politics, norms or egos. Thus, the superintendent can receive an objective report.

Your board members should know about your entry plan. In this age of transparency, it is a good idea to communicate to your internal audiences and the public at large your plan and openly display a follow-up report.

The plan’s purpose will vary. Some stress organizing data to analyze strengths and weaknesses and to set priorities. Another purpose may be to foster appropriate relationships among various parties. The typical entry plan states a purpose and establishes timelines, goals and objectives, activities and outcomes.

An entry plan for a North Carolina superintendent established this stage would enable executive leadership to “prepare for greatness.” For each subgroup, there was a separate purpose. For the news media, the plan stated: “Clearly articulate my goals early so the public, press and education community know what to expect. … Demonstrate seriousness of purpose to transform … into a world-class school district.”

Keeping the big transition issues in mind can accelerate productivity. High-quality entry plans yield these five or similar outcomes/timelines: (1) discover or create a burning imperative by day 30; (2) identify the key metrics or milestones to drive performance by day 45; (3) invest in early wins to build confidence by day 60; (4) identify who needs to be in what roles with the right support by day 90; and (5) determine how to refocus people and practices on your agenda by day 100.

As the new superintendent, you can formulate a private plan for personnel matters. Moving staff members, even those who are the most detrimental or unproductive, is one area that can most hasten your exit. You will encounter more resistance to personnel moves from school board members than any change in curricular programs. Count on the fact that the most lazy and incapable employee has friends on the board.

Final Perspective
My most recent entry plan coincided with a school board election with some candidates vowing to immediately oust me and bring back the popular superintendent who had been bought out a couple of months earlier. I learned enough from my planning to avoid being bought out myself until 23 months into the job with 22 months left on my contract.

More importantly, as my entry plan progressed, we were able to resolve huge financial problems, increase student achievement, raise expectations and temporarily stabilize the system, if not the politics. The next superintendent will have an easier transition.

Human beings are not naturally adept at making transitions. This is one reason we have created ceremonies and rituals to provide proper ways to behave and adjust. Think of how much planning goes into a wedding or a retirement. As educators, we plan transitions for entering kindergarteners and their parents, students rising to middle school, graduations from high school, etc.

Leadership transitions, as well, serve as meaningful events for a school district and community. A well-planned superintendent transition raises the chances of extended tenure, positive accomplishments and a sense of well-being for everyone, including the new superintendent.

Art Stellar has served as a superintendent for 25 years in seven school districts, most recently Burke County, N.C. E-mail: artstellar@yahoo.com

The School Administrator November 2011 Number 10, Vol. 68| Rookies and Retirees| 28-33

Feature

NAEP: A flawed benchmark producing the same old story

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by James Harvey, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. Harvey, who helped write the seminal 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” is the author or co-author of four books and dozens of articles on education and has been examining the history of NAEP as part of his doctoral studies at Seattle University.

By James Harvey

The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released this week and can be summarized quickly: New NAEP numbers tell the same old story. Fourth- and eighth-grade students have inched ahead in mathematics but only about one third score at the proficient or higher level in reading.

Proficiency remains a tough nut to crack for most students, in all subjects, at all grade levels. NAEP routinely reports that only one third of American students are proficient or better, no matter the subject, the age of the students, or their grade level. But no one should be surprised.

NAEP’s benchmarks, including the proficiency standard, evolved out of a process only marginally better than throwing darts at the wall.

That’s a troubling conclusion to reach in light of the expenditure of more than a billion dollars on NAEP over 40-odd years by the U.S. Department of Education and its predecessors. For all that money, one would expect that NAEP could defend its benchmarks of Basic, Proficient, and Advanced by pointing to rock-solid studies of the validity of its benchmarks and the science underlying them. But it can’t.

Instead, NAEP and the National Assessment Governing Board that promulgated the benchmarks have spent the better part of 20 years fending off a consensus in the scientific community that the benchmarks lack validity and don’t make sense. Indeed, the science behind these benchmarks is so weak that Congress insists that every NAEP report include the following disclaimer: “NCES [National Center for Education Statistics] has determined that NAEP achievement levelsshould continue to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted with caution” (emphasis added).

Proficient Doesn’t Mean Proficient

Oddly, NAEP’s definition of proficiency has little or nothing to do with proficiency as most people understand the term. NAEP experts think of NAEP’s standard as “aspirational.” In 2001, two experts associated with NAEP’s National Assessment Governing Board (Mary Lynne Bourque, staff to the governing board, and Susan Loomis, a member of the governing board) made it clear that:

“[T]he proficient achievement level does not refer to “at grade” performance. Nor is performance at the Proficient level synonymous with ‘proficiency’ in the subject. That is, students who may be considered proficient in a subject, given the common usage of the term, might not satisfy the requirements for performance at the NAEP achievement level.”

Far from supporting the NAEP “proficient” level as an appropriate benchmark for student accomplishment, many analysts endorse the NAEP “basic” level as the appropriate standard.

Criticisms of the NAEP Achievement Levels

What is striking in reviewing the history of NAEP is how easily and frequently its governing board has shrugged off criticisms about the board’s standards-setting processes.

In 1993, the National Academy of Education argued that NAEP’s achievement-setting processes were “fundamentally flawed” and “indefensible.” The Government Accounting Office in 1993 concluded that “the standard-setting approach was procedurally flawed, and that the interpretations of the resulting NAEP scores were of doubtful validity.”

The governing board was so incensed by a report it received from Western Michigan University in 1991 that it looked into refusing to pay the university’s prominent assessment experts before hiring others to take issue with the report’s conclusions.

The governing board absorbed savage criticism from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. Six years after the National Academy of Education report, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that:

“NAEP’s current achievement level setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters’ judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results.”

In fact, reported the National Academy of Science panel, “the results are not believable” largely because the NAEP results flew in the face of other evidence. Too few students were judged to be advanced, thought the panel, when measured against other indicators of advanced work, such as completion of Calculus or participation in Advanced Placement.

Fully 50% of 17-year-olds judged to be only basic by NAEP ultimately obtained four-year degrees. Just one third of American fourth graders were said to be proficient in reading by NAEP in the mid-1990s at the very time that international assessments of fourth-grade reading judged American students too rank Number Two in the world.

For the most part, such pointed and critical comments from eminent authorities in the assessment field have rolled off the governing board and NAEP like so much water off a duck’s back.

As recently as late 2009, the U.S. Department of Education received a report on NAEP that it had commissioned from the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska. The institute is named after Oscar Krisen Buros, the founding editor of Mental Measurements Yearbook. The report noted, “Validity is the most fundamental consideration in developing and evaluating tests.

“The Institute then took NAEP to task for, among other things, lacking a “validity framework,” ignoring any program of organized validation research, unprofessionally releasing technical reports years after NAEP results had been announced to the public, and the fact that “notably absent [are] clearly defined intended uses and interpretations of NAEP.” The Institute went on to recommend:

“… [a] transparent, organized validity framework, beginning with a clear definition of the intended and unintended uses of the NAEP assessment scores. We recommend that NAGB continue to explore achievement level methodologies…. [W]e further recommend that NAGB consider additional sources of external validity [such as] ACT or SAT scores…and transcript studies…to strengthen the validity argument.”

In short, for the last 20 years it has been hard to find any expert not on the U.S. Department of Education’s payroll who will accept the NAEP benchmarks uncritically.

NAEP and International Assessments

The NAEP benchmarks might be more convincing if most students elsewhere could handily meet them. But that’s a hard case to make, judging by a 2007 analysis from Gary Phillips, former acting commissioner of NCES. Phillips set out to map NAEP benchmarks onto international assessments in science and mathematics.

Only Taipei and Singapore have a significantly higher percentage of “proficient” students in eighth grade science (by the NAEP benchmark) than the United States. In math, the average performance of eighth-grade students could be classified as “proficient” in six jurisdictions: Singapore, Korea, Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, and Flemish Belgium. It seems that when average results by jurisdiction place typical students at the NAEP proficient level, the jurisdictions involved are typically wealthy — many with “tiger mothers” or histories of not enrolling low-income students or those with disabilities.

Complexity and Judgment

None of this is to say that the NAEP achievement levels are entirely indefensible. Like other large-scale assessments (Trends in International Math and Science Survey, the Progress on International Reading Literacy Survey, and the Program on International Student Assessment), NAEP is an extremely complex endeavor, depending on procedures in which experts make judgments about what students should know and be able to do and construct assessment items to distinguish between student responses. Panels then make judgments about specific items and trained scorers, in turn, bring judgment to bear on constructed-response items, which typically make up about 40 percent of NAEP items.

In summary, three important facts about NAEP have been downplayed, ignored, or swept under the rug and need to be acknowledged and addressed.

First, NAEP’s achievement levels, far from being engraved on stone tablets, are administered, as Congress insists, on a “trial basis.” 

Second, the NAEP achievement levels are inherently based on judgment and not science. While it is not entirely fair to say that this is little better than throwing darts at the wall, it is fair to say that this is little better than educated guesswork. 

Third, the proficiency benchmark seems reachable by most students in only a handful of wealthy or Asian jurisdictions.

Enough questions exist about these achievement levels that Congress should commission an independent exploration to make sense in straightforward language of the many diverse definitions of proficiency found in state, national, and international assessments. A national assessment that puts proficiency beyond the reach of students throughout the Western world and most of Asia promises not to clarify our educational challenges but to confuse them.

Occupy the Classroom

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 19, 2011

Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.

Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.

Maybe it seems absurd to propose expansion of early childhood education at a time when budgets are being slashed. Yet James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown that investments in early childhood education pay for themselves. Indeed, he argues that they pay a return of 7 percent or more — better than many investments on Wall Street.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes.

We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up. Still, new research suggests that early childhood education can work even in the real world at scale.

Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.

Not so fast.

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Professor Deming found that in these life outcomes, Head Start had about 80 percent of the impact of the Perry program — a stunning achievement.

Something similar seems to be true of the large-scale prekindergarten program in Boston. Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Christina Weiland, both of Harvard, found that it erased the Latino-white testing gap in kindergarten and sharply reduced the black-white gap.

President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.

That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.

Research, Knowledge and the Teaching Profession

by Ben Levin — August 29, 2011

The central argument in this short essay is that teaching practice in all schools should be grounded in evidence of effective practices based on both professional knowledge and external research, and that the development of a system to do this is a central need in education.

It is ironic that everyone in schools thinks that the work teachers and students do together is the most important thing about schooling, yet at the same time we are very reluctant to prescribe what teaching should look like. Those positions are logically incompatible. If teaching is so important – as I believe it is – then surely every school has an obligation to make sure that all teaching practice is as good as it can be. And surely every educator has an obligation to seek to improve his or her practice by being familiar with research and by getting feedback from colleagues and students.  

Yet we know that in most schools and school systems, teaching practice varies greatly from one classroom to another, and that results also vary greatly. If you don’t believe this, just ask students or parents. I have also asked many groups of school leaders about the variance in teaching practice. They all admit it is there but very few of them are doing anything about it in a systematic way.

If teaching is a real profession – and I believe it is – then it should engage in what other professions do, which is the pursuit of high quality practice every day and by every single person in the profession. This means not just sharing knowledge, but agreeing, based on evidence, on what counts as good practice and expecting everyone to be guided by such agreement.

In education, this idea is not widely accepted at all. Rather, the belief that teachers should individually determine their own practice is very deeply engrained. This belief is held not only by teachers, but also by many academics in education, who regard autonomy as the central aspect of professionalism. Yet this attitude is not characteristic of other professions. In fact, a professional is only autonomous in certain senses. Professionalism consists in the application of knowledge to specific situations; it does not permit a professional to make choices based on personal style or experience where those preferences are not consistent with the best available knowledge. Of course in all professions the reality is not always consistent with this ideal, but in teaching, the ideal frequently seems to be that teachers should be able to use whatever practices they want.

This kind of agreement on good practice is not about teachers being ordered about on how to teach. It is not about principals or school boards issuing dictates on daily teaching or lesson plans. That is managerialism, not professionalism, and it is inconsistent with what we know about building good practice, which requires the belief of the professionals involved.

Rather than managerial direction, I prefer teachers collectively owning their practice and expecting all colleagues to do what is right for students. “I’ve always done it this way,” or “that way doesn’t work for me” is no more legitimate for a teacher than it would be for any other professional who refused to follow professional codes of practice. What would we think of a dentist who refused to give a patient a lead cover when taking an x-ray or an engineer who declined to use a computer to verify calculations because “I’ve never done it that way”? Personal preferences cannot be allowed to override collective professional knowledge.

A commitment to common practice does not at all take the spontaneity and creativity out of teaching, any more than requiring 14 lines takes the creativity out of writing a sonnet or requiring punctuation takes the creativity out of writing prose. Indeed, as Campbell pointed out years ago (1972), a high level of technical skill actually increases the potential for creativity; it does not reduce that potential. You have to be good at something to be creative about it. Our knowledge about teaching is still limited in many ways (e.g., Hattie, 2008), so there are numerous areas in which there is no agreement on good practice. But where we do know about effective practices, such as using formative assessment, or giving students input and choice, or starting with an assessment of what students already know, or encouraging students to read in their first language, there should be no room for educators to decide they just don’t want to do these things.

Sometimes this idea of collective ownership of practice is translated into the concept of professional learning communities, in which teachers work together to define and implement good practice. Certainly effective professional work does require collective efforts leading to the commitment of teachers to new and better practices. As noted earlier, professionalism has to be built, not imposed from outside. And new practices have to be rooted in the realities of the profession; they have to be ideas that make sense to professionals. Moreover, we know that individual practice is deeply affected by the social setting. So we cannot change practice one teacher at a time; changes will only be sustained if they are supported by and consistent with the way the school or district as a whole operates. In that sense, professional learning communities are a part of a new teacher professionalism. However they are not enough.

Relying on learning communities is not enough because there is no system or driver in this approach that works towards compelling evidence on better practice. The history of professions is littered with examples of new ideas that were entirely rejected by the profession itself before they eventually became conventional wisdom and normal practice. The resistance of doctors to washing their hands between seeing patients is just one of the most egregious examples of the many that could be cited in medicine and virtually every other profession. People, in whatever occupation, are hardily resistant to evidence when it conflicts with our habits or long held predilections.

That is why the second key element in improving teaching has to be a robust research and development effort. Various ideas have to be tested and carefully evaluated, using the best available research and analysis, to determine if they actually do produce better results. Again, we simply have too much evidence, in education and other fields, of practices that were advocated – and often adopted – and only later found to produce no improvement in results.

The possibility for real improvement lies in bringing these two elements together. Research findings cannot determine practice because the results do not always take account of the endemic features of practice, and they will not have impact if they are inconsistent with how most practitioners see their work or with the social organization of schools. On the other hand, practical experience alone is not sufficiently trustworthy either, because it plays on human tendencies to favor what we like or what suits us ahead of what can be shown empirically to be true.

At present, no education system has anything like an organized system of this kind that brings together research evidence and practitioner knowledge in a way that privileges neither but forces each to be tested against the other in a way that is most likely to advance knowledge. Indeed, it is not even clear what such a system would look like if it were to be meaningful on the scale of a state or national education system. It would surely involve very different approaches to research than currently exist in most universities or other research institutions.

But the generation of valid and reliable knowledge, difficult as it is, is only a first step. The more important and difficult task is to have that knowledge become the norm for everyday practice. We know from history that practices in many fields spread very slowly even when they have strong empirical support. In education the mechanisms for learning from evidence are also weak. Few school systems have any organized system for learning about, sharing, and applying research findings in a methodical way. Teaching as a profession does not have the equivalent of, say, clinical guidelines that are designed to shape practice in health care.

Yet the benefits of moving in this direction are evident. If teaching is a matter of what any teacher decides to do, then it becomes vulnerable to whatever practices an external body, such as a legislature, wants to impose. It is only when a profession can demonstrate that its practices are well grounded in evidence that it can have any grounds to resist the imposition of others’ ideas. In this sense, teachers’ autonomy actually rests on their embrace of a model of professionalism in which teachers use evidence to define and shape their collective practice. Since the results of such efforts will also be better for students – by definition, since they rest on the best evidence of effectiveness – this is clearly the direction in which we should be trying to move. If teachers, teacher organizations and researchers work together on this goal, we could see very large improvements not only in student outcomes, but in teacher efficacy and satisfaction. Teaching would then be able to think of itself as a true profession.

References

Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. New York: Penguin.

Hattie, J.A.C. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of meta-analyses relating to achievement. London and New York : Routledge.

Levin, B. (2010). Can education be a research-based profession? The Australian Educational Leader, 32(2), 21-23.

Levin, B. (2010). Leadership for evidence-informed education. School Leadership and Management, 30(4), 303-315.

Meet the CEO Behind the Attack on “Privileged” Public Employees

By Ruth Conniff, October 18, 2011

"Government workers are the new privileged class," James E. MacDougald, the founder of Free Enterprise Nation, told the Washington Post recently.

MacDougald, the Post explains, is a retired CEO who now heads Free Enterprise Nation, which the paper describes as a "research and activist group" which he founded "to call attention to the financial burden posed by government workers."

Actually, Free Enterprise Nation, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, is an "activist" group in the same sense that the Washington office of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks runs "activist" campaigns.

According to records available on Open Secrets, Free Enterprise Nation spent $30,000 so far this year and $60,000 in 2010 lobbying for changes in public employee pension rules, a ban on federal support for states and municipalities that are struggling to meet their pension obligations, and the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production and nuclear power, among other issues.

MacDougald put $1 million of his own money into the group,according to TampaBay.com.

It seems transparently ridiculous to call this a grassroots, citizens' uprising against the "privileged class."

But the anti-public-employee message Free Enterprise Nation and other rightwing groups are putting out has real traction.

Echoing through the talk-radio ditto-chamber, and recycled by Republican politicians from Scott Walker in Wisconsin to Arnold Schwarzenegger in California to Chris Christie in New Jersey, the idea that public employees are coddled and ought to give up pension and health care benefits is catching on with stressed-out private-sector workers.

For people who work in the private sector at all levels (and I have personally heard this message repeated by both well-off and underpaid acquaintances) there is real resonance to the message that public employees shouldn't have job security, a decent retirement, and high-quality health care mostly paid for by their employers while private sector workers have seen their 401Ks take a hit and are increasingly insecure.

The huge irony here is that the people pushing the message are the truly privileged (not cops-and-teachers privileged—corporate-lobbyist privileged) trying to stir up resentment among different sectors of the lower and middle class.

Governor Scott Walker does this masterfully when he talks to Wisconsinites about his caterer brother who has to pay $800 a month for benefits and would "love to have the deal" that public sector workers--whose unions the governor is aiming to smash--have.

(As Democratic state senator Jon Erpenbach of Wisconsin pointed out at a Progressive Magazine event last weekend, Walker and his Republican allies in the state legislature are still comfortable enough with state employee benefits to continue to draw them for themselves.)

In a YouTube video James MacDougald claims that public sector worker have "better pay and better benefits" than private sector workers, and argues that the nation's financial woes are caused by private sector workers making an average of $59,000 a year paying taxes to support public sector workers' lavish $119,000 a year in average pay and benefits.

Those numbers are grossly distorted, as the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out since public employees in the professions, while paid considerably more than the lowest-paid private sector workers, still earn less than their private sector counterparts with comparable degrees. If you compare workers with similar education in the same line of work, public employees earn less.

Historically, people who do public service jobs were willing to accept lower pay in exchange for job security and good benefits, while their counterparts went for the big bucks in the private sector.

That may be changing. Thanks to the union-busting efforts and coordinated PR campaigns on the right, all American workers may now be gambling on Wall Street and hoping to cash out at the right time when they retire, with little in the way of job protection and declining benefits even as health care costs increase and health care industry profits skyrocket.

It's no accident, of course, that the right is targeting public sector unions, since 36% of public employees are in unions, compared with a paltry 7% in the private sector.

And it's no accident that unions are the target of the corporate-financed message that public employees should have their pensions raided and their health care rolled back

The Post notes that "union leaders say their members are being asked to pay for the mistakes made by politicians who chose not to adequately contribute to pension plans and by Wall Street firms whose disastrous bets led to big investment losses."

But if public employees are being asked to pay--taking big benefit cuts and seeing their unions destroyed--Wall Street banks are posting profits, paying large bonuses, and hoisting their champagne glasses thanks to trillions in taxpayer bailout funds.

The real punchline: they got where they are in part by convincing American voters that teachers and firefighters are the "privileged class."

Save the children by fighting 'truthiness'

By Mark Ray

Special to The Times

The Web wilderness of information confronting children poses new challenges. Guest columnist Mark Ray, a teacher librarian and Washington's 2012 Teacher of the Year, says school libraries and librarians are a critical to helping children learn to discern facts from "truthiness."

TRUTHINESS is hurting America. And I'm not going to take it anymore.

According to Wikipedia, this term, coined by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, is "truth" that a person feels intuitively "from the gut" or that "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness could be heard on a recent weekend when NPR's "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me" posed the following question:

"(Presidential candidate) Herman Cain ... said that even though 'I don't have the facts to back this up,' he believed:

A. If he were to capture Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geith-ner, Mr. Geithner would grant him three wishes.

B. The White House is orchestrating the Occupy Wall Street protests to distract attention from its own record.

C. Phil Collins is the greatest singer-songwriter ever.

D. Kittens are the snuggliest."

The correct answer is B. But any of the answers are correct, because with truthiness, the clause "I don't have the facts to back this up" permits anyone with a blog or microphone to fabricate "truths" that are published and distributed on the Web in nanoseconds. And if you read it on the "Internets," it's bound to be true.

On Oct. 3, I was named the 2012 Washington State Teacher of the Year. I am a teacher librarian. Since then, I have been fielding questions from reporters curious about what teacher librarians do and somewhat surprised that they even made school libraries anymore. Their core question is, "why do we need libraries and teacher librarians?"

It's simple. Among other things, librarians fight truthiness. And truthiness is bad for America. That makes libraries and librarians good for America. As a teacher librarian, my job is to ensure that students are effective users and producers of information and ideas. All teachers should be doing this, but right now, my classroom colleagues are working hard to make sure students pass their tests.

In this 21st century, we consume information by turning to a screen instead of a newspaper or book. In the past, we could go to the library and find materials that were likely to be accurate or at least balanced. While I'm not advocating a return to a time when libraries or books were the only place to go for information, I'm also sure that "The Google" is not a library. Today, we must make decisions about bias, currency and accuracy ourselves. Many students struggle with that.

Thanks to the Web, anyone can create ideas and information. For our students, this is a wonderful thing, vesting learning with authenticity and purpose and allowing them to use networks to collaborate, create and share their work and thinking with others throughout the world. But it is a learned skill and an awesome responsibility.

I teach digital citizenship and information literacy, which are about being safe, responsible, effective, informed and active as part of our society. These skills include both using and producing information with rigor, fidelity, fairness and purpose. While responsible adults would be loath to leave children alone on a dark suburban corner, they seem content to allow their children to attempt to make meaning from a screen and remain silent as districts close libraries and defer 21st-century information skills as something to be done tomorrow.

Truthiness is a pox on our society. Trading conjecture for the confirmed and sound bites for the hard work of research, scholarship and attribution, truthiness is a laziness of the mind. And like childhood obesity, it will cost our country far more than we realize.

Much has been written about the current political gridlock and social polarity that define the nation our children will inherit. Scholars contrast ours with earlier times when quaint words like compromise, concord and comity allowed us to do great things. Those great things were predicated on the ability to base decisions on facts and shared core ideas, not on our gut.

Getting to the truth has never been harder than it is today. The loss of libraries, teacher librarians and the ascendance of truthiness fundamentally hurts our nation. We are losing the expertise, resources and skills necessary to be informed voters and citizens. This is not about politics. All corners of the political and cultural debate contribute to our factually impaired fog. This is about fundamentally preparing our young people to be successful in work, college and life.

Truthiness is bad for America. And I have the facts to back that up.

Mark Ray is the 2012 Washington State Teacher of the Year. He is a teacher librarian and instructional technology facilitator at Skyview High School in Vancouver.