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12-7-12 Education Issues in the News
NJ Spotlight - Op-Ed: American Education -- Wrong Questions, Wrong Answers…The ultimate goal of education: helping students learn how to be, how to do, and how to know

NJ Spotlight -State May Ease Alternate-Route Rules for Charter-School Teachers…Education Department provision would provide more flexibility in hiring, training

NJ Spotlight - Op-Ed: American Education -- Wrong Questions, Wrong Answers…The ultimate goal of education: helping students learn how to be, how to do, and how to know

By Rich Ten Eyck and Bernie Josefsberg, December 3, 2012 in Opinion

In the past decade, we have seen a growing litany of assertions proclaiming the belief that the system of American public education injures and/or ill-equips massive numbers of children. It is this belief that has spawned a Race to the Top to standardized curricula for our students and evaluation systems for our educators. It is this belief that has led us to accept that large-scale, centrally designed and state-administered assessments will prod educators ands students alike to do the work required for students to score at the “desired” levels on both national and international assessments.

What if the beliefs that are driving the current reform efforts are not supported by fact? What if, in fact, the majority of American students are not underperforming their international peers? What if the “fixes” designed to remake the American school system are not and, worse, cannot be successful in dealing with the issues facing our educators, our students, and our communities? What if they, in fact, are more likely to destroy the very qualities of our system that the “high-performing “ countries are seeking to emulate and the very qualities our children need to be successful in a rapidly changing and unpredictable future?

This is not a call for resistance to change. It is a suggestion that calls us to reject superficial questioning and the accompanying simplistic solutions.

Since 1989, with the release of the NCTM standards, American education has been increasingly driven by the adherence to two widely accepted, but largely unchallenged, tenets. First, the American education system is a failure and continues to fail massive numbers of American children. Second, there is a need to standardize the content to which American students should be exposed and the progress toward the attainment of these standards should be measured by state administered, large-scale assessments.

These beliefs have dominated the direction of education reform efforts, federal and state policy decisions, and the efforts of local schools and districts. These beliefs have, in recent years, become the accepted “fact” of our education system. Today, both nationally and in states throughout the country, reform of public education, critiques of schools and teachers, the need for yet another round of more rigorous standards and assessments dominate the news and political discourse.

On one very important level, such attention is justified. We have not lived up to our own expectations. We live in one of the very few countries in the world that has committed to both equity and excellence in the education of children. The achievement of this goals remains elusive, nowhere more so than for the poorest of our nation. While success in this goal remains a challenge, the definition of excellence has changed dramatically. Concurrent with “raising the performance bar,” rising poverty levels have increased the demand for excellence among the very populations for whom these higher standards represent the greater challenge, making the attainment of such excellence even more elusive.

Increasingly, thoughtful, highly respected educators and policy analysts are questioning the very basis of what has become the driving force in our schools and in the lives of our children. These voices come from a variety of experiences: life-long educators, national policy developers, conservative and liberal political analysts, students of national and international educational policies and practices, and so forth. They share one critical observation. We may have looked at the American education experience from too narrow a perspective. We may have asked the wrong questions and, with the best of intentions, arrived at the wrong answers.

What if the standards as they have evolved do not reflect what our students need to know and be able to do? What if the large-scale assessments do not provide an accurate picture of student learning? What if the data readily available to educators, parents, policymakers, and politicians were actually used to assess the accuracy of the “beliefs” driving the current reform efforts? What are the key factors in the success of the many “model” schools throughout the country? Are these factors part of an intentional process to provide the experiences our students need? If not, why not?

This is not intended to be an attack on the notion of high standards. As Sir Ken Robinson, in his TED Talk on Changing Paradigms of Education, has noted, “Who would possibly argue for lower standards?” Rather, it is intended to serve as a call to look beyond the shallow and simplistic responses of the current reform agenda. It is a call to examine whether or not there are other, more informative questions we should be asking and seeking to answer.

We are a system in need of change. Some might argue that the need is more for transformation than for reform. There is a need for change in many ways and at many levels. This need lies in the recognition that, in spite our successes and the commitment of the vast majority of the nation’s educators, our system has not changed as quickly as the world our students are entering.

It is our hope that these questions will lead us to a more thoughtful exchange of ideas, as well as a more thoughtful analysis of the needs of our students and the design of the kinds of experiences that are most likely to engage them in the ultimate goal of education: learning how to be, how to do, and how to know.

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After spending over 40 years in public and private education as a teacher, union president, and superintendent, Rich Ten Eyck served as an assistant commissioner in the NJ Department of Education. In 2005, he left that position to work as a senior consultant for International Center for Leadership In Education.

Dr. Bernie Josefsberg has over 40 years of school experience. He is currently the superintendent for Easton, Redding and Region 9 in Connecticut.

 

NJ Spotlight -State May Ease Alternate-Route Rules for Charter-School Teachers…Education Department provision would provide more flexibility in hiring, training

By John Mooney, December 7, 2012 in Education|3 Comments

The Christie administration has proposed easing some of the state’s teacher-certification rules for charter schools, saying the move would give the schools more flexibility in hiring.

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The provision, which is tucked deep within the administration’s Professional Licensure and Standards Code for NJ Teachersproposed new administrative code for teacher licensure], would essentially give charter schools their own alternate route similar to the state’s long-established and popular “alternate route” process for hiring public-school teachers who did earn a traditional education degree in college.

The proposal, which is now before the state Board of Education, is facing some resistance from the state’s dominant teachers union, among others. But it nonetheless moved ahead with preliminary approval at the board’s meeting on Wednesday.

Under the proposal, the charter schools would no longer need to meet the existing requirements that their alternate route teachers have at least 30 hours of credits in their content area, nor would they need to have a set number of hours of classroom training before they are hired and once they are hired. They would also not be required to have a mentor teacher as rookie teachers do in the public schools.

State officials stressed that the charter-school alternate-route teachers would still need to pass a national exam in the content subject, and the charter schools would still need to provide in-school training and support for its teachers once they are on the job.

But the charter schools would have flexibility in how to do that, officials said, as long as they met the conditions of the state’s review.

“The rationale is increasing flexibility and autonomy in exchange for increased accountability,” said Amy Ruck, director of the state’s charter school office.

“Our belief is a lot of this (training) will be already be happening in the charter school,” she said. “Why require it in a prescribed way? This focuses more on the outcomes and less on the inputs.”

A number of other states have eased certification requirements for charter schools even more. Four states have no certification requirements at all for charter schools, and another 17 allow for some hiring of noncertified teachers, usually up to a certain percentage of staff.

The proposed certification rules for alternate-route teachers in charter schools would not be transferable to a public school.

“We believe this would be more the exception than the rule because it is not transferable,” Ruck added.

Not all are pleased with the move, with at least one board member and leaders of the New Jersey Education Association maintaining it sets up different standards for district school teachers than it does for charter schools. In a public hearing on the proposal last month, concerns were raised by the state’s principals association as well.

“With all the teacher evaluations now being required and the concerns about teacher effectiveness, you are now reducing the qualifications for teachers in charter schools?” said board member Edithe Fulton, a former president of the NJEA.

“I just don’t understand that. What’s the rationale?” she said yesterday, a day after she confronted the administration at the board meeting and cast the lone dissenting vote on the proposal’s preliminary approval.

The NJEA’s current vice president, Wendell Steinhauer, said the union has voiced its opposition as well and hopes to still meet with education department officials to iron out differences.

“I know charter schools are supposed to be laboratories of innovation, but I don’t think that should apply to certification,” he said yesterday. “They are still public school teachers.”

The proposed licensure code for public-school teachers has so far received little attention as it moves easily through the approval process, despite some significant changes in how teachers get credentials and are trained once on the job.

For instance, the administration would tweak the existing requirement that public-school teachers receive 100 hours of professional development over five years, instead moving to a 20-hours-per-year mandate but allowing for more flexibility in how that professional development is determined.

Board member Ronald Butcher said he’s not sure the 20 hours is any better than the previous 100 hours, saying it only further restricts teachers.

“The 100 hours was pretty arbitrary, and we have now moved to another pretty arbitrary number,” he said yesterday. “What if there was an opportunity to do 15 hours one year and 25 the next? Looking at the code, there is no flexibility for that.”

Butcher raised his concerns at the meeting, and state officials pledged they would revisit the measure in a year to see if it has some unintended consequences.