Posts Tagged ‘
education reform ’
The spring of 1978 proved to be a pivotal time shaping my career. These were the ten weeks I completed my student teaching at a small rural high school in Colton, Washington.
Fortunately, I was taught and mentored by a marvelous master language arts teacher, Diana Carlson. Our first meeting was memorable. “Mr. Jamison, I have good news for you. In the coming weeks you will become the Language Arts Department at Colton High School.”
With thirty-five years of distance and perspective since that spring, and wonderful experiences along the way, I am deeply grateful for the high expectations and rigorous regime framed by this fine educator. Diana required me to teach four different grade levels of high school English, business communication, a social studies class, and to assist in directing the high school play after hours. Working fifty to sixty hours a week, I planned, created, delivered, evaluated…breathed, ate, laughed, fretted and lived… with these students and classrooms consuming my life.
We all know the importance of strong induction and mentorship supports for our newest professionals. While I benefitted the following year from an equally strong teacher who mentored me in my first full-time teaching job in Independence, lately I have looked back on that experience in Colton for an entirely different reason. Increasingly, I am concerned we are not adequately serving and supporting Oregon’s rural schools. (more…)
Category:
Chalkboard Project, CLASS Project |
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Tags: Chalkboard Project, CLASS Project, Colton, Dan Jamison, education policy, education reform, Oregon Education, planning and development in rural areas, rural districts, rural leadership, teaching and learning, Washington
This post originally appeared on Huff Post’s IMPACT blog and can be read in its entirety here.
The recent passing of Margaret Thatcher signals the true end of an era — Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan all were powerful leaders in the 1980s. While Reagan is now known largely for his international agenda, his domestic policies remain a part of our national fabric.
The end of April will mark the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking “A Nation at Risk” education report issued during the Reagan Administration. No matter how one feels about Reagan’s viewpoints, there is no doubt the report’s stark introductory language is memorable:
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Thirty years on we are still struggling with those words and how we are failing students especially those who live in low-income neighborhoods.
The 1983 report kicked off a national education reform effort that picked up steam in many states. Massachusetts and Maryland in particular made great strides and now are considered to be the states with the highest education standards in the country.
Meanwhile, I must admit my state of Oregon has many great features but a strong K-12 reform agenda has not been one of them. On state report cards, we get an A for being bike friendly and an A+ for hazelnut production. But Education Week gives us a C on its report card and ranks us 43rd in the nation for education based on numerous factors including how we treat teachers. We received a D in the subcategories of accountability for quality and incentives and allocations.
Read more.
Category:
Chalkboard Project, education achievement gap, education reform |
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Tags: Chalkboard Project, education, education policy, education reform, Huffington Post IMPACT, Margaret Thatcher, Oregon Education, Ronald Reagan, Sue Hildick
Adam Davis is a Founder and Principal of DHM Research, an independent, non-partisan public opinion research and consultation firm in Portland, Oregon. With over 30 years of experience in all phases of public opinion research, Adam’s expertise ranges from survey research design to focus group moderating.
Twitter: @DHMresearch
Facebook: www.facebook.com/dhmresearch
Much is made in Oregon of the urban/rural divide—the supposed gulf that separates Oregonians living in urban and rural areas of the state based on differences in their values and beliefs. I started measuring these differences thirty-six years ago when I first began to research opinion in all corners of the state. While there are important differences, what I also learned then, and continue to see in our surveys today, is how similar we Oregonians are in much that we hold dear, regardless of where we live in the state. Too often only the differences are reported by the media and beaten like a drum in political speeches. (more…)
Category:
education reform, funding |
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Tags: Adam Davis, DHM Research, education policy, education reform, K-12 education, Oregon, Oregon Education, PERS, public education, urban/rural divide
Tim Nesbitt writes on public affairs, has served as an adviser to Govs. Ted Kulongoski and John Kitzhaber, and is past president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. He writes an opinion column for The Oregonian on alternate Tuesdays. This column was originally posted to OregonLive.com on April 2, 2013 and can be found in its entirety here.
Sometimes big ideas come with small price tags. It’s the doing, not the dollars, that delivers the most dramatic results. That’s what we’re seeing as more and more high schools make college-credit courses available to their students. It’s a practice that is not just making high schools better. It’s also making college cheaper.
Consider Gov. John Kitzhaber’s remarks at a Portland City Club forum last month. When asked about a high-priced proposal to make college more affordable by creating an endowment for financial aid, Kitzhaber said he supported the concept. But then he pivoted to a different idea to reduce the cost of college: Bring more college courses into our high schools. He reminded the audience that students who graduate with college credits on their transcripts are not only more likely to go to college and earn a degree, they also finish faster, pay less and take on less debt in the process.
But in a state where funding for K-12 continues to lag the national average, can we afford to support such an effort? And, when close to a third of our high school students are failing to graduate within four years, shouldn’t we put our resources into making high schools successful as high schools before we try to turn them into junior colleges? Those may sound like good questions. But the doubts they express are being quickly dispelled by what is happening on the ground in Oregon schools.
Read more.
Category:
curriculum, Student Success |
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Tags: college courses in high school, education policy, education reform, governor kitzhaber, K-12 education, making college cheaper, Oregon Education, Portland City Club, Tim Nesbitt
You can read these words because someone taught you how to read.
You can do your job because over the years, everyone from your kindergarten teacher to your college professor to your mentor taught you how.
We become the people we are, as Mr. Rogers said, because of the people who loved us into being. In schools—big and small, city and rural—across Oregon, the love and dedication of thousands of teachers help millions of students become the people they will be. Scientists. Mechanics. Engineers. Doctors. Farmers. Inventors. And yes, teachers.
Take a moment and think about one teacher who helped you become who you are.
Not to brag, but our new video predicts the future, and we’re pretty proud of it. Check it out below.
Category:
professional development for educators, Student Success, Teacher advocacy, Teacher Effectiveness |
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Tags: DEC, Distinguished Educators Council, education policy, education reform, innovation in education, Leopold Ketel, Oregon Education, professional development, support educators, support teachers, teacher preparation
I teach students to set SMART goals—goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely; goals that challenge us yet can be reached; goals for which we can gauge success in relatively short periods of time. Our hope, of course, is that having SMART goals will spur us to take specific actions to achieve the goals.
When the legislature adopted achievement compacts for school districts about a year ago, my hope was that districts would set SMART goals and, more importantly, change practices with eyes toward meeting the goals.
So I was pleased when, at the start of our school year, my principal shared with our staff that our school was taking a number of steps to boost our graduation rate, including providing summer support to incoming freshmen who struggled academically in middle school, appointing an administrator to focus on freshmen attainment of credits, and strengthening relationships between freshmen and upper-class mentors. He suggested at the time that this partly was due to graduation rates being a primary factor in achievement compacts, and the state’s and the district’s focus on all students earning diplomas. (more…)
Category:
Student Success, Teacher Effectiveness |
1 Comment »
Tags: 40-40-20, achievement compacts, education policy, education reform, graduation rate, Kitzhaber, Oregon Education, Rudy Crew
Adam Davis is a Founder and Principal of DHM Research, an independent, non-partisan public opinion research and consultation firm in Portland, Oregon. With over 30 years of experience in all phases of public opinion research, Adam’s expertise ranges from survey research design to focus group moderating.
Twitter: @DHMresearch
Facebook: www.facebook.com/dhmresearch
My last two postings presented some issues education reform advocates in Oregon should consider as they work to improve public K-12 education in Oregon and do battle, often with teacher unions, in Salem and in their local districts. Another tool to have in your advocacy tool box are survey findings showing how teachers (as opposed to teacher union leadership) feel about the issues, including an understanding of the motivations that underlie those feelings, if attitudes cut across the full teacher population or if there are certain subgroups of teachers (e.g., newer teachers) that may feel differently than other subgroups, and how these feelings compare to voter attitudes. (more…)
Category:
education reform, Legislative |
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Tags: Adam Davis, advocacy, DHM Research, education reform, K-12 education, legislative session 2013, Oregon Education, public education, student success, teacher voice
Education reform is well-meaning but does not always further teachers’ ability to teach. I would like to put forth a shopping list of teacher needs. Our primary need is to add back our lost funding, because our students are slipping through the cracks as programs are cut, and class sizes burst at the seams. Oregon teachers need to work in schools where the focus is not on cutting resources.
Secondarily, we need:
Time
- Restore lost teaching days, and give us a longer school year. It’ll be interesting to see the results of Chicago’s experiment with a longer school year, but I bet more hours in school will mean greater learning gains.
- Limit the amount of time that we have to do administrative work like data entry. In Japan, teachers teach longer hours and have assistants who grade and do production work. We used to have instructional assistants that would handle some of this, but cuts to personnel and increased demands at the top for accountability through data collection has cut into our time to plan quality instruction. (more…)
Category:
career paths for teachers, teacher appreciation, Teacher Effectiveness, teacher preparation, teaching strategies |
2 Comments »
Tags: common core state standards, education reform, funding, Oregon Education, resources, Ruth Wallin, school funding, time, training, trust
Current education reform efforts are spread over many different points of emphasis. Prominent among these is the effort to improve teacher quality. By itself, improving teacher quality is a multifaceted, complex program of innovations, including attracting more high performers to the profession, increasing the rigor of teacher education programs, differentiating workplace roles, and varying compensation based on performance. A central pinch point in achieving these goals is teacher supervision. It is a pinch point because all the elements of improving teacher quality rely on teacher feedback that is relevant, accurate, credible and fair. Historically, delivering this kind of feedback has been difficult and largely unrealized.
Context
In thinking about teacher supervision, let’s first consider context. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the average public elementary school in the United States serves about 500 students. At a student-teacher ratio of 30:1, about seventeen regular classroom teachers would staff a school this size. In addition, let’s assume that the school has no specialists other than one special education teacher for a total of eighteen professional staff. Let’s work with this configuration as our prototype as the same organizational principles related to teacher supervision scale up or down pretty well for larger or smaller schools. The same principles apply to secondary schools as well, though with more complications due to more differentiated staffing models.
Of the eighteen teachers in our prototypical school, three or four are likely to be master teachers, one or two are likely to be struggling, three or four are likely to be marginally effective, and three or four are relatively new to the teaching profession. Everyone else is meeting expectations pretty consistently. In this school, like most others, there are a variety of performers and a variety of needs for improvement. That’s life. (more…)
Category:
education reform |
4 Comments »
Tags: consequences, education reform, effective teaching, feedback, performance standards, systematic approach, teacher ladders, teacher observations, teacher quality, teacher supervision
Eduardo Angulo, Executive Director of the Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality, shares his thoughts on public education reform in Oregon.
Oregonians’ drive for public education reform has taken many years to arrive at its climax. Finally, we are in the middle of it and are being driven by Governor Kitzhaber’s bold actions. He put it best when he said; “I am intending to wear out my welcome to make sure we have equal education for all our children in Oregon.”
In the past four years, I have been in the middle of it all by being part of the three-year Harvard-Wallace Foundation Education Reform Initiative with the four largest school districts in Oregon and Massachusetts. I was also part of the Oregon Race to the Top Design Team to develop the state’s federal school reform grant application. This past August, I was part of the Governor’s LearnWorks Team to develop the new Outcome Based Budgeting and Proficiency Based Teaching and Learning Framework to guarantee that every student is successful – from birth until college graduation.
(more…)
Category:
education reform |
5 Comments »
Tags: Eduardo Angulo, education reform, Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality
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