A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR.THOMAS PAYZANT: I want to say a word about context, and I do all of this with a hat that I don't often get to wear, that of a critical friend. Usually I'm sitting there and other critical friends are telling me what they think I ought to do. But I'll try to be as objective as I can. But I want to start with context.

I've only been here for a three or four-hour slice of all of this, but even though I recognize that this is a Commission that is focusing on the teaching of math and science, to what end? Somewhere in the context setting of this report, and maybe you've talked about this in your earlier sessions, we have to remember that this is all focused on young people, and that's the only reason that we all exist.

I would say the context in which that conversation should occur is the recognition that all young people are going to have to know and be able to apply their knowledge of math and science in a way that we used to ask only a small percentage to do. And that the context setting is very important. How is that going to happen in terms of context of federal, state and local issues. And my hat is a local one to wear.

I think it's very clear expectations, which ties in with Uri's point about what do we want students to know, what should they know about math and science. The expectations are standards. A curriculum that reflects that, teaching practice that gives access to that curriculum and learning for children, and assessments that will give students the opportunity to demonstrate what they know and how they can apply what they know, and all of that has to be aligned. That's what I mean by context. To pick up on the demand side, the way I characterized it in a conversation at lunch, you get in a room with students, parents, teachers, administrators, policy-makers, you name it, and the conversation goes to literacy. People may acknowledge that they don't really know how to teach somebody to read, but everybody knows something about literacy, or they think they do.

When the conversation goes to math and science, there is a chill in the air, and many are very apprehensive because they know they don't know very much about math and science and the conversation doesn't go very far. That's part of the context which I think you have to - to set. There are a couple of other things I want to mention. What is the role of the individual classroom, the school, and the system? That's another way of taking a cut at your recommendations, because there's got to be a line there as well, I would argue, and there's a lot of tension in this country right now about what should be centralized, whether it be federal direction, state direction, local school board direction, superintendent direction, principal direction, and then there's the good old classroom teacher that has to make it all work in the classroom versus decentralization. In the traditional mode, the teacher goes into the classroom and closes the door, and does her thing or his thing, or school locus of control using charter schools and other kinds of models in terms of autonomy and flexibility. I think you've got to at least think through these kinds of context variables as you run your recommendations through a screen thinking forward to implementation.

I would take another cut on the resource issue, because a lot of the recommendations that I've heard today have tremendous impact with respect to resources, and most of them relate to people, because the purpose of all of this is teachers and teaching. Most school districts, 75-80 percent of the budget is in people. So you start fooling around with people costs and an addition of 1 percent or 2 percent becomes huge in terms of real dollars. So maybe you want to think about whether any of the strategies suggest some reallocation of existing resources as the first step to making the case for additional resources.

Let me make a few comments about -- oh, one other context issue that I haven't heard mentioned, and you'll say, oh, spoken like a true superintendent. But I don't know about most of the people in schools around the table, but one of the biggest context variables that I have to deal with is collective bargaining. And there are lots of realities that you're talking about here that without being judgmental whether it's good or bad, in a lot places in this country, in a lot of local school districts have to be resolved at the collective bargaining table, and not just as a result of policy direction that may come from the federal, state or local school board or the superintendent's office. So that's another kind of screen that you've at least got to look at, or have a strategy for getting the NEA and AFT, which you may already have, really engaged in buying into some of the implementation strategies and what will be required.

Let me go to a few comments in each of the areas. And I'm going now from the big picture to some of the details. One of the pieces that I didn't see on the recruitment strategy and incentives was the whole notion of job sharing. And thinking about job sharing, even in a way that you might possibly, and perhaps business and industry would say, no way, because we've got a supply and demand problem, providing an opportunity for a person to work at INTEL a portion of the week and teach a day or two a week in a local school system. It may be a crazy idea, but it might be out there a bit on the cutting edge. Or a transition opportunity for people who might think that they want to leave INTEL, their career, or early retirement, and then make the switch.

I think you need an urban and perhaps a rural strategy. A lot of what's being talked about will play out very, very differently in urban and rural school districts. And I'm really concerned about nowhere in the conversation in the recruitment session did I hear anybody say, we've got to target some people within the larger target of getting math and science teachers. We need math and science teachers of color, and we need them big time in our urban school districts. We need them everywhere. But that is a very important issue, it seems to me, to be put on the table. It makes some people uncomfortable, but, nonetheless, it's there. And I don't say that that's the only part of the urban strategy.

Some people say, well, maybe we should have additional salary incentives for people to teach in Title I schools. Every one of my elementary and middle schools is Title I, so how does that help me in Boston? Unless, and we've got the best salary structure in the state for teachers right now. And we're very competitive on teacher salaries overall.

So, it's putting some of this through a sieve in terms of how it will play out. I can't speak to the rural pieces well. There may be somebody on the Commission who can, but I would suspect that there are some pieces there. And don't fall into the trap of playing to the great middle in all of this as you think through the implications.

And part of the urban strategy, is it going to take a particular kind of math or science teacher to reach the students who are furthest behind, where the gap between where they are and where they need to be. And we can get them to the same high standards. But does that take a kind of teaching, an understanding of content and pedagogy that is different from the student who is up there at standard, just waiting to go to the next plateau. The details, yes.

Induction. Extra time. I saw the major bold recommendation being one of extra time. I think there's other ways to think about using existing time, or flexibility, on the way to convincing people for more. One of the things that we tried in Boston is I've never been a fan of five professional development days scattered throughout the school year. We get six hours, six and a half hours a day. The culture says there's a long lunch on a professional development day, because we only get 20 minutes if we're lucky or 15 the rest of the year. And so you do a couple of hours in the morning, and a couple of hours in the afternoon, and some people have to leave early. So we converted this past contract, three of our days to hours, and then said the hours can be used school by school in a thoughtful, focused way, around the teaching, learning agenda, tied to the whole school improvement plan.

The other thing that we've pushed for is common planning time where there is common planning time at the elementary, middle, and high school level that's facilitated by coaches or specialists looking at student work in literacy and math. And that can be a much more powerful use of planning time than is often the case.

The final thing I'll say around the recruitment, induction, professional development part, I've heard very little conversation today about the role of colleges, universities and teacher training institutions. I don't know that we have been very successful in creating good professional development school models around the country. But it seems to me that if we were able to do that, using a model not unlike a teaching hospital where you think of the continuum from pre-service people in training to professionals at all levels of the career ladder who are in-service, and then bring research and practice, theory and clinical practice together on an ongoing basis, you create the kind of environment in the school, potentially, that will allow for continuing focus on training and development over a period of time.

I think I will stop there, other than to say on professional development, there has always been tension, it seems to me, among three approaches, from a policy perspective, to professional development. The individual teacher should decide. She or he is a professional and knows best what that person needs to improve. There's some truth in that. But I don't always necessarily know what my needs are. I have to have somebody point them out to me where I might get a little better. So that then often leads to system kinds of direction, policy direction for professional development.

Then the third piece, which seems to be getting a little bit more support in the literature, is school based professional development, where communities of teachers come together around the real work of the school and work together in teams, or in small schools, or in small learning communities and large ones, around a particular area of professional development, in math or in science in this case. And that I think it would be useful for you to think through what piece of this is individually driven, what piece may be system driven, whether it's federal, state, or local school board, or superintendent's office, and what really ought to be school based, if what we're all after is school improvement within systems of schools that give direction for taking everybody to higher standards.

And then I think you have to say something about evaluation. How do we know that we've got it right, because there's been very little hard nosed evaluation done around professional development that gives us a lot of direction on what the pay off is of the resources we're putting in?

This page last modified April 24, 2000 (gkp)