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

SENATOR GLENN: Now we'll move to a panel, and we'd like to hear from voices in the field about what is needed to deliver high quality instruction in math and science. Michael Lach, a physics teacher, Cindy Chapman, first and second grade teacher, Janice Jackson, former deputy superintendent in Boston Schools, Barbara Blumenthal, management consultant.

Many of you expressed interest at the first Commission meeting to learn from business about the process and change and empowerment of employees. And I hope the articles in the briefing book stimulated some of your thinking in that regard so I?m sure this panel will provide even more stimulation.

Michael Lach ? high school science teacher

MR.LACH: Well, I guess we?ll just get started here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Let me give you a bit of background. I?m a physics and environmental science teacher at Lake View High School in Chicago, right on the northwest side of the city. Before teaching there, I taught in New York City Schools for a year, and spent three years in the Orleans Parish Public Schools down in New Orleans. My classroom experience is all in inner city schools with regular neighborhood kids who are mostly of color, and almost all of them are really poor. They are schools that many people don't want to be with, to say, and most people don't really want to teach there either. But I'm happy for my experience.

This year, I am working as a fellow in the office of Congressman Vern Ehlers. In reflecting on the question, what does it take for teachers to deliver high quality instruction, several things come to mind: content knowledge, subject specific pedagogical knowledge, administrative support, the ability to relate with kids, the ability to think quickly on your feet. I'll only touch on a few of those in my remarks here, and hopefully we can address more of them in the discussions to come later on.

I need to start with the simplest and most immediate concern for me, which is that of materials and supplies. To do hands-on instruction, to do any sort of instruction, it takes equipment, and that stuff just isn't there in the schools that I work in. When I taught in New Orleans, I received $50 a year for equipment and 200 Xerox copies a month. Things are a little better now in Chicago, I'm up to $700 about a year, and I can make as many copies as I want to, but it's still not nearly enough. Not only is it not a proper amount, but also it's clear that the administrators think they know more about the sort of resources and effective science education needs much more than I do.

So I end up spending about $2,000 of my own money a year on computers, on chalk, on markers, on paper, and after doing this for nine or ten years, it's a pretty strong disincentive to go somewhere else. We're just not delivering what we need to.

On top of that is the problem of classrooms that are falling apart, and large class sizes, so it's clear that there is a resource allocation difficulty with our schools, and that's easy to fix. Something that's a bit more complicated is the idea of what pushes me forward. When I teach, I always have in mind a vision of accomplished practice that I work towards. It usually comes from a master teacher I've met at a workshop, or an article I've read, and it always changes. But it keeps me going and it keeps me doing things in my classroom to improve things.

When I started, I wanted to be like a fellow named Jeff White who teaches in rural Georgia, and he showed me how he had his students floating on a homemade hovercraft when he dealt with friction and force and motion. And he has more demonstrations and tricks than Bill Nye, The Science Guy, and I thought, I want to do that.

After a little while I then said, I met this fellow named Lowell Herr who teaches at a very prestigious private school in Portland, Oregon, and he has his entire physics lab networked with computers and uses interfaces and probes to do all the data acquisition. His students do curve fits, they do histograms, they do PowerPoint presentations, just like people in the real world do. And I thought, my inner city kids need to be doing that as well, and I want to be like him.

And after a few years of working to do that, then I said, I need to be like this fellow named Rich Kaplan who teaches in Chicago. And he created a culture of trust and communication and rigorous mathematics that really infused the entire school and made it so his school has the highest percentage of seniors taking AP calculus in the country. And these are inner city working class kids who are really excited about thinking academically and thinking about math.

So this vision is really important. It gives me a sense of where I need to go to so I can continue to improve my practice and change what I'm doing. With the support to get there, with the incentives, with the administration and the school system working to help teachers improve, coupled with that vision, I think we'll really see an increase in student learning.

As the video segments and the presenters yesterday made clear, the environment in the school in the classroom plays a big role in teaching and learning. High quality instruction demands the integration of the research base with the teacher, the student and the environment. But, as you also heard yesterday, that's a much trickier job than it seems, and the schools that I'm familiar with just don't provide the time, the resources, the incentives, the know-how to the teachers to make that happen. Most teachers have never been in a real meeting, and don't really know how to conduct a meeting themselves. It's pulling teeth sometimes just to get an agenda beforehand. It's not something teachers do; we've never been told to do it.

In the past years, I've changed sort of how I run my classroom, I've been more and more dependent on NSF curriculum because they're prepackaged, and there's an incredible research base behind them. But even more important than that is the community that comes with it. With all of them there's a bunch of researchers, and there's a couple of universities, and there's a cadre of teachers who know this stuff and are working with it. And I can e-mail them, and call them, and meet with them over the summers and over breaks, and get the sort of professional development and the enthusiasm from them that my school doesn't provide for me. And that's important.

Most schools and school systems are run by managers, not by visionaries. The people that make sure the t's are crossed, the i's are dotted, the forms are in, and all the minutia are taken care of. There's a lot of truth to the old teacher's adage that says if you really want your students to learn, you stay away from the office and the administrators at all cost. To deliver high quality instruction, teachers need the freedom and flexibility to be innovative and creative and they need to be accountable in meaningful ways for those results. Unfortunately, the schools that I've worked with are a long ways from both of these parts. Classrooms tend to be micromanaged by district curriculum and by overly enthusiastic administrators.

And the assessment instruments don't paint a very clear picture of the complexities of learning science. There are creative teachers or even good teachers in every school who want to create wonderful learning experiences, but they're often not recognized and they're rarely empowered to help other teachers attain that same success. The example yesterday of creating the sort of intellectual discomfort, where kids feel uncomfortable with the content, and really pushes them, is not encouraged by many administrators, because it leads to discipline problems, and to noisy classrooms, and to broken equipment, which can be problematic.

Accountability in science learning still isn't quite where we need it to be. Attendance, class enrollment, college acceptance are downplayed in return for emphasis on standardized test scores. Unfortunately, these tests often look like math or reading tests, not science tests. And correlation to standards seems to mean make sure that the headers on the chapters match up from one document to the next. I think it's possible to create a rigorous assessment that would be able to show what students know and are able to do in science, but my sense is it probably would look really pretty different from what we're using now.

Those are only a few of my suggestions. I have many more. But I'll pass on to my next panelist here. Thanks.

Cindy Chapman ? first and second grade teacher

MS. CHAPMAN: Okay. Now, I don't use these things very often, is this good? You can hear me okay? Can?t hear me? My name is Cindy Chapman. I teach first and second grade at Inez Science and Technology Magnet School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We're a public school where we used to have some say in who went to our school, but we've lost a little bit of that now because our state has implemented choice, which we want people to have choice of what schools they go to, and a lot of people want to come to our school, and they should because -- I think I'm at the "died and gone to heaven" school, because at my school I have tremendous support.

This summer, we participated in a wonderful science project, professional development project that my principal came for two weeks and studied science with us, and is helping us teach the classes and will help us take our field trips. I'm in a wonderful place.

I have had more opportunities for professional growth than I think most teachers have. And in some ways I have an embarrassment of riches. But this is really what it ought to be like for everybody.

So let me tell you a little bit about what it's like for me. Ten years ago, I had the wonderful privilege of being a fellow in an NSF grant that was supported by Exxon called the New Mexico Fellows for the Advancement of Mathematics Education. For three years, we studied mathematics content taught to us the way that we wanted to teach mathematics, but we weren't likely to do it. We had training, we?d been studying the NCTM standards. We'd been to NCTM. I had had some fabulous training, which did include some strong content knowledge help in AFT's ER&D thinking mathematics, which my colleague Alice Gill was my teacher. But I got to be in this New Mexico Fellows for the Advancement of Mathematics Education, and learned math taught to me the way I wanted to teach math.

We had algebra, trigonometry, geometry all rolled together for about three semesters. We had math history, probably the most important math class I've ever taken in my life, because it was when I took math history that I discovered that there was a place in the world of mathematics for me, and that teeny little old second grade teacher that I was, I was a math teacher, and math was important to me, and I could do math and I could understand math. And I loved that math history course so much that I asked my teacher, who was Florence Bathanelli of the NEA, I asked her to come last year to the NCTM program in San Francisco, and do a mini-course especially for elementary teachers on math history. And one of my colleagues wrote in the Exxon Intersection Newsletter about how important that course had been for her, and it just made my whole life. So that was a thrill.

What is important about the fact that I have this better understanding of math content paired with how to teach it in a good way is that I know how to listen to my students. And I have faith in my students and I trust in the mathematics. So that I know that if they get confused, and if they get lost, it's a wonderful thing, and it will make sense eventually. And I have great faith in my students, so that I take the wait time. And I am insanely curious about what they think and what they understand, and what are they going to do next. And I love their misconceptions just as much as I love their conceptions, and we all study and learn together, and my students strongly believe that there is more than one way to solve problems, and that they will be able to come up with a way to solve it.

In fact, once you tell children that there is more than one way to solve problems, you have a really hard time getting problems to stop, because somebody always wants to come up with another way to show you that they figured out how to solve a problem, which is such a joy.

Well, my biggest joy is this year, I am teaming with a first year teacher who student taught with me last year, and he is a graduate of Iowa State University, and came to student teach in Albuquerque through Exxon, mutual Exxon connections that we have, and the joy of watching him do things that he has seen me do, I know he's seen me do them, is just indescribable. The questions that he asked, he is clearly a gifted teacher. And, boy, is he the best and brightest, and do we want to keep him. And I hope there's lots more like him out there.

To listen to him ask my students, how do you know today is Friday, what makes you so sure, can you convince the rest of us that today is Friday, and we'd do our little calendar math every day, insisting that students explain and justify their thinking, and be able to convince other people. And then being willing to let mistakes hang, and step back, and see if anybody notices, and can anybody else disabuse this person of this notion, or shall we all just stick with this misconception for a while and mess around with it, and come back to it later, and be able to plan together situations that will make that happen. It is a "died-and-gone-to-heaven" place.

I just hope that the kind of recommendations that you come up with will have something to do with the importance of content knowledge being taught to teachers the way that we need to teach it.

Janice Jackson ? college instructor and former deputy school superintendent

MS. JACKSON: I have several comments, and so if I start to go too long, somebody just flag me. And I say that because when I look at my own background as it relates to science and mathematics, and as it relates to preparing people to deliver excellent teaching in classrooms, it's complex. And so I think about my own background. I am a teacher who taught sixth, seventh and eighth grade, I taught mathematics, and I was shocked that they let me teach math because I came from a family where my sister was what we called science smart. My sister was a year older than I am was science smart, and I was just smart. And so, that meant I wasn't as smart as she, yet, when we took the same Algebra II class, I did better than she did. But somehow or another, I thought I didn't get math and science because everyone talked about how she was science smart.

So I taught sixth, seventh and eighth graders in mathematics, but I've never taught science. And I assumed that I was just supposed to know the math and teach the math. So that's what I did. But what I discovered when I left the field, and I did leave education for a short time, was that the teacher who replaced me didn't have a clue how to teach. And she called me up and asked me, how do you teach math. And the first question she asked me was, how do you teach a number line. Now, I thought everybody knew just physically how a number line worked. That's one of the basic things in math. She didn't have a clue.

So I went in, and I brought some kids well, actually, what happened was, I went in to help her, kids saw my car in the parking lot, and they said, can we come too. So, what I did was demonstrate with these children how you could teach them something as basic as a number line. But what that opened for me was this inquisitiveness about how do we help teachers teach that which they do not understand. Because this woman, as much as she loved kids and as hard as she worked, she really didn't understand something that basic. So, I've spent most of my career with this particular teacher in mind.

I substitute taught algebra and geometry in a high school. They handed me the textbook, a copy for me, no teacher's edition, and said "Go teach." And I said, okay, because I figured I'd taken it, I could teach it. What I discovered was, I?d taken it, I couldn't teach it. And I had to think about how did what I do affect the learning of the children who sat before me, and how could I be comfortable with what I didn't know. And that, for me, was a real blessing to find comfort with saying, I don't get it all, but we can figure it out.

I then served, after a couple of other things, as deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education for the U.S. Department of Ed, which meant that I visited schools across this country, and American schools abroad, for the Department of Defense. And what I discovered in visiting those schools is that people are very well meaning, they want to do the best that they can, but they're not always sure what to do. And I say that because I got into some deep trouble when I was in Boston when I said, one of the things we have to deal with are teacher expectations. And largely teacher expectations for students of color. And when I said that, and started to try to have that conversation, people were insulted. They told me that I was teacher bashing, that I didn't get it. And then what it led me to understand in my role in Washington, and then my role as deputy in Boston, was that we don't know much about the science, the craft, and the art of teaching.

Now, I've heard a lot of people talk about that, but there are people who are putting information out there, who have done research, who have talked to teachers, and I really encourage you, I've looked at what's in your binder, but I encourage you to talk to more and more of those people who are thinking about what does it really take to be a good teacher. And I'm saying that because right now it's in vogue in this country to say, anybody can teach. Everybody is talking about, we can just take them out of industry, we can take them out of the military, they can run our school districts, and they can teach our children. We don't say that about our dentists, our doctors, our accountant, our lawyer, but anybody can deal with the most precious gift we have, which is the minds and hearts of our children. I think we have to step back and ask some real questions about that.

I think we have to look at education as it leads to results, and I heard conversation this morning about the need to be results oriented. When I did the change and worked on the change in Boston, which I will talk a little bit about, we were results oriented. But, we also knew that in order to get results, we had to pay attention to process, and that education is a human endeavor. And we can pretend that we're working with widgets, but we are not. We are working with adults who stand before children who have emotional and psychological needs as well as needs to teach and to learn.

So I think it's very important that we keep in mind, what are we really talking about here. So, one caution that I would give to the Commission, as I was listening this morning, is please, please, please go out and visit schools, because the reality that I had as I worked as deputy superintendent and visited schools across this nation is not the reality that I was hearing discussed this morning. I think you need to see what it really means when you talk about having an understanding of the discipline.

When I was a K-8 teacher, when I taught sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, I taught seven subjects. There is no way on God's earth I could be an expert in seven subjects. And my major was in sociology with a minor in elementary education. So, how do we help people learn to teach in those ways.

So I think we need to help with materials, as I heard earlier, that there have to be materials that are understandable to teachers, make sense to them, but also help them ponder, and encourage them to say, "I don't know, but together we can find out." I think we need to make sure that teachers understand knowledge about how children learn. I heard someone say, we have to stop just talking about teaching, we need to talk about learning. One of the things that I discovered made me a good teacher, and I discovered it because people came back and told me, was that I spent time figuring out, when we were doing work, where were the holes in children's thinking. So, if we're doing a tough problem, and it's complex, I could say, no, the answer is X, and move on, or I could say, now, let's walk through this step-by-step, but it meant I had to know something about the subject matter, and I had to know something about the discipline, and I had to not be afraid to wander into unknown territory. That is not easy, and most of us don't do that in our own jobs, but we say that teachers have to.

So I think we need to spend a lot of time looking at learning, the developmental side of learning, and it's not new information. There are people out there who have written about it, who have talked about it, and who have implemented professional development that's based on how children learn.

I think we need a clear vision about how schooling is connected to the real world. And by that many teachers have never done anything but be in school, and so their lives, they went to school, they went to school K-12, then they went to learn to be a teacher, and then maybe they're a teacher and go on to be a principal, but their entire life has been in schools. It's important that they get experiences that allow them to see how what their work does connects to what happens outside of schools, and there are ways to do that.

And then, finally, I think, teaching requires that we have an inquiring mind. Now, that's another thing that I think helped me be a good teacher. I was always wondering, when I was hearing the earlier speaker talk, I always wanted to know why, and so I was asking why, and people would want to shut me up, and I would still say, well, I don't get it, why. And I encourage my students that I taught in K-12 to think that way, and I encourage the students that I teach in teacher education at this moment to think that way. And they kind of laugh at me, because every assignment that I give them, the last piece of the assignment is called reflection, reflection on why did you make the choices you made, learning to expect the unexpected, so what do you anticipate will work, and what might be problematic. And then I ask them to talk about, what might you do in a different way now that you've reflected on this. It makes them crazy, but they tell me it helps the next lesson be better. So, I said, I've got to have courage and let them be crazy because what they say is, she's tough, and she makes us pay attention to the details, and I said, put that on my evaluation, I like that one. But it was supposed to be intimidating to me.

What have I observed, if I think those are important things about education, what have I observed in schools, when I was working in K-12, and trying to improve education in Boston? I think it's very important that we pay attention to teacher time and give teachers time for reflection, that we provide opportunities for teachers to dissect what they're doing. When I am teaching at Boston College, one of the things I always do for my students is, I step back and say, what do you see me do, and then we talk about why I use some of the teaching strategies that I used. I think it's important that we provide opportunities for teachers to be in study groups about problems of practice that they choose, not what the administrator chooses, or what researchers choose, but what's important to them, and how will they find solutions with their colleagues.

I think it's also very important that we ask people to serve as mentors and as coaches to teachers in classrooms so that you don't go in and close your door and say, it's my classroom, I'll do whatever I want to do, but you ask people to give you feedback on the work that you're doing.

I think one of the critical things that we have to look at, and then I'm going to stop, is we have to look at the role of administrators in the work that we do. As the deputy superintendent, I ran a business. I ran a $700 million business. Now, what I tried to do was to say, at each level of the organization, because I tried to look at it systemically, what needs to happen if we're going to deliver high quality teaching? A piece of that, I tried to look at the business literature, and we used John Kotter?s book, Leading Change, and I was fascinated. And made all our people read it, and we did text based discussion, all the senior leaders read it, and they didn't get it. And a part of why they didn't get it is, you can't take the business literature and just overlay it onto education, because some of the circumstances are different in important ways. So I then had to go on and translate, because it made sense to me, but it didn't make sense to them.

So I think one of the things I would encourage us to do is to look at where the place is where we talk about change and reform in the business environment that can help education, but we learn to make those translations. And I would encourage each of us, the Commission in particular, but I continue to encourage myself, to have courage that there are some tough things that you will need to say, and you may need to go against the grain when you talk about high stakes testings, that cannot be the only means of discovering results for kids, that you say that, that it must be multi-measure, because you do it in your own organizations. Yet, when it comes to schools we say, it's only this way.

I would encourage you also to get behind this issue of local control. When I heard the gentleman from the UK speak this morning, he spoke about a very, very different education system than we have in the United States. So, I think it is doable that the federal government can have a role, or I would not have worked for the federal government. But it is a different circumstance, and we cannot just overlay one on the other. So I ask you to grapple with the complexities of what that would really mean.

And then, finally, I would encourage you to talk to people who actually do the work of teacher change, like John Safire who is the president of Research for Better Teaching, or Lauren Resnick, who is at the University of Pittsburgh, looking at, who runs the Institute for Learning, you could look at the National Urban Alliance, which has really turned a couple of school districts inside out. But this is about getting at the real deal of dealing with human beings as they work in classrooms. So I applaud you for your work and your commitment, but I encourage you to take on the tough issues, and deal with the reality of school, not the school that we want to see in this room.

Barbara Blumenthal ? management consultant

DR. BLUMENTHAL: My name is Barbara Blumenthal. I'm a management consultant. I'm the person that's supposed to talk about the private sector and what lessons can be learned, even if you do have to translate some of them.

I want to start off by asking a question. Everything I heard today, and in the readings that I had done to prepare for this, tell me that there?s a huge challenge. I think it was James Stigler who pointed out in one of his articles, the whole effort to reform education in the last 20 years has directly avoided what happens in the classroom. And I would like to direct my comments today really to that challenge. It's cultural change, there's a lot of experience with cultural change in the private sector, and I think we can probably share some of those insights with you today.

But it starts with a very interesting question, which is a question for this Commission: whether large scale cultural change is really required to improve math and science teaching. When I heard the descriptions this morning of what good teaching looks like, and the difference between what currently exists and what quality teaching looks like, this is not a small change. We're not talking about a few adjustments, we're not talking about spending a little more money, we're not talking about buying a few supplies, we're talking about getting into the hearts and minds of teachers and having them perform their jobs in a fundamentally different way.

So that's a question for you. Are there large numbers of teachers out there like Michael and Cindy and Janice, is this what the national survey would tell you, we have large numbers of teachers out there who are dissatisfied with their own performance, who are looking for new techniques, and if that's what you decide, then the job of the Commission is relatively simple. You can identify best practices, you can give them new insights, you can document through videotapes a range of approaches, the rest will be easy, because you have willing teachers out there who are just ready to jump on that bandwagon and go off and do exciting things.

If, on the other hand, there are relatively few such teachers out there in the country, and the vast majority of teachers are comfortable with their approach, and are not looking -- and are told that they're good teachers, and believe that they're good teachers, then you have a very different challenge. And the central challenge becomes how to develop the leadership at a local level that will help teachers who are not already motivated to change to want to improve their performance. Once they want to, the rest, as I said to somebody the other day, is relatively easy. And they said, well, it's not all that easy. But once you get to the point where teachers want to improve their performance, it almost doesn't matter which approach they adopt. You know, you begin to see improvement, and then you begin to learn, and you begin to question whether your new approaches are better, and you're on your way.

So I want to talk a little bit about what we've learned in the private sector on the same kind of topic. First of all, whenever a company says we want to improve our performance through things like better customer service, better quality, improved productivity, these are not things that a CEO, no matter how good he is, can dictate. I should say he or she -- he or she is-- can dictate. These are fundamental cultural and behavioral changes. You don't get better quality or better customer service until there's a front line employee, or front line manager who begins to do their job in a fundamentally different way. So it's widespread cultural change in large business organizations that have led to the kind of performance improvements that many of you have heard about.

The job of creating cultural change falls to front line managers, front line and middle managers bear the brunt of it. And the most difficult step in the private sector has always been getting people motivated to want to improve. So, and then once they want to it doesn't matter whether you use reengineering or activity-based costing, or quality circles, it almost doesn't matter what methodology you use, once they're engaged in the need to improve performance, they're on their way. So I'm concerned very much with that first step, the first step of taking an organization, whether it's a school district or a school and creating a culture where the teachers want to begin to take these steps to improve performance.

Since I see leadership as the central challenge, let me offer a very specific suggestion about how you might develop school-based leadership. It's based on some very specific approaches that we've learned work pretty well in the private sector. First, the first point is that leadership is developed on the job, it's not something you can learn in a classroom, it's not a training session. It's something that you learn on the job. Unfortunately, if teachers are isolated in the classroom, it appears that principals are pretty isolated, as well. So you need some very special efforts to help principals learn leadership skills. I would suggest a workshop. It's not a traditional workshop, because I read in some of the literature a lot of criticism of the traditional approaches to professional development in education.

This is a very different kind of workshop. It has an action learning format, which means that you take principals who are currently facing a challenge of a major change initiative in their school, and you bring them together as a group, and you give them -- they come to the workshop with their issues and their challenges. You give them some information, some background, some case stories of other districts, other schools that have done it well. You give them some conceptual background on the problems of change, of why people resist change and a lot of other techniques and tools that have been used in a variety of settings. But it's all intended to help them come up with solutions to their own problems.

So they're coming to this workshop to figure out their next steps, the things that are most frustrating to them as they are trying to get their teachers to adopt new approaches. And they go off and go back to their schools, and they probably come back about two months later. So they would return to the workshop about every two months for a day, for a full day maybe over the course of a year, and during that time they will make progress. They will make progress, because they are learning some skills and some tools and techniques that are useful to them, because there is a network of people in a similar situation that they're able to share information with, and there's a little bit of peer pressure going on, because you come to the workshop and in two months you come back and you ask each other, well, how did it go?

So you have a chance to reflect on what worked, what didn't work, and you can begin to get at, after a while, some of the skills that it takes to be an effective leader. So it's a safe environment where you can actually do some practicing of skills. We assume that principals somehow just have these skills, and know how to listen, that they're effective coaches. We found in the private sector that when we start these change initiatives, most middle managers are not very good coaches. And they need a lot of help to improve their coaching skills, and none of this will work unless principals are good coaches. So it's a setting where you can begin to get at some of these skills, as well as concepts and techniques.

I think the most important thing, okay so, one of the challenges is, from reading the literature in the last couple of days, as I understand it there is not a lot of history of investing in development of teachers. I suspect that there's even less money invested in the development of principals and other leaders. So this would obviously be an issue. It turns out this kind of approach is not very expensive. It's a lot less expensive than having consultants go into each and every school and tell them what the answer to their problems are, and help them implement solutions. So this is a much -- actually a fairly inexpensive approach to helping principals lead their own change efforts. So I guess if you conclude that the behaviors of large numbers of teachers is a central issue facing this Commission, then you're going to have to invest in principals. You're going to have to invest in leadership development.

I want to end by making an important point. I don't want to leave the impression, just because I talk about resistance to change and teachers who aren't motivated to change, that teachers, or that employees in general are the problem. We've learned in the private sector that employees are not the problem. That the problem are, is the way that we manage, the organization context that we create, the systems that we use that make people provide indifferent customer service, or poor quality. And the answer is, when we fix the way we manage, and we improve the processes and our systems, and our management style, that these same employees do phenomenal things. And they do it because they're excited, they're committed, and they want to do good work. And they do -- they end up performing in ways that top management never even thought was possible. So the problem is not the people. I just want to make that point.

Everything that I've read tells me that cultural change in education, there's some important differences between the private sector and education. There's also important differences between what we heard this morning in the U.K. and the problems that would be faced in the U.S. I think that a directed approach to change, which sometimes gets things started in the private sector, which is what they're doing in the U.K., is a very directed top down approach to change, I can't imagine that it's going to work that well in the U.S. And that you have to take an approach that's much more bottom up, that really engages teachers and their willingness to make improvements, rather than forcing a new better way of teaching instead of the old way of teaching, but you haven't begun to address the questions of do teachers care about this change, have teachers even surfaced their own assumptions and beliefs so that they believe in this new approach. So there's a lot of things that he talked about today. I wish he were here. I'm not sure how far that change effort, how deep that change effort is going to go.

So the last point is that the Commission, I've heard a lot of talk about talking about what the right answer looks like, almost, what good teaching looks like. I think that that's probably -- you could get very deeply into an area that won't get the Commission very far if you put too much effort into figuring out what the right answer is, or even what the set of right answers are. Instead, if you can focus on the process of change, and how to get an organization from here to there, I think you'll have a much more productive outcome.

So when you're capturing those lessons about what good teaching looks like, I would also make sure you capture the lessons about how that school got there. What the principals did, what the leadership did, and all those other variables that will help people, when you make your presentations, it will help people to understand how to take the first step, and what the change process needs to look like for their school district.

MR. LACH: If I understand this procedure correctly, then we'll just go around one more time briefly and make a few more comments.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Can I suggest in the interest of time, that maybe we should open it to Qs and As, you might turn some of your comments to the questions that are relevant.

MR. LACH: Very well then, questions.

MEMBER: May I start? Yesterday and today we've seen the elements of content, students, and teachers. This morning parents and the community were brought up. Let me bring a fifth one out, and that is something that you all brought out and that is the element of the bureaucracy that we have to deal with. Be it principals, administrators, middle management, superintendents, district staff, school boards, which Senator Glenn has brought up several times, all of you have stated the importance of dealing with these bureaucrats. And my colleague from New Hampshire and I had a long discussion as to why he left education, and why many teachers are leaving education. And that is because of the lack of support, which is your case, and why you happen to flourish in your field, because you have your principal who is very, very supportive. I'd like to listen a little bit more as to your experiences and opinions as to what we perhaps as a Commission need to do to deal with this particular element, which is the element of bureaucracy in education?

MS. CHAPMAN: First of all, I think somebody somewhere needs to tell the public and the powers that be that teachers cannot be held accountable for things over which we have no control. It is demoralizing and insulting to have schools and teachers and principals punished because poverty students don't do well on tests. And when tests are the only thing that you look at, you have to know that you hinder innovation instead of encourage it. So I think that somewhere in there you need to say something along those lines.

MR. LACH: But, we also want lots of accountability. I want people to see that I'm doing a good job, and to get credit for that. And the sad truth of the matter is that good teaching isn't rewarded, and bad teaching isn't punished. There's lots of people who just stay in the classrooms year after year, after year, and they really shouldn't be there. It's too hard to get rid of them.

MS. JACKSON: I just want to say, I am one of those bureaucrats, or was one of those bureaucrats. I'm now in teacher education. But, I ran a district. And I was one of those when people said "them," they were talking about me. I think we have to look at schools and school districts organizationally and systemically, and that we have to hold people accountable at each level, but if we're always going to talk about who to blame, we're not going to figure this out. The question is, at each level of the organization what needs to be happening that enables the kind of teaching that we need to have.

And I look just at Massachusetts, we know just by state test scores if you're a high states testing person we know that our students are not doing well on those tests. So what happens? When the legislature goes to pass the budget, the governor cuts out major money to help with education, and there's no uproar. So what happens, people then say, the administration was bad, the teachers in schools are bad. When the resources weren't there to do what we were being asked to do. So I don't think this is just about blame. It's about how do we help people get the skills they need.

Now, what we found in Boston was, when it came to school administrators, people don't want to do the job. When you look at what the job entails, largely people are not trained to do it, it's changed dramatically over time. And so we had to grow our own, which meant that we had to start going out and encouraging people to take on the principalship, and see it as an honorable role, knowing that you had to have thick skin to do it. And that had to be purposeful. But I was one of them. So people can bash, but it's not going to get us anywhere.

MEMBER: A question I have relates to your own individual preparation in teaching, basically when you were undergraduates. How many of you were education majors? Okay. If you had to do it over again, in terms of the courses that you took to become a teacher, are there any courses that come to mind that were a waste of time which you could have had other things that were a lot better? I think this is important, I mean, I think we've all been through that, but I don't think we've talked to that.

MS. CHAPMAN: I don't think any of my elementary ed courses were really -- I think elementary and secondary had a very different -- we tend to have different attitudes about our preparation and about our education courses. They were good. I did not have enough training in how to teach reading, and I have had to seek that on my own, thank goodness, along with many other wonderful things, opportunities I've had, I did have training in better ways to teach reading, and I'm proud of that. I don't know if this is the place to say it, I think we have got to look at the role of the elementary teacher differently.

I'm not sure that generalists can be experts at everything, I know we can't. And my partner and I try to share some of the load of the instruction so that we can concentrate more on polishing our lessons in areas where we feel we have more expertise. He has an emphasis in science, I have lots of background in math. We're both teaching math, we're both teaching reading, we're both teaching a little bit of science, he's doing most of it. But, I'm not sure that anybody ought to try to teach everything all by themselves in elementary school. So maybe that's something that preservice needs to look at, too.

MS. JACKSON: I was an elementary minor, but we had as many credits in our minor as we did in our major, as a sociology major. But, one of the things that I think I would have done differently, I don't know that I would have chosen sociology. I chose it as -- because I had to have another major. I didn't think about becoming an expert in a discipline, and I might have thought about that in a different way, and talked to my own students in teacher ed about do what you love, take on that discipline, so you become an expert in a discipline. I just chose one because I had to have a major. And in retrospect I would have chosen something different.

But I think in terms of what we're doing in teacher education now at Boston College, and I'm in teacher education and educational administration, so I'm preparing principals, teachers and superintendents, is part of what we have to help people learn to do is to remember that education is about learning, and about inquiring minds, and someone said that, it's about curiosity, and helping people have a thirst for wonder. But it's a thirst for wonder grounded in getting someplace. This isn't a journey that goes nowhere. It's a journey that has to get students somewhere. So how do we help teachers think about what the goals are for their school, for their classroom, what's required of them in terms of instructional strategies, and care for students, and then how do they assess whether kids accomplish what they intended, and what does that mean for improving their own practice.

And so I've been teaching at Boston College since my third semester, and I've changed my course each time. And I work with my students to say, when you've done a lesson ponder what went well and what needs to change. And I think that's a dramatic shift in what's happening and in the way we teach teachers.

MEMBER?S DESIGNEE: I'd like to ask just all of you a question, one of the phenomena that is occurring in I think many districts, I know Cincinnati the best, and all of you talked about accountability, the principal is a key and is a middle manager, the bureaucracy, this whole issue of pay for performance, particularly in schools that enroll high poverty children, it seems to me that in that situation we are adapting a principle that works in business but may not work in education, at least the retirement rate of principals is fairly interesting in Cincinnati at this point in time. Do any of you have experience with that or reflections on it?

MR. LACH: I think it makes sense sort of in theory, but it's very hard to identify what we mean by performance. If performance is, if you can pick A, B, C, or D correctly, that might not be the smartest thing to do. If performance is a community review of a body of work that the student has done in a really rich manner, that might be much more effective. I don't think we know how to assess what students know about science in a way that provides for sound policy. At least, I don't know of a way.

MEMBER?S DESIGNEE: Usually of course it's test scores, standardized test scores raising and attendance rates and those kinds of things.

MS. JACKSON: I don't know pay for performance. That's not what's been done very much in education, but I would caution, has it really worked in business, because there are a lot of people making a lot of money that aren't necessarily performing well. And so I wouldn't want to assume that that's the only answer. However, I do think there's an issue about respect that we have to talk about. When I think of what I earned running a $700 million organization, and what business people earned who ran organizations less complex with a far less lower bottom line, it didn't compare. And when you think about teachers do every day, and what their equivalents would be in other sectors, I don't think it's just about pay for performance, I think it's about how do we give people dignity, and how do we reward them and give them incentives to stay in the profession.

When I left education, I left the same year -- graduated from school, rather, the same year as my sister who was a chemical engineer, she made $10,000 a year more than I did. Now, something is wrong there. I don't think it's just about pay for performance, though I think performance is a piece of it, and performance has to be measured with multiple measures. It's about generally how do we compensate teachers for what they're expected to do. And how do we ask them to do what they need to do with commensurate compensation.

MEMBER: Can I follow this question, maybe go a little bit further. Do you think it's possible we can devise a kind of tangible set of criteria for rewarding good performance, or incentives, not necessarily only in monetary terms, both in terms of school district, principals, and teachers. I think one of the problems -- I've worked primarily in the university education. I find the incentives are so important, even for the so-called real you know, esoteric scholars. And without that you cannot do. We have to also reward the department chairman, dean or chancellors. How can we devise a system, but tangible? Sometimes we can talk a lot but not really come down to more specific, you know, bottom line. I think if we can do that, that will carry us a lot further.

MS. JACKSON: I can tell you things that I saw work in Boston. One was opportunities for people to talk about their work. So we had what we called study groups, where teachers could write a grant proposal to the district, and we used Goals 2000 money. They could write a proposal to talk about a problem of practice that was important to them. And then they went out, formed a study group, they could contact experts, they could use the money to buy materials, whatever they wanted to use the money for to come to some resolution about the problem before them. That was one thing. I saw people feel rewarded when they were asked to be mentor teachers, when they were asked to work with other teachers to help them get better in practice. And then they got to either write about their work, or give presentations about their work. But, they got to talk out loud, think out loud about the work that they did, and began to see how powerful that work was.

And then the other thing that I found very helpful was to look at things like school-to-work, we call it School-To-Career in Boston, where the teachers actually went out and worked in industry at downtimes for the school district. So if they had students who were going to work in a hospital, they would at times go to work in that hospital, or if the students were working in the financial district, the teacher went out and worked in the financial district. So you not only got the opportunity to see what happened in the rest of the world, and how it related to your work, you were treated with respect. And often what happens is teachers aren't.

I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to a teacher's staff meeting, but they're appalling. They're nothing like what you see in a business meeting you know. Everybody rushes in, you sit in little kid chairs, and you're supposed to talk about intellectual things. It's a whole different environment. So I think there are incentives that are not just about pay. Though, I will say pay talks about respect, and that we need to think about what that is.

MS. CHAPMAN: And you're probably aware that it's very important to avoid competition when it comes to incentives. If there's only a small pot and only so many people can get it, then why would I be foolish enough to share my expertise with somebody who could get that money instead of me. So it can't be a stingy type thing.

MEMBER?S DESIGNEE: Barbara, if I could just ask you one question. You noted that the problem is not people, and then you provided three ideas that were problems, the way we manage, the organizational context, and the systems we use. And being involved in organizational transformation as you are, that organizational culture keeps coming back at us in almost every presentation that we hear. Could you sort of elaborate a little bit on the organizational context and how you can change the organizational context if people aren't part of the problem?

DR. BLUMENTHAL: So, what would a principal do to create a different kind of climate within a school?

MEMBER?S DESIGNEE: Without involving people. If people aren't the problem, and the culture is the problem, what I don't understand from what you've said is, how do you change the organizational context?

DR. BLUMENTHAL: You have an important point that culture is about a set of behaviors that are common in an organization, and the behaviors, obviously, are attached to people. I guess what I meant was, we shouldn't be blaming people for the way they behave, what we call the old behaviors. They were induced for a reason. We have created -- in the private sector we have many organizations that don't value openness. You go into meetings and you don't tell the truth, and you tell the truth out in the hallway after the meeting is over, you say that will never work after an hour-and-a-half discussion where nobody raised these fundamental objections. So, one of the most important things about creating a climate where learning can happen, which I think is what you're talking about in the schools, is creating some trust, and that has to come from leadership. Trust that you won't be punished for trying something new. You know how scary it is for a professional who says, I've been doing this job for 10 or 15 years and I'm very good at what I do, and you're asking me to do something where I will feel incompetent, and not just for a day or two. I'm going to feel incompetent for a while. That's what we've done in the private sector. And we have to make sure that it's okay to be incompetent for a while. So there's that issue.

There is also sort of an emotional reaction to change. I mean, we can have a long discussion about why people resist change. For a high school science teacher who has made that their life to say that you now have to change invalidates what they did before. So you have to help them overcome this sense that what I did before was wrong. So there's a lot of tricks. Anyway, you have to honor the past, it's okay, you were doing what was right at the time, but now we have to try something different.

So there are various ways of engaging people to help them come to terms with the need to change. But I think leadership plays a critical role in creating that environment where there is some trust, where there's openness, and where you have to sometimes teach people how to have that dialogue. You have to teach colleagues how to provide constructive criticism that will be heard, and how to offer their own ideas in a way that they're open to feedback. So, there are a lot of skills involved in this as well. And then you begin to create a different way of behaving, and when it becomes a common way of behaving, we call it culture. So then you've created a new culture within the school.

MEMBER: One issue we have not addressed yet is the use of technology in the classroom and its potential as a teaching aide, as a means for helping students learn. And I would just be interested in what your sense is where we are with that? Is some of the promise being realized, if not, why, and what you think the potential might be for the future?

MR. LACH: I'm a big tech person, and I think a lot of what we have in educational technology is still pretty unfocused. I don't think we quite know what to do with it. Providing the World Wide Web to all these students is great. It's more information than I know what to do with, much less my students, and they don't have much way of sorting through it, as one example.

However, in science, technology has really changed the way we go about figuring things out about the world around us. I use computers and probes in my class all the time. It means the usual cycle of activity in my class is, students collect data, do a curve fit, and then present their results to everyone else. So all the major equations in physics, from the kinematics equations to Newton's laws to E&M things are all discovered by students the same way physicists did it at one point using this technology. And that process of collecting data, analyzing it, and arguing from evidence, you really can't do that without using the computers. And, unfortunately, I don't see much of that dialogue happening in schools of education or in the professional communities. There are little pockets of teachers who sort of go about doing these sorts of things, and I think that would be a much stronger push for doing things.

I also think that technology can really help the teachers organize and manage their equipment. We talked about contexturalizing the instruction to the environment, and I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I tailor things so specifically that I take a textbook or some curriculum materials, scan it into my computer, OCR it, so then I can adapt the text so it's perfect for my students. I can add questions, I can take out questions, I can adapt things, I can change the pictures. I want it to be appropriate for my kids, that's what I have to do. And I think teachers should know how to do that, and be able to do that both within the copyrights and also within the legal aspects.

Using the World Wide Web and databases could allow for the collection of meaningful student work. My students can put their answers to questions in a database, which is also tied to scores on various tests and other answers, so at the end of a quarter, I have a very, an enormous database on my hard drive, but I also have a really rich amount of information, both pictures and words and numbers so that I can analyze my students. And I couldn't do that without the computer.

So I think those are the sorts of directions we should be moving instead of--

MEMBER: Could I just jump in? I think when we talk about technology, we always like to say it's instructional technology. But we should not underestimate the Internet or web page which has a lot of very important functions, networking. Really you can network a school district, teachers, principals, parents, students, and the content. In fact, right now, in the Internet activities the most fastest expanding right now is educational learning space. And I just hope people involved in a lot of school teacher and teaching and so on realize networking is so important to get everybody together. Before we didn't have that capability.

MS. JACKSON: You asked the question why do we think technology is not being used as well as it could be? In Boston, the mayor made a commitment to get, I think it was, one computer for every four or five children, and we've really worked hard to do that, working with many of the hardware companies. One of the problems I find is that the focus is about getting the hardware, it's not about instruction. And that, while I think you are right, we can use the web and the Internet in great ways, there's a lot of bad stuff out there on the Internet. And so, there is some thinking that has to go through that asks the question, how is technology value-added? Like, what is it that we can do with technology that we couldn't do if it wasn't there? And I don't think people are thinking about that well enough yet, which is something I think the Commission might want to make some comments about.

SENATOR GLENN: Thank you all very much. This has been very interesting.

This page last modified March 3, 2000 (sab)