Category Archives: Blog

Pandemic-informed Teacher Evaluation

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Teaching and learning in the pandemic may have proved Descartes wrong.  You don’t need to be in the classroom to see teaching to know that children learned.  Historic teacher evaluation systems requiring principals to sit in the classroom observing teaching were disrupted by remote and virtual instruction.  Prior to the pandemic, the evaluator needed to see the teacher doing teaching in order to evaluate the teaching.  For several semesters this was not possible due to the pandemic.  Yet, during the pandemic we still measured student learning performances and drew conclusions about a teacher’s work.  There is no evidence that state school superintendent or school boards suspended the evaluation of teachers during the pandemic.  Teachers were evaluated and contracts for subsequent school years were issued based upon a teachers work during the pandemic.  Voila!  The pandemic clarified that we can indeed use student learning outcomes to assess and evaluate a teacher’s proficiency in causing children to learn.

Let’s learn from this and change the construct of annual teacher evaluation. 

WI Stat 115.415 states that 50% of a teacher’s evaluation will derive from student performance measures and 50% from the teacher’s demonstration of the INTASC standards.  INTASC standards describe the requirements candidates for a teaching license must meet in teacher preparation programs.  The legislature eliminated the use of statewide academic assessments as student performance measures in 2019-20 due to the pandemic – that year only.  Accountability for student performance other wise was maintained in the statute.  The legislature did not consider that remote teaching made  administrators unable to observe a teacher’s comportment with the INTASC standards.  Either this was short-sighted or it recognized that observing these standards is not required to evaluate a teacher’s work.  I like the latter.

A continuing teacher evaluation practice looks like this.  There is annual accountability for student learning.

The school board annually approves the district’s curriculum for grade level and subject courses.  The district assigns licensed and prepared teachers to teach the approved curriculum.  Students by age group or subject interest and readiness are divided into classes and assigned to teachers for instruction.  The board’s expectation is that teachers will teach the assigned curriculum and students will learn that curriculum.

A new construct for teacher evaluation looks like this – principal/teacher agree on how the teacher will be evaluated, including specific student performances and teaching required to achieve those performances.

Why is principal/teacher agreement necessary?  Each class assignment is different, even for multiple sections of the same grade or subject, because the children in the assignment are different.  Each child approaches learning differently, some with known learning challenges and others with exceptional ease of learning.  The pandemic made this loudly clear in our remote education experience.  Individualization of instruction is more necessary now than ever before.

Secondly, the pandemic created greater learner spread.  From their remote experience, many children display missed or incomplete learning from the past two years of instruction.  There are a variety of reasons for this, but none matter today.  The challenges of making their learning complete is the matter.  Today, there is greater variance in learning status and readiness than in the pre-pandemic and this variance will not be alleviated quickly.

As new practice, the principal and each teacher create an annual evaluation plan for the teacher.  They  discuss the goals of the assigned curriculum and consider how the children assigned will require instructional modification and individualization in order to successfully learn the curriculum.  The evaluation plan recognizes different teaching for different classes and different children in each class.

The principal and teacher determine the student performances that will be used to evaluate the teaching of these children this school year.  The target is that all children will successfully learn the curriculum – the evaluated strategies for target achievement will differ teacher to teacher.  Last year’s measures may not fit this year’s class and the measures for the teacher in the next classroom may not fit this class.

Stop using the same evaluative measures for all teachers when we know that every teaching assignment is different.

This is not a weighting of teacher evaluations due to differences in children assigned.  All children will be successful learners.  This is differentiating and personalizing the evaluation measures used to determine that all children learned and acknowledging the teacher’s proficiency in teaching to all children.

Teacher evaluation too frequently is contentious and burdensome.  Stop making it so.  When principals and teachers collaborate in determining what will be evaluated they are equally invested in the teacher’s success.  Principals can gather evidence without the old scenario of everyone in the class knowing that on this day the principal is sitting in the back of the classroom watching the teacher and students as he evaluates the teacher.  Everyone also knew in yesteryear the principal would not be sitting in the back of the classroom evaluating tomorrow, next week, or next month.  Evaluation was like a dental check-up – do it once a year and get it over with.  This stilted scenario didn’t work well, so stop using it. 

The pandemic causes us to look at many of our usual practices asking “Why would we want to do it that way now?”.  Teacher evaluation is one of those.  Today we have too much at risk in the business of educating children; we cannot use systems that do not work.  We can collaborate, identify real learning targets and teaching strategies, and be accountable for evaluating teacher proficiency in causing learning without watching Descartes’ trees fall.

Hybrid School Year – A Rethought, Pandemic-informed School Calendar

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Every year school boards consider the school calendar for the next school year.  Setting the annual calendar is not only a statutory responsibility of a board but a very real statement of how the board views the provision of instruction to children.  The calendar sets the architectural structure of schooling.

Deep into the pandemic, the 2022-23 calendar also reflects what a school board has learned about its community and 21st century children.  Without argument, pandemic schooling will influence post-pandemic schooling for years to come.  Children, teachers, parents, and community are approaching 4K-12 education differently on the backside of their remote, virtual, and hybrid school experiences. 

A first question in this consideration should be “does a traditional calendar of 36 consecutive weeks of teaching and learning interspersed with traditional holidays provide the best teaching and learning calendar?”. 

The traditional calendar is derived from our agrarian/industrial history.  The agrarian context is that children are available for school between the fall harvest and spring farming seasons.  School began late in September and ended late in May.  Consequently, a school calendar is compacted to keep the summer months free of school.  In our state, tourism has replaced farming as the driver for a compact calendar.  Working-aged children provide the “grunt” labor for tourism.  The key element of the agrarian calendar is availability – children are available for schooling when they are not working.

The industrial context is the five-days a week assembly line of teaching and learning.  Get all of the age-eligible children in the schoolhouse, disperse them in a hierarchy of grade levels and academic courses and annually push them to the next level until the graduate.  Begin teaching the approved curriculum on day one, teach it in consecutive weeks and days  and finish learning nine months later.  The key element of the industrial calendar is daycare – children are in school so that adults are available for employment.

Public school shadowed the collegiate model of a two semester and four quarter block of 36 weeks of school or the amount of time required to teach one Carnegie unit of academic credit.  The test case in the early 1900s was a college course Biology – compacted into two semesters of 18 weeks each.  Voila! Our national educational leaders wanted high school to prep for college, so the college semesters because high school semesters and have been ever since.  The key element of the collegiate calendar is teaching time – a course can be taught (not necessarily learned) in semester blocks.

School boards have mandated a traditional, annual calendar based upon agrarian, industrial and collegiate models for more 100 years.  With such repetition this is the fallback calendar that most school boards first consider when they discuss a calendar for the next school year.  It also is the calendar that most adults in the community relate to, expect, and accept for the education of their children.

The most common rationale for why schools do what schools do is – that’s what school was like when I was a student.

The easiest action a board can take is to adjust the 180 days for interrupting holidays, place the first day of instruction on or after September 1, and vote to approve.  The most contentious discussion will be on the placement of spring break – when and how many days.  Finis.

But, does it provide the best teaching and learning architecture?  No.  Every school faculty, administration, and board has learned new things from our pandemic experience and a 1900s school calendar is archaic.

The second question in the board’s consideration of the next year’s calendar is “will we change the calendar using what we have learned?”.  It takes a lot of will power to move the status quo toward something new. 

What have we learned?

The pandemic taught us the prioritized value of school in our community is this:  school = day care.  Parents and employers are going ballistic when children are quarantined at home due to covid.  Remote education did not necessarily fail as an instructional delivery system.  It failed because adults at home were not able to support learning at home.  A child at home interrupts work routines.  Our economy accepts the agrarian/industrial model of nine months of school and three months of summer of children available for seasonal employment.  Employed parents have learned to work with the traditional calendar and do not like/want changes in the calendar the school publishes at the start of the school year.

We learned that parents and the community want their school to publicize an annual calendar parents and the community can count on.  Cancelling any calendared school day is problematic.

The pandemic is teaching us that the social-emotional or mental health development of children is a new priority.  The acculturation of children requires them to be in personal contact with each other.  Without daily school attendance, children become unruly, self-centered, and asocial.  Checking the school discipline reports after children returned to daily attendance is confirming these three characteristics. 

Parents want their schools to fix the pandemic-bred social-emotional problems children are exhibiting. 

The problem is in the arithmetic.  If it takes 36 weeks to teach a standardized curriculum in our 4K-12 instructional ladders, when will schools address social-emotional and mental health issues?  If we keep to the traditional calendar, some things will have to give.

Third, despite all optimistic reports, pandemic children are displaying gaps of missed and incomplete learning.  Early reading proficiencies require the personal attention of trained teachers.  Mathematical thinking, especially in the transitional years of fractions into Algebra requires constant conversation between teacher and child to assure accurate understanding and application of algebraic foundations.  On-line foreign language instruction is exceptionally difficult with the consistent and constant modeling of a teacher.  A child may have learned to blow into a trumpet while at home, but without the careful and constant modeling of a teacher in how to modulate breath, sound does not become music.

The pandemic caused missed and incomplete student learning.  It will take several years to make pandemic children complete in their curricular education. 

The sorting out of individual student needs as we work to make all children complete in their learning takes time for assessment and planning as well as more time for individual and small group work.  The same remedial plan is not needed nor appropriate for grade levels of children.  Some children suffer more missed and incomplete learning than others.  Children with exceptionalities, children in poverty without reliable Internet, and children without strong home learning supports for remote learning missed more essential learning and have more incomplete learning.  Individual attention is required to understand the wide variety of learning needs, planning and delivery of individual learning is required, and these take time.  Time is what the school calendar delivers. 

We require a hybrid calendar that meets our community’s traditional demands and completes our children’s educational needs.

The first step in creating a hybrid calendar is to address the length of the teacher’s annual contract.  The traditional contract shadowed the school calendar – 180 days plus paid vacation/holidays plus clerical/preparation days – made the contracted year 185+ days.  A contract of 185 – 190 days is not enough time for teachers to do the work we now require for the complete education of all children.

The contract must be expanded to encompass the work required in the new calendar.

Teachers need adequate time in front of the school year to evaluate the learning needs of each of the children in their assignment.  Generalizations about readiness for the next grade level or course not longer hold true.  The new generalization is – each child needs to be evaluated for readiness to learn and an individual learning plan needs to be devised for each child.  For example, most children promoted to second grade in SY 22-23 will have learned more than half of their first grade curriculum, but second grade will need to make all children secure in their first grade learning before or while teaching all children their second grade curriculum.  If not, children will need to return to first grade.  And, that is not going to fly with children or parents.

The social-emotional and mental health issues need to be melded into start of the school year routines and implemented throughout the school year.

Best teaching practices provide initial instruction, assess the success of initial learning, evaluate the need to adjust instruction for clarification, correction and extension, followed by continuing instruction informed by adjustments, and completion of the instructional unit with final assessments of learning.  This is the model the WI DPI is insisting upon in its re-certification of teacher preparation programs in our state.  The model requires time for careful assessment, evaluation of assessment data, and planning for instructional adjustments.  This model should be in the hybrid calendar.  And repeated several time during the school year.

Children in the post-pandemic need a school calendar that is based upon what we have learned from the pandemic experience and the best instructional practices we know for completing their ongoing education.  This calendar will move the status quo for future school calendaring.

A hybrid calendar based upon our pandemic learning and best practices looks like this.

Teachers have two weeks prior to September 1 to assess student readiness and needs and plan a first unit of instruction built around individual student plans.  Teachers have the full array of student assessment data and time to make data-informed instructional plans for the children they will teach.

School starts on September 1 or first day after if the first is a weekend day.

The first unit of instruction plus social-emotional and mental health inclusions will be completed in five weeks.  Add to the time required for the first unit the time needed for the school’s annual fall assessments.  At the end of the sixth week of school insert a week of no school for children.  During this week, schedule

  1. time for teachers to assess student learning of the first unit and make informed adjustments in their planning for second and subsequent units of instruction,
  2. parent teacher conferences to share teacher observations about student learning and plans for addressed learning needs in the next months of school, and
  3. mental health/school stress relief for children, teachers, and families.

The A, B, and Cs of the hybrid calendar are essential.  The repetition of past instructional practices will not on their own remedy the dilemma of missed and incomplete pandemic student learning.  A more clinical approach is required.  The A, B, Cs are that clinical approach.

A) makes “plan your work and work your plan” specific in scope and exact outcomes.  Success in the first unit of learning sets a child’s pattern for the year.  Success begets success; why would we do it any other way?  Well, we do in the traditional calendar that moves from one unit to the next without examination.  “She will do better in the next unit” and “If he didn’t learn it in that unit, we’ll circle back in the next units and he will do better” are recognition of failure.  We need to stop that traditional approach.

B) ensures time for a clinical review of student learning and examination of successes and needs.  The traditional expectation that teachers do this kind of review of a unit’s instruction in the evening after school or on a weekend in the traditional school calendar was fully unrealistic and a generalized failure.  The second part of B) is a very detailed parent conferencing on student successes and needs.  The conference includes the assessment of the first unit and reports from the fall assessments.  Parent conferencing here is not the showtime of an open house, but the sharing of clinical data.  This work takes time and time must be provided.

C)is the assurance that school deliberately puts stress relief into the school calendar.  For some parents, this time off from school is the time for medical and dental visits.  For some, it is the time children to be friends outside of the school day and restraints of adult-driven weekends. 

The hybrid calendar will remove all the single days of no school that range through the school calendar for teacher PD, clerical, and conferencing, and will eliminate two- and three-day weeks around the holidays. 

All weeks will be five school-day weeks, excepting Memorial Day week.  The entire week of Thanksgiving will be no school days, the odd days preceding Christmas and after New Years will he rounded into complete weeks of vacation, and spring break will be one week scheduled between instructional units.

The hybrid calendar will require more days to complete than the traditional calendar.  As September 1 is non-negotiable as a start date, the last day of a hybrid school calendar will be in the third or fourth week of June.  For the community needing child labor in the summer, working age children will be available for the heart of the season – July 4 to September 1.

This is a pandemic-informed and best practices-based school calendar.  The education of all children is the priority not the time available for their schooling or daycare.  Teachers are given the time needed to plan, teach, adjust, and clarify/correct learning at the time of learning instead of at the end of a semester or school year.  It is a repeatable calendar. 

School boards must learn that school calendaring based upon the agrarian, industrial, collegiate models does not meet our contemporary post-pandemic and teaching and learning requirements.  New thinking about school calendaring is required.

Educational governance in the long view

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April school board elections remind us that the officials we elect shape the future of the school district.  The local news media post and League of Women Voters host “get to know the candidate” information and forums to highlight “…this is what I will prioritize if you elect me”.  Individual candidates tell us “I will…, vote for me.”  We read and listen to understand the differences between candidates.  There are so many issues that confront school today that a voter truly needs a score card to keep track of where the candidates stand on any one or all issues.  The bottom line, however, is this question:  Does board membership make a difference in the long run of educating children?  Yes, it does.

The electors of the school district vote to elect board members.  Once elected, board members determine the policies and priorities of the schools.  Democracy elects and representative government leads.  Representatives can make a difference.

A school board’s work is measured by the unique voices of its individual members when they speak and when they vote on board motions.  Electors look for promises made to be promises kept.  For the most part, campaign promises today speak to contemporary, hot issues and the pandemic has spawned strong sentiments about virus mitigation protocols and student well-being resulting from remote education and masking.  Masking, quarantining, and school closures are hot buttons and easily seen as the apparent and immediate issues for respective candidates. 

Subliminal to the pandemic-based discussions are arguments of who should make school decisions – the school board or activist parents.  That is the key issue of the 2022 school board elections.  The argument is what will be taught, how it will be taught, what rules will govern teaching, and what powers will parents have in regulating teaching and learning in school.  Check the numerous and growing small, partisan, as in liberal or conservative, politically vocal web sites in your community to observe how and who is crafting these arguments.  People in your community gather regularly to rally their causes and memberships are growing. 

Read nationally to understand models of parent engagement and protest.  Some seem radical and over the top until you read that activist models are being copied and played out more and more often.  Small groups of parent voices a commandeering school governance and creating minority voice rules.

What does this mean?  It is a long view change in how the writers of state constitutions envisioned and formulated school governance.  Our current model is democratic election of representatives who make policies that govern local schools.  A new model is governance by political activism.  In this model, elected boards make policies that reflect the wants of politically active parents, a minority of the constituency.  Policies may “ping pong” between the most active of activist groups and the media coverage of their demands, but the premise is the same regardless of parent group – school boards must represent the immediacy of parent activism. 

This is a watershed argument for a change that flies in the face of the community.  School boards are elected to represent the entirety of a community not just the parents of the moment.  Board members are elected by residents whose children did not attend the local school or attended local schools decades ago.  They are elected by taxpayers whose interest is that schools educate all children to be the good and productive future taxpayers of the community.  They are elected by adults who want children to be prepared for the unknowns of their future.  School curriculum is not to be partisan but broad and leading to objective, informed, and inquisitive student thinking.  Teachers are not hired based upon their leanings but upon their abilities to cause children to learn.  At least, that is the constitutional design.  New argument changes school reality into only serving and protecting the points of view of activism. 

The election of school board members matters because schools reflect their school boards.

Covid Provoked Reforms – Professional Pay for Professional Teachers

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Sometimes a crisis creates an opportunity.

The pandemic is stripping public education of its most valuable asset – veteran, professional teachers.  The wear and tear of pandemic teaching is driving more teachers into early retirement and career resignations than in pre-pandemic years.  And, fewer college students are enrolling in teacher preparation programs.  The pool of professional teachers is being choked at both ends – decreased numbers of new teachers and increased numbers of departing teachers.

A Rand survey, fielded in early January 2021, found that nearly one-quarter of teachers indicated a desire to leave their jobs at the end of the school year, compared with an an average national turnover rate of 16% pre-pandemic, according to NCES data.

How the pandemic has changed teachers’ commitment to remaining in the classroom (brookings.edu)

These are not new phenomena.  The beginning of this trend preceded the pandemic.  The number of graduates of teacher preparation programs has been less than the number of teachers leaving the profession for more than a decade.  However, the pandemic accelerates the trend.  In the 2020-21 school year, remote teaching, overlaying mitigation procedures, and the animosity of maskers and anti-maskers became their last straw.  School districts are thankful for substitute teachers willing to accept full-time teaching assignments regardless of their academic training.  In too many schools, classes are combined and increased in class size because of teacher shortage.  Too many upper level and elective courses are cancelled because the school cannot employ teachers prepared for those assignments.  This is true in urban, suburban, and rural schools alike.  What will we find in 2022-23 and beyond?  Answer — greater gaps between staffing needed and staffing available and a greater number of children taught by willing adults not professional teachers.

We need different answers.

“The first step in solving any problem is understanding why it’s happening. The top three reasons for the teacher shortage, as reported by our survey respondents, are as follows:

  1. A lack of fully qualified applicants
  2. Salary and/or benefits are lacking compared to other careers
  3. Fewer new education school graduates”

The State of the Teacher Shortage in 2021 (frontlineeducation.com)

We may not be able to affect the lack of qualified applicants or the dearth of new teacher preparation program graduates immediately, but we can affect teacher compensation.  And, when we make significant changes to teacher pay, interest in teacher preparation programs will increase and the number of veteran teachers staying in the profession will improve

My grandmother was an elementary school teacher in central Illinois in the early 1900s. She was paid $300 for the school year and was provided room and board with a local family.  She knew her salary was not enough for her to live independently.  It was not supposed to be.  She was a single female and teaching was the plight of single women awaiting better prospects. 

As ludicrous as it may seem, the attitude toward the teaching profession espoused in the early 1900s continued through the century.  Because teachers are public employees paid with public tax money, teacher compensation always is restricted by conservative attitudes of “You work of the public and your pay comes out of my pocket”.  Low pay meant low taxes and elected officials who run on promises to keep taxes low are more frequently elected to office. 

In the 1990s a young teacher with a family of four qualified for food stamps.  Not professional grade pay but consistent with the perception at that time of teachers and how much they should be paid for their professional work.

This thinking arises every year the legislature considers our state’s financing of public education.  In the balance of its spending on a thousand budget items, the monies spent on improving teacher salaries are weighed against prisons and highways and social programs and professional teachers remain on the minimal public dole.  At the basics level, teacher salaries do not keep pace with the costs of living.

Teachers pay in the United States has risen +.2% in the time period of 1969-70 to 2019-20 when comparing annual pay to the value of a dollar in 2020.  In Wisconsin, comparative teacher pay for the same period declined by -5.9%. 

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.asp

The second reality is that teacher salaries do not align with other professions requiring a baccalaureate degree and professional training.  The historic table of teacher salaries displaying years of experience and earned professional credits or advanced degrees rationed out annual increases requiring a teacher to work in the same school district for 25 years before realizing the district’s top salary dollar.  Parallel professions access higher incomes much earlier in a career and are not “topped out” on salary tables.  Topping out returns us to the overarching restriction that teachers are public employees and not expected to be paid well.

The problem is “You get what you settle for”.  Today we are not able to provide a trained and duly licensed professional teacher in every classroom.  Why?  Because we have a shortage of teachers available to teach.  The education of too many children is provided by persons willing to be in the classroom not by prepared teachers.  We are not able to meet the educational needs and dreams of all children.  This is the price for settling for low.

The current crisis gives us the opportunity to treat teacher pay differently and to change the direction of current trends.  Begin with the work year, increase teacher pay, pay professionally, and make teaching the desirable professional employment it should be.

  • Make the teacher contract a calendar year not a school year document.  Pay teachers for the year not nine months of the year.  What other professionals besides athletes are only professional employees for part of the year?  This does not mean multiplying a teacher per diem times the 260 workdays of a calendar year.  It means that teachers will be paid professionally for a calendar year and available for professional work the entire year.

Traditionally, most teachers must have summer jobs to sustain a livelihood.  Teachers pay in the school year was inadequate for a full year’s living needs.  How often do we see doctors, dentists, lawyers, and engineers waiting tables for three months to augment their professional salaries?

  • Maintain 180 days of classroom teaching.  There is no compelling research that says year-round student attendance causes improved learning or is good for the whole development of children.  Instead of adding quantity to the days, add quality.  There is a compelling reality that it takes significant time to teach and learn an annual curriculum.  A school year must have adequate time to teach, assess learning, adjust teaching to ensure learning, and time to practice and reinforce learning. 

Districts have “caved in” by diminishing the number of days in a school year as acquiescence to complaints a school year is too long.  There is no evidence that a district exhausted the teaching of its approved curriculum before the end of the school year.  To the contrary, district assessments consistently display students who did not successfully learn their annual curriculum.

  • Add quality control-thinking to school.  Every school intends for each child to achieve one year’s growth in learning each school year, but few schools ever make this mark; some children yes, but all children no.  And children with exceptional needs, almost never.    

Children and teachers today are on a 180-day conveyor belt of teaching and learning and testing.  Break the “belt” and place clusters of professional days throughout the school year.  Allow teachers time to consider what they have taught, what they have taught well, and what they need to adjust and teach again to cause quality learning for all children.  Children need a break from the constancy of school to consider what they have learned well, what they have not learned well enough, and what they need to learn anew.  Weekends are not enough time.  Weekends should be non-school time for everyone.

Additionally, the pandemic is teaching us to allow mental health breaks for everyone in the school and school families.  Social-emotional health has gained our attention and, when the pandemic is over, we need to practice what we have learned and extend our learning into the future.  Four-day weekends or a week with no school attendance dispersed in the school year is good mental health, and good instructional practice. 

  • Develop teacher in-service based upon the observed needs of the school year.  Traditionally, schools provide each teacher with several days of preparation time before the first day of the school year.  A teacher begins to know how the children in the class learn in September, but often first impressions of student needs do not pan out in October.  Quality control of student learning means teachers have the time to adjust their teaching to the changing student demands.  After school and weekends fail to give teachers adequate time to understand the problems students present and find solutions.  Quality controls take time.

Use the dispersed breaks in the school year for teacher preparation.  This does not need to be time in school, but time on task.  It is not vacation time for the teacher but fulfillment of the yearlong, professional contract and professional compensation package.

  • Create a probationary teacher salary (years 1 -3), a teacher salary (year 4 to year 10), and a professional teacher salary (post-advanced degree).  Historically, a new teacher was on probation for 2-3 years depending upon state and district.  During probation, the teacher does not have a continuing contract only an annual contract.  The administration makes decisions on whether the teacher warrants a continuing contract.  This is professional try-out time.  The continuing contract award should be based upon the probationary teacher’s meeting the quality standards of the district.
  • The probationary teacher salary will be the current base wage per diem x 220 days.  The base salary will be raised by annual cpi increments during the probationary period.
  • Create a teacher salary to be 80% of the professional teacher salary.  The teacher salary is not meant as a career salary but a step between a probationary salary and a professional teacher salary.
  • Require a teacher to obtain an advanced degree by their 10th year of employment in the district.  Historically, too many career teachers obtain no more than the required baccalaureate degree.  The BA-teacher fulfills all the district requirements for minimal professional development to maintain a contract.  Teachers stuck in the BA-minimum range comprise the majority of who leave teaching early and annually.

The Wisconsin legislature removed the DPI issuance of successive teaching license based upon a teacher’s professional development.  Once licensed, responsibility for the maintenance of the license was assigned to the local school board.

The definition of professionalism includes continuing education in the professional field.  A school board should not confuse required PD for contract maintenance with required PD for professional advancement.  A teacher is obligated to stay current with curricular changes to maintain a contract.  A teacher who achieves significant professional education advancement warrants professional advancement in salary.

The board should consider ending a continuing contract for teachers who do not advance professionally – ten years is enough time for this advancement.

  • Pay all professional teachers a top salary (100% of the current top teacher salary) when they are awarded an advanced degree.

It would look like this.

A newly hired teacher will be paid the district’s beginning salary plus an annual cpi increase for their first three years of employment.  During that time, the administration will supervise and evaluate the teacher’s professional work for the purpose of awarding a continuing contract.

The district should expect 80% or more of its teachers to be paid professional teaching salaries with 20% or fewer working for professional teacher status.

A change to professional pay for professional teachers in combination with changes in school calendaring and scheduling of district-required professional development will cause

  • more college students to consider teaching as significant professional career,
  • mid-career teachers to remain in the profession, and
  • veteran teachers to complete a career as a professional teacher.

Example:

Probationary teacher salary         $42,000

Teacher salary                              $72,000 (available in the 4th – 10th year of employment)

Professional Teacher salary          $90,000 (available upon completion of an advanced degree)

All salaries adjusted annually for cpi.

Covid Provoked Reforms – Proficiency in Standards-based Learning

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The status quo thrives when there are few challenges to disrupt its normal.  Newton taught us that a body at rest will remain at rest unless it is acted upon by a force.  The lack of compelling forces for change have kept much of public education in a Newtonian normal for decades if not a century.  We should not squander the forces for change that the pandemic presents.  Make plans now for stopping practices that do not work and shaping your new normals.

The grading of student work and students emerges every few years as a consistent problem for educators considering best practices.  Like a groundhog on its annual day, we examine grading looking for something new to know and do as if we want to change.  But, not liking what we see as options, we put our grading practices back into the inertial nest of ongoing poor practices.

Then, comes the pandemic.

How does a teacher apply traditional grading practices for a child whose attendance is disrupted by the pandemic and whose engagement with learning is somewhere around 50-60% of the school year?  How do we assign a value a student’s learning of a grade level or course curriculum when we only taught parts of that annual curriculum?  How do we compare a student’s academic work in 2020-21 or 2021-22 with any other student’s work prior to the pandemic?  How do we grade students who are learning the virtual curriculum of a commercial provider not our school district’s approved curriculum?

We stop the questions because they all point to the same conclusion.  Past grading practices cannot be applied in the pandemic.  We must stop applying past practices that are not valid or professionally defensible for current times.

It is time to replace A, B, C grading that conceptually is an aggregate of academic improvement and achievement, student effort, participation and attendance, and collegiality and collaboration with peers all topped with a smidgeon of extra credit or whatever the teacher adds to make the grade seem to fit the student.  No matter the teacher I have talked with over 50 years of observing grading practices, most teachers follow the Golden Rule of Grading – I grade my students as I was graded when I was a student.  There are modifications, but most practices fall within the shadow of past, personal experiences.  It is time to do better.

Educational standards are not new to educators.  Standards anchor teacher preparation and licensing.  The reauthorization of PI 34 by the Wisconsin legislature says “PI 34 restructured teacher education, educator licenses, and professional development for Wisconsin educators.  The system is based on Wisconsin Educator Standards with demonstrated knowledge, skills, and dispositions for teaching, pupil services and administration.  Initial licensing is based on an educator’s successful performance as measured against these standards.”  Teaching licensing is proficiency-based on the learning and demonstration of specified standards.

https://dpi.wi.gov/licensing/programs/rules-statute

Standards are described in state statute and by state departments of instruction of education.  State standards anchor contemporary curriculum development.  Every subject area taught in Wisconsin is supported by DPI-adopted curricular standards.  “Wisconsin Academic Standards specify what students should know and be able to do in the classroom.” 

https://dpi.wi.gov/standards

These standards provide the scaffold of student learning that creates the basis for standards-based proficiency grading.  It is valid and appropriate to align the evaluation of student learning with these curricular scaffolds.  The scaffolds are laddered by grade level and broadened at each grade and course.

The use of standards-base proficiency grading is not a newly made recommendation.  Teachers have sidled up to this idea in the past, but the pull of the Golden Rule of Grading has consistently overpowered change.  Now that the Golden Rule is broken, standards-based grading makes more and more sense.

To do this, we need to make two types of decisions.

  • What evidence demonstrates secure proficiency of a standard?
  • What aggregate level of proficiency demonstrates secure completion of a grade level or subject course?

While these may be argumentative questions, they are not difficult to answer.  The evidence demonstrating secure proficiency of a standard derives directly from unit and lesson planning.  Using older language of lesson planning, “The learner will …” describes the demonstrated outcomes of interest.  A properly constructed standards-based instruction provides the standards which will be proficiency assessed.  The evidence of completion also is in the unit design; it is in the statement of “extent and degree to which the student will demonstrate the standard”.  Standards-based proficiency grading is using the outcome statement of your standards-based curriculum.   Record keeping of the outcomes for which a student has demonstrated secure proficiency provides a grade book of achievement and growth. 

If your curriculum is not standards-based, you have foundational work to do.

A school’s instructional committee can readily collaborate to determine the extent of the checklist/grade book needed to indicate grade level/course completion.  Collaborative agreement of what demonstrates completion of a grade level or course is essential to balance student work across the curriculum.  Successful completion of one grade level or course should not be disproportionate to another. 

Teachers should thankfully welcome a standards-based proficiency design as it eliminates the problems of measuring effort and adding an extra credit to allow students improve an assigned grade.  This is defensible.  Without expecting an answer, why did we feel compelled to allow extra credit to erase the facts that student did not complete the basics of a grade level or course?  Emotion overcame reality.

The alignment of grading with the demonstration of standards-based proficiency overcomes the dilemma presented by interrupted school attendance and engagement due to covid 19.  Demonstration of learning is not clock or learning place-bound.  This design overcomes the issues of remote versus in-person.  Proficiencies are what proficiencies are – a student can or cannot demonstrate secure content knowledge or skills or dispositions about her learning.

Using standards-based proficiency grading creates a new practice that improves upon the older practices that failed the test of the pandemic.  Standards-based proficiency grading creates a best practice for our future.  We can and should create this as a new normal.