Category Archives: Blog

The Butterflies Are Loose; Help the Unexpected to Find Flight

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Edward Lorenz published his first paper on chaos behavior in 1972.  Loosely, he said chaos occurs when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future, then unpredicted and unexpected stuff happens.  His paper was titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?”

Education in the time of COVID 19 offers us the opportunity to understand a bit of chaos theory and allow butterflies to flit.

Crisis sometimes begets chaos and sometimes it opens the door to what has been in the offing. Our Governor has mandated that all K-12 public schools be closed at the end of day last Wednesday.  Believing that local conditions required differently, our school board directed that our K-12 school would be closed beginning the Monday in advance of the Governor. 

More than a decade ago, our school board began a one digital device program per student program.  High school students were given laptops for their 24/7 use.  Middle school students were given Chromebooks for in school use that quickly morphed to 24/7 use.  Elementary students had IPads for daily use at school. 

Two years ago our school board began discussion of e- or remote learning as a response to school closures due to weather or other emergencies.  Discussion with teachers and parents waggled on the effectiveness of virtual learning and the capacity of school families to manage learning at home.  All the controversies of Internet availability and daytime home supervision were played out.  Several months ago, our school held an “in school” e-day.  Normal class activities were suspended and children did “lessons” as if they were at home.  Some were asynchronous online assignments.  Others were pre-prepared lessons using tablets and laptops.  And, some were traditional learning packets.  A month ago our school held a “stay at home” e-day.  Lessons resembled the in-school e-day.  Afterward, administrators surveyed parents and talked with teachers about the day.

Then, COVID 19 arrived. This week our school staff, students and parents entered the world of remote schooling opportunity like every other school community in the state.  However, instead of jumping into the deep end of the pool, our school waded into familiar waters.  At the end of the day on Friday, every student took a school-provided digital device home along with their school books and supplies.  On Monday and Tuesday, teachers and instructional aides prepared and disseminated lessons for several day’s learning at a time.  ELA and math and social studies and Spanish are sequential and feel like daily lessons.  Tech ed, science, art, music, and PE are chunked into a week’s lessons.  All assignments have a due date plus one week as a provision for tech problems, necessary remote assistance on a lesson, and the possibility of illness.  Teachers and aides prep each day from 8 am to 10 am and are available online between 10 am and 4 am.  Administrators and counselors make daily contacts, voice and digital, with children with special needs.  Special educators and aides provide IEP-based assistance to children with their remote lessons.  The school food service will make sacked meals that will be bussed to local fire stations for families to pick up as needed.

As we put these remote school operations into motion, we have created a new normal that will hold until future notice.  Normal now is schooling that is not normal.

The butterflies are loose.  Random acts are causing unpredicted and random effects.  We are learning new things about schooling everyday when the approximate future does not approximately determine the future.  Now is the time to consider what school should, can and will be like when the COVID 19 epidemic no longer plagues us.

What rules and regulations regarding schooling should no longer hold because we have evidence to their contrary?  To what extent are we able to release education from mandated days and hours of instruction when school days become possible again?  If children can learn a curriculum by not attending school daily, what level of school attendance is required?  If non-education businesses and enterprises can work from home or not at school, can educators?  What are the non-educational services that families and community rely upon – the must haves – versus the services that we learned to do without?  If school is not in session, can we re-allocate dollars required for daily school to other school district services?

We cannot yet measure the effectiveness of remote learning?  One can imagine that student proficiencies in ELA and math that were at less than 50% may be still be less than 50%.  But, what if they are not?  Perhaps, we will reassess our thinking about and need for standardized proficiencies.

Students at home with a passion for learning will pursue their passion.  They will practice their flutes and cellos.  They will draw and paint.  They will read and think.  They will cook and bake and sew and create. New fashions will be forthcoming. They will be online and their programming and gaming and communicating will stretch their today far beyond what they have done in the past.  Perhaps we will observe real break out performances otherwise not possible.

Teachers will refine the language and presentation of initial instruction using synchronous and asynchronous pedagogy.  They will need to be more precise in their initial instruction and to respond to questions with more clarity.  Consider the quantity of wait time in a regular classroom.  Remember the hours of off-task time.  Can we be more efficient with remote learning?

Just like a butterfly in flight, one question about “what will school be like when this crisis is ended” creates or bounces off another question. The possible answers abound and create more and more potentiality that the future will not look at all like what was before.

I hope that educators everywhere will use the COVID 19 months to consider where our better educational butterflies want to go so that our re-emergence from crisis into non-crisis will not take us unwittingly back to yesterday.

A School Year Is Long Enough To …

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I have not yet met a person who does not have an opinion on the length of a school year.  By and large, most people who are not students, parents of students, in the business of school or reliant upon child labor don’t care and “I don’t care” is an opinion.  The remainder, a minority of our community – parents, grandparents, employers and others whose daily life is touched by school – form their opinion from their personal experience, their self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  Normally, this blog sets a proposition, examines what we know and think about the topic, and creates an action or To Do with a rationale.  Today, I will start with the conclusion.

The Big Duh

A school year must be the length of time necessary to teach and cause children to become competent in an annual curriculum.  It need not be longer nor shorter than that, but it must be long enough to teach an annual curriculum. 

What Do We Know?

Over time educators have packaged learning into grade levels and content courses and courses of study and each package is an annual curriculum.  Elementary school is parsed into 4K or pre-kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st grade through the last grade of your school’s organization, typically 5th or 6th grade.  Each grade level is a step on a curricular scaffold building a child’s knowledge, skills and dispositions about learning school year by school year.  Secondary school is parsed into content courses of English/language arts, math, science and socials studies and perhaps a world language.  These are stacked or sequenced, as in English 7 through English 12 and Algebra through Calculus.  Some content courses seem to be stand alone courses, like Marketing or Personal Finance, but have underlying content and skill structure in English, social studies, and math.  Also, secondary school instruction provides continuous courses of study in music, the arts, and technical education.  Year after year of instruction in choir, band and orchestra or in painting and ceramics or technical training refines and improves student performance.

The packaging in terms of time began when our communities were agriculture-based and children could attend school when not needed during the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons.  Packaging was reconsidered when child labor laws were implemented and regular schooling replaced daily work.  A school day mirrored a work day and a school week mirrored a world week and school calendaring filled the community need for day care for millions of children nationwide.

Curricular packaging has been refined and fit into grade level and course competencies.  A child’s progress through the 3 R’s was a pathway up the scaffold of reading, writing and arithmetic.  At one time, a 6th grade education or the ability to read, write and cipher at the 6th grade level was an adequate adult competency.  Later, the level of competency advanced to 8th grade and children could stop attending school after completion of 8th grade or the age of 16.  That was good enough.  Today, high school is the completion of 13 or 14 years of schooling and a generalized competency of 10th grade or better.

Our contemporary school scaffold is a child’s annual demonstrated competence on annual curricula that validates promotion to the next annual curricula and eventually graduation.  The time required to complete each step of the scaffold or each packaged curriculum is approximately 180 school days or 36 weeks of school.

There are no prizes or awards for schools that have shorter or longer school years.  There is no economic incentive to add days to a school year.  School revenues and contracts for all school employees are a set amount in a school’s annual budget and decreasing or extending a school year does not alter these major expenses.

Why Is This Thus?

Why is 180 days the seemingly standard for a school year?  The question was asked and answered more than 100 years ago.  The world’s richest man of his time, Andrew Carnegie, was committed to the role of education as the essential strategy for improving life in the early 1900s.  In 1906, he funded the Carnegie Foundation led by Harvard President Charles Elliot to study and recommend standards for a college education.  At the time, the national college graduation rate was less than 10% and the quality of a college education was dependent upon the college.  There were no national standards for education.  The Carnegie Foundation literally defined college and university education in the United States for the next century. 

The Foundation also recommended changes in public education.  For our purposes, the Foundation defined a high school Carnegie Unit as a (one) credit awarded for completion of 120 hours of instruction over the length of a school year.  A school year, then, is the length of time to required to achieve 120 hours of instruction plus assessments plus other school requirements.  According to the Carnegie plan, a high school student could earn six to seven credits per year and 24 to 28 credits over four years and high school graduation became the completion of 24-28 credits. 

Using the 120 hours of instruction as the standard for an annual curriculum and allowing for reteaching and make-up lessons for students absent from school and for the additional legislative mandates that must be accomplished in a school year, 180 days became the normal length of a school year in US public schools.  Ninety days was a semester and 45 days was a quarter or grading period.

Since 1906, much as changed in the field of teaching and learning, yet the basics of a Carnegie Unit and the standards for a school year have remained largely unchanged.  A discussion of a school year begins with 180 days.

We must always be aware of the influences of money and politics in public, as these are constantly at play in public education.  By rule of the US Constitution, the responsibility for public education is delegated to the states.  Hence, the funding and rules related to public education are legislated by state government.

It is honest to state that state funding for public education is allocated according to money available not by money needed.  This basic understanding tells us that legislatures with a need to fund many state programs that compete for a limited annual state budget are always looking for ways to reduce or contain costs.  Public education, prisons and highways are the three largest expenses in state budgets.

The school year is an example of such manipulation.  For decades, a school year was 180 days of instruction.  First, start with this as the number of interest:  180 times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the largest cost of a school year.  More than 80% of school costs are paid in salary and benefits to employees.  If school funding is considered on a per day basis not a per year basis and a school year is defined by hours instead of days, then the total sum of money spent for salaries and benefits can be changed.  Second, change the number of interest to:  hours of instruction times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the cost of a school year.  The total remains the same as long as the hours of instruction equal 180 days of instruction. 

In Wisconsin, 437 hours of instruction are required for Kindergarten students, 1,050 hours for grades 1 through 6, and 1,137 for grades 7 through 12. 

Third, allow schools to determine the length of class periods and the number of hours in a school day so that each grade level meets the legislated number of instruction hours.  Now, a school year can be less than 180 days.  More importantly, the cost of school is reduced by each day of salary and benefit that is removed from the annual school calendar. 

Politics and economics not student learning drive the contemporary defining of a school year.  Today, a school year can be reduced to the bare minimum of days required to complete mandated hours of instruction, a number in the 170s.

Yes but!  If we add the concept of educational accountability to the definition of a school year, how much teaching and learning is required for a child to competently complete an annual grade level, a content course or a course of study?  There is no magic in the Carnegie Unit.  Critics of the Unit have harped for decades on its arbitrariness.  Yet, the idea that the completion of a rigorous course of instruction should be the basis of how we “package” a year of school keeps us returning to the idea of the Unit.  A school year must be accountable for learning not just time in class.

To Do

Accountability for learning matters and competency is the metric of measure.  The number of hours in a school day or in a school year is just the vehicle for achieving competent learning.  School Boards approve and adopt annual curricula for all children in all grade levels and courses with the intention that children will successfully and competently complete each.  We must honor this element of local school control of public education. 

We have a national problem with proficiency.  A majority of children do not meet proficiency standards on local, state and national assessments.  This is an instructional challenge.  We must improve the instructional tool box used by all teachers to more effectively cause every child to learn.  This is a commitment challenge.  We must hold to the goals of annual student achievement and invoke what we know about the science and art of explicit teaching and the necessity for instructional interventions when initial instruction is not successful.  Proficiency is created when a child is competent in each curricular unit of instruction so that at the end of a school year there is a sequence of proficient learning.  We must intervene at the point of mislearning or non-learning not at the end of school year.  And, to point, reducing the number of days in a school year contradicts what we know about student proficiency.  Teachers need all the time they can have with children not less.

Take Away

As a School Board member, I hear from parents who want to reduce the length of our school year.  I return to the first paragraph.  Most who have an opinion about the length of a school year base their opinion upon personal experience, self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  A Board member’s responsibility includes educating the public about education and local education, in particular.  As an educator who is a Board member, my first accountability is to causing every child to become a proficient learner and to learn.  In the business of causing learning, instructional time is our most valuable resource.  We can improve teaching skills and refine curriculum.  However, without adequate time for all of the layers of instruction, initial through necessary interventions, to be successfully deployed, teacher skill and engaging curricula will not cause the educational outcomes children need.  A school year may be an arbitrary number of hours and days, yet there is a substantial rationale connecting instructional time with learning accountability.  At the end of conversation, we get what we settle for and less time will result in less learning.

Meddling, Muddling, Modeling Not Middling

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A wonderful educator, Mildred Middleton, taught us that it is very appropriate to “M” around in school work.  Education is not static work, she told us.  Everyone and everything is changing, some appearing as  revolutionary and but most feeling as evolutionary, but it all is changing.  Dick, Jane and Spot left the reading shelf replaced with trade books.  Now, graphic books, anyone?  Anyone?  New Math upset the apple cart and then the apples were collected, the cart arighted, and New became one of several approaches to math instruction.  Common Core made everything more academic and accountability made everyone more antsy.  Change is always at hand somewhere around the schoolhouse.

Mildred helped us to understand change and, to steal a line from Apollo 13, to “work the problem”.  While we wanted to apply a single strategy to understanding the phenomenon of change, she used the M’s to help us work the problem even when we don’t know how.

M-ing is valuable for adults and children alike.  Instead of watching people give up because they don’t know what to do or run around with their hair on fire chasing the solution of the moment, we can teach adults and children to be meddlers, muddlers, modelers, and to never accept middling.

Let’s define our terms.

Meddling is being a Thomas Edison and trying dozens of viable options seeking the best option of all.  Meddling is active engagement, hands-on action, and continuous commitment to the work.  Meddling is inquisitive and inventive.  Meddling is an itch being scratched.

Muddling is observant cognitive and emotional inaction.  Muddling is saying to oneself and to others, “I don’t know what to do at the moment.  I need to stop the doing and push the observing and thinking and talking with others.”  Muddling takes personal strength in a world that expects immediate action and results.  Muddling is taking the problem apart to best understand where and how to start and this requires emotional patience.  Muddling can lead to meddling and modeling when a person has sorted things out.

Modeling is the creation and development of a focused result or set of results when a person has committed to an idea or plan.  Modeling is working the plan.  Modeling is shaping the variables at hand so that they contribute to making the plan work or the idea come alive.  Modeling is how a lump of clay becomes a piece of art or an idea becomes a cogent argument or a social problem is addressed to mutual satisfaction.  Modeling is inherent in the teaching of a successful lesson plan and in a child’s personalization of what is learned from that lesson plan.

Middling is mediocre.  Middling is “any answer will do”.  Middling is meeting the minimal, just passing, just above the grade of F.  Middling is not good enough for those who engage in meddling, muddling and modeling.

The M’s are an intersection of knowledge, skills and dispositions about learning and self that are valuable for children and adults in every area of life.  To work the M’s, a person must know things, have skills to manipulate things, and accept the dilemma of not knowing what to do and the liberation of knowing what to do but having the patience to observe until then.  The M’s are acquired not innate. 

When we engage in the M’s, we need to careful.  Modeling is the most attractive M.  It produces the showcase and salves the ego.  Most people grade and reward the results of modeling because modeling typically results in something we can see, touch, hear, read, or smell.  Care needs to be given to also value good meddling and good muddling.  What if we also assessed and graded the quality of meddling or the quality of muddling?  A good modeled result can only be produced after good meddling and muddling. 

Mildred gave us one more pearl that assists us apply the M’s.  When we understood the value and the strategies of each M, she said, “Now, pull up your socks, young man, and get to work”.  And, we have been M-ing in school ever since.

Good Teaching and Good Schooling Grow a Whole Child

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If you talk about improving student academic performance today, invariably someone will say “We need to be more concerned with the whole child than just test scores”. The comment is meant to dissolve the discussion of objective curricular performance by wrapping arms around the subjective developmental characteristics of childhood. The implication is that those focusing on curricular results are not interested in the socio-emotional development of a child and, more implicitly, that increasing a focus on curricular outcomes decreases consideration for the holistic well-being of a child. Whoa!

Take Away

The education of children always provokes the question of “to what end”. Five generations past and more, white, male children were educated to become literate citizens. Female and children of color or any disability were not publicly educated. Three generations past, children from elite families received pre-professional educations and most other children were educated to be productive in the local and national economy. Post-WW2 children were educated to strengthen our nation in a Cold War and for international leadership. A generation ago children began to be disaggregated by their observed characteristics of gender, race, ethnicity and language, and disabilities and disadvantages and education was purposed to close achievement gaps between disparate groups. Across generations there is a common theme that school prepares a child for adulthood, adulthood needs being defined by the times.

A three-legged stool historically supported the rearing of children. The first and most significant leg was family. The second leg was church. And, the third leg was community, including school. A phrase embraced this triad: “These are the parents’ children, the community’s kids, and the school’s students”. Today, almost 50% of marriages end in divorce, only 12% of the population attends church once per month, and traditional institutions, such as Scouts and 4H are under suspicion due to some disreputable adults . The Y (no longer an MCA) and Boys and Girls Clubs provide day care. School, despite its detractions, remains the constant over time in the lives of children, kids and students.

The “whole child” interest is valid and wholesome. It also is either uninformed, misinformed or purposefully distracting.

What Do We Know?

Who the speaker is matters. The commenter may be seeking help. A parent advocating whole child may be addressing the lack of support from the other two legs and looking to the school for non-educational support. Or, the parent may be facing a significant challenge or problem in raising the child and looking for non-academic help from school. Or, the commenter could be a social worker or law enforcement officer who understands the implications of an “unwhole” child and knows that school through mandatory attendance represents a singular, and positive constant in the life of most children. And, the commenter could be a politician needing to make answers to confrontative problems, like community violence and drug and alcohol addictions, and so he legislates that schools will address mental health issues.

Educators have a simple and direct response. It is – “Good teaching and good schooling grow a whole child”.

Why Is This Thus?

Good teaching understands the concept of readiness to learn. Readiness means that a child is physically, intellectually, and emotionally prepared to engage with a teacher and prepared instruction for the purpose of learning. Even though a child may be present in the classroom, sitting at a desk, and looking ready to be taught, this may not be the fact. Good teaching looks closely at the child to appraise “is this child or are these children ready for this?”. Good teaching listens to other teachers, parent communications, counselors and school health personnel and understands when a child is not ready to or may be significantly distracted from learning. Readiness to learn considers all facets of the child.

Readiness to learn are daily measures taken several times each day. A child’s night before and amount or quality of sleep affect readiness to learn. Breakfast or its absence affects readiness. A bus ride or walk to school affects readiness. A child’s experiences in the morning classes and at recess and passing from class to class and at lunch can affect subsequent readiness to learn. Good teaching is a child first attention to each student and looks for any of these enhancers of or distractions to learning. A child who is not ready or clearly distracted will not learn.

A balanced curricular program understands and helps to educate the whole child. Balance is access to curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities. Interestingly, adults seem to think that all children seek opportunities to sing and play an instrument, and be on stage in a play and make the varsity each season and to paint and make pottery and be on the debate team or Key Club or dance team and take a load of academic classes. While some may, most do not. What they want is opportunity to explore what they want to explore. And, opportunity to extend learning in the areas they choose. Balanced curriculum provides an expanse of experiences and open choices that help grow a whole child.

Today a whole child must be a contemporary child. When adults don’t like what is happening in education, they either make comparisons to what life, childhood and school was like when the adult was young or they call upon theory as blatant truth. From the get go, yesterday is past and there is no getting it back and the past was not perfect. Believing that school in the 80s or 90s was more focused on the whole child than today is just plain wrong. Additionally, believing that school can operate on a theoretical model of whole child education is tantamount to believing every girl should look lie Barbie and every boy like Ken.

To Do

Good schooling and good teaching facilitates a whole child by:

  • offering a wide variety of educational opportunities for all children and letting children choose. Inclusive options let children explore and develop their skills and interests and talents, not just those that adults prescribe.
  • celebrating child successes. Some children who do not have supportive homes or family networks do not know what a celebration of success feels like. Success begets more success and celebrations are part of that begetting.
  • making 360 degree observations about each child. Listening to parents, bus drivers, cafeteria servers, hall monitors, custodians – everyone who makes a comment about a child helps good teaching to grow a whole child. At the same time, good teaching filters commentary that pertains to teaching and learning and passes non-teaching and learning commentary to other school resources.
  • helping children grow from their failures and mistakes. Neither of these close children from future teaching and learning. Instead, they make it more compelling. A whole child experiences bumps in the road to her future.
  • engaging with every child as frequently as possible. When a child is able to ghost through a school day without a direct teaching-learning conversation with a teacher, this child is falling toward unwholeness. We must know that some children choose this silence and invisibility. If we are listening to all our sources about children, we will know when a child may needs to be left alone and when to re-engage them. Otherwise, engage all children continuously. Children shall not be ghosts.
  • lastly, the assessment and measurement of learning in all areas of academics, activities, arts and athletics should be embedded in our attention to the whole child. The fact that a state mandates schools to test all children in reading and math is not a negative. In advocating for a well-rounded education for all children, the state and each school should have an assessment and measurement system informing us about each child’s growth in art, music, world language, history and civics, and financial literacy. We should have measurements in tech skills. And, please, we should have strategies for assessing a child’s social and emotional well-being and abilities to be collegial and collaborative. Without systems of assessment how will we know a child is whole?

The Big Duh!

Good teaching is all about the whole child.

Informed, Nuanced, Experienced Veteran Teachers Are Rain Makers

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Accumulated knowledge, skill sets honed over time, and perceptions sharpened by experience lead to this observation: “At the point of retirement, most teachers know more, can do more, and have more value as teachers than any preceding year in their career”. A veteran teacher who persists through decades of teaching has high value to children, colleagues, and a school in her pre- and post-retirement years.

Take Away

How do schools make the most, in fact exploit, the valued commodity of a veteran educator? The answer is – we don’t. The teaching assignment and expectations for a veteran teacher mirror the expectations of a first-year teacher. We treat teachers with proven talents and teachers of unproven talents as similar “plug and play” personnel.

Teachers, of all ages, still operate in the block box of a classroom. A veteran teacher’s knowledge, skills and perceptions shine in their classroom, but are seldom known or discussed in whole school or faculty settings. The black box syndrome and mentality defeats the value of experience because of its isolationism. Whether the veteran is a Kindergarten teacher with decades of success in causing our youngest children to read or a high school AP teacher with years of causing our college-bound children to earn college credit while in high school, teachers work in isolation of each other and nominally alone within their school.

Informed experience is a value-added commodity that is achieved over time. A recent graduate knows the latest pedagogical theories and best practices and is ready to apply them. A veteran who is up-to-date on the latest theories and best practices adds the value of knowing which theory and practice works best with some student but not with others. The discernment of what, when and why children need specific teaching is an acquired judgment that is earned with experience, yet is undervalued in school.

It is essential to appreciate that all veteran teachers are not created equally. Some vets grow and ripen and enrich with time while some only repeat their first year of teaching over and over again every year.

A faculty group photo helps us observe many truths about our teacher corps. We see many contrasts. Faces and, to some degree, hair color portray two-thirds of the faculty as looking younger and less than one-third looking older. If we compare annual faculty group photos, we observe fewer and fewer of same veteran faces. There is a gradual yet steady decline in the number and in the continuity of older, veteran teachers. We believe that the work force in our nation is “graying” but, in public education, the work force is getting younger and younger. This means that we are losing the professionally-developed talent, knowledge, experiences, and perceptions faster than we are growing the talents of our young teachers.

What Do We Know?

In the 2015-16 school year, teachers in public schools averaged of 14 years of experience. If we interpret this in age as experience, the average teacher is in her mid 30s and has been working as a teacher for about one-third of her anticipated work life.

http://neatoday.org/2018/06/08/who-is-the-average-u-s-teacher/

In that year, the most common public school teacher is in her first three years of teaching. These data are supported by the fact that 44% of first year teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. That means that most schools have a continuous turn over of young and inexperienced teachers. We see this in the faculty group photo – so many look so young.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/today_teaching_force_richard_ingersoll.html

The average retirement age for teachers hovers around 59. Interestingly, many teachers retire before they are eligible for social security. Part of the reason is that salary tables tend to top out with little to no annual salary improvement after a set number of employment years. Some states and districts enact “rule of 30” incentives that encourage teachers to retire when they gain 30 years of experience or “rules of 55” that set the retirement incentive at a combination of age and years of teaching experience equaling 55. A teacher’s annual income of pensions and social security may be equal to or more than their annual working salary well before their anticipated retirement year. Why stay? Why not start a second career with earnings on top of teacher retirement benefits? We have created professional structures that purposefully diminish our teacher talent pool.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/why-your-retirement-age-matters

School leaders know the teachers in their faculty who perennially cause the greatest student learning. They know the “rain makers”. Principals know this through applying Effective Educator processes, comparing student assessment data, and sitting in classrooms observing teaching. They know it through their work with students and parents. And, they know the journeyman teachers who annually do a satisfactory job of teaching. However, this knowledge remains tight-lipped behind screens of confidentiality. If it were discussed, the parent demand for placement in “rain maker” classrooms would be impossible for satisfy.

Why Is This Thus?

In most school systems, a teacher with 40+ years of teaching is at the top of the district’s salary and benefits scale. The first consideration school boards make toward veteran teachers is financial. In many school districts, a veteran may cost twice that of a first-year teacher. If finances drive the decision making, “helping” expensive teachers to retire is a school board and administrative priority.

There is a large scale failure to understand the cost of less effective teachers. Successful initial learning is the most cost effective instruction. When a teacher must re-teach lessons to classes of children or extend the planned time for a unit of instruction, there will be instruction at the end of the year those children will not receive. That instruction must be taught the next year. The accumulated effect of ineffective teaching is graduates who did not learn all of their curricular objectives. Tier 2 interventions requiring “specialists” in addition to classroom teachers add significantly to the cost of a public education. Remedial summer school adds cost in large doses. The greatest cost is the sum of lost knowledge, skills and attitudes children suffer year after year that diminish their capacity for success in college and career. These are not costs in the hundreds of dollars, but in the millions nationwide. Getting teaching and learning right in initial instruction is the gold standard.

Most observers assume that veteran teachers with 30-40 years of teaching are slowing down. Their best years are behind them. They miss the point. Doing the same thing over and over diminishes energy, not the talent to work. Give a proven veteran a new assignment or change the challenges of the children the teacher instructs and the combination of informed experience and expertise takes over. Intellectual adrenalin makes vets act and look like younger teachers.

Too often principals respond to student and parental wants and demands and place veteran teachers in high popular demand or politically visible assignments. Parents want rainmakers teaching AP and college prep track courses. Rarely do parents of low achieving children stress principals to assign rainmakers to children performing below grade level. Some times teacher assignments are made for parents and not for children.

Lastly, phasing veteran teachers toward retirement is the way schools always have approached personnel. As institutions, schools are slow to change past practice, even poor past practice.

To Do

Use the informed experience and talent of veteran teachers for customized assignments, such as underachieving regular education children or children living in poverty who lack out of school resources. The vet’s understanding of chunked instruction, pacing, modeling, tutored guided practice, and interval reinforcement work well for children needing nuanced teaching.

Use the wisdom for instructional design. We engage large groups of teachers, most of whom are inexperienced or less experienced, to write curriculum and units of instruction. One of our misapplied thoughts is that every voice has equal value. Engage “rainmakers” in designing best strategies for making more rain for everyone.

Assure that talented veteran teachers work with small, discussion groups to refine student understanding. Too often, vets are assigned to large group information sessions because they are more entertaining. Knowing the right question to ask at the right point in a child’s learning is an acquired talent.

Weight employment using the value-added of informed experience and past records of causing significant student learning to create combinations of teaching and teacher coaching. First-year teachers graduate from mentored student teaching assignments straight into “you are on your own” classrooms. And, if they are assigned a mentor, mentoring seldom includes mentor observations because of their respective teaching classroom assignments. Give a proven and productive veteran released time to coach one or two inexperienced teachers.

Create emeritus teaching assignments for retired teachers. With closed-minded thinking, many states make it difficult for a retired teacher receiving a teacher’s pension to re-enter the classroom. An emeritus assignment need not be full-time or full-year. A highly trained veteran-in-retirement can work a very customized teaching assignment to cause children to learn. It may be an assignment that is “on demand” when children need talented and personalized instruction the most. Be creative.

The Big Duh

More than 40% of all teachers who start in the profession leave before their fifth year. The majority of teachers in any school are inexperienced due to this constant turn over. Among teachers who persist in the classroom are those who sadly repeat their first years of teaching over and over again. These often seek their first opportunity for an early retirement. And, there are talented rainmaking teachers whose experience, continuous professional development, and refinement of acquired art and science of teaching make them high valued veteran teachers. School leadership needs to optimize the use of their rainmakers and be creative in keeping rainmakers in the most productive of teaching assignments. A veteran teacher is a talent we cannot afford to waste.