Parent concerns addressed in special education bill from Sen. Braun

Jan 25 by Beth Sigall Leave a Comment

The education of students with disabilities is receiving a great deal of much-needed attention in the 2019 legislative session in Olympia.

State Sen. John Braun (R-Centralia) and State Sen. Christine Rolfes (D-Bainbridge Island) filed an important bill this week to help better support families and focus on improving outcomes for students with disabilities. It includes:

access to a free advocate for families who need help navigating the special education system
the creation of local special education advisory committees in every school district to give families an effective method of providing feedback
improvements to transition planning for students to help better prepare them for life after high school
teacher training
updates to funding formulas.

Here is the press release that accompanied the bill’s filing from the office of Sen. Braun, along with links to the original bill.

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OLYMPIA…Major new legislation introduced today in the state Senate would address parent-centered concerns about special-education services through a combination of policy updates and funding. The approach is reminiscent of the comprehensive 2017 proposal that ultimately moved Washington’s K-12 funding system into the 21st century.

“We have an opportunity this year to support big improvements in how special education is delivered, and the outcomes for students with disabilities. Those needs go much deeper than a budget appropriation,” said Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia and prime sponsor of Senate Bill 5532.

For instance, Braun noted Washington is in the bottom 10 states when it comes to inclusion, meaning how often a student with disabilities is educated in a general classroom. Barely half of special-ed students receive a diploma, which puts the state in the bottom one-fourth nationally.

State Sen. John Braun (Centralia)

“There’s a difference between wanting to serve these students and being equipped to serve them, in ways that will prepare them for productive lives. Parents have told us it’s not strictly about money, which is why our proposal is strong on policies that are geared toward getting them and their schools the kind of help they can use most,” Braun said.

SB 5532 would improve professional development for teachers to support best practices in special education. It also would improve the transition planning necessary to support further education and training for students with disabilities once they move on from high school.

Families would gain from receiving free access to advocates who would help them and their children navigate the special-education system, and from the establishment of local advisory committees to enable even more involvement and interaction with their school districts.

On the financial side, Braun explained, the bill includes updates to state funding formulas that would better align allocations with actual costs.

“This proposal blends things we know from a long history of supporting vulnerable Washingtonians and their families, and factors we emphasized more recently – like the importance of outcomes – during the successful effort to modernize basic-education funding,” said the Senate Republican budget leader. He was among a select group of lawmakers who crafted Washington’s landmark bipartisan K-12 funding reforms in 2017.

“It’s also the next step in our ongoing drive to address inequities in the public-school system, so students can achieve their fullest potential.”

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Full text of bill is here: SB 5532

Bill digest is here: SB 5532 bill digest

How schools of education fall short on teacher prep

Apr 14 by Beth Sigall Leave a Comment

There’s no shortage of stories these days about the difficulties school districts have hiring and keeping teachers. How we can keep new teachers from leaving during their first five years on the job is the focus of an in-depth report in The Atlantic Monthly that follows the careers of three new teachers and asks what, if anything, could we do better to help prepare them for the first years on the job.

Life as a new teacher – In this piece, we see inside the classroom of newly-minted middle school English teacher Michael Duklewski. At 33 years old he’s a career changer who used to be a lobbyist but went back to school at a well-established teacher’s college (Towson State) to earn his teacher’s certificate.

Duklewski’s teaching experience sounds both rewarding and at times pretty frustrating, too. He seems eager to try new modes of instruction to engage his students – staying up late hours developing a lesson plan on monologues using video clips from popular movies (it ends up being a home run with the kids). But he’s regularly clocking 12-to-15 hour workdays just to keep up with the basics of the job, leaving little time to do some of the more ambitious work he’d like to do, such as using data better to track student performance.

It’s all about classroom management – What struck me the most from the article was how much time Duklewski spent managing classroom behaviors, how frustrated he felt about that, and how his education training at Towson State didn’t provide him with the tools he needed to do that part of his job effectively. To his credit, Duklewski figured out through trial and error he should vary his approaches. So a class wide point system works for awhile, then he changes it up when it stops being effective. Or, calling students out for bad behaviors in class in front of peers doesn’t work as well as having a private conversation with them after class. Using praise for students who are on task and working ends up motivating others to do the same. And so on.

The author concludes that in general, teacher training programs for the most part spend little time teaching prospective teachers one of the most important parts of their job – how to manage the classroom and how to deal with inappropriate behaviors. For example, there is little evidence of widespread instruction in these programs on the effectiveness positive behavioral supports.

Take some time to read this thoughtful piece. Because as school districts increasingly are asked to provide additional mentoring and training programs, including here in Washington state where the legislature passed a bill this session to shore up teacher mentoring, perhaps we should ask schools of education to provide more relevant training before those teachers enter the classroom.

Rethinking money spent on teacher training

Dec 18 by Beth Sigall Leave a Comment

State governments and school districts spend a considerable amount on continuing teacher education and training, with the aim of making current teachers better at their jobs. An exhaustive new research study spanning two years from The New Teacher Project takes a closer look at whether these programs work, and asks if continuing to invest in them is the best use of tax dollars.

In “The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest For Teacher Development, researchers tracked teacher training over three large schools districts and one charter school network. Here is a summary of their findings:

School systems make massive investments in teacher improvement.
But most teachers do not show significant improvements in their craft from year to year, and only half of teachers reported that training brought about lasting changes in classroom instruction.
They could find no evidence that particular types or amounts of training consistently helped teachers improve.
School systems don’t really help teachers understand how to improve, or that they have the ability to improve at all.

In his review of this research, Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asks whether money spent on training could be better spent on raising teacher pay across the board:

“The single most important education ‘reform’ would be to pay teachers more…a lot more; my ballpark figure is 40 percent more. The considerable funds now spent, apparently ineffectively, on improved teacher development would be a good down payment towards improved teacher salaries.”

Read more about The Mirage report on teacher training and download the report here.

Read Dick Startz’ analysis of the research in his blog post at The Brookings Institute here.

Teacher Training – It’s Not Working

Aug 18 by Beth Sigall Leave a Comment

An extensive new study released by TNTP, an education non-profit, shows that while school districts are spending significant sums on teacher professional development, and the teachers themselves are missing a lot of class time in the process, very little of this effort is helping teachers improve their craft.

The study looked at 10,000 school districts and 100 school administrators with multiple measures of teacher effectiveness (evaluation ratings, classroom observations and student test scores). On average these districts spent $18,000 per teacher on training (about $50 billion annually). Those same teachers missed about 19 days of school, which translates into about 10 percent of the entire school year. The study showed no correlation between the training the teachers received and teachers improving their work in the classroom.

Read the full story at The Washington Post here.

Review the TNTP study here.

New Survey: Most Teachers Like Their Jobs and Would Recommend It To Others

May 5 by Beth Sigall Leave a Comment

“Why do K-12 teachers stay in the profession despite its many challenges and notoriously limited financial rewards? According to a recent survey of just over a thousand elementary, middle, and high school teachers around the country, the answer is: job satisfaction.

“We all know what a challenging profession teaching can be,” said Pamela Roggeman, Ed.D., academic dean for the University of Phoenix College of Education. “Our goal with this survey is to understand what it is that keeps them coming back to it, year after year.”

The survey was conducted online in the U.S. by polling and market research firm Harris on behalf of the University of Phoenix between April 14 and 27. In total, 1,002 full-time K-12 teachers responded to the survey, explained Tanya Burden, director of public relations at Apollo Education Group, of which the University of Phoenix is a subsidiary. All respondents had earned at least an undergraduate degree, she said.

A majority (88 percent) of survey respondents cited job satisfaction as the primary reason they continue to pursue the teaching profession. Many (71 percent) said that seeing students grow is what they most enjoy about the job. And more than half (68 percent) of those who entered the field in the last 10 years said they would recommend the profession to others.”

Continue reading at T.H.E. Journal here