Thursday, April 28, 2005

Arnold's Initiative

In the May 2nd issue of Business Week, there is an article in the Education section about an initiative by Arnold Schwarzenegger to link teachers pay to test scores. The huge red flag that everyone should be concerned with, is the intent to link pay with test scores from standardized state tests. While this particular initiative appears to be ill-conceived and is facing great resistance from the American Federation of Teachers, the demands of teacher accountability and pay for performance is rising rapidly.

Recent pay-for-performance initiatives are showing early signs of success, such as the ProComp plan in Denver, CO. This joint initiative between Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teacher Association is an excellent start that contains multiple factors related to assessing teacher performance. For those of us who have been in the classroom, pay linked solely to test performance is a scary thing. We are all aware that multiple factors affect a child's outcomes, both in the classroom and on high stakes tests.

But let's also be realistic. Education has been sheltered from the demands of accountability for far too long. The USDOE always likes to show the graph that compares the amount of dollars invested in education to the reading on grade level indicators for fourth graders.


NAEP Reading Scores Compared to ESEA Funding

It is very depressing to think that over the course of about 25 years and nearly $20 billion invested, that only 20% of fourth graders, as measured by the NAEP exam, are reading on grade level. If you can't read, how can you learn? Seems pretty fundamental to me.

This brings me to where my interests are in education: School improvement processes supported and accelerated by smart technology that is used effectively. Before you can use the technology, you have to do the heavy lifting of process improvement.

PLAN ==> DO ==> CHECK==> ACT

The four fundamental pillars of Deming's Continuous Improvement methodology. These four words have gained importance as continuous improvement has gained ground in the education industry. Leading consultants such as Pat Davenport, Gerald Anderson and Larry Lezzotte have created school improvement processes that either are centered on or contain portions of Deming's methods. So what you say? The interesting thing here is that dramatic successes have been achieved using these processes. So what you say again? The other very interesting thing is that these processes are achieving large scale success in different situations and different districts.

This is exactly what Richard Elmore, Education Chair at Harvard, addresses in his book, "School Reform from the Inside Out." Large scale replication of proven school improvement processes has proven to be a daunting and elusive goal. But recent successes at Brazosport ISD, Fontana USD and others are showing that school improvement processes can be replicated at differing districts with different compositions and different settings.

Where do I think technology fits? More on that in the next post....