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The teacher’s main responsibility is to bring the subject to the students in such a way that they learn it. If they take interest in it, so much the better. Some teachers live for that second part — sparking the students’ interest — but first and foremost, the students need to learn the subject.

That’s what a teacher does, period: Teach the subject to the students in as interesting and lasting a way as possible.

But the just-released New York State Teaching Standards expect teachers to fulfill a much broader range of responsibilities. Consisting of seven standards, each of which is broken down into numerous elements, the standards outline, for the first time, what all teachers in New York State will be expected to do.

According to these standards, teachers at all levels, all subjects, are supposed to understand and respond to each student’s background, psychological needs, and interests; integrate technology into the lessons; stay abreast of developments in their subjects and in pedagogy; cite research in support of their instructional decisions; show understanding of the school’s history and social context; bring multiple perspectives into their lessons; incorporate sound, movement, touch, images, and writing in their instruction; apply the lessons to real-life situations and students’ personal experience; help broaden students’ cultural perspectives; and much more.

None of these expectations is really alarming or new; teachers do combinations of these things all the time, and a set of Model Core Teaching Standards proposed by an interstate consortium last year set a precedent for overreach. The problem is that the nature of teaching depends largely on the subjects, grade levels, students, and teachers, and some of the items listed are more important than others. (more…)

The path toward teacher certification is laden with demands that prospective teachers prove that they’re sensitive, socially conscious, and self-critical. If a national group of education agencies has its way, those demands could soon extend throughout teachers’ careers.

Teachers and others would do well to look at the “Model Core Teaching Standards: A Resource for State Dialogue,” released in July for public comment. Developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC), the new teaching standards (separate from the Common Core State Standards that have been in the news recently) retain much of the language of the 1992 teaching standards, with some reordering and rewording to match the “new times.” Whereas the 1992 standards were intended for beginning teachers (and adopted by 38 states), the new standards are for all teachers.

The ten standards fall into four categories: The Learner and Learning, Content Knowledge, Instructional Practice, and Professional Responsibility. Each standard is broken down into Performances, Essential Knowledge, and Critical Dispositions. Like the 1992 standards, the Model Core Teaching Standards downplay subject matter knowledge while emphasizing the social processes of the classroom and the attitudes that teachers should have. Because these standards come so soon after the Common Core State Standards, they might influence how the Common Core standards are interpreted and implemented.

The 1992 document devoted the first standard to content knowledge; the new standards address content in standards 4 and 5. Two standards devoted to content seem like more than one, but neither standard addresses the need for specific knowledge. (more…)

Teacher layoffs in New York State are about to begin, and they will not be pretty. There is no ideal approach to them; one can only hope to do as little harm as possible. But how do we set our priorities? Who should stay, and why?

Currently, the teachers contract requires layoffs to be done according to seniority, following the basic principle of “last hired, first fired.” In a recent City Journal op-ed, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Marcus Winters objects to the idea of laying newer teachers off first:

Basing layoffs on seniority would make sense if it were true that more experienced teachers were always more effective. But a wide and uncontroversial body of research says that’s not the case. We know that after only a couple of years in the classroom, a teacher’s additional experience has no bearing on the amount her students learn.

Unfortunately this is one of those “research has shown” statements that distort what the research has actually shown. (more…)

Test scores now have regal status. They drive many of our policy decisions, yet we pay too little attention to their content and merit. We know they leave much to be desired, but we need to understand why.

Often the reading passages and questions are poorly written and geared toward limited thinking. For example, the New York State sample sixth-grade ELA test (the actual test from 2005) on the NYSED Web site includes a short anonymous “poem”:

The Giant Pipe

To me, this giant pipe
Is the secret brain center of the world,
The biggest spaceship, the deepest cave,
The longest tunnel, a haunted house,
A submarine, the home of a queen.
Like a lizard that changes colors,
I can live in different worlds.
Like treasures in a pirate chest,
My secrets are hidden
Inside this giant pipe.

A picture below the poem shows a pipe on a playground. (more…)

The charter school study released this week that suggests charter school students are catching up with their suburban peers leaves many questions unanswered. As GothamSchools and the New York Times reported, the study found that a student who attended a charter school for all of grades K-8 would close approximately 86 percent of the “Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap” in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.

But here’s what I want to know.

1. How many students in the study actually completed grades K-8 in charter schools? Nowhere in the study does it say. Yet these students supposedly close 86 percent of the Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap in math and 66 percent in ELA. It would help to know how many there are. (more…)

Last week I read a thought-provoking column by Diane Ravitch in the New York Post, in which she discusses the lowering of the bar on New York State math and ELA tests. She points out that to reach level 2, which is sufficient for promotion in New York City, a student needs a significantly lower percentage of points than he or she would have needed three years ago. Ravitch comments. “Ending social promotion, as the city rightly wants to do, is thus meaningless, because students can reach Level 2 by just guessing.”

Likewise, Meredith Kolodner writes in the Daily News, “The number of correct answers needed to score a Level 2 to get promoted has sunk so low that a student can guess on the multiple choice section and leave the rest of the test blank.”

This is disturbing. Surely it isn’t possible to get a 2—and thus a promotion to the next grade—by just guessing! Or is it?

To find out, I conducted a little experiment. (more…)