 First on our agenda this afternoon is an exploration of the changes to our public education system and the profession of teaching required for each and every child to have an infective teacher in front of him or her each day and preparing them to meet the challenges of the 21st century. We're about to hear a vision for new public education system and a reframed profession of teaching from two world-renowned scholars, practitioners and researchers, Dr. Paul Reville and Dr. Debra Lohenberg Ball. So I will read quickly their bios. They are long and distinguished. Paul is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and the founding director of its educational redesign lab. He recently completed nearly five years of service as the Secretary of Education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which I think is our Finland. As Governor Patrick's top education advisor, Reville established a new executive office of education and had oversight of higher education, K-12 and early education in the nation's leading student achievement state. He served in the governor's cabinet and played a key education reform role on matters ranging from the Achievement Gap Act of 2010 and Common Core State Standards to the common world's highly successful Race to the Top proposal. Dr. Ball is the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Go blue, we're four and one. Beat Northwestern. Sorry, I'm a Michigan alum. We bleed blue. And an Arthur Thurnell Professor and a Master Educator. She currently serves as Dean of the School of Education and Director of Teaching Works. She taught elementary school for more than 15 years and continues to teach mathematics to elementary students every summer. Dr. Debra Ball has co-authored more than 150 publications and has lectured and made numerous presentations around the world. She serves on the board of the National Science Board and the Mathematics Science Research Institute Board of Trustees and chairs the Spencer Board of Directors. Oh, that wore me out. I don't know how she does all of these things. And of course, we won't talk about teachers and the professional teaching without hearing from teachers directly. So following these esteemed folks conversations, we will ask three master educators to join us for discussion and how we can systemically support transformation of teaching. And I'll introduce them after Paul and Debra have provided their remarks. So we don't have a defined order. Who would like to go first? Paul's going first. Without further ado. Okay, I think I'm going to stand up if that's okay. I don't have any slides, but I'm going to stand and come over here. I want to talk about, well, first of all, I want to say thank you for the invitation to be here. Thank you, Julian, for the introduction. And thank all of you for the good work that you do. I've been hearing a little bit about the work that's going on in the field, and I know we've got at least three teams from Massachusetts in the room. So Hello to my colleagues from Massachusetts. I'm really happy to be here and happy that you're thinking about this topic. I want to, I've been doing a lot of work lately about the redesign of public education and thinking about what it would take for us to deliver on the promise of public education, which is excellence and equity. And it's a promise we sort of inscribed in law in Massachusetts in 1993 and in most of your states, sometime during the 1990s, where we said we wanted to have an education system that prepared all of our children to be successful in society, and all means all we added. No excuses, no exceptions. So as was mentioned in my intro, I just finished, not just finished, but a couple of years ago I finished five years of service with Governor Patrick in Massachusetts, the nation's leading student achievement state. We instituted education reform with the usual main strategies, standards, assessment, accountability, school choice, lots of improvements to our system. We went from the middle of the pack in the early 90s to the head of the class literally on virtually any indicator you wanted to look at. I have a NAEP slide that I show when I am doing slides that says, you know, Massachusetts in the last five administrations of the NAEP test has been first in math and English at both fourth and eighth grade, the only measured levels for five times running. And thank you. No other state has done it once. We've done it five times, but it should be a short celebration because as all of you know those kinds of rankings are based on averages and those averages conceal, you don't have to scratch far beneath the surface to see deep persistent achievement gaps that look a lot like the achievement gaps that we had when we started all this. Only the floor has come up. Some of the gaps have closed a little. We've undeniably made progress. But it's a short celebration because we have a long way to go if we're going to get to all means all. And what do we actually mean by all means all? It means educating all of our children to be successful in this society, to be able to get and hold a 21st century job with all the skills and knowledge it would take in a high skill, high knowledge economy to do that. Kind of job that would allow them to support themselves and a family. They kind of education that would prepare them to be active citizens and leaders should they choose to do so in a democracy. The kind of education that would allow them to be heads of family with the character traits that we associate with that. Kind of education that would allow them to be successful, fulfilled individuals, and lifelong learners capable of solving problems that we as educators can't even conceive of. So that's what we set out to do most of our states in the 1990s. And now here we are in 2015 and we have these deep persistence achievement gaps. For example, we still have an iron law correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement and attainment. Notwithstanding our best efforts at education reform. A lot of hard work by leaders, by teachers, by policy makers, by parents, by students, by communities. And still we have this correlation between socioeconomic status and educational attainment. Doesn't predict anything for any individual. We have lots of individuals. I suspect a number in this room who've defied the odds of demographics. But we're now not yet anywhere near a society in which demographics don't equal destiny. And that's what we aspire to, a society where demographics have nothing to do with destiny. So we have to ask the question, well, what's the problem? What do we get wrong here? What didn't we do that we should have been doing? So the first question I ask in the Massachusetts context is, did we get the goal wrong? I mean, was shooting for all means all just overly ambitious, too idealistic, not appropriate? Or was it, as we thought at the time, and I still think now, just the right thing to do, not only for moral, ethical kinds of reasons, as each generation has an obligation to do at least as well, if not better, by the next generation as they come along. Civil rights leaders, religious leaders, moralists from time immemorial have reminded us of this responsibility that we as adults have. We've chosen to forget it or ignore it sometimes, but we do have that responsibility. And at the same time, as we became aware in the last quarter of the 20th century, it is now in our economic interest. If we want to grow this economy, if we want individuals to be able to provide for ourselves, if we want to attract businesses to work in places like Massachusetts where the costs of doing business are high and the climate is tough and the natural resources are slim, you're going to have to have brain power. That's what you're going to compete on. So if we're going to move forward, we now have this felicitous coincidence between our moral obligations and our economic self-interest. And so that drives us to have to have that kind of a goal of all means all, which many of us hastily and somewhat naively set in the 90s thinking that if we just set and clarified that goal of preparing all children for success in a system that historically had only prepared a small sliver of students for success that somehow educators could figure out how to do it. So I don't think we got the goal wrong. So the second question I'd ask is, did we get the strategies wrong? Were ideas like having standards and assessment and accountability misdirected? And my answer there is no, it wasn't a misdirected strategy. It was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient to achieving the goal. It didn't go deep enough. It wasn't robust enough. It didn't get us to where we were going, but we need to have clear standards of achievement in our field. If we want taxpayers to invest in what we do and to keep their confidence with us, we're going to have to show that we actually accomplish something. So that's important. We need to keep track of progress. We may have some problems. Some of the instruments of school reform and standards-based accountability have been blunt instruments and need to be modified or changed, but I would argue they don't need to be vacated. Choice I know is more controversial in a group like this, but choice is something that Americans like in virtually every walk of their life. So it's not surprising that they've taken to it in education. So it's likely to be there and we're going to have to figure out how to adjust to that. But it by itself is clearly not the answer to getting to all means all. So we had some necessary strategies, but not sufficient strategies. For example, these strategies have led to our thinking more deliberately and more deeply about teaching than I would argue we ever have before. You know, looking at the use of data, for example, in classrooms, in schools, one of the biggest changes I've seen as I travel around Massachusetts over the past 20, 30 years is now there's talk about data and data informing teaching and educational strategy all the time. It's talked about. Whereas before 20 years ago, you could go to a teacher's lounge and you'd never hear the word. So we've done some good things, but it hasn't been enough. So then I come to the third question, which is do we have the right delivery system? And I would argue that the delivery system that we have inherited from the early 20th century, a school-based delivery system, a factory model school delivery system is outmoded. It's outdated. It was designed to serve another era for another purpose, the early 20th century in which we were batch producing, batch processing, mass producing education to rapidly turn over a large number of immigrants and others coming into the cities and prepare them for low-skill, low-knowledge jobs in a manufacturing economy. This was a great model. Not surprisingly, we love the factory then. We picked a factory model and we've hunkered down on that. We've kept with that. It still looks largely the same what we do in schools as what we did then. And it doesn't actually work now. Why doesn't it work? What are the problems with it? Well, one is it's based on a one-size-fits-all kind of assumption that all the kids coming in are like raw material coming into a factory. You can control for the quality of the product coming in. You give it the same process and it comes out the other end in pretty much the same way. But it isn't like that. And those of you who teach know this better than anyone. Kids come in not necessarily with different aptitudes. I'm not saying we all have the same aptitudes, but kids come in more than capable of doing what we ask them to do in school. The human brain can do what we're asking them to do in school, any human brain unless it's damaged. And then we make other adjustments. So they're capable, but the question is you've got some kids coming into kindergarten who've heard 30, 40, 50 million words less than another child. We were just talking about this among the teachers earlier. When I visited kindergarten in Massachusetts, I'd see about a five-year range between people who were two or three years, kids who were two or three years beyond, above the expected readiness for reading at kindergarten and two or three years behind. And when you looked at the data actually on what happens to those kids as those quintiles move through K to 12 education, they pretty much stay in the cohorts, this very little movement. So in a certain dispiriting sense, it's over before it even begins in terms of getting to all means all. So this notion that one size fits all just isn't going to work. We've got to think differently about our kids because they are different when they come into us. Second thing just quickly, we know that there are lots of impediments. Nobody knows better than you. Things that arise in the conditions of students' lives outside of school that get in the way of their coming to school and being attentive and supplying motivated effort when they get there. And unless we develop a system that mitigates those problems in some way, unless we have a braided system of health and human services and education, we're not going to be able to assure that every child gets to school, supplies their best effort, and has a chance of getting to the level of achievement that we want them to get to. And we're not asking teachers to solve all these problems because teachers are overloaded. But at the same time, we are asking for systems where a teacher who finds a child who has gone homeless in her classroom over the weekend can pick up the phone and actually call somebody who can do something about it urgently because she knows she'll never be able to get through to that child until such time as that homelessness issue is addressed. So we don't have those systems now. We've got a lot of experiments. We've got a lot of good news projects that are out there, but they tend to be islands and they tend to be isolated. So we need to figure out how to braid those services and bring them together. Again, we need to recognize the difference between children. We need to meet every child where he or she is in early childhood and give them the services and support and academic challenge and guidance that they need to traverse the education system and be successful at each stage along the way to emerge with some level of post-secondary education ready for success. Last thing related to the problem that we have in our one size fits all factory model is it not only is there too little time for everything that we ask schools to do now, world-class performance in core subjects, well-rounded education, 20th, 21st century skills, social and emotional learning, and while you're at it solve all the other problems that society has from obesity to teen pregnancy to virtually anything else and if you can feed them, have health clinics and drive our education on top of it. So there isn't enough time in the school day for everything that we're asking it to do. We're taking the old box and cramming everything in and on top of that the amount of time that's in school relative to the amount of time in their lives is 20%, 20% of their waking hours they're in school. So it's a relatively weak intervention utilizing one-fifth of their waking hours and we're hoping to get to equity with that intervention. It's just not strong enough and those of us who have privilege, those of us who have children provide those children with virtually round the clock enrichment in their waking hours outside of school. It isn't school but it's education and the differences are huge in terms of access to this kind of out-of-school enrichment and it turns out that this out-of- school enrichment has every bit as much to do with achievement gaps that show up when we measure them in school as anything we do in school. So if we only concentrate education reform on optimizing what happens in school we're not going to get to all means all until we level that playing field with respect to access to out-of-school learning. So those are the kinds of things that I think we need to work on. My argument is we need a new engine in education. We're trying to get the job of all means all done with a Model T engine that was meant to run 30 or 40 miles an hour and we're now in the 21st century and we need a Tesla that's going to go 100, 120 miles an hour. And we tried to strap our engine with standards and slap on a carburetor of choice and hope that it will go that kind of maximal speed but the engine just wasn't built to do that. We need to rethink that system and I think there's a huge opportunity for the profession and for unions in particular to take the lead in this conversation about what a 21st century system looks like. We're very conservative as a society about education. We hunkered down we want it to look like the education we had when we're kids but unless we reconceptualize what it would look like to have a system that differentiates, to have a system that braids health and human services, to have a system that levels the playing field in terms of access to out-of-school learning. Unless we do those things we can't get there. So I was asked last thing I'll do because I'm packing an hour's worth of stuff in a few minutes here. I was asked to comment on what this looks like for teachers and I made a few notes thinking in the wee hours of the morning actually last night what I think a teacher in this new system would have to be capable of. So here are my reflections. I don't know what the whole engine looks like. What I do know is we need a vigorous conversation or kind of design charrette nationally on how to do this and I think teachers can lead that but here's what I think teachers will need to be able to do in the kind of system I describe. First of all they'll need to be nimble curators of knowledge and learning experiences. So not so much to have all the knowledge themselves but to be capable of finding experiences and providing access to experiences that are going to provide enriching learning opportunities for their students. They do need to be content experts at least in some areas and pedagogical designers people capable of applying knowledge and knowing how knowledge gets applied through experience and designing problems for children. They need to be connectors repositories of community art culture recreational and enrichment connections. So instead of it being all about in the four walls of the school it's all about in the community and connecting students to experiences that go beyond school and from which they can learn. They need to be personalizers that is diagnosticians or assessors of where students are figure out where is this student you know it's got to be like a hospital. What we're doing in education now if we were doing it in medicine would be like having a hospital and everybody who comes through the front door we say irrespective of your ailment we're going to give you the same treatment and the same length of stack. Now it wouldn't work in medicine and we wouldn't tolerate it but we do it every day in education and not that medicine is the epitome of efficiency and effectiveness but the logic there is a kind of logic we ought to have of meeting kids where they are and giving them what they need to get educated and that means we're going to have to be as teachers diagnosticians and then ultimately prescribers. We need to be masters of technology in the internet. We need to be counselors family connectors community connectors listeners empathizers cultural boundary crossers. We need to be inspirers motivators and enthusiasts and finally we need to be advocate advocates for children and families for our profession. We need to have a vision and we need to be persistent in going after that vision. So those are a few thoughts on where I think we need to go with the teaching profession overall and with our field generally we need to have a vision of where we're going otherwise in the words of our colleague David Tyak we'll be tinkering toward utopia we'll be making little changes but with little or no hope of getting to all means all in terms of the future of this nation to say nothing of the future of our profession I think this is vitally important work and I applaud you all for working on it. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you. So I wanted to make a couple of geographic connections first I see the people from Columbus Ohio probably didn't appreciate the comment about go blue so we love you anyway. And then I see Cedar Rapids Iowa so I wanted to say I have a connection to you because I went grew up in Massachusetts now the western part of the state which is about as far from Boston as you can get but I went to high school in Iowa City Iowa so I have a fond spot in my heart for Iowa so yeah go hawks too I can do that one too so anyway I'm glad I can't actually see all of the table cards over there but it's a great honor to be in a room with people who I know are contributing so in so many different ways to public education so thank you for inviting me here and I um I think that where you began Paul and where I'd like to pick you end it is where I'm going to focus my comments so he began by saying how are we going to deliver on the promise that somehow our forebears made to some of our young people and we're trying to figure out what that really means for today's young people to deliver on that promise of what public education really needs to do for the next generation of adults in this country and the second thing I want to pick on is I'm going to focus entirely on teachers and I really actually want to argue today if we can plug this back in that um the teaching in my mind is the number one policy imperative can maybe put that in for me of our time and I say that not because I think teachers are some of more important than kids but that having been a teacher myself for many years and as um as you said um Philly and I continue to teach I have a very profound uh deep respect for the work and I don't know that many people in our country actually share that and one of the things asks I have a view this afternoon as educators I think many of you how many of you have actually been classroom teachers yeah lots of you is that I think we have a particular role to play in changing the conversation about teaching and not just the conversation about teachers so that's essentially part of what I want to talk about and my ask of you is that on the basis of what I'm going to talk about that I hope that you will join me in trying to change the way teaching is thought about in our country and I think no one else can actually do it besides people who have been so profoundly involved in the work um I want to think also about teaching as it relates to young people so the notion of this probably somewhat startling phrase of safe to practice is with my eye on the students um for some reason when we think about the profession of teaching we worry a lot more about the adults and about everybody arguing about the adults and we don't remember that it's kids who are placed at risk when we don't think about the importance of this work that people who teach do so I want to think with you a little bit about what it would mean if we as a profession agree that it's not okay to have people teaching kids who aren't ready to take the safety of children seriously and by safety I of course mean physical safety but I also mean obviously their academic safety the risks that we put them to when people who don't know what they're doing are their teachers and that's our fault so I want to talk about that their emotional safety their social safety their number of kinds of safety and there's a lot of big at-risk discourse in this country but I actually think that we're as a society responsible for taking kids and placing them at risk so when I say this I think you know there are a lot of kids in this country there are 50 million kids in our schools and schooling as in some ways I think you were saying Paul is the commitment we make in our society as we say we do to advancing the next generation of young people there's a lot of evidence that teaching actually has an enormous impact so that despite I agree with you Paul it's a small intervention but there's dramatic social science research that shows the difference between what somebody has a lot of skill in working with students can achieve with those students and someone who hasn't had the opportunity to develop that skill doesn't do big big differences in what happens to kids who are assigned over years to teachers who actually have lots of skills and understanding who they are respecting the resources they bring to school can explain content versus a teacher who's fumbling at the wheel because he or she hasn't had the opportunity to get good coaching good training sort of thinks it's national work and fails at it and the difference in outcomes for those kids is so large that we should feel embarrassed for not ensuring that all kids get the teachers who actually can do that work and that we make sure that all the adults are willing to do that work get the support that they need but that's hopeful also because for the very reason you said Paul if teaching is such a small intervention in kids lives but we know that it can have enormous power it's at our fingertips to be able to do something that could improve the opportunities that kids in this country really got so the final thing which I've hinted at is there is I think we all talk a lot about how much people don't respect teachers but what I want to say this afternoon is I think the problem is at least as much that possibly we ourselves but certainly the public doesn't understand the work and those are slightly different things maybe they don't respect us because they don't respect the work but I want to talk with you today about the work because it's always the most exciting to me when I get to talk to people who actually know what I'm talking about when I talk about teaching I spend a lot of time talking to people who don't know anything about this work so I actually think the problem of advancing teaching as the nation's most important resource and supporting the people who do it and improving the quality of how it's done whether it changes a lot in the 21st century or not even tomorrow we could do a lot more for our kids if we took more seriously this work I was going to give you a little quiz and I'm just going to I'll post these slides later but the it's kind of like that NPR radio program I was going to ask you and I'll just give you a moment but I'm not going to take it up with you to look at these numbers and figure out what the question that goes with them is that has to do with what I'm talking about today so if you look at a number like 1.5 million what is that about that has to do with the topic I'm talking about so it has something to do with either teachers or kids or something about the demographics of our society or something but all these are things you think a lot about and I'm going to give it to you later and you can talk about it could be one moment at your table to take up one of these and see if you can agree on what one of them is the answer to John okay so I'll tell you one of them and that actually creates the urgency for me but all of these create urgency for me 1.5 million is the number of teachers that we're going to need in this country in the next three to four years that's a lot of people and that also means that there's a lot of hope because if we could organize you can't hear me oh 1.5 million teachers is the number of teachers we will need in the workforce in the next that's a conservative estimate that also is a kind of hope because if we could organize to change the way beginning teachers are ready for their work we could have a huge impact on kids that's not a trickle that's a lot of people but I'm not going to spend more time in this but I promise I will post the slide and maybe maybe the answers okay so can I control it so this is another a little bit of data at the beginning of this talk I won't spend too much time I think this is really important for us to understand because anybody who thinks they're going to actually contribute to the improvement of our opportunities as teachers or our colleagues needs to understand the scale of the profession the reason we need 1.5 million teachers is that the workforce is huge and it's actually now is the second largest workforce in the country the second largest occupational group only exceeded by retail salespeople but for years it was the largest occupational group but then maybe the important thing to notice is that there's no other profession that even approximates the size of teaching the second largest profession is nursing and it's about two-thirds the size of teaching but that's also a profession that struggles to get both respect and appropriate support and training so I say this both because it's critical because it's large and because anything that attempts to support teachers needs to take account of how many people actually out of their goodness of their heart and their commitment decide that they're going to spend some other time teaching kids and we don't actually try to do enough for those people ourselves and others like us I've already said some things that I think are useful for you to have in your fingertips about evidence about the difference between teachers who have lots of skill and what I mean by skill is it's not like they're born to be better teachers they've had more opportunities to learn to do things that really matter versus people who are dumped into classrooms or maybe graduate from programs that haven't really helped them or they're in some kind of pathway where if you're quote smart you're supposed to figure it out on your own it's not great and because the difference you can see in the data of what happens to those kids is pretty dramatic you could end up in the bottom or the top quartile depending on the sequence of the skill level of the teachers you've had independent controlling for all the things like socioeconomic background things that we do know have a big predictive effect the fact that teaching can actually mediate that is really important so those are useful to know so there's you know there's a lot of promise right now when I became a teacher in the 1970s nobody was really talking about teacher quality it's kind of a mixed bag but it is on everyone's fingertips these days and on everyone's tongues and maybe we can you know kind of deploy that to our advantage so there's some barriers to being serious about teaching one of them is you know I'm going to say very clearly to you we don't prepare teachers in any pathway nearly well enough there's some great programs in this country but on the whole teachers enter teaching hugely underprepared for the actual work that we do and somehow we believe that people are supposed to figure out and we're you know to tell us extent I think those of us who teach have contributed to this I'm going to taunt you with that in the moment we tend to teach teaching is something heroic we hear about the great teacher we sort of celebrate some great teachers but frankly it ought to be something that everybody gets you don't talk about other professions that way if I asked you you know how many times have we had an excellent airplane pilot you know your basic assumption is that all the airplane pilots you encounter are going to fly perfectly competently and you're going to be safe why we think that it should be a rare event to have a good teacher seems ridiculous to me but somehow that's become the discourse and if you ask an audience that's not teachers how many really good teachers did you have they often you know have one or two out of 70 teachers they've had that's ridiculous that's not appropriate um we maybe ourselves but certainly others don't think teaching can be taught we continue with discourses though you have to be born to do it you have to figure it all out on your own that's basically a recipe for continuing to have a relatively media mediocre standard of practice we need to stand up for the idea that this is something people can learn to do and that it's important for people who teach and who have taught to contribute to articulating what it is you have to know how to do not just believe not just be oriented to but know how to do so when I taught my summer class this summer I've taught now for about I don't know give or take about 40 years and every single summer when I teach the students I teach I have to continue to figure out how I get a group of 30 kids who really dislike math to decide that they're math people and that they're actually really good at it and I have to think how I'm going to get them all engaged in the work I'm going to have to think about what the problems are how I get them to listen that's not simple and I've been doing this for a really long time it's really good for me to immerse myself then every summer to remind myself that one doesn't stop learning this and it's not that intuitive it actually takes skill and practice so what we have to do these are the three things I think we have to do that I'll try to just briefly say something to you about one is the thing I'm trying to incite you to do with me which is we need to stand up better for the power of good teaching in our society that means you know I'm a corner when you meet neighbors at the store across the garden fence wherever it is you encounter other people in our society think about how you could get people to understand teaching we do a lot to some extent too much whining about all the things that are wrong with our situation and all the ways that people don't like teachers that's not what other people walk around who do other kinds of work in our society when I meet someone as a nurse she's as likely or he's as likely to tell me about a really fascinating case that he or she had recently and it gets me really curious like how does somebody learn how to do that as a nurse but I don't think that we as teachers walk around saying and I had this kid who until he was in third grade like really like barely came to school and for in the first term and go on like that to say something that happened and not make it seem like a miracle but like the things that fascinate all of us who teach we need to do more of that I think we probably need to recognize this is not a contemporary situation in which we find ourselves there are a lot of historical factors that contribute to why teaching is viewed the way it is why it's as under supported and under prepared as it is and not be too naive to think this is all like NCLB or something like that this is a very long standing which also means that any effort to improve it is going to take quite a lot of deliberate work it's not going to be simple to create a profession in which people really get appropriate training and in which there's a threshold you don't get a classroom if you can't do some particular things and that means I think that and it will take people like the people in this room we need to articulate what is the common professional curriculum by that I mean the things people have to learn in order to be teachers do you know that the typical curriculum and teacher preparation programs in this country has been around for almost a hundred years and it's divided as you probably know like educational psychology methods of x and methods of y history of American schools I mean exactly what goes on in programs differs a lot but even in the alternative root programs there's not a center on the work on what it is people actually do as teaching which is slightly shocking that's not how other professions organize the work they organize around what you have to learn how to do so that's a big task for us so let me just taunt you will just a moment so that you don't do this anymore if you do these are the kinds of things that teachers go around saying a lot they say things like teaching has always come naturally to me or I've developed my own way of things that works for me like I saw what you did in your summer program but that wouldn't work for me or it requires a lot of improvisation you really can't specify what teaching takes or I've learned everything I know from experience I mean imagine if you went to see your doctor and your doctor said you know what this doctor in my the office next to me does when he performs surgery is this but that's really not my style I really prefer to use a plastic spoon when I do it somehow we've come to think that it's unprofessional to treat teaching as though it has skill and technique I don't know where we got that idea but try to put anybody like a research mathematician in an elementary class and it might remind you that it takes a lot of technique and skill because that person does no math at some level maybe not the way that he or she needs to know it probably he but anyway I don't think it's that great that we keep making it seem that talking about technique is anti-professional it almost seems anti-professional to make it all seem like it's all individual and idiosyncratic so I hope you can think about this if you are one of the people who tends to resist the idea that teaching could be actually taught and described just think a little bit how that sounds to other people and whether we really do we really want to go on saying stuff like that so I'm going to talk about a couple things about the context one is that and for the rest of this talk I want to interest you in the problem of beginning teaching so we could talk about the whole workforce but frankly we have a giant problem around beginning teaching that is we have a very large number of people in the workforce who have only been teaching a year or two they actually cycle out really quickly and then we have another crop of people who've been teaching a year or two to some extent this has always been true but it's worse than it's ever been about four years ago the modal number of years of experience on the teacher workforce was one the mode that means more kids in this country had a teacher with one year of experience than any other number of years of experience so if you add that to some of what I've been saying about the lack of consistent professional training a lot of kids are at risk because we're letting people teach who actually don't yet know what they're doing and they leave and then more new people come that's not a way to build a profession either and so I want to focus on that a second big problem is the gap between who the kids in our country are and who the teachers are and that wasn't true in the 1940s or 50s before Brown versus Board of Education like we know why that was an important decision but at the point that we desegregated schools we also lost huge numbers of black teachers and black principals and never recovered so this is a big problem as our population really turns over to being majority black and brown children and there are many reasons why it matters that I would love to talk to you about but I don't know if we'll have time today we have basically no system for preparing teachers so these are really big problems in the context if we wanted to advance the idea that teaching is a fundamental civil act that empowers the next generation of young people they're you know they're 50 million kids in school but there's 78 million people in this country under the age of 18 78 million people I mean if you want to think seriously about what the cost to the individual flourishing of those human beings and to our society by as you said Paul under educating most of them it's appalling so there's really a reason to think about this carefully here's a slide that I'll leave for you to look at later but it basically takes up this question of experience and helps to show that although many of us think that there were always huge numbers of teachers who taught for a long time there always have been a lot of beginning teachers but you can see on the road of 2011 that there are more teachers teaching fewer than five years than they've ever been before and that requires some attention you also know that the demographics of the school age population is changing really rapidly when I became a teacher I think about 80 percent of school children in this country were identified as white and by now they're fewer than half so the fastest growing group are populations that identify as Hispanic or Latino but overall black and brown children children of color are tipping over 50 percent it's a very rapidly changing demographic in our society the gap between who the teachers aren't who the kids are this was one of the statistics on that slide is enormous and it would be worth asking yourselves you know why is that so important and it would be a long conversation to have I'll just tell you a couple of my thoughts one is that you could argue that the workforce responsible for the development of humanity in our society ought to look a little more like a society that's kind of a moral point and maybe you wouldn't agree with that but it is one point one could make and I would make it another is that children deserve to interact with people with whom they identify in school and children deserve to meet a wide range of adults in school so many students of color can go through school and never encounter a single teacher with whom they identify as similar in race and it's not a race matching argument I'm making it's just what would that if you're a white person imagine what that could mean to go through school and never ever have a white teacher very unlikely but there are many other things that could be said about both for all groups of students what this means and it's important to think about another maybe more subtle one is that the things we've come to believe our readiness for school or our good discipline practices or our best practice have been grown out of a dis sort of a skewed group of people the people who do research the people who have built up all this knowledge don't represent the range of American adults either so our professional knowledge is impacted as a field when it's overwhelmingly white people who have been building the knowledge so that's kind of not doesn't get talked about nearly as often but if you think about the problems we're seeing with discipline practices think about that for a moment and what cultural biases get replicated in our discipline practices that lead to huge social problems that we can see might want to think about what that means about our profession not about the people not about the kids so there are lots of other reasons this is a pretty difficult topic and I probably shouldn't be tucking it into the middle of a talk except that I think it's so important that I don't like talking about the teaching workforce without reminding ourselves that when we talk about quality the quality has to do with who it is and whom we're serving and what we know so I've said a lot of this stuff already the disc that beginning teaching is a problem lots of beginning teachers will tell you that they feel very underprepared and the evidence shows that they get less good results it's not just that they feel less good they don't they kids don't learn as much in on average in classrooms of first and second and third year teachers um but it's also not random because if you're a black or brown child a student of color or a low-income child you're far more likely to be having beginning teachers over and over again and I think we can all talk about why that is but it means that it's inequitable about who's being exposed over and over again to underprepared teachers please understand that I'm not saying that there are no good beginning teachers maybe each of us in this room was a very good beginning teacher maybe I was a good first year teacher I'm talking about in the aggregate the probability that somebody is skillful enough to be responsible for a little kid learning to read not good not a high probability in fact the evidence on that's pretty clear that the teachers who are coming through alternative pathways are really doing much less well in teaching early reading and I think we all know what the consequences of that is so what do I mean when I say there's no system for preparing teachers this I want to put a little bit of a point on this point I'm obviously the dean of a school of education so this is my world now but there's some things that are worth calling out and they really apply across the sector there are I don't really know what number to give you but there are over at least over 3000 different programs that prepare people for the work and here I'm counting higher ed based programs alternative programs it's probably a much bigger number than 3000 frankly but that's the number I'll use for today mostly to say it's a lot and even though the profession is large it's a large number and there's no agreement about what people should be learning in those programs that's bizarre that's not true of medical schools that's not true of any other profession and the social work school that's next to my building they actually agree on core practices that social workers should be learning so why teaching looks so different than that is not so clear but we're unique in that respect um a troubling fact is that we continue to read this is something you could help with as well we continue to be willing to buy in to the idea that conventional academic knowledge is equivalent to knowing your content for teaching when we all know that's not true you have to know your content to teach but getting a high grade in differential calculus actually doesn't equip someone to explain fractions on the number line to third graders or does it really help someone to teach geometry in high school and the data are clear on this this is not me telling you my point of view there's an overwhelming body of data that shows that the level of attainment of the teacher in mathematics is unrelated to student achievement in k8 and only sometimes related in secondary and occasionally negatively related and i'll leave it to you to figure out how knowing having more advanced degrees in math could lead you to be less good at teaching but i'll leave you but the point is that's not it's not saying that content knowledge doesn't matter it matters enormously but every time we settle for did the person have a high s at score which doesn't measure content knowledge anyway or a high gpa in an academic discipline we're giving up the conversation about what content knowledge really does mean we're giving it up and we shouldn't be because it matters a lot and that's not it but we rely and we let others rely on it and maybe most troubling of all there's no common standard of what it takes to have a license to teach and be allowed to practice on young people imagine that being true in any other occupation it isn't true so we let people and we say you know you have to learn you can't possibly know everything at the beginning all true but shouldn't there be some standard of performance of skill to be responsible for other people's children's learning and we don't agree on that we actually think it can't be done and i have a question that so i want to show you five other occupations i've been sort of randomly mentioning some but i want to tell you something about these five and then i'm pretty much wrap up so my point right now is what would it look like to be serious about the professional training of teachers of lots of different kinds of people in different parts of the country what would that mean so these are five occupations and i picked them because some of them are professions and some of them are skilled trades i thought that would be challenging for us what they have in common is this so they're all none of them like teaching okay they're hairdressing electricians nurse midwives airplane pilots surgeons okay you could give me tons of reasons why they're not like teaching that's not what i'm asking you right now what these have in common is one basic thing and something that follows from it the basic thing they have is that when they train people for these fields they worry about the safety of the clients do you remember my comment at the beginning of safety they're worried about the people who will be served by these people and whether they'll be safe you don't want when you call an electrician to come repair wiring in your house to be at risk that your house will burn down right and you actually probably don't want your ear cut off when you get your hair cut or maybe just colored badly but you know it's your interest that's at heart that they have appropriate training and i don't have to say anything about airplane pilots but you would find it ridiculous if you've got on a plane and someone said oh you know i've always really liked aerodynamics and i played with planes when i was little i love planes and this is my first flight but they tell me you kind of have to figure it out of the job you wouldn't find that amusing but when teachers say it we somehow nod and say well that makes sense it'll take a while before the teacher knows what she's doing and the reason is that people get it that people are at risk somehow we don't aren't willing to say that kids are at risk like i said earlier so what are these three or these five occupations do as a function of being worried about risk they do three things that we haven't done that we could do they worry about the key practices that are needed in the field so i'm translating that into our field we would have to if we were going to do that we'd have to think about key practices of teaching and the highest leverage things to know to be skillful with kids that's what the airplane industry does when they train pilots they think what are the key techniques skills and knowledge that you have to do in order to fly a plane responsibly even a small plane which is also unsafe if you don't know how to do it they also all provide very deliberate training in well you could call it clinical but basically practice so you don't go into airplane airplane pilot training school and fly a plane on your first day they don't say like take the plane up and see how it is you work in simulators you walk side by side with pilots you do all kinds of things to gradually assume greater and greater control over the skill but in teacher education we think it's a virtue to just dump people in the classrooms and have them try things we could actually systematically gradually provide clinical training that was much but involved simulations that involved rehearsals that involved working with more and more complex parts of teaching we could do what these other fields do and finally they all have performance assessments in order to get a license you don't get a license to practice hairdressing even by graduating from a program you actually get watched cutting hair coloring it doing some handling some unusual situations then you get a license and if you don't believe that ask your barber or hairdresser next time you get your hair cut in teaching you've complete an approved program and you get a certificate maybe you take a basic skills test I ask you to think about whether that actually predicts whether somebody's able to be responsible for kids learning so I'm I just think these are important to think about is that other occupations put us to shame they agree on what people should know how to do and believe and know they stage the training that's clinical and they make sure that individual candidates can do a threshold level of competent performance before they let them practice independently that's what we would have to be doing so what I hope you'll do is I hope you'll think about even if you want to argue with me which you may well I hope you'll think about what I've been saying today and I hope that at minimum you'll be conscious of the ways that you promote our profession as you talk to people out in society that you'll share examples of the complexity of our work talk to people about the power that teaching can have tell a story out of your own experience or someone else's help others to understand how incredibly potent good teaching can be and why in fact in the words of Bob Moses it's a civil right the kitchen of access to that rather than a random or unusual event try to start standing up for the importance of rigorous licensure you don't want people joining our field who aren't going to do work that we consider to be professional work it's not in our best interest as people who are already educators and try to think more about what we could share in common even though we know kids differ in context differ can we really not agree that there's some basic things you have to know how to do no matter who the students are you're teaching and where you're teaching for example wouldn't most teachers probably have to be able to assess whether their kids understand exactly how you might do that might have a bunch of different techniques but you really don't want someone teaching who can't talk to a kid or watch a child or look at some production a child makes and think diagnostically you don't want someone teaching who can't do that you probably don't want some teaching who can't respectfully communicate with members of the family of the child across culture across language across race you probably don't want someone teaching who can't lead a discussion in a civilized way and help kids learn something from listening to one another how you exactly do that if you're in Detroit or in rural North Dakota I'm sure there are things about that that differ but if we can't even agree that there's some basic core practices other people are going to decide that for our field and that will not advance the profession so I hope I've made clear why I think teaching is critical and why I think we have a particular role to play in turning this country around about the way it supports people who do that work thank you thank you so much Debra and Paul for your perspectives your research based perspectives and thank you all for your thoughtful and probing questions that we are about to roll into so we have a few microphones in the audience we have time for three or four questions so please place your hands up and the rovers will find you it looks like we have one back here hello I'm Mary Ann Woods Murphy I'm on the NEAF board I'm a teacher in Nutley New Jersey this question is for Debra Ball I wonder what your thoughts are about including more practicing educators K-12 educators in the education departments in schools what I've noticed is that there may be a few clinical practitioners who are in charge of such things as field practices or student teaching but there seems to still be a divide among those educators who have frontline experience and those who don't who are teaching in in higher ed so you're talking about if I am I hearing you that you're thinking what are my thoughts about involving people or practicing educators in educating the next generation of educators absolutely so I think it's crucial and at our own school we have a growing number of people who are very highly accomplished teachers some of their national board certified teachers some of them have just taught a long time I'm probably unusual as a dean of education that I'm a teacher but that doesn't really answer your question I think the only caveat I put in it is just as mathematicians I made a joke about mathematicians a little bit ago maybe it wasn't a joke just as mathematicians can't walk into a classroom and teach skillfully even though they know math because one has been an experienced teacher or a skillful teacher doesn't immediately equip you to help someone else learn it so there is stuff to learn about how you teach teaching because it's it becomes somewhat tacit the more expert expert you get which might be why we tend to say that it can't be broken down but when you're a beginner as the people who are learning to teach are it's useful to know how you break apart things that have become very smooth or fluent if you're an experienced teacher so I think practicing educators would have to learn a little bit about how to break down their work to make it available but they would know much more about the work than people have never taught so I just think you might have to learn to be a teacher of teachers as well does that make sense looks like we have probably time for two more questions here all right um so the question kind of goes to something Pazie was talking about this morning what you've put up here on the slide that we want the best to come into teaching we need to raise the bar and make it more rigorous for people to get into teaching and to get the licensure we're also at a time where we're hitting this point where we have a higher need for people than we may have coming in how do you manage that those opposing or what appear to be opposing forces at a time when we need more what we want to say we want to raise the bar which could actually mean fewer coming in that question to the panel I actually think we should reclaim the question of rigor my own thinking about that is it would be worthwhile having a professional conversation about what the rigorous prerequisites are for being somebody who will be good at learning teaching and we're as I said about something else subscribing and endorsing a view that doesn't actually predict anything about whether somebody learns to be the teacher so yes to rigor but I'd like the rigor to be about things that are actually related to becoming good at teaching like being able to explain something to somebody else being able to listen to other people maybe being somebody who can speak different dialects or different language so you're sensitive to language maybe somebody who's attuned to other people things like that but we keep reinforcing ACT and SAT scores which have been shown to predict nothing about whether somebody becomes good at teaching I don't know why we're agreeing to that I do I mean you're the other part that you were raising was the conflict between raising the bar and needing a greater supply because typically when we raise the bar the supply goes down and I do think that we're going to have to we're going to have to think about changing some of the incentives and making it a more attractive profession and I think doing some of the things that Debra was talking about in terms of building a respected profession that becomes perceived as a respected profession I mean I think this is critically important this business about what it you know what good teaching is all about a lot of the public is still sort of framing this as teachers are born not made and if you know your stuff you teach and it's just sort of a set fixed proposition so unless we find a way to make real to the public some of these professional qualities that we associate with the work of teaching there isn't going to be the urgency to make the investments that would make it a more attractive profession that would allow us to simultaneously raise the bar and at the same time attract more people one more back here is there a roving mic out there oh we have a question here right here this question is for paul full disclosure probably a dozen years ago paul facilitated with the reny organization labor management collaboration which kind of have led us here and I'm going to challenge you paul I'm sure you're not surprised when you were in a position of political authority one of the things you guys did which was a very good thing in the latest round of education reform was to require our charter schools to be reflective of the student population in the communities they're in unfortunately the department of elementary and secondary education has not seen to it that that requirement of the law is being followed and right now in the commonwealth of massachusetts they're talking about lifting the cap on communities like springfield urban areas and the fact of the matter is is that our charter schools in springfield do not have the same number of kids who live below poverty who are not native english speakers who are special needs who are in foster care who are adjudicated in the juvenile justice system who are immigrants who are refugees and what I see happening if we lift this cap is the resegregation of our schools based on culture need and economics personally whenever I fill out a form and they ask what race I say human race my philosophy is there is but one race the human race it's inclusive of all ethnicities all colors all creeds all human beings and if we let this go further we're going to have schools that have the resources to meet the needs of every child in that school because they don't have the most needy children and one of the most insidious things some of these charter schools do is if a child's going to jeopardize their test scores or their graduation rate the council mountain sent it back to us so we can't afford to have schools that have the resources because of the student population they're dealing with to meet all their needs and schools that don't have the resources to meet the needs of probably the most challenged and vulnerable children in the commonwealth of massachusetts so i challenge you you no longer have the political positional authority but there are people in this commonwealth who are going to hear you if you would put this forward when they wouldn't hear me mainly because i'm a union person or for someone who don't know me i look like the way i look but i'm asking for your help so that's my question to you well i thought when i left office i was done being put on the spot but now you put me on the spot tim which doesn't surprise me tim is a one of our most persistent respected advocates for equity and is also a master of giving a speech masquerading is a question so so let me say the following we built in you know the technical question that i mean the assertion you're making i don't know because i haven't looked because i haven't been in office for a couple of years as to whether those you know whether the numbers of the new schools coming in which was all we could control actually reflect the disparities that you're talking about the preliminary look while i was in office was they were much better for example we opened one of the charter schools we opened in boston was virtually entirely latino when historically we'd not serve latino students in boston at all so i think we made some progress in that regard but i'm willing to accept the assertion that we could do better and i'm really you know i am concerned and i would not want the kind of outcome that you described so if i thought we're going that direction you can bet i'd speak up about it having said that i also think you know if you want to go back to that law we gave in that law the opportunity to teachers to take charge of their own schools to create innovation schools within existing mainstream school system with all the characteristics of charter schools only inside the system so the systems wouldn't lose the money and sadly very few teachers have come forward to take up that opportunity seize control take it away from management and run those kinds of schools themselves so that's the return challenge i would give to you is how do we get teachers ready feeling able willing and safe and competent in taking charge of education themselves and competing from the inside out with with charter schools thank you so much we are going to move forward but i also want to say one quick thing on this issue because this is one of my primary research areas so we have a new piece coming out in the sanford law and policy review because what charter schools will say is if you look at the aggregate numbers they'll say we look similar but the way we've been thinking about this as researchers if you use new gis methods which is geographical methods you can draw circles around charter schools and what you find is that those schools are more segregated than the traditional public schools nearby so for those folks out there that are interested in this just tweet at me and and i will send you a draft of this new paper that'll be in the stanford law and policy review speaking of tweeting i know there's some other questions out there so what i've done is i've grabbed the twitters of these two folks that's at paul revel and at debba school underscore ball so you can also tweet questions for them after after this session so let's get moving thank you so much to to our panelists