 also thank you very much Barbara and it's terrific to be here I feel inspired with a lot of the things that Superintendent Flanagan said and then that have taken place throughout the day it's makes you want to try and help make things better by letting people know how things are and then move forward from there. I am my job is to leave my team here and talking about the teacher composition, how teacher composition what it's looked like in the last few years and maybe how that's related to the implementation of the Michigan Merit curriculum and then we're really using this with an eye toward thinking about how schools are have responded changed adapted what you will to the Michigan Merit curriculum and this goes towards some of the comments from the morning about implementation and fidelity and so with that I'll just it culminates in a sense as we get into the schools with our transcript study and start to learn more about not only what's offered and what's taken but what's taught and who the people are who are teaching it so that's all where this is going and so I'll just give Karen one more plug that we're all on board with that very much so and we're hoping that we'll be able to get the data to get more deeply into these issues. So the questions that we'll be asking are how have high schools reallocated teaching positions to meet curricular changes what has been the impact of the Michigan Merit curriculum on the balance of teachers in terms of Michigan Merit curriculum teachers versus non-MMC teachers and just the backdrop for this that's sort of been in behind all day but it's been very much in the forefront of our minds has to do with the economic conditions of Michigan because when you start to think about the teachers and they're hiring there with the context that they're teaching in and the Michigan Merit curriculum you want to be thinking about what the economy in Michigan has been like during the course of the time that we're studying this slide here represents the state of the economy if you will in terms of per capita income from 2000 to 2010 with lines that the dark line on the right is roughly where the implementation of the Michigan Merit curriculum was in 2007 and so what you see here is that this is labeled a one-state recession starting around 2003 then the per capita income really dipped a bit in Michigan and it was going up nationally and then never really has recovered a kind of once the national recession hit in about 2008 Michigan paralleled the national recession so it gives you a feel for the economic conditions that exist and have been accumulating prior to accumulated prior to the implementation of the Michigan Merit curriculum and as the people some of the graduate students and the other members of our team have been walking around the room over the last few hours asking about hiring practices and teacher issues certainly the economic conditions came up and I just want to thank Beth Guan and Caitlyn for doing some of the legwork on that and I'll be talking about that okay so one of the things that we have observed is we've just used this large-scale database just to look at teacher pupil per teacher ratios and how have they changed over time starting from 2004 roughly our base year to 2011 and what you see is that they went up fairly significantly from about 18 pupils per teacher in the 2004 to about 20 in 2011 and if we graph it it looks something like this at some level this accounts for changes in overall student population because this is pupil per teacher ratio so we are aware of this we are interested in learning more about what happened and in particular if you know we've marked the rollout or the the announcement of the Michigan Merit curriculum with the dashed line and the solid line indicates the initial implementation of the Michigan Merit curriculum and the biggest jump in pupil per teacher ratios occurred right in that interval and so this was concurrent we certainly have not sorted out was the pupil per teacher ratio our response to the Michigan Merit curriculum was it anyway involved a part of it or was this just purely coincidental but and that's part of our task for the future but as we figure that out we at the very least we have to be aware of it and we want to learn more and that's partly why we are asking you questions in the last few hours but also where we'll be going with our future collection so one of the questions we turn to is as these pupil per teacher ratios increased who were the teachers who were being retained if you will or what types of teachers were in the population and as you look over time we noticed an interesting thing that the basically the number of Michigan Merit curriculum teachers state about the same and therefore it dropped a little but it didn't drop nearly as much as the non Michigan Merit curriculum teachers so what we are taking from this is that in one way or another schools managed to retain or hire teachers who could teach in the Michigan Merit curriculum core curricular subject areas and talk about core curriculum we're talking about basically math science much of the core social studies and language arts so these teachers that you see with the the light green bars down below we're teaching in those core subject areas and so the schools tended to retain those teachers or to hire new ones but one way or another those proportions at the proportions actually went up in the number state almost the same so that's a quick little snapshot of some of the things that we've been looking at and so what we're interested in doing and we're going to turn the tables on you a little bit is to make sense of some of what we've been seeing we have done some preliminary analyses and other areas which I don't want to go into but before we go into those in the next year and what have you we wanted to learn a little bit more from you folks about what was going on with these hiring practices why might these be taking place so this is these are the questions that I asked Gwan and Caitlin and Beth to roam around and ask folks why were they making the decisions they were making about first about hiring teachers and secondly about allocating teachers to courses and teachers and students to courses just to get a feel for the responses so they were good enough to do that and then we met a little bit and talked a little bit and I'll just give you a feel for some of the things that some of you all said was going on so the first thing is I had we you know of course we're aware that some of this could be economic and in fact we heard that we heard that the economic conditions were paramount to making hiring decisions and in particular that for example a lot of the hiring decisions of course weren't hiring decisions it was a question of who to keep and so then and sometimes this was via attrition and sometimes this was via riffing or something like that but one way or another what happened was the teacher composition was changing the numbers were changing and but and we see that the MMC teachers wound up being more likely to be in the resulting teaching population a second thing that we heard that was very interesting was we've been puzzling about how much schools were doing their hiring explicitly in response to the MMC how much of it might have been in response to just needing to increase math and science teachers generally out of a general perception or institutional fact so we weren't sure and one of the striking things that I think we heard twice was that a couple of school districts not they weren't just responding to the MMC they were anticipating the MMC that is in roughly 2005 or something I think I think I heard two years ahead of time the school districts were actually starting to ramp up their MMC teachers so that's pretty interesting from a couple different perspectives one from a research perspective okay we need to start paying attention that we can't just mark our implementation line at 2007 for example because there was an anticipatory implementation the second thing is it suggests that schools are sometimes very forward-thinking you know and catching the next wave before it even hits and we certainly hear this with respect to that we heard it with respect to the Common Core that their schools right now that are already anticipating or in the last years have anticipated the Common Core coming and may have already retooled their teacher composition to address the Common Core okay on the how the teachers are allocated to courses we were real interested in sort of the driving forces and we heard a mixture here so one that we heard was well student demand drives things well we had to offer these new math and science courses so we put a smattering of courses out there students signed up for them and we had to hustle and get teachers the other approach there were some other approaches that were a little different from that so as some schools did is they hired generalist teachers or even some part-time teachers and the part-time teachers might teach across levels they might teach in the middle school in the high school or they might teach across schools and the generalist teachers might teach across subject areas so this is one way to offer some of the new math courses is to hire a generalist teacher who can fill the old science but also teach a couple of new math courses or something like that so it's interesting how nimble the schools have been and how varied they can be in response to the Michigan Maric curriculum okay so there's more I could go into but one of the things I wanted to do was to put out these few basic responses and then turn the tables a little bit and the question to you all is as you see these questions up here how did you make decisions about hiring teachers and how did you make decisions about allocating students and teachers to courses and so that's my opening question for you I'd be interested how much you think the economic conditions were driving things versus other factors how much control you had that sort of thing all right now pause just think about in the local high school in 2006 and the two issues that I heard from our students and that were FTEs for students was the biggest factor what the state was going to give us made a difference on who was employed and also just losing students we had natural attrition from the economy where Pfizer, Young's who left a lot of employees and so from there our student account went down and that was the biggest factor that we needed. If we go back and look at the first slide it's tough to do there we go in the center column is the total number of students that were in Michigan from 2004 to 2011 and when we collapsed it to the pupil per teacher ratio you kind of lose track of the fact that it went from about 356,000 to about 315,000 so a loss of 40,000 students which is really an enormous loss you know and we were talking about seven eight years there and so in fact you'd expect that a lot of districts would have been responding just to the emergence issue of the loss of students okay thanks okay so if it had been rephrased to how did you decide who to retain it was just awkward to start off that that question that way would the answer have been Michigan Mayor curriculum was in our minds do you think if I had the opportunity to replace then it most certainly would have been and trying to find somebody in math and science math and or science but that wasn't the issue at the time just trying to balance a budget had very little control over the revenue that was coming into the district and therefore it was all cut thank you jewelry making small woodchop classes that are choir where our high schools won 30% of our students were in choir band and now we're down to less than 18% that the mayor curriculum drove them to core classes and their electives were dwindled and so many high schools have six six hours per day and we even have seven and we still our electives are and so therefore our drama debate a specialized English class and of course choir and band members were the enrollees were diminished and the teachers were cut thank you so we did hear a few times about the number of electives being reduced not only the number but the number of people kids taking electives there's someone 2006 I was in a pretty small district and the difference was it wasn't necessarily the number of people hiring or who you're hiring it was the certifications that they had so they had to have you know having dual certifications or being able to teach a lot of different things being flexible was a lot more important because we knew things were going to be changing and some of those classes might not be in existence in a few years and we might need them to be strictly be math down the road so it was kind of some forward thinking about which teachers to hire not necessarily the numbers so that's really interesting because it goes to superintendent Flanagan's comment about well I don't need math right but if you could come in with a dual certification you were probably much more marketable because you had this versatility over the long run exactly yeah I think we're hearing some of that and I'm kind of curious as we explore our data to see how much of that versatility was really manifest at around 2006-2007 that sort of thing where we're going to look to see prior to that how much people were more focused in a single area so that's something for us to look at I'm also from a small rural school and I guess I would like to say we as far as looking at this we were one of the schools anticipating but I would say not you know we weren't hiring it was when somebody retired we were looking how to replace that person our staff has continued to shrink for as long as I can remember and we're still trying to do the best we can to not have it affect students serve them in the best way possible but we're looking at dual certifications and how we can best use resources so when you look at dual certifications and you're reducing I'm just curious if you can keep the microphone there because I'm curious I'm only a counselor I just know how my principal is well the counselor actually knows what's going on in school right we know a lot so the question is did existing teachers seek dual certification you know understanding this press that was coming or did you basically teachers retired and then you were looking to hire dual certification a lot of those elective classes that kids used to have that we no longer have and I think our students who have special needs and their skills aren't as strong some of those the foods class foods and nutrition class or the you know the electives that were for a variety of students as those people retired we look to replace with other other needs certification needs yeah okay alright so but it was as they retired so so you use the you chose to hire differently is that okay so I would say initially maybe we were able to replace but no I mean now we're bare bones okay and still trying to serve in the best way we can alright well I appreciate your participating in the exercise both as might have interacted with some of our team during the first few hours and for this part it's helpful to us we're going to keep asking in lots of different ways maybe if you're in one of our 150 sample schools maybe at this kind of venue a year from now or something like that we really are interested to know the experiences that you all have had and how varied they were and then our job is to try to capture that and interpret it in terms of the larger scale data that we're analyzing okay so thank you very much