K-12 Education

The Albert Shanker Institute at 25

The Shanker Institute turns 25 years old this month!

The Shanker Institute was formed in 1998 to honor the life and legacy of AFT President Al Shanker. The organization’s by-laws commit it to four fundamental principles—vibrant democracy, quality public education, a voice for working people in decisions affecting their jobs and their lives, and free and open debate about all of these issues.

From the beginning the Institute has brought together influential leaders and thinkers from business, labor, government, and education from across the political spectrum. ASI continues to sponsor research, promotes discussions, and seek new and workable approaches to the issues that shape the future of democracy, education, and unionism.

Instructional Coaching: Education Buzzwords or Effective PD?

As a former classroom teacher, I can vividly remember my first interaction with an instructional coach. It was during my third year of teaching and the county assigned one coach to work with more than twenty teachers to help increase student engagement. The coach observed our classrooms once a semester and then led a one-hour group debriefing session. Needless to say, this particular instructional coach appeared over-extended, and it led to a somewhat negative perception of the whole process.

Five years later, I met and worked closely with a mathematics instructional coach in my graduate program. This coach worked with elementary teachers in a specific building and was one of the most dedicated educators I have ever encountered.

After two extremely different experiences, I started to ponder the effectiveness of the coaching practice, and it seems as if I am not alone in my inquiry.

AFT Ukraine Project

Our guest author is Shari Obrenski, President of the Cleveland Teachers Union. She served as an American History and Government teacher at Jane Addams Business Careers Center in the Cleveland Municipal School District for 22 years prior to becoming President of the CTU.

Desmond Tutu once said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” I think most of us aspire to be a source of light in what can be a difficult and dark world. Whether we are showing a small kindness, such as opening a door for a stranger, or doing something much larger, like giving food or shelter to someone in need, bringing light to darkness is something we are taught from a very early age.

We also struggle throughout the course of our lives to choose light over darkness, both individually and collectively. We have seen this age-old struggle surface once again, almost exactly a year ago when Russia invaded the Ukraine. This conflict has brought darkness, both physical and emotional, to the people of Ukraine as war is waged right outside their doors.

Who Will Stand Up for Public Education?

Our guest author is Karin Chenoweth the founder of Democracy and Education an organization dedicated to providing information and support to school board candidates who are standing up to the extremist threat

With all the attention on federal and state campaigns in November 2022, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that right-wing extremists had set their sights on winning school board elections.

School board elections tend to be an afterthought among both voters and those most involved in electoral politics. Civic-minded community members running without party affiliation—sometimes without opposition—traditionally have made for rather staid elections. Voters walking determinedly into the polls fully informed about presidential and congressional races can be stopped in their tracks with the question, “Do you know who you’re voting for school board?” They often haven’t thought about it.

And yet, with more than 88,000 school board members in more than 13,000 school districts, there are more elected school board members than any other category of elected official. Often intimately involved in their communities while working many hours for little or no pay, school board members are in many ways the face of small-d democracy in their communities.

Is ESSER Money Being Spent or Not?

Our guest author today is Jess Gartner, CEO and Founder of Allovue, an education finance technology company.

As part of a series of federal pandemic-relief stimulus packages, K-12 schools received three rounds of funds through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER I, II, and III), totaling nearly $200 billion. Almost immediately, headlines across the nation probed how (or if) schools were spending these dollars. Nearly three years after the initial round of funding ($13 billion) was granted by the CARES Act in March 2020, questions linger about the pace and necessity of spending. Why is it so hard to get a straight answer?

For two years, the prevailing theme in the headlines had been that school districts were sitting on stacks of cash, whereas more recent (and far less breathless) stories say the money is now on track to be spent. Why all the confusion? The complex multi-year process of receiving, planning, spending, and reporting ESSER dollars is more complicated and drawn out than a single soundbyte can convey (I’ve tried!). Let’s take a quick look at a few key issues to bear in mind when thinking (or reading) about ESSER funds, and then a couple of conclusions as to what’s really going on.

School Vouchers: There Is No Upside

Our guest author today is Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University.

What if I told you there is a policy idea in education that, when implemented to its full extent, caused some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record?

What if I told you that 40 percent of schools funded under that policy closed their doors afterward, and that kids in those schools fled them at about a rate of 20 percent per year?

What if I told you that some the largest financial backers of that idea also put their money behind election denial and voter suppression—groups still claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Would you believe what those groups told you about their ideas for improving schools?

What if I told you that idea exists, that it’s called school vouchers, and despite all of the evidence against it the idea persists and is even expanding?

Country, Family, Schoolmates, and Gender Affect Reading Test Scores

Our guest author is Professor Ming Ming Chiu, Chair Professor of Analytics and Diversity, Special Education and Counseling Department and Director, Analytics\Assessment Research Centre, Education University of Hong Kong

A child's reading skills depends not only on her motivation, ability, and reading instruction, but also on her context—her country, family, schoolmates, and their interactions with her gender, according to large-scale international studies of over a million students in 63 countries across two decades using advanced statistics (including multilevel analysis of plausible values). Children with greater motivation to read than others, spend more time learning to read and do more reading, so they typically have stronger reading skills. Also, children with greater intelligence (IQ) learn to read more readily. Although some children learn to read on their own, most children receive direct reading instruction at home or at school (especially that each letter corresponds to a sound in languages with alphabets like English [alphabetic principle]) while constructing integrated meaning from the sequences of words.

Furthermore, the environment around a child also affects her reading skills, including her country's income, income inequality, and cultural values; her family's money, education, cultural knowledge, and social networks; her schoolmates' information sharing, evaluations, motivations, and norms; and their interactions with gender, such as favoritism, learning opportunities, and social interactions.

Infrastructure Matters

Towards the end of the summer of 2022, citing a recently-published article, Chester Finn wondered whether we have seen the end or a new beginning for standards-based reform. The theorized mechanism behind standards-based reform is that alignment across three key areas: academic standards, curriculum, and student assessments will drive student achievement. A hallmark of the accountability policy era, standards-based reform links assessment and materials, while paying less attention to the role of leadership to frame and implement the adoption of standards and curricular materials, the role of curriculum in organizing and sequencing instruction, or the role of professional development in ensuring access to information and support for enacting standards-based instruction. Many standards-based reforms presuppose that schools are equally primed for change and that change will be meaningful if accomplished. The gains from 30 years of implementing standards-based reforms have been lackluster. Many wonder whether standards-based reform is not only a failed experiment, but one we could have predicted would fail.

Happy Holidays from the Shanker Institute

Happy Holidays!

We have enjoyed working alongside you again this year, providing you with insightful commentary on critical topics of the day, including pressing public education, labor movement, and democracy issues. To provide time for our colleagues to step away from work, rest, and recharge, the Albert Shanker Institute will be pausing new blog entries until January 2023. We look forward to working with  you to make progress in 2023.

If you can, we encourage you to support AFT’s effort to provide generators to Ukrainian schools and community centers. Use this link: https://www.aft.org/aft-disaster-relief-fund and choose “Ukraine” in the dropdown menu

Also, in keeping with our goal to give back this holiday season, our gift to you is to highlight a few adoptable pets from one of the nonprofits our staff members support. This year particularly, shelters and rescues are reaching capacity with record breaking numbers of adoptable pets. Here are a few of the beautiful cats available for adoption from the Montgomery County Partners for Animal Well-being (MCPAW). (See all MCPAW's adoptable cats and MCPAW's adoption application.)

Heartwarming or Heartbreaking: Reflections on Abbott Elementary and Our Underfunded Schools

It took me about eight minutes into the pilot of Abbott Elementary, before I let out a sigh. For those who have not seen it, Abbott Elementary is a “mockumentary” that follows a group of passionate educators, all with vastly different experience levels, coming together to teach at an elementary school in Philadelphia. My sigh was coming from a place of relief—finally, someone had captured the duality of how heartwarming and heartbreaking being a teacher could be. The frustration, the tension, the passion, and the warmth was all there, neatly wrapped in about 22 minutes per episode. Now, Abbott Elementary is being nominated (and winning!) award after award, but to many former and current teachers, it is so much more than that. Personally, the show feels like my chance to explain what I did—to explain why I loved what I did but also to explain why ultimately, I had to leave the teaching field.

Some scenes felt so close to my own experiences, I wondered if the creator and star of the show, Quinta Brunson, had quietly but closely been watching my teaching journey. She had to have been there; she captured my experience too well to have not been with me through the astronomical highs and the gut-wrenching lows. From the anticipation and optimism of the first day, to my first moment of true clarity and understanding after a difficult yet urgent meeting with a parent, to the moments of connection with students. It is clear that despite having never taught, Brunson understood and continues to understand, the sheer joy that comes from being a teacher. But she also captured the disappointment, the feelings of failure, and the never-ending frustration of having to navigate problems that you did not create—all on top of the fact that when you finally get to go home, you live the lifestyle that comes with low pay and low respect. After watching and reflecting, I realized that perhaps my experience as a burnt-out teacher in an underfunded school was not as unique as I thought it was.