Notes from the Education Summit

Greetings from beautiful Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines, where I'm listening in on the state Education Summit, which began this morning with a heavy focus on teacher quality (check out SourceMedia's own Patrick Hogan's liveblog for the play-by-play).

Experts say the single most important factor in student learning is a highly effective instructor. Panelists this morning seemed to agree that means starting at the beginning – recruiting the best students and training them in rigorous colleges of education.

That's not happening now, National Council on Teacher Quality President Kate Walsh said. In fact, it's easier to get into a teacher training program than it is to qualify educationally to play college football. “There's a clear example of how standards need to be raised,” she said.

But, Stanford University Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond said, data shows that people who actually become licensed to teach are typically in the top half of their college class – which puts us in the same neighborhood as Singapore.

Most teacher training happens after the teaching certificate is in hand. Darling-Hammond said the difference between the U.S. and high-performing countries is that teachers in those countries have 15 to 25 hours a week for their own planning and learning. She said we have to redesign schools so they're good places for adults, as well as students, to learn.

In his opening remarks, Gov. Terry Branstad floated an interesting idea about establishing a core group of Master Teachers who would split their time between classroom instruction and coaching their peers.

But education Professor Steve Tozer, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, cautioned against placing too much emphasis on teacher talent. The more we think about talent as a property of qualified teachers, not well-run institutions, the less we consider managing institutional excellence, he said.

The idea of well-trained principals hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, he said (that includes, I'll add, at the summit, where standards for principals didn't get much more than a nod).

The process for selecting and training administrators is even less rigorous than it is for teachers, Tozer said, yet: “The organization cannot do better than its leadership. This is a lesson we have not yet learned in education, and we need to learn it.”