by Douglas Reeves
December 1, 2022
School leaders and educational policymakers are faced with a stark choice in how to invest funds that have been distributed to schools and district as a result of COVID relief legislation. That choice is between investing in people or products. There are certainly products that have value, and the multi-billion dollar investment in technology has given access to students and families that previously were disenfranchised from the technology revolution of the 21st century. Nevertheless, products fade. Investments in people will endure. This article suggests three guidelines for how to get the most out of investments so that the benefits will last long after federal funds have expired. First, invest in assessment literacy, not tests. Second, invest in school leadership and build a bench of future leaders. Third, invest more than money in attracting and retaining great teachers and paraprofessionals.
Assessment Literacy
Educators and school leaders understandably want to know how students are performing, not merely on annual state assessments but on their progress throughout the year. Unfortunately, a lot of products that are marketed as formative assessments would be more accurately labeled as “uninformative assessments.” Here is the acid test question for every assessment that teachers must consider: How will the results I receive today help improve teaching and learning tomorrow? Too often we see that test results are delayed by days, weeks, or even months, so those results have no possibility of influencing teaching practices. It is also common that the test items are secret, all in the name of test security, an excuse which insures that there is little relationship between the taught and tested curriculum. This creates a particular problem in mathematics – the subject most adversely affected by learning loss during the global pandemic – because teachers must know whether student errors in math are due to mathematical misunderstandings or due to challenges with English literacy. When schools invest in assessment literacy, helping teachers to design, implement, and analyze effective formative assessments, they will have intellectual property that schools will own long after federal COVID funds have expired. Most importantly, teachers will have direct alignment between standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessments. When there are challenges with student misunderstandings, teachers can address students’ needs immediately, create mini-assessments, and provide the daily progress that motivates students and teachers.
School Leadership
While it is common knowledge that the quality of the classroom teacher is the primary influence on student learning, we dare not neglect the fact that the key to attracting, supporting, and retaining great teachers is the quality of school leadership (Grissom et al., 2021). While a lot of ink has been spilled about exhorting principals to be instructional leaders, our observations around the nation are that principals are bombarded with meetings, e-mails, and administrative tasks that take them away from their primary duty of supporting classroom teachers. While the evidence is clear that short unannounced classroom observations are a powerful way to improve teaching quality (Marshall, 2019), time is a zero-sum game. Every hour devoted to demands outside of the school is an hour denied to the core responsibility of instructional leadership. Leaders need not only to support classroom teachers, but also must attend to the needs of paraprofessionals and other staff members who might consider becoming educators if they know that they are valued, known, and appreciated by administrators.
Invest More than Money to Attract and Retain Teachers
Teacher pay remains woefully inadequate, especially given the demands placed on teachers during the pandemic and the extraordinary learning and behavioral challenges teachers face in the post-pandemic era. College tuition costs escalated far ahead of the inflation rate, leaving many teachers facing six-figure debt with a five-figure income. But even with salary increases associated with the recent infusion of federal COVID relief funds, more than half of teachers are considering leaving the profession and few teachers recommend that their own college age children consider teaching as a career. In my interviews with teachers, there are non-monetary factors that drive their decisions to leave or remain in the classroom. These factors include, above all, respect. Teachers despair about the disrespectful way they are treated by students, parents, and most recently, members of the public who berate teachers during school board meetings. Teachers are also concerned over the lack of physical and psychological safety, especially with behavioral outbursts escalating as students returned from school closures. Because of the shortage of substitute teachers, many educators report losing planning periods, professional learning opportunities, and the chance to collaborate with colleagues. Investing in fair pay and benefits for teachers is necessary but insufficient to retain the quality of teaching professionals on which our schools depend. We must also invest in lights in the parking lots, security personnel, time for collaboration, and opportunities for professional learning.
Our investment in education is precisely that – an investment that yields tremendous rewards for society and the nation. Students who succeed in school will contribute to the tax base and raise families who value education. Our failure to invest in teaching and leadership professionals will not be a savings, but cost that will be reflected in decades of poverty and unemployment for students who do not succeed in school. While the injection of federal funds has helped schools in many ways, the best and most enduring investments we can make are in people, not products.
Douglas Reeves is the author, most recently, of Fearless Schools. He is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions and can be reached at Douglas.Reeves@CreativeLeadership.net.
References
Grissom, J. A., Egalite, A. J., & Lindsay, C. (2021). How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research. The Wallace Foundation. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Documents/How-Principals-Affect-Students-and-Schools.pdf
Marshall, K. (2019, February 20). “Rethinking the Way We Coach, Evaluate, and Appreciate Teachers. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/rethinking-way-we-coach-evaluate-and-appreciate-teachers