LeaderTalk

Hiring Practices

Growing a new school, grade by grade, means that we'll be hiring a significant number of teachers for the next several years. And there's really nothing more important than teacher hiring. We've brought on five new teachers this year, and I'm really excited about the folks we're bringing on. We received well over 100 resumes, we did over 20 interview to we made sure we got the people we needed.

So how do you find the teachers you need... here's some of our techniques.

1) Search far and wide. There are a lot of Web 2.0 tools out there for people searching for jobs. If it's the Coalition for Essential Schools Job Board or Idealab or LinkedIn, let folks know you're out there.

2) Differentiate with your job description. What's your philosophy? What are your expectations? Don't include edu-babble lines that any school could use like 'We believe all children can learn' or 'We want to create life-long learners.' When you use edu-speak, make it edu-speak that does reveal the philosophy of your school.

3) Don't be afraid of a rigorous interview. We email interviewees our curriculum book and ask them to create a presentation of a unit plan, based on what they've read in our book.

4) Ask good questions in the interview. Every question we ask (and there are a lot of them) has a purpose. We want to see how deeply our teachers think about education, we want to know what passion for teaching they have, we have practical questions and we have procedural questions. And then there are the follow-up questions...

5) Have students on your interview panel. It's their school. They have to take the classes these people teach. Listen to the students' opinions.

6) Ask yourselves -- do you see that person around the faculty table with the other teachers? Will they be more than a teacher in their class and will they be a good colleague.

7) Come to consensus on hiring. I don't care how long it takes. Spread the documents from all the candidates all over the floor if you have to, but when you are done with your interviews, lock yourselves in a room and get to a place where everyone feels good about the hire.

8) In the end, do more than ask "Are they a great teacher?" Ask, "Are they the teacher we need?" We've interviewed some very good teachers who we felt weren't great teachers for SLA.

I find that hiring takes a *ton* of time to do right. Job fairs, postings on every job board I can find, reviewing every resume, doing tons of interviews... and spending the extra time on working to come to consensus on our choices. But no matter how much time it takes, it's nothing compared to the time spent dealing with the ramifications of rushing the hiring process.

Sweeping Changes in NCLB and DoE

Apparently, there are some major announcements coming out of the Department of Education this week. According to a friend of mine at the DoE, "Queen of All Testing" Margaret Spellings is on her way out to be replaced by Doug Christensen, State Education Commissioner of Nebraska. Christensen is best known for creating the STARS (School-Based Teacher-Lead Assessment Reporting System) program, a portfolio-driven system for meeting NCLB requirements.

Politically, this can only be interpreted as a major shift in priorities for DoE. The rumors are swirling that Bush doesn't think NCLB will pass reauthorization, what with the increasing GOP opposition to the bill. Bush has long put NCLB out there as one of the major pieces of his domestic agenda, and despite opposition from teachers unions, parent groups and others, he and Sec't Spelling have long championed NCLB as both "good policy and good politics."

Realistically, Bush must know that this has long been an unfunded mandate built on educational platitudes, backed up by unsound educational ideas wrapped up in a pretty title that few politicians have been willing to criticize. My opposition to NCLB is long-standing, but even I have to admit that with someone like Dr. Christensen at the DoE helm, I have a much stronger belief that a federal commitment to public education is a possibility.

I probably shouldn't do this, but my friend at DoE did forward me a copy of the embargoed press release / remarks for tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll catch hell, but it's too exciting to see some of the priorities expressed by Dr. Christensen. First, I think we will now see a federal government much more willing to have states seek alternative methods of making AYP. At one point, Dr. Christensen will talk about what STARS has done for Nebraska:

I have found that in schools where classroom-based assessment is led by teachers in collaboration with their administrators, that cultures develop where personal and professional renewal lives and thrives. I have found in schools with classroom-based assessment to be places where passion is back and it is welcomed. I have found that classroom-based assessment creates places where the passion is back and in these schools it is okay to be passionate about our work; our profession, our kids--all of our kids. And, I have found classroom-based assessment to create places where the professional spirits of educators can thrive and places where their hearts embrace each child and every child. Aren’t these the kinds of places where all of us would like to live and do our work?

Linking this kind of thinking to a full-funding of NCLB also seems to be a priority. Two weeks ago, Tom Harkin of Iowa spoke out on how this bill has been almost criminally underfunded. He was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as saying:

"Year after year, the president sends us a budget that comes nowhere close to funding No Child Left Behind at an adequate level," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa, who chairs the education subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, at a hearing on NCLB funding last week. The president's budget for fiscal year '08 underfunds the law by $14.8 billion, he adds. "The numbers have gotten almost laughable."

For Bush, it seems as if he does believe that the only way to preserve NCLB is to moderate its reliance on high-stakes tests while also taking advantage of the bi-partisan support for funding public education. Even his allies on NCLB reauthorization know that the program must be fully funded. In a very controversial editorial this week in the Washington Post, Ted Kennedy called for the reauthorization of the bill, but he also conceded that:

The law promised increased funding levels over the life of its provisions, in step with the increase in targets for student performance. Yet year after year, the federal government has failed to provide the resources that states and school districts need to improve struggling schools. Assessment and accountability without the funding needed to implement change is a recipe for failure.

One can only presume that some of that extra funding will go to states willing to proceed with alternative assessment programs like the STARS program in Nebraska. I wonder, with Dr. Christensen at the helm of DoE, what other changes in the law will be called for.

Originally, as we all know, NCLB called for 100% of students reaching levels of proficient or advanced on state-mandated tests by 2010. There has been incredible pressure on the federal government to revamp those goals, especially as it applies to English Language Learners. Even in New York state, a state that has had high-stakes graduation requirement tests long before NCLB, a recent memo from State Education Commissioner Richard Mills to administrators across the state is highly critical of the ELL policy, as Mills writes, "We believe many ELL students need at least three years to learn sufficient English to take the ELA test, and we remain concerned about the effect the federal decision will have on the schools, teachers, and most of all the children." And this is from a commissioner who has been very much opposed to any sort of alternative to his own testing system. One wonders what changes Dr. Christensen will call for in NCLB mandates for schools to acheive Adequate Yearly Progress.

Lastly, it just excites me to no end to think that we now will have someone at DoE who speaks to the ideas of creating 21st Century schools. Dr. Christensen has written powerfully on the need for modernizing our schools for several years now, and tomorrow's remarks lay out a powerful framework for his vision:

What does it mean to be educated? is the key question. What does it mean to have learned? What does it mean to know mathematics, to be able to read and write effectively, to know science, history, geography and economics? What does it mean to be fit and well? What does it mean to appreciate the arts? What does it mean to be "prepared" to continue learning, "prepared" to enter the world of work, and "prepared" to be a participant in our democratic society?

In creating this clear and compelling vision, we are describing what is to happen to the student and what the student is to know and be able to do as a result of having participated in the educational process. The vision is one of an "education" and/or an "educated person." It differs significantly from most of our current visions, because they are often visions of schooling and what school is to look like, usually expressed in terms of such things as graduation requirements, credits, or diplomas, all of which are based on time and not on results or outcomes.

Once we have developed a clear vision, it will be compelling because it will describe the students we want to see coming out of our schools by describing what they know and can do -- their levels of competence in terms of knowledge, skills, and application. It will describe how well they are prepared to take the steps all students must take upon leaving the K-12 system -- steps into the roles of learner, worker, and citizen.

Suddenly, after years of thinking that we really were in a dark time for the democratic experiment that is public education in this country, I have hope. We have a visionary at the DoE who we can hope will be a true reformer in the democratic sense of the world. We can -- and we must -- expect compromises, but tomorrow will be a better day for our schools than today. And although I probably shouldn't do this, I can't resist... I've posted the embargoed copy of Dr. Christensen's speech up on my web site. Go read all of it. It's really worth the read.

-- Chris Lehmann

An Ethic of Care and 21st Century Schools

[Before getting into the post itself, I just wanted to thank Scott McLeod for inviting me to be a part of LeaderTalk. As more and more administrators start to blog, it is my hope that this project is able to increase the level of transparency of our schools, open up the discussion about school design and school sustainability, and be a place where educational leaders of all stripes can tackle many of the issues we face as we move our schools into the 21st century.]

As we talk about reforming education and building 21st Century schools, I think it's important not to let all the talk be about the tools or even about project-based learning, but that we take a look at a deeper notion of student-centered schools. In most common usage, the term "student-centered" means that the work of the classroom involves student-ideas, student-passion, student-questions. And that's amazing stuff, but that only begins to really explore what the phrase can mean.

For me, "student-centered" goes beyond what happens on any given project or in any one classroom. It has to speak deeply to the idea that our students' lives are the most important thing at the school. We have to care about who are students are, who they want to be, who they can be. At our school -- the Science Leadership Academy -- the first qualification after "Must have PA certification" is "Applicants must be committed to the idea that we teach students first and our subjects second." That, to me, is the heart of what it means to be student-centered. The best pedagogical writing about this idea that I've ever found is done by Nel Noddings who writes about the ethic of care.

But how do you manifest the ethic of care in a school? Where does it live? For me, it's about creating an Advisory or Family Group class. How do we insure that we see kids as more than just students
of the subject we teach? We build into our schedule a class where we are the curriculum. We build into every teacher's schedule time where they have a group of 15-20 students, not as students of a subject, but as people. And we give that time priority by including it as one of our teachers' preps. And we model how important Advisory is by being advisors ourselves.

The 21st Century school needs more than just technology, and it needs more than classes where student ideas are valued. As our society gets more complex, as the choices confronting our students get harder and harder, our schools must live by the ethic of care, so that every student knows that there are adults who will be her advocate, who will listen and who will value her thoughts, her ideas, who she is, and who she can become.

For those wondering how a school might structure an Advisory curriculum, be sure to look at The Advisory Guide: Designing and Implementing Effective Advisory Programs in Secondary Schools published by Educators for Social Responsibility.