Always nice to get the word out about ways to solve the math and science teacher shortage in the Fairmont Sentinel.

The biggest no surprise of last week was that ED 08 has died of natural causes. The Gates and Broad foundations initially said they would put up $60 million to get education in the forefront of the election. They apparently spent $24 million and really don’t have much to show for it. I saw Roy Romer speak a couple of times and I was not impressed and wondered why he was chosen.

If you want education to be a campaign issue, then you have to get parents irate about our pathetic education system. Giving out fancy buttons and brochures to education think tanks is not going to bring about systemic change. All these think tanks around Washington suck up lots of money and don’t actually “do” anything. And because parents don’t read think tank stuff, there is no grassroots push for change.

If foundations would move all of their money away from think tanks that theorize and push issues, it would create a budget for a network of statewide parent groups. Those groups would then educate parents in their state and build the outrage that should be there. That outrage will become votes that are the one thing (besides cold hard cash) that actually move politicians.

You could call the group Parents for Quality Education and they would be able to do what the unions do. They would attend every state board meeting and push for changes at the granular level that can help students. They would have someone at every state senate and house education committee hearing looking for bills that would hurt or help students and mobilize concerned parents. They could become the advocates for change that are so desperately needed. They could shift the discussion away from adults and move it to the students.

It is time to stop talking and theorizing about education change and start making it happen. I applaud Gates and Broad for moving their money out of an ineffective campaign and hope that foundations will start investing in true systemic change that starts with parents.

Jay Matthew’s looks at staffing our schools. He uses the KIPP DC: Key Academy as an example where the principal had to fire 2 teachers because they were disorganized and were not improving even after coaching. He is correct in imagining the nightmare that would result if the teachers were left in place. Students in those classes would suffer academically and it would be very difficult to get them back on track.

I don’t think the Key Academy is alone. In the education world, or in any other world, there is a good chance that 10% of your staff is not going to work out. The problem in education is that we are looking at 3.2 million teachers which means that 320,000 teachers need to be replaced right now. Even more depressing is that it means that 6.4 million students are being adversely affected because we cannot replace those teachers.

But education is like owning a very old house. When you go to do a seemingly simple repair, it ends up requiring a ton of work and a ton of money. When you go to fix a simple hole in the wall you find the insulation is gone, the wood is rotting and the plaster is cracked.

In the Key Academy example, there is a strong principal who knows what to look for in a teacher and is spending time in the classroom understanding the dynamics of that environment. Sadly, we cannot assume that every school has that same leadership. In order for us to be able to accomplish this wholesale replacement of 10% of the workforce, we have to have good tools to observe the teacher and we have to have principals trained on using those tools.

Firing two teachers in order to ensure students have a great year sounds like a solution, but it does not scale. In order to do that, we have to train the principals and we have to find a tool to give them to help fix teaching. That would require a ton more work and probably a ton more money.