eduskeptic

Under the No Child Left Behind legislation, there were no gray areas. There were two options, perform to the standards, or be taken over. Not much in life is quite that black and white.

Schools now have the ability to choose a different course. Instead of being locked into a largely unwinnable march to failure in 2014, there are now options.

The Obama administration, with Arne Duncan at the helm of the Department of Education, has offered school districts the ability to opt out some portions of NCLB. Nothing in the legislation lets districts off the hook relative to advancing learning. Rather, it puts in place reasonable goals that are, with work, achievable.

The trade off is this: states that opt in to the new regime will be required  to adopt “…college- and career-ready standards, focus on 15 percent of their most-troubled schools, and create guidelines for teacher evaluations based in part on student performance.”

States applying for waivers have till the middle of November to do so. Those states granted waivers will find out sometime after the first of the year. The requirements are sure to be rigorous, and states will need to fully agree to participate in order to receive a waiver.

What does this mean for education in general? That is hard to say. The reality is that nothing is as it seems on the surface when discussing legislation regarding education. The full import of what all this means won’t be known until a year or so after it is put in place.

It is, perhaps, a good place to start though. Rigorous, not rigid, expectations are far better than the certainty of doom under the unintended consequences of the original NCLB.

Educators will hopefully be included in the discussions about how to satisfy the conditions of the waivers. Gov. Brown would do well to include actual classroom teachers, from rookies to old pros, in this process. It’s not too much to ask for.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

The No Child Left Behind law launched 10 years ago, perhaps with good intentions, perhaps not. It can be compared to jumping out of an airplane, and a few hundred feet later finding out that you don’t actually have a parachute strapped on. Exhilarating, but maybe not such a good ending.

The argument isn’t whether our school systems need to do better. They always do, no matter what. Education is not a static enterprise.

The goals that had to met by schools started out a reasonable point. Each year the expectations increased, and that yearly increase was also a reasonable, reachable goal. Schools did have to focus on the goals and work pretty diligently to meet them, but it could be done.

On a graph, the yearly increases were somewhat like a ramp leading to a classroom. It started at not much, and gradually increased. A few years into the program though, the ramp disappeared. The trajectory shot up at a very steep angle. It very much resembled a hockey stick.

During this time, the Eduskeptic was teaching Kindergarten in a small district in the Sierra, east of Sacramento, California. In meeting after meeting, we went over all the data that we could generate regarding our K through 4 grade levels. Everyone was engaged in this process. We knew what was expected, what we needed to do, argued fiercely over it, and it was kept at the forefront of our planning processes.

As a result, in 2008, the school was awarded the California Distinguished School designation. Pretty cool. The process of educating very young children continued in the same manner as before. Nothing changed. Meeting state and federal expectations continued to be a big part of what we did.

While this was going on, I looked at the graph of expectations, noted where we were, and where we needed to be, over and over again. It was obvious that a train wreck was on the way. The Eduskeptic admits to being mathematically challenged in some higher math areas. One of his Kindergarten colleagues, however, was a math person.

One fine day during one of our Kindergarten recesses, I brought out the graph, with our progress meticulously charted. My reading of the trajectory of our progress relative to the hockey stick of requirements was that we would, at a very definable time, run into the handle of the hockey stick, far short of the requirements. My colleague confirmed what I thought to be true.

There was nothing in our upward trajectory history that indicated that we could ever meet the goals once the line of expectations rocketed upward.

The only way to do it would be to swap out our entire student population and replace it with certified genius level drones. We were going to run into the wall of the hockey stick handle in the 2010-2011 school year, and be in the school improvement boat starting in the 2011-2012 school year.

That was an accurate prediction. Like many other fine schools doing a wonderful job of educating children, the school where the Eduskeptic taught is indeed in the school improvement program, not because of the quality of teaching or make up of the students. It is entirely due to the unrealistic tenents of NCLB. Keep in mind that the fine teachers at this school didn’t all of a sudden take a two year nap. This school, and too many others just like it, has no business being put into such a designation.

Now, though, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have pulled the plug on most of the unattainable requirements of NCLB. To be sure, there are still stringent requirements, and there are some other requirements put in place. The end result seems, at least right now, to be a recognition that mathematics can be a predictor, there is always a bell curve and it cannot be defeated, and, oddly enough, gravity really does work.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

In the last two articles, the Eduskeptic discussed teaching reading to very young children, ages 4-7, and the reality of the developmental processes involved.

A short review:

• developmental processes in children cannot be pushed or hurried up, which is the reason they are called “developmental”
• the best care, nutrition, family, cannot hurry the processes
• the worst care, poor nutrition, dysfunctional family, can slow things down
• decoding and reading are very different things
• until the neurons axons are fully myelinated, especially in the angular gyrus region of the brain, children can’t read well, if at all
• the angular gyrus isn’t fully myelinated until sometime after the 5th year, and prior to the 7th year.
• the angular gyrus, when fully myelinated, allows many different functions to come together and be quickly transmitted
• the process occurs more quickly in girls
• reading, as opposed to decoding, follows this developmental process

The question then is this: can very young children, Kindergartners, be forced to read? It’s not likely. They can, however, be supported as they are exposed to and gather the information that will allow them to read.

Kindergartners can learn to decode words, and are certainly able to memorize pages from a short book. Comprehension about what they are decoding is rare. Decoding is a necessary step on the road to reading. Comprehension is reading.

Kindergartners  can remember a short word list. Around 25 is pretty much OK, by the end of Kindergarten. To require that they either understand what the words are, or be able to use them consistently in sentences is absurd. The idea that these very young children should know 100 words in order to be ready for first grade is patently insane. It is strange enough to require first graders to know 100 words.

If Kindergartners are read to on a regular basis, given books to look at, exposed to the printed word,  are included in participating in predictable books, and are read familiar stories more than once, they quickly get the idea that all those squiggles on a page mean something. Their natural curiosity kicks in, and they are on the path to reading—all in their own time. Yes, some Kindergartners actually do learn to read. It’s got everything to do with the myelination process.

First grade children are at a more developmentally appropriate age to begin to read. They will do so at varying rates. Nothing about children happens in lock-step with other children. The process of teaching these children to read is a very complicated endeavor.

Good teachers know that everyone moves at their own rate, though some just give lip service to the idea. The really good ones actually know how  to support these different rates, and are comfortable with how children progress.

The really good first and second grade teachers will recognize when one of their students has hit a ceiling. Rather than blindly insisting on the next level, they go back, re-teach, re-teach, re-teach until that child reaches the next level. It’s been called laddering, scaffolding, framing, circling, supportive reading, and so on.

Regardless of the edu-speak word or phrase du jour, it involves a couple of really important issues: teachers who absolutely know what they are doing, and who understand and embrace the developmental growth of their students. The ceilings that the children hit have to do with the myelination process, and being continually supported through this growth process allows them to jump to the next level of proficiency as soon as their brains are ready to do so.

It is vitally important that teachers of K through third grade students acknowledge and support the developmental processes that all children must go through as they grow. Unrealistic expectations do nothing more than frustrate teachers and parents, and can do irreparable harm to very young children.

Young children who are pushed by adults to things they are developmentally unable to do are likely to exhibit burn out in third grade. It is a long way from third grade to high school graduation.

It is important for those in educational policy making positions to actually be familiar with the developmental processes. They, of all people, should understand the myelination process, and act accordingly. Mostly, they do not.

Someone has to stand up for the children. Parents and teachers are in the best position to insist on developmentally appropriate practices when it comes to their young children. The politicians quite obviously do not.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

The last musings of the Eduskeptic centered on teaching reading to young children. Young children, for the purposes of this article, are those who are between 4-7 years old.

The push for ever more expectations of Kindergartners and first grade students started prior to the No Child Left Behind legislation. It came to the forefront with gusto when NCLB was passed into law. It was a seemingly good idea. However, it was ill formed, badly executed, carried forward by people who had no experience actually working with very young children.

Developmental processes cannot be hurried along. They are called “developmental” for a reason. There isn’t any known method of speeding up how the brain, and the body develop. The best nutrition and care in the world, while certainly a benefit for young children, don’t equal a faster process. Conversely, lack of good nutrition and care can have a negative impact on development. The body does need nutrients and care to prosper.

The biological time table rolls along at an individual pace. Each child is different in reaching certain milestones. Children crawl, walk, run, talk, explore, at different times, dictated by their own internal biological clock. None of these happen at the same time for children who are the same age. That much is certain.

The ability to read is determined by many things happening in the brain, and in the child’s environment. Reading depends on the brains ability to connect and integrate various sources of information–visual with auditory, linguistic and conceptual areas–and to do so quickly.

All this is dependent upon the maturation of each of the brains’ individual regions, their associated areas, and the speed with which they can be connected and integrated. The speed with which these actions occur depends a great deal on the myelination of the neurons axons in the brain.

Myelin is the fatty sheathing wrapped around a cells axons. More myelin equals a faster neuron, basically a faster conduction of the electrical charge that fires across a synapse to another axon.

Myelin growth follows a developmental schedule that differs for each region of the brain. For instance,  auditory nerves are myelinated in the 6th prenatal month; visual nerves, 6 months postnatally. Sensory and motor regions are myelinated and function independently before 5 years.

The principal regions of the brain that underlie our ability to integrate visual, verbal, and auditory information rapidly–like the angular gyrus–are not fully myelinated in most humans until 5 years of age or later. This is a critical piece of information related to reading.

It has been suggested (Norman Geschwind) that for most children the myelination of the angular gyrus is not sufficiently, or fully, developed until between 5 and 7 years of age. The process takes longer for boys.

This is the information that is commonly referred to by some teachers as the “developmental processes” . It is in fact probably not understood at this level by most people, including teachers, who are outside the medical field. Brain research related to teaching is woefully inadequate. Who in the teaching field has ever heard of something called the angular gyrus and the myelination processes?

The Eduskeptic, in all of the professional development workshops attended over a 30+ year career, never heard anything about this. Reading specialists the Eduskeptic has spoken to are in the same boat.

What all this means is that, prior to the full myelination of the angular gyrus, the processes that lead to reading simply aren’t in place. It also goes a long way in explaining the reason that some children read before others.

It also points out the futility of insisting that Kindergartners read before getting to first grade. It is a biologically ridiculous idea for most 5 years olds’. What is OK is the preparation for reading. Being exposed to books and print, learning rhymes and songs, being read to–which is hugely important–are all critical to the process. It is important to remember that decoding and reading are two wildly different things.

It illuminates the importance of a systematic, sensitive, and fully informed approach to reading in first grade and second grade, taught by teachers who understand the developmental processes the brain must go through prior to being able to read. Anything less places unwarranted expectations and stress on very young children.

The Eduskeptic encourages anyone in the early education field, teaching children from 5 to 7 years old, to read Maryanne Wolf’s book Proust and the Squid. The basis for this series of posts regarding reading are due to the information presented in her book, along with many years of complete frustration dealing with “educational leaders” and colleagues who simply didn’t, and may still not, understand developmental processes.

Next post: what’s important in teaching reading to the very young. As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Some time ago, when my teaching career was at about halfway through, young children were not expected to be reading by the time they left Kindergarten. Those of us who taught very young children in Kindergarten, and our first and second grade colleagues, understood that developmental issues precluded doing so for 4, 5, and most 6 year old children.

Fast forward a few years. There came a push for the very young to be able to “recognize” a set number of words that were used most often in first grade reading. The Eduskeptics radar went off.

It seemed at the time, and I was clear in my statements about it, that we were about to step onto a very slippery slope that would end up with this “recognition” morphing into a “requirement” related to a “standard”.  The Eduskeptic was, most unfortunately, correct in paying attention to his long range radar warning.

Each year I would remind my Kindergarten colleagues, and everyone else, that we were caring for very young children. Developmental processes cannot be pushed. They occur on their own biological time table, and it differs from child to child.

Our third grade teachers, long ago, said that third grade was where the preceding 3 years would come together. Reading really took off. It if didn’t, the probability that a problem existed was very real. The coming together part was, in actuality, the developmental processes in the brain finishing a task related to reading.

It is important to understand that reading is wildly different from decoding. Simple word recognition is not reading. Working through a series of words, and naming them correctly, is decoding. Decoding and reading are related but are very different critters.

The “standards” march came on full force with the No Child Left Behind Act. Over time, people who didn’t actually teach young children decided that everyone needed to be at “average”. It is a completely unattainable goal. As the Eduskeptic has pointed out many times before, average only exists in the presence of below average and above average. Average is the quintessential moving target. Death is more certain than “average”.

Standards were developed for every grade level. Reading, inappropriately, became part of Kindergarten. Children 4, 5, and 6 started to be held accountable for something that they were very ill equipped to do. Read.

It was, and continues to be, an extremely stupid skill to insist upon in Kindergarten. Stay tuned. The Eduskeptic’s next post will explain the reason for this.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Summer break is in full bloom by now. Depending on where in the US one lives, it started either somewhere around the end of May or at the beginning or middle of June. It was always an exciting time when I was still teaching. It still is.

The break is generally a big hit with teachers, children, and parents, although some parents might really rather that the little ones continue to spend time away from the house. This break happens in summer due to one seasonal fact: it gets hot.

Long ago, after the industrial revolution, students were, for the first time in this country, going to school in large warehouse-like buildings. The move off the farms into the city put large numbers of children in school. The buildings lacked one really important feature: air conditioning of any kind. The summer break was born.

The Eduskeptic is convinced that this break is absolutely necessary, for everyone. There are those who will claim that children lose what they learn over the summer break. Some still think that the break is 3 months long. It isn’t and never has been. The pundits who claim that this educational loss occurs regularly advocate for a longer school year. They will point out that other countries do it, so we should.

Our system is different than most other countries. It’s difficult to produce a good comparison without launching into the apples and oranges mirror.

There isn’t any evidence that children lose what they learn. The beginning of the school year start up always produces a need for everyone to get back into the swing of things. Teachers need just as much time to get back into it as the students do.

What does the summer break do then? Ideally it provides a time for children to simply be children. Unstructured time, especially for the elementary years, is extremely important. It’s a time for children to put to practical use what they learned at school. It’s a time for unfettered running amok of their imaginations, the pure joy of exploration for explorations sake. It’s a time for the teenagers to run till they are empty, then sleep for long periods of time. It’s a time for them to explore the emerging teen relationship/friendship puzzle. It’s a time for families to play, love, and live without any particular reason to pay attention to the clock.

In short, the summer break gives everyone time to just be. It’s good, it’s always been good, and will, in the Eduskeptics opinion, always be good. It’s good to take time to wonder, explore, and learn at your own pace.

Once again a study has been published about the purported benefits of preschool. The title of many articles that have followed are something like this: Long term study of preschool says better grad rate, less drug use, fewer arrests for children enrolled.” Sounds good. The newest study, published in the online version of Science, isn’t much different from a Rand Corp. study from years ago, and more recently, or other studies done about the effects of preschool.

If you stop at just the title of the article, or don’t read it thoroughly, you might come away thinking that preschool for all is a cure all for all. It isn’t.

Here is a snippet from Time, the online version:

“To cut crime, raise education and income levels, and reduce addiction rates among the poor, no program offers more bang for the buck than preschool, as a new study published in Science demonstrates.” Again, sounds pretty good.

Read a bit further, either in the actual study, or the Time article, and one discovers this:

The children in the study were from the “…lowest-income neighborhoods of Chicago, where nearly 40% of residents live below the poverty line; most of the children were African American.”

This study, like the Rand Corp. (where Chicago was also the area of the study) and other studies, says that children from an impoverished inner city life who went to a “quality” preschool did marginally better than children from the same situation who did not attend a “quality” preschool.

According to the study, the preschool children, 900 of them, had a better graduation from high school rate, a better college acceptance rate, had fewer drug, including alcohol, problems, and fewer arrests, than the control group of 500. It is not a spectacular difference, but any positive difference is good.

The problem isn’t that this study, like the others, will be used in the push for mandatory universal preschool as a panacea for all that ails the national school system and the nation in general. Carefully chosen snippets will be trotted out by various politicians and other hucksters to support their particular school reform package of the day. They can’t help themselves. They smell money.

The real issue isn’t addressed. Preschool, no matter how good, solves nothing. The impoverished communities still exist, the drug infested, squalid houses still exist. Embedded unemployment, constant crime, still exist. A lack of hope for a better life still exists.

With these kinds of issues facing inner-city children and their families every day, the best preschool experience in the known universe won’t overcome the effects of poverty. There doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to put the effort into actually addressing the underlying issues that seem to relegate some children to a clearly difficult life.

Chicago isn’t alone in high poverty inner-city problems. Every state, every city, has it’s own version of the kinds of neighborhoods that the children in the study come from.

It will take a national effort to make any kind of a dent in the multiple ravages that drug addiction, split families, single parent families, and multi-generaltional poverty produce.

The Eduskeptic is forever skeptical of studies like this one, and the others, simply because they are used to further the mistaken notion that their conclusions are applicable to the general population. One simply cannot extrapolate the information and apply it broadly to all children. It simply doesn’t work.

This is not to say that a very good preschool can’t help children get ready for their first few years in the public school system. They can, and do. What they won’t, and can’t do, is solve the basic problems that so many very young children face as a reality every day in poverty stricken areas of our country.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.



A recent conversation with a parent whose child had been in the Eduskeptic’s Kindergarten class highlighted a continuing issue in the education arena. This parent said that she was on the “bad Mom” list (not really, but it is a feeling one gets), because the family had taken trips on school days. Read on:

In my talk with parents at the beginning of each year, I made a few things clear to them: I wouldn’t be successful without their support and help throughout the year; they were welcome any time in our classroom; education and learning were not restricted to the classroom; the time to do things with your family is now, there is no other time to do it; childhood lasts a relatively short time. The list goes on.

For very young children, learning is very intense all the time. There are some opportunities that occur only when children and families are young. It is a time to explore and experience. The classroom offers exploration, experiences, and opportunities for learning. So does everything outside the classroom.

Grandparents need to be visited, places in town and in the forests need to be explored. Lakes, rivers and pools should be splashed in. Trails are there to be hiked. Gardens need to be dug and planted. Snow needs to be skied. Bugs need to be collected, looked at, wondered about. Trips to different places need to be taken. The uniqueness of each season needs to be explored. Unstructured play and exploration need to be there in abundance. The list goes on.

The Eduskeptic told the parents in his classroom that if an opportunity came up to do something with their children (visit Grandparents, camp, ski, explore, have a snuggle day), that they should do it. Education is not only in the classroom. What I asked is that they notify me if they were going to do something special. If it was for 5 days or more, I would gladly arrange for an independent study for them. In California, if the absence is 5 days or more, a completed independent study gives the child credit for the time and the school ADA money for the time. If is less than the proscribed time, no body gets anything, and the schools absolutely do not like any loss of money.

If what they were doing wasn’t going to hit the 5 day mark, but was close, I encouraged them to take the 5 days. If it were just a day or so, I would arrange for them to have the materials that we were going to cover over the day or two that they would be gone. Either way, the children had adequate school material with them. I expected them to keep up. So did their parents.

Another caveat was this: if the child was really behind in class, and I didn’t think that being gone would be to their advantage, I worked harder with the parent to provide lessons for when they were gone, or spent extra time with the child when the family returned.

The Eduskeptic never had any regrets about his approach, nor did the parents. The children did well and almost all of them came back with whatever work I had sent with them, completed.

It is a complicated world. Parents don’t always have the luxury of a job that is Monday through Friday, during the day light hours. Time with the family then must come when the parents are available, regardless of the name of the day.

The parent that the Eduskeptic had the conversation with works 3 days in row, 14 hour shifts, and the days are never the same. Her husband is on a different schedule. Their children are all on the honor roll, which is no surprise to the Eduskeptic. It is obvious that this family spends time with their children, certainly allowing for education to take place no matter where they are.

My response to her was this: continue doing what you are doing. There will come a time when the children will not want to be away from their friends at school. The social structure will take over, and impromptu family excursions will fall by the wayside. It is inevitable. Besides, the children are on the honor rolls at their schools. That alone indicates how this family values education.

As much as the “go to school at all costs” group will howl over the Eduskeptics approach, which lasted for the 24 years he taught Kindergarten, the school system absolutely needs to accommodate families who are wise enough to know that learning is a whole world activity, and not restricted to a classroom.

Not everyone gets opportunities for family explorations. Not every family works a Monday-Friday, daylight hours job. Schools would be wise to support the endeavors of parents who take the time to learn with their children, inside or outside the classroom.

Teachers are hired to teach, which, for the most part, they do. How they teach is as varied as the number of teachers on the planet. No one does the same thing, although similar methods and approaches abound.

What’s more important in the classroom, teachers, teaching methods, technology, class make up? It is not an altogether easy answer, especially now.

Years ago, children communicated with each other by being in the actual presence of others. Sending letters, using the telephone, or passing hand written notes was the highest technology available.

Teachers in classrooms generally lectured about a subject. Depending on the subject, the hands on component consisted of reading, writing, building a model, or, in the case of science, experiments. It’s what was available and it’s what happened, day in and day out, in classrooms across the globe. Mostly, it worked pretty well.

Starting with children who were born about 30 years ago, there was an ever faster change in the way children communicated. The pace of the change simply accelerated over time.

By the time children who were born in 1979 hit high school, and then college, they were keeping in touch with a multitude of modalities. The entire social media experience was on us, and is on us, and continues to change at an extraordinary rate.

The interconnectedness of young people now days is more intense than it has ever been. To some extent, teaching methods have attempted to keep up with all of this. Close, but maybe not close enough.

In a recent study published in Science, the use of a more hands on approach, rather than the traditional large lecture hall experience, appears to have resulted in better test results.

The study by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, used a more interactive, real time feed back method in a physics class of 250 students at the university level. Another 250 students were taught using the lecture method.

The interactive method posted much better test results. The interactive class was taught by two grad students, the lecture class by a well respected Professor.

Oddly enough, Kindergarten uses the interactive, instant feedback method more than anything else. Of course, the biggest difference between Kindergartners and University students is that the University students weigh more and have been around longer. The brain, it seems, learns best by doing.

It seems, according to this rather limited study, that the person teaching may not be quite as important as the method and tools employed by the teacher. This is not to suggest that the teacher hasn’t much to do with the process. Everyone has had teachers who simply inspire those in the classroom, and teachers who are best described as rather flat and uninspiring.

Give the results of this study, perhaps the teaching profession would do well to support the mass inclusion of available technology to match what children, from Kindergarten to college, are already using.

The basic skills still need to be mastered. It’s how they are mastered that may be a tipping point between average and spectacular.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Bill Gates has, by any standard, been a successful entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist. For a college dropout, he’s done rather well.

With the continuing dialog, and at times, bombast, regarding our educational system, there has been a great deal of attention focused on teachers. The main focus seems to be on evaluating teachers. From some quarters, the intent seems to be to get rid of as many senior teachers as possible, from others it is truly a dialog regarding how to put together a competent, helpful, and meaningful evaluation system.

Bill Gates entered the debate with $355 million (USD) through his foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The intent of this is to overhaul the personnel departments of some big school districts, and the way they evaluate teachers.

Social scientists and, according to a newspaper report (Sacramento Bee, 1.04.10), thousands of teachers, are involved in developing a “better system for evaluating classroom instruction”.

There is a $4 billion grant “competition” from the federal government for the same purpose.  Some twenty sates have jumped into the competition pool. It’s a lot of money.

Mr. Gates and his foundation aren’t the first ones in the pool. A widely panned method, put forth by economists, is a statistical exercise that purports to measure how much teachers help their students learn. It is based in changes in standardized test scores, and the changes from one year to the next. It’s called the value added method.

Gates’ effort and research starts with value added. The aim, however, is to develop other, better, methods for measuring teacher effectiveness. A large part of the effort is to also help educators understand the reason one teacher is more successful in the classroom than another. The “help educators” part is a big part of how Gates may be offering something useful.

What is described by researchers and educators involved with the project as “maddeningly complex”, the effort looks at much more than simple, and largely discredited, standardized test scores.

Gates was surprised by the lack of study on what actually makes a good teacher, what he calls the exemplars: “What’s unbelievable is how little the exemplars have been studied.” For those of us who are in or who have retired from the educational system, it’s not a surprise at all. All too often, the high priced trainers who took up staff development time were either rookies with very little teaching history who abandoned the classroom to become corporate trainers to those who simply had never spent any time in a classroom teaching children. They were not credible at all, and we all knew it.

Gates, on the other hand, is using video to help figure out the puzzle. By June, 2011, his researchers should have about 24,000 video taped lessons. Eventually, the researchers will review over 64,000 hours of classroom instruction. They are looking for a correlations between teaching practices, high student achievement, and value-added scores.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist, is leading the research. His hope is that more districts will start using classroom videos for training and evaluations. The foundation is working to keep costs down. The start up costs can be significant: $1.5 million for a 140 school district with 7,000 teachers, with ongoing costs in the $800,000 range.

For the most part, districts already spend quite a few dollars evaluating teachers. If the Gates initiative is actually something that provides a quality method for evaluations, then the real costs will have to be quantified.

Did Gates get it right, again? He may have. At the very least, his research efforts are doing the apparently heretofore unthinkable: using actual exemplary teachers and teaching methods to not only evaluate effective teaching methods, but to help teachers reach a better understanding of what it takes to get to the exemplary level. It beats using a system that relies on standardized test scores as a sole method of evaluating effectiveness in the classroom. Standardized test simply aren’t capable of measuring all of the chaotic variables that walk into a classroom with each child, and coming up with anything meaningful. Gates system might be able to do it.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything. It’s less embarrassing that way.