Scattered thoughts -- Cowboy Troy faces a retention crisis

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk makes seven interesting points about the Chicago teachers' strike. This one stood out: 

This is a clash of values.  This Ed Trust statement calls out the teachers union for low-balling expectations for kids. It’s a good illustration of how underneath the posturing and rhetoric and the substantive disagreements Chicago is really about what kind of school system they city is going to have – the old kind, which was a quasi-jobs program or the new type where performance and execution matter most. In that way the strike is an important national moment.

Realizing that for many, many years, public schools were as much about the adults' employment as anything is critical to understanding why we find our system in its current shape. 

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Sara Mead makes a great point about teacher quality within schools:

First, policy conversations about equitable teacher distribution tend to focus almost exclusively on teacher distribution across schools, and how to get more effective teachers working in high-poverty schools. That's important. But research suggests that most of the variation in teacher quality occurs within rather that between schools. There is also evidence that the kids who most need good teachers tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to within school teacher distribution--exactly the opposite of what we want to have happen. If we're serious about ensuring effective teachers for all students, we need to engage issues of teacher distribution within as well as across schools.

My experience in schools before my current one, especially when I taught in a large, district high school in Philly, backs this up. My class assignments during my rookie year were OK, but many other first-year teachers I knew were given classes with unusually high numbers of repeaters or just students with reputations as difficult to teach. 

Combine this with a salary structure that lowballs younger teachers and one can see why half of all teachers quit in the first five years.  

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Per all of the twittering about MNPS playing chicken with the state, I kept thinking about this one hit wonder:

This isn't a political statement. I just wanted an excuse to post a Cowboy Troy video.