The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Testing Teacher Effectiveness

Grant Wiggins, the "Understanding By Design" guy, agrees with Cuomo that the current local system of teacher ratings in NY is a "sham", but writes (from New Jersey) in An Open Letter to Governor Cuomo: Re-think the Regs of APPR | Granted, and...

Here is a simple analogy to make the point. You were a ballplayer and are a Yankees fan. But suppose only once per year, we “tested” the Yankees on their skills, on tests developed by experts. Now, imagine, the players do not know how they did, either during or after the test. Now imagine, the NYSED gives them a value-added score – with test security, so they cannot double-check or question the test results (or test validity). Worse, imagine in addition that the impartial evaluators and internal supervisors (coaches) went to one game where the Yankees were terrible – like the game last week in which they made 4 errors, left runners stranded, and pitched poorly. By the logic of your plan, we would be obligated to find Manager Girardi “ineffective.” But that’s both bad measurement and not common sense. Two weeks later it looks different, doesn’t it? Indeed, the charm of baseball is that a long season of 162 “tests” enables the truth of quality to out. If this is true for highly-skilled and trained professional athletes, what about novice young students?

In short, I fear you are making matters worse, not better, by this new round of reductionist rules. And by insisting that they be put into operation next year, with no time to really think them through, test them, and refine them ensures that this effort will backfire.

TEP Charter: Teacher Pay, Student Scores

Wikipedia describes The Equity Project as

The Equity Project (TEP) is a New York charter school opened in September 2009. The school will instruct students in fifth through eighth grades and will pay its teachers a starting salary of $125,000 per year, more than double the national average. Teachers must also work double the hours a typical teacher works.

Now Vox reports that This school paid teachers $125,000 a year — and test scores went up

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere: ...

... Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired.

Intriguing...and a hopeful sign generally. It should be noted, however, that I got to that report from the link at statistics-prof Andrew Gelman's blog on Time-release pedagogy?? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

...there’s something strange here or i’m missing something obvious. That jump from 3-year impact to 4-year seems excessive.

That does seem really odd. Still, it's a hopeful sign.

Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.

Depressed Teachers, Low Class Performance

I notice this morning a report on a Florida study: Elementary teachers' depression symptoms related to students' learning -- ScienceDaily

Teachers experience some of the highest levels of job-related stress, and such stress may leave them more vulnerable to depression. How do elementary school teachers' symptoms of depression affect the quality of the classroom environment and students' learning? A new study has found that teachers who reported more symptoms of depression than their fellow teachers had classrooms that were of lesser quality across many areas, and students in these classrooms had lower performance gains, particularly in math...

The researchers looked at 27 teachers and their 523 third-grade students (primarily White and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) in a Florida school district. Teachers reported the frequency of their symptoms of clinical depression, and students' basic reading and math skills were assessed throughout the year.

My first question, though, is: cause or effect or both (i.e., causal loop)? Do classes do badly because the teachers are depressed, or are teachers depressed because their classes are (or are expected to be) doing badly? (Or both?)

If the depression results from job-related stress, and if (low) classroom quality results from many factors which contribute to job-related stress in many ways, then it would be really surprising not to find a correlation between measures of classroom quality problems on the one hand, and symptoms of depression on the other. I suppose a mild depression that we see may actually be making visible classroom troubles mildly less bad, if we believe in Depressive Realism | Psychology Today

While people with depression can suffer from cognitive distortions, the scientific literature suggests that those with only mild-to-moderate depression can also have more accurate judgment about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events which may or may not occur), and a more realistic perception of their role, abilities, and limitations. This so-called 'depressive realism' may enable a person with depression to shed the Pollyanna optimism and rose-tinted spectacles that shield us from reality, to see life more accurately, and to judge it accordingly.

So it's not an easy call, if you want to know what influences which -- but either way, it does seem worth watching for symptoms of depression...and one of those symptoms, though far from conclusive, is a class that's not doing well. Interesting.

Google Classroom, mobile version

Google Classroom is a big deal, just as a set of utilities to make instruction work a bit better. Now it's an app: Google rolling out Classroom mobile app for students, teachers | ZDNet

The mobile version of Classroom, Lugo explained, is designed to further facilitate communications between teachers and students, namely through the addition of a teacher assignments page and the ability to archive classes.

Students will also be able to attach files (i.e. PDFs) and use the mobile device's built-in camera to attach photos to their assignments, whether they be drawings for an art class, a family tree for social studies, or diagrams and results for science experiments.

"And if they've forgotten their homework, they can ask someone at home to snap a photo, text it and then turn it in with the app," Lugo remarked. "Of course, if the dog has actually eaten it, Classroom can't help you."

My main reaction to this is a memory of correspondence-school courses in elementary school, just over half a century ago while living in Veracruz. Writing under Mom's supervision had advantages, even with the actual teachers being weeks away by snail mail. Google Classroom utilities can't replace teachers -- but they can expand the set of available frameworks for teaching.

Or then again, maybe not.

On Being a Student (Temporarily)

I'm not sure how much effort this blog deserves, at this point; I was letting it die without ever really deciding to do so, but it's possible that saving brief notes or at least clips on educational practice and progress will be useful in future, and I do scan blog posts anyway. So.... Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - The Washington Post

I have made a terrible mistake.

I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!

This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and administrators to improve student learning outcomes.

As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day....

It's an interesting story, and perhaps all teachers should do that... one or two days per year? There's a postscript to it on Wiggins' blog, at A PS to the guest post on shadowing HS students (and the author revealed) | Granted, and...

I was the first teacher in my school – in 1978 – to tape myself. I thought: well, coaches watch game film; why don’t I? Yikes! I was horrified. I had thought of myself as a good teacher and I was praised for being one. But the tape told a different story. My manner was a bit off-putting; I was a tad sarcastic; I was using phrases like “Well, it’s obvious that…” and “So, anyone can see that…” and I was not as skilled as I thought I had been in checking peripheral vision. I had missed 5-6 kids making a timid attempt to enter the discussion. Without my noticing and imploring them in, they fell back to more passive distanced listening...

It occurs to me that every class minute is a minute of "public" behavior by the teacher; perhaps webcams, available for view by parents, should always be on. (Or perhaps every teacher would immediately quit.)

Incentive Pay for Teachers

This report is from India; it's entirely possible that it's completely irrelevant to US issues. Still, it's also possible that it's not irrelevant at all: Shout it from the Rooftops! Performance Pay for Teachers in India

Students who had completed their entire five years of primary school education under the program scored 0.54 and 0.35 standard deviations (SD) higher than those in control schools in math and language tests respectively. These are large effects corresponding to approximately 20 and 14 percentile point improvements at the median of a normal distribution

Second, the results suggest that these test score gains represent genuine additions to human capital as opposed to reflecting only ‘teaching to the test’. ... ...

Or then again....

Saving Money

The "Conversable Economist" keeps looking for research supporting low-cost school reform proposals. Lately he's seen Classroom Evaluation of K-12 Teachers

"During the TES [Teacher Evaluation System] evaluation year, teachers are typically observed in the classroom and scored four times: three times by an assigned peer evaluator—high-performing, experienced teachers who are external to the school—and once by the principal or another school administrator. ... dozens of specific skills and practices covering classroom management, instruction, content knowledge, and planning, among other topics.... the evaluators are often pretty tough in grading and commenting on lots of specific skills and practices, but then they still tend to give a high overall grade.... almost everyone was ending up with fairly high overall scores, so the practical effects of this evaluation in terms of pay and jobs was pretty minimal.
Nevertheless, student performance not only went up during the year that the evaluation happened, but student performance stayed higher for teachers who had been evaluated in previous years. "... Imagine two students taught by the same teacher in different years who both begin the year at the fiftieth percentile of math achievement. The student taught after the teacher went through comprehensive TES evaluation would score about 4.5 percentile points higher at the end of the year than the student taught before the teacher went through the evaluation. ..."

It's a substantial change, presumably higher for some teachers (and students) and lower for others. It would be interesting to see how much the effect depended on the administrator evaluation vs. the external evaluator evaluation; what could be done by variations in the rubric, or self-evaluation, or even student evaluation using different rubrics. But mostly I'd be interested in how this would work with classes structured in non-traditional ways, especially flipped classrooms.

Taylor (the Conv. Econ.) links to his earlier low-cost reform research post at Low-Cost Education Reforms: Later Starts, K-8, and Focusing Teachers

three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K–12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments.... We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform.

Again, my main concerns would be how this interacts with modified classroom structure -- and with consolidation, which tends to separate the age groups from one another, and by increasing mileage among low-density populations tends to increase the cost of separating transportation.
Or then again, maybe not.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.

Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Educational Cartoons...

Problems must be solved and dilemmas require compromise, according to Larry Cuban -- Cartoons on Problems and Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

I worked with K-12 teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents in distinguishing between problems and dilemmas when it came to figuring out school reforms and getting into complexities of classroom practice. Occasionally, I would use cartoons to make my points...

Interesting and fun, but the most thought-provoking item I found was not one of the cartoons, was not even one of the linked cartoons, but was a linked absence-of-cartoons in Cartoons/YouTube on Charter Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon. I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools.

I have a feeling that controversy-cartoons generally do "anti" much better than "pro", and this is supported by the commenter who tells him to look for anti-union cartoons (as being implicitly or explicitly pro-charter, I guess). Very odd.
Or then again, maybe not.

Online Resources from/for Teachers

Most of my notes are about resources coming from outside the current educational system, but this morning I noticed Teachers Make Money Selling Materials Online - ABC News

Teachers like Nannini are making extra money providing materials to their cash-strapped and time-limited colleagues on curriculum sharing sites like teacherspayteachers.com, providing an alternative to more traditional — and generally more expensive — school supply stores. Many districts, teachers and parents say these sites are saving teachers time and money, and giving educators a quick way to make extra income.

They're talking about TeachersPayTeachers.com - An Open Marketplace for Original Lesson Plans and Other Teaching Resources and about Share My Lesson - Free K-12 Resources By Teachers, For Teachers, and about the more institutional approach of Membership, policy, and professional development for educators - ASCD, with its ASCD InService Blog.

As a total outsider, I feel some hope that teacher developments can grow to meet the Khan Academy and its ilk somewhere in the middle, but wonder if our educational system (The System™) actually has the flexibility to allow that growth; I remember the hope of Papert's MindStorms, long ago, and then his later book, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer. I remember my eldest and his high-school friends in our kitchen, talking excitedly about the "Children's Machine" and about how School™ had absorbed the promise of Logo in spite of all the good teachers, just because of the kind of system it was. It's likely that change will have to be pushed from outside.

Or then again, maybe not. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

Students Evaluating Teachers

Research on role reversal? No, just an apparently-practical way to evaluate teachers. Why Kids Should Grade Teachers

The responses did indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings. (By comparison, teachers who get a master’s degree—one of the few ways to earn a pay raise in most schools —delivered about one more month of learning per year than teachers without one.)

"Rated most highly" doesn't mean "most likable"; they're asking which teachers have control of the classroom, which teachers teach. It seems to work.
Interesting.

Teacher Evaluation

Economics Nobelist Gary Becker seems to approve this summer's new teacher-evaluation research; in Good and Bad Teachers: How to Tell the Difference he says

Teacher unions all over the country have fought against using performance-based measures to evaluate teachers, but the unions are gradually losing this battle...
...the criterion used in evaluating teachers by many school systems and also by academic articles on school reform is the value added (VA) by teachers to student performance; namely, the improvements in students’ test scores as a result of taking classes of different teachers.
... the fundamental way to judge teachers is not how their students do on tests, but how different teachers affect the likelihood that their students finish high school and go to college, how teachers affect the earnings of their students after they enter the labor force, and whether their students get involved in gangs and crimes.
A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. ... 20 years... 2.5 million children ...
They find large effects on subsequent adult earnings when these young students had teachers who produced good improvements in test scores...

teachers with good VA ratings should be paid considerably more than teachers with bad ratings.

Or then again, maybe not.

Chicago

Wins, losses and draws in Chicago school strike - CNN.com

"Across the board, on every issue, the teachers got a more favorable outcome than the school system," [Professor Bruno] said Wednesday.
The deal, which still must be ratified by the union's overall membership, calls for an average raise of 17.6% over four years... it also strips out a merit pay program that would have been tied to increased emphasis on student test scores... Teachers also managed to hold the line on health insurance increases, and protect seniority pay increases and raises for additional education that the school system wanted to limit or eliminate. Union officials also trumpeted victories in ... The union didn't get all it wanted. In addition to the salary compromise, the school day and year will be extended
"The mayor doesn't walk away empty-handed from this,"

Well, maybe not quite.

From the viewpoint of progressive Matthew Yglesias we get Chicago public schools' pension crunch.

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:...

Everybody's going broke.
Or then again, maybe not?

update: The libertarian summary is found on Saturday Links | The Agitator

Step one: Capitulate to the teachers’ union in the largest city in your state. Step two: Ask the rest of America to guarantee your state’s $200 billion pension gap.

Yeah, everybody's going broke.

Many to One Education

Economist Arnold Kling provides Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology

The attempt to achieve large scale in college courses is misguided. Instead of trying to come up with a way to extend the same course to tens of thousands of students, educators should be asking the opposite question: How would I teach if I only had one student? Educators with just one student in their class would not teach by lecturing....
To put this another way, I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.

I'd tentatively say he has a large part of a point here, but...hmm. The MOOC model, whether it's carried out for higher education or K-12, doesn't have to contradict his many-to-one ideal; if there are 100,000 students finishing a MOOC, then they all have something in common (they have passed "Intro to Calculus" or "Designing a Rocket Stove" or "Baroque Music as a Commentary on Galileo" or "Origami Polyhedra" or whatever it is.) That likely means that they have all done reasonably well on a series of (peer-graded + machine-graded) quizzes, exams, and projects. It means they share some kind of assessment. It doesn't mean that they have all gotten there the same way; it doesn't mean that they have all done what Stanford students do.

But I'm not disagreeing with him about what's important; education needs to be more customized, more personalized, not less, and specific MOOC proposals may try to save money by going the wrong way. (And I hereby propose that the "normal" course length should be a quarter, not a semester. Or maybe a week. Break everything into Pieces! Hulk SMASH!). And he's at least two-thirds right about tablets.

Or then again, maybe not.

Chicago teachers vs. teaching?

The Economist notes on The teachers' strike in Chicago: Fighting irrelevance with fire that

The boffins at the Urban Education Institute (UEI) in Chicago have written an exemplary book on school improvement. They looked at 100 elementary schools that showed progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period, and 100 others that did not. They argue—with quantitative data—that five essential pillars are needed to build a great school. These are:

• effective school leadership,
• collaborative teachers (with committed staff and professional development),
• parent-community ties,
• a student-centered (and safe) learning climate with high expectations,
• and ambitious and demanding instruction.

(Reformatted.) I'm always suspicious of lists like that, but it's plausible. In any case, like most of what I've read in the past few days, the point of the article is far from favorable towards the striking teachers; the author here believes that they not just demanding more money, but trying to prevent improvements in a failing school system. And this seems to be bipartisan, to a considerable extent: they're battling Rahm Emanuel, extremely prominent Democrat, while from the other side we hear Paul Ryan on Chicago Teachers’ Strike: ‘We Stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’ - ABC News

“I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”

Emanuel and Ryan both like charters, too. So do I. And they both like external evaluation. I have mixed feelings about that. Should Teachers Be Graded On Standardized Tests?

if you think that teachers do make a difference, and that some of the teachers aren’t very good, it seems to me that you have two choices. Hold out for a decentralized, discretionary, local-knowledge based system which has no change of materializing for various legal and structural reasons. Or develop admittedly imperfect evaluations, and use them as a replacement metric for seniority and ed credentials. Naturally, the teachers will hate this, in part because some of the resulting decisions will in fact be unfair. But it might be the best we can do.

Well, in Chicago it might be the best they can do; I suspect that local small schools can eventually do better. Or then again, maybe not.

There was also a roundup of opposing views at Chicago Teacher Strike: A News and Opinion Roundup | Via Meadia.

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?