Podcast appearances and mentions of marc tucker

This week we are joined by longtime listener and first time caller Marc Tucker to talk about fighting games! In this case, we are talking about one on one fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken. Marc tells us about a thriving and diverse community that is playing these games and gives listeners all kinds […]

Marc Tucker is the former President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). Marc's goal at NCEE "was to learn as much as possible from the countries that have been outperforming the United States, translate that into a policy agenda, and then work with the states to implement that agenda by helping them develop the policies and the institutional capacity they need to do the job." His 2019 book, Leading High Performance School Systems, is both an exposition of top-performing school systems throughout the world and a potential blueprint to transform the American School System. This book serves as the focus of our conversation.

A speech by Sam Blumenfeld from the late 1990s going into the history of the so-called progressive educatators from Horace Mann to Marc Tucker. Sam passed in 2015 but his work lives on via the Sam Blumenfeld Archives: http://campconstitution.net/sam-blumenfeld-archive/

Marc Tucker: Redesigning American Education | Steve Hargadon | Apr 12 2012 by Steve Hargadon

Increasingly, schools systems are spending less per child on education while producing better academic outcomes. Our guest shares insights and strategies to cultivate higher performing schools. Follow: @ASCD @runin26 @bamradionetwork Marc Tucker is the founder, President/CEO Emeritus and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Tucker has been a leader of the standards-driven education reform movement for many years. He created New Standards, a 23-state consortium designed to develop internationally benchmarked student performance standards and matching student examinations. Rachael George is the principal of Sandy Grade School in the Oregon Trail School District and an ASCD Emerging Leader.

Keri Randolph, former Assistant Superintendent for Innovation in Hamilton County, shares her own reluctant journey into the classroom and tries to find out why so few people are taking that path. Asking why no one wants to teach anymore to the following experts: Pete Fishman, Vice President for Strategy Deans for Impact @psfishman Kate Walsh, President of National Council on Teacher Quality @nctqkate Tiffanie Robinson, President and CEO of Lamp Post @LampPostBldgs Barnett Barry, Founder and CEO for Center for Teaching Quality @teachingquality Rickteyzia, Aspiring Teacher and Lasell College Graduate Carole Basile , Dean of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State Teachers College @asueducation Lance Huffman, former principal Mariel Novas, former community organizer Shanna Peeples, 2015 National Teacher of the Year and author of Think Like Socrates The dread color-coded sheets. They always started arriving around January. The Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources would prepare weekly updates on anticipated job openings at schools in the district and distribute them to the district leadership team. Green meant a school was fully staffed; yellow meant more than 50% of openings had been filled; and red meant more than 50% of openings had not been filled. During my first January in the district, I was shocked to see the abundant red lines and numbers of anticipated openings. Over the next few months, the red lines increased with more than 300 teachers needed to fill openings for the following school year. Our conversations as a leadership team were rarely about quality or effective teachers, but rather a growing lack of certified candidates. Through these conversations, I learned that, some classrooms in our highest poverty schools went without a permanent teacher for months or even a year in high needs areas like math and science. But, we were starting to experience shortages across the board except in our most affluent schools. We moved back the hiring season so that it started in December in hopes of signing teacher early before they could be recruited away. We partnered with our local university to improve teacher preparation and strengthen the student-teaching experience. We started a mentoring pilot to support new teachers in hopes they would stay, but through all of this, I saw a bigger problem. Not enough people wanted to teach in our schools. See below for some references and additional resources to accompany the content in the podcast. The Situation: Framing the Issue. Do we really have a teacher shortage? a. 2017-18 Teacher Shortage Area Nationwide List from the Office of Postsecondary Education at the US Department of Education. Urban, rural, high poverty and low-achieving schools have the biggest staffing problems. b. Some schools and districts (for example, South Carolina) are looking to teacher exchange programs to fill vacancies. c. Retention is a huge issue, but it is outside of the scope of this podcast. We plan to release an episode solely on retention soon. d. We have a national shortage of minority teachers. Teaching is local, and so are shortages. a. Teaching is more local than most professions. Teachers are more likely to teach near where they grew up and receive their training locally, as well. Read more about Deans for Impact on Peter Fishman’s blog, 13 Miles: The Inherent Localism of Teaching. b. Check data from your state here. Shortages can vary within states, within communities and even within districts. Teacher preparation programs are lacking in numbers and quality. a. Declining enrollment in teacher preparation in some parts of the country raise concerns that local supply won’t meet local demand. More on the data included in the podcast from the Learning Policy Institute. b. Teacher preparation program- the quality debate. The National Council on Teaching Quality reviews and ranks teacher preparation programs including traditional and alternative certification programs, though, there’s debate over how to measure the quality of teacher preparation programs. Here’s the link to the Third Way survey, Teaching: The Next Generation, Kate Walsh mentions in the podcast. Here’s the list of alternative teacher preparation programs in Texas. There’s a lot about teaching in many communities that isn’t attractive. a. North Carolina salary schedule referenced in podcast, and blog article on the high numbers of North Carolina who work additional jobs outside of the regular school day. b. The OECD 2017 Education at a Glance report released in September found that the US pays our teachers on average less than 60% of the salaries of similarly educated professionals- the “lowest relative earnings across all OECD countries with data” and the report also noted that US teachers work longer hours than their international counterparts, and this makes the profession “increasingly unattractive to young students.” c. More on Tiffanie Robinson and Lamp Post. d. More on the Center for Teaching Quality’s Barnett Berry. De-professionalization and the Low and High Roads a. The 2017 American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Union Teacher Worklife Survey report decreasing teacher morale and mental health. b. National Education Policy Center’s 2015 brief, Reversing the Deprofessionalization of Teaching c. For more on de-professionalization of the teaching profession: i. Darling-Hammond, L. (2007). Images of teaching: Cultivating a moral profession. In Arcilla, et al (Eds.), A life in classrooms (pp. 16-33). New York: Teachers College Press. ii. Mehta, J. (2013). The allure of order: High hopes, dashed expectations, and the troubled quest to remake American schooling. Oxford University Press. d. Marc Tucker, President and CEO of the National Center of Education and Economy, writes extensively on the education labor market and has been a leader in the standards movement in the United States. He led the writing of America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, informed the high road, low road discussion in the podcast. Reimagining the Teacher Workforce and the Profession a. Read more about Dr. Carole Basile and the work at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University to reimagine teacher preparation and the teaching profession. This blog offers more information on some of the work Dr. Basile discussed. b. More on the The Behavioural Insights Team in the UK and their work can be found on their website. The work referenced in the podcast on what motivates the talented young people to join the teaching profession was from personal communications with members of the BIT team during a visit to Chattanooga in the spring of 2016. c. For more on the value and importance of diverse teams, check out this article. There wasn’t time to go international in the podcast, but it is important to note that there are bright spots internationally with high-performing education systems and a professionalized teacher workforce. Finland is one of the most often cited and striking examples, partly because of the success of Finnish reforms but also because of the fairly rapid professionalization of teaching with key policy changes about 40 years ago. Teacher training shifted to Finland’s university system from a teacher college model. Rigorous entrance standards raised the bar for those entering the profession, and teacher preparation programs were designed to be high quality and challenging. By elevating teacher training to the university system, the profession became prestigious and more equal in clout with doctors and lawyers. This high road approach has been accompanied by policy changes to support professionalization such as government funded training for teachers and protected time for teachers to plan, collaborate and hone their craft. It is no surprise that Finland does not have teacher pipeline or teacher shortage problems. In the United States, we do not have the federalized system that supported Finland’s transformation, but one can imagine that there are states and communities who could mimic Finland’s professionalization strategy. Since teaching a local labor market and most teachers are trained locally, states or local communities could work with higher education to raise the bar on teacher candidates. I think it will take policy to make changes, because there is little impetus for higher education to raise standards and admit less students to their programs. The pressure will have to come from the state government as the teacher certification entity and/or from districts who demand higher quality candidates. References: Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). Steady work: How countries build successful systems. In The flat world of education. (pp.164-172). New York: Teachers College Press. Schwartz, R.B. & J. Mehta. (2011). Finland: Superb teachers- how to get them, how to use them. In M.S. Tucker (Ed.) Surpassing Shanghai. (pp. 51-78). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Linda Darling-Hammond led a team of researchers to conduct an international comparative study, Empowered Educators. The study and accompanying series of policy briefs related to teacher recruitment, professional development, appraisal, and other topics was funded and supported by the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington DC-based organization led by Marc Tucker, with the help of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Our discussion focuses on some of the lessons learned from a multi-country comparative study of practices used in high-performing education systems, and their implications for policy and practices in the United States. View the series of policy briefs at: http://ncee.org/empowered-educators/empowered-educators-resources/#PolicyBriefs

Last week when we talked about college application essays for what seems to be the millionth time in our three years together, we suggested that you go back and listen to Episodes 98, 99, 106, and 110 if you have a senior at home with college application essays due now and over the next few weeks.  As I said last week, I have been spending some time in one of New York City’s most exclusive high schools to help two classes of seniors with their essays.  As a result, I have been thinking hard about the sorry state of the writing skills displayed by some of our best public school students--and, of course, what to do about it.  1.  One of My Favorite Stories As we mentioned back in Episode 99, no one--not me, not you, not the best English teacher you ever knew, not the most expensive college consultant you can find--can truly fix a kid’s writing in the middle of trying to get his or her college application essays created, edited, and submitted on time.  The situation is too pressured, everyone is too anxious, and there is too little time.  So, let me tell you my favorite story about how to solve the problem.  As we said back in Episode 99, in the more than 100 Common Application main essays I read and edited last year (and that number does not include all of the supplemental essays that I also read and edited), I found one essay that was surprisingly well written, including from a grammar and mechanics point of view.  (By the way, this year, I have also read one, maybe two, really good essays from students in that highly respected school.)  Last year, I called the best writer aside and said to him, “How did you learn to write like this when none of your classmates appears to be able to do it?”  His answer was immediate and seemed exactly right to me. He said that he had worked regularly with a writing tutor since he had been in ninth grade.  His tutor went over his written work and showed him how to improve it.  He said that she had worked shoulder to shoulder with him in many, many sessions.  I got the feeling that she was relentless and demanding.  He said that he did not enjoy the tutoring and did not enjoy writing now.  But he sure could do it, and he knew that he could do it. In my experience with high school students and with younger professionals who have worked for me and with my own three children, this is what it takes to improve someone’s writing.  It is not lessons taught from the front of a classroom--although some grammar and mechanics lessons undoubtedly should be taught from the front of the classroom for openers.  Rather, it is painstaking discussion and editing of the student’s own work, while the student watches and learns and absorbs and understands the reason for every change that is being made.  This shoulder-to-shoulder editing process has to be repeated and repeated and repeated--until the student becomes almost as good at it as the teacher is.  It sounds slow and laborious, and it is.  But it works, and I am not sure that anything else does.  This is writing tutoring, not writing group instruction. Here is the rest of the problem, which is already clear to every teacher in the U.S. and, I hope, will now be equally clear to all of you parents who are listening (if it is not already).  Today’s middle school and high school English teachers cannot serve as writing tutors for each of your kids--and that is precisely why so many of our high school students will not learn to write well enough for college.  Imagine trying to correct the written work of 150 students on a line-by-line basis--or even of 100 students or even of 50 students--day after day and week after week, while talking through those corrections with each student one by one.  And, of course, that’s not all English teachers have to do.  I am not defending overworked English teachers here; I am merely stating the obvious--something so obvious that I can’t believe more schools haven’t tried to solve it rather than just looking away and pretending the problem doesn’t exist. I recently said something pretty objectionable to two classes of quite smart high school seniors--at least, they thought it was objectionable.  I was talking about their draft essays that I had just read and tried to edit.  Some were so poorly conceived and written that I really couldn’t even edit them.  Here is what I said:  “This writing will not get you through college.  You might think that it will, but it won’t.  You might think that it will because you are going to major in mathematics or chemistry or engineering.  But it still won’t.  That’s because each of you will likely have to take at least a couple of humanities courses that will involve writing essays or papers or research papers in order to graduate.  And when you do, this writing won’t get you through them.”   2.  Talking to a National Audience Last February, I had the occasion to speak at a national conference of teachers and administrators from Early College high schools.  I called my presentation, “Your Seniors Can’t Write.”  Parents, listen to what I said to see what you might do in your own kid’s high school to help us solve the problem.  It’s going to take all of us, and I believe that nobody’s voices should be heard any louder than yours.  I started by asking the audience, “What’s in your junior year and senior year English curriculum?”  I am guessing, I told them, that it is literature heavy:  American, British, or world literature, especially if you have standard grade-level courses that all students take (even if you have some honors and AP levels of those courses).  If you have a variety of semester electives as your curriculum, I continued, you might offer a writing-focused course or two, most likely journalism.  Then I asked this, “Is a curriculum focused on teaching literary works--novels and short stories and plays and poems and speeches and literary essays--as well as great nonfiction works the best way to improve students’ writing?”  I told them that, usually when I make a presentation at a national conference, I believe that I have “the answer” to a problem that people in the audience are trying to solve.  But this time, I said, “Today, I do not have the answer, and I am hoping that you do.  Today, I have just the problem.”  I warned the audience members that I intended to put them into small groups toward the end of the presentation so that they could work out some ways to solve the problem.  Nonetheless, I said, I was willing to go first and offer an idea to get the conversation started.  I opened with an anecdote.  Last fall, I said, I asked two classes of juniors in an elite New York City high school what they would like to study in the upcoming spring semester.  The students were all in a standard year-long American literature course at the time.  In the interest of full disclosure, I had just had a long discussion with them about the quality of the writing of the seniors I had been working with and I had also analyzed the writing of a few of their own junior classmates impromptu--kids who thought they wrote quite well (but who soon realized and then stated bravely in front of their classmates that they didn’t).  I said, “Would you prefer to keep doing American literature or would you prefer to focus on writing?”  Virtually every one of these college-bound students voted to switch the curriculum to writing.  Unfortunately, no school administrators were listening.  3.  An Idea for Solving the Problem So, here was my idea for improving high school English curricula. (By the way, for more than three decades, I have written high school English curricula that are used in states all over the U.S., and I never did what I am about to suggest.  Why?  Because, sadly, I had not seen the problem up close the way I have in recent years.)  I suggested that all high school students take an intensive writing course in the spring semester of their junior year.  It would be best, of course, if all high schools in the U.S. would do this so that no student’s college admissions chances would be hurt by a course that colleges thought was odd, or not rigorous enough, or out of the mainstream.  If I could, I would wave my magic wand right now and make that happen in all U.S. high schools.  My course would focus on expository writing, on academic writing.  It would not include any creative writing, like poetry or short stories or plays, which many high schools like to do and perhaps do very well.  It would not include any literary analysis, because most of us do not write like that once we get out of college.  One thing it would include is the college application essay.  Students would write more than one main essay for more than one of The Common Application prompts (whatever the prompts are at the time).  I had a high school English teacher many years ago who explained to us that the word “essay” comes from the Old French “essai”--meaning a trial, attempt, or effort.  So, it is perfectly reasonable to write several essays--that is, to make several attempts--before finding the one that actually works best.  I know that’s going to sound like more work to kids--and, in a way, it is--but all writers know that, all too often, many attempts have to be started and abandoned before a piece of good writing takes shape.  In my course, students would also write several essays targeted to the most commonly used topics for supplemental essays in college applications--in fact, both a long and a short version, so the word count would always be appropriate, depending on the word limit of a particular college.  That is not a hard thing to do, and students will find that three or four essays well done can be used over and over again, with minor editing, in various college applications.  But wait just a minute.  In my course, there won’t be writing of only 650 words or fewer.  (Parents, you should know by now that 650 words is the limit for The Common App main essay.)  No.  There will also be a research paper of many pages--maybe more than one.  Here’s why.   Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and, more importantly, he’s a really smart guy.  Marc wrote an article last January in the Top Performers Education Week blog entitled “Our Students Can’t Write Very Well--It’s No Mystery Why.” Let me read you the sobering opening paragraphs of Marc’s article:  My organization decided a few weeks back that we needed to hire a new professional staff person.  We had close to 500 applicants.  Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year and asked [each of them] to produce a one-page summary.  All were college graduates.  Only one could produce a satisfactory summary.  That person got the job. We were lucky this time.  We are more often than not disappointed at the subpar writing ability of the applicants for openings at our organization.  Many applicants are from very good colleges.  Many have graduate degrees.  Many are very poor writers. Their lack of writing ability does not auger well.  When we look at what they have written, the logic of the narrative is often very hard to find. It would appear that their lack of writing ability stands as mute testimony to their lack of thinking ability. How, we ask, could this have happened? . . . [H]igh school students are hardly ever asked to write anything of significant length.  Why not?  Because in this age of accountability, they are not tested on their writing ability.  By which I mean that they are not asked to submit to the testing authorities 10- or 15- or 20-page papers . . . .  This point is critically important.  There is only one way that we can find out whether [students] can write a substantial research paper--by asking them to write a substantial research paper and looking carefully at the result.  If we do not ask them to produce this product--over and over again, as they get better and better at it--then they will not be able to do it well.  If they have not done the work, then neither their teacher nor the engines of the accountability system can assess it.  If this sort of serious writing is not done and--in our accountability-oriented environment--is not assessed, then it will not be learned.  End of argument. Well, in my new high school English course, I don’t need to have my course’s research papers submitted to and assessed by outside evaluators--although that is actually both an intriguing and a feasible idea--but I would like them to be assessed by the teacher.  Not really assessed, so much, as edited line by line, with the student sitting there and hanging on every word.  By the way, I care almost nothing about grades in my course.  I don’t want the teacher to spend time “grading” things.  I have friends who are English teachers who constantly worry about having to grade things--a lot of things and quickly--so that they can substantiate a report card grade eventually.  In my course, I want the teacher to spend time working with each student individually on every sentence that student writes.  I could easily support every teacher’s giving every student an A in the course--as long as every student kept writing and working hard at it and improving. I might just have one of those research papers that Marc is calling for be about individual colleges or, perhaps more generally, about issues in higher education.  I told the audience at the conference that Marie and I had just written a new workbook for high school students entitled How To Explore Your College Options.  I explained that the workbook was literally an explanation of an 11-page questionnaire that, we thought, every high school student should fill out about any college he or she might be interested in attending.  In my course, after each student does the research to get the answers to 52 key questions about a college, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have the student write up the findings so that other students might benefit from them.  Students in a class could create their own guidebook of college profiles for a variety of colleges--and learn to research and write at the same time.  But, let me not get ahead of myself.  I told the audience that my course would be called College Research and Expository Writing.  Of course, there would be an honors version, and I plan to put every student in it.   4.  It’s Up to You, Parents Parents, if you have a younger high school student at home, consider talking to your high school principal about the English curriculum now.  See whether you can get a writing course offered--or even required--so that your kid has a better chance at writing not only great college application essays, but also great term papers and research reports and whatever else they are going to have to write once they go to college.  I had a great high school history teacher who made us write five-page papers every week because he knew we were going to have to do that all the time in college.  I never thanked him enough for that great preparation.  Parents, fixing our national crisis in high school students’ writing is way more important than my telling you how to help your kid write a winning college application essay.  And I can’t fix it without you.  By the way, not one Early College high school educator in the audience challenged the title of my presentation, “Your Seniors Can’t Write.”  So, what does that tell you? Find our books on Amazon! How To Find the Right College: A Workbook for Parents of High School Students (available as a Kindle ebook and in paperback) How To Explore Your College Options: A Workbook for High School Students (available in paperback) Ask your questions or share your feedback by... Leaving a comment on the show notes for this episode at http://usacollegechat.org/episode143 Calling us at (516) 900-6922 to record a question on our USACollegeChat voicemail if you want us to answer your question live on our podcast Connect with us through... Subscribing to our podcast on Google Play Music, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn Liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter Reviewing parent materials we have available at www.policystudies.org Inquiring about our consulting services if you need individualized help Reading Regina's blog, Parent Chat with Regina

BYU's John Barrick discusses online sales tax. NASA's Stephen Hoffman on the Journey to Mars Mission. Stanford History Education Group's Teresa Ortega talks real and fake news. Marc Tucker, National Center on Education and the Economy, on accountability in the education system. Colorado Department of Corrections' Rick Raemich discusses the issues of solitary confinement. World's Awaiting with Rachel Wadam on children's Christmas books.

Standards-based education, American workforce, lifelong learning. 'Tough Choices OR Tough Times' is the recently published report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. The Commission calls for a total shake-up in how America educates its people with an innovative system that boosts students to unprecedented levels of learning throughout their lives while creating a structure that gives them the best teachers and schools the country can offer. Marc Tucker is co-author of 'Thinking for a Living - Education and the Wealth of Nations', selected by Business Week as one of the 10 best business books of 1992.

Standards-based education, American workforce, lifelong learning. 'Tough Choices OR Tough Times' is the recently published report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. The Commission calls for a total shake-up in how America educates its people with an innovative system that boosts students to unprecedented levels of learning throughout their lives while creating a structure that gives them the best teachers and schools the country can offer. Marc Tucker is co-author of 'Thinking for a Living - Education and the Wealth of Nations', selected by Business Week as one of the 10 best business books of 1992.