Educator Productivity

Educator Productivity is sometimes seen as a dirty word in education. But it doesn’t have to be.

Educator Productivity – By Marguerite Roza 03/02/2016

 

.

==

Educator Productivity -The obvious reality, in 21st century education, is one size fits all doesn’t work for anything.

Everyone is different, has different needs and requires a different solution to their problems

The current, incumbent, paradigm in traditional education is one size fits all:

• Teach everyone the same, regardless of how they learn
• Distribute money equally, regardless of need
• Pay everyone equally based on longevity, regardless of contribution
• Focus on the needs of the institution, at the direct expense of the students

It’s pretty clear this isn’t working to empower all students with effective and efficient student success outcomes.

Its also clear that  it fails the at risk students and bores the gifted students.

The tired, proposed, incumbent solution is to throw more money at a flawed system to temporarily cover-up its ineffective and inefficient methodologies, to no direct gain to sustained student success performance improvement outcomes

The research is copious that the current one size fits all information dump system of teaching does not and will not empower students with effective and efficient deep learning skills required for the 21st century, but paradigm paralysis remains.

Education only exists to advance relevant student success outcomes.

Traditional education has lost sight of this focusing on the needs of the institution.

Since students = revenue and lots of education is publicly funded, educators must embrace their profession and change with the times to empower ALL their students with student success outcomes.

Pretending that this isn’t their responsibility, or blaming student failures on everything else is no longer a legitimate argument.

Traditional education and traditional educators must become more effective and more efficient in delivering sustained student success outcomes to ALL of their students.

The funding public expects nothing less

More Money

Paradigm Paralysis

Professional Development

Results: Districts Schools

==

Educator Productivity – The Article:

Educator Productivity – After studying education finance for more than two decades, I’m still humbled when I see the data. When schools with the same demographics get the same amount of money, some achieve better outcomes for students than others. Simply put, some schools are more productive. Too often policymakers’ immediate response is to declare, “What matters is how that money is spent.” They then frequently institute policies to make sure resources are spent across all schools in uniform ways that better reflect “best practice.”

But that reaction ignores an even more astonishing finding in the data. Often those schools do spend their money in roughly the same way and still get wildly different outcomes!

Why? Those who work in schools know that the many human variables at play matter a lot when it comes to student learning. Relationships between staff and students matter. Community factors matter. And individual teachers and staff matter. Maybe there’s that one teacher who is amazingly talented at what she does; or the teacher’s aide who serves as a de facto grandmother to half the student body; or the chess club leader who manages to keep young boys engaged in school through early adolescence; or the superstar math teacher who seems solely responsible for a middle school’s stellar math scores. (Lucky for me, my kids benefitted from his super-human effect). This is the stuff the financial datasets don’t capture. Yet these human aspects are critical to any school beating the “productivity odds” – doing more than expected with the resources at hand.

So how is a school system supposed to improve productivity when so much of what matters can’t be centrally managed and scaled across schools? The biggest mistake is to establish policies as if all this human stuff didn’t matter. This thinking has prompted some systems to push a one-size-fits-all set of expenditures for every school, even if that means making budget tradeoffs that completely override a local school community’s priorities. (In my own hometown of Seattle, students, staff and parents at a local high school staged a walkout in 2014 to protest the district’s move to eliminate a critical Latin teacher.) The net result is a top-down approach where schools are told what to do and how to do it with accompanying funding systems that put principals in a virtual straitjacket. In essence, such policies work to cripple schools’ ability to harness the human element that matters so much in learning.

Educator Productivity – Read The Entire Article, Here

==================================================================

To Discuss how these Solutions will add value for you, your organization and/or your clients, Affinity/Resale Opportunities, and/or Collaborative Efforts, Please Contact:

Tom McDonald, tsm@centurytel.net; 608-788-5144; Skype: tsmw5752