My "Klout" and how it went up even more, yesterday; how should I use it?

To my shock and surprise, as of late June, I was 11th on the  list of most influential education policy tweeters in the country, ahead of the NEA & Randi Weingarten, according to Mike Petrilli at the journal EducationNext. (see list to the right.)

This is measured according to something called “Klout” which analyzes “more than 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score” (whatever that means.)  

 Though the list had my Klout at 59, today it is "steady" at 64; which I suppose is a result of the article.  That puts me on a par with Michelle Rhee (if her score did not go up.)  And guess what?  Michelle Rhee started following me yesterday, among several others  on the list.

Diane Ravitch is #1 of course, as she should be. Apparently Petrilli left out some other prominent tweeters with high scores, like the SOS march and Rita Solnit of Parents Across America, among others.  But still!

I only signed up for twitter in March 2010, originally to follow Diane Ravitch, and soon found that I had several people following me, so I felt compelled to tweet to them. 

It soon became an addiction but obviously a useful one, since my tweeting has driven  people to the blogs, websites, and articles I think they should read, primarily those that serve as an important counterweight to the dominant education reform myth of our time, as promulgated by  #3,5,6, 8, 17, 20 and others on the list: that privatization and high stakes testing is the best way to improve our schools.

I seem to be the only real-life public school parent activist on the list; we need to get more parents tweeting to join me.  Let’s go gang!  Sign up to twitter, it’s easy at twitter.com, and then follow me at @leoniehaimson; you'll be able to check out many interesting news stories, commentary, and blogs; and you will soon find that you have followers (and "Klout") of your own.

So, readers, I ask you: how should I use my newly discovered Klout?  Influence is related to perception, so even if I landed on the list by mistake, I feel as though I should try to leverage my good fortune somehow.  Please give your suggestions, and help me to figure it out.

More about this list and how it was derived here.

Response to Mike Petrilli on technology and class size

Mike Petrilli, via Diane Ravitch, responded to my earlier comments on his post on moving beyond the debate on "teacher quality" this way:

I appreciate the feedback on my article, and am glad it resonates with many of you in NYC. As promised at the end of my piece, I'll flesh out my ideas for making average teachers into effective teachers in a future column. But yes, I think that technology-someday at least-will have the potential to help do exactly that. (Programs like K12.com- where I used to work- are already making average Moms and Dads into effective teachers.) So will a strong core curriculum. But I'm very skeptical about reducing class size as a viable solution. Of course it's popular with teachers (which is all the Public Agenda data can show), but the most rigorous studies demonstrate that class size has to be reduced dramatically in order to make a difference, and even then there's only strong evidence that it matters in the early elementary grades. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been reducing class size across the board for decades, which only makes the teacher quality challenge greater.

My boss, Checker Finn, once estimated that if the teacher ranks had grown proportionately with the student population since the 1950s, rather than at three times the rate, we could afford to pay the average teacher $100,000. Instead we've opted, as a country, to hire lots more teachers at lower salaries. Maybe that wasn't the best choice.

My response is as follows:

Michael: Urban high-needs school districts with large numbers of minority students still have far larger class sizes on average than the average middle-class or wealthy suburban school district, and of course any of the elite private schools. See the belwo chart from ETS, for example, in a report called "Parsing the Achievement Gap."

And while there has been a big change in the teacher/student ratio, much of that has gone to intervention specialists, pull out teachers, push-in teachers, etc. but not nearly enough to lower class size.

If we're serious about improving achievement and narrowing the achievement gap we need to prove it by creating the same opportunities that people with means demand for their own kids -- especially as the research shows that it is poor minority kids who benefit from smaller classes the most. Otherwise, there is a strong whiff of hypocrisy about the whole debate.

The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Dept. of Education, concluded that class size reduction as one of only four, evidence-based educational reforms that have been proven to increase student achievement through rigorous, randomized experiments -- the "gold standard" of research. More technology is not included among them.

This combined with the fact that actual practitioners in the field, including teachers and principals, overwhelming respond that class size reduction would be the most effective way to improve the quality of teaching, makes it hard to understand why there continues to be so much intellectual effort expended in combating any attempts to achieve this.

I liked what you started to move towards in your comments on teacher quality -- and I loved your recent column on the importance of extra-curricular activities in educating students and expanding their leadership skills. (For more data to back up your argument there, see two Mathematica reports, "Expanding Beyond Academics: Who Benefits and How?" and "Valuing Student Competencies: Which Ones Predict Postsecondary Educational Attainment and Earnings, and for Whom?" both coincidentally co-authored by my brother.)

But if we really want to make teachers more effective, we should start listening to what they say will work best, rather than imagining that somehow we know better.

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

What do educators themselves say about the best way to improve teacher effectiveness?

See Mike Petrilli's post on the Fordham "Gadfly" about how we should focus more on making the teachers we have more effective, rather than continuing to search for the elusive "higher quality" teacher through strategies like eliminating tenure, pay for performance, or alternative certification.

While I agree with the thrust of his argument, his suggestion that one way of doing this through "augmenting technology" is bogus. No study has shown that technology improves teacher effectiveness or raises student achievement.

Instead, teachers themselves say that the best way to improve their effectiveness by far is to reduce class size. See the recent national survey of first year teachers from Public Agenda, called "Lessons Learned" .

76% of teachers overall said that reducing class size would be "a very effective" way of improving teacher quality, and 78% of teachers who work in high needs schools. 21% of teachers said reducing class size would be "effective", for a total of 97% -- far outstripping every other strategy mentioned, including :

Increasing teacher salaries (57%), increasing professional development opportunities (54%), making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers (41%), requiring new teachers to spend time under the supervision of experienced teachers (35%) requiring graduate degrees in education (21%), requiring teachers to pass tough tests of their knowledge ot their subject (21%), tying salaries to principal or colleagues assessment (15%) tying rewards and sanctions to student performance (13%), eliminating tenure (12%), reducing regulations for teacher certification (8%), and relying more on alternative certificaiton (6%)..

(In each of the categories I have put in parentheses the percent who said this would be a "very effective" way to to improve teacher quality.)

By the way, these views about the effectiveness of reducing class size to improve teacher effectiveness are shared by more experienced teachers and most principals as well.

See this 2006 public agenda survey of teachers and school administrators, "Is Support for Standards and Testing Fading."

"If the public schools finally got more money and smaller classes, they could do a better job." 88% of teachers agreed with this statement, and 85% of superintendents and principals, far outstripping any response.

Compare how many teachers, superintendents and principals agreed with this statement: "More testing and higher standards will ensure kids will master the skills they need": 1% (teachers), 7% (supers); 10% (principals).

If we really respected the opinions and views of the professionals who work in our schools, we would do everything in our power to reduce class size.