CORE President Robert Sheffield on California’s New Math Framework – Part 3 (November 2021)
Robert Sheffield:
I’ve been at this kind of work for almost 25 years now, so somewhat of a grumpy old man is thinking about what’s going to be different now and how are we going to do things differently. And so I will kind of point out a note of caution. And then also this point of caution comes from me as a man that represents one of the communities that’s being focused on as a part of the equity commitment. This is visionary and aspirational, but I’m really wondering about the level of investments that’s going to be required to make it real. And is the state truly willing to invest long range in what it will take in order to develop teachers to be able to teach in these ways, as well as develop leaders who are capable of supporting teachers as they’re teaching. And then ultimately also how are the curriculum providers developing the right type of curricular tasks to be able to represent the types of equity positions and equity stakes that we are describing through the framework.
So I do have this wonder. So while I appreciate the design, and I appreciate the components that are there, I’m wondering about the level of commitment. And so for me, as I look at this framework, the state needs to make a minimum of a 10 year commitment. And so here’s why I kind of say 10 years. If I was to project, a young person or a transitioning career professional that’s going into math teaching as a career, what we know is it’s gonna take them roughly two to three years to go through their pre-service program. And then what we also know from research is that teachers grow, change, and develop for the most part during that first seven years of practice. But after that first seven years of practice, for the most part, change stabilizes and teachers move forward with the pedagogies and dispositions that they acquired during that first seven years. So if the goal in this state is to truly shift instruction to align to the vision and aspiration of this framework, we’re talking about a minimum of a 10 year commitment if we’re just talking about those teachers entering the workforce. So we need to know that this is a long range play.
And so if we are thinking that instruction is going to change overnight, or if we’re looking at this and saying three years from now why haven’t test scores changed, we’re asking the wrong set of questions. And we don’t need to ask those questions any longer, because we also know from research and from our own practice how long it does take for teachers to change at scale. So we don’t need to look at this from a short-term perspective. We need to look at this as a very long-term play. Second key point that I definitely wanna raise is nationally, when we begin to look at teacher preparation relative to math instruction, we also see that teachers tend to have, definitely in middle school, have the least amount of preparation of all the disciplines in secondary schools, so even if we include the high school. So how are we going to think differently about that phenomenon that’s been the case nationally for as long as we’ve been tracking these types of data?
Now in California, the data play out in specific ways, and we also need to know as LEA leaders, how are those data playing out within your locales. So to what degree are your teachers that are teaching secondary mathematics, in particular at the middle grades, what type of content knowledge do they have based upon their coursework that they’ve taken? How have they developed that content knowledge over time? How have they developed the accompanying pedagogies to go along with that content knowledge? And we need to be very clear about how we’re going to systematically develop that knowledge and practice over time. The framework gives us some guidance in those areas in chapter eight. And so, it is critical that we are spending some time understanding the ways in which the framework designers have already called out some of these aspects of teacher development.
But if we choose to overlook these aspects of teacher development, we will find ourselves down the road still asking the question around why is math achievement not improving? And then what do we need to change next? Now, we always need to be looking to improve, but we also need to be looking to learn lessons from the past, and lessons from the past say that in terms of math teacher development, it is an area that we need to think about differently. And we also need to think about it differently in terms of the ways in which we systematically develop teachers over time to meet these expectations that we’re setting for the entire community of teachers via the framework. So, I definitely wanna make sure that as a state we’re thinking about the long range play, we’re thinking about this systematically, we’re thinking about this based upon what we already know about math teacher preparation.
And then when we add this last component, if this is truly about equity, we also have to think about this one data point that we know pretty much at scale nationally: as schools become more segregated towards having higher percentages of Black and Brown children, we also see that the qualifications of math teachers in particular tend to go down. So how do we also address that as a component of equity? Where if the data continuously show that there are less qualified teachers in more segregated environments, if we are really trying to move the equity needle forward in this state, what are we gonna do about that? Because we have to actually solve for that problem. And we need to name that problem. We’re not blaming teachers, we’re just talking about the reality of the system that we work in and that we have to manage. We need to name that problem, and we need policy levers to address that specific problem as we’re also trying to roll out the framework.