Teaching Experience and Working in Education

[lapril]

As I navigate the field of education, it continues to baffle me how few people have actually stood in front of children(or adults) and led a lesson. It's beginning to make sense to me why so many aspects of K-12 education are broken. There are so many people at the top who are creating policies without any context for the conditions in classrooms. I wouldn't expect counselors or social workers to have teaching experience, but policy makers? curriculum coordinators? teacher educators? come on! I imagine the person who decided PARCC should be computerized has never fathomed that urban districts largely don't have access to functioning computers. In the past I've had supervisors who had no teaching experience, yet they were tasked with evaluating my performance Of course they rated me as "highly effective" because they had no idea how to assess a teacher. Similarly to if I had to evaluate the performance of a neurologist. I was prompted to create this poll as I browsed through this forum. I'm hoping the majority of us have taught at the K-12 or post-secondary level. 

[Vulpix]

6 hours ago, lapril said:

As I navigate the field of education, it continues to baffle me how few people have actually stood in front of children(or adults) and led a lesson. It's beginning to make sense to me why so many aspects of K-12 education are broken. There are so many people at the top who are creating policies without any context for the conditions in classrooms. I wouldn't expect counselors or social workers to have teaching experience, but policy makers? curriculum coordinators? teacher educators? come on! I imagine the person who decided PARCC should be computerized has never fathomed that urban districts largely don't have access to functioning computers. In the past I've had supervisors who had no teaching experience, yet they were tasked with evaluating my performance Of course they rated me as "highly effective" because they had no idea how to assess a teacher. Similarly to if I had to evaluate the performance of a neurologist. I was prompted to create this poll as I browsed through this forum. I'm hoping the majority of us have taught at the K-12 or post-secondary level. 

It's very interesting and definitely a problem.  I'm in a policy program right now, and I'd say the majority of us *do* have teaching experience, albeit usually less than 5 years.  Those of us who don't have teaching experience either see it as something they're ashamed of, and admire the teachers and wish they had that to draw on, or just don't seem to give a damn that they don't.

[econteacher]

I have seen this firsthand. I taught for six years at the high school level, and then made the jump to state central office doing curriculum and assessment work (mostly the latter). I thought for sure I'd be seen as "wet behind the ears" based on only a few years in the trenches.

I was stunned at how few of the people in state central office had little to no teaching experience. Many just taught long enough to get their admin certification (2 years in my state) and then moved right into policy decisions. And from their decisions, it was very very obvious (even to me, not exactly the most seasoned educator) that they had no real grounding in the classroom. The superintendent of my old district had taught for one year. One year in front of kids, and was now ostensibly making major decisions about the direction of one of the larger school districts in the country! You can imagine how much teachers in the district respected his proclamations...

Even now, doing nonprofit financial education work, most of the people in my division have no classroom experience. I don't know if other fields are this way as well, but it really does seem that there are a large number of ed policy people who still opine on matters related to the classroom with no real understanding of the day-to-day.

[Vulpix]

20 hours ago, econteacher said:

I have seen this firsthand. I taught for six years at the high school level, and then made the jump to state central office doing curriculum and assessment work (mostly the latter). I thought for sure I'd be seen as "wet behind the ears" based on only a few years in the trenches.

I was stunned at how few of the people in state central office had little to no teaching experience. Many just taught long enough to get their admin certification (2 years in my state) and then moved right into policy decisions. And from their decisions, it was very very obvious (even to me, not exactly the most seasoned educator) that they had no real grounding in the classroom. The superintendent of my old district had taught for one year. One year in front of kids, and was now ostensibly making major decisions about the direction of one of the larger school districts in the country! You can imagine how much teachers in the district respected his proclamations...

Even now, doing nonprofit financial education work, most of the people in my division have no classroom experience. I don't know if other fields are this way as well, but it really does seem that there are a large number of ed policy people who still opine on matters related to the classroom with no real understanding of the day-to-day.

Just out of curiosity, can you share where you see the biggest negative aspects of this, like what areas are these policymakers least sensitive to, or where do you feel like your classroom experience gives you a greater understanding?  Are these admins less practical with teacher/student expectations, less aware of issues that teachers face, or something else?  I'm just wondering where specifically the problems tend to come in with this lack of experience.

I'm coming off of three years teaching, and in a policy program now.  I came in thinking "I'm so behind, I have no policy experience, I don't know anything about anything," but many of my peers have no teaching experience and wish they did.  I still do know to what extent my teaching background will benefit me or inform my perspectives in the policy world.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Vulpix

[econteacher]

1 hour ago, Vulpix said:

Just out of curiosity, can you share where you see the biggest negative aspects of this, like what areas are these policymakers least sensitive to, or where do you feel like your classroom experience gives you a greater understanding?  Are these admins less practical with teacher/student expectations, less aware of issues that teachers face, or something else?  I'm just wondering where specifically the problems tend to come in with this lack of experience.

I'm coming off of three years teaching, and in a policy program now.  I came in thinking "I'm so behind, I have no policy experience, I don't know anything about anything," but many of my peers have no teaching experience and wish they did.  I still do know to what extent my teaching background will benefit me or inform my perspectives in the policy world.

Off the top of my head, here are two examples:

Curriculum: Those who lacked classroom experience did not have a clear sense of what teachers can accomplish in a day/week/month/year. This became an issue when new standards were being introduced, and many of the PhDs in curriculum and development (many of whom never taught) who sat on the writing committee proposed ambitious, multilayered, interdisciplinary standards that in theory were really really awesome, but required far more class time than is available. They never once stopped to consider that there are only 180 days in a school year, and that of those 180 days you lose some due to snow days, some due to pep rallies, some due to assessment time, etc, leaving a high school teacher really only 140 days or so of instructional time with students. Yet, curriculum and pacing guides were being written which assumed that teachers had over 200 days of instruction.

Assessment: This is the big one I saw (and if you read my other post in this forum it's my topic of interest). I worked in high stakes assessment for the state, and the number of policymakers who did not understand the purpose and principles behind our assessment was stunning. For example, many of our policymakers wanted to use student scores on the test to measure growth, despite the fact that the assessment is not designed to be a growth assessment and actually includes no baseline data where one could even measure growth! And yet, by golly it was a test and that's what tests MUST be used for, so they went ahead and used it.

Grading: Further, at the classroom level they implemented policies involving homework where a student can not get points taken off for homework being turned in late, and in fact they can resubmit formative assignments as many times as needed for higher grades until mastery is achieved. The idea behind this is well-researched and makes a lot of sense: if these assignments are designed to be teaching documents and more formative in nature, then grading them for accuracy doesn't make a lot of sense because you want kids to learn rather than be punished. (Some research even says you shouldn't grade formative tasks at all, because they're designed purely for learning. One district tried that and found that kids were not doing any of the formative tasks because they had no incentive to do them. So the compromise was reached that formative tasks would be graded, but could be re-done for improvement.)

That all sounds really good in a manuscript, and maybe in a classroom of 10 highly motivated students it's awesome and truly a best practice.

But teachers in my district had an average class size of 40. As you can imagine, once students learned that they can turn in grades at any time, they did nothing all marking period and turned everything in all at once. So not only were teachers swamped by over 400 assignments in a one week span, those they WERE able to grade and give back to students (often with low grades because the kids rushed through them) were often resubmitted  again to try and get a higher grade before interim grades or final grades were posted. It was a nightmare. I remember sitting at the meeting with the Chief Academic Officer explaining all the data and having her say, "Why are teachers so behind on giving feedback?" Ugh.

[Vulpix]

1 hour ago, econteacher said:

Off the top of my head, here are two examples:

Curriculum: Those who lacked classroom experience did not have a clear sense of what teachers can accomplish in a day/week/month/year. This became an issue when new standards were being introduced, and many of the PhDs in curriculum and development (many of whom never taught) who sat on the writing committee proposed ambitious, multilayered, interdisciplinary standards that in theory were really really awesome, but required far more class time than is available. They never once stopped to consider that there are only 180 days in a school year, and that of those 180 days you lose some due to snow days, some due to pep rallies, some due to assessment time, etc, leaving a high school teacher really only 140 days or so of instructional time with students. Yet, curriculum and pacing guides were being written which assumed that teachers had over 200 days of instruction.

Assessment: This is the big one I saw (and if you read my other post in this forum it's my topic of interest). I worked in high stakes assessment for the state, and the number of policymakers who did not understand the purpose and principles behind our assessment was stunning. For example, many of our policymakers wanted to use student scores on the test to measure growth, despite the fact that the assessment is not designed to be a growth assessment and actually includes no baseline data where one could even measure growth! And yet, by golly it was a test and that's what tests MUST be used for, so they went ahead and used it.

Grading: Further, at the classroom level they implemented policies involving homework where a student can not get points taken off for homework being turned in late, and in fact they can resubmit formative assignments as many times as needed for higher grades until mastery is achieved. The idea behind this is well-researched and makes a lot of sense: if these assignments are designed to be teaching documents and more formative in nature, then grading them for accuracy doesn't make a lot of sense because you want kids to learn rather than be punished. (Some research even says you shouldn't grade formative tasks at all, because they're designed purely for learning. One district tried that and found that kids were not doing any of the formative tasks because they had no incentive to do them. So the compromise was reached that formative tasks would be graded, but could be re-done for improvement.)

That all sounds really good in a manuscript, and maybe in a classroom of 10 highly motivated students it's awesome and truly a best practice.

But teachers in my district had an average class size of 40. As you can imagine, once students learned that they can turn in grades at any time, they did nothing all marking period and turned everything in all at once. So not only were teachers swamped by over 400 assignments in a one week span, those they WERE able to grade and give back to students (often with low grades because the kids rushed through them) were often resubmitted  again to try and get a higher grade before interim grades or final grades were posted. It was a nightmare. I remember sitting at the meeting with the Chief Academic Officer explaining all the data and having her say, "Why are teachers so behind on giving feedback?" Ugh.

Thanks for sharing!  Very interesting.  I definitely experienced some of the latter in my last year teaching.  I always gave students the chance to correct their math tests for basically full credit, provided they showed the work, with the rationale that they learn from their mistakes.  Unsurprisingly, this turned into something of a copy-the-smart-kid's-test fiasco, and I knew it was not working.  I never figured out a system I was happy with, but now I see how it would be important to have familiarity with these types of classroom issues.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Vulpix

[username111]

So...I'm going to disagree a bit. I think it's important to have a teaching background if you plan on pursuing an Ed.D.or Ph.D. to work for or manage an SEA or LEA. If you want to evaluate student and teacher performance for real world applications, like student retention or teacher compensation, then you should definitely know what's going on in the classroom.Same goes for stuff dealing with curriculum and pedagogy. Academic or think tank research may be different, though.

If you plan to study the impact of policies on the broader education landscape, then I don't know if having a teaching background is super important. For example, I'm planning on studying the market narrative of school choice, things like the impact of competition on public school performance and the relationship between marketing expenditures and charter school performance. For me, it's more important to have a background in statistics and economics than a K12 teaching background. Of course, there are times when economists are completely clueless about what happens in schools and that messes with their findings. For example, my masters advisor told me about a program evaluation conducted by economists in which they had null findings. But the program wasn't even implemented!

All I'm saying is that having limited or no background in the classroom is not a hindrance in all ed policy situations. To me, it all depends on the context and your professional goals. Let me know what you think! (Btw, I have no teaching experience.)

[ZeChocMoose]

1 hour ago, username111 said:

So...I'm going to disagree a bit. I think it's important to have a teaching background if you plan on pursuing an Ed.D.or Ph.D. to work for or manage an SEA or LEA. If you want to evaluate student and teacher performance for real world applications, like student retention or teacher compensation, then you should definitely know what's going on in the classroom.Same goes for stuff dealing with curriculum and pedagogy. Academic or think tank research may be different, though.

I agree with you. I think it's one of those it sorta depends what you end up doing in the field of education because education is not just solely about K-12 students or their schools. There are some subfields that it's more important to have leadership/administrative experience or to understand the nitty gritty of how education policies are made or to be able to apply research methods to evaluate education programs.  I would advocate more for having some background in your education subfield before you go back to school - that could be teaching, but it doesn't have to be. 

On 8/18/2016 at 5:45 PM, lapril said:

As I navigate the field of education, it continues to baffle me how few people have actually stood in front of children(or adults) and led a lesson. It's beginning to make sense to me why so many aspects of K-12 education are broken. There are so many people at the top who are creating policies without any context for the conditions in classrooms. I wouldn't expect counselors or social workers to have teaching experience, but policy makers? curriculum coordinators? teacher educators? come on! 

I don't think it's fair or realistic to assume that policymakers are going to have teaching - or really any education employment experience.  There are a lot of type of policies that they need to deal with and they are not going to have background knowledge on the majority of them.  I think it's way more important that they reach out and listen to educators than for them to personally have the experience.

K-12 education has serious problems not because people don't have teaching experience - it's because there is widespread inequality in our society and we see that play out in the quality of schools that are available to students.  Students who are poor and students of color often attend schools in low quality schools year after year that have compounding effects on the quality of education that they receive and how they feel about education.   

3 hours ago, econteacher said:

Assessment: This is the big one I saw (and if you read my other post in this forum it's my topic of interest). I worked in high stakes assessment for the state, and the number of policymakers who did not understand the purpose and principles behind our assessment was stunning. For example, many of our policymakers wanted to use student scores on the test to measure growth, despite the fact that the assessment is not designed to be a growth assessment and actually includes no baseline data where one could even measure growth! And yet, by golly it was a test and that's what tests MUST be used for, so they went ahead and used it.

To be fair a lot of people don't understand this - policymakers, the public, some teachers, some academics, etc.  State assessment tests are easy data to collect from all public school students so it tends to get used a lot in all sorts of ways - some legitimate and some not.

[econteacher]

10 hours ago, username111 said:

So...I'm going to disagree a bit. I think it's important to have a teaching background if you plan on pursuing an Ed.D.or Ph.D. to work for or manage an SEA or LEA. If you want to evaluate student and teacher performance for real world applications, like student retention or teacher compensation, then you should definitely know what's going on in the classroom.Same goes for stuff dealing with curriculum and pedagogy. Academic or think tank research may be different, though.

If you plan to study the impact of policies on the broader education landscape, then I don't know if having a teaching background is super important. For example, I'm planning on studying the market narrative of school choice, things like the impact of competition on public school performance and the relationship between marketing expenditures and charter school performance. For me, it's more important to have a background in statistics and economics than a K12 teaching background. Of course, there are times when economists are completely clueless about what happens in schools and that messes with their findings. For example, my masters advisor told me about a program evaluation conducted by economists in which they had null findings. But the program wasn't even implemented!

All I'm saying is that having limited or no background in the classroom is not a hindrance in all ed policy situations. To me, it all depends on the context and your professional goals. Let me know what you think! (Btw, I have no teaching experience.)

So I guess since we're all academics (or aspiring academics) I need to practice being more precise with my words :-) Thank you for posting this, so that it allows me to clarify a little.

When I talk about needing teaching experience and policy decisions, I was referring more to curriculum/assessment/classroom policy, and not necessarily the topics you were talking about. I should have been more clear.

To give an example, there was a great article in the most recent American Economic Review by some economists looking at charter school takeovers in New Orleans and Boston, and comparing outcomes to the public school system. It's a really interesting article, in part because it's a natural experiment in a complete charter school takeover rather than a lottery situation. That's always been one of the trickiest things in the charter school research, is that having a lottery system means that schools are "skimming" the students with motivated parents (you have to show initiative to enter the lottery, so the kids who are eligible have built in academic advantages right from the start), so you can't make an apples-apples comparison with public schools. But this article found a neat way around that problem. (Basically, the entire New Orleans school system was taken over after Katrina, so kids were simply grandfathered into new charter schools that took over their old public school.)

It was eye opening because I'm a charter school skeptic, having seen them at both a teacher level and at a state level in central office. In my fairly extensive dealings with them I think they're deeply, deeply flawed.This study fairly conclusively showed that the charter school takeover had a profound positive effect on student performance. It was very impressive, especially to a skeptic like me.

Now, this study was purely econometric in nature; lots of regression, complex models, etc. And I think it showed fairly convincingly that the charter takeover improved student learning. That's a big deal. And that's an example of where number crunching/statistics is very useful.

However (and the authors, to their credit, acknowledge this) nothing in that paper explains why the charter is successful. This is where someone with classroom, K12 experience would be useful in researching what exactly made the charter effective. Was it curricular decisions? Was it a discipline approach? More homework? Less? Younger teachers? The study doesn't say. And this is where a K12 researcher, with K12 experience, would be useful and vital.

tl;dr: Statisticians/ed policy wonks do the macro studies and tell us where to focus the lens, K12/teaching experienced researchers zoom in with the lens.

Did I explain that okay? 

Edited August 26, 2016 by econteacher
Reworded first sentence for clarity

[econteacher]

7 hours ago, ZeChocMoose said:

I agree with you. I think it's one of those it sorta depends what you end up doing in the field of education because education is not just solely about K-12 students or their schools. There are some subfields that it's more important to have leadership/administrative experience or to understand the nitty gritty of how education policies are made or to be able to apply research methods to evaluate education programs.  I would advocate more for having some background in your education subfield before you go back to school - that could be teaching, but it doesn't have to be. 

I don't think it's fair or realistic to assume that policymakers are going to have teaching - or really any education employment experience.  There are a lot of type of policies that they need to deal with and they are not going to have background knowledge on the majority of them.  I think it's way more important that they reach out and listen to educators than for them to personally have the experience.

K-12 education has serious problems not because people don't have teaching experience - it's because there is widespread inequality in our society and we see that play out in the quality of schools that are available to students.  Students who are poor and students of color often attend schools in low quality schools year after year that have compounding effects on the quality of education that they receive and how they feel about education.   

To be fair a lot of people don't understand this - policymakers, the public, some teachers, some academics, etc.  State assessment tests are easy data to collect from all public school students so it tends to get used a lot in all sorts of ways - some legitimate and some not.

I agree that policy makers don't necessarily need K12 experience, as long as they are not making classroom level decisions. Analyses of school funding and such can be done by wonks; I'm talking more about curricular decisions (should we have integrated standards?) or assessment decisions (should high stakes assessments be done exclusively on computers?).

You bring up a great point with education inequality. That's clearly a macro question, and I completely agree that policy makers and economists can develop macro solutions to solve or mitigate the effects of those problems. And I would encourage any and all study into those issues. However, often times those macro prescriptions are slow to come by. In the interim, there are micro, classroom level policies which can be implemented to help students of color on a daily basis, and those policies/studies (I would argue) really need to be crafted by people who know what life is like in the trenches.

(I really hope I don't come across as anti-policymaker. Far from it. I'm an economist by training and believe that policy models are vital to understanding education. Analysis of huge statistical data sets by wonks is vital, important work that does not require one to have taught 8th grade to understand what's happening.)

As for assessments not being understood by parents and such...I agree. And I don't expect parents to know point biserial values or to compute the theta or anything like that. But if classroom level decisions are being made by members of the state board or principals, then they had better know some of the basics of test construction, item development, etc, so that they can use the tool effectively.

[ZeChocMoose]

14 hours ago, econteacher said:

However (and the authors, to their credit, acknowledge this) nothing in that paper explains why the charter is successful. This is where someone with classroom, K12 experience would be useful in researching what exactly made the charter effective. Was it curricular decisions? Was it a discipline approach? More homework? Less? Younger teachers? The study doesn't say. And this is where a K12 researcher, with K12 experience, would be useful and vital.

I agree and I also think it needs to come full circle.  Once researchers know what is the effective component or at least strongly suspect it's x, y, and z in this particular school or schools  - they need to try to replicate it in other classrooms and schools.  The field is starting to do more of this which I find promising - but a lot people tend to want to stop once they find something that worked in one school and label it "best practices" which is so unfortunate because some of these practices don't translate well to other places or other educational contexts -or- school doesn't have adequate resources to successfully implement the practice.

Having worked with a lot of economists, I do think they don't get or maybe believe that education context matters.  I am not sure if it about insufficient background in education or the models that they tend to estimate just ignores this - but yea some of the assumptions that they make in their models are a bit puzzling.

15 hours ago, econteacher said:

As for assessments not being understood by parents and such...I agree. And I don't expect parents to know point biserial values or to compute the theta or anything like that. But if classroom level decisions are being made by members of the state board or principals, then they had better know some of the basics of test construction, item development, etc, so that they can use the tool effectively.

To me, this comes back to how educators are trained not whether they have a background in teaching.  Schools of education don't do a particular great job in making sure students in all education programs understand research, assessment, and evaluation.  They tend to make sure only students who are already interested in these topics learn about these issues.  Unfortunately, in some schools of education, they don't have adequate faculty to teach these topics either.  I know in higher ed programs there are only a handful of schools that even offer classes on these topics.

[econteacher]

9 hours ago, ZeChocMoose said:

To me, this comes back to how educators are trained not whether they have a background in teaching.  Schools of education don't do a particular great job in making sure students in all education programs understand research, assessment, and evaluation.  They tend to make sure only students who are already interested in these topics learn about these issues.  Unfortunately, in some schools of education, they don't have adequate faculty to teach these topics either.  I know in higher ed programs there are only a handful of schools that even offer classes on these topics.

Agreed 100%! When I was in state office, we did a number of studies trying to analyze how social studies teachers were taught/trained in their certification programs. Not a single school in the state required teachers to take any sort of statistics/measurement/assessment class. Given the proliferation of PARCC scores and everything else, this seems borderline negligent.

And if you look at my other thread seeking guidance about which fork to take, assessment or curriculum, I think you'll see that I'm hoping to plug that gap of adequate faculty to teach the topic 

[lapril]

 

On August 25, 2016 at 11:09 PM, username111 said:

So...I'm going to disagree a bit. I think it's important to have a teaching background if you plan on pursuing an Ed.D.or Ph.D. to work for or manage an SEA or LEA. If you want to evaluate student and teacher performance for real world applications, like student retention or teacher compensation, then you should definitely know what's going on in the classroom.Same goes for stuff dealing with curriculum and pedagogy. Academic or think tank research may be different, though.

If you plan to study the impact of policies on the broader education landscape, then I don't know if having a teaching background is super important. For example, I'm planning on studying the market narrative of school choice, things like the impact of competition on public school performance and the relationship between marketing expenditures and charter school performance. For me, it's more important to have a background in statistics and economics than a K12 teaching background. Of course, there are times when economists are completely clueless about what happens in schools and that messes with their findings. For example, my masters advisor told me about a program evaluation conducted by economists in which they had null findings. But the program wasn't even implemented!

All I'm saying is that having limited or no background in the classroom is not a hindrance in all ed policy situations. To me, it all depends on the context and your professional goals. Let me know what you think! (Btw, I have no teaching experience.)

Hi @username111

I agree, there are some aspects where teaching isn't required, like the one you described. I do think, however, that the "impact of policies" and "creating policies" are two completely different things, with the latter requiring teaching experience. I believe it'd be in everyone's best interest if the policies were created by former teachers. I didn't mean to speak in extremes in my initial post.

[istanbulnotconstantinople]

Hi All,

Thankyou for this thread it has been very enlightening.

I am applying for a PhD in education policy having been a teacher for 7 years now (both in the UK and in Turkey). I have always wanted to work in education policy but was also of the opinion that real experience of education mattered (it is also part of why I moved to work abroad to experience a different systems of education and broaden my viewpoint).

In applying for education policy I have been struck by how few PhD candidates I can find on grad school faculty websites who have been teachers (and even those that are are mostly mathematics teachers). At times - I'll be honest - it has demoralised me and made me think that statisticians are all grad schools really want. Don't get me wrong, I am very interested by all of the statistical research and comparisons in education and can see the validity (just like in the charter school case discussed), but I know that this is something which other people are far more qualified to do than me. Furthermore, a large part of my desire to work in education policy stems from having worked in environments where it is clear that professionals have so little say in policy decisions and therefore that the policies being implemented are actively harmful. I am not by any means accusing statisticians of causing this, but it does seem to me that if people are not involved in policy who have real experience then this situation is far more likely to occur. The excellent examples given by econteacher have been part of my reality throughout my teaching career and I want to work in policy in order to reduce the inclusion of impossible policies and those than in their enactment are far more harmful than useful.

Therefore, points raised in this forum about different areas of expertise and combining different ones are pertinent. I personally would be more than happy to learn more statistics during my phd, but my focus is on comparisons in policy enactment. This makes more sense for someone from my background both educationally and professionally, but it is definitely necessary for me to work with people who have other perspectives and expertise.

Finally, however, I would like to add that I do actually have huge concerns about the inclusion of people in management programmes who have never taught in schools. Primarily because such people seem to have the most unrealistic expectations of their workforce and what can actually be done within classrooms. The marketisation of education and use of business models of management has been incredibly detrimental to learning in many instances. I think that education requires models of management that are specific to it and therefore that if people are entering the field of education with outside knowledge but willing to be flexible and adapt their ideas based on the specifics of the education environment then that is great. Unfortunately, I think a lot of education management systems (in the UK at least) are mimicking models from business settings that are largely ineffective within school environments and thus it is clear that the voices of people within the system need to be heard much more clearly than they currently are.

Edited December 31, 2016 by mjl89