Teacher Beat

How do you make sure you don't get lost in a crowd of 9,000 delegates? Wear your state-delegation T-shirt.

It's become something of a tradition for each state delegation to wear specially designed shirts over the course of the Representative Assembly, especially on the first day. Some affiliates opt for a political design: This year, the California Teachers Association's shirt says "NCLB: Erase, rewrite, reauthorize" on the front and "Learning is more than a test score ... and so is teaching" on the back.

The fun-loving Ohio Education Association picked bright Hawaiian-style shirts. (Given the design, at first I thought "OEA" stood for "Oahu Education Association," and a woman I chatted with said the initials are frequently confused with the Oklahoma and Oregon affiliations.)

Another delegation picked dark-blue collared shirts, which not everyone was happy with. "We look like bus drivers," joked one woman in the elevator.

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A few more thoughts after reviewing my notes and videos of Duncan's speech yesterday.

Although there were hisses at Duncan's statement that tenure policies may need some tweaking, there was some scattered applause, too. Same story with Duncan's statement that it's "illogical and indefensible" not to include student achievement as part of compensation, evaluation, and tenure decisions. Both examples come as a good reminder that externally, the NEA may speak with one voice on these issues, but internally there are plenty of different opinions.

A good number of teachers, it seems, agree that there can be fair ways to consider student achievement in human-capital decisions. An Education Sector report came to a similar conclusion last year, finding that younger teachers were generally more open to pay reform than their peers but still strongly valued their unions.

(Also take a look at the comments to my last item; several folks pointed out their own thoughts on how teachers can be part of the reform process.)

There was almost no reaction when Duncan said that much of the coursework teachers take to get "lane" increases aren't correlated with teacher effectiveness. That surprised me for personal reasons more than anything else: I got a bunch of e-mails from irritated teachers when I wrote a story that dealt tangentially with that issue.

Andy Rotherham and Mike Antonucci, on their respective blogs, both noted the loudest protests were actually in response to Duncan's plugs for the Green Dot charter schools and mayoral control of school districts. (I'm assuming the negative reaction isn't just due to the relatively large sizes of the New York and California delegations.)

It looks like teachers are still suspicious of Green Dot, despite founder Steve Barr's apparent commitment to working with unionized teaching forces, and still not enamored with N.Y.C.'s Joel Klein.

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To answer the question I'm sure you all have: Yes. Teachers booed and hissed during some of the performance-pay portions of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's speech. And they weren't overwhelmingly happy with the talk of reform to seniority and tenure systems, either.

But some of the stories I've seen around the Web on the speech are billing this as "tough love" for the teachers' unions. There was some of that, sure, but President Barack Obama and Duncan clearly telegraphed their intentions to push hard on these issues in the stimulus legislation, and that passed months ago.

So there was an element to this whole proceeding that came off as a little bit rehearsed to me. I wonder if Duncan had prepared his seemingly ad-libbed line for when the booing started: "You can boo; just don't throw any shoes, please." And I'm pretty sure most of the delegates had gotten their vocal chords ready, too.

To me, the biggest news out of the speech is that the administration is increasingly emphasizing student achievement as one measure of teacher pay or evaluation, although not the only measure. That is a big issue, and it's one that helped sink congressional attempts to renew the No Child Left Behind Act in 2007.

Also, large parts of the speech seemed to key directly off of the stimulus legislation. When Duncan talked about seniority putting some teachers in schools and classrooms they're not prepared for, well, that gets to the equitable-distribution-of-teachers language in the stimulus.When he talked about the poor state of evaluations, well, that lines up to the language that will require states and districts to report the number and percentage of teachers scoring at each performance level on local evaluation instruments.

Check back at edweek.org soon for a full story.

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Rumor has it that EdSec Arne Duncan's big speech today before some delegates here at the National Education Association's Representative Assembly will focus on performance-based pay.

That will hardly be news for those who have been following the Obama team. After all, Obama has mentioned that two years running before this very group of educators. We also know that the NEA's resolutions do not endorse any type of incentive pay other than bonuses for teachers who earn national-board certification, so President Dennis Van Roekel isn't going to be able to go much beyond that.

Delegates are a different story, and their reactions will be interesting to watch. These are state and local folks, and they are free to experiment how they want with pay, even if it bucks the national union (just ask Denver).

Personally, I hope we'll hear more about the teacher distribution and evaluation assurances in the stimulus bill. There's been nary a peep from the Education Department about these since it released the initial stimulus guidance to the states.

It's possible, I suppose, that we'll get a few more details on whether the applications for the federal Teacher Incentive Fund will explicitly state that performance-pay programs must include student-achievement data and be collectively bargained, two hot-button issues for the teachers' union. But I'm not holding my breath.

Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli outlines what we definitely WON'T hear from Duncan.

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Today I head down to San Diego for the National Education Association's Representative Assembly, which begins in earnest on July 3.

What will this year's NEA assembly bring? Without a doubt, we'll see plenty of debate on internal NEA policies. We'll probably continue to see the union criticize the No Child Left Behind Act: The union's ESEA Committee expected to make another report this session. We may even get a couple of interesting resolutions that highlight the union's sense of its own purpose and mission, as we did about private pre-K providers last year.

This year also marks Dennis Van Roekel's first solo job heading up the RA. Serving as the de facto emcee carries a lot of responsibility: There's a boatload of procedural protocols to master, the president's address, and all those "new business items" that are introduced over the course of the week and that tend to keep everyone up late on the last day of the RA.

The last time I spoke to Van Roekel, I asked him how he felt about all this. "I'm nervous!" he said with a laugh. Yet there's some truth to the answer. After all, the NEA president does have the opportunity to promote new policies or set a path forward for the union during his address. And I can't be the only person who thinks that Van Roekel, who kept a pretty low profile last year, is still a little bit of a cipher. What will he have to say to 9,000 of his best friends? Inquiring minds want to know.

Don't forget to check in with us tomorrow, as Education Secretary Arne Duncan addresses a group of teachers and listens to their feedback. We've heard there will be more on performance-based pay, something that now-President Obama got booed for two years running when he mentioned it to the RA.

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The University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research has a new study out on teacher turnover in the Windy City, and it's pretty grim stuff, according to this news story.

In about 100 of the schools, over half the teaching force leaves every year, the report found. Also, small schools tend to exacerbate turnover compared to larger schools, the story says, in what could portend some problems for the city's Renaissance 2010 initiative in which smaller schools is one key strategy.

The report also examines factors such as teacher qualifications, crime and safety, levels of parental engagement, and school leadership for their relationship to rates of teacher turnover.

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The District of Columbia public schools just announced that six teachers have begun a five-week fellowship in the central administrative office. They'll be scattered among a variety of divisions, including special education, data & accountability, and human capital.

The press release says the initiative is designed to "ensure teachers' voices are always present in central decisionmaking at the central office."

I'll be interested in hearing more about these teachers as they progress through their fellowships. Will they come with some notions about the administration that will be overturned? Or will those notions be reinforced?

More than 150 teachers applied for the fellowships. The winners receive a $5,000 stipend for their efforts.

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As a reporter, it's always irritating to discover that another paper has beaten you to a story you've had in mind, in this case following a teacher through the peer-assistance and -review process. Nevertheless, this Washington Post article is a pretty thorough look at things in Montgomery County, Md., and includes a glimpse at the PAR panel that makes the call on whether to renew teachers or proceed with dismissal.

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That could have been the title, anyway, of this Web site on peer-assistance and -review programs.

Created by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, the Web site is part of an ongoing research investigation that's being headed up by Susan Moore Johnson. It is probably the most extensive resource in existence on the PAR process, and contains all the research that the team has done. (You can find a summary report in PDF format on the Web page, but if you're interested in just one or two areas, try the tabs on the left.)

The Web site serves both as a primer for those new to the PAR process and a resource for districts that are considering setting up such a system.

Moore Johnson and her team examined the peer-assistance and -review programs in seven districts: Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio; Minneapolis; Montgomery County, Md.; Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y.; and San Juan, Calif.

In brief, PAR programs assign novice teachers (and in some cases, struggling veteran teachers) with a "consulting teacher" peer who provides direct classroom support and evaluation. The consulting teacher files reports with a PAR panel consisting of district officials and teachers. Later, the consulting teacher reports back to a PAR panel with a recommendation on whether a teacher should receive tenure (or in the case of a veteran teacher, whether he or she should be retained or dismissed).

There's really far more here than I can put into a blog entry, but here are some things from the report that I think are worthy of some additional discussion:

--Pretty much all the districts studied have some kind of professional teaching standards against which teachers' performance is measured. Typically, there is a very strong understanding about what good teaching looks like and what a struggling teacher needs to do if (s)he isn't meeting the standards. In other words, peer review probably won't work where such standards are not in place.
-- None of the seven programs requires student-achievement data to be included in the PAR reports that the panels review before making their decisions, although consulting teachers in a few districts like Montgomery County informally review the data.
--Some of the districts studied give teachers a one-person majority on the PAR panel. Others don't. It would be interesting to see if that affects the decisionmaking process or the rates of tenure-granting and dismissal.
--Some of the districts include principal evaluations in the material reviewed by the PAR panel; others don't. Again, it would be interesting to see how this affects the character of the process. One of the unions' complaints about principal evaluations is that principals can be arbitrary, so evaluations by both CTs and principals have a "checks and balance" flavor about them.
--Union officials, administrators, and CTs all say that there are more failing teachers in schools than are currently being referred to PAR. So while the programs seem successful, to some extent, they may not have "penetrated" to the point where all parties view them as a viable pathway for teacher improvement and/or discipline.
--Successful PAR programs seem not to have been "compromises" arrived at in bargaining but a reform strategy that was carefully articulated beforehand and included as a part of a labor-management collaboration.
--What do CTs do after their terms are over? They're frequently encouraged to go back to classrooms, but some districts allow them to enter nonteaching roles in schools, and others to go to administration.

Much much more on the Web site. Check it out. And lest you think PAR is old news, remember that the American Federation of Teachers is pushing hard on peer review, and Obama even brought it up in his November education speech.

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The process for granting tenure should be fixed, a think-tank report released this morning says. The system as it is now doesn't include consideration of student achievement. States and districts don't invest in teacher standards or assessments necessary to make good tenure-granting decisions.

And here's the kicker: Joan Baratz-Snowden, the former director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers, now a consultant, penned the report for the Center for American Progress.

What's a former AFT official doing taking on tenure, you ask? Well, despite her initials, there's no BS with Joan B-S. I can recall back when she was still at the AFT and the press people used to groan when I'd ask to speak to her, because she didn't always stick to the party line. And that's what makes this such an interesting report. The perspective it offers is going to be challenging for pretty much everyone who's got skin in this particular game, both those who defend the current system of tenure and those who decry it.

For instance, although Snowden thinks the tenure process is in need of serious Band-Aids, she also thinks tenure is necessary, given the poor training of the principal force and the pressure teachers are under in the era of accountability.

Like an evaluation system, the tenure-granting process should be rooted in a common language for understanding teacher effectiveness and what the evidence of good teaching resembles, Snowden writes. Districts and teachers, through collective bargaining, should create a system based on data from multiple sources, including evidence of student learning and the quality of the school environment, and profession judgment of both teachers and administrators.

Snowden finds three examples of good tenure-granting processes: The Toledo peer assistance and review program, the Green Dot contract with its portfolio-based evaluation system, and the Minneapolis model, which requires teachers to assemble a collection of evidence of good teaching over three years.

Once you've read the report, why not write in and tell us whether and how you think tenure should be revised?

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