UPDATED

Republican Presidential presumptive nominee Mitt Romney's first major education policy stump speech was heavy on criticism of teachers' unions, but light overall on the details of how he'd revamp federal teacher-quality spending.

My colleagues at Politics K-12 have a great overview that you should be sure to check out. In the meantime, let's fact-check some of Romney's claims in his speech.

• "There are currently 82 programs in 10 agencies that spend $4 billion on teacher quality. As president, I will consolidate these programs, and block grant them to states that adopt innovative policies. For example, states will be rewarded if they regularly evaluate teachers for their effectiveness and compensate the best teachers for their success."

The figure of 82 teacher-quality programs comes right out of this Government Accountability Office report, but the rest of the proposal is somewhat confusing. For one, fully three-fourths of the $4 billion figure is in the nearly $3 billion Title II-A state grants, which basically already are a block grant. As for consolidating programs, the Obama administration has already proposed this a number of years running, but not gotten anywhere with it. Those consolidations were envisioned as competitive grants—not a fill-out-the-paperwork-and-get-your-cash block grant.

• Romney dragged out a quote from the American Federation of Teachers' Al Shanker, in which the late labor leader purportedly said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of children."

The problem with this is that Shanker may never have actually said it. Debates continue to rage about whether this quote is apocryphal or just badly documented.

• "And our job keeps getting harder because the unions wield outsized influence in elections and campaigns. ... Annually, many teachers are forced to pay almost $1,000 in union dues. The two major teachers' unions take in $600 million each year. That's more revenue than both of the political parties combined. In 2008, the National Education Association spent more money on campaigns than any other organization in the country. And 90% of those funds went to Democrats."

Where to start. The unions are most certainly among the biggest campaign spenders and are still probably the largest in K-12 education. But the statement confuses two things: dues and campaign dollars. Until 2010, dues money could be used for lobbying but not campaigns; unions had to keep campaign cash strictly segregated in a PAC, which members donated to voluntarily. (The "voluntary" nature of these donations, of course, can certainly be contested. As Mike Antonucci of Intercepts aptly pointed out, in states like California, PAC donations can come out of your paycheck unless you fill out often jargon-laden paperwork correctly.)

This has changed somewhat, because campaign-finance rulings now permit unions—and corporations—to spend from their dues-funded general treasuries on independent expenditures, such as campaign advertising, as long as they are not officially coordinated with candidates.

The NEA figure from 2008 seems off. At the federal level, it was 48th in the list of top donors that year, far below the American Federation of Teachers, which was No. 19. (Goldman Sachs was No. 2 that year and the realtors' and bankers' association were also in the Top 10.) It's possible Romney was talking about state spending, and I will update this post once I can access the database of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which seems to be down at the moment.

UPDATED, 5:10 p.m. Romney's claim that the NEA is the largest spender seems to pass muster at the state level, where NEA and affiliates topped the list of donors in 2007-08 (the realtors' association was No. 8). Keep in mind, though, that this is largely because of its ballot-initiative expenditures. Only 35 percent of its spending overall was on candidate races, or about $19 million. (When you look at it from this perspective, it spent about the same as the realtors' association.)

• "So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses—and unwilling to stand up for kids."

The campaign cites the administration's bids to shutter the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarships Program, which the unions pushed hard on, as evidence that it's kowtowing to the unions. But at the same time, the Obama administration's push to open charter schools and evaluate teachers partly on student-achievement gains have earned the administration some fairly well-publicized rebukes from the unions and raised some good questions about how many teachers are going to want to volunteer on his behalf once the campaign ground game gets started.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Federation of Teachers has convened a task force to make recommendations on how to improve the quality of teacher preparation.

The panel first convened in January, and is expected to have its recommendations ready sometime this year. (The task force had planned to release a report in time for AFT's biennial convention in July, but its members pressed for more time to discuss and draft the report, surely a sign they have something interesting up their sleeves.)

AFT last tackled teacher preparation a little over 10 years ago, and many of the recommendations in the report it released in 2000 were prescient as to the debate teacher education would assume over the course of the next decade. For instance, that report called for increased attention to student teaching, or the "clinical" part of preparation.

There appears to have been progress on that front. For instance, we've seen much interest in hands-on teacher preparation programs, such as residencies. And the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education has also called for the clinical part of preparation to be substantially expanded and improved.

Other recommendations in the AFT's former report are only now starting to undergo scrutiny. Most striking is its call for teacher preparation programs to set a minimum-entry requirement of a 3.0 GPA. While there has been some policy interest in such a requirement, the larger debate about entry criteria (largely drawn from the selective practices of international countries) continues to be a matter of some debate among teacher educators.

The prior report also called for a national, rigorous entry test measuring college-level subject knowledge, rather than the basic-skills tests states currently administer. According to the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy organization, only the state of Texas requires a test normed to the general college-going population (see page 15 of this report.)

And the report also called for a rigorous exit test. While 25 states are in the process of developing a test that could conceivably fit that criteria, many details about how that exam will be used remain unknown.

That brings us back to the new task force. AFT officials plan to use the 2000 report as a starting point and to build on it. As always, the big question here is whether higher education will take to heart the recommendations it makes.

Below is a list of the task force's panelists.

• Francine Lawrence, AFT executive vice president (chair)
• Kevin Ahern, president, Syracuse Teachers Association
• William Buxton, associate professor, SUNY Cortland
• Arthur Hochner, president, Temple Association of University Professionals
• Jerry Jordan, president, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT)
• Catherine Lugg, professor, Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education
• Marlene Morales, faculty, Miami Dade College School of Education
• Derryn Moten, co-President, Alabama State University, culty-Staff Alliance
• Lynn Nordgren, president, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers
• Sandra Schroeder, president, AFT Washington, AFL-CIO
• Brenda Smith, president, AFT Colorado and Douglas County Federation of Teachers
• Andrew Spar, President, Volusia Teachers Organization
• Dr. Melissa Stinnett, assistant professor, Western Illinois University, department of curriculum & instruction
• Deborah Tully, State Ed Issues Coordinator, Ohio Federation of Teachers
• Kenneth Zarafis, co-president, Education Austin

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Department of Education has finally released the state "report cards" each state must submit annually on its teacher-preparation programs, and they're chock-full of information about programs states have deemed underperforming, the states' different entry routes into the profession, and the battery of licensing tests each state uses.

It's the first year states have had to fulfill a bunch of revised reporting requirements, which were added in the 2008 rewrite of the Higher Education Act.

I'm told these went live in March, but my attention of late has been on a series of stories on education campaign finance. Apologies for being a bit late to bring them to your attention. In any case, they are ripe for analysis.

Keep in mind that these reports represent just one level of reporting required under the HEA. There's also an annual federal report (which was released earlier this year). In addition, every individual institution also has to prepare one. For an overview of what's in all the various levels of reporting, check out this helpful document and this Teacher Beat blog item.

So why look at these reports? Well, a few months back, for instance, I did a story showing that most states set the cutoff point on their licensing tests far below the average scores of test-takers, based on data submitted in these reports. Because the ED hadn't released the reports at that time, I had to persuade and cajole states to give the data to me or use other tactics to secure it. The story was based on just six states' reporting. But now, you can see if the pattern holds up in all 50 states. (The smart money says it probably does.)

Keep in mind that a federal plan to issue new regulations on Title II—the section of the HEA dealing with teacher preparation—is also likely to make changes to some of the data required here.

Dig in!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A handful of California parents have sued the state over five laws that allegedly concentrate poorly performing teachers in schools that primarily serve disadvantaged and minority students.

Filed today in the California superior court, the lawsuit takes aim at California rules that: require tenure be granted after only two years, before a teacher's performance has been well documented; create some dozen steps in the due-process procedures for dismissing teachers for poor performance, which the plaintiffs say allows that process to drag on for months or years; and mandate that seniority serve the major factor (barring a few exceptions) in determining which teachers are laid off during reductions-in-force.

The combination of these statutes, the filing reads, "inevitably presents a total and fatal conflict with the right to education guaranteed by the California Constitution because it forces an arbitrary subset of California students to be educated by grossly ineffective teachers who fail to provide them with the basic tools necessary to compete in the economic marketplace or participate in a democratic society."

Named in the lawsuit are the Los Angeles and Alum Rock Union school districts, Governor Jerry Brown, schools Superintendent Tom Torlakson, the California education department, and the California board of education. It seeks an injunction against the five statutes in question.

This is one in what appears to be an increasing number of lawsuits in the state that say students' educational civil rights are violated by its own education laws. Two years ago, plaintiffs won a settlement barring seniority-based layoffs in certain Los Angeles schools in a lawsuit that drew on a similar argument. More recently, another group of parents sued over the issue of teacher evaluations; it contends that the state has not followed a 40-year-old state law requiring that pupil progress be counted in teacher evaluations.

The lawsuit was sponsored by a California nonprofit group called Students Matter. Students Matter was advised by a committee including a bunch of other education advocacy groups—some controversial in the field—including Democrats for Education Reform, Parent Revolution, StudentsFirst, and the Education Trust-West.

A few other interesting things to note in this lawsuit. First, it leans heavily on value-added research, referencing economist Eric A. Hanushek's work (particularly this study) and a second, recent study that connected better teaching to higher lifetime earnings. It also cites a number of stories in the California press about the difficulty and expense of dismissing tenured teachers. Finally, litigators Theodore Olson and Theodore Boutrous are among the attorneys representing the plaintiffs. They're also the lead attorneys on an effort to overthrow California's controversial Proposition 8, which barred same-sex marriage in the state.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A column from The New York Times takes aim at the Teacher Performance Assessment, a performance-based licensing test that about 200 teacher preparation programs across 25 states are now piloting.

In essence, the story says that a number of students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts are refusing to participate because they don't like that Pearson, the New York City-based educational publishing and testing company, is in charge of arranging the scoring process, rather than teachers and faculty members.

Pearson has been caught up in "Pineapplegate"—a wave of criticism over an apparently bungled New York-based reading-test question. But that issue doesn't even show up in the column, which instead seems to play into general fears about the "corporatization" of public education. "There is a whole education industry that is flourishing because it is built on the denigration of public schoolteachers," its author writes.

The irony of all this is that the exam has been developed by Stanford University researchers and teacher educators (Linda Darling-Hammond is a proponent) and by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, among others. They are not the groups that most observers in the education community would lump in the "corporate" camp. They don't tend to be big fans of alternative certification, for instance.

Apparently to defend its participation in this exam, AACTE has issued a statement that appears to directly respond to the criticisms raised in the NYT column. Its basic point is that teacher educators have been deeply involved in providing feedback on the exam's design, and that it will provide a baseline for programs to determine how well they're training graduates, as well as help create a national database for discussing beginning teacher practice.

There has been a wave of policy interest in teacher education—for example, the Education Department's negotiated rulemaking on Title II of the Higher Education Act. During that process, it was pretty clear that a lot of teacher educators oppose outcome-based measures based on students' standardized test scores. But they have been increasingly pressed to come up with alternatives that can reliably measure teacher competence, and the Teacher Performance Assessment appears to be the main tool that many are pinning their hopes on.

So a lot rides on the pilot that is now underway. The TPA is based on other performance-based teacher exams, such as National Board Certification and the Performance Assessment for California Teachers, used in that state, and both of those exams appear to have some relationship to student achievement. But the TPA is a different, more streamlined version of those assessments. There are a lot of unknown factors about its technical properties. (There are also questions about just how it will be used in licensing by the six states that have already committed to adopting it. Will teacher-candidates get to take it multiple times?)

The researchers conducting the TPA pilot are collecting outcome data such as GPAs, scores on licensing tests, and standardized test data for the students taught by the pilot teachers, to figure out the relationship between scores on the exam and these other factors. So some of these data will hopefully begin to flow within the next two years as the pilot wraps up.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, Robert Pianta, pens a provocative piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that poses what's probably the essential teacher-quality question du jour: Who should be responsible for defining and policing the standards of the teaching profession?

The genesis of the piece is the Education Department's effort to write new rules governing teacher preparation, which collapsed last month. While Pianta isn't fond of some of the ED's proposals, he argues that the drive to do something on teacher preparation has been born out of failure of higher ed., and other related agencies, to monitor quality:

"Teacher unions, higher education, and even alternative teacher-preparation routes such as Teach For America have ceded responsibility for building credible and open internal quality controls. Education schools and other preparers of teachers have failed to build competency- and knowledge-assessment systems to identify and measure the skills that teachers need for successful performance. Such systems would be capable of publicly verifying that teachers met certain known performance benchmarks before they entered the profession, and passing would mean a high likelihood that the students taught by a graduate would make progress academically.

State agencies today certify teachers using an accumulation of academic credits and assessments that do not discriminate between good and poor performers. Nearly all graduates pass criteria that have no known association with teaching and learning in elementary and secondary classrooms. But when teacher-preparation organizations say that state-standards tests and value-added metrics are neither reliable nor valid, they sound like unions arguing against teacher evaluation—placing blame on imperfect assessments rather than finding alternatives and testing them."

To throw another log on the fire, there are more sets of teacher standards out there than I can possibly list in one post—Danielson, the inTASC standards created by the Council of Chief State School Officers, the standards set by the teacher-college-accreditation bodies, and every state's own professional licensing and program-approval standards for starters. But arguably, these standards haven't been well linked to assessment mechanisms, nor have they served as the lever that their creators have hoped to change the nature of how teachers are trained.

A few education schools have begun to move in this direction. And quite a few others are pinning their hopes on the Teacher Performance Assessment, a licensing test being piloted in about half the states. But only time will tell if they actually begin to do the things that Pianta outlines in the commentary.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Universities, community colleges, and K-12 districts in 30 states announced plans this week to work together on redesigning secondary mathematics teacher preparation to align to the Common Core State Standards.

The project is being coordinated by a science- and math-focused initiative of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, a group that supports states' major public research universities.

Called the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership, the project has already won a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Overall, there are 38 partnerships involving some 68 universities, nine community colleges, and 87 school systems. (You can find the full list of participants here.)

"We're really trying to move very aggressively with the whole project," said W. Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University, and the co-chair of the project's planning committee. "There's an immediate need, and if we don't step up and address it we'll have lost a moment to really make a difference and help support the preparation of teachers to really be able to meet the challenges of the common core and other national documents."

To join, each of the partnerships had to apply to the APLU demonstrating institutional commitment, letters of support from administrators, a needs assessment, and evidence that they've discussed the project with their state's education department.

The partnership lists a number of goals, including building consensus on guiding principles of preparing math teachers, promoting better partnerships between K-12 and higher education, and developing a research agenda.

It isn't entirely clear what the policy implications of all this will be, but Martin told me that it could mean discussions of more flexibility or even changes to states' licensure and certification regimes.

Right now, he said, the partnerships have met once and are beginning to set up work groups to focus on sub-areas such as recruitment, mathematics content knowledge, and so on.

Advising the project is a high-powered group of individuals, many with close ties to the standards, such as William McCallum, the head of the department of mathematics at the University of Arizona and one of the writers of the math common standards; William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University who has written extensively about the common standards in math; and J. Michael Shaughnessy, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

There has been quite a lot of concern lately about how to ensure teachers are fully prepared to teach to the new standards, as I wrote in this story for Education Week's recent special report on the common core. (Make sure to check out the others, too.)

Secondary mathematics carries some particularly interesting challenges where the common standards are concerned. For example, the common standards outline an "integrated" math alternative to the algebra I/geometry/algebra II sequence commonly taught in high schools.

While most states and districts are now wrestling with the challenges of providing professional development for teachers already in the classroom, my read has been that there's been less attention to the standards at the preservice level. Perhaps that is beginning to change with the MTE-Partnership; I'll be watching to see what happens as the project comes together.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Layoffs by seniority continue to be one of the touchiest issues in teacher-quality policy, as recent action in Pittsburgh and Rhode Island show, often pitting teachers' unions against groups that argue that such rules negatively impact students by not taking performance into account.

This week saw more action, this time at the state level, on this most sensitive of topics. In Minnesota, Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have done away with seniority-based layoffs. Groups such as StudentsFirst and MinnCAN supported the measure, as did most Republicans, according to the Star-Tribune.

As I've mentioned before, the American Federation of Teachers in particular seems caught in a little bit of a bind on this, being for evaluation reform but cagier on attaching consequences to the results of such systems. In general AFT officials say they think seniority should be used for layoffs, unless and until fair evaluation systems are developed—fair being, obviously, in the eye of the beholder. In Minnesota's case, new evaluations don't come online until 2015-16. (Education Minnesota, the state teachers' union, is a merged AFT-NEA affiliate).

The Missouri house, meanwhile, narrowly approved a bill to end seniority-based layoffs in that state, according to the Associated Press. It moves next to the Senate. Lobbying in that state is no doubt every bit as intense as it's been in Minnesota.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Four teachers have been announced as the first recipients of the Fishman Prize from the New Teacher Project (TNTP), a teacher-training group. They'll each be awarded $25,000 and get the chance to participate in a summer internship with the organization.

Before you say, "not another teacher contest," this one is interesting because TNTP has designed it with the idea of spreading effective teaching practices. The summer residency program—designed so the winning teachers don't miss any class time—will involve working with other teachers to improve technique and producing a paper to be published by TNTP. Shira Fishman, a 2011 District of Columbia teacher of the year for whom the contest is named, will be on hand for the six-week internship.

The winners are:

• Katie Lyons, a 6th-9th grade literacy and social studies teacher at National Teachers Academy in Chicago;
• James Irish, an 8th grade math teacher at KIPP Central City Academy in New Orleans;
• Leslie Ross, an 9th grade biology teacher at Ben L. Smith High School in Greensboro, N.C.; and
• Whitney Henderson, a 7th grade writing teacher at KIPP Central City Academy in New Orleans.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Hannah Rose Sacks

Starting this fall, Mississippi's Ocean Springs High School will offer a two-year academic track for students interested in teaching as a profession, reports WLOX-TV.

The program, Teacher Academy, provides firsthand experience and skills-based learning opportunities to prepare students for a teaching career. The objective is to better prepare students so they not only enter the teaching profession, but remain long-term educators, according to the State Secondary Teacher Academy.

A framework document cites Mississippi's projected demand for elementary, secondary, and community college teachers greatly exceeding the number of students enrolled in teacher-preparation programs as the motivation to attract more students to the profession.

Teacher Academy is expecting to:

• Recruit high-quality high school students for the teaching profession.
• Give qualified high school students an opportunity to begin a career path to teaching.
• Provide a framework for developing solid partnerships with area institutions of higher education and offer new options for the district's students.

The program will allow students the opportunity to shadow and assist teachers. Academy enrollees will also learn some of the fundamental skills required for teaching, including lesson-planning, in addition to the two-year curriculum.

The curriculum covers three major areas of study: Teachers as Professionals; Principles of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment; and the Learning Environment.

According to the academy's framework document, the program is based on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Praxis standards, and the Mississippi education department's Subject Area Testing Program, as well as college-readiness and technology standards.

Entrance to the Teacher Academy will involve a selection process that includes an evaluation of students' academic and behavioral records, reports WLOX-TV.

Posted by Hannah Sacks at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend