September 2008 Archives

Time was when teachers in California could be dismissed, transferred, or disciplined if their students wrote articles that school administrators did not like.

Not anymore. A bill signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over the weekend would make it tougher for administrators to retaliate against high school and college journalism teachers who protect students' free speech.

According to the California Newspaper Publishers Association, teachers have been punished at least 12 times since 2001 because of articles written by student reporters.

In one instance, an adviser for a high school newspaper was reassigned after her students wrote a scathing editorial calling for cleaner campus bathrooms.

The governor also signed two bills cracking down on teachers who are accused or even convicted of serious crimes but still remain in the classroom.

One bill allows the state to revoke the licenses of teachers who plead no contest to certain sex crimes or drug offenses without waiting for a review that can sometimes take two or three years, according to this AP story.

The other bill allows the credentialing commission to revoke teacher licenses automatically if a previous criminal conviction has limited a teacher's contact with children. The commission also will be able to suspend teachers automatically if they have had their license revoked in another state for misconduct.

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An appeals court ruled earlier this week that three Lowell, Mass., teachers were improperly dismissed from their jobs following a district-administered English fluency test. The three teachers are non-native English speakers.

Massachusetts, in 2002, required all public school teachers of subject-matter classes to be fluent and literate in English.

The court found that the Lowell school district did not follow state regulations, which specify that teachers' grasp of English should be evaluated through classroom observation and personal interviews.

It's an interesting case, and I'm not sure how many other states have similar laws on the books. The "highly qualified" teacher provisions of NCLB don't really seem to speak directly to this issue. ELL teachers must be fluent in English and demonstrate competency in the subjects they teach, but there's not much in the federal law saying how states should ensure all their teachers are literate in English.

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UFT President Randi Weingarten this afternoon proposed her solution to the problem of "excessed" teachers in New York City--an immediate hiring freeze.

Excessed teachers are those who have lost their jobs because of their schools closing or downsizing and who have not been able to find new jobs because of a new district policy that allows principals to hire those that are a good fit regardless of seniority. The New Teacher Project released a report earlier this week that said the excessed teachers will cost the city $74 million this school year. The project has urged the district to make some changes, like placing nontenured teachers on unpaid leave if they are unable to find a job within three months. Tenured teachers would have one year to find a job before they went on unpaid leave.

But Weingarten said in a press conference that the department of education should establish an immediate hiring freeze for license areas that can be filled by teachers in the excessed pool. She also wants the district to set up a program to recertify excessed teachers in additional license areas so they can fill vacancies as they come up.

“Here we have hundreds of dedicated and experienced educators who, through no fault of their own, were excessed from their teaching jobs and are still looking for permanent jobs after many months of trying to get interviews,” Weingarten told reporters. “We have canvassed 160 of them so far, and they all report that they have applied for 20 or more vacancies in schools without getting a single interview."

You can read the full release from the United Federation of Teachers here. The NTP report is here.

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A nonprofit group, Teachers in Space, is seeking applications for a program to fly teachers to space in suborbital vehicles and return them to the classroom.

The original NASA Teachers in Space program ended with the 1986 Challenger disaster, which killed teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe and six other crew members. The program was retooled as the Educator Astronaut program, in which former educators became full-time NASA employees, but did not return to their classrooms. Barbara Morgan was the first Educator Astronaut. She flew aboard the space shuttle in August 2007.

The Teachers in Space nonprofit was set up to revive the original concept of the program. Selected teachers will train during weekends and the summer and will fly on reusable, spacecraft being developed by private industries. The nonprofit expects finalists to be announced in 2009 and for spaceflights to begin in 2010-11.

See here for details.

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The Dallas Morning News has a story this morning about the district wanting to use $18 million of Title I money to pay the salaries of 300 teachers. The district, apparently, has a shortfall of $84 million in its budget.

But this is not sitting well with the state education department, which says that federal money cannot be spent on making up for local budget cuts. And that, state officials say, is in effect what Dallas plans to do.

The imbroglio in Dallas does make one wonder about how states and school districts will cope with budget woes in a dramatically uncertain economy, and how this will affect teachers.

Just this week, there was a story in the Baltimore Sun that Gov. Martin O'Malley, burdened by a $432 million budget shortfall, is considering shifting the cost of $622 million in teachers' pensions to Maryland school districts which, in turn, are screaming about their own money woes.

No doubt we'll be hearing more such stories in the weeks to come.

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Responding to the New Teacher Project's report on excessed teachers in New York who will cost the city $74 million this school year, United Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten has called a press conference at 4 p.m. tomorrow where she will be joined by "several of the hundreds of educators in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool who have tried for months to secure permanent teaching positions despite Department of Education policies that hinder their efforts."

Stay tuned as we bring you more on this.

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The promise of more money has not exactly sent school districts in Minnesota rushing to embrace Gov. Tim Pawlenty's widely touted Q Comp performance-pay plan for teachers. After three years, in 2007-08, only 39 of the state's 334 districts and 21 charter schools had signed up for it.

Part of it might have to do with the fact that the plan requires local unions to get on board. And as is well known by now, unions are not the biggest fans of performance pay, although Minneapolis had implemented a popular, union-approved performance-pay plan before Q Comp.

Now Pawlenty, a Republican, wants Q Comp to focus even more aggressively on student test scores, under a proposal he'll make to the state legislature, according to this AP story. Under the current plan, 60 percent of a teacher’s salary raise is based on factors like teacher evaluations and student growth. One-time bonuses can be awarded for, among other things, schoolwide progress on student growth. Career-advancement opportunities are also available to those who wish to become mentors or lead teachers.

Besides changing Q Comp, Pawlenty also has plans to improve the teacher workforce: He will seek tougher entrance and testing requirements for college students thinking about becoming teachers and will attempt to open classrooms to scientists and other professionals looking for a career change.

But exactly what is causing him to believe that tying student test scores to performance pay is going to be the answer to Q Comp's limited popularity?

If you can figure that one out, let us know.

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The Algiers Charter Schools consortium in New Orleans just received a $17.6 million grant from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, a program designed to seed performance-based compensation programs.

Algiers' grant was initially given to the Lakewood County school district, in Florida, but that district faced internal squabbles about implementation and opted out after its first year.

Like a number of other TIF grantees, Algiers will use the Teacher Advancement Program model. TAP, which is overseen by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, includes standards-based professional development and a career ladder for teachers, in addition to pay bonuses.

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The Washington Teachers Union membership is meeting tonight about the proposed D.C. contract, including its "red" and "green" compensation tiers. To my great dismay, media aren't allowed to attend. But I'm betting this will be the contract's make-or-break moment.

The head of the WTU, George Parker, said on PBS' Jim Lehrer Newshour recently that members are polling 2-to-1 against the contract.

The contract would allow teachers opting the "green" tier to earn up to $20,000 annually in bonuses, but they'd forgo tenure protections for one year for that opportunity. "Red" tier teachers would maintain the existing pay schedule. The contract also would formally dismantle the seniority system for hiring and transfers.

Parker has by all accounts pushed to give the two-tiered proposal a go, contingent on some additional protections for teachers who opt to join the green-tier pathway. But he's faced a lot of pushback, including some generated by his own parent union, the American Federation of Teachers.

In a legal opinion, which you can find here, the AFT's attorneys said the plan's new definiton of excessing—removing a teacher from a school building and assigning him or her elsewhere—would create "a quick method to terminate teachers without due process."

Mr. Parker says that isn't so. D.C. rulemaking and court cases already allow the district to bypass excessing and consider factors other than seniority when it reduces the teaching force, he argues. (DCPS has been losing huge numbers of its students to the city's burgeoning charter schools.) The relevant documents include D.C. Code §1-624.08 and WTU v. D.C. Board of Education, 109 F.3d 774 (D.C. Cir. 1997).

Still, if Parker can't convince members tonight, then I'm not sure how much longer he can hold out for the contract.

Yet some D.C. teachers I've spoken to are worried about Chancellor Michelle Rhee's plans to push reforms through the district's separate licensure and evaluation systems. If teachers are going to end up with more accountability, one DCPS teacher told me, why not at least have the chance to earn higher salaries along the way?

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Teachers overwhelmingly think that high school students should be taught rudimentary aspects of personal finance, according to a new survey by Americans Well-Informed on Automotive Retailing Economics, a group that promotes consumer education on car financing.

Such aspects would including basic savings and retirement investing (94 percent), financing a car purchase (92 percent), financing a home purchase (91 percent), maintaining a household budget (98 percent), managing a credit card (98 percent), managing a bank account (99 percent), acquiring medical insurance (97 percent), and acquiring a student loan (97 percent).

Additionally, 72 percent of teachers said that students old enough to purchase a car were unprepared to make decisions about how to go about that process. That does seem significant, given that a car is probably most young adults' first big purchase.

The survey reflects interviews with 291 teachers and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points.

My questions, on reading this, deal with the realm of the practical. Who should be responsible for teaching these items, and in which courses they should be taught?

I checked with the Education Commission of the States on what existing state policies are. Four states require high school students to undergo some financial-literacy instruction for graduation, either as part of another course or as a stand-alone unit (Oregon, Utah, Missouri for the class of 2010 and beyond, and South Dakota for the class of 2010 and beyond). Among the other states, there's a lot of activity in this area, including grants and task forces that are examining the issue.

I'd be interested in hearing from some of our math and economics teachers out there about how they integrate personal-finance topics into their courses.

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There's a mysterious drop in the number of teachers with master's degrees in the state of West Virginia.

According to data from the state's department of education, the number of such teachers declined 5 percent over the past decade. Some attribute it to the baby boomer-retirement exodus. Others to the fact that bad economic times are causing fewer teachers to seek master's degrees. Yet others to the inevitable argument that teachers are leaving for higher-paying jobs in other fields. You can read more about it here in the Charleston Daily Mail.

Interestingly, during the time that the number of teachers with master's degrees fell, the number of teachers seeking national-board certification rose.

There are some states that require teachers get a master's degree to get a permanent license or to reach the highest step in a career ladder. But this news does make one wonder if the decline in advanced-degree-holding teachers is limited to West Virginia, or is it happening nationwide?

We don't know yet, but time will tell.

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Teacher shortage? Not in New York City, where 1,000 "excessed" teachers will go without jobs in the 2008-09 school year while receiving full pay and benefits at a cost of $74 million to the school district.

These teachers are the fallout of a new hiring policy in the city that allows school administrators to hire teachers that are a good fit regardless of seniority, according to an updated version of a report released by the New Teacher Project. The excessed teachers are those who lose their jobs as a result of schools downsizing and closing. The teachers are then placed in a reserve pool and have to apply for new jobs themselves, because under the new policy, they are no longer assigned jobs by the central office. Read our story on the original report here.

The New Teacher Project has lauded the changes in the hiring policy, but has been urging the district to make some changes, like placing nontenured teachers on unpaid leave if they are unable to find a job within three months. Tenured teachers would have one year to find a job before they went on unpaid leave.

In a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten dated Sept. 19, the president of the New Teacher Project, Timothy Daly, said his organization is reissuing the report with updated data because the problem has only grown in the months since it was first released.

Most of the excessed teachers, who work as substitutes and other temporary replacements, are tenured. But, the report says, there is no requirement that these teachers even find a job. In fact, it points out, more than 14,000 teaching positions in New York City were filled during the period when these teachers did not find jobs.

The UFT had slammed the report when it was first released in April this year, saying the experienced teachers lost their jobs through no fault of their own. The union also criticized the New Teacher Project as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the city's education department because the project runs the New York Teaching Fellows program that has hired more than 8,000 teachers for the city.

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My colleague Scott Cech has a great story up about the issue of formative assessment, the classroom-based, typically nonstandardized exercises that help teachers adjust their instruction and are not used for summative or high-stakes purposes.

The research on the practice is strong, but most teachers haven't been trained about how to implement it. That's a big obstacle for states and districts that want to benefit from formative assessment.Some experts, as Scott reports, say formative assessment must be seamlessly integrated into instruction, which means that teachers need help constructing assessments that reflect the local curriculum.

So what are the options for doing that on a large scale? I've heard that a few states, such as Louisiana and Kansas, are developing online resources where teachers can download, access, or even post examples of formative assessment. Other districts are using professional-development programs like those offered by the Assessment Training Institute at ETS to get teachers on board.

I'm thinking we'll see more states and districts entertain these ideas in the future.

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According to a new Center on Education Policy analysis, Maryland schools entering the "restructuring" phase of school improvement under NCLB are increasingly choosing the option to replace teachers and staff.

In the past, most schools in restructuring appointed a "turnaround specialist" to improve the school. But the state has closed that option, and there's little evidence of its success, the report says.

The report has already generated some lively commentary over at Eduwonkette (including "Skoolboy," who calls replacing staff the "neutron bomb" theory of school reform.)

School leaders in Maryland have implemented this differently. Some have required all staff members to reapply for their jobs at the school; others have targeted only specific employees.

There are a lot of effects to parse out here. They include questions such as whether this intervention attracts more effective teachers to the schools; who makes the decisions about which teachers are let go and/or rehired; what happens to teachers who are not rehired (do they go to other schools in the district); and ultimately, whether it's a more effective reform strategy than the other options for restructuring.

It's too early to answer these questions in Maryland, according to the report, which goes on to indicate that in some of these schools, the restructuring caused a loss of morale and fears about job security. But, it says, those effects dissipated relatively quickly.

What's it like in YOUR school?

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Michael DiMaggio will join the NEA Foundation as its director of development.

He comes to the 40-year-old NEA Foundation from the Council of Chief State School Officers, where he spent seven years creating their corporate partner programs and oversaw the organization’s development efforts. At the CCSSO, he worked on an initiative that provides support and technical assistance to state education agency officials in low-performing, high- poverty schools and alternative education high schools.

DiMaggio was once a special education teacher and high school athletic coach, according to a release from the foundation. The NEA Foundation gives out grants to teachers, education support staff, and higher education faculty to improve student learning in public schools and colleges.

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In a conference call on this survey, Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City schools, said he supported "front-loading" compensation for new teachers and offering more pay based on teacher bonuses.

"So much [of teacher compensation] ends up in defined-benefit pension plans,” he said. “I think a lot of teachers are not going to be around to accrue long-term pensions.”

Salary front-loading and performance pay? Hmm. Sounds a lot like the contract that District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is trying to put into place, with its green-tier proposal that would allow new teachers to make almost $70,000 if they demonstrate teaching effectiveness.

Rhee and Klein have appeared at events together, most notably at the Democratic National Convention. Both signed onto the Education Equity Project manifesto and support teacher-accountability measures.

I wonder if Klein will push a similar, two-tiered plan in New York? He'd probably face opposition from Randi Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers and its New York affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers. By all accounts, she is not a fan of the D.C. plan.

(Members of the Washington Teachers Union are set to discuss the D.C. contract proposals on Sept. 22 or 23; reports differ. In any case, we may soon know whether the red/green tier proposal will be included in a tentative contract and be put to a vote, or whether Michelle Rhee will have to resort to Plan B.)

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I had a bunch of stories due last week and neglected my blogging duties. So I owe my co-blogger Vaishali a big-shout out and thank you for holding down the fort in my absence!

Not long ago, I wrote a story about a volume on state and federal accountability policies edited by Bruce Fuller at the University of California. The study I focused on found, using survey data from three state samples, that in the wake of standards-based reform, teachers are changing how they are instructing. But they are doing so autonomously and not always in uniform, aligned ways.

Of course, on the ground, it's more complicated than that. Among the chapters I didn't get to feature was an interesting one that suggested that elements of the NCLB school-improvement cascade do, in fact, lead to more collaborative and cooperative work by teachers in school buildings.

The study's author, Kristin Gordon, a graduate student in sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, analyzed data from a Georgia teacher survey. Her analysis sought associations between factors such as a school's failure to make AYP and the number of years in school improvement, and teachers' perceptions of time and empowerment.

The findings were surprising. The length of stay in "improvement" status under NCLB was positively correlated to time: that is, the longer teachers worked under sanctions, the more postively they evaluated the adequacy of their time for teaching, completing administrative duties, and collaborating with their peers.

Additionally, teachers' feelings of empowerment were positively linked to the number of years in improvement status: They felt more empowered the longer they worked under sanctions.

After performing qualitiative, case-study interviews, Ms. Gordon postulated that in response to the accountability pressure, teachers developed common strategies to improve student achievement, and that this led to the sense that time was used more effectively and that teachers were taking shared responsbility for student progress.

A teacher may have quite a bit of autonomy behind a closed classroom door. But the NCLB school-improvement cascade, Ms. Gordon told me, "does seem to have penetrated through that door."

The study also found a possible downside to the accountability pressure. Ms. Gordon's study found that AYP failure was linked to a reduction in teachers' empowerment. In other words, after teachers came together to work collaboratively, it was demoralizing for them if the school didn't make AYP the subsequent year.

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Teacher advocates have long argued that it is unfair to judge a teacher by student test scores alone, especially those in classrooms with challenging environments. This week, the state commissioner of education agreed with that perspective when he reinstated a teacher who was fired over a teacher rating system based on student test scores.

According to this story in the Dallas Morning News, Sharon Toussaint was one of eight teachers fired from Kimball High School under a recent reorganization to address chronically low test scores.

Toussaint petitioned Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott to be reinstated. In his ruling, Scott said the school environment, including student discipline problems, and not Toussaint, caused the lack of student achievement. He asked that the district either reinstate her with back pay, or pay her one year's salary.

Toussaint told the Dallas Morning News that she had had years of good job evaluations.

The Dallas system, called the Classroom Effectiveness Index, is a decade-old one that was dusted off and revived last year so school district officials could hinge on it a $22 million employee bonus program. It received positive reviews from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999 and from researchers at the University of North Texas in 2002. But since last year, it has been found to be riddled with errors, most due to clerical mistakes.

Perhaps Dallas could serve as a valuable example for school districts around the nation which are focusing more keenly than ever before on teacher accountability and on designing systems to assess the effectiveness of educators?

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American Federation of Teachers locals have partnered with districts on pioneering reform efforts, including peer review and assistance in Toledo, Ohio, and charter schools in New York City.

Now, locals working on reform plans could get financial support from the national union, which today announced the creation of a $1 million fund to support such efforts.

The announcement of the AFT Innovation Fund comes just as the national teachers' unions have come under criticism from both Democrats and Republicans as standing in the way of reform.

In addition to the $1 million seed money, the AFT will seek more funding help from philanthropies. Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, called it "union-led reform that will incubate promising ideas, promote proven programs, support risk taking, and encourage shared responsibility for strengthening our public schools."

"Our intention is to support innovations from the bottom up—and move away from the top-down corporate model,” she added.

As more and more districts attempt to impose accountability and differentiated pay plans for teachers, it is becoming clear to unions that partnering with their districts would be a much better option than having plans imposed on them.

You have to credit the AFT for being proactive here.

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Has Obama actually converted the NEA into a fan of charter schools?

Maybe not quite, but when did you last hear an NEA president say something like this about charter schools:

“Those of us in the education community can learn from charter school success stories and failures. The key is to identify what is working that can be sustained and reproduced on a broad scale so that as many students as possible can benefit.”

That's a quote from Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA president, and it came in a statement issued right after Obama's speech in Dayton, Ohio, where he unveiled his education reform plan that, among other things, calls for doubling funding for charter schools.

"Sen. Obama gets it,” Van Roekel says about the plan. “He knows that reform cannot take place overnight or by using quick fixes. Obama wants to invest in comprehensive strategies, both immediate and long-term, which will pay dividends for our children, our economy and our country.”

The Ohio Federation of Teachers, which is not exactly a fan of charter schools in the state, happens to be an American Federation of Teachers affiliate, however, and there's no word yet from them so far on the Obama plan.

Update: Here's what Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, had to say about Obama's plan on charters and merit pay:

"Sen. Obama is absolutely right that successful charter schools should be supported and held accountable, and that failing charter schools should be shut down...Sen. Obama and the AFT also see eye to eye on supporting differentiated compensation plans that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Well-designed pay plans negotiated with teachers treat them as the professionals they are, which in the end helps students."

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Democrats have often been criticized for being in cahoots with the teacher unions on education policy, and each time Sen. Barack Obama voices support for charter schools or merit pay-- ideas that the national teacher unions aren't terribly fond of-- there's a lot of back-and-forth on how he's breaking away from the unions.

Today, in his speech at a school in Dayton, Ohio, the Democratic presidential candidate-- who has received the endorsement of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers -- called for more charter schools, merit pay, and for replacing bad teachers.

"We must give teachers every tool they need to be successful, but we also need to give every child the assurance that they'll have the teachers they need to be successful," Obama said. "That means setting a firm standard — teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don't improve, they'll be replaced."

But in Ohio, I would guess, Obama's support for performance pay and replacing bad teachers would actually go down quite well with the local unions (although his ideas on charters might not, as my colleague Michele McNeil points out). Many Ohio locals have embraced performance pay, including Toledo and Cleveland. The Toledo local pioneered peer review more than two decades ago. And four districts in Ohio were recipients of the first installment of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants last year.

You can be fairly certain he wasn't booed by any teachers in the audience when he mentioned merit pay this time.

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Sen. John McCain's swipe against Barack Obama and teacher unions at the Republican National Convention Thursday has provoked a suitably angry response from the National Education Association and its new president.

In his speech, about which you can read more on our Campaign K-12 blog, McCain said Obama, his Democrat rival, "wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucrats. I want schools to answer to parents and students."

Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the 3.2 million-member NEA, which had 40 delegates at the convention, in a statement Friday called McCain "completely out of touch" with the needs of working families, educators, and students.

"John McCain could have used his acceptance speech to outline a plan for providing schools with the support and resources they need. He could have used his acceptance speech to respect the tireless work of educators and parents. He could have the used his acceptance speech to put forward a bold new education policy. Instead, he chose to vilify educators and praise school voucher schemes," Van Roekel said.

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The beginning of the school year is also the time when teacher disgruntlement rears its head. Although there have not been any strikes in large urban districts in recent memory, and a couple of threats this year fizzled out, there are plenty of teachers out there walking the picket lines right now.

In Broward County this week, teachers threatened to work less to protest stalled negotiations on their contract. ''There will be no volunteering, no field trips, no taking papers home,'' Broward Teachers Union President Pat Santeramo told the Miami Herald. Strikes are illegal under Florida law, so an all-out job action is out of the question.

In Bellevue, Wash., teachers are striking over a standardized curriculum that mandates what is taught in class from day to day, and the pace at which it is taught.

In Duquesne, Pa., teachers are striking after the district offered them only a 3 percent hike instead of the 19 percent they wanted. And in Souderton, Pa., teachers have been walking the picket lines over disagreements on salary and health-care benefits.

The national teachers' unions are never too eager to discuss trends in teacher strikes, but outside experts have often said in recent years that the number of teacher strikes will go up as educators have to battle more fiercely than ever before for health-care benefits and teacher pay and against federal mandates.

These few examples, most in small districts, don't signify a trend for now, but they do seem to encompass all these issues.

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In recent years, some voices like the New Teacher Project have called for changing how teachers are hired by school districts, and have even worked with some districts to revamp their hiring practices and to improve teacher retention.

Now, a new report from the Annenberg Institute of School Reform at Brown University is touting another approach: it says districts ought to consolidate all teacher-related functions, like recruitment, evaluation, professional development, staffing, and even collective bargaining, under a single "human- capital management" office. The hope is that this would ensure better coordination of the teacher-related functions and transform the way districts recruit, hire, train, evaluate, and pay teachers.

The report says that when anything to do with teachers or teacher quality arises, people look to the human-resources department. But some functions, including collective bargaining and professional development, could fall outside the purview of human resources. And the authors argue that if, for instance, the human-resources office is doing a great job hiring teachers but the professional-development office is not doing as great a job training them, it could have negative effects on the entire district.

It's a provocative thought. But are there any takers out there?

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In the most recent Education Week poll, an astonishing 83 percent of the 600 people who responded felt teachers should be permitted to carry guns to school. It's a very strong response and one of the most popular polls we've had on the Web site.

So let's hear some additional feedback on this from our teachers out there! Do you agree with the poll results? Do you feel more threatened out there in your classrooms?

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The NEA has been a rather busy bee at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul even as the AFT, not surprisingly, has chosen to stay far, far away.

Dennis Van Roekel, the spanking-new president of the NEA, was at a Minneapolis jazz club yesterday where several unions led by the NEA were hosting a labor salute to Republican supporters. He spoke with my colleague Mark Walsh, who is covering the Republican convention in the Minnesota capital. Mark writes that 40 NEA members are among the delegates: a fairly sizeable number given that the unions are always perceived as being strongly Democratic-leaning. But the union did give out nearly $72,000 to GOP candidates during this election cycle, which, although less than 10 percent of what they gave the Democrats, is more substantial than the $1,000 that the AFT gave Republicans.

At the convention, John Wilson, the NEA's executive director, today moderated a "dialogue on policies and practices that would make 21st-century skills a centerpiece of public education."

The AFT, meanwhile, has no presence at all at the convention. A spokeswoman said the union does have Republicans among its 1.4 million members, but the national union is focusing its energy and resources on the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, who the union's membership and leaders endorsed in July.

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Here's the latest on the D.C. contract news: Chancellor Michelle Rhee has said that she has a "Plan B" for instituting reforms to Washington's teacher-quality system if the tentative contract she's working on with the Washington Teachers' Union falls through (see previous posts and my story here for background.)

She wouldn't elaborate on what Plan B entails. But here's one possibility: the district has quietly been laying the foundation for changes to its licensing system.

According to a document from the office of the State Superintendent of Education, the district wants to institute a system that provides schools with more flexibility in hiring and placing teachers, and that would tie licensure to a teacher-effectiveness measure.

The proposed changes would replace D.C.'s "Standard" and "Professional" licenses with "Regular II" and "Advanced" licenses. Under the Regular II license, teachers would not have their teaching license authomatically renewed upon completion of credit hours and workshops, as is the case with the standard license. Instead, they would have to demonstrate efffectiveness or face nonrenewal.

Teachers holding an "Advanced" license would also have to demonstrate effectiveness or their license would revert back to a Regular II license.

The document doesn't detail the process a teacher would need to complete to demonstrate his or her effectiveness.

The proposal has to go through a public comment period. I'm betting the WTU will have concerns with the teacher-effectiveness proposal.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:50 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)