Stephen Sawchuk comes to the teacher beat at Education Week after covering federal education policy.
October 2008 Archives
October 31, 2008
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Philly Extends Current Contract
Here's an update on the Philadelphia teacher-contract negotiations: The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the district agreed to extend the current agreement by a year.
PFT members will get a 4 percent increase next March.
"Both parties have identified a number of areas of common concern that we will be working together to address such as: providing a safe environment in and around schools for students and staff; developing targeted and fiscally responsible approaches to reducing class size; improving teacher quality by recruiting and retaining qualified and effective teachers and improving both evaluation and support of them; insuring that teacher compensation and the work day are structured in a way that improves teacher recruitment and retention and optimizes the best academic results for children; and closing the achievement gap," a statement from the district reads.
Looks like Superintendent Arlene Ackerman wants to revise evaluation and compensation in one swoop. It will be interesting to see whether she and the union can agree on what those policies will look like.
Check out the new paper by the Education Commission of the States on how to improve the effectiveness of high school teachers. It gives examples of state policies designed to deepen teachers' conceptual knowledge, integrate college and workforce readiness into instructional goals, create communities of practice, support teacher induction, differentiate learning, and incorporate technologies.
Do you have similar policies in your state? Post them here and let us know, or e-mail me directly at ssawchuk@epe.org.
The Institute of Education Sciences has quietly released a study that's almost guaranteed to cause a lot of chatter if not outright controversy in the eduworld.
According to the study, the two comprehensive programs studied in their first year—one from the Princeton, N.J.-based ETS and one from the New Teacher Center, in Santa Cruz, Calif.—did not improve student achievement, rates of teacher rentention, or teacher practices.
Comprehensive induction programs, unlike the informal, often unfunded "buddy systems" common to districts, provide training for mentors, support "release time" for teachers and mentors to meet on a weekly basis, and faciliate the improvement of teaching skills linked to improved student achievement, such as differentiated instruction, classroom management, pedagogy, and so forth.
The caveat: There's some limited cost-benefit evidence to suggest that these programs' effects are only felt after two or even three years. The study in question only covers year one of implementation. (Other IES studies will analyze results from a subset of schools that got a second year of comprehensive induction.)
Check back later at www.edweek.org for a full story and some reaction from the field.
That's a famous line from The Wizard of OZ, and it's basically at the heart of this story in the Washington Post about the D.C. contract negotiations.
According to a letter sent by AFT President Randi Weingarten to WTU President George Parker, back in July, Parker had requested that AFT not be involved in the negotiations.
But concerns about the then-tight relationship between Parker and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, along with complaints from local members about the two-tiered pay proposal has caused the AFT to watch the negotiations quite closely. The national union commissioned a private poll of WTU members, as I wrote earlier; it commissioned a legal opinion on the pay proposals here; and there are plenty of letters showing that the AFT hasn't exactly been thrilled with how the WTU has been approaching things, for example this one.
These activities have raised Ms. Rhee's ire: "The national union's claims that they have no involvement in local negotiations have been patently false," Ms. Rhee says in the Post story. "If the national [union] wants to insert themselves in this negotiation, then they should be at least honest about their involvement."
In a subsequent statement, Weingarten said: "While the AFT has not been directly involved in negotiations, we have been working in a supportive role to help George Parker, the WTU executive board, and our hard-working members reach an agreement with D.C. public schools," she writes. "We are proud of that work and are surprised that anyone thought it was being kept a secret."
What to make of all this? Well, in general, the national unions routinely provide collective bargaining assistance to their affiliates. In this case, the question seems to be the extent to which the union, directly or indirectly, is exerting influence over the WTU's approach to the contract.
As Bill Turque notes in his story, the national union also has a direct pipeline to the activities of the WTU through George Bordenave, who works for the AFT but has been detailed as an assistant to Parker.
Of course, the one who really knows what's what is Parker. When I last spoke to him, he expressed nothing but gratitude for AFT's support and denied rumors of tensions between WTU and AFT.
"Randi and I have a very good rapport. Randi has not in any way put pressure on the local in response to [the pay proposal]," he told me.
Given AFT's intense interest in the proposal, I can't help but wonder if, in private, he feels a little differently.
Yesterday's testy education debate between Barack Obama's education adviser, Linda Darling-Hammond, and John McCain's education aide, Lisa Graham Keegan, got even testier when subjects like teacher performance pay and alternative-preparation routes like Teach For America cropped up. (To watch the whole debate at Teachers' College, register here).
On performance pay, the fight came down to which one is better: a career-ladder and peer-evaluation approach that Darling-Hammond touted, or a let's-pay-teachers-who-raise-student-scores approach that Keegan held up.
Calling performance pay a "key part" of McCain's education program, Keegan described a plan in which school principals should be the people in charge of evaluating their own staff. McCain, she said, would like to have federal money go directly to schools so principals can reward teachers primarily on the basis of student achievement.
But, she added, inevitably, the unions just won't come on board. "We have so many constraints around being able to pay teachers for their own performance, mostly in the bargained agreements, that there is no way to do it now," she said.
Darling-Hammond touted an approach that the unions also endorse, in which new teachers get professional development and support from expert mentors who also make a decision about tenure.
Teachers who are rewarded, said Darling-Hammond, would "need to demonstrate excellence in the classroom and evidence of contributions to student learning and achievement."
Then followed a charged argument over which performance-pay plan is better: Arizona's 2-decade-old career-ladder program, or Florida's now-on-ice performance-pay program that bases a good part of the teacher bonuses on test scores.
"I'm sorry to say that Arizona's career-ladder program has not had a profound effect on achievement," said Keegan, who was that state's superintendent of public instruction between 1994 and 2001. There were no statistics cited, but Keegan held that Florida's plan, on the other hand, had a bigger close in the achievement gap than any other in the country.
Watch their exchange on performance pay here:
When the debate veered to teacher quality, Keegan put forth Teach For America, which recruits fresh graduates and asks them to commit to two years of teaching in high-needs schools.
McCain, she said, would expand TFA using professional-development funds from Title II of the No Child Left Behind Act.
"So why don't you do that?" she queried Darling-Hammond. "Why don't you expand that program and dedicate dollars to that?"
Darling-Hammond raised concerns about the retention rates of TFA teachers and reeled off statistics citing that 49 percent of teachers who come in without training leave teaching within three years, while only 19 percent that come fully trained through teacher programs do so.
Watch their exchange on Teach for America here:
The two education advisers also debated their candidates' stances on
teacher preparation. Watch that exchange here:
Over at Swift & Change Able, Charlie Barone takes on California's focus (or lack thereof ) on teacher-quality initiatives, drawing on the Center on Education Policy's reports on school restructuring and the Renee v.Spellings lawsuit on the "highly qualified" teacher definition.
The state has long tussled with federal legislators on teacher quality. Its 1996 class-size program caused big hiring problems for poorer districts, reportedly angering Congressman George Miller, D-Calif., who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee. The state's initial definition of highly qualified was deemed inappropriate by the Education Department. More recently, California districts have been accused of taking underqualified teachers and enrolling them in alternative-route programs so as to call them highly qualified. (Teachers not yet certified who are teaching through alternative routes can be considered HQT for up to two years.)
I went back through the Title II program, which is the funding stream that disburses most federal teacher-quality dollars to districts, to see if there's anything that would give the state or the feds more leverage over spending. It turns out that if districts don't meet their annual HQT objectives—which at this point should be 100 percent for all districts— for two years and fail to make AYP for three years, then districts are supposed to enter into agreements with the state on how to institute professional development to help them meet those targets.(Districts normally can use Title II for almost any teacher-related purpose.)
Quite a few states, California included, aren't targeting their funding in this manner, according to these monitoring reports on the Education Department's Web site.
Randi Weingarten has taken issue with my saying in an earlier blog post that the New York City performance-pay plan had been "forced down the throat" of the United Federation of Teachers.
In a phone conversation this week, Weingarten emphasized that she was the one who took the initiative to the table.
"I negotiated the plan and I believe that the plan actually helped us prove to the school system that collaboration is a key ingredient to school success," said Weingarten, who, as my earlier blog post pointed out, has always spoken very positively about the plan in public.
As to why Weingarten would agree to a merit-pay plan that bases a large proportion of a school's reward on test scores, the union leader said that although she is against "testing as the be-all and end-all," she did not want yet another accountability system thrust on New York teachers.
Portfoliogate has just come up as a big issue in the campaign (see Mike Petrilli here and my colleague Michele McNeil here).
It's great to see such a wonky topic outside the field attracting attention. Of course, I want to hear more discussion about the teacher implications. And it seems that like so much else in education, this is a matter of tradeoffs: Portfolio assessments certainly have the potential to give teachers richer information about student achievement than standardized tests alone. But they are also a lot of work for teachers to create and to score.
Nebraska, the only state to use local rather than statewide assessment instruments for NCLB accountability, has already dealt with this issue. The state, I'm told, did massive amounts of training on how to create assessments aligned to curricula and state standards. But the training takes a lot of teachers' time. (Ed Week's Katie Ash touches on this in her story here.)
The Milken Family Foundation is in the process of announcing its 2008 Milken Education Award winners.
Teachers are selected for the $25,000 awards for demonstrating results in raising student achievement, crafting exemplary lessons that serve as models for other educators, and showing strong leadership capabilities.
Here's a link to this year's winners, plus bios and links to videos of the award winners.
According to this story, Georgia is granting waivers to districts that don't have the money to hire extra teachers to meet its caps of 20 students in kindergarten, 21 in grades 1-3, and 28 in grades 4-8. This means that schools no longer have to hire additional educators if they exceed the caps by just a few students.
As I reported earlier this year, Florida, even before the economic crisis reached its current proportions, suspended the final stage of its mandatory class-size reduction program. California districts were also expected to forgo voluntary class-size subsidies.
I'm told most districts try to cut elsewhere before turning to instructional positions. But because teachers' salaries make up the largest expenditure in most districts' budgets, it looks like more teacher cuts and larger class sizes are on the horizon for now.
A federal judge has ruled that New York City can prevent teachers from wearing political buttons in schools. The city's powerful teachers' union had filed a lawsuit Oct. 10 claiming that teachers' free speech rights were being violated when the school system asked principals to enforce a district policy banning them from wearing such buttons. Read our previous blog post here.
There was a partial victory for the union, however. Judge Lewis Kaplan said teachers may post political content on their union bulletin boards in areas that are closed to students, and that materials about candidates may be put in staff mailboxes.
United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said she's happy that the ruling protects teachers' free speech rights in schools. As for the wearing of political buttons, she said the union had already proposed a compromise to the district in which the UFT would ask its members not to wear them in classrooms.
The matter may not be closed, however. This was a preliminary ruling, and the judge might hear more evidence at a later date. Weingarten also indicated after the ruling that the union might pursue the matter further after Election Day.
There were some heartbreaking scenes in Dallas yesterday when 375 teachers were called out of their classrooms and handed pink slips as the cash-strapped district carried through a massive layoff designed to cut costs.
Read the news story about the layoff and the personal account of a teacher who lost her job in the Dallas Morning News here and here.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa called it "a day of tremendous sadness" for the school system. Dallas previously fired hundreds of district employees, all part of a plan to avoid a projected $84 million budget shortfall.
Supporters of Chancellor Michelle Rhee's two-tiered pay system are planning a demonstration at the union's headquarters on Oct. 22. They plan to press Washington Teachers Union President George Parker to bring the contract to a vote. And over at D.C. Teacher Chic, there's a link to a petition to the same end.
In the past, Parker has said he can't submit the proposal until a tentative contract has been hammered out. Right now, the D.C. contract negotations are at a stalemate.
As Ms. Rhee skyrockets to national attention, the contract is increasingly being viewed as a litmus test for the ability of an urban superintendent to shake up traditional structures (Clay Risen makes this point nicely in his profile of her in the Atlantic Monthly here).
Only a handful of pro-green-tier teachers showed up at the last protest, but with the pressure on, perhaps we'll see more this go-around.
Over at NCLB: Act II, my colleague David Hoff makes a great point about the new Century Foundation volume on reforming NCLB. With all the focus on accountability, there's not much discussion of the law's teacher-quality provisions, he writes. And they are important: NCLB was the first version of ESEA to set a minimum teacher-qualification standard for poor schools.
Here's a list of what will likely be the big teacher issues to be hammered out in the NCLB reauthorization.
1. The "Highly Qualified" Designation: Most teachers are now highly qualified. However, there was a brief controversy in 2006 when the Education Department tried to get states to close their alternate HQT pathways for veteran teachers (known as "HOUSSE") after discovering that states were letting teachers earn additional content-area endorsements using the process. Will a reauthorized bill phase out this process once and for all?
2. Equitable Distribution of Teachers: Few people noted that last year's draft bill made all states' teacher-quality funding contingent on whether states were making progress on their plans to equitably distribute teachers among schools. I haven't checked up on this issue in a while so I don't know whether any progress has been made on these plans. But with NCLB's focus on equity for poor students, I'm sure it will come up.
3. Performance Pay: A performance-pay program in the 2007 "discussion draft" created some ill will between the House Education and Labor Committee Chairman, George Miller, and the two teachers' unions. Will we see a second performance-pay smackdown in the future?
4. Title II: I'm always surprised that so little is written about how states spend the $3 billlion they receive annually through this NCLB program, which Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently termed "the consummate local control pot of money" in an interview. Most of it supports professional development of varying quality and class-size reduction. The big bugaboo here: It isn't clear whether class size will be given its own funding stream (as it was pre-NCLB); maintained as an eligible use of funds in Title II; or excised from federal law altogether. You can bet the teachers' unions will fight to prevent the latter.
So John McCain wants to cut back on teacher-certification standards. And then he wants to weed out the bad teachers.
Here's his quote from last night's debate: "We need to encourage programs such as Teach For America and Troops to Teachers where people, after having served in the military, can go right to teaching and not have to take these examinations which — or have the certification that some are required in some states."
At another point he said, "We need to find bad teachers another line of work."
So what he's saying is that we admit anyone without checks and controls into the teaching profession, and then go about finding and getting rid of the bad ones?
Umm, hold on Senator, but wouldn't it be better if we found good teachers in the first place? Then we wouldn't have to worry about spending as many resources hunting down the bad ones.
As for Barack Obama, he said it was "critically important for us to recruit a generation of new teachers, an army of new teachers, especially in math and science, give them higher pay, give them more professional development and support in exchange for higher standards and accountability."
Obama also spent quite some time appealing to swing- and red-state voters reiterating his support for issues like performance pay and charter schools, and throwing in the fact that his position on these issues has not gone down well with the teachers' unions.
"I support charter schools and pay for performance for teachers. Doesn't make me popular with the teachers' union," he said.
The National Education Association, however, was quick to give a thumbs-up to Obama's performance in last night's debate.
"Senator Obama's vision for the future of this country, and the future of the American economy, couldn't be more different than McCain's. While Obama calls for early-childhood education, professional pay, college affordability, parental involvement, and full funding for critical education programs, McCain calls for more of the same, including voucher schemes and rolling back teacher-certification standards," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement.
You can read more about the debate and the candidates' positions on education issues from my colleague Michele McNeil here.
I went to a roundtable discussion last week on performance-pay programs hosted by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. In attendance were representatives from a variety of programs, including several of the Teacher Incentive Fund grants.
The attendees brought up a number of interesting challenges they face as they implement their programs. I've listed several of the key themes below.
1. Transitions. Mark Bounds, the teacher-quality leader for South Carolina, noted that a new pay structure can be hard to swallow for teachers who have put in 20 or 30 years under an old system. The systems must allow for some type of transition, he contended. "It's important to honor the existing salary schedule," said Bounds."We can't change the world in a day."
2. Sustainability. Carla Stevens, Houston's assistant superintendent for research and accountability, suggested teachers aren't likely to buy into a program that doesn't seem like it's going to be around all that long. "People [will] say, "This is another flash-in-the-pan thing; why shouId I pay attention,' " Stevens said. A case in point: Several Washington Teachers Union officials expressed that about the D.C. plan Chancellor Michelle Rhee is promoting. The system, which would provide up to $20,000 in bonuses to teachers, would hinge at least initially on private-foundation grants. WTU members are wondering what would happen to the program if the private funds are exhausted.
3. Costs. Performance-pay systems can be really expensive, especially when layered on top of existing salary structures. Maybe too expensive? It's one concern for Dan Weisberg. "It may be a bridge too far to redo the step-and lanes [salary-schedule] system, but it's too expensive to build [performance-pay] on top of a lock-step salary schedule," opined Weisberg, the chief executive for human capital for New York City, which has a new schoolwide bonus system. "If you don't crack that issue, I'm not sure how you reward those doing a great job now [and] signal to those coming out of college that this is a profession you want them to go into," he said.
Spellings, in an interview I had with her after the roundtable, also brought up this issue. "I think, as painful as it might be in times of scare resources, we’re kidding ourselves if we think there’s unlimited resources to have all these things piled on top of each other," she said. "I think it’s a serious policy question."
So what does this all come down to? Several attendees said these questions raise the need for research, research, research on these programs. And it seems logical to assume that everything from bonus amount, design of professional development, and changes to the pay structure could all affect these programs' ability to change recruitment, retention, and student-achievement rates.
Unfortunately, while the TIF grants are seeding some really interesting programs, some observers aren't sure they're going to be great for solving the research question. Only three of the 34 TIF grants are employing a randomized or quasi-experimental design to evaluate their programs that allow for researchers to draw cause-and-effect conclusions about the programs.
An Associated Press story this week said the Tucson school district has launched a $550,000 effort to recruit more minority teachers with the hope of diversifying its staff and giving minority students a better chance of seeing themselves as part of the education system.
Not surprisingly, the move is spurred by the fact that the district sees a disconnect between the numbers of teachers belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups and students from these groups.
Districts have for decades worried about the difficulties of attracting minority teachers, and some have launched aggressive efforts to do so. Many observers have weighed in on how this can be done, including the National Education Association.
But in recent years, some of the newer recruitment programs and teacher-preparation pathways have had success in this area.
I have a story this week about the Boston Teacher Residency, a yearlong, highly selective preparation route that enrolls more than 50 percent of minority candidates each year. It offers candidates a strong focus on classroom experience. Candidates get a stipend and don't have to pay their tuition if they stay in Boston's schools for three years after graduation. Residency programs have become so popular, Sen. Barack Obama has included them in his education plan. You can read more about the Democratic presidential nominee's plan from my colleague Alyson Klein here.
Meanwhile, alternative-preparation programs like the New Teacher Project have shown that aggressive recruitment and the removal of bureaucratic hurdles can help bring in minority candidates.
School districts struggling with recruiting minority teachers might want to take a closer look at what it is these programs are doing.
A teachers' association that calls itself nonpartisan says it is organizing thousands of teachers to march to the nation's capital this Saturday to protest "teacher abuse" by administrators.
Myra Sawyers, who heads the Virginia-based Educators for Progressive Instructional Change, says that teachers are tired of being "not respected and the poor compensation." With the elections around the corner, this appeared to be a good time to draw attention to the topic, she said.
"Teachers are being harassed, demeaned, and they are never given serious attention because the powers-that-be shut them down," she said.
Now while none of those sound like new complaints to us, nor—we expect—to the powers-that-be, Sawyers hopes that the rally, which the teachers plan to hold at the foot of the Capitol, is going to shake lawmakers into giving teachers a greater role in influencing standards and policies.
She said more than a thousand teachers have registered on EPIC's Web site, and she has heard from hundreds more from around the nation who plan to attend.
And in case some teachers are worried about retribution, EPIC will provide paper bags so they can cover their faces.
Joe Williams, over at Democrats for Education Reform, has an interesting take on Buttongate. He suggests that the United Federation of Teachers' support for teachers wearing Obama buttons will help the public forget that the AFT went all out for Hillary, not Obama, during primary season.
I doubt the lawsuit will help Obama forget this turn of events, though, and it will be interesting to see how AFT's support for Hillary is going to affect the union's relationship with Obama, if he becomes president.
It could have no effect at all: A pragmatic individual might respect an organization that staked out a clear position early on in the primary game.
It seemed inevitable that these tough economic times would eventually affect teachers in cash-strapped school districts. Now comes news that the Dallas school district, facing an $84 million shortfall this fiscal year, has decided to lay off nearly 1,100 employees, including about 550 teachers.
More than 400 of the lost jobs, according to the Associated Press, include teachers in the core-subject areas of mathematics, science, social studies, and English. An additional 500 employees—such as teacher aides, hall monitors, and clerks—will also be cut.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa has promised a "deliberate and thoughtful" process in determining which teachers would lose their jobs, watched over by the two teacher unions in the district.
There may be more such news in coming months, as districts teeter under the financial crisis. You can read about how the crisis is affecting school districts in this article by my colleague Michelle Davis.
New York City teachers have taken to federal court their fight against a school district policy that bans teachers from wearing campaign pins in schools, saying it violates their rights to free speech and political expression.
The United Federation of Teachers today filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking a temporary restraining order against the policy, which, according to the UFT, has been on the books but has not been followed for decades. But on Oct. 1, city schools Chancellor Joel Klein asked principals in an e-mail to enforce it.
UFT President Randi Weingarten told reporters today that “it doesn’t matter whether you support Democratic Senator Barack Obama or Republican Senator John McCain. As voters, we all should have the right to express our views."
There have been similar incidents in other districts: Just last week, teachers in Soquel, Calif., were asked to leave their political buttons behind when entering classrooms. But the issue raises interesting questions about freedom of expression for teachers.
The union argues, rightly so, that teachers are individuals with responsibilities as professionals and citizens that they need to balance.
On the other hand, I don't think most workplaces would look kindly on their employees wearing political buttons on the job.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is not too happy about a recent New York Times article on D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's proposed performance-pay plan for teachers, which she says falls way short of a merit-pay plan Weingarten signed off on in New York City earlier this year.
In a letter to the newspaper that appeared this morning, Weingarten, who also heads the United Federation of Teachers in New York, says the plan "that you applaud is one that Chancellor Rhee intends to impose upon teachers, not one that she hopes to develop with teachers."
Rhee's plan, she adds, shows "no effort to replicate the types of programs that encourage creativity and risk-taking by teachers that have been so rewarding to both children and teachers in New York City."
Many in the AFT's Washington affiliate have been opposed to the plan, so Weingarten's anger is not surprising. But here's where we are confused: When the New York plan was put forward, the inside word was that Weingarten wasn't too happy about it because it does base a good part of the bonuses on student test scores—something unions just don't like. But the UFT ultimately gave in because the relentless Joel Klein administration simply wouldn't give up. Now Weingarten has always praised the plan in public, but when did it go from being one that was forced down the union's throat to one that's the answer to teachers' prayers everywhere?
Maybe after last month's news that 6,000 teachers in New York would get $19.7 million under the plan?
Eduwonkette has an interesting post up about the dismissal of a popular Wilson High School teacher. She suggests that this situation shows the weakness in D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's strategy to permit principals more say over the hiring, firing, and remediation of teachers.
If principals can't be trusted to make evaluative decisions about teachers, or if those decisions are too subjective, then what should these evaluations be based on?
Teachers have some real concerns with supposedly objective measures of their performance, too. For good reason: Researchers are still trying to figure out the best methodologies for using standardized test scores to estimate the "value added" of teachers on their students' achievement. (See my colleague Debra Viadero's write up of this issue here.)
Perhaps the answer is to institute a mix of subjective and objective measures in teacher evaluations, or to use multiple kinds of evaluations before arriving at a determination about whether a teacher needs remediation and/or should be put on a track to dismissal. Of course, those raise additional questions about how to arrive at the right "mix" of measures and who besides principals ought to be conducting the evaluations.
There's an important subtext to Eduwonkette's post that also deserves some attention. Just how accurate do evaluations need to be? If even one teacher is misidentified, is that too many? What's the appropriate level of safeguards around teacher evaluations, and what should those safeguards look like?
(This underlying issue of accuracy is a big one in today's Age of Accountability. Most of the wrangling over No Child Left Behind fundamentally has to do with whether the AYP measure is accurately identifying schools needing assistance and whether tweaks to N-sizes, confidence intervals, growth models, etc. improve or enervate accuracy.)
It's been quiet out there of late in the comments section. Let's hear some feedback from our readers on this issue.
It's a frequent complaint by Washington policy types: Too little is known about local collective bargaining processes and local media don't pay enough attention to negotations until contracts are finalized.
In Philadelphia, students are protesting in an attempt to bring attention to the contract's effects on teacher distribution, according to this story.
The students say the district and union are not paying enough attention to equitably distributing "highly qualified," experienced teachers across the district.
"I've seen students cut class and come to my classroom to avoid bad teachers," the Philadelphia Inquirer article quotes one student as saying. "The system of teacher distribution in Philadelphia is broken."
Like sands through the hourglass, so continues the soap opera of the D.C. teacher-contract negotiations.
The contract hinges on a "red"/"green" tier proposal that would give green-tier teachers the opportunity to earn $20,000 annually in performance bonuses, contingent on their forgoing tenure for a year. The red tier resembles the traditional system of salary boosts. The contract also would formally dismantle seniority for teacher hiring and transfers.
DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, evidently tired of the stalemate between her district and the Washington Teachers Union, announced this morning her plans to move forward with an alternate "Plan B" for teacher-quality improvements.
It will involve the creation of a new performance-evaluation system based primarily on student achievement; implementation of a 90-day plan to remove ineffective teachers; and a move to bypass the senority system through a series of laws that allows the district to make staffing adjustments based on factors other than length of service.
"We cannot waste any more time in our quest to ensure superior educators in every classroom," Rhee said in a statement.
I spoke to George Parker about these developments. He wasn't thrilled, saying that Ms. Rhee's rhetoric feeds into the fears that the district's teacher force already harbors: that she wants to fire teachers.
The breaking point continues to be the issue of tenure under the green-tier proposal. Parker has long argued for an appeals process for those teachers who opt for the green tier and are not granted tenure. He said both he and Rhee have laid out proposals for an appeals process but couldn't compromise on the details.
Now, Mr. Parker said, he wants the tenure issue off the table altogether.
"I think it is important that we come to a realization that the concept of performance and incentive pay offered by the green tier is separate and apart from everything to do with tenure and seniority," he told me. "What does giving up tenure have to do with your performance?"
It's not fair, he added, that veteran teachers who may be effective wouldn't have the chance to earn the bonuses unless they put their jobs at risk.
Though neither side has yet declared an impasse, it's a good bet that the contract will go to arbitration next.
In the meantime, under D.C. rules, Rhee can set the evaluation procedure on her own. But that proposal goes through "impact bargaining" with WTU, which can object and send it to an arbitrator to decide.
My head is spinning.
Don't change that dial - we'll bring you more soon.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to try for a third term in office.
American Federation of Teachers/United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten responds:
“Personally, I have always been opposed to term limits, as has this union. I am also, as are so many people, very concerned about the economy, and I am grateful the mayor is willing to step up. That said, I am very concerned, given that New Yorkers have twice spoken about this issue in referendums, and because of that, I think the most democratic way to change term limits is to go back to the people.”
It seems pretty mild given the number of disagreements between Weingarten and the duo of Bloomberg and his schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. On the other hand, AFT itself has no term limits, so this is a delicate balancing act for the union leader.
Anyone know the last time AFT put the issue of term limits to its own members for a vote?
The McCain-Obama war has made it into the classroom. Teachers at a California high school will no longer wear "Educators for Obama" buttons after a parent who supports John McCain complained.
John Hadley says the teachers at his 16-year-old daughter's school in Soquel, Calif., were attempting to politically influence students.
In California, educators can wear political buttons at work except during classroom instruction, unless the matter has a direct bearing on an education issue, such as a proposed school bond or contract matter. But the state also allows districts to set limits on the political activities of teachers during the school day.
The buttons were supplied by the local teachers' union.
I recently did a story on two states, Idaho and Georgia, that are moving to standardize their teacher-evaluation processes through the use of performance-based frameworks. These frameworks spell out what good teaching should look like and what types of evidence evaluators should consider in making determinations about teacher performance.
One of the subtexts that I didn't get to explore fully in this story concerns whether student- achievement data should be part of these evaluations. It's a tough question that runs parallel to the debate over the place of test scores in performance-pay programs.
One of the teacher-evaluation experts I spoke to, Charlotte Danielson, has a lot of concerns with the use of test-score data for evaluation purposes given the still-developing research base around "value added" methodologies for isolating teachers' contributions to student learning.
"The details of it are so fraught, that I’m not optimistic about it being done in any fair way," Danielson told me. "High stakes and high rigor is fine; what worries me is high stakes, low rigor."
Some groups, like the National Council on Teacher Quality, argue that states should make objective measures of student learning the preponderant criteria for evaluations. Only Florida currently does so; 15 other states look at some type of achievement data. And in South Carolina, an educator cannot be deemed satisfactory on an evaluation if he or she does not score sufficiently high on the student-learning portion of the evaluation.
Sandi Jacobs, an NCTQ official, said student achievement needn't be limited to test-score data. It could include examples of student work.
Idaho isn't going wading into this controversy for now. A draft of the state's evaluation standards will likely require teachers to demonstrate how they use assessments in their teaching, but won't actually base the evaluations on assessment results, said Tom Luna, the state superintendent.
Georgia, though, is putting a tentative toe into this pool. Its new evaluation instrument, being piloted in about 30 districts, includes a requirement for teachers to show their students are learning.
The state will leave it up to each district to identify the measurement instrument to be used, while individual principals, administrators, and teachers will set the benchmarks that indicate that a teacher is "emergent," "proficient," or "exemplary" in improving student achievement.
An official I spoke to in the state education department, Barbara Lunsford, said she hopes the pilot will produce feedback about how best to integrate student-achievement data into evaluations without negative consequences.
"We want [to have] that conversation about how do you hold a teacher accountable for student learning in a fair, justified way.That’s the elephant in the room," she said. "We don’t want any system that jeopardizes teachers' wanting to be in schools where kids have [the greatest needs]."
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