March 2009 Archives

It's turning out to be a day of wonk-tastic posts at Teacher Beat, but when there are billions of dollars hanging in the balance, details really do matter.

Case in point: The accountability principles in the stimulus bill require districts that receive Title I recovery funds to "report a school-by-school listing of per-pupil educational expenditures from state and local sources."

Right now, it's not clear whether these expenditures are going to include actual teacher salaries. Under the current Title I, districts can just submit a district-wide salary average to prove that resources are equitably allocated among high- and low-poverty school districts. But, as groups like the Education Trust and the Center for American Progress have shown, low-income schools frequently hire less-experienced teachers with lower salaries. That means, these groups say, that the so-called "comparability" of resources are anything but.

But I'm hearing that it's possible the guidance Education Department plans to release next week could require accounting of actual salaries. That would create a big reporting challenge for districts. And it would also likely signal the Obama administration's longer-term plans for Title I comparability.

You can read David Hoff's much more detailed story on the comparability issue here.

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I'm hearing rumblings that the Obama administration is going to take the teacher-effectiveness and teacher-distribution language in the stimulus bill seriously. If you're looking for a primer on those issues, take a look at this story I wrote not long ago.

Delaware is one of a handful of states that's doing some really exciting work on teacher distribution. The state, in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Education Laboratory, the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center, and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality—three federally supported technical-assistance/research bodies—is using state teacher data and surveys of administrators, to figure out the working conditions and policies that seem to contribute to the uneven distribution of teacher talent. (I neglected to mention two of those partners in the story. Thanks to several readers for pointing this out.)

Teacher Beat will keep you updated as we learn more about what Delaware discovers about distribution, and also once we have a better sense of what the Education Department expects to see in applications for the state stabilization funds.

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During our interview with Education Secretary Arne Duncan the other day, my colleagues Michele and Alyson pressed him on the assurances states need to fulfill in order to receive their second chunk of money from the economic-stimulus package. In his answer about state data systems, he said that states should ensure that those systems can link student and teacher data. If you could track this down to the schools of education, you could determine whether some programs typically produced teachers of higher or lower quality, he said.

This isn't as far-fetched as it might sound. Louisiana is already using such data to evaluate its programs; other states such as Ohio, aren't far behind. Also, the head of the national accrediting body for colleges of education recently agreed that states need to step up their oversight of preparation routes.

Building on that, I asked Duncan if he'd press the states to do more to close poor programs. The new Higher Education Act has more reporting requirements that, supposedly, will make it easier to distinguish program quality:

Duncan was pretty unequivocal that weak preparation programs should be closed down, and he said that alternative routes should be held to similar standards.

Again, though, as with removing ineffective teachers, I suspect this will be a challenging thing for him to follow through on. Presumably, he could withhold higher-ed funds from states that don't take this seriously (such dollars are the collateral for teacher-college accountability, much as Title I dollars are for K-12 accountability under No Child Left Behind). But given that a lot of higher-ed funds come in the form of student loans, that would be politically tricky.

I also asked Duncan what he thought the role of the teachers' unions should be as the Obama administration pressed forward. His answer was rather interesting.

On the one hand, he clearly cast teachers' unions as equally concerned about kids as they are about their members. On the other hand, he made it clear that unions will not be spared from rethinking long-standing structures.

But this was my favorite quote:

"What the unions have that maybe they haven't felt in the past is that this is a historic, unprecedented amount of resources coming into schools, and are literally saving hundreds and thousands of teaching jobs, great union jobs, that’s really important. And unions are going to have a seat at the table, and I'm talking to the union leaders virtually on a weekly basis."

The syntax is a bit hard to parse. What do you think it means that Duncan brought up "union jobs"? Do they owe him one now? Or is this really an olive branch after eight years of less congenial relationships (and presumably fewer phone calls) between the Education Department and the unions?

As always, Duncan is a tad hard to read. We'll just have to be patient and wait to see what the administration has in store.

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A group of Ed Week reporters and editors met with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan yesterday, including Politics K-12 divas Alyson Klein and Michele McNeil. Not about to be out-diva-ed, yours truly talked his way into this powwow and hit up the new Ed Sec with a bunch of teacher-policy questions.

As there's been so much chatter about performance pay, I decided to focus my questions on other issues that have been raised of late. One was to follow up on President Obama's recent speech and on language in the FY 2010 budget request that suggest the new administration will take a tougher stance on identifying and removing teachers who don't improve, even after given intense support.

Duncan gave a bit of a circuitous answer, as you can see from this video.

In a follow-up question, I pressed Duncan to explain which mechanism he'd use—such as a funding stream or program—to help districts identify and reward effective teachers and encourage ineffective ones to move on."This is where I think my job is easy," Duncan said. "I don't have to come up with these ideas. There are great programs around the country that are identifying that talent, rewarding that talent different ways." Such programs should be brought to scale, he added.

He highlighted Chicago's Teacher Advancement Program as an example of a coordinated system for supporting and advancing teaching talent. Essentially, TAP couples strong systems of professional development and evaluation with performance-based pay. I have a big story on the TAP program coming out next week, so you'll be able to read a lot more about it soon.

Duncan also said that the incentive or performance-pay programs should not merely reward individual teachers, but also take into account everyone who works in the school building and supports student learning. "When you reward folks, you don't just want to reward individual teachers, and you don't want to pit teachers against each other. That' s a recipe for disaster. Many of these programs haven't worked because they've made teachers shut down," he said.

Schoolwide performance pay, it should be noted, is also the type favored by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Interestingly, TAP contains both an individual- and a schoolwide-bonus component. Hmm, could there be a compromise on the horizon?

In demeanor, Duncan makes an interesting contrast to his predecessor Margaret Spellings. Spellings presented herself as alternately folksy and steely, while Duncan is consistently genial. But he remains very on message and, as a result, somewhat less likely to drop the kind of bombshell quotes Spellings was famous for.

We'll soon have another video and related post for you on Duncan's views of teacher education, alternative certification, and on the role of the teachers' unions here at Teacher Beat. And over at Politics K-12, they'll have more for you on the stimulus.

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Now THIS is interesting. Apparently, there's a big panel discussion on 21st-century skills going on today at the National Education Association's headquarters. NEA, one of the founding partners of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, is hosting.

I heard about the event in a very roundabout way and sent a puzzled e-mail to a bunch of folks inquiring whether I could drop by and attend, since I've written about 21st-century skills in two recent stories. I was extended an invitation by one NEA official, only to have it rescinded minutes later by another.

The panelists all appear to be supportive of 21st-century skills. They include NEA Executive Director John Wilson; Ken Kay, the president of P21; and Paige Kuni, the worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel and one of the P21 board members. Also expected to be in attendance is Barbara Pryor, a legislative assistant for U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. Don't know where the senator stands on P21 but I assume, given that West Virginia's been pushing hard on 21st-century skills, that he's also supportive.

Is this an opportunity for proponents of 21st-century skills to lick their wounds from the battering they've gotten lately? Maybe, but it could be more than that. The invitation list, and I'm assuming it's invitation-only, reads like a who's who of the top education organizations in town. CCSSO? Check. AASA? Check. NASBE, AACTE, NSBA, PTA, NAESP, NASSP? Check, check.

On the other hand, also on the invitation list are a bunch of members from the American Federation of Teachers, including AFT Secretary-Treasurer Antonia Cortese, who's clearly not a fan of P21.

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From Guest Blogger Dakarai A. Aarons

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will have a hand in shaping the 2012 presidential primary calendar. The union head was among those named to the new Democratic Change Commission by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. (Hat tip to POLITICO.com for first reporting the news.)

The 37-member group is charged with recommending changes to the Democratic Party’s rules for the 2012 presidential nominating and delegate-selection process. The nominating calendar became a source of serious tension during the 2008 campaign, after Florida and Michigan defied party leaders and held their Democratic primaries earlier than normal.

Weingarten is joined on the commission by at least two others affiliated with education: Tuscon, Ariz., school board member Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.; and Robert Hampshire, a Carnegie Mellon University public-policy professor who helped organize informal gatherings for Obama supporters.

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Every Monday morning, our executive editor here at Ed Week puts up a copy of the paper from 25 years ago in the kitchen. Some stories now seem a bit frozen in time—you don't hear so much about asbestos fines nowadays—but others are eerily prescient.

"Teaching: The Pressure for Change Is Mounting" screams a headline over two stories. One is about a National Education Association committee considering teacher career ladders. The other is about the sorry state of teacher evaluation, circa 1984.

Some of the grafs could be written today. One of them reads: "The success of current efforts to redefine the way teachers are rewarded depends directly on the ability of states and school systems to find fair and reliable ways of selecting the teachers who are to be promoted and paid more." Translation: Test scores were problematic back then, too.

Both articles were written by Tom Toch, who wrote for Ed Week back then. Just last year, in his post as co-director of the Education Sector, Toch authored a paper on teacher evaluation and found that most districts' evaluation systems are still terrible.

There seems to be a bit more progress on career ladders/differentiated pay, but as Mike Antonucci pointed out recently, an NEA resolution says that such additional compensation beyond the single salary schedule "must not be based on education employee evaluation, student performance, or attendance."

A lot's happened in 25 years, and we're seeing some elements of the teaching profession change (alternate routes come to mind). But pay and evaluation have largely stayed the same. Some of this seems to come down to money; the story notes that better evaluation systems, and training for teachers/administrators on how to use them, is costly. That's an issue now, too. On the other hand, the only model from these stories that I recognize as still extant is the Toledo peer-assistance and -review model, which perhaps lends credence to the unions' assertions that these things are only ever going to work if teachers are involved in creating them.

Twenty-five years from now, will we be continuing to write these same stories? Or will only the dates have changed? Someone send me a copy of this blog item then—and my picture too, since I'll want to remember what I looked like with hair.

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Elizabeth Green has the scoop on the latest in the New York KIPP unionization at the Always Mentally Prepared campus in Brooklyn. At least one teacher there has pulled her support for the union. In the meantime, the staff of two other KIPP schools have sent in a petition to sever their contact with the United Federation of Teachers. Commentary from Rotherham here.

UFT pres Randi Weingarten sounds a bit flustered in quotes posted on Alexander Russo's blog. She tries to draw a connection between the two events, blaming KIPP management for the move. "What is interesting is this move comes after the KIPP AMP teachers started their organizing drive and on the eve of the PERB hearing on recognizing the union at KIPP AMP," Weingarten said. "KIPP management is obviously fighting hard because it doesn't want their schools to be unionized." I'm betting KIPP would disagree with that analysis.

Obvious or not, the timing on this is politically tricky for the union, now that Obama's gung-ho for increasing the number of charter schools and a number of urban superintendents hope to use charters to get out from under collective-bargaining rules.

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From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

In an attempt to prevent dispersing more pink slips than necessary (as is the modus operandi in California, among other states), Arizona legislators are considering a bill that would push back the state deadline for sending layoff notices from April 15 to June 15.

District officials in favor of House Bill 2630, which is expected to pass in the next few days, see it as a necessary move to avoid driving worried educators out of the state. The Arizona Education Association opposes the bill, stating that it would give laid-off teachers little time to find new jobs.

However, the reality is that the budget has not been passed before June 15 in the last three years, so there’s a good chance a two-month delay would not change the numbers. John Wright, the president of the AEA, told the East Valley Tribune that the bill “simply delays tough decisions." In all likelihood, the state budget will not be finalized, and teachers will have remained in contract limbo for longer than necessary.

UPDATE, March 20: The Arizona state legislature rejected the proposal to extend the layoff-notification deadline. Pink slips will be sent out by April 15th, as usual. Representatives of the Arizona Education Association are pleased with the decision, saying teachers need as much notice as possible about potential layoffs. Some dissatisfied Republicans, claiming that education budget cuts will be less than the estimated $900 million, had accused the bill’s opponents of “fear mongering.”

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I recently wrote a story on the staffing situation in Providence, R.I. The state commissioner, Peter McWalters, has directed district officials to override the collective bargaining agreement and to staff open positions through a criterion-based hiring process, rather than teachers' seniority perferences (see here for the story and here for some background).

The head of the Providence Teachers Union, Steven Smith, wasn't able to comment at press time, but I got a chance to speak with him earlier this week. Not surprisingly, he's unimpressed by the directive. For instance, it ignores the turnover within the rank of school principals and administrators, he asserted.

"[T]hey have had complete control of staffing at the administrative level, principals and vice principals," he told me. "I can't even fathom how many building changes have occurred in the past seven to eight years. ... You have this merry-go-round of principals and now you want them to pick their staff?"

Smith said his union isn't conceptually opposed to schools having more autonomy over hiring, but teachers should be included in the staff-selection process and he hopes that will be included as the district provides more details on the criterion-based staffing. "That's something we'd be much more agreeable to," he said.

He said the directive also ignored other issues in the district such as school safety and an escalating number of incidents of unruly behavior in the schools.

Smith also sounded piqued that the order also contains a "staffing stability" requirement for schools to keep a teacher facing a layoff within that school to serve as the designated substitute teacher. The proposal was initially the union's idea, he contended.

"I should really sue McWalters and the district for plagiarism," he said.

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From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

Last week, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board, facing an $87 million budget deficit, approved a plan that would lay off 456 teachers and 83 assistant principals, according to the Charlotte Observer. Heated that administrative contracts are not being slashed first, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators responded by organizing a rally and marching to the government offices with signs and banners.

Superintendent Peter Gorman has emphasized that the plan is no more than a draft and that he is looking elsewhere to make cuts. Although stimulus money may help, he claims, the state budget looks less than promising and a blueprint is needed now.

While teacher layoffs are becoming pervasive, the cutbacks in North Carolina are attention-worthy for a few reasons. First, the layoffs will be based primarily on performance rather than seniority (contrary to initial reports). This obviously riles up the unions, which have less bargaining clout in a right-to-work state such as North Carolina. In addition, teachers in high-needs areas (such as math, ELL, and special education) and Teach for America recruits will be not be affected by the layoffs.

Does it seem somewhat contradictory to declare performance as the top priority yet exempt entire groups from having to demonstrate competence to keep their jobs? More than likely, school officials see the exemptions as a logistical necessity, to ensure that high-needs classes and high-poverty schools are proportionately staffed. Yet even though teachers will unite in opposing layoffs, I imagine that giving some staff members immunity could become divisive.

In a truly meritocratic system, all teachers would be evaluated and the lowest performing let go. However, tougher decisions must be made. Will students suffer more if the one highly-qualified ELL teacher in the school is laid off and classes are canceled or if a more effective English teacher is fired in his/her place?

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Dan Willingham offers an interesting conceptual analysis on how to improve teacher evaluation here. Essentially, he says that the diagnostic can go both ways, either by over- or under-identifying which teachers aren't performing up to snuff. Finding the appropriate balance is tricky, and the unions need to advance this conversation, he writes, but that's hard for them to do because of their role as teachers' protectors.

The inimitable Andy Rotherham's take on it is here. Unions, he writes, "don’t want to use data to evaluate teachers and they don’t want to use managerial discretion. I guess that leaves the Magic 8-Ball?"

In seriousness, I myself mused about this subjective/objective dichotomy not too long ago here, and these issues of accuracy are worth exploring. First, for the grand majority of our teachers, evaluations have to serve as a road map toward improvement. Too often they don't. And secondly, no one wants a system to misidentify or penalize effective teachers. But neither should kids have to bear the brunt of ineffective teachers.

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Last Friday, I had a nice catch-up with Dennis Van Roekel, the leader of the National Education Association. We talked about the NEA's discussions about joining a larger labor coalition with AFL-CIO and Change to Win, two labor umbrella organizations that themselves are thinking of reuniting after a nasty split.

"Any discussion of where the labor movement will be in 10 to 15 years, I think NEA ought to be part of that discussion, as a 3.2 million-member organization," Van Roekel told me.

He added that a couple of factors make this a good time to consider joining the larger labor movement. First, over the last 10 years, four state affiliates of the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers have merged: in New York, Florida, Montana and Minnesota. Since AFT is an AFL-CIO member, there's a lot of crossover. He estimated that perhaps 600,000 NEA members are also part of AFL-CIO-affiliated unions. Secondly, in 2006, the NEA and AFL-CIO struck a "solidarity partnership" to allow NEA members to sit on local labor councils.

Additionally, NEA worked more closely with other unions during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles than ever before, Van Roekel said. "No matter what comes out of this, I think there will be more cooperation and collaboration with the unions. We're learning a lot more about each other."

There doesn't seem to be an official timetable for all of this, but Van Roekel said things should become clearer by mid-April.

Van Roekel also indicated that this discussion would not necessarily smooth a merger with the AFT. That's an entirely separate issue, he said.

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Here's a sobering story out of Texas with some big education implications.

According to the story, the state teacher pension system's unfunded liabilities have tripled over the last six months, to $40.4 billion. Although the system will be able to pay out benefits for current retirees, its future looks grimmer, unless the state can figure out some way to offset the liability. Other states, notably Georgia, are in a similar situation.

Lawmakers are considering increasing the percentage that employees have to pay into the system, a move that's sure to be unpopular with the teachers' associations in the state.

It will be interesting to see if these kinds of issues start a conversation about ways to rework teacher-benefit systems, such as whether it's feasible to shift from defined-benefit plans (most states have these) to defined-contribution plans. Teacher-pension issues are quite complicated so I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but in essence, under a defined-benefit plan, a state handles investments and promises teachers a guaranteed payout regardless of how the market performs. Defined-contribution plans require teachers to make investment decisions, so while they're faced with the ups and downs of the market, the state contribution tends to be less volatile. That may seem an unfair burden on teachers, but on the other hand, there's presumably less of a risk of an entire pension fund going bust.

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Some academics and policy folks are pushing back on the findings of this Mathematica study that used an experimental design to compare the student-achievement results of kids taught by graduates of several-alternate route programs with those coming from traditional teachers' colleges. My colleague Mary Ann Zehr wrote a story about the study here.

These educators argue that the study generalizes the affects of traditional and alternative programs, doesn't delve deeply enough into the quality of coursework; and doesn't offer any road map for improving either kind of program.

In one such analysis, Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond noted that both the alternative and traditional teachers had less training or coursework than most teachers do nationally and were pulled disproportionately from schools with exceptionally weak teaching forces."The sample of teachers cannot be generalized to districts and schools that draw from a better-prepared pool and hire much more selectively, or to the overall teaching pool nationally," she writes.

Barnett Berry of the Center for Teaching Quality says that the alternate-route candidates had more access to mentoring, possibly contaminating the comparison. In another post Berry writes that the study's examination of coursework did not delve into the quality of these courses, relying instead on descriptions pulled from syllabuses.

Jennifer Jennings, aka Eduwonkette, and Sean Corcoran asserted that the study's authors did not highlight the fact that many of the students taught by alternative-route programs lost ground over the course of the year: "Throughout the report, the authors find numerous cases of negative outcomes associated with [alternatively certified] teachers, but more often than not choose to deemphasize these findings."

Fellow blogger Skoolboy (aka Aaron Pallas) has this analysis. "We get a pretty clean estimate of the relative effectiveness of pairs of traditional-route and alternate-route teachers that are not representative of any population of teacher education programs, teachers, or schools," he writes. Moreover, the study, he states, does not account for the self-selection of teachers into various preparation models, nor for the fact that the teachers studied were those who drop out after just a few years.

My take on all this is that all the routes studied here were pretty crummy, and we still have a long way to go to figure out the models of teacher preparation that produce effective teachers and suit their needs. I'd like to know how various types of models might be equally effective, but offer different approaches, depending on the candidate's personal situation (undergrad, grad, career-changer, adjunct, coach, etc.)

If the worry is about coursework, for instance, the answers to the questions of when it should take place and what it should consist of are going to depend on the specific needs of the teacher candidate. Even great coursework may stress out a career-changer teacher who's already putting in 12-hour days; that coursework might need to be sequenced differently from an undergraduate, who is taking it while student teaching.

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From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

Today in California, 26,000 school district employees will find pink slips in their boxes. Although the massive dispersal of such notices by the March 15 deadline is somewhat of a yearly charade, with most of them generally being rescinded when the budget is finalized in May, teachers are preparing for the worst this year—and rightly so. Education budget cuts are estimated to land between $8.4 and $11.6 billion (the unions are predicting the higher end of the scale) and even some district officials are admitting that the outlook is bleak. "I think we'll be able to hire some back, but not as many as in years past," Steve Betando, assistant superintendent in Fremont, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Nowhere close."

Teachers are retaliating by organizing protests and asking supporters to wear pink today, for what is being dubbed Pink-Slip Friday. This seems like one of those rare issues where teachers, administrators, classified staff members, parents, and students are united in their opposition. And while many companies can justify budget-driven layoffs as a way to eliminate fluff positions or increase individuals' productivity, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who’d admit to seeing the upside to laying off teachers. Let me know what you think.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan just announced the appointment of Jo Anderson Jr., the executive director of the Illinois Education Association, as senior adviser to the department. He'll be in charge of outreach to teachers and teachers' unions.

There have been some rumblings about this, so while the appointment isn't exactly a shock, I'm told there was no analogous position under the Bush administration, which had a rocky relationship with the two national teachers' unions.

A couple of interesting things here. First, looks like we're going to get a lot of Illinois folks coming to Washington just like the "Texas contingent" under Bush. And second, I'll be curious to see how having a union official in the department influences policy development around the performance-pay and ineffective-teacher-dismissal proposals in Obama's speech.

While Anderson will clearly have the secretary's ear, I also have to wonder if it will be harder for the unions to say no thanks when Anderson pushes them to get on board with some of the administration's teacher ideas.

UPDATE: Here's what John I. Wilson, the executive director of the National Education Association, had to say about the appointment:

"Jo Anderson is an innovator. They could not have picked anyone better who is visionary and has demonstrated through deed his commitment to all children."

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From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

Last month, Stephen reported on the NSDC finding that U.S. teachers spend more time in the classroom and less time on collaboration and professional development than their peers in the highest-performing countries. (Many of our readers were right on board with the study’s findings—take a look at some of their insightful comments.)

The PD scheduling discussion came up more locally this week when a southeast Wyoming school board, prompted by a parent petition, voted to get rid of its district’s weekly staff training half-days. It’s easy to see how this case might provoke (and/or stem from) an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers. The two parties’ perspectives on scheduling are, in fact, tough to reconcile. Parents want to keep their kids in an academic environment, while teachers want to become more effective instructors. Or, if you prefer to consider more selfish motives, the parents don’t want to take off work or find child care (or subject their kids to in-school babysitting if it’s offered), and the teachers don’t want to attend training outside of school hours.

But why accept this parents' vs. teachers' mentality? As Stephen and I were discussing earlier this week, maybe it boils down to a PR problem. During those professional-development days, the districts are ideally offering invaluable research-based training that will transform classroom instruction. But as far as many parents know, teachers could be spending those half-days grading papers in their classrooms alone or, worse, sitting (sleeping?) through tedious, irrelevant seminars.

While teachers shouldn’t necessarily have to convince parents that they are using their out-of-class time wisely, the district could step in and get the message across. Perhaps those districts with the PR problem can inform parents about professional development by inviting them to follow-up workshops, sending home a PD summary, or posting the materials to the school’s Web site. Wouldn’t this keep the school accountable and assuage parental anxiety about the necessity of days off? Does your district find ways to involve parents in PD?

(As an aside, I’ve also heard of teachers who, after a day of PD, take a few minutes of class time to share what they learned with their students. It seems to me that modeling lifelong learning could be even one more benefit of PD.)

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Talk about good timing: The Anderson, Ind., school district has become the first peer- assistance and -review program in the Hoosier State.

Like the Toledo, Ohio, peer-review program, the Anderson PAR will provide targeted assistance to new teachers and to struggling veterans through a combination of peer-mentoring and -evaluation.

“PAR is an example of an innovative, successful union-led education reform,” said Dal Lawrence, who helped craft Toledo's program nearly 30 years ago. “It shows just how inaccurate the stereotype is that teacher unions are anti-reform or anti-accountability.”

The AFT has promoted PAR for quite some time, and the concept got an extra boost at its 2007 convention.

PAR will debut in Anderson this fall.

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I had the chance late yesterday to speak to Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers' president, about President Obama's education agenda-setting speech. We talked mainly about Obama's contention that there is "no excuse" for districts to keep severely underperforming teachers in the classroom. (To me, that was newsier than the talk of performance pay, which dates way back to the campaign.)

"The point he's making, that there needs to be better evaluation systems, is spot on," Weingarten told me. "The reason we see default to individual student test scores [to judge teachers] is because of the lack of reliable teacher-evaluation systems across the country."

As I expected, Weingarten brought forth the Peer Assistance and Review program, used in various permutations in Toledo, Ohio, and elsewhere, as a possible evaluation model. One of the benefits of PAR, she said, is that it doesn't rely on test scores or solely on a principal's observation for judging teacher performance; rather, it is part of a system of multiple measures.

(It's important to keep in mind that in some instances, peer review is used to determine whether a teacher gets tenure, and in other cases, it's part of the dismissal process.)

I asked Weingarten whether she thought test scores had a place as one such measure in evaluations. She didn't explicitly say no, but her response indicated skepticism. "Where they're used, they tend to become the predominant component, and it doesn't account for all the other factors related to teacher performance," she said.

The tests themselves have never been evaluated for their appropriateness in judging teachers, she added.

Interesting stuff, and sure to be on the burner as the Obama agenda moves forward.

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It's the debate that won't die! Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge blog takes issue with Ken Kay's rebuttal to the 21st-century skills smackdown of the other day. Despite Mr. Kay's contention that the argument isn't about content v. skills but how to provide students with both, the P21 Web site doesn't include examples of units that simultaneously integrate 21st-c skills and engage students in rich content, he asserts.

I took a look at the groups' skills map in core content areas, which can be found here. Here's one example for 12th grade English from the map:

"After reading a dystopian novel such as The Giver, The Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid’s Tale, or Fahrenheit 451, students will create a movie trailer that highlights universal questions raised by the novel. Students will view each others’ trailers, write up notes critiquing them, and present their feedback in a 'Siskel and Ebert' remake."

Echoing Robert's comments, a couple of educators at the panel discussion said they felt that these types of activities were poor substitutes for rich discussions of the novels' themes and literary merits.

On the other hand, these "skill maps" were put together in collaboration with associations that represent content educators, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, Mr. Kay told me in an interview. So does that mean that, even within the teaching profession, there isn't agreement about what "core content" means?

Let the debate continue...

P.S. A lot of great, thought provoking comments on this previous post on 21st-century skills. Check them out!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:12 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

In his big speech this morning, President Barack Obama reached back to grasp various threads that he's laid out—on the campaign trail, in his election platform, in his speech to a joint session of Congress, and most recently through the FY 2010 budget request—and knit them together to provide what's probably the clearest statement so far of his priorities for education and for teacher policy.

As my colleague Alyson Klein points out in this post, nothing here really should come as a surprise if you've been paying close attention to Obama since the campaign.

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel told Alyson he thought the speech was "wonderful" and that the incentive pay proposal didn't endorse "failed merit-pay plans." The money could be used to support things like National Board Certification (which is pretty much the only type of incentive pay the union formally endorses), he argued.

While that's one possible scenario, it's quite likely that there are a bunch of issues here that will indeed cause headaches when the rubber hits the road.

For instance, Obama said that he wants to see 150 districts experiment with incentive pay, coupled with stronger teacher-induction programs. Alyson suggests the $200 million in TIF spending in the recently passed stimulus bill will serve as the vehicle for this to happen. But the national teachers' unions have never been all that fond of the TIF because it doesn't explicitly say performance pay plans have to be collectively bargained, and because some districts have interpreted the requirement to base pay on objective measures of performance to mean test scores. Many unions oppose using test scores to determine individual teacher pay. In fact, the unions pitched a fit in 2007 when House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller created a performance pay proposal that included test scores and didn't explicitly reference collective bargaining.

And few of the TIF grantees (if any, I'll have to check) use National Board Certification as a way to reward effective teaching.

I suspect the administration will try to address these issues in the application for funding. (Alyson notes in a second post that the Obama administration reiterated that all of this would be done in collaboration with teachers.)

Second, Obama made a real push for improving teacher performance and removing teachers repeatedly deemed ineffective, but it really isn't clear if that means a more expedient dismissal process than the typical district's tenure-based due-process procedure, a process tied to better teacher evaluations, or some other method. It also isn't clear how Obama is going to scale all of this up: if, for instance, there will be a funding stream or some sweetener in the budget to get the initiative rolling. The 2010 budget has just a paragraph about it.

Van Roekel told Alyson he'd not yet talked with the administration about the teacher-dismissal issue, and that the current "due process" procedures are there to give teachers a chance to improve. The American Federation of Teachers didn't comment specifically about this part of Obama's speech, but the smart money says they'll again bring up peer review and assistance as a way to improve teachers and let go of underperforming ones.

Seems like the AFT's leader, Randi Weingarten, does get the potential pitfalls involved in all of this.

"As with any public policy, the devil is in the details, and it is important that teachers’ voices are heard as we implement the president’s vision," she said in a statement.

We'll bring you more as we get details.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:39 PM | Permalink | 5 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

By now, I hope you've had a chance to check out this story on the 21st-century skills movement and a group of individuals who are raising questions about it. Ken Kay, the president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the main group that advocates the incorporation of these technological, communication, and analytical skills into the curriculum, offers a lengthier explanation of his group's stance on the group's Web site here.

The argument from naysayers with respect to teachers isn't really so much one of content versus skills, it's that "project-based" instruction is an incredibly difficult kind of teaching to do without losing sight of content, and requires excellent preparation.

When I went to West Virginia to check out how the state is instituting professional development on 21st-century skills, this was one tension that even teachers who were really good at doing project-based learning fully acknowledged..

I remember watching 4th grade teacher Rachel Hull, who was in the process of doing a project-based unit with her students. Kids were asked to create a toy for Santa Claus to deliver that had to meet certain specifications, and one element of the toy involved circuits. So the students were gathered around investigating why small lightbulbs lit up when the circuits were wired one way and not another and asked to test various hypotheses about why that might be.

The problem was that in allowing kids this type of freedom, a lot of questions came up that Ms. Hull didn't know how to answer offhand. For example, she related to me that one of her students wanted to know if the circuit could power a Christmas-tree lightbulb, rather than the lighbulbs included in the project materials. Ms. Hull told me that she was going to have to look up the answer to that question and others on her own time.

Another teacher, Juanita Spinks, told me that making project-based learning relevant to kids' lives was hard to do in English/language arts. Her solution was not to throw out classic literature but to use such works as the core texts for exploring other types of narratives.

But when you multiply these challenges by 30 kids, that's a lot of extra work for a teacher. Some will be up to it; inevitably, some will not.

(I'll also take this opportunity to point out that in West Virginia, teachers were tying their projects to state content standards.)

I'd argue this debate shares some similarities with the test-prep/No Child Left Behind debate. One of the complaints about NCLB, for instance, is that it forces teachers to focus too much on preparing for tests. But most teachers would prefer to give kids a rich curriculum that will get them over what by most accounts are basic-skills tests, rather than do straight test prep.

So, does this mean that many teachers are not equipped, either because of poor training or a lack of resources and time or a less-than-supportive administration, to deliver a really powerful curriculum for kids?

If so, what do you think the solution is?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:45 AM | Permalink | 8 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

More news from The New York Times here on NEA possibly joining a larger labor coalition with the AFL-CIO. The union's president, Dennis Van Roekel, is supposedly involved in the talks.

"We have a good chance to have a basic outline to create a unified labor movement for the first time ever,” the story quotes Larry Cohen, the president of the communications workers’ union, as saying about this. “The NEA was founded more than 100 years ago and has never been an explicit part of the U.S. labor movement.”

Mike Antonucci, over at the Education Intelligence Agency, recalls the 1998 failed merger between the NEA and the AFT. He's skeptical that Van Roekel can get the membership on board. And it's true that the NEA's Representative Assembly can be difficult to persuade. At last year's convention, the membership soundly rejected a proposal to organize private-school instructors, even though that proposal was strongly pushed by the leadership.

I put in a request to the NEA for comment about all this. Let's see what they have to say.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:01 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of divergent reactions to the teacher-data report cards in New York City, see here and here. Per Elizabeth Green over at Gotham Schools, the city wants to extend the initiative for another year. (Hat tip to Elizabeth for breaking this and following it up on her blog.)

These reports are based on teachers' individual "value-added" contributions to student learning. They aren't supposed to be used for accountability purposes, merely to help the teachers improve. (The United Federation of Teachers has OK'd the use of test score data in the city's schoolwide performance-pay programs, but not for use in judging individual teachers.) I wrote a bit more about this issue here.

It'll be interesting to see if this comes up in the debate about whether to renew the mayoral control of schools, an arrangement that has put NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC Chancellor Joel Klein into power.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:46 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

As cellphones become a universal accessory among students, policymaking about their use in schools is quickly transitioning from the district to the state level. According to the Des Moines Register, 16 states now have laws restricting the use of cellphones and other devices in school. Iowa state Rep. Deborah Berry hopes to add her own state to the list of those with legal restrictions, citing concerns that the phones are both a distraction and a safety risk. "I've seen in my district where they're organizing fights" through text messages, she said recently. "It's a serious issue."

In other parts of the country, cellphone technology is being used as a teaching aide. A middle school in Keller, Texas, started a controversial pilot program replacing laptops with cheaper and more portable Verizon smartphones. In a recent Education Week article, Andrew Trotter describes some of the innovative ways teachers are using mobile technology in class, including to track student responses, record podcasts, and send assignment notices. AFT spokeswoman Janet Bass has spoken out against the use of cellphones in the classroom, saying companies such as Verizon are pushing them as a way to make money off schools.

However, the cellphone issue is much more nuanced than a good/bad debate lets on. One student in Texas recorded her teacher’s angry outburst—egregious expletives and all—through her cellphone, which eventually led the teacher to step down from his position. Was the student justified in her disregard for school cellphone restrictions if it prevented future verbal assaults? Or does this situation highlight the potential for cellphones to be used to intimidate or embarrass teachers? (Teachermagazine.org has a rousing discussion on this topic here.) In any case, it seems clear that this multifaceted policy debate will only be further complicated as cellphone and smartphone technologies advance.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 5:23 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

According to this story Hawaii's licensing board was illegally extending licenses, meaning that nearly 4,000 teachers probably don't meet the federal definition of a highly qualified teacher. Oops.

(Officials with the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board, and apparently the attorney general, dispute the charges.)

The story suggests the state could lose federal funding for this error, if indeed there is one. I doubt that will happen for a couple of reasons. First, the state's going to need the money to get these teachers properly certified, and second, the U.S. Department of Education, under the Bush administration anyway, usually redistributed withheld federal funds directly to districts. In Hawaii, there's only one school district, so that plan wouldn't amount to much.

There's no question, though, that federal monitors are going to ask for an expedient solution to all of this.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:55 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

Washington Post veteran Jay Mathews dives into the great class-size reduction debate here (check out the thoughtful comments, too.) He points out that in the recession, many districts preserve class size and make cuts elsewhere, which may not be the most cost-effective solution.

This has always been an interest of mine because of the sticky mismatches between what the research says, what districts can actually do, and the age old question of cost-effectiveness. In fact it was my very first blog post on Teacher Beat.

Contrary to popular belief, class size reduction is actually one of the few educational interventions with good research supporting it. Mathews cites the Center for Public Education study, and the long-cited STAR study in Tennessee also found lasting benefits for minority students in grades K-3. The problem, as Mathews alludes, is that most states and districts aren't in a position to reproduce the stipulations in that study: class sizes between 14 and 17 students.

And, of course, the smaller the class size the more teachers you have to hire, and there's a quality issue from that perspective. So, the argument goes, should you reduce class sizes from 25 to 23 students, for instance, or use your money to make your existing teachers more effective?

This may seem like a very conceptual debate, but it's actually a big tension that could arise in the reauthorization of the No Child law. Edu-geeks may recall that President Clinton started a federal class-size reduction program that, in 2002, was folded into NCLB's state teacher-quality grant program, Title II. (When that happened, lawmakers removed most of the Clinton-era quality-control stipulations, meaning such funds could be used to reduce classes in high school where there's little research to support the intervention.)

Now, the National Education Association has been pushing to restore a $2 billion separate class-size funding stream. Before the stimulus changed everything, I would have thought that this would be impossible, given that Title II gets only about $3 billion and lawmakers are being asked to repurpose that money in other ways. What will happen? Good question.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:22 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

From Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

The Center for American Progress held a panel discussion on Friday regarding its paper on how states can improve alternative-certification programs (see Stephen’s post). In addition to Robin Chait and Michele McLaughlin, co-authors of the paper, there were three other ed experts on the panel: Alex Johnston, CEO of a nonprofit advocating for public schools known as ConnCAN; Richelle Patterson, a senior policy analyst for NEA; and Scott Cartland, principal of Webb/Wheatley Elementary School in northeast Washington, D.C.

Although most of the panel members were in agreement about the efficacy and necessity of alternative-certification programs, Patterson provided the divergent viewpoint. She was careful to explain that while the NEA does support multiple routes to certification, especially those for career-switchers with deep content knowledge, it opposes inconsistent licensure standards and programs that promote short-term commitments.

Teach For America, Patterson contended, and similar programs are good models for recruitment but fail to assist in teacher retention. "TFA teachers—they’re in, they’re out. Teaching should not be a profession that's continually in revolution," she said.

Cartland, who voluntarily left a high-achieving school to take over the restructuring effort at a failing high-poverty school in northeast D.C., provided a convincing ground-level argument about the continued need for high-quality alternative programs. He explained that nine of the 11 new teachers he hired were from Teach For America and the D.C. Teaching Fellows programs because they were the only ones willing to take on the job. "There is no ed school that can guarantee people will stay even past the first month; the environments are just that challenging."

Patterson remained concerned with the assumption that teachers, rather than the system they work within, should have to change. "Are we just putting a Band-Aid on a real situation? If the real issue is poor working environments or lack of respect . . . shouldn’t we work on the real issue?"

It appears there is another dilemma altogether that is not being directly addressed: temporary vs. long-term solutions. It’s easy to see programs like TFA as Band-Aids because they are not focused on retention—but most would question if it is better to let our education system bleed. With one-third of all teachers certified through alternative programs, as the report indicates, where would the nation's public education system be without this supply of teachers, a disproportionate number of whom are willing to enter urban and rural schools? Would teachers be placed in under-resourced schools unwillingly? Would some of the toughest classrooms in the country be left without teachers altogether? Systemic change takes time, and in the meanwhile, students will continue to attend schools each day.

With more than half of the education stimulus funds headed to the states, the question as to whether the country should pump funds into what is needed now or what can help schools down the road is more important than ever. Some might say two-year commitments are beneficial for now, with the goal of weaning ourselves off these programs and working toward the proliferation of retention-oriented programs—such as teacher-residency programs—in the future.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 2:51 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

I'm on the mailing list for a lot of teachers' union trade papers, which are useful for gauging issues of importance to local affiliates.

The New York Teacher, a publication for the United Federation of Teachers, contained a bit of a surprise in the Feb. 19 edition: a new feature, called "Principals In Need of Improvement."

"When a principal gravely mismanages a school and makes life impossible for the staff, it tends to happen in the shadows. Many staff members are intimidated and afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals. But for the sake of the staff and of the students, this situation needs to be brought into public view. As a result, these stories will be told in this occasional series," the paper states.

Looks like the union's not afraid to play hardball with some of those principals it asserts are arbitrary and vindictive.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:42 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

The National Education Association is getting cozier with the AFL-CIO and its rival Change to Win, two umbrella labor coalitions that are themselves thinking of reuniting, according to this AP story.

The American Federation of Teachers is a longtime member of AFL-CIO but the NEA has always been a bit aloof about its status as a cross between a professional organization and a labor union. NEA did grew closer to AFL-CIO in 2006, when NEA and AFL-CIO struck an agreement allowing NEA officials to sit on local AFL-CIO labor councils. Now, it looks it's considering joining the larger labor movement.

One of the subtexts here, the story points out, involves creating a unified front for supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, a labor priority. The bill would allow for union organization through "card check" or signature cards rather than through the secret ballot. If you've been following the KIPP unionization drama in New York City you'll want to get well versed in this bill. It could presumably make such organization easier in less labor-friendly states.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:03 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)