August 2009 Archives

Some bad news for supporters of intensive, or "high quality," teacher induction: Teachers were no more likely to boost student achievement or to stay in the profession after two years of these services, compared with teachers who received less-intensive forms of mentoring, according to a new Institute of Education Sciences report released this afternoon.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because this report offers the second year of findings from a three-year study. I wrote about the year-one effects here. The findings are notable because of the study's "gold standard" research design, which involves a set of "treatment" and "comparison" schools.

Intensive-mentoring programs are typically more comprehensive and structured than the more informal "buddy systems" that are widespread in America's schools. Mentors in the program are also more carefully screened and assigned to novices. The two most widely known models are those run by the New Teacher Center, in Santa Cruz, Calif., and by the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, which were used in the schools studied here.

The year-two study was conducted by comparing a subset of schools that received a second year of intensive mentoring in about seven school districts, to a pool of schools that received the regular district-sponsored mentoring programs. Many of the findings parallel the year-one findings: Teachers receiving the intensive mentoring were more likely than those in the control group to report that they had a mentor and that they had spent more time in mentoring activities.

But the additional mentoring just doesn't seem to be translating into better student reading and math scores or teacher-retention rates. It also doesn't seem to be affecting the type of teacher who chooses to stay or leave the profession.

I'm no research expert, but I'd say it's fairly common for one year of a treatment not to have an effect; big, complicated programs like these intensive-mentoring initiatives can take a while to be put into place and iron out all the kinks. After two years, though, one does wonder where the disconnect might lie.

I'll update this blog item shortly as more reaction pours in from the field. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 1: The New Teacher Center has a release out on the study. It says that the design of the study didn't permit schools to replicate its induction model fully. For instance, the mentor-selection and supervision process was not conducted using the NTC's protocols. Also, the mentoring provided in the "comparison" groups was better than originally thought, so the schools receiving the intensive mentoring may not have had a strong enough "dosage" to differ from the comparison schools. These issues, NTC contends, may have led to the "no effects" results.

"In sum, we recognize that the Mathematica study was an experiment, not an induction program. We believe that it may not reflect the significant outcomes that can be achieved when districts have the time, capacity and willingness to focus on an in-depth, universal implementation of all elements of high-quality induction," New Teacher Center officials wrote.

You can read more about NTC's general issues with the study here.

UPDATE 2: Also, to clarify the first paragraph in this blog item, Mathematica Policy Research conducted the study for IES.

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That's one of the major concerns raised by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, on the Race to the Top front.

Whether or not it's an intentional move on the Obama administration's part, it is interesting that while alternative-route programs get a good share of attention in the teacher-quality section of the proposal, traditional education school routes are practically absent.

In comments on the RTTT guidelines, the group's president, Sharon Robinson, recommended that rather than asking states to show the extent to which they encourage alt-route programs, the Education Department should ask states to show whether teacher preparation programs—both those in higher education and alternative routes—partner with school districts to respond to their needs and produce teachers that are effective, as measured by a performance-based assessment.

That's an interesting proposal, but there aren't many states that currently use performance-based licensing tests. California, Arkansas and Ohio are among the few outliers that do use them.

If ED insists on focusing on alternative routes, Ms. Robinson continued, then such teachers should need to complete "substantive coursework" in pedagogy and a rigorous clinical experience before being deemed a classroom "teacher of record." Those recommendations sound similar to the ones advanced by the National Education Association (and which received some criticism from supporters of alternative routes for being too similar to traditional teacher-ed routes.)

Finally, the group raised concerns about the linking of student and teacher data, saying test scores should not be the sole measurement of effectiveness.

"Efforts to incorporate evidence of student learning in evaluations of teachers and principals should ultimately incorporate a balanced set of quantitative and qualitative data that reflect teacher practices and performance in the classroom, as well as a broad range of contributions to student learning," Robinson wrote.

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As I note in this story, the National Education Association really went after alternative routes in its comments to the proposed guidelines for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program. As evidence, NEA listed several studies that found that teachers from alternative routes were either less effective, or no more effective, than other teachers in the classroom.

But all those studies, to one degree or another, rely on student test scores as a measure of teacher effectiveness.

In the same letter, NEA argues that "achievement is much more than a test score ... the tests widely in use in the United States ... typically focus on lower-level skills or recall and recognition." By that thinking, we shouldn't really give a whole lot of credence to these studies.

Confused? I am.

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Here's a fascinating story out of Texas about districts gradually getting choosier in who they will accept as substitute teachers.

Some districts, the story notes, now require applicants to hold a teaching credential. In the past, a GED or high school diploma and some relevant experience were the only real criteria.

The phenomenon appears to be a direct factor of the market right now: There are just so many more applications for these jobs that the bar has gotten higher.

I've come across a similar phenomenon in other districts. It didn't make it into my recent story about the math and science talent pool, but officials in Chesterfield County, Va., told me that they had stopped accepting applications for substitute teachers altogether.

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American Enterprise Institute edu-maverick Rick Hess has this provocative essay in the most recent issue of Education Next. He brings up a lot of interesting ideas about recruiting career-changers and deploying teachers differently in the classroom.

But the thing that really stopped me in my tracks was this observation on class-size reduction.

"In this decade, as states overextended their commitments during the real estate boom, the ranks of teachers grew at nearly twice the rate of student enrollment. If policymakers had maintained the same overall teacher-to-student ratio since the 1970s, we would need 1 million fewer teachers, training could be focused on a smaller and more able population, and average teacher pay would be close to $75,000 per year."

One can certainly quibble with elements of the statement, such as whether policymakers would really have increased teacher salaries to that degree. But assume for a moment that it's correct. Would we now have better teachers? After all, as economists will volubly tell you, when you change things like compensation, you effect change in the talent pool that applies for jobs. (It is one of the theories behind performance-based compensation.)

Teachers, which would you prefer: a class size of, say, 15-to-1 and your current salary, or a $75,000 salary and a class size of, say, 30-to-1?

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Back in 2006, at the American Federation of Teachers' convention in Boston, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy made an appearance and absolutely electrified the delegates.

AFT delegates are, generally speaking, a much quieter bunch than National Education Association delegates, but on this occasion, they leapt to their feet, swarmed the stage, and took pictures. With all the hullabaloo, I couldn't see anything except Kennedy's shock of white hair from where I sat in the press gallery. It took a good 20 minutes or so to get things settled down to the point where Kennedy could actually make his address.

There's no doubt about it, Kennedy was extremely popular among teachers and teachers' unions. AFT actually made him a lifetime honorary member a few years back, and according to a release from the union, was sometimes called "the senator from AFT."

At the time of his death, Kennedy was also pushing hard on the health-care front. A health-care reform bill is probably AFT's biggest legislative priority this year, now that the Employee Free Choice Act and No Child Left Behind renewal have seemingly been put on the back burner.

Given all that, it's interesting to reflect that NCLB probably would not have passed, at least not as we know it now, without Ted Kennedy. As a number of obituaries have pointed out this week, President George W. Bush reached out to Kennedy in 2001 to help get the law through the Senate.

(It's worth pointing out, too, that a lot of the bill's tougher provisions actually came from the Democrats, not the Republicans. Rep. George Miller, for instance, pushed to require a school to make "adequate yearly progress" for all the different subgroups, in addition to the school as a whole; Bush's original proposal would have required the disaggregated reporting, but only held schools accountable for subgroups of disadvantaged students.)

Will the next chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee be as well received by the AFT?

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., right, reads a book to children at the Head Start Center in Boston in 2003. Children's book author Rosemary Wells is at left. Photo Credit: Chitose Suzuki/AP-File

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Colleague Mary Ann Zehr has a great blog item up about the Obama administration's push for using test scores for teacher-evaluation and -compensation purposes. Several academics are raising concerns about the idea, especially for teachers of English-language learners, she reports.

Content exams, especially those given in English rather than in native languages, are not good measures of these students' abilities, they write.

This is not a trivial issue, when you consider that perhaps only a third of teachers explicitly teach reading/English-language arts or math. What do you do in all the other content areas? What do you do for special populations, like ELLs—or for that matter, teachers of students with disabilities? And especially given the mainstreaming of both populations and the prevalence of "team teaching," doesn't it get significantly harder to filter out individual teachers' contributions to student learning?

Important questions with which the Obama administration will have to engage.

As for ELLs, perhaps some readers could weigh in on whether it would be feasible (and wise) to use the English-language-proficiency exams administered under Title III of the No Child law to gauge teacher effectiveness, rather than the math and reading content exams. The proficiency tests attempt to gauge ELLs' progress in reading, listening, speaking, and writing in English.

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The state-appointed emergency manager of the Detroit public schools, Robert Bobb, has dramatic plans to right-size his beleaguered school district, but he's already facing opposition from his local unions.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers and other district unions are carrying out a protest this morning against Mr. Bobb's proposals for renewing the district's collectively bargained contract.

Among the provisions, the district proposes cutting salaries by 10 percent, increasing the proportion that members must pay for health and dental coverage, and freezing "step" increases, DFT officials contend. The plan would end other financial perks, too, such as a pay-out for teachers who retire with dozens of days of sick leave and compensation for a lost planning period, and it would require teachers seeking to transfer to obtain a principal's approval.

"In essence you seek to eradicate every right and benefit that our members have achieved through four decades of collective bargaining. I know that you don't realistically expect me or my membership to agree to these regressive, oppressive, and punitive proposals," DFT President Keith Johnson wrote in a harshly worded letter to Bobb.

Even more telling, my e-mail box is starting to fill up with messages from angry teachers. One of their chief concerns is the elimination of additional compensation for having a class size that exceeds the district-specified average.

But on the other hand, the district really is in serious financial trouble, as colleague Dakarai Aarons reported in this feature story. It has a deficit of $259 million. Enrollment continues to drop; in 2010 the district will have half the enrollment it had in 2001.

Are the proposed cuts the only alternative to additional layoffs?

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Officials of the National Education Association issued a stinging criticism yesterday of the Obama administration's "narrow agenda" for the Race to the Top program and formally announced the union's opposition to key elements of the $4.35 billion initiative.

Among other areas, the NEA said it would not support the program's goals of encouraging states to use test scores for evaluating teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, and bolstering alternative routes to teacher licensure.

In a strongly worded letter, the union intimated that Education Secretary Arne Duncan was reneging on his promise to promote education reform by being "tighter" on goals, but giving states and districts more flexibility to achieve reforms.

"The administration's theory of success now seems to be tight on the goals and tight on the means," Kay Brilliant, the NEA's director of education policy and practice, wrote in the letter to Duncan that accompanied its formal comments on the proposals. "We find that top-down approach disturbing. We have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind, and we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success and that usurp state and local governments' responsibilities for public education."

The tough talk underscores an increasingly complex relationship between the traditionally Democratic-leaning 3.2 million-member union and the administration it helped elect.

NEA officials publicly said that they agreed with the goals of the Race to the Top program, which is oriented around the four "assurances" in the economic-stimulus legislation: to improve teacher and principal effectiveness, turn around the lowest-performing schools, bolster standards and assessments, and update data systems.

Duncan, meanwhile, promised to work with teachers rather than imposing reforms on them.

But the detailed guidelines for the Race to the Top, released last month, conflicted directly with NEA policies, making strife with the union all but inevitable. For instance, it proposed giving a competitive advantage to states that eliminated caps on charter schools. The union strongly supports caps.

"Despite growing evidence to the contrary, it appears that the administration has decided that charter schools are the only answer to what ails America's public schools," Ms. Brilliant wrote.

The criteria also put a premium on using test scores for evaluating, paying, and granting teachers tenure. Two states with barriers to using such data in evaluations, California and Wisconsin, are at various stages of trying to rework them so they can be eligible for the funds.

In its attached comments, the union also raised the specter of legal challenges, stating that the program's priority on overhauling teacher evaluation, pay, and tenure would contravene local collective bargaining agreements. The administration must require reforms to policies involving teachers to be set in contracts, the union wrote.

In 2007, similar concerns about the use of tests for rating teachers and about collective bargaining helped derail congressional attempts to renew the NCLB law.

Requests for comment from NEA officials were not immediately returned.

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I was poking around on the American Federation of Teachers' Web site and came across this blurb from their Inside AFT newsletter about the union's thoughts on the Race to the Top fund. Apparently, it held a webinar for its affiliates to get them up to speed on the $4.35 billion program.

"In general, the AFT believes the administration's draft 'is being overly prescriptive in many areas' of the new program, legislation director Tor Cowan explained, 'and this is crowding out the chance to use evidence-based solutions already developed on the local level.' "

Most of the newsletter is behind a firewall, and AFT will probably submit much more detailed comments on the proposed criteria closer to the comment deadline.

Still, the unions have been fairly quiet about the RTTT, and this indicates some dissatisfaction with the guidelines, which put a premium on using test scores in evaluating teachers. Also, it is evidence of a philosophical difference in reform approaches between ED, which has 19 different criteria in the Race to the Top application, and the AFT, which put only a few guidelines around its own $1 million innovation fund.

I wonder what the "collaboration meter" is registering these days over at AFT HQ.

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We're evidently headed to a lot of wrangling on this topic, given the focus on student-teacher data in the Race to the Top proposed criteria. So, once again Teacher Beat provides you with a cheat sheet to help you make sense of it.

First off, we must start by assuming, as the federal government does, that it is appropriate to consider student achievement at least to some degree in evaluating teachers. (I fully realize there are people and groups out there who vociferously disagree. If you are one of them, I invite you to leave a comment below to tell us all why, but this would be a short blog item if we didn't start from that assumption.)

Next, how do we define student achievement? This is the place where things really start to get dicey, because most of the annual testing is done in math and language arts. But only perhaps a third of teachers explicitly teach those subjects. So how do we get estimates about student performance in non-tested grades and subjects?

The National Council on Teacher Quality, in this report on Colorado's bid for the Race to the Top funding, elaborates on a few interesting alternatives. It suggests randomly sampling student work, as long as these samples are reviewed independently and audited centrally to ensure consistency.

As for test scores, probably the most promising option is to use "value-added" models that track growth over time rather than absolute proficiency levels, so that teachers aren't penalized off the bat for having poor-performing students.

Now, we've all heard that value-added estimates of teacher performance are problematic. The estimates of a teacher's effectiveness can vary from one year to the next. Sometimes tests aren't appropriately scaled to give good estimates; and the models are typically better at identifying outliers (very good or very weak teachers) than making finely-graded distinctions in the middle.

Still, there is a possibility of reducing error here by focusing only on the top and bottom teachers and comparing results over time, (i.e., if you are a bottom-quartile teacher for three consecutive years, something's wrong.)

Additionally, such scores could be compared to scores on measures conducted by trained observers (principals and/or peer teachers) that describe, for instance, whether a teacher effectively engages students in content, makes the purpose of the lesson clear, and engages in formative assessment to ensure students have mastered concepts.

Finally, we have this important question: Just how reliable should we expect teacher-evaluation systems to be? What margin of error are we willing to accept? Right now, districts lean toward one end, rating nearly all teachers as proficient, even those who are very poor. Clearly we don't want to go the other way, either, and misidentify scores of good teachers.

But if we expect a system to be infallible we're probably going to be disappointed. As any good scientist will remind you, measurement comes with error. Are stakeholders, especially teachers and teachers' unions, willing to accept a system that is highly reliable but not perfect? (If 95 percent of judgments are accurate, is that high enough? What if 90 percent are accurate?)

Now that I've put all that out there, let's hear your thoughts. Is this doable, or should we all give up and go home?

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That's the subtext of this must-read blog item by colleague Mary Ann Zehr over at Learning the Language. Zehr profiles this GAO report, which found that many teacher training programs devote at least one course to techniques for working with students with disabilities, but far fewer—about one in five&mdash devote similar attention to English-language learners.

One hopes that will change in the future, perhaps spurred by new reporting requirements in the Higher Education Act that require programs to set goals for increasing the number of teachers trained to work with SWDs and ELLs.

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from guest blogger Lesli A. Maxwell

California's budget is busted and school districts have had to let teachers go, but that's not keeping a new organization from pledging to deliver a bevy of new teacher talent to the state's public schools over the next 11 years.

Today, an informal network of folks who oversee 70 separate alternative teacher certification programs around the state are launching a formal membership organization that aims to find top-notch professional people who want a second career in the classroom.

Called the California Teacher Corps, the organization has one particularly lofty goal: grooming 100,000 new teachers and placing them in classrooms by 2020. That's a big number, even by California standards.

The group particularly wants to help cultivate new teaching talent in the state's rural and urban pockets where school district leaders struggle most with recruitment, hiring, and retention.

"Our primary goal is to recruit the best and the brightest teachers," said Catherine Kearney, the president of the newly-formed Corps. "We think by working together in a formal way we can really begin to address teacher preparation issues in California including the critical need for special education, science, and math teachers."

By pooling resources in a formal organization, Ms. Kearney said, the Corps hopes to reach smart, motivated professionals who may not have considered teaching. "We want the pathway to be wide open," she said. Most of the alternative programs are affiliated with colleges and universities though a handful of county offices of education and charter management organizations have their own accredited programs.

Ms. Kearney said that more than half of the graduates in the state's alternative certification programs are ethnic or racial minorities and that participants in the programs are overwhelmingly drawn to a second career in teaching by social justice motives.

While teachers have lost jobs this year because of the state's fiscal crisis, a wave of teacher retirements is expected in the coming years, some 8,000 annually, according to a report last year by WestEd.

"We really think this is the time to be proactive," Ms. Kearney said.

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The wires are buzzing with news of the Gates Foundation's decision to advance five districts' teacher-effectiveness plans, part of the foundation's commitment to putting $500 million into researching the question of how to measure and promote teacher effectiveness.

The districts are Memphis, Tenn.; Pittsburgh; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Omaha, Neb.; and a coalition of charter-management organizations in Los Angeles.

About 10 districts were approached by the foundation to submit proposals for the project, which has been informally referred to by Gates as its "Deep Dives" into teacher effectiveness. Now, the five that have made this cut must put together a Memorandum of Understanding involving various stakeholders, such as teachers' unions and community officials, as a good-faith sign that they have seriously committed to doing the hard work if they receive the Gates backing.

Although Gates hasn't made the proposals public, bits and pieces have been leaking out. In any case, it's probably safe to assume that the project will at the very least require districts to overhaul their professional-development and teacher-evaluation systems, and might even contain pay reforms.

(I'm told that the term "deep dive" will be replaced with something along the lines of "Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching," which, though less succinct, probably wisely avoids Jacques Cousteau imagery.)

Gates won't make the final decisions about which districts' proposals to pursue until November. It could choose to proceed with all five, spokesman Chris Williams told me.

And things aren't over for districts that didn't make the cut: The foundation was so impressed by the caliber of their proposals that it plans to underwrite select elements of them in the future, in what it will call "acceleration" grants.

Gates' newfound focus on teacher effectiveness actually predated the federal stimulus "assurance" on teacher quality and the Race to the Top proposed application guidelines, which vaulted the topic into national prominence.

In other words, you can bet everyone will be poring over the foundation's final choices.

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This morning I was perusing the comments that have been filed to date on the proposed guidelines on the Race to the Top grants, and was surprised to discover one from an administrator in Washoe County, Nev., who pointed to a section of the state code that appears to put it out of contention for RTTT funds.

NRS 386.650 states that information in the state's longitudinal database ... "must be used for the purpose of improving the achievement of pupils and improving classroom instruction but must not be used for the purpose of evaluating an individual teacher or paraprofessional."

I did a Google search and found just one story on the issue. All that attention on neighboring California seems to have overshadowed Nevada's law.

But I'm betting it hasn't escaped the Obama administration's watchful eye.

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The New York Times' Sam Dillon has a write-up of all the state action around changing laws in the hopes of qualifying for Race to the Top funds.

There's not a whole lot of new news here if you've been reading this blog and Politics K-12. But buried near the end of the story is the tidbit that a key California state lawmaker is drafting legislative language to "clarify" the state's position on the linking of student and teacher data.

Now, does that mean that officials are actively seeking to undo the state prohibitions on the use of the data? Or are they merely trying to strengthen their current argument that the law doesn't prohibit districts from using student-achievement data in evaluation decisions regarding teachers?

As I've surmised before, the obstacles that prevent districts from doing this aren't just political, but also practical: They would probably have to build or expand their own data systems in order to make use of the data, and that kind of infrastructure development doesn't come cheap.

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From guest blogger Dakarai I. Aarons

With the advent of technology, schools now have more data than ever available at their fingertips. That means everyone is jumping in enthusiastically to use it, right?

Not so fast!

In a brief released this morning by the Alliance for Excellent Education, the group says teachers are suffering from what some educators call the DRIP syndrome--data rich but information poor.

The brief says "while student data is becoming more abundant, not enough teachers have access to training, support, and the structures needed to use data effectively."

The Alliance's conference this morning on the topic was filled with something unusual at a Washington education conference: actual teachers and administrators!

Those from the ranks of the classroom were not only in the audience, but on the panel to help their fellow educators figure out how, where and when to use all these reams of information to do the much-vaunted "data-driven decision making" most superintendents will tell you is already going on in their schools.

One large barrier to schools using data effectively is the lack of training teachers and administrators have in creating and using good assessments, said Leslie W. Grant, a visiting assistant professor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia.

Grant recalled her own teacher preparation program, in which she said her professor told the class they would have to design an assessment for their lesson plan, but never taught them how.

Schools of education have operated this way for years, and many still do. Moreover, Grant said, up until recently, few states required any evidence teachers had any competency in assessment as part of the licensing process.

"We're expecting (teachers) to do things they've not had training on," Grant said.
Also key to data use is making creating a culture where people believe in its value, said Norah Lycknell, principal of D.C.'s Janney Elementary School.

"Do you believe in innate ability or do you believe students can progress toward a goal? Data is a tool for the latter," she said.

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The Education Department has some important data up on states' progress meeting the "highly qualified" teacher requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, as well as on how districts are spending their Title II dollars. (Title II is the main funding stream for supporting teacher quality.)

According to the most recent figures, from the 2007-08 school year, 95 percent of all core academic classes are taught by highly qualified teachers, meaning they are fully certified, have demonstrated subject-matter competency, and hold at least a bachelor's degree. North Dakota remains the only state to have 100%, but more than a dozen states—Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin—are at the 99 percent mark.

High-poverty schools are still less likely to have HQTs, especially at the secondary level, where 89.6 percent of core classes are taught by such teachers compared with 96 percent of core classes at low-poverty schools.

Because these are national figures, they tend to mask as much as they reveal. For instance, the gap between high-poverty and low-poverty schools in Maryland is 30 percentage points. A couple of remote states, such as Alaska and Hawaii, still have problems getting highly qualified teachers, probably because of a combination of not producing enough in-state and not being able to attract others to teach.

In 2008-09, districts (which receive the lion's share of Title II funds) spent 39 percent on professional development and 38 percent to reduce class sizes. That's quite a change from last year, when 50 percent was spent on professional development and only 27 percent on class-size reduction.

It's possible that some of the shift toward class size was done to keep teachers from losing their jobs in the economic downturn. But the class-size-reduction data are troubling when you consider that not all of the money is being spent in alignment with the research, which has found benefits only for the early grades. According to the ED data, just 61 percent of teachers hired to reduce class sizes were in grades K-3.

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This just in: The Providence Teachers' Union is suing to prevent Rhode Island officials from implementing a directive for schools to start implementing site-based hiring based on teacher-candidates' qualifications, not their seniority.

Former state education Commissioner Peter McWalters made the order in the final months of his term. The lawsuit names new Commissioner Deborah Gist, Providence superintendent Thomas Brady, and school board head Robert Wise, The Associated Press reports.

The district's collective-bargaining agreement requires staffing through the seniority process, which critics say leads to the mass "bumping" and displacement of teachers.

PTU's lawsuit argues that the directive violates this agreement, and that staffing formulas must be renegotiated through collective bargaining.

Read more background in this Education Week story.

Although I haven't had a chance to speak to PTU President Steven Smith since this interview, I got the sense that he wasn't necessarily opposed to the concept of site-based hiring as long as teachers got a say in selecting their future colleagues. Nevertheless, the lawsuit indicates that the union does not look kindly on attempts to trump the collective-bargaining agreement, no doubt because of the precedent it could set.

No indication yet as to whether this will affect plans to debut site-based hiring in six Providence schools this upcoming school year.

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At first, I thought Mike Antonucci was reading a bit too far into this recent speech by David Sanchez, the president of the California Teachers' Association:

"California law also doesn’t prohibit the use of student assessments in evaluating teachers, but if and how that is done is bargained at the local level.

The CTA Board of Directors has already appointed a member and staff workgroup to guide our efforts throughout the reauthorization. CTA will also be making sure [the National Education Association] holds strong and does what’s right around [No Child Left Behind]."

Antonucci sees this as pointed warning to the NEA not to get too far out ahead of the membership on issues like NCLB and the Race to the Top Act. My first thought was that it was merely a rhetorical flourish.

But then I remembered back to a 2007 hearing on NCLB which is now famous for featuring the Great Performance-Pay Smackdown between Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Reg Weaver, then-president of the National Education Association. (Sorry, I can't find a link for you, but you can read a bit more in this old blog entry.)

During the hearing, several top CTA officials showed up with about 25 members in tow, more than pretty much any other group that attended (and believe me, everyone in Washington's acronym soup was there). CTA even nicknamed the staff draft then under discussion the "Miller-Pelosi" bill, conveniently forgetting that then-ranking Republican on the House education committee, Buck McKeon, had his name on every page of the draft.

Then this past year, a good third of the new business items at the NEA's Representative Assembly were sponsored by the California delegation.

Stuff like that definitely makes CTA hard to ignore.

Sometimes policy officials and, yes, journalists, have a tendency to think of "the unions" as a sort of monolithic category, an image that serves them well from a lobbying point of view. But in reality, they are complicated, messy bodies with constituencies, differences of opinions, and disagreements.

How will the CTA/NEA dynamic play out during the next iteration of NCLB and the wrangling over the Race to the Top program?

It will be interesting to watch.

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The federal government's programs for improving the quality of teachers are not well-coordinated and contain no strategies for working systematically to improve teacher quality and student achievement, the Government Accountability Office says in this report.

The U.S. Department of Education administers 23 programs focused primarily on the goal of improving teacher quality and an additional 33 programs with other goals that allow funds to be spent on some teacher-related activities. Of the 23 programs specifically focused on teacher quality, only nine have been evaluated or are in the process of being evaluated, the report says. Eleven others have been financed for seven years or more and have never been evaluated.

Issues with coordinating programs involve such challenges as differing data systems and cross-division communications, but also some structural issues inherent in the design of the programs. For example, the Title II-A state teacher-quality funds in the No Child Left Behind Act are directed toward "high need" school districts, as are the Math and Science partnerships. But while federal law defines high-need school districts for Title II, it allows states to define the term for Math and Science partnerships. States, unsurprisingly, have a looser definition, and the funds are more thinly spread and not coordinated.

And per this item, the report also discusses some of the challenges of evaluating Title II, which at $3 billion is by far the largest federal teacher-quality grant program. One of the reasons it's hard to evaluate the Title II-A formula dollars is that they are so often combined with state and local resources, so that it's challenging to separate out the effects, the report says.

Perhaps so, but I'd argue that that is still a serious deficiency in the program. For comparison's sake, think about all the fuss about transparency and accountability ED is making about the Race to the Top, a one-time $5 billion infusion. Now compare it with the Title II grants, $3 billion ANNUALLY that you almost never hear anything about.

As one source pointed out in a story I did on this topic last year, that part of the NCLB law has few measurable objectives; putting them in might be a way of trying to gauge the effects of these dollars.

The Center for American Progress has some additional ideas here.

But as a broader question, how do you think the federal government could better coordinate its teacher-quality efforts? Remember, Congress will be dealing with this when NCLB comes up for renewal again. Opportunity knocks.

Post your ideas and let us all know.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:47 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Readers,

It has been one year since the folks here at Education Week decided that it made sense to have a blog to cover the policy and politics of teachers. And what a year!

It's been a huge learning experience for me. I've gotten some great reactions to it and "linky love" from bloggers whom I respect and obsessively read, like Gotham Schools' Elizabeth Green and Eduwonk, but also from teachers, administrators and union folks who write in and keep their own blogs. I appreciate hearing from all my readers, even those who have been critical of certain items (John Thompson, your comments always give me food for thought, whether or not we agree.) Without you, this blog wouldn't have lasted this long.

I've struggled to learn the ropes of blogging style. (I can still hear my editor: "Steve, a blog item cannot be 1,000 words!") I've run up across weird things I never could have anticipated, like the frightening number of people who land on this site by Google-ing "teacher beats student."

I've learned that blogging makes covering some events much more lively and entertaining. I had a ball covering the NEA convention this year, for instance. Confetti! Dennis Van Roekel's keynote! Felt sunflowers! Bob Chanin's farewell! Linda "Bon Jovi" Darling-Hammond's award! (Click here and scroll down for the coverage).

I've also learned that it's hard to balance straight-up policy coverage with the color reporting people expect from blogs. One of the items people either loved or hated was this one on Randi Weingarten's take on the Duncan administration—and her fab yoga arms.

I've used this forum to report out interesting tidbits that didn't make it into full EdWeek stories, and to ruminate over ideas that eventually became full stories. I've done hard news, conceptual pieces, and analysis.

But most of all, I mean for Teacher Beat to be your forum, too. So as we head for birthday No. 2, I encourage you to make use of the comment function to share your reactions, your insights, and personal stories from your own districts and classrooms.

You can also e-mail me directly to share story ideas, commentary, or critiques. What am I covering that you find helpful? What am I missing out on?

Thanks for joining me on this adventure.

Stephen

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:37 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

There was a bit of a mini-controversy in June when the New Teacher Project released its Widget Effect report.

But it wasn't the report's overall thrust that did it. Pretty much everyone agreed that our current systems for evaluating and offering assistance to struggling teachers are crummy.

The controversy was about the data on dismissals in one particular district: Toledo, Ohio. According to the district's personnel records, Toledo dismissed one tenured veteran and did not renew five novice teachers' contracts, the NTP reported.

But what about the district's much-heralded Peer-Assistance and -Review model, a number of sources wrote me afterward. Aren't the dismissal numbers much higher than that? Most people were merely confused, but some accused the NTP of willfully skewing the data.

And the American Federation of Teachers put out this press release:

"While the overarching conclusions of the report are sound, we have concerns about the report's data, particularly with respect to teacher evaluations in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo has a highly regarded teacher evaluation system ... that produces much better results than those described in this report."

So what gives? Well, I've been talking to folks on both ends and I've started to do some digging around the numbers. To put it kindly, the data-gathering is really a mess. What it boils down to is that the district and the Toledo Federation of Teachers had entirely different ways of "coding" dismissals through the PAR system.

For instance, the district doesn't appear to record teachers who resigned after being in the program as having been dismissed, but the union counts them as such. Also, it appears that the PAR program applied to some long-term substitute teachers. These teachers wouldn't have necessarily shown up in personnel records, but the union may have counted them within the overall PAR figures. And finally, the union used the term "terminated" teachers to refer both to nontenured teachers who were so poor that they were let go before their contracts were up, and to tenured veterans who were put into PAR and ultimately dismissed. The district, by contrast, separated out tenured from non-tenured teachers.

There's a lesson here for any district or union that wants to try peer review: Agree on common definitions and change your data systems accordingly, or it will be really hard to justify your numbers.

OK, I know you want the actual figures. Well, I'm not going to publish what I've got for a couple of reasons. First, my information isn't complete, and second, it's my understanding that officials from TFT and NTP are working together on trying to audit the numbers and come up with figures they can agree on. I don't want to insert myself in that process.

But count on the fact that we'll be bringing you updates once we know what's what.

Does the Toledo PAR really produce "much better results" than other evaluation systems, as AFT has asserted? We'll see.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:20 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

As I travel and talk to teachers, they consistently tell me that one of their biggest frustrations is the testing under the No Child Left Behind Act. Such testing is largely dominated by multiple-choice questions, and teachers feel under pressure to "teach to the test" or prep students for these kinds of questions.

As some of you know, in addition to covering teacher issues here at Education Week, I also track and write about the latest developments in student assessment. I just wrote a long story on researchers' ideas about how to improve assessment.

The germ of this idea came out of the notion that some tests might be worth teaching to, if they reflected the kind of rich activities and critical problem-solving that we want students to engage in and teachers to foster.

Although none of the examples I wrote about gets into the realm of "portfolios" or extended research projects—which have been shown to be somewhat unreliable and not comparable across states as an overall measure of student learning—they are all examples of extended performance-based tasks that require students to use critical problem-solving skills. And they are standardized, which means that they might be adopted for use in an accountability context.

Some will protest that tests should be used only for informational purposes, not for accountability. I understand those arguments, but as it's unlikely that test-based accountability is going away, I tried to tailor the story to what policymakers and researchers might be able to accomplish within the existing framework.

I hope you'll check it out and post your thoughts below.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:04 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Inside School Research, colleague Debra Viadero profiles a couple of must-read studies related to teachers.

One of them, by Marguerite Roza at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, suggests that it's well nigh impossible to keep class sizes the same, keep all teachers employed, and continue to give all teachers their contractual "step" raises in a budget downturn. Since most districts spend about 80 percent of their costs on personnel and fringe benefits, something's got to give, Roza argues. One solution is to trim teachers' salaries in order to keep all teachers employed.

In a second blog item, Debbie discusses some new findings related to "value added" models for judging the effectiveness of teachers. Since quite a few of the proposed criteria in the Race to the Top application nod in this direction, here's a way to learn about the latest caveats on these methodologies.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:23 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

I've finally had a chance to go through this internal National Education Association review of several affiliates' alternative-compensation models (hat tip to Mike Antonucci).

It's worth checking out, although you'll have to read between the lines for the good stuff. Or you can just use this Teacher Beat Cheat Sheet (like, wow!).

Solidarity vs. Collegiality: Among the most interesting findings related to the Denver Pro-Comp model. Members felt that the program eroded solidarity by dividing membership between those that opted into the system and those that chose to remain on a regular salary schedule. Yet at the same time, they reported that the system's professional-development units increased collegiality and helped teachers work more effectively in teams in their own schools.

That's got to be a tough one for a national union that supports job-embedded training but doesn't like anything that calls solidarity into question. And isn't there a parallel here to the whole D.C./Washington Teachers' Union red-tier, green-tier idea? Officially, the WTU didn't like D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's tenure proposals, but perhaps that opposition was rooted in an even deeper philosophical disagreement—namely, when you start giving people choices, you divide the membership and make it harder to represent everyone's best interest.

Transparency vs. Accuracy. The systems that NEA and its own teachers deemed as being the most successful, in Helena, Mont., and Manitowoc, Wis., were the only two that didn't include some inclusion of student achievement in the teacher-bonus plans. Teachers felt that the measures based on test scores were not nearly transparent enough. Unfortunately, as an NEA official noted in one of the appendices, " ... simpler and more transparent measures can often be the most unreliable."

Knowledge and Skills vs. Outcomes: The Helena and Manitowoc plans granted more pay for things like earning national-board certification, a professional-development certificate, or completing "career-development plans."
But, unlike every other plan studied here, they focused entirely on what the teachers did, not on whether students learned more.

In pointing this out, let me be clear that I'm not trying to minimize what these plans accomplished. Teachers in both situations found that the programs increased opportunities for working with other teachers. Nevertheless, the focus on student outcomes seems to be where the conversation on performance-based pay is going at the federal level.

Antonucci has an analysis of the talk in the report about how the NEA might rebrand its opposition to performance-based pay in light of this report. My bet is that the NEA will do it by advancing "knowledge and skills-based plans" like Helena's and Manitowoc's, possibly combined with a career ladder.

And although detractors will view that as a disingenuous move, perhaps NEA deserves some credit for at least wrestling with this idea. Over time, there will be room for such plans to incorporate measures of student achievement, ones, we hope, that educators feel are transparent.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:39 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

There was some interesting movement on the Teacher Incentive Fund last week, when the Senate appropriations committee took up the Labor-HHS-Ed bill.

The senators inserted some new language that was not in the 2006 appropriations bill that first created TIF, a federal initiative for seeding alternative-compensation systems.

According to the new language, grantees must now demonstrate that the performance-pay systems "are developed with the input of teachers and school leaders."

That seems like a bone thrown to the teachers' unions, and it also appears to have assuaged some legislators who were on the fence about the program (read Alyson Klein's writeup here).

The sense I get from the teachers' unions, though, is that they won't be satisfied with anything short of an absolute requirement that these plans be collectively bargained or adopted through a majority teacher vote in states without collective bargaining. I'm sure by now you are all tired of me saying this over and over on this blog, but that is potentially a really big fissure between this administration and the unions. It's also why the final shape of the Race to the Top and TIF application criteria are so important.

Also take note in Alyson's story about a failed amendment attempt to boost the appropriation by moving funds out of the Title II teacher-quality state grant program and into TIF. A vocal opponent to this movement was, as Teacher Beat predicted, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

And Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., also apparently didn't support the shift, asserting that Title II is a "proven program" and TIF isn't. I had a good chuckle over that, because there's nary a study anywhere that shows that Title II has raised teacher effectiveness. And as far as I know, there are no plans to evaluate Title II rigorously (as there now are for TIF). Claiming that a program isn't effective is, of course, a tried-and-true strategy for not supporting something you just don't want to support.

In the meantime, feel some pity for the program, which is 3 years old and doesn't even have an official authorization from Congress just yet.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:00 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

A Minnesota law will allow teachers to found, lead, and manage new schools in which they'll have significant say over curriculum, budgeting, staffing, and special programming, according to this story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The schools will be authorized by local school boards and will be staffed with unionized teachers, who will establish the governing structure itself. For instance, they won't necessarily have a principal: Teachers might decide to select a leadership team to run the schools.

The article quotes an official from the Minneapolis teachers' union, which has been laying the groundwork for such schools there, as saying that teachers are used to having programs and reforms pushed on them; with the new schools, they'll be able to take charge of the school's direction.

Of particular significance is that this arrangement seems to blur the lines between teachers and management. Since the schools will be unionized, they likely will be subject to the district collective bargaining contract, transfer rules, dismissals for poor performance, and so forth. It will be interesting to see how the teachers that lead the school will deal with those rules and whether their perspectives will change on how well such rules support or hinder student learning.

The newspaper says New York City, Boston, and a few other states such as Colorado have tried similar strategies. It's not clear to me whether those states and cities have union-run charter schools, teacher-run schools that are not officially charters (as is the case in Minnesota), or some kind of hybrid.

In any case, if teacher-lead schools exist in your state or district (or if you happen to teach in one), why not leave a comment below and tell us what you think about them?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:54 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)