September 2009 Archives

I've covered enough hearings on the Hill to know that they can range in interest from complete snooze-fests to eyebrow-raising soap operas.

Fortunately, today's hearing on the teacher-equity provisions in the economic-stimulus bill and the No Child Left Behind Act ended up being pretty engaging—at least to those of you who, like me, are unabashed nerds about the complicated politics of crafting teacher policy.

First off, most of what was discussed has been discussed before, and it's certainly graced many a page of Education Week. Witnesses, for instance, talked about teacher-student data firewalls, about the inadequacy of evaluation systems, and about the teacher-distribution requirements in the stimulus.

Republican members again pushed for the Teacher Incentive Fund, a federal performance-pay program: Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., a witness, introduced today—for the third time—an authorization of the TIF program, which has been funded since 2006 but never set down in law.

Democrats talked a lot about teacher mentoring, and they directed most of their questions to National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel while dodging the controversial statements about collective-bargaining contracts made by several of the other witnesses.

All of that sounds strictly by the books, right? Well, what ended up making this hearing particularly interesting was that it pushed to the surface the very complicated relationship between House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and the NEA.

Fairly early on in this hearing, Rep. Miller made a particular point to note two items in Van Roekel's testimony, which was mostly drawn from the union's new report. In that report, as I noted here, the NEA said it would support union locals through the TIF. It was the first time the union ever really affirmed the program, which requires student achievement to be considered in making bonus-pay decisions.

Van Roekel's testimony also stated that the union would request every affiliate enter into a "memorandum of understanding" with districts to waive contract language that could prohibit the distribution of effective teachers.

You may remember the Great Performance-Pay Smackdown of 2007, when Miller and then-NEA President Reg Weaver during a hearing traded barbs about whether or not the NEA had reneged on its support for a performance-pay program.

Today, Chairman Miller made it very clear that he considers the NEA as being on record as saying it will support TIF and the waiver of some contract elements.

As if to underscore the point, Mr. Miller reiterated to reporters after the hearing that he views the NEA as having affirmatively shifted its stance in those areas. "I think it's a major step for the NEA; I think it's very constructive," he said. "They have reached out to the future on this discussion and this subject." And in a release from the committee, he added that the NEA testimony came as "a very important signal from NEA that represents a significant departure from their historical position."

At another point in the hearing, in response to questions from the committee members, Van Roekel said he didn't think it was appropriate to use "a single test score" in making decisions about teachers. The phrase really seemed to raise the hackles of Rep. Miller, who jumped in with this speech:

"There is nothing in the Race to the Top that says that a test score would have to be the sole factor in evaluations, so let's clear the air on that. It's simply not the fact," Miller expounded. "There was nothing in the TEACH Act [a 2005 Miller-introduced bill], nothing in the [2007 NCLB] discussion draft. .... I think that it's a real disservice to the administration [to claim otherwise] because Education Secretary Arne Duncan is trying to broaden that discussion."

Now, to be fair to the NEA, a number of Miller's own committee members, both Republican and Democrat, also talked about the use of test scores in evaluations as if they were the only factor.

Still, the larger point stands. And that is that after everything that went down in 2007, George Miller wants the NEA to back up words with real action.

Photos: House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., left; National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, right.

Photo Credit: Andrew Councill for Education Week

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's a story that could be a portent of things to come: Georgia is starting to cancel pay bonuses for teachers who have earned advanced certification through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

The story does a good job of laying out the various issues, including the recent debates about the effects of the credential on student achievement.

But there's another, broader issue lurking in all of this. When compensation bonuses—whether the National Education Association-friendly national-board certification or some other measure based on test scores—are layered on top of an existing salary schedule, rather than integrated structurally into compensation systems, they're essentially much easier to cut when the going gets tough.

A lot of performance-pay programs have struggled to sustain their programs financially after an initial few years of start-up cash. It's still a big question, for instance, as to what will happen with the first Teacher Incentive Fund grantees, now in years two and three of their five-year funding commitments.

Obviously, it's politically more difficult to talk about totally rearranging the compensation structure rather than just layering new programs on top of it. But might it also help those programs stick around longer so that teachers can continue to have the opportunity to win higher salaries?

What do you think?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In this blog item, colleague Sean Cavanagh noted that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are on opposite ends of the "21st-century skills" debate. (NEA is one of the partnership's founding members; AFT challenges the effort, per this letter.)

This is a curious split, and it's even curiouser when you consider that AFT was initially on board with the notion of 21st-century skills.

In early reports from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, or P21, the main advocacy body promoting such skills, AFT Secretary-Treasurer Antonia Cortese was listed as a P21 board member. Now, she's on the board of Common Core, the Washington-based group that is probably the strongest critic of P21.

I asked the AFT to elaborate on this a bit, and got this reply back from Cortese: "We're not against teaching children skills or teaching them to think critically, but these things have to be taught in the context of a content-rich curriculum."

That's a nice statement of where the AFT now stands on 21st-century skills, but I'm not sure that it answers the political question at work here of what caused the shift in attitude.

There are, as Eduwonk intimates, implications for future policymaking. After all, as the No Child Left Behind law gets renewed, NEA will be pushing for more support for the P21 agenda. The AFT won't be. Although the two unions' agendas for the reauthorization align for the most part, 21st-century skills represent at least one splinter issue.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:00 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Teacher Beat is back!

I've been catching up on some of the big teacher-related news of the last week. (Yes, my brother had to pry my hands away from the computer while I was on vacation.) Here are a few tidbits that caught my attention:

• Interesting news about a Kentucky lawsuit over whether teachers should be allowed to leave their unions at will, rather than during the "open enrollment period."

• New York City Chancellor Joel Klein bites the bullet and tells principals to hire teachers from the absent-teacher reserve pool, even though he's philosophically opposed to the idea.

• American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten calls the Race to the Top an extension of No Child Left Behind, or "Bush III." She seems to have forgotten the crucial contributions of Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. George Miller in the crafting of the NCLB law.

• The Washington Post's Marc Fisher does a big profile of Michelle Rhee. I'd have liked to see a bit more analysis about whether her hard-charging style has actually given her leverage for her agenda or improved the actual quality of teaching, but we may have to wait until the D.C. contract is finalized to find out.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'll be taking a few days off to visit family, so you probably won't hear too much from me next week. While I'm gone, keep up the great commenting on teacher effectiveness (which I've decided is such a complex issue that trying to make sense of it runs second in difficulty only to trying to make sense of airline frequent-flyer rules).

Additionally, the Teacher Beat page will be down on Saturday, Sept. 19, as the tech folks move us over to a new system. It should be back up on Monday.

While I'm out, I'll be sitting in on some history classes taught by my brother, a doctoral student in history who teaches college freshmen. It will be interesting to hear his take on college readiness and to watch him in action. I hope to come back with some fresh teacher-related story ideas.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Mathematica Policy Research has a report out looking at a small group of teachers who earned their teaching credentials through the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence program.

ABCTE is a national alternative route that allows candidates to bypass most education coursework.

Students taught by the 25 English language-arts teachers studied did not have statistically different achievement results on the state test than those students taught by a "matched" comparison group on non-ABCTE teachers with similar characteristics. But students of the 18 ABCTE teachers scored lower than their counterparts in math by about 25 percent of a standard deviation. (The report says that means the classroom average would have been about 10 percentile points lower in the ABCTE-taught classes).

This is one of the first studies to look at the impact of teachers who earn this credential on student achievement, but the small sample size means the results probably shouldn't be extrapolated beyond this particular group of teachers and applied to the ABCTE program as a whole, said Steven Glazerman, one of the Mathematica analysts who conducted the study.

And because this isn't a "randomized" study, where students are randomly assigned to teachers, it's not clear whether other factors might be influencing the results. (Do ABCTE teachers tend to be assigned, or to seek out, high-poverty schools? Do principals assign them different kinds of students?)

The ABCTE folks are, unsurprisingly, not thrilled by the results. “We had hoped for a much larger and more balanced sample size and we were disappointed that this paper was not submitted for peer-review," said ABCTE president David Saba in a statement. "ABCTE has issued over 1,900 certifications but only 30 ABCTE certified teachers were studied by Mathematica. ... This sample size is just too small to conclude anything except that this deserves further study.”

Saba also noted that many of the teachers studied were veterans who needed to become fully certified in order to stay in the classroom, not the career-changers and new teachers that the group targets.

When I asked Glazerman if this study is the tip of the iceberg where ABCTE is concerned, he sighed. "I would love it if there were an iceberg," he said.

One of the challenges, he explained, is that the number of ABCTE teachers who work in tested grades and subjects and have enough sequential years of student-achievement data to be studied is not great enough to get to the sample you'd need to make broad generalizations about the program.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:29 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Here's another feather in American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten's cap: A Boston school and the union's Massachusetts affiliate have approved the state's first charter school contract.

And in an example of the innovative labor-management ideas Weingarten asserts such arrangements can breed, the contract will allow teachers and administrators in the Conservatory Lab Charter School, in Boston, significant autonomy over how pay decisions are made.

The details of the differential pay program will be hashed out during the 2009-10 school year by a committee of teachers and administrators formed to come up with the pay plan. Teachers will get traditional raises that year, and the program will go into effect for the 2010-11 school year (though the contract will allow it to be tweaked after that).

The only stipulation in the contract about this pay program is that it can't be based on student test scores, said Thomas Gosnell, the president of AFT Massachusetts. Other measures of student performance would be allowable, he added.

Teachers won't be able to appeal performance-based-pay decisions once the program is in place. So there is a strong incentive to get the details of the program right upfront.

What happens if the committee can't agree on the structure of the program? "I certainly hope that won’t be the case," Gosnell told me."I would hope they can come to an agreement, because this is real opportunity to set up some collaboration."

In the worst-case scenario, the management would apparently have the right to create the program, he indicated.

Although pay is clearly of interest, it actually wasn't the main reason teachers sought a union, Gosnell said. They wanted more input in decisionmaking and felt a contract would allow for more "predictability" and less staff turnover, he said.

Aside from the performance-based-pay elements, the contract contains what Gosnell described as traditional seniority and due-process provisions.

Union members approved the contract in mid-August; the school's trustees approved it Sept. 15.

There could be more Massachusetts charter school action in the future. Although he couldn't identify any schools by name, Gosnell said that his union is in discussion with teachers at several other schools and is actively seeking to increase the number of unionized charter school teachers.

"We devote a lot of time to this," he told me. "We strongly believe in organizing charter schools."

For background on the recent trend in charter school unionization, see this story.

UPDATED: The school's management sent me a statement underscoring that the new contract preserves much of the hallmark autonomy and flexibility valued by the charter movement.

“This contract preserves the charter school ethos by reflecting a commitment to students, flexibility and innovation, as well as to the professionalism of teachers," said Head of School Diana Lam. "We see the contract as a win for students and teachers alike.”

Photo: A unionized charter school teacher, AFT Executive Vice President Lorretta Johnson, AFT President Randi Weingarten, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Green Dot founder Steve Barr, pose at a reception at the AFT's 2009 professional-issues conference in Washington. Green Dot, a charter-management organization, and the AFT's New York City affiliate reached a contract deal in June for a school in that city.

Photo Credit: Michael Campbell/American Federation of Teachers

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The National Education Association plans to put $6 million over six years into "comprehensive strategies and policies to increase teacher effectiveness in high-needs schools." The funds will be focused on four strategies outlined in this paper, authored by Barnett Berry, the president of the Hillsborough, N.C.-based Center for Teaching Quality.

Among Berry's major recommendations, states and districts should focus on comprehensive initiatives to lure teachers to hard-to-staff schools and ensure that they grow in effectiveness while there. In other words, don't just stick performance pay in alone and expect it to work.

Berry puts it this way: "Pay incentives, however will always be a partial solution. Incentives tied to working conditions and professional opportunities will be at least as important, if not more so. A menu of incentives should include, at a minimum, reduced class size or student load; increased planning and collaboration time; graduated teaching loads for novice teachers; and additional opportunities for proven teachers to lead initiatives and share expertise."

It's an appealing idea to consider homing in on the "bundle" of incentives that will encourage effective teachers to go to, and to stay in, hard-to-staff schools, or that will help existing teachers in those schools become more effective. Some of the best-known programs that have hit upon this idea and that look a lot like what Berry recommends are the Benwood Initiative in Tennessee, the Mission Possible program in Guilford County, N.C., and the Teacher Advancement Program.

As part of defining what those characteristics are, NEA says it will survey teachers in high-needs schools to understand the working conditions they need to be successful and review policies that seem to get in the way of those working conditions.

All that said, however, it is interesting to note that NEA is also fairly selective from among the report's recommendations in what it plans to fund.

For instance, NEA promises support for the national-board-certification process and to encourage incentive-pay systems to offer at least $10,000 for such teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools. But it doesn't say it will spend it to recruit, say, math and science teachers who are especially hard to find for low-income schools.And, of course, the union's policies allow it to support national-board certification, but not incentive pay for certain subjects.

NEA also pledges to support "state and local affiliates who are legitimate partners in pursuit of innovative incentive and compensation programs, through funding streams such as the [Teacher Incentive Fund] grant program." Now that confuses me. The TIF requires student-achievement to be part of the incentive programs, and districts have interpreted that to mean test scores. The NEA's internal policies don't allow for the use of test scores, so it can't support locals that agree to bargain such programs (NEA folks didn't respond to several requests for clarification on this issue.)

And finally, in the section on defining teacher effectiveness using multiple measures, Berry discusses a variety of possibilities (national-board certification, value-added, performance-based assessments) and says that researchers and teacher associations should work together to determine an acceptable definition and use the results to create policies to improve teaching practices.

NEA says it will pursue such efforts, but adds that those will include "proactive ways in which to use seniority or other contract provisions" to promote teacher equity.

In other words, while this $6 million infusion of cash is admirable, and the union's work on working conditions in low-income schools could be revelatory, the actual policies it plans to support don't appear to differ significantly from what the union already prefers.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:37 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

With all the chatter about common standards, I've been wondering how a set of agreed-upon standards would affect teachers and assessments, my primary coverage areas here at Ed Week.

I wrote a little while ago about some possible implications for testing. But I'm really in the dark about what it will mean for teachers.

So, teachers, tell us, what's it like to go through the process of having your state standards overhauled? Were you supported in helping to make sense of them? Were you given updated tools and curricula? And what do you make of the conversations around common standards?

E-mail me at ssawchuk@epe.org, and let's chat. Or, post a comment below.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You may have heard heard of districts that hire a good portion of teachers from foreign countries like India and the Philippines. Many of these teachers come seeking the opportunity to win higher salaries here than they could in their native countries, and many have proven to be successful teachers. The Baltimore Sun did quite an interesting story a few years back on the large influx of Filipino teachers to that metropolis.

But there's a seedy side to this practice, too, and the American Federation of Teachers brings it to light in a deeply disturbing report on the practice of for-profit recruiting firms that contract with districts to supply these teachers.

From what the report describes, some of these firms have basically subjected hopeful teachers from abroad to what amounts to indentured servitude. Such teachers have been forced to live in substandard housing, charged usurious interest rates on loans they took out with the companies to secure passage to the United States, forbidden to own vehicles, and threatened with having their work visas revoked, it says.

Some of these teachers were officially employed by districts and managed to fight those types of policies through their unions, the report notes. But others were employed by the recruiting companies and therefore were not covered by collective-bargaining agreements, so there was little that unions could do to help them.

Now that AFT has put this out there, will federal, state, and local governments step up their oversight of teacher-recruiting firms?

More from Jay Mathews at The Washington Post here.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Vis-a-vis this recent blog item, Education Department official Judy Wurtzel apparently won plaudits today from educators for reiterating that teacher evaluations should be based on several different measures of performance, not on test scores alone. (She was speaking at the Association for Curriculum Supervision and Development's legislative conference, which I've been following at Twitter.)

Wurtzel, the deputy assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at ED, added, however, that such data should not be excluded from the evaluation process.

Now that that's cleared up, the question becomes to what extent test scores (or other indicators of student growth) should be weighted in making determinations of teacher effectiveness. I went back through the draft Race to the Top guidelines to find out, and unfortunately the language here is fairly vague. Student-growth data should be "a significant factor" in such decisions, the proposed criteria state.

Now just what does that mean? Some teachers and administrators, no doubt, would think that basing 10 percent of an evaluation test scores would be significant. But that's a far cry away from specifying that the student data should make up the majority of the data sources weighed in an evaluation or be made the preponderant criterion. (Those terms leave no doubt that such data would make up at least 50 percent of the rating.)

Does ED want to leave this decision up to states and districts to determine? That's a possibility, but seems a bit odd given that the RTTT application is so detailed in all other respects.

If you support the use of these measures, how much weight do you think they should be given?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:16 PM | Permalink | 8 Comments | Recommend

It isn't just the teachers' unions that are nervous about the draft guidelines for the Race to the Top.

I've been making my way through the thousands of Race to the Top comments, and there are a handful from some academics who argue that there isn't a strong enough research base to support the use of "value added" data for decisions involving teachers.

The inclusion of such measures in the Race to the Top guidelines appears to fly in the face of the Obama administration's promises to fund research-based approaches in the Race to the Top, these scholars contend.

Helen Ladd, a scholar at Duke University, argues that the proposed criteria would lead teachers to focus even more heavily on standardized tests, and that the value-added measures themselves are not reliable.

"Even the most sophisticated approaches typically cannot distinguish the contribution of teachers from the classroom context, and they generate estimates of a teacher’s quality that jump around from one year to the next, largely because of the small sample sizes for individual teachers," she writes.

Ladd has been involved in a number of studies associated with this research group at the Urban Institute that makes use of value-added data.

Two scholars at the Economic Policy Institute, Sean Corcoran and Joydeep Roy, reiterate a lot of the methodological issues, add that teacher effectiveness can be affected by school culture and peers (see this story for more), and contend that "teacher effects" don't seem to persist after one year. They add that there isn't a lot of data to show how such value-added data would be used to improve teacher effectiveness or instruction.

Paul Barton, a former director of ETS' policy-information center, has issues with the quality of tests now in place, the definition of growth (what does a year of growth or one grade level mean, anyway?), and the ability of value-added methodologies to separate out teacher effects from other types, such as the orderliness of schools, the adequacy of materials, instructional programs, leadership, and so forth.

"It is, I believe, an impossible task to separate the effects of each of these elements so as to assign quantitative values to each, and use this for accountability or to control for them to isolate teacher effects," he writes.

And the folks at the American Educational Research Association say that the use of test scores for teacher accountability contravenes prescribed standards in the measurement field for the use of assessments.

There is no doubt that this is a highly complicated area. The solution, if there is one to be had in this field, is that the value-added data should be incorporated with other measures of teacher effectiveness.

That's essentially the position of the teachers' union in Wisconsin, which has supported the undoing of a law in that state that blocks a teacher-student data link. My understanding is that it's also the position of the Obama administration that evaluations should consist of multiple measures.

In this blog item, I wrote about how that might be accomplished: by looking at the value-added data only at the top and bottom quartiles of effectiveness, over several years, and by incorporating information from teacher observations based on a solid set of performance standards. (Think Charlotte Danielson's framework or those used by Teach For America or those that ground the national-board certification process.)

Perhaps there is something to be learned from the Teacher Advancement Program, which uses value-added data as part of its system, and, I'm told, is doing some work to figure out whether observational ratings of teachers correlate to the value-added scores.

As a national policy agenda, though, this is only going to work if teachers think that it's doable. So if you're a teacher, what do you think? Write in and tell us.

UPDATE: Don't forget to check out Debbie Viadero's recent story on methodological issues with teacher value-added.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:28 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico get the National Council on Teacher Quality's green-eyeshade review of their teacher-preparation programs. The Washington-based group rates the programs on their degree of selectivity, exit standards, and how well they prepare teachers to teach reading and mathematics, according to principles laid out in two earlier reports.

(Those reports, it should be noted, were a bit controversial in and of themselves. For example, the council asserted that reading pedagogy should align with the 2000 National Reading Panel report findings, better known as "scientifically based reading research.")

NCTQ is mostly underwhelmed with what's going on in those states, citing lax state oversight as part of the problem. None of the states has high entry standards for programs, NCTQ officials write. Nor do the states have high exit standards, in the organization's view, with the states requiring licensing tests that lump together math and reading with other subjects (or don't cover them in enough depth), so a candidate could miss a lot of questions in one of those areas and still be granted a certificate.

Per state regulations, I'm reminded of something that a source told me today. "In the education field, we tend to conflate arduous processes with rigorous processes," he said.

As for content, the majority of the programs studied didn't meet NCTQ's guidelines for preparing teachers to teach reading and math. But programs at Western Governors University in Utah (an online, competency-based rather than credit-based program), the University of Utah, and the University of New Mexico did pass muster in those areas. The report spells out a couple of areas where those programs could still be strengthened, particularly for the teaching of algebra and middle school math.

Stay tuned, the council should have other states' reports coming out in the future.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A teacher-run public school (take note: not a public charter school) is poised to open its doors in Boston this year as one of the few such schools in the nation.

The school is run by two teacher-leaders rather than a single principal. According to a release from the Boston Teachers Union, the union agreed with the Boston school board to waive some contract provisions for "greater flexibility," although it doesn't specify what they are.

A few other states, notably Minnesota, are also interested in a similar concept, per my earlier blog entry here. In that state's case, the schools aren't officially run by the union, but the teachers in it would be unionized and operate according to the terms of the collective bargaining agreement.

My question is very much the same I had in the Minnesota example. It's all well and good to say that you're committed to shared decisionmaking, but what happens when teachers in the school have different opinions? Will the teacher-leaders step up to make an executive decision? Will other teachers start to view them as "management" or even grow to resent them? Or will this really lead to better labor dynamics in the school?

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, likes to say that contracts and agreements of this nature, as well as charters, are ways of piloting innovative labor-management ideas. The BTU and the AFT get major props for trying things like this out. I just wonder if they will end up liking the results.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:22 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

I checked in with officials at both teachers' unions to get their sense of the Obama back-to-school speech brouhaha.

The National Education Association's director of education policy and practice, Kay Brilliant (who surely has the best surname in the field since Margaret Spellings), said the union supports the thrust of personal responsibility, persistence, goal-setting, and achievement the president will discuss.

"I just find this whole thing amazingly curious," she told me. "I think we're disappointed that [the controversy] has taken on a political tone. We think this is an important issue, and as far as we can tell, it's a neutral topic. It seemed pretty benign."

The controversy itself could make for a teachable moment, she added. But it's hard to see how a teacher could address it without fueling even more flames in communities where this has become a big deal.

The inexhaustable president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten (who's traveling 'round the country on a back-to-school tour at the moment) sent in this statement:

"As an organization that represents teachers and school staff, we are gratified that the president of the United States is calling on students to stay in school and take responsibility for their education. These are the things we have called for our kids' role models to do. We are surprised to learn that people are trying to create a controversy around such a mom-and-apple-pie issue. Every member of the community has a role to play in education, including students, and President Obama is asking them take responsibility for their education."

UPDATE: Randi discusses the topic over at MSNBC, in this video.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:32 AM | Permalink | 14 Comments | Recommend

There are some things that just make you go "huh?"

According to this AP story, a whole bunch of teachers in Philadelphia are quitting or planning not to show up for their first week of school. More than 110 resigned this week; others have put in for long-term sick leave.

District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is not happy, calling the missing-in-action behavior "very unprofessional."

Teachers' union President Jerry Jordan said that it's not unusual for teachers to choose among different job offers before school begins.

Part of me thinks this must have something to do with Ackerman's intentions to overhaul hiring and seniority practices in the school district, as colleague Lesli Maxwell reported.

But on the other hand, have you heard of this happening in other fields? I can only imagine my editor's reaction if I were to tell her I was missing a deadline because I had an interview with some other education pub.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:19 AM | Permalink | 10 Comments | Recommend

With all this wrangling over teacher effectiveness and the best ways to measure it, you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd all moved on from old teacher wars (traditional vs. alternative certification, content vs. pedagogy) to the new ones. Well, think again.

In Indiana, the state's professional-standards board advanced a plan to overhaul the state's licensing system. The proposal would require teachers to pass a basic-skills test before entering a preparation program and to take more content coursework. It also would allow mid-career professionals to become teachers and administrators by passing tests rather than completing programs.

But it's caught a lot of pushback, especially from state colleges of education and those who say it would weaken entry standards. And those groups will have a chance to promote changes to the elements as the rules go out for public review.

Anyone want to guess what the result will be?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:58 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Remember those "teacher equity" provisions in No Child Left Behind? If your answer is no, you're probably not alone.

The law requires states to put plans into place to ensure that poor and minority students aren't disproportionally taught by out-of-field, unqualified, or inexperienced teachers. The states all submitted the required plans in 2006. But there's been precious little news about their implementation since then.

In the economic-stimulus legislation, Congress took another whack at the issue by requiring states receiving recovery dollars to comply with the teacher-equity provisions.

Now, nine lawmakers on the Congressional Black Caucus are taking EdSec Arne Duncan to task for what they say are oversights in his agency's implementation of that language.

In this letter, they outline two areas of "serious concern." First, ED's guidelines for Phase II of the state-stabilization funds only reference poor children, not poor and minority children. Second, the regulations only require states to distribute "highly qualified" teachers and don't mention the other two statutory indicators, teacher experience and field.

The letter sounds awfully similar to recommendations the Center for American Progress, Education Trust, Democrats for Education Reform, and the Education Equality Project made in their comments on state-stabilization and Race to the Top criteria. (Draw your own conclusions.)

Those groups also say that, for states to qualify for the discretionary RTTT funding, they should actually have evidence that they have made good on these provisions, not that they plan to do so.

"It would be a huge disappointment if the Obama administration continued the Bush administration's neglect of [these provisions]," Education Trust VP for Government Relations, Amy Wilkins, told me during a recent chat on teacher equity.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm swamped today working on a feature, but I'll be back tomorrow with some fresh items related to the Race to the Top. In the meantime, if you're seeking your fix of teacher news, check out these great stories by colleagues, and one from yours truly.

• Debbie Viadero has the scoop on a new study that shows the presence of an effective teacher seems to raise the teaching quality of that educator's peers. Now, the question is: What causes that phenomenon?

• In this story, I write about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's push to identify the most accurate and defensible teacher-effectiveness measures. Observations, value-added, student feedback, you name it - it's here.

• Michele McNeil notes that not all of the teacher-effectiveness proposals in the RTTT are easily workable in our nation's rural school districts. As she writes, it's hard to do great evaluations if you're the only physics teacher for miles around.

• And Lesli Maxwell has a detailed story up on Philadelphia Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's plans to institute site-based hiring over seniority and make other changes to the human-capital structures in Philadelphia. She's working collaboratively withe the union for now, but she has the "nuclear option" to force this stuff on teachers through a series of legal rulings if they hedge.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:46 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Education Next has a fascinating new survey on the "Obama effect" (full coverage from Education Week here).

About 43 percent of Americans said they supported basing part of a teacher's salary on his or her students' progress on state tests. But, when told about Obama's support for the systems, 13 percent more of the public favor the idea. Increases also appeared among these key groups:

• Support increased among African-Americans by 23 percentage points (to 55 percent).
• Support among Democrats increased by 15 percentage points (to 56 percent).
• Among teachers, support rose 19 percentage points (to 31 percent).

Teachers are still fairly uncomfortable with performance pay, but it seems significant to me that many more of them trust that if Obama supports it, there must be something to the idea.

There's also no doubt this finding is troubling for the teachers' unions. As I speculated a few months back, it's going to be harder for the unions to say "no" with a pro-labor Democrat pushing for these kinds of reform.

The survey was conducted in March, and clearly the president's popularity has decreased somewhat since then, so you may have to take these findings with a grain of salt.

Also of interest, support for merit pay climbed by only 6 percent when respondents were exposed to positive research evidence on the issue. Seems the Obama endorsement is more powerful than that of scholars.

(I'm not at all sure just where this "positive research evidence" referred to in the study comes from. Research on performance-based pay is still nascent, and many of the best studies were conducted in other countries with entirely different schooling systems.)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:48 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend