November 2009 Archives

A Washington superior court judge has backed Chancellor Michelle Rhee in a dispute with the Washington Teachers' Union over layoffs. The union sought a preliminary injunction that would essentially have required Rhee to reinstate teachers who were laid off supposedly due to budget cuts while other legal claims worked their way through the District of Columbia school system.

In essence, the union said that Rhee hired hundreds of young teachers over the summer, more than the district could pay for, thus forcing a later need to make cuts. Because of a series of administrative rulings in the late 1990s, layoffs in D.C. are done not only by seniority but also by performance. In this case, principals laid off many veteran teachers. That precipitated protests, allegations from the WTU that Rhee was bypassing termination procedures in the contract, and hearings with the D.C. Council.

Rhee's staff disputed the charges, although there has been much back and forth between her staffers and the council about when the district was aware of the upcoming budget crunch.

The reductions-in-force, as they are called in contract legalese, have been cited as one reason that a new collective bargaining pact in D.C. is still languishing. (Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has gotten in on the action by saying that the contract situation has gone on for far too long.)

Bill Turque at The Washington Post has most of the details you'll need. But for our purposes, let's leave aside the he-said-she-said aspect of this mess to consider the larger implications.

Although whether or not the RIF was appropriate is the primary issue here, a secondary subtext concerns how teachers were laid off and whether building principals, who were charged with the cuts, made fair, accurate, and defensible decisions. (D.C. is one of only a handful of districts that perform RIFs by anything other than strict seniority.)

Lately, there has been much discussion from the federal government, the Gates Foundation, and others about moving from systems in which proxies for effectiveness, like seniority and credentials, are replaced by evaluations and measures that attempt to gauge teacher effectiveness in much more sophisticated ways. Presumably, that would make decisions such as RIFs and terminations more in alignment with what students need, i.e., keeping the most effective teachers.

But as this D.C. situation points out, that is really only going to work if principals or evaluators are highly trained to use these evaluation instruments; if unions agree that principals (or whoever makes evaluations and consequential decisions resulting from those evaluations) are doing a fair job; and finally, that both parties view this system as an appropriate procedure for handling layoffs and terminations and that there are clear procedures for doing so in place.

None of those things, I suspect, will come easily, cheaply, or without a fair share of legal wrangling. In other words, I think it's possible that this D.C. lawsuit is only the tip of the iceberg as districts attempt to move to performance-based teacher-quality systems.

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

Betsy Hammond at the Oregonian turns in a great story about how the state legislature plans to take up a measure to overturn a 1923 law that prohibits teachers from wearing religious clothing or symbols, such as yarmulkes, crosses or headscarves, in the classroom.

I'll admit to not knowing that this was prohibited in Oregon, much less anywhere else in the United States. But as it turns out, two other states also disallow teachers from wearing such symbols in the classroom, Hammond writes.

Clearly, the lines between freedom of expression and freedom of religion are thin and difficult to negotiate when it comes to teachers—public employees who are in a position of authority over children. Even if religious clothing is generally permitted, a lot of the fine lines about what a teacher can and can't say about their beliefs are set fairly locally by districts.

It's also interesting to consider that this is very much a cultural phenomenon. In France, with its very strict separation of church and state (la laïcité), not even public school students are allowed to wear religious symbols. That's come up here in the U.S. locally and there have been court cases about it. But in France it's a decades old national debate, partly because the country has a significant Muslim population. (Hat tip to my brother the historian for the background on this.)

In any case, it makes me wonder about the broader issue of teachers and the way in which their profession influences or curtails their 1st amendment freedoms in the classroom. Take, for instance, the flap about teachers wearing political buttons in New York during the election 2008 campaign.

Why not leave a comment and tell us what you make of this interesting and complex aspect of the teaching profession?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm a bit behind in writing up this report on teacher evaluation. But as this topic is likely to be on the national scene for a while, I expect you won't hold it against me.

The report, from the Hope Street Group, was put together with input from teachers, not just policy folks, an important thing to keep in mind as these new systems are developed. It has a great overview of the different issues at play, and ultimately, it recommends that both objective measures (value-added data, student work, teacher-generated growth goals a la Teach For America) and observational measures of classroom performance, conducted by trained instructional leaders, according to a performance-based set of measures, should make up the system.

Over at Eduflack, Patrick Riccards situated the report's recommendations within the two accountability manifestos of the Education Equity Project and "Bolder, Broader" group. I really can't improve on his analysis, so I'll just direct you there.

And the Hope Street Group is getting an extra shot in the arm now that Alice Johnson Cain, a longtime staffer for House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller D-Calif., will be heading there to work on teacher-effectiveness issues. (Having reported on AJC's boss for years, and by extention her own work, I can attest that this is a real coup for the group.)

One thing that worries me a bit, though, is that despite all these reports on teacher evaluation, there seem to be very few models that exist districtwide. (Plenty of individual schools do a good job with evaluations, but as we all know, scaling up is hard to do.) Both Cincinnati and now the District of Columbia have attempted to place a performance-based evaluation system at the center of teaching and learning, but in both cities, the effort has turned out to be controversial.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

U.S. Secretary of Arne Duncan has been praising Louisiana's model for using "value-added" data to gauge the strengths of its various education programs, but it looks like a bunch of other states are coming on board, too.

First, we heard that Texas had plans to do something similar, also using value-added data.

And now there's this story from Ron Matus in the St. Petersburg Times that says that Florida is using data from the state test to gauge whether at least 50 percent of each training program's graduates are helping their students to grow a year or more on the tests.

I can't tell from the story if Florida is using a "value-added" methodology like Louisiana's, or some other format. The story uses the term "value table," usually a somewhat simpler growth model that looks at the breakdown of students into the various categories on the state test (i.e., "proficient," "basic," etc.) But in any case, it looks like there's a bona fide interest among the states to look at the outcomes of teacher preparation.

Now, I wonder, how will these states intervene in those programs that don't seem to be producing effective teachers?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Just 20 days after its previous contract with New York City expired, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew is signaling that he doesn't think the union will easily reach agreement with the city on a new one.

The union's delegate assembly agreed to his request to declare impasse if talks don't improve, GothamSchools reports.

After impasse is declared, the contract moves toward mediation. If that fails, it moves to "fact finding," in which an independent board makes recommendations for reaching a pact. GothamSchools notes that fact-finding has backed the union on a couple of issues in the past.

In any case, there are certainly a lot of hot-button issues on the table for this contract go-around. They include the absent-teacher reserve pool, the performance-pay program that then-UFT President Randi Weingarten negotiated in 2007, and with all the bad New Yorker press, possibly even the "rubber rooms" for teachers under investigation.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This story by the Boston Herald brings up a lot of relevant issues about the structuring of incentive-pay programs.

In essence, the program in question would give AP teachers bonuses based on the number of students who earn passing scores on the test. But the union thinks that all teachers should share in the payout. There is a lot of requisite finger-pointing on both sides, and the reporter refers to "union grinches." (Bet you didn't know that even journalists are getting into the Christmas spirit early, too.)

One of the things that I hear a lot from my union sources is that all teachers, not just a select few, should at least be eligible to win pay bonuses, so it's not hard to see why the Boston Federation of Teachers would be unhappy with this program. On the other hand, just spreading money to all teachers regardless of some kind of criteria doesn't really amount to performance pay at all; it's a raise for everybody.

Can you think of a compromise here? Let us all know how you'd structure this program.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's an important story about recently introduced legislation to amend the Troops to Teachers program and make many more school districts eligible to host these teachers.

The program gives stipends for veterans with a certain number of years of active military service to get their teaching credentials if they agree to work for three years in a school serving a high percentage of poor students.

For veterans who left the military on or after Jan. 8, 2002, The bill would decrease from six to four years the number of years of active service a veteran needs to qualify. It would also allow individuals serving on or after Sept. 11, 2001 to qualify if they completed 90 days of active service. Finally, the bill would also expand the program from "high-need" school districts to all school districts that receive Title I funds for disadvantaged students.

It seems like an admirable idea to expand the talent pipeline through such changes, but there are potential tradeoffs to consider. For instance, most school districts receive Title I funds of some kind, even though poverty levels are quite variable within Title I districts, which means that this program would not be nearly as targeted with these changes in place. Is it possible such a change would mean that the most challenged schools would no longer get dibs on these teachers?

It's something for Congress to think about during the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which will likely incorporate some version of this bill.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You may remember that I moonlight as Education Week 's assessment reporter in addition to covering teacher issues. Right now, I'm in Boston covering the U.S. Department of Education's first public forum on the $350 million that it'll be putting toward consortia of states that create common assessments aligned to common reading and math standards.

The panelists are having very rich conversations on everything from how to use technology to improve what cognitive skills can be measured to how to structure consortia that work together effectively (do you need an executive director?). Yesterday, though, much of the conversation focused on the role of teachers in the assessment process.

A number of the panelists brought up the idea of using performance-based tasks and extended open-response questions, and engaging teachers in the design, use, and even the scoring of these tasks. A Canadian testing official, Jim Dueck, talked about how the province of Alberta has done this for a number of years. To minimize bias and scoring snafus, teachers read all of the responses blind, and the responses pass through many scorers and review levels.

The benefit, proponents say, is that teachers then have much more understanding of the standard at hand and whether students truly demonstrated mastery of that standard. They also feel more ownership of the assessment process, rather than facing decontextualized assessements dropped out of the sky.

The panelists didn't agree, though, on whether such tasks should be performed in a low-stakes context in the classroom, to guide instruction, or whether such tasks could be rolled into an accountability context in a fair, reliable way.

The only state that did anything like this under the No Child Left Behind Act, Nebraska, faced a lot of skepticism about the system because its assessments were locally designed, making it harder to develop comparability across districts. And in 2007, when House education leaders proposed allowing 15 states to develop a similar system for NCLB, I remember that Dianne Piche, then at the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights (now at the Education Department), likened permitting teachers' scoring of their students' tests to allowing 16-year-olds to score their own driver's-license exams.

But could it work if the tasks were standardized across a consortium? What if scoring were done blindly, as in Alberta? How about some kind of centralized auditing process of teacher scoring to increase reliability and comparability?

Do the challenges outweigh the costs, or vice versa?

Tell us what you think.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The final Race to the Top guidelines are here! There are some interesting new details on the effective-teacher policies. And of the four pillars or "assurances" in the economic-stimulus legislation, teacher effectiveness, it turns out, gets the most weight (28 percent) in the scoring process.

Let's dig in.

The first thing I noticed here is that it is not an absolute requirement that states gain teachers'-union approval of the state RTTT proposals. As colleague Michele McNeil writes in her story this morning, teachers' unions are just one of a number of stakeholders that states are supposed to get to sign off on the application.

The definition for "effective teachers" has changed, and as Teacher Beat predicted not long ago, the guidelines now explicitly state that teacher evaluations must include "multiple measures" in addition to basing a "significant part" of the evaluation on test scores or other measures of student growth.

The supplemental measures the guidelines recommend include observation-based assessments of performance and evidence of leadership roles, such as serving as a mentor or the leader of a professional-learning community.

But the notice still does not define what a "significant part" means with respect to test scores. That could, potentially, be problematic. (Is 10 percent significant? 50 percent?)

The teacher-quality criteria that will by far garner the most points for a state is by putting into place systems to tie the results of teacher and principal evaluations to decisions involving professional development, compensation, promotion, tenure-granting, and dismissal.

In a new element that is almost sure to upset folks at teachers' colleges, the scoring criteria direct reviewers to give more points to a state that permits alternative routes to operate outside of schools of education than those that restrict such routes to schools of education.

The American Federation of Teachers has a few interesting things to say on the final criteria. First, it seemed pleased with the changes to the teacher-evaluation language and even seems to feel that its input was instrumental in shaping it. Then there's this paragraph:

"We know that many states have begun the application process, but that not all are involving teachers and their unions in a meaningful way. We take Education Department officials at their word when they say they will look for meaningful collaboration in the state Race to the Top applications."

Randi Weingarten threw a fit about the lack of attention to collaborative union-managment reforms in the SHMC report earlier this month, so to be honest, I expected something a bit more, well, colorful, from her on the Race to the Top guidelines. After all, there's still a lot of attention to using test scores to measure teacher performance here. And one of these state applications could presumably still get funded without having any union people sign off on it. (Where's the collaboration meter when you need it??)

On the other hand, I know she'll be closely watching the state application process. And, as New Teacher Center blogger-staffer Liam Goldrick points out in this intelligent item, a lot of implementation power lies in the hands of local unions.

Fasten your seatbelts...

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Barack Obama and his administration have made quite a big deal about the Wisconsin legislature's move to undo a law barring student test-score data from being considered in teachers' evaluations.

You may remember that having such a "firewall" between teachers and students essentially disqualifies a state from participating in the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund. Both Wisconsin and California have been scrambling to rectify the issue, although two other states with similar restrictions, New York and Nevada, are passing on it for now.

Last Thursday, I wondered if Wisconsin's law really had the teeth it seems to have, since the bill doesn't actually permit the data to be used for disciplining or dismissing teachers. Additionally, the bill also requires every district to bargain the evaluation system with its local teachers' union, and does not affirmatively demand that the test-score data be used.

Turns out I wasn't the only one to be asking these questions. There's a lot of discussion out there on Wisconsin's law this morning.

The Wisconsin State Journal accuses Democratic legislators of "watering down" the bill. At Flypaper, Andy Smarick suggests that states are just after the Race to the Top money, not necessarily the accompanying reforms.

Now, the question is whether the Obama administration thinks that this law aligns closely enough to its priorities for teacher evaluation to fund the state's RTTT application.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm swamped again on some long-term stuff but my wonderful colleagues have some important teacher-related stories.

• Read Lesli Maxwell's write-up of the Strategic Management of Human Capital report here.
• Catherine Gewertz highlights the lack of research about high school instruction in this story.
• And Debbie Viadero has a must-read item up about new research on a Texas performance-pay program.

Second, the mail has been pouring in on this blog item about the SHMC report. (Reminder: I love getting direct mail from readers and I encourage you to send it. But don't forget that your thoughts get out to a lot more people if you use the comment function on the blog.)

A few readers felt I was being glib when I said in this item that the AFT might have had a different reaction to the report if it had included more references to collaborating with unions. I assumed that this was just an oversight from the report's drafters because many of the most high-profile changes to the teacher-quality continuum have been done with union support (think Denver Pro-Comp). But these readers admonished me for making that assumption, and argued that the report needed to be more careful and deliberative about that point. Food for thought!

A colleague of mine had an interesting perspective on the report. Her read was that it seemed to focus on individual teachers more than on teachers working together in their schools collaboratively. It's an interesting observation, and researchers like Harvard's Susan Moore Johnson have been wrestling with this question of individual vs. collective improvement in schools.

Finally, all eyes are on Wisconsin as it works to remove the "firewall" between teacher and student data. Apparently, if the law goes through, such data could be used in evaluations but couldn't be used to dismiss a teacher.

I'll confess to being a bit confused about that. Don't evaluations, after all, ultimately factor into decisions to dismiss teachers? I'll start sniffing around on this today, but if you have immediate details or thoughts, do enlighten us!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Strategic Management of Human Capital initiative released a report today outlining new strategies for attracting, developing, and maintaining an effective teacher workforce, and in doing so, has managed to really tick off Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers. She calls the report "top down" and "disrespectful" of teachers and unions. UPDATED: Here is the link to the report.

Among the recommendations, the report says states and districts should raise entry requirements for teacher preparation; institute a tiered licensure system requiring teachers to complete an induction program and demonstrate teaching effectiveness before receiving tenure; and overhaul professional development and evaluations to be standards-based and to provide pathways for teacher improvement.

AFT has both substantive beefs with the proposals at hand, and feels that feedback from its representatives to the task force wasn't adequately taken into account in the report's drafting. A letter that Weingarten sent off to the task force chairs, Allan Odden and James Kelly, says that the report "relies too much on untested ideas for finding excellent teachers, and not enough on supporting and developing teachers to make them great."

She says the proposals don't pay enough attention to the context in which teachers teach, and that accountability for student outcomes is focused too heavily on teachers, and not on the administrators and other environmental factors that affect working conditions. And finally, there is not enough focus on developing reforms in collaboration, with unions, she asserts.

"The work of the task force so far, however, has focused almost exclusively on how teachers need to change rather than how the system and all its actors need to change and work collaboratively to support effective teaching and student learning," Weingarten writes in the letter.

Let's take all of this in turn.

On the "untested" piece: It's true that there are only a handful of experiments to reward teachers on anything other the basis of longevity and credentials. But most of these examples are bonus programs rather than true-blue overhauls of teacher compensation and some of them were done with unions. The general idea is hardly revolutionary, and there are some interesting new studies in the works to help flesh out the research literature on this topic.

As for some of the other ideas, New Mexico and a handful of other states already have a version of tiered licensure. Rhode Island and Indiana are contemplating raising the entry point on teacher-licensing examinations. Unions and administrators alike think professional development and evaluations are lousy and need to be more closely tailored to professional standards to offer quality feedback for improvement. I've never heard anyone from the AFT knock teacher induction. And one of AFT's own locals, Minneapolis, has a rather elaborate process for tenure-granting that includes the submission of a portfolio. (Read more about it in this report.)

I don't know whether all of these examples have really great scientifically based evaluation procedures in place so that we can learn from them. (One hopes so, because otherwise it will be hard to figure out if they're superior to current systems.)

On Weingarten's criticism that this report focuses too heavily on teachers: It's not invalid to say that things like community organizations and parents and wraparound services should be part of the conversation, but can you fault a task force on teachers and principals for focusing, you know, on teachers and principals?

On the other hand, she does make a good point with the environmental-issues factor. She notes that the report says principal evaluations should include consideration of school context, but doesn't mention context with respect to teacher evaluations. (It would be very interesting and enlightening to see whether SHMC, in subsequent work, specifically addresses school context within an improved system of human capital management.)

I am not privy to how the SHMC folks worked to craft this report. But If the drafters had fixed that language on environmental factors (an additional sentence would've done it) and liberally sprinkled the phrase "in collaboration with unions" in the report, would AFT would have had a different reaction?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:37 PM | Permalink | 9 Comments | Recommend

Two recent news stories illustrate nicely two ways of looking at teacher preparation: an "output"-oriented view of teacher preparation that focuses on student achievement, and an input-oriented one that focuses on credentials and curriculum.

Texas is looking to institute a state system for approving schools of education that puts a heavier focus on teacher effectiveness. It sounds very similar to Louisiana's system, which tracks graduates of teacher-training programs into their classrooms to gauge their ability to boost achievement.

Indiana officials, on the other hand, are duking it out over proposed regulations that would allow for more alternate-route teaching programs, reduce pedagogy coursework in education schools, and require candidates to take more content-area preparation.

In both stories, the common theme is one of the state's role in overseeing teacher training. That's an important if overlooked aspect of teacher preparation: Teachers' colleges and alternative routes get a lot of criticisms about their quality, but ultimately states are charged with identifying and closing poor-performing programs. (The Texas story notes that not once in 16 years did the state accreditation body actually close down a program.)

What mix of "inputs" and "outputs" do you think states should be regulating?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend