January 2010 Archives

The National Council on Teacher Quality has released its third encyclopedic "yearbook" of state teacher-quality policies, this time focused on what laws and regulations states had on the books as of 2009. (Remember that these are state policies; local ones are supplemented by what's in collective bargaining agreements, memorandums of understanding, or the results of meet-and-confer arrangements.)

Most of the states got scores in the D range. Just a handful of states—mostly Southern, right-to-work states, interestingly—got the slightly higher but still undesirable grade of C.

Here are a few facts from the yearbook that I find especially interesting:

• Twenty-six states require no content preparation for elementary-level special education teachers.

• On evaluations, nine states don't specify any evaluation parameters. The others do; of those, 15 require annual evaluations, and 16 require objective measures of student performance to be considered. Twenty-one states don't require evaluations to include classroom observations. (Paging Randi Weingarten!) Four states require evidence of teacher performance to be considered when granting tenure.

• Four states offer teachers a defined-contribution rather than a defined-benefit pension plan.

• Seventeen states set a salary schedule based on teacher longevity and credentials, and 18 require districts to set similar schedules.

• Nineteen states support performance-based-pay programs. Of those, 16 explicitly connect performance pay to evidence of student achievement (not necessarily test scores) and 14 allow all teachers to participate, not just teachers in tested grades and subjects.

As we all know, teacher quality is often a touchy subject, one with more than its fair share of passionate advocates. Or to put it another way, tempers flare early and often on this beat. The NCTQ reports frequently cause a maelstrom of debate. This one will probably be no exception. The council labels traditional salary schedules as "outmoded," for instance, thinks that teachers should be compensated for boosting student achievement, and says most pension systems are inflexible and unfair. And the council has specific ideas about what teachers need to know to teach reading and math, which is a hot-button issue all by itself.

Feel free to write in and let us know if agree with the rationale behind the council's selected indicators and grades. Do you agree with its view of the state policies documented here? Why or why not?

It will be interesting to see whether, in the wake of the Race to the Top, some of these numbers—in addition to the council's grades—change in future years.

You can read prior Education Week coverage of this annual report here and here.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm swamped today finishing up a story for the paper, so I'm turning Teacher Beat over to you.

I take continuous improvement seriously, as does Education Week, so I want to remind you that this blog is only good insofar as it supplies information and analysis that you find useful.

So how am I doing? Which topics would you like to see more coverage of? Am I doing too much on teachers' unions and Race to the Top? Not enough on state teacher-quality policy? Would you find more news analysis helpful? More links to resources?

Post a comment and let us all know; or e-mail me directly if you're shy. ssawchuk@epe.org.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten had a brief call with reporters this afternoon in which she praised the Obama administration for proposing to boost education spending even as most other areas are slated for cuts.

"We very much appreciate that the core education budget has been preserved," she said.

Whether she'll like the specific education priorities in the budget is another story. So I asked about the Teacher Incentive Fund, since in a briefing Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan intimated prioritizing rewards for teachers and principals, according to this Politico story. Here's Weingarten's response:

"We've seen some good examples out of TIF and we're looking to find the labor-management partnerships that TIF could help fund. So as I said in my speech a couple of weeks ago, it is the glue that helps this new path forward, and hopefully TIF will be the vehicle to facilitate that."

Weingarten added that she's concerned about cuts to programs that support the economic safety net.

(We've since learned that the Promise Neighborhoods program, based largely on the Harlem Children's Zone, will also receive an increase.)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There are many teacher implications to this Washington Post exclusive on the federal budget. (More here from Alyson Klein at Politics K-12.) President Obama's 2010 budget request will apparently include some new funds for education, but will also collapse the number of federal K-12 ed programs from 38 to 11 and eliminate six programs altogether.

Translation: Overall education spending will go up. But it might not be going to the teacher programs, and the one you depend on may be going buh-bye.

Practically all of the federal education programs, to one extent or another, affect teachers, but there are quite a few that are specifically focused on educators. The ones I can think of just off the top of my head include the Title II state teacher quality grants, a flexible teacher-oriented funding stream that mainly supports professional development and class size reduction; the Teacher Incentive Fund, a program that seeds teacher and principal performance-based compensation; Troops to Teachers and Transition to Teaching, two programs that help career-changers enter the classrooms; Education Technology and Math and Science Partnerships, two programs that support professional development; the Teacher Quality Partnership grants, which supports teacher preparation and "residency" programs; and support for advanced certification, such as through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

If I were a betting man, I'd expect the administration to preserve and expand the TIF, which is one of its vehicles for promoting teacher effectiveness. I suspect the TQP program will also stay about the same, because as a senator, Obama supported language to rework the program that ultimately got put into effect in the 2008 Higher Education Act renewal. And I would anticipate something happening to Title II, given the tidbits Arne Duncan mentioned in our recent interview with the EdSec.

I'll be sure to comb through all this when we see the details and do an updated post once I know what's what. But keep in mind that, even if the budget zeroes out, consolidates or tweaks some of these programs, all of that has to go through Congress. And every federal program, no matter its size, has one or two ardent defenders on Capitol Hill.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Exciting news in teacher preparation this week.

First, Arizona State University has announced that it will work with Teach For America to inform its own teacher-preparation program. A press release from ASU says that it will adopt the national alternative-route program's tools, including its recruitment and core-member-support mechanisms, to create "an improved national model" for teacher preparation and increase the number of effective teachers it produces.

As I wrote in this story and as Amanda Ripley wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, TFA has spent years trying to refine its recruitment and teacher-support systems and has gathered quite a bit of information about what appears to correlate with teacher effectiveness based on these efforts.

The rhetoric in education-policy circles and in the media tends to paint TFA teachers in one of two ways, either as crusading saviors or as under-prepared idealists. Both of those tropes miss an important fact: TFA has discovered some very interesting and novel human-capital practices. It's heartening to see this type of cross-pollination; I'd wager TFA will also pick up a thing or two from its contact with ASU.

Second, Urban Teacher Residency United, a group that supports the development of teacher-residency programs, is having its "residency for residencies" training this week. In a day and age where residency programs are quickly becoming the ne plus ultra of teacher preparation, UTRU's training is designed to support new partners to institute the many complex factors that make up a true residency program. These include a yearlong student-teaching experience in a school similar to the ones where candidates will be teaching; strong mentoring by experienced teachers; and embedded coursework, among other things.

I've heard rumblings out in the field about programs that are now calling themselves residencies, but don't have these core components, so this seems like a clever way of making sure everyone's on board.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A few people have written in urging me to write a bit about the situation in Houston over the district's new criterion for dismissing teachers. The gist of it is that Houston Superintendent Terry Grier referenced Randi's Big Speech to support a policy that would allow the dismissal of teachers with low value-added scores. (It is now one of 34 factors that could be used to dismiss teachers.) Weingarten responded with a letter accusing Grier of misrepresenting her words. Eduwonk and others called Weingarten's bluff. And on the other side of things, Diane Ravitch lept to Randi's defense.

There are several things going on here that should be parsed. (1) Grier promises that the Houston situation isn't just about test scores but it's difficult to figure out from this document how these 34 factors will relate to teacher dismissal. (2) Weingarten was insistent that any evaluation system that included consideration of test scores be coupled with documented support for teachers, i.e., peer review and mentoring. The document linked above says teachers will get remediation support, but it's not clear whether those measures pass muster with the AFT. (There's no peer review, for instance.) (3) Assume, now, what would have happened if Grier had addressed teacher support and multiple measures of performance more explicitly in his letter. Would he have earned the same rebuke from Weingarten? Good question, and it gets at the heart of what I think is take-away number (4), which is that whether you think Grier's letter was willful misrepresentation, as Weingarten asserts, probably depends on where you stand politically on teacher unions. And finally there is (5), that no matter what Weingarten says nationally about evaluations, her affiliates have to get this done on the ground.

UPDATE: The folks over at AFT wrote in with some additional details. Regarding number 3 above, it looks like I got the timing wrong; Grier's "Dear colleague" letter went out after Houston Federation of Teachers presented Randi's statement at a board meeting. Also, regarding number 1 above, the union asserts that Grier said the value-added scores could be a stand-alone reason for dismissing a teacher. For the other side of things, including a comment from Harvin Moore, who sits on the Houston Board of Education, read some remarks in the comments of this Eduwonk blog item.

The bigger question this all raises for me is the whole union-management collaboration theme Weingarten has been talking about. Randi appears to be absolutely committed to the idea, but the definition of "collaboration" remains pretty vague. Take, for instance, the fact that Weingarten's vision of collaboration appears to be deeply linked to collective bargaining, something many districts in Texas (including Houston) and right-to-work states don't have. Can collaboration exist outside of a bargaining context? How would it work in Texas? Also, what about districts with meet-and-confer arrangements?

Ultimately, Weingarten and the AFT may have to be a bit more specific about what collaboration entails if they want others to believe that it can change the labor-management dynamic. Maybe her entreaties to some of the Washington groups (read the last three grafs here) to develop mechanisms and protocols for collaboration will yield concrete examples. Otherwise, though, the term remains subjective and slippery, and might even be viewed as a tactical ploy rather than a genuine plea for reform.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Philadelphia teacher contract was approved. This Philadelphia Inquirer story covers the bread-and-butter issues. Of course, I'm more interested in what reform proposals are on the table.

I don't have a full copy of the contract yet, but here are some details the district decided to highlight:

• 90% of teacher vacancies will be hired through site-based hiring rather than seniority.
• In schools that are chronically underperforming, deemed "Renaissance Schools," the district can implement longer school days, a longer school year that would include Saturdays and summer school, and site-based hiring.
• There will be a new school-based performance-pay program to reward schools that make strides in student achievement, but apparently there won't be an individual bonus-pay program.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Just this morning, negotiators in Philadelphia reached agreement on the form of a new collective bargaining pact. The details aren't public yet as the agreement will go to the rank-and-file of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers for ratification on Thursday. But bank on some changes on the teacher-quality front, especially for compensation and evaluation.

Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has clearly put teacher-quality issues at the top of her agenda, and some independent pressure groups have been focusing on the state of teacher evaluations there.

It's possible that we'll also see some of AFT pres Randi Weingarten's "signature touches" in the contract. (See the latter half of this post for details on what I mean by that.)

I'll have more details for you as we get them.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has announced plans to support legislation that would overhaul the statewide teacher-salary schedule and allow teachers to opt into one that determines pay partly on performance-based measures.

States have tried to do statewide performance-pay before, but this example stands out because it sounds as though it would fundamentally restructure how the salary schedule operates. Teachers opting in would no longer get supplements for advanced degrees, which have only weak correlations to student performance. Instead, they would win additional compensation based on observations of teachers and growth of student performance to determine teacher effectiveness and base compensation on those results.

The plan would go into effect in 2013, and current teachers could "opt into" the plan or remain on the current salary schedule. Teachers hired after Jan. 1, 2014, would automatically be enrolled in the system.

The bill would apparently be linked to the state's Race to the Top Fund application in that the state board of education would draw from examples of performance-pay systems developed through Race to the Top funding.

It's an interesting proposal, and the press release mentions that it would allow new teachers to earn much higher salaries than they typically earn. I wrote a story about that issue not too long ago.

Questions still remain. According to one story, 50 percent of compensation would be based on student growth measures but it's unclear what those will be. And it's also not clear whether pay would be variable from year to year (i.e., if you were deemed effective one year and ineffective the next, would you lose money?) And, of course, this has to pass the legislature. There will surely be opponents who want to sink the idea.

Other states with statewide salary schedules include Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia. In most states, salary schedules are locally bargained.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Missouri State Teachers Association formally opposes the state's Race to the Top bid, per this press release. Aside from contending that teachers weren't appropriately consulted in the drafting of the plan, the union states forthrightly that it's not willing to support reform efforts that go against its internal policy resolutions, such as using test scores in decisions involving teachers.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association, on the other hand, has said it's encouraging locals where the plan is a "good fit" to apply. Translation:"> the plan doesn't trump collective bargaining rights. But an FAQ from the state department of education says that "to the extent that the parties are unable to implement required reform activities, grant funding may be withheld or terminated."

With that language, Pennsylvania may have become a state to watch. Unlike other states it's requiring all "participating districts" to have both school board AND union signoff and to implement all aspects of the reform plan. Although the state is still not as clear as others about who'll make the call on how much student test scores are weighted in new evaluations, it's certainly trying to negotiate the issue that Andy Smarick writes about here: maintaining an aggressive reform plan with lots of stakeholder buy-in, the best of both worlds when it comes to RTTT scoring.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The worst thing about being a blogger is having to feed the beast every day. But the best thing is knowing that there's always space to follow up on a story that deserves more time, attention, or nuance than there is room in the paper.

Such is the case today with Randi Weingarten's Big Speech, which is quickly becoming something of an annual tradition for the American Federation of Teachers.

• A lot of the coverage in the general press focused on Weingarten's remarks about incorporating test scores into teacher evaluations. Perhaps this is just representative of the difference between writing for a specialty publication and writing for a mainstream newspaper, but this is hardly news. Randi has been making the point for months. Her union's initial reaction to the Race to the Top guidelines, from August of last year, emphatically states that "obviously" student achievement should be considered when judging teachers, although assessments shouldn't be the sole factor. And her union has funded examples of this through its Innovation Fund.

• Weingarten made the point that test scores, if they are to be used in teacher evaluations, should be a measure of student growth over the course of the year rather than an "apples to oranges" comparison of cohorts of students. But most state tests are not given multiple times a year. There are exceptions, but many value-added methodologies project a student's performance based on prior academic achievement—when (s)he was being taught by other teachers.

• A few people have written me to say that they don't put much faith in all the talk of due-process reform,—which to me was the real story—since it would have to be coupled with an AFT-approved evaluation system. On the other hand, what Weingarten outlined today seems entirely consistent with, for instance, the Gates Foundation's intensive partnerships and measures of effective teaching work. Don't write off this effort just yet.

• Eduwonk gives us some food for thought by implying in a one-sentence aside that the focus on due process may have partly been born out of the political pressure to do something about the "rubber room" situation in New York City, after Steven Brill's critical story in The New Yorker appeared last year. Too bad no one thought of putting rubber-roomed teachers onto a trashy reality-T.V. program.

• EdSec Arne Duncan was supposed to attend the speech, but ended up not being able to make it. He was attending the funeral of Vice President Joe Biden's mother. But there was plenty of Education Department representation there this morning, including communications head Peter Cunningham and senior Duncan adviser Jo Anderson.

• The National Education Association has been strangely silent on all of this, though the union is definitely paying attention (a high-level communications fellow from the NEA was among the staffers in attendance). Surely NEA chief Dennis Van Roekel has an opinion!

Photo: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, confers with John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, left, before speaking at the National Press Club on Jan. 12. Hartina Flournoy, the assistant to the AFT president, stands in the foreground.
Photo Credit: Andrew Councill for Education Week

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

More action on the Race to the Top and unions:

• The NEA and AFT affiliates in Rhode Island aren't quite on board with the state's plan just yet; the AFT affiliate wants "recourse" in the Memorandum of Understanding to prevent administrators from having too much power over assignments, reports Jennifer Jordan in the Providence Journal.

• The Tennessee Education Association is supporting legislation to position the state for the contest, but still hopes to insert a provision capping the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations at 35 percent. Other state officials think it should be 50 percent. The RTTT application guidelines don't elaborate on what it looks like to base "a significant part" of evaluations on student achievement, and it's not clear who's going to emerge as the victor in this go-around. (A bratty five-year-old voice inside my head is saying 'I told you so' right about now.)

• In California, the Sacramento Bee has the scoop that the CTA, like other unions across the country, is urging local affiliates not to sign off on the MOU for the state's Race to the Top bid. CTA has long been one of the more vocal NEA affiliates in its opposition to performance pay.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

United Teachers Los Angeles recently put out a big editorial that explains its view of how to help the teaching profession. It largely reiterates the union's usual support of such features as reduced class sizes and better professional development, but there were a few new things in it that caught my attention.

First, the union suggests expanding the practice of allowing teachers to interview candidates at their schools. This form of hiring, usually called site-based, generally gives individual schools and often administrators more say over who they choose to work with. But one thing I can't figure out is how this system works in tandem with the seniority system. Perhaps it is addressed in the district's new contract, which isn't up on UTLA's Web site yet. But under the old contract at least, such hiring practices seemed to apply only to voluntary, rather than involuntary, transfers.

Second, the union gives props to peer-assistance and -review programs for teachers. But as recently as 2008, UTLA President A.J. Duffy was quoted as disliking PAR programs. What happened between then and now?

Finally, the union supports teacher training where candidates spend more time student-teaching in classrooms that resemble the ones where they will end up teaching. This mirrors the clinical-fieldwork push that seems to be the watchword in teacher education these days.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Big changes are afoot in Indiana, where the state's professional-standards board has approved a new set of licensing rules that would require secondary teachers to hold a content-area major, with a minor in education (rather than an education major). Elementary teachers could major in education, but would need to hold at least a minor in a content area.

A few other changes didn't get much press attention but are worthy of some scrutiny. For one, teacher education programs don't necessarily need accreditation through the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education to receive state accreditation. Second, the new rules will allow teachers to use professional-development credits, rather than credits earned through degree work, for re-certification.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Some juicy tidbits for you this Friday morning:

• The Arizona Education Association is threatening to sue over a state law that disallows seniority to be used in hiring and salary decisions, and would make it easier to remove ineffective teachers.

• California's bill to position it for Race to the Top, which includes controversial provisions to allow students in poor-performing districts to transfer to other districts and a "parent trigger" to overhaul a school, passes the state Assembly.

• Ohio seems eager to avoid union controversy in Race to the Top by making its teacher effectiveness system mandatory for promotion and retention decisions but only voluntary as the basis of compensation.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This week's edition of Education Week has a really interesting Commentary about improving education schools. The authors, Robert Maranto, Gary Ritter and Arthur Levine outline five "lessons learned" for education schools gleaned from the transformation of business schools after the 1950s into highly rigorous institutions.

We're already seeing a lot of interest in upgrading the quality of student-teaching or "clinical fieldwork," as it's now being called. This Commentary talks a bit about the other key part of the education degree, coursework. It suggests reorganizing coursework around "rigorous academic disciplines with well- established quality," such as psychology, biology, statistics, and content knowledge in the K-12 disciplines. To do so would probably mean greater linkages with other departments in the academy, essentially making the "education" degree something of an interdisciplinary one.

It seems logical to assume that it'll be necessary to upgrading both coursework and clinical fieldwork in order to improve the quality of teacher preparation. One of the things that Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said teachers have told him during his listening and learning tour is that what they learned in their ed schools has no relevance to the classroom.

So how would you redo ed school coursework and student-teaching to create explicit linkages between what's being taught in class and what's practiced in the field?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

According to this press release from the Michigan Education Association, the state has extended the deadline for unions to sign the MOUs to commit to the Race to the Top program until Jan. 12.

But the real meat is in this paragraph:

"The parties also agreed to include language protecting collective bargaining rights in the standard MOU and to "grandfather" such language into MOUs that have already been signed."

Sounds like unless it's careful, Michigan could end up with MOU language like Massachusetts' or Kansas', which basically let districts ignore whatever pieces of the reform plan they don't manage to bargain.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So says this AP story and this story from the Grand Rapids Press. We're up to five state unions now, by my count: Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and the NEA affiliate in Louisiana. All are NEA affiliates; the Florida and Minnesota unions are also affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers.

The New Jersey Education Association objects to using test scores to evaluate teachers. In Michigan, meanwhile, union leaders said they were "shocked" to be removed from the application process. They say they won't sign off on a plan that's still in draft form, which they've likened to singing a blank contract. (I'm not sure how to square that rhetoric with their dislike of specific policy proposals in the draft to institute a tiered licensing system and guidelines for differentiated compensation.)

Increasingly, Race to the Top appears to be becoming a test about what unions and administrators really mean when they talk about "labor-management collaboration." Collaboration, it's now clear, involves not just issues about how involved unions are in the drafting of the applications and the memoranda of understanding, but also whether unions and management can reach agreement on controversial ideas such as tying pay to test scores and evaluations. (The Race to the Top awards lots of competitive points for doing so.) This is particularly a problem for the NEA, whose own internal policy resolutions eschew tying test scores to consequential decisions involving teachers and which can't support locals that want to do so.

So do states hold fast to those proposals, knowing it will win them competitive points but might alienate their unions? Or do they put forward less aggressive proposals but risk losing out on the funding?

Also, if few state unions sign off on these plans, what will it mean for Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who pledged to work with unions last summer?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over at The Washington Post, Jay Mathews has done a great job of digging into the District of Columbia's IMPACT teacher evaluations, which couple five performance-based observations with value-added (growth-based) test scores and other measures.

His latest column talks about the quality of the feedback that the district evaluators are giving as part of the observations. Regarding an evaluation that one teacher sent to him, Mathews says that the written feedback was a bit vague or didn't list examples gleaned from the observation. The IMPACT system's key manager, Jason Kamras, responded here, noting that the written feedback is supplemented by a dialogue with the evaluator.

It may seem fairly obvious that high-quality feedback with lots of supporting examples is crucial for a good evaluation, but let's not forget that many districts barely even have performance standards for teachers. IMPACT, like other evaluations systems based on standards, is complex. It will probably take a while to get everything calibrated to the point where it functions with few snafus. Ultimately, details such as the quality of feedback will determine whether teachers embrace the system as a legitimate pathway for improving their teaching, or eschew it as arbitrary or unfair.

So let's hear your thoughts about what aspects of IMPACT, or about teacher evaluations in general, you'd like to see more reporting on from Mr. Mathews and yours truly.

I'll start off the conversation with some thoughts I've been having: Is it appropriate to base so much of an evaluation on student growth? Will D.C. will get rid of the "learning styles" requirement now that scientists say there's little research that supports them, as colleague Debbie Viadero writes here? Are there too many performance standards for a teacher to meet in a 30-minute observation?

(You can view a graphic that explains the IMPACT system inset within this Education Week story, or a longer write-up in this blog item.)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I must apologize for my extended absence from blogging, thanks to a combination of delayed holiday travel and a sinus infection ('Tis the season to be, uh, jolly.)

Fortunately, there's been a lot of interesting things going on out there on the Race to the Top. So we return to our regularly scheduled programming!

At the end of last year, I did a couple of blog items on how state unions were responding to their respective state's Race to the Top applications. You can read a fuller version of what I wrote in those posts in this Education Week story.

Since then, some additional developments have occurred. Much like affiliates in Minnesota and Florida, the Michigan Education Association is also advising local affiliates to not yet put their signatures on local memorandum of understanding, which would commit them to implementing the reform plans if the grants were won.

A counter-example can be found in Louisiana, where the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, an American Federation of Teachers affiliate, appears to be endorsing the plan. But the president of the National Education Association-affiliated Louisiana Association of Educators, Joyce Haynes, wants student achievement to make up no more than a third of teacher evaluations, rather than the 50 percent figure state leaders have proposed.

That's an interesting difference between the two unions that hasn't really been fully explored yet. As I noted in my story and as Sherman Dorn also highlights, both Minnesota and the Florida state unions are merged NEA-AFT affiliates, making it difficult to determine whether or how their relationship with the national unions shaped their sentiments toward the Race to the Top.

When I checked in with the national teachers' unions, AFT leader Randi Weingarten said that the Florida and Minnesota state unions didn't feel that the process of devising the applications was collaborative. But state officials dispute that, and it's clear that there are substantive policy disagreements in Minnesota, where Q Comp is a sticking point. National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel never got back to me.

The clock is ticking down to the application due date, January 19. How many unions will be in or out?

UPDATED: According to this news story, the Michigan Education Association has told affiliates not to sign off on the MOU while the plan is still in draft form. Detroit, which is represented by the AFT, is also out.

UPDATE 2: A reader helpfully pointed out that one of the links wasn't working. It's fixed now.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend