February 2010 Archives

The much-awaited—by Teacher Beat anyway—proposed regulations for the Teacher Incentive Fund grant have finally been released by the Education Department.

They are much more newsworthy for what's NOT explicitly stated than what they actually lay out.

The teachers' unions have said that any federal performance-pay program should require grantees to collectively bargain the terms of the grant with the local union, or to use another adoption mechanism, such as a teacher vote.

The notice dodges that issue almost entirely. Although the regulations would require all applications to engage stakeholders, per this addition in last year's budget bill, there is barely any mention about collective bargaining. Here's the extent of the language. Applications must demonstrate that their plan:

"Has the involvement and support of teachers, principals, and other certified personnel (including input from teachers and principals in the schools and [districts] to be served by the grant) and the involvement and support of unions in participating [districts] where they are the designated exclusive representatives for the purpose of collective bargaining that is needed to carry out the grant."

There are a few additions to the program, such as a requirement that grantees update their teacher evaluations, that would probably require bargaining. But this is still a far cry from giving teachers a formal vetting process over the grants.

To be funded, applications must meet three "absolute" priorities. All grantees must explore either individual or group-based awards or some combination of the two and measure teachers on both student growth and on observations; show evidence of fiscal sustainability; and show "programmatic" sustainability by being aligned with other strategies for increasing teacher effectiveness.

Applications will earn additional competitive points for exploring value-added measures of achievement based on test scores, and designing innovative ways to use the grants to increase recruitment and retention in low-income or hard-to-staff schools.

The most interesting feature, besides the issue on collective bargaining, is that some of the new grantees will be required to participate in a random-assignment study of schools to gauge whether the programs help to improve teacher recruitment and retention and student achievement. That language was added to comply with new language in the economic-stimulus bill, as I reported here.

UPDATE: Per the above paragraph, some grantees can receive additional funding if they agree to participate in the evaluation part of the program, but not all grantees are required to do so. I apologize if this wasn't clear. (Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for pointing this out.)

Comments on the regs will be accepted until March 29.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Longtime Education Week editor Ann Bradley, a 21-year veteran of our newspaper, is heading over to the American Federation of Teachers. There, she'll serve as the interim director of the union's $3.3 million Innovation Fund, which supports joint union-management reform projects.

For the past decade, Ann oversaw coverage of school leadership and management, urban school districts, and efforts to target special populations such as students especially at risk of failing. Before becoming an editor, she covered all things teacher for the publication.

Ann has been a tremendous resource to all the reporters she's worked with here. She has encyclopedic knowledge of the unions' workings and of the teaching profession in general. Translation: She knows what she's getting herself into with all those boisterous AFT New Yorker types!

While I have half a mind to be very irritated with AFT Pres Randi Weingarten for stealing Ann away from us, I've got to hand it to her for making a great hire. And it's all the more reason to follow the results of those Innovation Fund grants closely.

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So reports The Associated Press. Nevada was one of five states that prohibited student-achievement data from being used in teacher evaluations, thus blocking the state from being able to apply for a cut of the $4 billion in federal Race to the Top funds.

The state teachers' union did manage to get language into the bill, however, stipulating that test scores can't be the "sole criteria" for evaluating teachers. The caveat caused some consternation from Gov. Jim Gibbons and a handful of legislators.

But in fairness to the union, the Race to the Top guidelines do say that multiple measures must be taken into account in teacher evaluations.

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Big news out of Los Angeles on school management: Under the district's choice movement, the school board will allow nonprofits made up mainly of teachers and administrators already in the district—rather than to charter school operators—to operate 22 new schools and turn around existing ones. Charter operators will only work with 4 of the schools up for this management round, which total 30 in all.

The charter organizers are pretty upset about this, while United Teachers Los Angeles chief A.J. Duffy—who's famous for denouncing charters, saying principals are vindictive, and claiming L.A.'s bureaucracy prevents innovation—seems happy overall with the news. The union backed the nonprofit bids and, of course, those schools will be unionized. That probably wouldn't have happened if the charters had won those bids.

Still, it's unclear whether Duffy is cognizant of how much this really seems to call UTLA's bluff. The teachers and administrators will be freed up from some rules, but will they manage to improve instruction? What happens if these schools don't turn out to be successful? If they aren't, don't expect the school board to be so generous the next time around.

UPDATED: Mike Antonucci's take worth reading here:

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The decision of Central Falls, R.I., Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire every teacher in a high school building is making big headlines in Rhode Island, attracting outrage from teachers' unions and from AFT President Randi Weingarten, and becoming a big education reform story now that The New York Times has picked it up.

Under No Child Left Behind's 1003(g) school improvement grants, which are doled out by formula to states, the Obama administration outlined four possible models for dealing with the lowest-performing 5 percent of Title I and Title I-eligible schools. Gallo initially wanted to use a "transformation" model with extended learning time and other changes to instruction but couldn't reach agreement with the union about how to compensate teachers for putting in extra hours. So now she's going with the "turnaround" model, which requires teacher firing.

A couple things to keep in mind: This is not, repeat NOT the first time that teachers have been fired in the name of federal law. NCLB allows for teacher firing in schools reaching the "restructuring" phase of sanctions.

So the reasons this is especially newsy are twofold. First, the Obama administration's requirements for the grants are stricter than the NCLB law is—and much more prescriptive than the Bush administration sought to be when Congress first gave the 1003(g) program money back in 2007. It's clear from this example that the beefed-up program is going to come as political cover for districts that want to take aggressive action.

Second, Arne Duncan is already quoted in Jennifer Jordan's story (linked above) as saying that Gallo's decision is in the best interest of kids. That's pretty tough talk given that Duncan had promised to prioritize labor-management collaboration (vague though the term is) over top-down fixes.

What's too bad, though, is that all of this political stuff appears to be overrunning other important policy issues. Without a doubt, this story is about union v. the district with all the requisite finger-pointing over wages and bargaining in good faith and so forth. But it's also about questions that the education community doesn't have really good answers to: How should extended learning time be implemented? What changes will need to be made to contracts, school supports, time schedules, and compensation? And is it possible to do those things in a cost-neutral way?

UPDATED: The local teachers' union has apparently called in the cavalry. Weingarten has a statement out where she blasts Gallo and state superintendent Deborah Gist for "resisting" her overtures to meet. She also takes a dig at Arne Duncan, who she asserts "didn't get all the facts" or talk to teachers before weighing in on matters. (Call me cynical but it hardly seems surprising that he's backing up his department's own school-turnaround model.)

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Two big pieces came out last week on "last hired, first fired" layoff policies in school districts, no doubt due to the continuing poor economy and the looming "funding cliff" created by the economic-stimulus legislation.

I wrote about this not-well-publicized policy a while ago, so it's heartening to see it gaining some additional attention.

In her piece for The Wall Street Journal, Barbara Martinez has some interesting quotes from parent advocates, who stand to play an important role in the debate over whether these policies should be rethought.

The National Center on Teacher Quality, in the meantime, has a paper out that looks at the largest 100 districts' layoff policies and makes recommendations on how these policies might be tweaked or overhauled to take performance or other factors into consideration. Using its database of collective bargaining contracts, the NCTQ finds that only 25 districts use factors other than seniority in layoffs. It also notes the important fact that teachers who are laid off frequently retain "recall rights" to return to the school system, sometimes for years, further hampering the hiring process down the road.

Does anyone know if there are any laid-off junior teachers who've gotten together to mobilize in protest of these layoffs? Drop me a line, if so.

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Denver, home of the ProComp pay system, "professional development" schools, and two teacher "residency" programs, is now trying to break ground on teacher assignments.

Superintendent Tom Boasberg has issued orders to end the policy of the forced placement of teachers who have been "excessed" into low-income schools, where records show they disproportionately land.

The teachers' union protests that force-placed teachers aren't necessarily ineffective and that this new policy amounts to a stigma of sorts on those teachers. Kim Ursetta, the former head of the local union, also offers this take on the situation.

On the other hand, a handful of these teachers have been "excessed" multiple years in a row, which means they're being passed from school to school.

Without details, it's hard to know exactly why this is the case, but it does bring to mind the "dance of the lemons." Because due process procedures can be so cumbersome, excessing is one strategy principals use to rid their buildings of ineffective teachers. They will claim a position or program has been reduced in that teacher's subject area, and then hire someone new later.

In any case, the really interesting subtext in Denver is that if teachers who are excessed time and time again aren't allowed to go to low-income schools, they'll be force-placed in more-affluent schools, typically ones with parental involvement that holds more political cachet. Are those parents going to stand for teachers who might not be up to snuff? Don't bet on it.

Also unclear is whether a move toward site-based hiring could result in an absent-teacher reserve pool, as in New York City.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We have two exciting new additions to our ever-expanding stable of education blogs, Rick Hess Straight Up and Walt Gardner's Reality Check.

Walt's first post has already made me think about what we all really mean about involving teachers in policymaking. I'm looking forward to see him elaborate on it in a future post, but for what it's worth, here are a couple of thoughts to chew on:

If you think teachers aren't considered in policymaking, then the next logical question to ask is which mechanisms and strategies would be the most fruitful for increasing their voice. This is very much the same question I posed recently about the American Federation of Teachers' push for labor-management "collaboration": It sounds great, but how do you accomplish it? How about in nonbargaining states? What does it look like? What happens when the two parties have a legitimate disagreement about policy?

A related question I have is to what extent teacher empowerment does or doesn't mean doing what teachers' unions want. I had an interesting and lively conversation once with one of my frequent commentators on this blog, a unionized public school teacher, about whether "teacher voice" and "teachers' union voice" are one and the same thing. The answer seems to be both yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that teachers' unions are the democratically elected bodies that represent teachers and through which teachers can affect policy. No, in that although unions take pains to minimize differences within their memberships publicly, there are plenty of internal disagreements. Take the California v. Wisconsin smackdown on charter schools at last summer's National Education Association Representative Assembly, for instance.

Or consider the way unions' approach to bread-and-butter issues tends to favor veteran teachers over novices, such as defined-benefit pension plans and across-the-board rather than targeted raises. Or the number of surveys that show differences in how teachers of various ages and stages in their career approach reform issues.

Gardner says that as practitioners, teachers aren't listened to to the same degree as doctors and lawyers. I'm not convinced this is a fair analogy. Teachers are without question professionals, but there is arguably much less agreement about what the profession of teaching entails in terms of training, professional growth, and so on than in the professions of medicine and law.

Your thoughts? C'mon, I know you have them. Let's hear some chatter.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Leave it up to the Big Apple to make me look silly. I just got done writing how few examples there are of test scores being used for teacher dismissal and lo and behold, New York City is also moving forward on this front.

GothamSchools has the scoop, including details on how the process would work. In general, teachers in the bottom quartile of effectiveness would be "tenure doubtful," although a principal could choose to offer it anyway.

There was quite a kerfuffle a couple years ago when the United Federation of Teachers got an eleventh-hour provision in a state bill prohibiting the use of test-score growth for determining whether or not to grant teachers tenure.

But Randi Weingarten, then president of the UFT as well as the head of the American Federation of Teachers, ultimately brokered an agreement with city schools Chancellor Joel Klein to allow teachers and principals to receive reports with teacher-effect data, under the condition that it was to be used only for formative, instructional purposes.

Now, Klein says such reports will inform tenure, and the UFT is threatening to take the matter to the courts.

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The lovely three feet of snow we just got hit with in D.C. gave me the opportunity to drink tea and snuggle up with a bunch of Race to the Top applications. (I'm sure my fondness for wonky policy bears no relationship to the fact that I'm still single.)

As many of you know, the Race to the Top guidelines put a premium on using teacher-evaluation systems to determine teacher effectiveness and to use it for decisions involving tenure, compensation, promotion, professional development and dismissal. A number of the applications, including those submitted by Louisiana, Indiana, Florida and Rhode Island would make student-achievement growth worth at least half of a teacher's evaluation. (In R.I.'s case it will actually be 51 percent of the evaluation.)

But fewer states explicitly tackled the issue of teacher distribution or assignments, and by that I mean where and how effective teachers are placed. This is where Rhode Island's plan really stands out for its specificity. In it, the state says that it will direct districts not to allow a student to be taught by more than one year by a teacher deemed "ineffective," and will prohibit districts from assigning ineffective teachers to low-income, low-performing or high-minority schools.

I know of almost no extant examples of a policy that would resemble this one. Probably the closest is the Aspen Commission's 2007 recommendations, which suggested barring teachers that were deemed ineffective based on teacher-effect data for seven years running from working in Title I schools. That proposal went over like a lead balloon with the teachers' unions.

Since then, though, the dots have been lining up in Rhode Island for this kind of proposal. State Commissioner Deborah Gist was already in the midst of trying to end assignments based on seniority, following in the footsteps of her predecessor, Peter McWalters, who'd targeted Providence schools Both efforts ran afoul of teachers' unions—in Gist's case, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, and in McWalters' case, the Providence Teachers' Union.

But even though the unions have fought some of the collective-bargaining implications to these staffing changes, they apparently see opportunities in the Race to the Top program. The Providence Teachers' Union ultimately decided to sign onto the state's Race to the Top application, and was backed by the state union in doing so.

This is difficult, fraught policymaking, and both sides deserve credit for the work. But there's a long way to go.

Is the state a shoo-in for funding? Not necessarily. Gist took some heat for phasing in the 51 percent evaluation figure over several years and for allowing educators five years to demonstrate effectiveness for recertification.

Photo: Rhode Island Commissioner Deborah A. Gist

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We've officially entered the brave new world of teacher accountability based largely on student test-score growth: Under protest from some teachers, the Houston board of education last night approved a policy to permit the nonrenewal of contracts for teachers whose students make insufficient academic growth on the state test.

There are a couple of reasons why this is an important story to follow. First, as Ericka Mellon has reported, the district has already identified over 400 teachers whose students have scored far below expectations for several years. Assuming some are ultimately removed, this would become one of the first widespread high-stakes uses of teacher "value added" or "effect" data. Currently, such data are used mainly to determine eligibility for performance-based bonuses (pick any number of cities' programs) or for a career-ladder program (as in Springfield, Mass.), but not for a formal accountability purpose.

Aside from Houston, I can think of only two other large-scale examples. The District of Columbia's IMPACT evaluation system, which just debuted in the fall of 2009, uses student-achievement data for anywhere from 5 percent to 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation.

The state of Tennessee, meanwhile, has permitted the use of growth data in formal teacher evaluations since 1998. But there the use of the data is a somewhat vaguely prescribed, minor, and optional component of a formal evaluation process. So it's hard to know how many principals now use it for evaluation, and to what extent.

While a bunch of states, Tennessee included, have changed their laws to increase greatly the weight given to student growth in teacher evaluations to position themselves for the $4 billion federal Race to the Top competition, none of them has implemented it yet.

And here's the second reason you should be paying attention: Teachers' unions are increasingly being pressured to accept such policies. In January, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, in her Big Speech at the National Press Club, reiterated that such scores can be used for teacher accountability under certain conditions. The Houston situation has, fairly or unfairly, become a big litmus test.

It isn't just Eduwonk who's calling Weingarten's bluff; there are others, including Democrats for Education Reform, a PAC. Take this zinger from the DFER blog: "[F]ar too often in the past, promises by union leaders for real reform over the airwaves have been squarely contradicted by the positions advanced by union officials in political backrooms. ... The first test of AFT's commitment to the principles it outlined last month will begin tonight in Houston, and play out over the days and weeks ahead." The Education Equality Project is also a supporter of the policy.

To be fair to Weingarten, she and the head of the local teachers' association have asserted that the Houston policy doesn't meet the conditions on which they'd be willing to accept such a policy. That may be so, but at some level it probably doesn't matter: The rhetoric of politics and the rhetoric of policy infrequently, if ever, go hand in hand. And this is one issue where no matter how things work out, the union seems to have more to lose.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Erika Mellon has quite a good story up in the Houston Chronicle about Houston Superintendent Terry Grier mulling over ending "lane" salary increases for earning advanced degrees. At least one other charter school network is also taking a second look at the policy, she reports.

There is only weak evidence that advanced degrees in education improve teacher effectiveness; most of the research suggests that the degrees must be subject specific, such as in mathematics or science, and only contribute to student learning in certain grades (high school).

Of all the stories I've done for Education Week that have proved to be controversial, the one that by far produced the highest volume of angry, even vitriolic comments and personal e-mails was this one on how much these pay bumps cost. Though it's hardly the last word on this topic, this is clearly a policy area where educators hold strong opinions.

Grier has his work cut out for him.

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

You may remember that when the New Teacher Project released its influential Widget Effect report last year, there was a bit of a mini-controversy ("Widgetgate"?) about its dismissal numbers for Toledo, one of the districts studied.

Briefly, the report found that Toledo had very low teacher-dismissal rates, like most of the other districts studied. But then the American Federation of Teachers put out a rather affronted-sounding press release stating that the peer-assistance and -review program in Toledo produces "much better results" than the report stated, and expressing concerns about the data collection.

So did TNTP lowball the dismissal numbers for Toledo by not considering teachers who were dismissed—or resigned—after failing to improve in PAR?

I started doing some digging around the issue and found that there were some inconsistencies in how the data were being classified. Since TNTP and the Toledo Federation of Teachers were engaged in a process of reconciling it, I decided to hold off on doing anything further until the final data were released.

Anyway, TNTP and AFT Toledo have finally audited all the numbers and come up with ones that, apparently, both parties agree on. You can find the full report here. But here are the highlights:

• The initial report found five formal dismissals of nontenured teachers and one of a tenured teacher between 2003 and 2008. The updated data show that two additional nontenured teachers should have been included in the report, for a total of seven. TNTP's next publication of the data will include the updated figure.

• In addition, the district and the union found that five nontenured and five tenured teachers resigned during this time period (an "informal dismissal"). These data will be reported as a footnote in the next publication of the report.

• Eleven teachers who were dismissed either formally or informally through PAR were long-term substitutes, not full-time classroom teachers, which was the unit of record for the report. I'll leave you to decide whether you think these teachers should be included in the overall dismissal rates.

Peer review, of course, is one of the features AFT has been promoting in a revised evaluation system. These data don't really tell us a whole lot more about the relative merits of PAR versus other evaluation models. Even if the dismissal numbers aren't significantly higher than in other districts, for instance, perhaps the quality of evaluation feedback is better. Perhaps teachers that might have faced performance difficulties have emerged much improved.

Here's one of the subtexts both for PAR and for evaluation reform in general: What percentage of teachers each year should be identified as underperforming, offered remediation, or ultimately be dismissed for not performing up to snuff? The academic literature in this area is scarce and rather out-of-date, which makes this most complicated of questions even more difficult to answer.

For a longer look at some of these issues,
read my story from last fall.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Center on Reinventing Public Education scholar Marguerite Roza and a colleague have a paper up about how districts could help to equalize uneven resources between richer and poorer schools without forcibly transferring teachers. (Disparities in teachers' salaries create much of the unevenness between more- and less-advantaged schools.)

It's a fraught issue that's related to the "comparability" financial test districts have to pass in order to receive their Title I funding. If you're sufficiently interested in this wonky but important issue, read more in this related story. Then write in and let us know whether or not you agree with Roza's analysis.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's another teacher-related question on President Obama's budget request: Will it be good or bad for professional development?

If lawmakers go along with cutting the Title II state formula grant program by half a billion dollars, then there'd already be fewer funds for professional development, unless class- size reduction—a large percentage of current spending under the program—is excised as an allowable use of the money. (Expect the teachers' unions to fight that tooth and nail.)

And a few of the funding streams that have been consolidated were focused on professional development, such as the educational technology grants. The National Writing Project, one of the big success stories in professional development, also would be consolidated into the proposed new programs.

On the other hand, the budget names proposed new Title II programs "Excellent Instructional Teams," and says they'd support the collaborative use of data to improve teaching. And to be sure, it was never all that clear in the first place that the professional- development that districts were providing with federal funds was any good. The definition in the NCLB law specifies that the funds can't be used for one-day workshops, but it's hard to know how many of the nation's 14,000 school districts paid attention to that stipulation.

M. Rene Islas, a policy adviser to the National Staff Development Council, a professional-development advocacy group, seems cautiously optimistic about the budget language in this post. (You may remember that Islas headed up teacher-quality issues back at the Education Department between 2002 and 2006.) NSDC is a proponent of the learning-team approach to professional development, where educators across grades and subject areas reflect on achievement data and set instructional priorities.

Still, there's another tension here worth exploring. How much professional development should be individually based and how much of it should be based on collaborative work? After all, one of the Obama administration's reasons for putting evaluations at the center of Title II is to ensure that all teachers are getting consistent feedback on their own practice. How can team-based professional development supplement individual feedback?

Over at Public School Insights, Claus Van Zastrow has a few thoughts on professional development in the budget here and here.

But what do YOU think?

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

Our own Alyson Klein alerted me yesterday to something that I'd totally overlooked in the administration's budget request. I was so busy paying attention to the proposal to put teacher-evaluation systems at the heart of the Title II teacher-quality state grant program that I missed a potentially even bigger marker in the budget in the Title I section.

In its "College and Career-Ready Students" program (basically its new brand for the Title I program, and possibly for NCLB/ESEA in general), the administration says the funding, which is doled out to states and districts under four complicated formulas, would require states "to develop a definition of 'effective teacher' that is based in significant part on student learning, and to put in place a system that links the academic achievement and growth of students to their teachers and school leaders."

It's one thing to put a definition of effective teaching in the Race to the Top program and to require student achievement to be considered in making determinations about teachers. That's a competitive grant program. While there's been a lot of grumbling about the teacher parts of the program, there's always been an unspoken, money-where-your-mouth-is defense: If you don't like the strings, don't apply.

Making Title I funding contingent on establishing a link between teachers and student performance is a different story. With about $14 billion hanging annually in the balance, it's the farthest-reaching federal K-12 program, and an important part of many districts' budgets. Like No Child Left Behind's requirements before it, it would be pretty much financially impossible to say no thanks.

To be fair, the administration doesn't say what states or districts would be expected to actually do once they've put this link into place. Maybe that's where Title II comes in. And this is just a budget line, not an actual proposal, so it has a long way to go before being put into place.

Still, while I'm not sure what the teachers' unions think of this yet— or if they're even aware of it—it's safe to say that this is going to cause some interesting discussions. The American Federation of Teachers, under certain conditions, has supported the link of student-to-teacher data, but there are implications for collective bargaining not addressed here that could be worrisome for Randi Weingarten.

And this will probably cause downright consternation at the National Education Association, where we have a couple of precedents. Back in 2007, when the Aspen Commission put out its recommendations for renewing ESEA, one of them was to put a "highly qualified effective teacher" measurement into the law based on value-added test scores. The NEA came out swinging against the proposal and switched its lobbying into high gear.

Later on that year, about 30 members of the California Teachers Association showed up on U.S. Rep. George Miller's doorstep to protest a proposed performance-pay program inserted in a draft ESEA bill that, compared to the size of Title I, was itsy-bitsy-rinky-dinky in size.

So while I may be getting ahead of myself here, this is definitely something that could change the game from mostly polite and noncommittal responses we've had so far on the budget.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I will confess to being somewhat confused by all the rhetoric around the new "college or career ready" accountability framework that the Obama administration is considering for the NCLB law. This Washington Post story makes a big deal about possible flexibility for the 2014 deadline, at which states' proficiency targets must reach 100 percent, and about the idea of intervening differently based on how far schools miss their targets.

But wouldn't the idea of everyone graduating "college or career ready" still be pretty much a universal proficiency goal—and a harder one at that, if you believe our current standards and tests are really as crummy as everyone asserts?

Perhaps this is where scrapping 2014 and focusing on growth instead of absolute targets would provide some breathing room. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, quoted in the WaPo story, sounds thrilled by the potential for changes. But it's possible that standards for college- and career-readiness, coupled with the proposed changes to Title II I wrote about yesterday, will push the bar for quality instruction even higher.

(By the way, a reality check on "universal proficiency by 2014." It's already fungible. The alternative "safe harbor" standard in the law actually makes 100 percent proficiency mathematically impossible.)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In its FY 2011 budget request, the Obama administration has finally put its cards on the table with respect to its plans for the federal teacher programs.

Let's take a closer look.

The biggest news, as I've suspected for a while now, is that the administration wants to realign the $3 billion Title II teacher-quality state formula grants program. (EdSec Arne Duncan dropped some significant hints about this last time I got a chance to interview him.)

Currently, that program is extremely flexible, with dozens of different activities and very few preconditions. According to one summary document, the administration seeks to put preconditions on these grants. States would need to revamp their evaluation systems for teachers and principals before getting their cut of the formula funds, for instance. And the program would be decreased to about $2.5 billion.

"Taxpayers invest nearly $3 billion a year in a teacher quality block grant that heavily supports investments with little evidence of or impact on increasing learning," the document states. (Sounds a lot like the lede of my story on this topic.)
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A $950 million "Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund" would combine both the Teacher Incentive Fund, a performance-pay program, and support for advanced credentialing programs, such as National Board certification. This appears to be the fund through which the department will support efforts to base teacher evaluation, promotion, compensation and so forth on determinations of teacher effectiveness.

Funding for a bunch of teacher preparation/alternative certification programs, including Teach for America, Transition to Teaching, and the Teacher Quality Partnerships (which support teacher residencies) would be consolidated into a $405 million "Teacher and Leader Pathways" competitive grant program.

The Troops-to-Teachers program would be transferred to the Department of Defense.

A bunch of other smaller programs and earmarks will be combined into three new "Effective Teaching and Learning" competitions focusing, respectively, on literacy, STEM education, and foreign language/history/civics. According to the budget, all three programs would contain a focus on effectively using technology, to make up for the elimination of the education technology professional-development grant program. Those programs would total about $1 billion in all.

Some caveats to assuage those of you who aren't happy about this turn of events. First, remember that this budget makes three pretty hefty assumptions: That Congress will reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (NCLB) this year; that it will rewrite it as outlined in this proposal; and finally, that congressional appropriators will do what the administration wants. There are good reasons to be skeptical about all three of those assumptions.

I'll have reaction from the teacher groups and observers as it comes in.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend