March 2010 Archives

It's Central Falls all over again! Savannah, Ga., will remove all the teachers in a high school and hire back no more than half the staff, per the terms of the Obama administration's School Improvement Grants, the Atlanta Constitution reports.

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel is pretty worked up about it: "This is a disturbing trend that will take communities across this country down a dangerous road," he said in a statement. "NEA is committed to transforming our nation's struggling schools, but this method is short-sighted and could have disastrous outcomes for students."

I'm beginning to think we're going to see a lot more of these kinds of stories, especially now that a bunch of states have received their grants funding (click on the releases for March 26.) Such stories do makes sense from the human-interest point of view, in that these kinds of reconstitutions affect a lot of people, and in the case of Central Falls, really an entire community.

As I've mentioned before, the removal of teachers has been allowable under federal law for the past eight years. Don't believe me? Read section 1116 of No Child Left Behind, which allows districts, when dealing with school restructuring, to replace all or most of the staff "relevant" to the failure to make adequate yearly progress.

No one paid any attention to this provision in the past, because for all the fear of the NCLB sanctions, most districts used the politically palatable "any other major restructuring" option under the law. In practice, the option rarely included dismissals and often meant only superficial changes to curriculum and governance. In fact, some news reports including the AJC say there were only 20-30 instances of staff reconstitution per year in the country.

The School Improvement Grants, by contrast, don't allow the "other" option, so for the first time states, districts, teachers, and unions are having to really confront what restructuring means, and they really don't like the implications.

It's clear that groups that don't support these changes are trying to prevent these school turnaround models from being put into the rewrite of ESEA. One way to help that goal along? Make sure they bring the firings to the media's attention.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Hawaii board of education and state teachers' unions have come up with a plan to end that state's by-now infamous teacher furloughs.

But Gov. Linda Lingle will reject the plan, according to this story, because of one major sticking point. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say 30 million of them, because that's how over-budget the union-board proposal is, Lingle asserts.

Essentially, the union-board plan would bring back all school personnel rather than the bare-bones staff that Lingle is willing to fund. And the governor is not happy that educators have spent time crafting an alternative. "For me it just points out the dysfunction of the Board of Education working with a labor union to come up with a plan they knew in advance I wouldn't approve," she said.

Yow.

The union, nevertheless, will put the plan to its members this week and has board backing to do so. Talk about labor-management collaboration!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has an important new analysis out on jobs data and the stimulus.

The bottom line: Although K-12 employment dropped by about 1.4 percent from 2009 to 2010, the federal economic-stimulus law paid for about 342,000 jobs over that time period, or 5.5 percent of total K-12 employment. In other words, it appears that the legislation did, in fact, save a significant number of teachers' jobs.

In all, the paper says, about 87,000 jobs were lost last year, in what is only the second decline ever in K-12 overall since 1993. But that's a lot fewer than the 600,000 that were projected.

Researchers Marguerite Roza, Chris Lozier, and Cristina Sepe collected employment data for the 21 states where it was available in 2010 to arrive at their estimate of a 1.4 percent decline in the workforce. Then they used a fiscal model based on states' 2008 employment and expenditure figures to adjust the data for 2010, and cross-checked this against the states' reported expenditures under the stimulus bill.

The researchers say that it doesn't appear that states used the stimulus fund to actually grow the overall size of their workforce, which would basically exacerbate the "funding cliff" once the state-stabilization funds run out. But reading this, I still have to wonder what's going to happen for states in which the economy hasn't picked up just yet. Will they be able to continue to make payroll for these employees whose jobs were saved—or did the bill just kick the can down the road a little farther?

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

So what, you ask, are the implications of the health-care reform bill for education?

Well, the main one is that as part of the way to lower the bill's overall costs, high-cost health insurance plans, sometimes called "cadillac" or "gold plated" plans, will be subject to an "excise tax." Many unionized employees, including teachers, have over the years traded higher compensation for better benefits, so this provision stands to affect probably a good number of them.

The teachers' unions, along with organized labor on the whole, lobbied hard to get rid of this provision. They didn't manage to accomplish that goal, but they did win a few major items in the budget-reconciliation bill, which will alter key parts of the Senate bill.

For one, the excise tax won't kick in until 2018, rather than the 2013 date which was in the Senate's version of the health bill. The income thresholds that would qualify a health plan as a "cadillac" plan are higher than under the Senate bill, and will be aligned to inflation over time. And finally, there will be a mechanism that makes adjustments to the thresholds based on the age and the gender of the group insurance pool.

That's a particularly important change for the teachers' unions, because their membership is still predominately female and also has a large percentage of baby-boomer teachers. Traditionally, explained Bill Raabe, the director of collective bargaining and member advocacy for the National Education Association, both women and older individuals paid higher premiums.

"We're completely supportive of the bill, and we think those changes were good changes for the good of working people," Raabe told me yesterday.

The caveat here is that these reforms aren't a done deal until the Senate passes the budget-reconciliation package containing the fixes. But the indications are that the package will pass. Here's a graphic from the Washington Post that explains some of the changes.

It's hard to know just yet what the delay on the excise tax will mean at the local level, Raabe said. Right now he's encouraging local affiliates to take their time to look at all their options and see how implementation goes over the next couple of years.

Presumably, local unions could, in the course of renegotiating contracts, try to scale back compensation in the form of health packages and put it into other areas, such as wages or pensions benefits.

There's a political implication for the ESEA renewal process, too. Now that Obama has his first legislative victory at hand—though it remains to be seen what will happen in the November elections—it seems unlikely that Republicans are going to want to hand him a second one this year by getting ESEA done.

I predicted a few days ago that we'll be hearing more mumblings and grumblings about the Obama administration's plans to yank the supplemental services and public-school choice options from ESEA. Here's Rep. John Kline, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, on that very issue just last week:

"Tutoring and transfer options are the only immediate remedies for parents of children trapped in underperforming schools. Backing away from these critical parental options by making their availability elective rather than mandatory is a tremendous disappointment, and one that could leave more than half a million students without the educational lifelines they depend on."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Newark, N.J., is moving ahead to try to get information on student performance into teachers' hands in a nonthreatening way. And it's got a partner in the American Federation of Teachers.

That's according to a release from the district, where schools are creating a data "urgent care" room in each school. In these rooms, the student data will be displayed prominently, and teachers can meet there to review and use them to plan how they'll shape upcoming lessons.

The AFT also helped to craft a training course on the use of data, which the local affiliate will work to expand with training this summer for all the district's schools.

This work comes as a good reminder that while teachers are often wary of the use of data for "summative" or evaluative purposes, they also see the value of the information when it is used for ongoing improvement. Here's some additional information from the AFT on the project.

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

Well, this is interesting. Intelligence Squared U.S., the originator of a live debate series that's aired on NPR and on Bloomberg television, recently had folks like AFT president Randi Weingarten and scholar Terry Moe, a critic of unions, go head to head over this resolution: "Don't Blame Teachers' Unions for Our Failing Schools."

The program consists of a debate by several panelists, some who support the resolution at hand and others who don't. The audience's reaction is polled both before and after the debate, and compared to see which "side" made the most compelling case.

You can see a transcript with the polling results here, but in essence, most of the voters listed as "undecided" before the debate ended up voting against the resolution, meaning they felt unions should be blamed for failing schools. I wonder what that says about ESEA reauthorization, given that unions are so far the major opponents of the plan put forward by the administration.

Weingarten's participation here seems curious, because the question itself sort of presupposes that unions are the major variable in school success. Surely everyone can agree that, while unions are important, there are many other factors affecting our troubled schools.

Maybe we ARE getting a step closer to Survivor: The Rubber Room edition.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As you no doubt already know, the Obama administration finally revealed its blueprint for ESEA reauthorization.

Much of what's in the blueprint EdWeek has already reported based on a close reading of the FY 2011 budget documents and stimulus bill. For instance, over a month ago I noted the proposal in the budget for all states to create a definition of an "effective teacher," based partially on student scores. Second, you can read all about the new teacher-quality programs in this story, including the plans to put revamped teacher evaluations at the center of the Title II state grants program. And finally, the changes to the "comparability" test were signaled clearly in the stimulus legislation.

So, what's new here? Well, the proposals would also tackle leadership, by requiring states to define what an effective principal looks like. Also, the requirement for states and districts to distribute teachers equitably among high-and low-poverty schools would be strengthened by making "effective" rather than "highly qualified" teachers the measuring unit.

Finally, will there be less teaching to the test? The proposal would maintain NCLB's annual testing and targets, but by my read, the four school-improvement interventions* spelled out in that federal grant program would apply only to the bottom 5 percent of schools, with some additional work for "warning" schools in the next 5 percent after that. That means states would mostly get to figure out how to intervene in schools, unless they didn't make enough progress in closing achievement gaps. Over at Curriculum Matters, Erik Robelen surmises that this might relieve the pressure for test prep, but that will probably depend on how this all gets fleshed out by Congress.

Now on to the unions' reaction: They really don't like this plan, already. Andy Rotherham wants to know how this is different from 2007, when the unions trashed a draft bill that ended up going nowhere. Indeed, it isn't terribly surprising that teachers' unions don't like the focus in this proposal on incorporating test scores in teacher evaluations, the comparability revisions, or the school turnaround strictures requiring some teachers to be laid off.

But in fact, it is different for this reason: Teachers' unions were largely ignored during the original drafting of the NCLB law. During the 2007 reauthorization attempt, they had wised up, and came out strongly opposed to Rep. George Miller's draft proposal. This time the unions are reacting to a 45-page summary document—not legislative language at all. That should tell you something about how high the stakes have gotten.

In their statements on the blueprint, NEA and AFT also have a slightly different focus.

The National Education Association doesn't like the preservation of annual testing, even though the law would no longer specify interventions for the vast majority of schools. This makes more sense if you've ever read NEA's policy resolution on testing (B-63 for those of you who are as geeky as I am about these things), which lays out more than a dozen different things that the union asserts tests shouldn't be used for.

AFT doesn't mention the fact that this draft preserves annual testing at all. Instead, the union's president, Randi Weingarten, claims that it places "100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent authority." Perhaps she is referencing the new school-improvement grant program, which led in part to the Central Falls, R.I. situation she's now embroiled in.

The unions both say there's too much "scapegoating" and not enough "collaboration" in the proposal.

The proposal would, however, require states to publish annual information about teachers' working conditions, based on surveys of educators. (Teacher voice, anyone?)

Now, here's the most important part: What do YOU teachers make of this proposal?

*Side note: It seems surprising that more was not made in national coverage of this blueprint of the removal of free tutoring and public school choice for students in schools not making adequate yearly progress, , i.e., the NCLB "sanctions." The reason for my surprise is that, coupled with the administration's decision not to continue the D.C. voucher program, it leaves Duncan and Obama open to claims that they aren't "really" for school choice, despite their push for charters. You can already hear some hints from House Republicans on this issue in Alyson Klein's excellent write-up. One could, of course, argue that the NCLB choice and tutoring were both unpopular and had mixed results at best, but that may not matter too much. Political rhetoric and policymaking are frequently disparate.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A high-powered panel of teacher-quality experts released a paper this morning proposing a new federal program called America's Teacher Corps that they claim would recognize the best teachers, reduce interstate barriers to teaching, increase access of students in high-poverty school to highly effective teachers, and make the profession more attractive to newcomers.

The paper's authors include some of the biggest names in teacher-effectiveness research and evaluation: Steven Glazerman, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research; Dan Goldhaber, a researcher at the University of Washington; Susanna Loeb, a professor at Stanford University; Douglas Staiger, from Dartmouth University; and Grover Whitehurst, former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, now at Brookings.

The new federal program that the authors advocate would represent a change from current teacher programs such as the Teacher Incentive Fund, which require applications from interested districts. America's Teacher Corps would appeal directly to teachers, who would then be "nominated" by their districts, based on whether they earned an average evaluation score in the top quartile of teachers on their past three evaluations.

Successful applicants would be eligible for a $10,000 salary supplement from the federal government, contingent on working in a high-poverty school. They'd also receive a portable credential allowing them to bypass credentialing barriers in other states if they decided to move. The authors posit that such barriers, even in those states with reciprocity agreements, hinder people from staying in the profession, and they propose requiring states that accept Title I funds to establish an expeditious mechanism for certifying ATC teachers.

Before you can scream, "What about National Board certification!?," the paper recognizes that program and some of its recent challenges. Teachers who receive certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards don't always work in the most challenging school environments (although the group is working hard to change that). And incentive bonuses for holding the NBPTS credential are paid out primarily by districts and states, where they can be subject to the whims of the economy.

The paper's authors estimate that perhaps 37,500 teachers would be eligible in the program's first year.

It wouldn't be a Teacher Beat post without some discussion of potential pitfalls in this proposal. For one, the program is contingent on really good evaluation systems at the local level capable of using multiple measures to distinguish great teaching from good or merely adequate teaching. Most districts don't have those, and in the few districts that made efforts to put in finely tuned systems, such as Cincinnati in the early 2000s, the scores tended to drift upward over time. (To be fair, this paper notes that the program could serve as a way to accelerate the development of better evaluation systems.)

Also, would states really want a certification with this level of portability? In theory, they should, but remember that they're the bodies in charge of certification, and relinquishing control is hard to do. Perhaps it would take a few leader states to demonstrate the credential's value before others signed on.

And finally, it's hard to tell exactly what the federal government is going to do with the teacher-quality programs currently on the books. The proposed FY 2011 budget provided a few clues, but we won't really know what's what until Congress gets moving on the FY 2011 budget and ESEA reauthorization.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Legislators in Florida have advanced a bill that, if passed, would make aggressive changes to tenure law and would shift the entire state away from teacher pay based on credentials and longevity.

Rather than a formal tenure law, the state has a rather odd distinction between annual contracts for teachers that must be renewed every year and continuing contracts for teachers after year three, at which point it's harder to dismiss teachers. The bill would put all teachers on annual contracts and, after a teacher's fifth year in the district, would award such contracts only to teachers in the top two performance tiers.

It would also require all districts to set up performance-pay plans by 2014, prohibit them from compensating teachers using longevity and advanced degrees, and would dock the state aid of districts that failed to set up such plans, forcing them to make up the difference through local tax levies. The bill would require new tests for students to be developed in subjects not covered by the state's current assessment programs.

The Florida Education Association, a merged AFT/NEA affiliate, is preparing to fight the proposal tooth and nail, and it's really no wonder: This bill has practically all of NEA's least favorite elements in it, including differential pay for math and science teachers, pay based largely on student scores, and much-weakened teacher protections.

Interestingly, there are certainly some good reasons to be wary of the focus on test scores, but the quotes from the unions in a lot of the local news coverage don't mention them.

Instead, the unions are claiming that the bill "will destroy public education" (surely that phrase should be the next candidate for "it's for the kids" notoriety) and that the bill would base pay on a single test score, another NEA talking point, when it appears that such judgments would be based on growth over time.

The state's school boards association isn't happy either, the Orlando Sentinal reports, saying that the bill would basically impose unfunded mandates on districts and might even contravene existing tax law.

In any case, history tells us this bill isn't going to be an easy sell. Scholar Patrick McGuinn put out a paper not too long ago that deals with the challenges of tenure reform. In it, he notes that the last time the Florida legislature tried to tackle teacher tenure, it actually ended up strengthening some elements of the tenure law. Oops.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So is it just me, or has the National Education Association been banging the labor-management "collaboration" drum a lot these days? After all, that's Randi Weingarten's line! Or at least, it's been one of the AFT president's most consistent themes over the last year and half of her tenure at the helm of the national union.

Now take a look at this recent NEA press release:

"Educators must have a say in what it takes to improve low-performing schools. ... When all education stakeholders are involved in the decisionmaking process, it spells success for students. This combination of collective responsibility and collaborative thinking has a track record for yielding results that are positive for students and their schools."

Or this string from a recent conversation with NEA head Dennis Van Roekel, when he was talking about school improvement:

"In schools that I visit where they're changing what happens to kids, collaboration is the common thread. It works together. Competition destroys it all. It takes a group of people with collective goals, the support of management and the board to do it."

Now I'm sure on the one hand this must be heartening for Weingarten. After all, as the saying goes, imitation + sincerity = flattery. And the NEA, of course, is an important partner when it comes to things like lobbying for education funding (or facing off with Rep. George Miller, natch), so it no doubt helps to speak the same language.

But I have to wonder if an eensy-weensy part of Weingarten is a bit peeved. After all, the NEA hasn't exactly followed AFT's lead on other hot-button issues, like using test scores alongside other measures in teacher evaluation or reforming due process.

And the NEA has most definitely laid low in the national press lately, while Weingarten's gotten a lot of attention, and not all of it good, over the Central Falls, R.I., situation and the Houston test-score-dismissal-policy debate.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Center on American Progress released three papers yesterday on different aspects of teacher effectiveness. I'll be writing a bit about them over the course of this week (We Read So You Don't Have To!), but they're all worth checking out.

First up is a fascinating look at charter school evaluation policies, written by Heather Peske, formerly of the Education Trust and now at Teach Plus, a group that works to connect teachers to education policymaking, and Morgaen Donaldson, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education.

Charter schools typically have fewer rules and constraints and stronger "corporate cultures," so they should have more opportunities to innovate on evaluation policies, the theory goes.

So, in interviews with teachers, principals, and CMO staff, the authors took a look at three charter-management organizations, deemed "Northern," "National," and "Western." All three use a set of performance-based standards, and a series of structured observations coupled with detailed feedback, as the basis of teacher evaluations. None of the CMOs uses a "value added" methodology just yet for formal teacher reviews. And only one, the "Western" CMO, had unionized teachers.

Among the researchers' findings:

• The schools rely much more heavily on evaluations as a formative tool for improvement, through observation, coaching, and discussion of practices, rather than assigning a summative year-end rating. (I wrote about this tension in an earlier item.)
• In the North and National CMOs, evaluation is directly tied to individual and collective professional development.
• The evaluations generally contributed to a much more collaborative enterprise that encouraged self-reflection, continuous improvement, and more transparent teaching practices.
• In schools in the nonunionized CMOs, unlike in most public schools, observations were not "formal" or "informal," "scheduled" or "unscheduled." Instead, all observations contributed to the final, summative evaluation.
• Regular observations and conversations between evaluators and teachers helped minimize "surprise" ratings, so that teachers weren't caught unaware.
• Hiring processes at the schools played an important role in selecting teachers who view evaluation as an essential part of improving performance.
• Dismissals were somewhat higher than the national average of 1.4 percent in public schools (those data are from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey), but not by a lot. Principals in the Northern CMO reported dismissal rates of about 5 percent to 10 percent in annual dismissals; in one National CMO school, between 4 and 11 percent were dismissed. The Western CMO had few dismissals. However, other teachers opted to leave rather than be formally dismissed.
• Principals reported that they often did not dismiss more teachers because of the struggle to hire replacements who were a good fit for the school.
• Like many public schools, the schools in the CMOs did not recognize teachers for outstanding performance.
• Principals reported challenges in carrying out evaluations, and teachers struggled to find time to use evaluation results to implement changes in practice.

The authors point out that this is basically anecdotal, case-study research, so the results shouldn't be extrapolated to all charter school networks. Nevertheless, it's groundbreaking work in an area with sparse research.

Finally, the authors make this observation: The focus of these evaluations systems was on making teaching more transparent and creating a cycle for continuous improvement, but not for officially or publicly differentiating among teachers. "Perhaps in searching for greater numbers of low summative ratings or dismissals, we are looking at the wrong solution to the problem of low teacher quality," they write.

Food for thought as the nation turns its attention to overhauling evaluation systems.

More up on dismissal policies in later this week.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So reports Catherine Gewertz over at Curriculum Matters. Apparently, the groups leading the common-standards effort particularly want input into whether the new grade-level standards, which will be released this week, are "teachable."

Catherine makes a good point, however, in noting that teachers' comments on the proposals will be summarized rather than made broadly accessible, as they are for the federal-regulatory process. Why is that? Good question.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The early-ed initiative PreK Now, a project of the Pew Center on the States, just put out this report on early-childhood education and teacher preparation.

Studies suggest, it says, that teachers with bachelor's degrees and specialized training in early education are more effective than those educators who don't hold such credentials. In other words, it's not enough to be good with kids or to like working with them; teachers benefit from specific training.

Another finding: States are all over the map in terms of how much training they mandate. Some states require no more than a high school diploma, while others require a bachelor's degree, and in still others, it's a degree with special training or certification in elementary education.

The report recommends that states move toward requiring a bachelor's degree and specialized training in early education, and highlights some models for doing so. States should consider, for example, a tiered phase-in system to allow incremental progress in raising the number of educations with such credentials over time. Legislators did this in two successive iterations of the Head Start program to increase the number of teachers holding associates' degrees and ultimately, bachelor's degrees, for instance.

It also recommends creating stronger partnerships between universities and community providers to create avenues to early-ed certification and licensure.

Here's one question the report raised for me: How strong are the correlations between credentials and student learning? At least one research synthesis by the National Institute for Early Education Research seems to find that measures of classroom quality and the quality of teacher-student interactions were higher among more-educated teachers, but there's no effect size given in the report.

On a broader level, it's clear that early-ed program effectiveness is a difficult thing to measure. There are some real pitfalls in doing so, if you remember the fights over Head Start's National Reporting System. And there are many more domains of early-childhood development (emotional, social, cognitive, language, etc.) than there typically are in elementary and secondary education.

It's interesting to note that in the pre-K arena, there is a push toward more teacher training and credentials, particularly the bachelor's degree, whereas in elementary education, researchers are finding that credentials beyond a bachelor's don't seem to do much to improve teacher effectiveness.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It looks like the teachers and administrators in Central Falls, R.I., are back at the bargaining table to work out a plan for transforming the school.

Jay Mathews at the WaPo apologizes for missing the 50 percent teacher-rehiring clause in a recent column. But he's not the only one who made this error; it's been missing in a lot of the national coverage. It took me three posts on the R.I. situation before I brought it up, an omission I made out of the (incorrect) assumption that it was common knowledge that staff-reconstitution policies, including these federal school improvement grants, generally let teachers reapply for their jobs.

The New York Times walks through some more reaction, complete with some tough talk from AFT's Randi Weingarten and NEA's Dennis Van Roekel. The story unfortunately omits important context, namely that this dispute is as much about classic labor issues like wages as it is about philosophical differences on how to turn around schools. (EdWeek's Dakarai Aarons has much more for you here.)

It's still not clear to me how the teacher-dismissal policies in this federal program relate to state laws and local bargaining contracts. We probably haven't seen the last of this issue.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Everyone is all a-twitter (ha!) over the Race to the Top Finalists. But there's another approaching phenomenon that has the potential to affect as many teachers as RTTT, if not more: Layoffs.

Exhibit A: Los Angeles has sent out pink slips to 5,200 teachers. Some of those jobs could be saved if the district and the union reach agreement on alternatives, like furloughs or salary cuts. But it looks likely that some teachers will get the axe.

Unsurprisingly, analysts are taking a closer look at last-hired, first-fired layoff policies. The National Council on Teacher Quality, anticipating a flurry of media stories on the issue, put out this primer a couple of weeks back. And here I will shamelessly plug my own story on the issue from 2009.

There are reasons to think that in California the layoffs will increasingly be viewed through a civil-rights lens. Because novice teachers and long-term substitutes tend to be disproportionately clustered in low-income schools, those schools stand to be decimated by cuts and the resulting forced placements. The American Civil Liberties Union is already beginning a lawsuit saying that LAUSD's cuts violate students in such schools' right to a quality public education.

Now the New Teacher Project steps into the fray with this survey showing that most teachers support consideration of additional factors in layoff decisions. The group surveyed over 9,000 teachers in two urban districts. About 74 percent of teachers in one of the districts supported using other factors. In the other district, 77 percent were on board with the idea. Not surprisingly, non-tenured teachers and those with fewer years of experience were the most inclined to support the use of other factors than veterans.

What's more interesting is the additional measures teachers said they'd like to see in layoffs. Classroom management techniques were the highest-listed factor in both districts, at 57 percent and 63 percent; in both districts more than half of teachers surveyed supported teacher attendance, and about half supported using evaluation ratings. Student performance was among the less-favored factors.

Survey results like this generally should be taken with a grain of salt because of the natural human tendency to support policies in the abstract, but not when they suddenly become more concrete, as in "I support clean energy but don't want my electricity bill to go up." It's one thing to agree in principle with other layoff criteria, but another entirely when your district starts using them and you're two years away from retirement.

Nevertheless, this is compelling evidence that even teachers don't find the current layoff procedures all that defensible. Changing that system will require teachers and districts to put their faith in new evaluation policies. That is a heavy lift indeed.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

AFT President Randi Weingarten continues to call in the big guns on this Central Falls, R.I. school-turnaround drama. Now the AFL-CIO, the labor association that AFT (but not the National Education Association) belongs to, has put out this statement in support of the teachers.

The local teachers' union, meanwhile, has filed an unfair labor-relations complaint with the state labor-relations board, saying that Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo didn't bargain in good faith with the union, The Associated Press reports.

AP also says that the union claims that the teachers haven't been proven incompetent or accused of malfeasance. Usually state laws and bargaining contracts determine layoff policies. I'm no lawyer, so I can't tell whether the terms of the school-improvement grant program can legally overrule those policies. Any federal-education legal scholars care to weigh in?

On another note, Washington Post scribe Jay Mathews sides with Weingarten, saying that teachers should be permitted to reapply for their jobs. But unless I'm missing something, that's allowable under the school-improvement rules. The federal criteria merely prohibit hiring back more than half of the teachers.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This Central Falls, R.I., situation just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Here's a new petition organized by the union protesting the situation.

Now President Obama has gone and waded into the controversy by saying he supports Sup. Jane Gallo and State Sup. Deborah Gist in their bid to fire all the personnel in the struggling high school.

"So if a school is struggling, we have to work with the principal and the teachers to find a solution. We've got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements. But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability. ... And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests—7 percent. When a school board wasn't able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff."

Ouch.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten gets into the fray with this statement:

"President Obama's comments today condoning the mass firing of the Central Falls High School teachers do not reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the teachers' significant commitment to working with others to transform this school. We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed."

Ouch.

The union is also fighting fire with fire, publicizing a 2009 report about a visit by state-level officials to the school that highlights turnover in leadership and a variety of conflicting reform programs.

I've no doubt that both superintendent and union believe what they're doing is best for students. But let's not forget that there are some pretty bread-and-butter issues on the table here about working conditions and pay, as I wrote about here.

The dueling rhetorical arguments at work—"blaming teachers" and "interests of adults v. interest of kids"—aren't particularly new ones. Whether or not you think they apply in this particular instance is probably beside the point. What's significant is that the AFT and a Democratic president are using them against each other, and that really is a novel phenomenon.

UPDATED: National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel gets in on the game:

"It's time for federal officials to get out of the blame game and into the classroom. One thing is certain: Firing the entire faculty of a school that is on the path to improvement is no recipe for turning around a struggling high school. And relying on a magical pool of 'excellent teachers' to spring forth and replace them is naïve at best and desperately misguided. ... In reality, we all know that the solution is not blame, it is collaboration...collaboration among school employees, management, parents and communities."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend