July 2010 Archives

Chad Aldeman of Education Sector and Andy Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners have put out an interesting primer on reforms to teacher-pension plans, many of which are seriously in the red right now.

EdWeek reporters have covered some of the same issues in the past. Defined-benefit pension plans, as my colleague Michele McNeil reported, can warp the teacher workforce, potentially pushing out great teachers before they're ready to retire and keeping less-effective teachers in the workforce.

And as I reported last year in a companion story, defined-benefit pensions also tend to disfavor certain teachers: Those who are mobile or don't necessarily want to spend their whole career in the classroom. I also wrote a bit about a possible alternative to the defined benefit vs. defined contribution argument, a hybrid called a "cash-balance" plan. Such a plan is portable, doesn't warp the labor market, and provides a consistent retirement return based on a set percentage of salary.

But Rotherham and Aldeman note one of the important downsides of CB plans: They're usually invested in extremely stable funds or indexed to things like long-term Treasury notes. So while generally safer for the districts who own the plans, they're not nearly as lucrative a long-term investment for teachers.

On the other hand, according to the authors' calculations, they perform comparably to defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans over the first 10 years or so of a teacher's career.

Are the tradeoffs worth considering? You tell us.

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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten had a quick briefing with reporters yesterday on all the edu-action this week.

Asked about President Obama's defense of the Race to the Top program to the National Urban League, Weingarten said it's only natural that the president would focus on the $4.35 billion initiative. She also acknowledged that, despite her union's qualms about certain aspects of the program, Race to the Top demonstrates the power of federal education spending.

"This is one of the president's signature initiatives," she said. "The Race to the Top has proven something really important: that the federal government knows how to be a lever for change."

Of course, in the AFT's view, the Race to the Top is not the be-all-end-all of education reform. The president has signaled that he wants aspects of Race to the Top included in the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Weingarten said she hopes ideas like the "powerful" ones advanced by the Urban League and a bunch of other civil rights groups this week will be considered, too.

I'll say this, though: Some of those groups are not exactly making that an easy task. As Michele McNeil reports over at Politics K-12, the Rev. Al Sharpton's group apparently no longer supports the "National Opportunity to Learn" framework. An even bigger surprise is that, according to Rev. Sharpton, the NAACP is out, too. (That group has yet to comment.)

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The National Education Association's $6 million Priority Schools Campaign got a bit lost last year in the wake of all the Race to the Top action. Other reporters, myself included, had a hard time distinguishing this effort from all of NEA's other initiatives.

Fortunately, while covering the NEA convention in New Orleans recently, I had a chance to sit down with Sheila Simmons and Steve Snider, the director and associate director, respectively, of the campaign.

A 2009 mandate of the union's 9,000 delegate Representative Assembly, the campaign is funded through the union's strategic plan. It will focus on four core tenets for improving low-performing schools: increasing staff effectiveness; developing family and school partnerships; increasing district and local-union collaboration; and leveraging community assets.

Those tenets aren't groundbreaking in and of themselves, the directors noted. What's new is that they are being put together in a comprehensive reform approach. As Simmons told me, "It's clear that none of this is really brand new, but it's now being done under a different landscape and different public policy."

As for scope, NEA will be focusing on schools in 13 states it's identified as having a strong state affiliate that can help guide the work. Within those states, schools identified as low-performing will have access to online and paper-based resources crafted as part of the campaign. But the core of the work will occur in the subset of NEA-represented schools that ultimately receive federal School Improvement Grant funds. Those will get on-the-ground assistance provided by teams of educators, including the staff of state and local affiliates.

It's no secret that the National Education Association isn't a huge fan of most of the U.S. Department of Education's four SIG models. So it's particularly notable that the union will work with schools using the "turnaround," "closure" and "restart" models, not just its favored "transformation" model.

NEA's critics are probably going to be skeptical of some aspects of this work, such as the fact that it's providing model contract language to local affiliates replete with the union's ideas about professional compensation and so forth. But I, for one, will be watching closely to see what the NEA comes up with.

Following is an edited transcript of my conversation with the campaign's directors.

Q. The priority schools campaign would put more than $6 million into these schools. Can you tell us, briefly, about your approach?

A. Simmons: We think there are four things you have to do. One is having a quality workforce, so we'll be looking to provide support and advocacy in improving the effectiveness and the capacity of staff in these schools. We think the whole issue of leadership is critical, leadership in terms of not only the school district but also leadership in the local association around collaborating and building capacity there. You cannot do this work without being in partnership with the community, so the family-school community partnership component is an element of change and how do we leverage the access of these communities in order to have wraparound services for the schools. If we do these four things, we think we can really improve student learning and student achievement.

Q. A lot of unions have concerns about several of the SIG models. How will you work in schools that are choosing something other than the transformation model you favor?

A. Simmons: We want to make sure that our members in those schools and the community in general understand that we support what's happening in the schools—not that we support necessarily the methodology, but that we support the public policy that says we have to address these issues. If you're in a collective bargaining state, we've developed model contract language that develops each of the models. If you're in a non-bargaining state, we have model MOUs and memorandum of agreement that really address these issues. So it's providing the resources and having some collaboration with the implementation.

Snider: That's where communications is really important. We're documenting the kinds of work our members have done around the country and what the leaders view are the various communication problems, what's come before, what kinds of tactics [members] have used to collaborate with administrators to bring these changes in, and now in the SIG era, to give our members an opportunity to communicate with each other through social media to see the kinds of techniques being used. One district or school might have something that's been successfully implemented through bargaining or an MOU that would be very useful to another school. Creating these communication methods makes the transformation a lot more real to members who are frankly approaching this without a lot of previous experience in some cases.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of things you might need to renegotiate in contracts to support these elements?

A. Simmons: One of the first things that each of the models has to do is teacher evaluation and the issue of teacher evaluation being tied to test scores. One thing we have to work with is how do you then have a teacher-evaluation framework that looks at multiple measures and is not only just based on the test scores. One thing we have done to provide support for NEA members is looking at some guidelines and principles. One part of the teacher-leader component of transformation talks about if teachers do well, there might be financial incentives, and if they don't, then there's a possibility of transferring, and so forth. Part of this has to be around how we deal with teacher evaluation, compensation, and reassignment. I would say those are the big three.

Q. The scope of these federal grants is three years, but you'll be reporting back to the Representative Assembly next year about progress. I know you don't want to just look at academic progress, although that's an important indicator. Can you give us an example of what benchmarks might look like for the other areas: for instance, parental involvement and community engagement?

A. Simmons: How many parents and community members do we have on the school councils, school improvement teams, site-based teams? This is where the rubber hits the road. What's the budget allocations for these schools? What's the hiring practice? How will the programs actually be implemented? And above all, the authority and accountability issues come into place. Also, we'll be looking to see how engaged parents are in their children's education. This can be the increased number of parents at PTA, but it's also about the real involvement of parents not just coming to the conference but actually being a part of the school, actually coming in and working in the classroom, volunteering in the school, learning how to be a better advocate for the student. The advocacy piece goes all the way to the school board.

Q. An NEA-affiliated school in Savannah, Ga., chose the turnaround model. What kind of conversations are going on there now about how the Priority Schools work will be implemented?

A. Simmons: There is always opportunity in a crisis. Initially, [the school staff] were told that everyone would lose their jobs and that was it. That's when they called us and said we need to have a conversation about getting this back on track. What happened was there was a lot of miscommunication in the community. Beach High School is the oldest African-American high school in Savannah, and people did not want to see it closed. They didn't want to see change come about, but at the same time, we knew that there were issues with the students and the school and that it was not performing in the area we wanted it to be.

One of the biggest pieces that made that a more smooth operation was bringing in the community. In the turnaround model, the governance changes, and the district has to assign one person who, for lack of a better word, is the turnaround czar. That turnaround person worked with the local association, and they had a series of meetings to make sure that the faculty understood what was happening, what the process was to replace [educators], and the criteria for rehiring. That was a locally developed set of criteria done with everyone involved. So that notion of having a collaborative culture is critical, particularly when you are talking about displacing and replacing faculty.

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States should overhaul the accountability mechanisms for teacher-preparation programs so that they focus on the effectiveness of graduates in classrooms, as measured by such factors as value-added data, classroom-based teacher observations, surveys of graduates and administrators, and data on the "persistence" or retention rates of graduates in the profession, an analysis released this morning says.

States should also craft common licensing tests to facilitate better state-to-state program comparisons. And finally, accountability provisions should apply equally to both traditional education school programs and to alternative routes, concludes the analysis by the Washington-based Center for American Progress.

It's a good summary of some of the current problems with today's teacher-preparation accountability systems, which began in earnest with the 1998 rewrite of the Higher Education Act. That law required states to identify, remediate, and/or close poorly performing programs. But few states supplemented the basic HEA reporting requirement—teacher candidates' pass rates on licensing tests—with more-rigorous measures.

Teacher colleges, meanwhile, have bristled at the fact that alternative routes to teaching located outside of universities generally aren't subject to an equal level of program scrutiny.

The CAP report draws heavily from this federal report, a summary of data generated to meet the HEA requirements. Among the data are these interesting findings: States currently use more than 1,100 teacher tests covering basic-skills, pedagogy, and content knowledge. Ninety-six percent of all U.S. preparation-program completers passed all required state tests. And less than 2 percent of all teacher ed programs have been flagged as low-performing by state-set criteria.

The report envisions an accountability system where all programs, alternative and traditional, are measured based on "clear signals using solid data," including the five elements I listed at the beginning of this item. Ideally, writes the paper's author, Edward Crowe, states would come up with uniform accountability measures, particularly a set of common tests and cut-scores for judging candidate competency.

"Engineering, accountancy, nursing, and medicine operate with uniform state accountability standards and requirements. This has occurred without doing violence to professional autonomy or academic freedom among program faculty," he writes.

A few of my own thoughts upon reading this paper:

• There may already be some movement on the testing issue: At least 20 states are working with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and Stanford University to come up with a performance-based teacher assessment, which presumably could be used as a piece of a revamped accountability system. Jim Cibulka, the president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, has some good information on the assessment in this recent newsletter.

• Louisiana, Texas and Florida are in various stages of linking "value added" data to their graduates' classrooms to gauge their success.

• As a recent National Council on Teacher Quality study showed, there just isn't a whole lot of agreement among teacher-educators about what candidates need to know to become teachers. So, while Crowe's argument that other fields have uniform preparation standards is compelling, it might be a tough sell for the teacher preparation field.

Now what do the states have to say about these proposals? Time will tell.

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

Teach For America teachers who are assigned to teach more than one grade, subject, or out-of-field are more likely to leave their schools—or the profession altogether, a new analysis concludes.

The paper is the latest addition to a complex research base on the popular alternate-route-to-teaching program. (Eduwonk has a nice summary of the research over at his blog.)

Morgaen Donaldson of the University of Connecticut and Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard University conducted the study, which is the first to my knowledge to examine the retention of TFA teachers longitudinally, using a national sample.

It also avoids some of the problems with retention-based literature in general. As the authors note, past studies haven't always distinguished between "voluntary" turnover and turnover caused by layoffs or forced transfers. Other analyses didn't track teachers over time to determine whether they left certain schools, but stayed in others.

The scholars analyzed data from surveys of some 2,000 TFA teachers enrolled in the group's 2000, 2001, and 2002 cohorts. Then they tracked the teachers' trajectories using something called "discrete-time survival analysis" (eek!), which essentially means homing in on which variables seemed to lessen the probability that a teacher would stay in his or her assignment.

Here's a rundown of the findings:

• Elementary teachers with a multiple-grade assignments were more likely to transfer to other schools after their first year, while high school teachers teaching several subjects or teaching out of field tended to leave the profession altogether.

• Out-of-field science teachers, counterintuitively, were less likely to leave the profession than in-field science teachers. The researchers posited that the in-field teachers might have greater access to alternative occupations.

• Although fewer than 10 percent of respondents stayed in their initial schools more than six years, 44 percent stayed in their initial schools for longer than TFA's two-year commitment, and 61 percent remained in the profession for longer than two years. The 61 percent figure is consistent with prior research on TFA corps members.

• The proportion of teachers transferring to other positions peaked in year three, with 19 percent of teachers who had not previously left their placement estimated to transfer in this year.

The takeaway for administrators, the scholars wrote, is that "assigning a more challenging courseload to a first-year teacher may put her or him at a greater risk of leaving the school. Administrators who want to retain new teachers should probably make an effort to assign a single grade at the elementary level or a single subject well matched to the teacher's college major at the secondary level."

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Differences in which teachers get cut under a seniority-based layoff system compared with one based on teacher effectiveness are large and persistent, a new analysis of the New York City teaching corps finds.

But unless the number of layoffs are considerable, the two approaches don't seem to differ all that much on how they affect class sizes, the analysis concludes.

In general, critics of seniority-based policies say they require more teachers to be cut than under an effectiveness-based system, thereby raising class sizes. They also disproportionately affect low-income, high-minority schools that tend to have more novice teachers, such critics say. (If you're just coming to the debate, read a summary of the contours of the debate here, or my longer feature on the issue here.)

The researchers ran several analyses on data on 4th and 5th grade teachers in Gotham. They modeled two layoff scenarios to respond to a (fictional) budget shortfall equivalent to a 5 percent reduction in total salaries paid to those teachers. They used seniority-based layoff procedures for one analysis and an effectiveness-based procedure for the other, using "value added" achievement-growth measures attributable to individual teachers.

Four scholars in all conducted the analysis: Donald Boyd and Hamilton Lankford at the University of Albany in New York; Susanna Loeb at Stanford University in California; and James Wyckoff, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. These researchers have studied New York City over the past 10 years and have conducted a number of studies on the teaching force there.

The value-added analysis comes with the usual caveat that value-added measures don't incorporate all aspects of high-quality teaching, and that measures over just one year tend to be unstable. The researchers used multiple years of data where possible to minimize the latter problem.

Among the researchers' findings:

• Seven percent of teachers would be cut under a seniority-based layoff policy, compared with 5 percent under a policy based on value-added effectiveness;

• The population of laid-off teachers varies considerably based on the layoff approach with only 13 percent of teachers identified for separation under both scenarios;

• Most schools would lose relatively few teachers under the simulations, but the "effectiveness" scenario does a slightly better job of mitigating the concentration of layoffs in specific schools. Twelve percent of schools lose more than 20 percent of teachers under the seniority model, compared with 8 percent of such schools under the effectiveness model;

• The typical teacher laid off under the effectiveness scenario is, unsurprisingly, much less effective than one laid off under seniority—a difference in effectiveness equivalent to 26 percent of a standard deviation of student achievement. That's more than twice the difference between a first- and fifth-year teacher's average effectiveness;

• To address concerns that value-added effectiveness measures "fade out" over time, the researchers simulated how layoffs would have been made in summer 2007, rather than 2009, and then tracked those teachers an additional two years. They found that, while there is an overall decline in the difference between the seniority- and effectiveness-based scenarios over time, the difference is persistent, equal to 12 percent of a standard deviation of student achievement.

• However, because of the relatively small percentage of layoffs, an effectiveness-based layoff doesn't have much effect on the 4th and 5th grade workforce as a whole, equivalent to about 1/10th of a standard deviation in teacher value-added.

The bottom line, the authors write, is that informing teacher layoffs with information about effectiveness can improve the quality of instruction in some classrooms. Given the limitations with value-added, effectiveness measures should incorporate other approaches, such as classroom observations.

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District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to dismiss 302 employees, mostly for poor performance, the chancellor said this morning in an interview. They will be separated from the system as of Aug. 13.

The dismissals reflect results from the first full year of the district's new, rigorous teacher-evaluation system, known as IMPACT.

According to Rhee, 241 of the dismissals are of teachers. Some of them garnered an "ineffective" rating on IMPACT, while a handful of others are "excessed" teachers with a "minimally effective" rating who couldn't find new teaching positions in the district. And finally, 76 are being let go for licensure issues, such as not attaining "highly qualified" status under the No Child Left Behind Act, Ms. Rhee said.

The evaluation results also showed that 16 percent of the D.C. teaching corps attained the top rating on IMPACT. Those teachers will be eligible to earn performance bonuses, Ms. Rhee said.

D.C. has about 4,000 teachers in all.

The results are much different than those under prior evaluation systems. No teachers were fired for performance under the former evaluation, in 2006-2007, and 95 percent garnered ratings in the top two performance categories.

Ms. Rhee, who laid off 266 teachers based on performance rather than seniority last fall, has been accused by critics of putting teacher dismissal above professional development and remediation.

While acknowledging that the firings would be controversial, Ms. Rhee defended IMPACT as a much more accurate picture of teacher performance.

"It's so much more objective than what we had before, where it was one person's opinion [of the teacher], which is totally subjective," she said. "This system is much more rigorous."

She also noted the disparity between the high teacher ratings in the past and the school system's low performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an independent gauge of student achievement across the states.

States and districts across the nation are retooling teacher-evaluation systems to reflect student achievement. IMPACT is among the first of such systems that is now in operation and includes consideration of student scores.

In addition to student scores, IMPACT relies on a series of five observations of each teacher by administrators and "master teachers," keyed to a complex "Teaching and Learning" framework with about two dozen different categories. Only a fraction of the teacher corps teaches in grades or subjects where student-growth data is available; for those teachers without the data, the results are based more heavily on the Teaching and Learning framework observations.

Final scores are translated to a 100-to-400-point scale, and those teachers who score below 175, in the "ineffective" category, can be dismissed.

Ms. Rhee also said that 737 staff members earned the "minimally effective" rating. While they won't lose their jobs, they will have a freeze or "step hold" put on their pay. If they don't improve next year, they will also be subject to termination.

Under the terms of the district's recently ratified teacher contract, teachers can "grieve" or formally protest only procedural aspects of their evaluation—for example, if they didn't receive the five required observations—but they can't actually grieve their scores.

The Washington Teachers' Union could not immediately be reached for comment this morning.

[UPDATE 7/23 1:50 p.m.: George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, has released a statement saying the union plans to contest the firings of some of the teachers and that a survey released by the WTU today shows many teachers don't trust the IMPACT evaluation system and believe they have been provided little support by it or in implementation of the district's new teaching and learning framework.

"While the WTU wants teachers to be held accountable, teachers should also be evaluated fairly with a fair instrument," Parker said in the release. "D.C. Public Schools has yet again found a subjective way to fire teachers, many of whom were not evaluated fairly. We look forward to an independent evaluation of the IMPACT evaluation system as agreed to between WTU and DCPS in the new contract."]

Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/AP-File

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

My apologies for the long absence from blogging. I took a few days off after the conventions and then had to turn my attention to a few stories on the common-standards adoptions. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

According to this document on the National Education Association's website, the union now supports the ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.

The bill would essentially require districts to certify that more- and less-affluent schools receive comparable state and local funding—including dollars spent on teacher salaries—before they get their share of federal Title I dollars for disadvantaged students. That would come as a significant change from current Title I accounting policy, which exempts teacher salaries from the comparability calculation.

This is a surprising and noteworthy shift for the NEA. The union, along with the American Federation of Teachers, opposed an earlier bid to close the so-called comparability "loophole" in the law, back in 2007.

Both unions worried that districts would seek to forcibly transfer teachers, rather than take more careful and deliberate steps to equal out talent or overcome the disparities in other ways, like reducing class sizes in schools with many novices.

It's not clear what caused the NEA's change of heart, but unless this is a misprint of some kind, the union has decided to put its lobbying muscle behind the bill. And it certainly will have a better shot of passing as a result.

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Your intrepid (and exhausted) blogger is heading back to Washington tomorrow, following the conclusion of the American Federation of Teachers' convention today.

This year's union conventions have given us a lot to pick over, parse, and chew on. When I embarked on this trip 10 days ago, I remarked that there are always some narratives that spin themselves out over the course of the conventions.

One is no doubt the unions' responses to the push for teacher effectiveness. Witness their respective Race to the Top resolutions (here and here), as well as the call for a Commission on Effective Teaching by National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, and an approved evaluation framework at the AFT.

I'm interested in what you think all this says about the unions. Feel free to post your thoughts here.

I'll have some follow-up news and more analysis before too long, but expect posting to be light over the next week as I get caught up on things.

Thanks for following Education Week's coverage of the conventions.

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Rumors were floating around for days that American Federation of Teachers officials would offer a resolution critical of the federal Race to the Top program, but such a resolution never made it to the convention floor.

Some wonky background for you: An AFT affiliate did submit a Race to the Top resolution, but it wasn't considered because submitted resolutions are first handled by resolutions committees. Only three resolutions from each committee's list are put to the entire delegate assembly. The RTT resolution, I'm told, came up fourth.

It will be referred to the union's executive council today, and then to a resolutions body for approval or rejection.

This is somewhat different from the National Education Association's New Business Items, which only require 50 signatures before they are put to the entire delegation. You'll recall that at their convention last week, the NEA's delegates, by a slim margin, took a position of "no confidence" in both the Race to the Top guidelines and in the use of competitive grants as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA.

The AFT resolution states that the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top initiative "promotes merit pay, charter schools and federal intervention into educational issues strictly protected by states' rights"; "fails to provide meaningful reform"; and "will ... undermine the collective bargaining process."

The resolution also calls for the union to oppose efforts to transform federal funding from formula programs to competitive grants.

That's something the AFT is already doing.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Federation of Teachers yesterday announced its next Innovation Fund grantees, and they'll be tackling everything from curricula to performance pay. I apologize for being a bit late to get you the news; yesterday was gangbusters at the AFT.

Without further ado:

• The Anchorage Council of Education, in Alaska, will help at-risk students earn diplomas by training "graduation coaches" in high schools.
• The Boston Teachers Union will work to increase students' engagement in lessons by creating prototypes of high-quality instructional units that can be distributed online.
• Education Austin, in Texas, will work with Austin Interfaith, a coalition of religious congregations, schools, and civic organizations, to convert several schools to "in-district charters."
• The Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, in Tampa, Fla., will use social networking to connect teachers and support them through the changes in pay, evaluation, and career possibilities under way in the district as part of its Gates Foundation grant.
• The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers will tap into teachers' desire to create high-performing schools by seeking to become an authorizer of charter schools under Minnesota law.
• The Toledo Federation of Teachers, in Ohio, will create a group performance-pay program for teams of math teachers in grades 4-8 in four high-needs schools.
• The United Federation of Teachers, in New York City, will help thousands of family child-care providers understand and teach early literacy development using a curriculum that includes an adaptation of the PBS television show "Between the Lions."
• Last, but not least, the Volusia Teachers Organization, in Daytona Beach, Fla., will develop a model for using evidence of student learning in a teacher-development and -evaluation system.

The new batch of grants totals $1.21 million.

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Bill Gates, who really needs no introduction, gave an address to the American Federation of Teachers today.

I got an opportunity to chat with Gates after the speech and will have more for you on that next week, but here's a rundown of the address.

You can think of it as somewhat akin to AFT President Randi Weingarten's earlier one at this convention: very carefully balanced. Gates congratulated the union for committing to reforms in places like New Haven, Conn.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; and Pittsburgh, and thanked the AFT teachers participating in his foundation's "Measures of Effective Teaching" study. He acknowledged that reform efforts should be focused on developing an evaluation system, not for sorting teachers, but to help them improve the effectiveness of their craft.

And he recognized that such reforms should be carried out in partnership with unions, saying they won't succeed unless they are shaped by teachers' knowledge and experience.

But he also called on teachers to continue to engage in what are some pretty new and scary changes to their profession.

"I believe these reforms can make a huge difference for students, as long as you keep pushing and bring all of America's teachers along with you," Gates said.

You can read and parse the speech (linked above) yourself, but a couple of lines are particularly worth highlighting. One that went unnoticed tweaked the National Education Association a bit. "You are driving the changes that will accelerate student gains," Gates told the AFT. "No other union is doing what you are to make this happen."

Near the end, he told the union that conversations about student achievement ultimately will need to include tenure.

"You owe it to your profession and your students to make sure that tenure reflects more than the number of years spent in the classroom. It should reflect the quality of the work in the classroom. And that means student achievement should be a factor in decisions about tenure," Gates said.

Delegates, who had started to applaud, broke into agitated murmuring at the mention of student achievement.

Still, given the rumors that there could be an en masse walkout in the middle of the speech, Gates received a pretty good reception from the union. He got a standing ovation when he took the podium. He initially received some measure of booing, too, but Weingarten, who had repeatedly implored her union's delegates to be gracious, was having none of that.

"I thought you guys were leaving?" she said sweetly to the hecklers, who were subsequently drowned out by laughter and applause. And as some of those hecklers exited the convention hall, delegates opting to stay began a chorus of "Nah nah nah nah, hey hey, goodbye."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Federation of Teachers' delegates just passed two important resolutions, on teacher evaluation and school closures, so let's take each of them in turn.

Resolution five, you may recall, codifies the AFT's evaluation framework and affirms that test scores, used appropriately and as one of several measures, can be considered in a teacher's evaluation.

It was expected to generate quite a debate and possibly even amendment attempts, but in the end, it passed fairly swiftly. A whole slew of candidates, including the presidents of major affiliates, spoke in favor of the resolution: Mary Cathryn Ricker of St. Paul, Minn.; Keith Johnson of Detroit; Brenda Smith from Douglas County, Colo.; Fran Lawrence of Toledo, Ohio; and Tom Dooher of Minnesota.

Those supporting the resolution said that it would create avenues to define the profession. They also invoked arguments of the if-you're-not-at-the-table-you're-on-the-menu variety:

Colleen Callahan, a member of the Rhode Island state affiliate, had this to say: "There are too many people who would like us to be silent on this issue. ... Teachers want us to take the lead and support them on their professional growth and development."

Lee Rutledge, from Baltimore, spoke directly to the student-achievement question, noting that the resolution requires districts to employ several methods for gauging the impact of teaching on learning. "If we leave [evaluation] to the states and districts, they will do it on the cheap. They will do it based on one test score," he said.

Still, two delegates out of the Chicago Teachers Union lobbied the body not to pass it. "The reason you're hearing so much from us is this: Arne Duncan came from our city. We know what the nation has in store for it," said Carol Caref of the CTU. "In Chicago, school closings and turnarounds have been going on for years, and the reason this [newly elected] Chicago delegation is here is because finally people in our union started fighting against them. This resolution does not take a strong stand against the use of standardized tests for evaluating teachers, and it needs to."

Right after that passed, the body considered, and passed, a resolution "opposing the unjustified closure of neighborhood schools." This one directs the AFT to oppose school closures based on "invalid measures that disregard the impact of neighborhood schools in the life of a community and do not offer solutions to improve teaching practices and supports for students," among other things.

I'll be eager to follow the results of that resolution in time, especially as the rubber hits the road on the School Improvement Grants. But in any case, the most interesting part of the debate was the addition of a significant amendment that contains some pretty harsh words about standardized testing. The amendment says that the union will now "expose the for-profit motives of high-stakes testing companies and end the improper use of test results which diminishes real learning and is used to punish students, teachers, families, schools, and districts, rather than build better schools."

Sounds like something the NEA, always more of an opponent of testing than the AFT, would have passed. And take note, it was supported by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, among other parties.

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This morning, two political bodies within the American Federation of Teachers presented their platforms for today's elections of AFT executive officers and council.

That's right, I said two. Apparently, this is the first time since the 1970s that there has been a full slate of candidates opposing the incumbents. Keep reading.

Current AFT Executive Vice President Lorretta Johnson spoke on the behalf of the incumbents, which include herself, AFT President Randi Weingarten, and Secretary-Treasurer Antonia Cortese. She underscored Weingarten's "vision" for moving the union forward, as well as her ability to fight back, and even call out allies:

"I saw Randi Weingarten bust the vice president of the U.S.," Johnson said, referring to Weingarten's confrontation of Joe Biden over the Central Falls, R.I., teacher-dismissal situation. "He got the message. All those teachers came back."

Then, a bunch of folks from a new political caucus formed just this year, called the BAMN Caucus, presented their point of view.

A bit more about BAMN Caucus: It's essentially a loosely coordinated group of teachers, some of whom belong to the separate, left-leaning BAMN group, and some of whom have challenged or will challenge incumbents in AFT locals. Several have had some success in winning spots on those local unions' governing bodies. Others are hoping to in the future: Among the BAMN slate is Candi Peterson, a trustee of the Washington Teachers Union, in D.C., and a staunch supporter of Nathan Saunders, who is running against incumbent WTU President George Parker.

This group thinks that Weingarten and many of the local affiliate leaders haven't pushed back hard enough on things like charter schools, the Education Department's policy priorities, and school turnarounds and closures. And they oppose her efforts to re-examine things like due process and teacher evaluation.

Speaking this morning, Heather Miller of Detroit, one of the candidates on the BAMN slate, had this to say about the activism in Detroit: "Our members opposed the policy of cynicism and cooperation with those who would destroy us."

Of course, it's hard to say at this early stage what BAMN's bid means in the grand scheme of the AFT. The political activities took place this morning before formal AFT business started, and the room was probably only about half full. We'll learn more when the election results are out.

It's also worth noting that BAMN candidates seem to be coming out of cities like Detroit, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C., that have had some remarkable challenges, like enrollment declines, school closures, and rancorous union-management relationships.

The wildcard to watch in all of this is Karen Lewis, the newly elected president of the Chicago Teachers' Union. As I reported yesterday, she recently joined the Progressive Caucus—Weingarten's coalition—but appears to differ with some of its objectives.

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It was always said of former American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker that he was a step or two out in front of some of his membership when calling for the union to change. (Think back to things like peer-assistance and review programs when they first came out.)

Now, some members are asking the same question of AFT President Randi Weingarten, in what is becoming one of the subtexts of this year's convention. After all, Randi's balancing act is a tough one. Her desire to push the union's thinking on things like tenure and evaluation leaves her open to criticism from her own members that she's willing to compromise too much, or too easily, on these most sensitive of issues.

Like any other union, the AFT is a democratic, political organization. The largest political "caucus" in the organization—groups that endorse candidates for executive office—is called the Progressive Caucus. It is supported by many of the AFT's big names, like Jerry Jordan in Philadelphia, Michael Mulgrew and Maria Neira in New York, Marcia Reback in Rhode Island, and John Tarka in Pittsburgh. Several (though not all) of those leaders have agreed to consider or implement systems that take student achievement into account in teacher evaluations.

But there's also a group called the AFT Peace and Justice Caucus. Though admittedly much smaller than the Progressive Caucus, it is not at all happy with the idea of teacher evaluation scores based even partly on student test scores.

"Evaluation & Pay Based on Test Scores? ARE YOU ANGRY? Many AFT locals have agreed to teacher evaluation plans based on unreliable student test scores," a flier some of its caucus members have been handing out reads.

It is also, apparently, unhappy that the union is welcoming Bill Gates this Saturday to the convention, deeming it "A Trojan Horse in the AFT House." (Weingarten defended this choice yesterday to reporters, saying that the AFT has always invited controversial speakers to its convention and is willing to work with anyone who displays an open mind.)

The Peace and Justice Caucus is encouraging members to vote against an upcoming resolution—to be introduced sometime today—which would essentially codify the AFT's teacher-evaluation framework.

You might think this is all Sturm und Drang for nothing, but the Peace and Justice Caucus got a boost recently with the election of Karen Lewis in Chicago. She emerged out of a group there that shares philosophical similarities with the Peace and Justice Caucus, and is critical of reforms like merit pay, changes to due process, and the use of competitive grant programs like the Race to the Top. Those are things that Weingarten has supported, albeit cautiously and only in certain circumstances.

It's anyone's guess as to how this will play out. A lot of members are wary about tying test scores, even coupled with other measures, to evaluation, and the discussion will be interesting. If delegates vote down the teacher-evaluation measure, or amend out the language on test scores, Weingarten will have some thinking to do.

UPDATE: (7/9/10 6:38 pm) Karen Lewis has very recently joined the Progressive Caucus, I am told. Interesting goings-on in the AFT!
UPDATE 2: (7/9/10 6:50 pm) Lewis joined the caucus shortly after her election, the AFT press staff tells me.

CLARIFICATION: I should have stated earlier that the Peace and Justice Caucus, unlike the Progressive one, is not actually a political caucus. It is, however, closely aligned to a new political caucus called "By Any Means Necessary" that is going to try to run a different slate of candidates in tomorrow's elections.

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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten announced just a few moments ago that the union has reached the 1.5 million member mark. It has added almost 70,000 new dues-paying members in the past two years across all of its divisions, not just teachers.

Weingarten, AFT Secretary-Treasurer Antonia Cortese, and Executive Vice President Lorretta Johnson danced on stage to "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" after the announcement.

(Kind of an odd choice, as that was former National Education Association President Reg Weaver's favorite grand-entrance song, but never mind.)

Quite a different story at the NEA, where membership has declined of late.

Video for you soon, hopefully.

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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten had a sit-down chat with reporters after her keynote address to the AFT convention Thursday, and there was some in-depth discussion about what's probably the top teacher-quality issue on the table today: evaluation.

AFT officials have said for a while now that over 50 locals are piloting teacher-evaluation systems based on a framework developed by the union. I asked about these districts' progress in implementing the plans.

Some of them, like Pittsburgh, New Haven, Conn., and apparently now Cleveland, have put evaluations at the center of newly inked contracts, while others are just getting started in development, Weingarten and other AFT officials said. They added that 21 districts and unions met in Minnesota and are in various stages of implementing systems based on the framework. Most sites aren't public yet as officials are still working to hammer out details, so this is something to keep your eyes on.

One reporter asked Weingarten whether, in her view, "multiple measures" of teacher performance included student outcomes beyond standardized test scores. Her answer was an unabashed yes, and she cited things such as written work, portfolios, teacher-designed assessments, and so forth. (If you're wondering what this might look like in practice, consider what Teach For America does to judge its candidates' classroom success.)

And for those of you curious as to what the AFT evaluation framework looks like, here's a rundown: In addition to professional teaching standards and measures of student outcomes, AFT wants to see that such systems are correctly implemented by trained evaluators, require administrators to address working conditions, and include systems of support, including time for teachers to work with colleagues or peer-assistance and review for struggling teachers.

UPDATE (7/9,1:53 pm) AFT helpfully provided this link to a more in-depth description of the framework.

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In her keynote address today, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sought to present two sides of herself and her work for the union, as both reformer and firebrand.

The union, she said, has been willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations about reforms to teacher evaluation and due process. But it won't hesitate to speak out against politicians and pundits who are using the mantle of reform to attack teachers.

Weingarten had a lot of tough ground to cover in this speech, and it's a delicate balancing act to advance some reform ideas and fight against others. No doubt some folks will accuse her of playing both sides of the fence. But she's also getting credit for her work, as in this recent op-ed.

As always, I recommend that you read the whole speech yourself, but here are the key quotes whose themes were woven throughout her keynote address:

"I stand before you today sure in the knowledge that we have examined our policies, looked at our practices, and made changes when we've needed to change. That has sometimes been hard, but it gives us needed credibility to hold a mirror up to others.

But frankly, I am shaken to the core —in fact I am horrified—by the immense threats to public services, particularly public education, that exist in the corridors of power in this country."

In the speech, Weingarten set her brand of reform—which is largely being carried out in the form of new contracts, such as those in Pittsburgh and New Haven, Conn.—against those pushed by what she termed the "blame the teacher" crowd. That crowd, she said, focuses on top-down reforms, expects teachers to overcome children's learning barriers by themselves, fails to engage in supports teachers need, like well-designed curricula, and is focused on teacher firing and the weakening of job security.

Weingarten and other officials took pains to point out that they've been willing to take on Democratic lawmakers, not just Republican ones, over certain policy prescriptions.

"I never thought I'd see a Democratic president, whom we helped elect, and his education secretary applaud the mass firing of 89 teachers and other staff in Central Falls, R.I., when not a single one of the teachers ever received an unsatisfactory evaluation," she said to much applause.

While introducing Weingarten, AFT Secretary Treasurer Antonia Cortese noted that the union called out the Education Department for seeking to isolate "pet programs" from cuts. And apparently, Weingarten also confronted Vice President Joe Biden at a recent AFL-CIO meeting for voicing his support of the Central Falls firing. "I don't think he'll make that mistake again," Cortese quipped.

A few other items of note.

• Weingarten again underscored the importance of out-of-school factors in student learning. "It is simply wrong to suggest that there is an epidemic of bad teachers, and at the same time to ignore poverty, budget cuts, the absence of curriculum, the huge attrition of good teachers—all the things we know truly hamper student success," she said.

• While calling some charter networks "lovely schools," she said many are essentially "boutiques" that selectively enroll (KIPP would beg to differ), tap resources not necessarily available to public schools, and aren't scalable solutions to the problems of public education.

• Curriculum continues to be an important focus for the union. It is one of the key supports teachers need, Weingarten said. That helps to explain why the AFT has been so engaged in the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

• In keeping in touch with her idea of "360 degree" accountability, an old theme from her United Federation of Teachers days, Weingarten said that school leaders and administrators must be held accountable for providing educators with the supports they need to succeed.

• She also said that the AFT is beginning a "full-on campaign" in support of public education "as it ought to be." Few details were immediately available; I'll bring them to you as I get them.

More later with some policy details on teacher evaluation from a press session Weingarten just hosted with reporters. Stay tuned.

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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will be giving her opening keynote in just a short while. But before we get to that, here are a couple of guiding questions to pay attention to over the course of this convention.

• What will AFT delegates' reaction be to recent education developments, like the Race to the Top? What do they make of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who was the source of ire for National Education Association delegates earlier this week?

• The AFT's Innovation Fund will announce its new grantees this Saturday. Who will the new grantees be?

• President Weingarten has taken some courageous stances on things like the use of test scores in evaluation. Some locals have followed suit in newly inked contracts. But are all local affiliates on the same page as Weingarten?

• What's the next step for AFT leaders in places like Pittsburgh and New Haven, Conn., as they roll out and implement new evaluation systems?

• The convention features a presentation by Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. How will it be received by delegates?

Teacher Beat will keep you in the loop.

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This year's NEA Representative Assembly ended at 7:24 p.m, and there are a few additional things worth mentioning.

• The delegation had a pair of idiosyncratic votes on two back-to-back items. The first one, New Business Item 47, which would have directed the union to publish an article in an internal newsletter promoting national-board certification, was voted down. A second one, NBI 48, directs the union to secure contract language that "maintains, establishes, and promotes" subsidies and scholarships to earn the credential. That one passed.

• With the economy struggling, delegates were generally quite concerned about the cost of new business items, voting down a number that came with higher dollar figures and altering others to lower costs. The total cost of approved items this year is just under $600,000, which still puts it slightly higher than last year's.

• As the evening wore on, a handful of other interesting NBIs passed with very little of the debate that characterized the earlier ones. Mike Antonucci writes about two of them, on charter schools, here. Another interesting one, 95, was brought forward by Beverly Ingle, the president of the state's Colorado affiliate. It affirms that the union will continue to offer technical support for locals implementing Race to the Top plans.

• There was a distinctly conga-line-ish moment during the beginning of the July 4 session, so I got my wish.

Now, off to the AFT. I am in transit tomorrow and will resume posting on Thursday, July 8. See you in Seattle!

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Education historian and advocate Diane Ravitch, the author of the bestseller The Life and Death of the Great American School System, came to the RA today to collect her "Friend of the NEA" award. She got a standing ovation after her speech panning the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top, charter schools, the "privatization" of public schools, merit pay, and efforts to shift away from seniority and tenure, among many other things.

Suffice it to say that with an audience like the RA, which has big problems with all those things, her speech was akin to pouring gasoline on a fire. At the end, in fact, Ravitch stripped off her jacket and put on a T-shirt that read, "Public Education: It's a Right, Not a Race," to great acclaim and applause.

The video of Ravitch's speech will probably go viral in less than five minutes so I'm not going to bother writing up her specific remarks. Overall, Ravitch's appearance at the RA says far more about her than it does about the the union. Her change of heart has been extensively documented by Education Week and others, and this award is more or less the capstone of that transition.

If this appearance is any indication, Ravitch now views herself as the defender of public education against forces that are bent on destroying it. On her Twitter page, she recently drew an allusion to the French Revolution, comparing her public protests to being on "the barricades." Today at the RA, she called her book tour a "whistlestop campaign."

It's worth pointing out that while Diane's book has received generally very positive reviews, others contend that Ravitch is selective in the research she cites to support her views.

In any case, NEA must be thrilled to have an influential public figure like Ravitch now aligned with its agenda. Whether the union really needs the help is an open question. It still enjoys support on Capitol Hill, and there are a bevy of lawmakers who are pushing back on things like Race to the Top, the School Improvement Grants, and No Child Left Behind.

Also, you wouldn't know it from this speech or the excitement it generated, but Ravitch and the NEA aren't on the same page about everything. Throughout her career, the education historian has taken a consistent tack on curriculum, arguing that it should be deep and rich and highly specific. But the NEA has never been as much of a leader on curricular issues as its sister union, the American Federation of Teachers. The NEA is, in fact, one of the leading proponents of the movement for "21st-century skills," a movement Ravitch despises and has claimed is nothing but an William Heard Kilpatrick-inspired brand of progressivism in sheep's clothes.

Photo by Kevin Lock, courtesy of the National Education Association

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has come in for quite a bit of criticism at this year's National Education Association Representative Assembly. But the NEA delegates moved swiftly to table New Business Item 44, which would have encouraged President Obama to replace Duncan with "a person who is aligned with the interests of the NEA, its members, and especially the students it serves."

In my four years of covering the RA, I have never actually seen something like this happen. Usually unpopular resolutions are defeated, but not removed entirely from consideration.

That said, the general tenor of this item confirms a somewhat odd phenomenon I've remarked on about this year's RA, and that is that delegates have fastened on Duncan or, as in NEA President Dennis Van Roekel's keynote speech, "the president's advisers," as a whipping boy for policies they don't like—as if Duncan weren't answering directly to President Obama.

We got an extended riff on that theme from the delegate who tried to offer this new business item, Geoff Mize of Ohio. "When an adviser has laid out such a misguided path, it behooves a president to replace that adviser. His path is not turning hope into action."

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Just joining us this Monday morning for the 2010 National Education Association Representative Assembly? You've got some catching up to do, because Teacher Beat's been blogging all weekend.

NEA Delegates Vote 'No Confidence' in Race to the Top: The item passed, but not every delegate wanted it to.

It's Easy Being Green: Find out what the NEA is doing to reduce waste, at the RA and at its headquarters building.

2010 Greatest Education Governor Award goes to Maryland's Gov. Martin O'Malley. (He didn't flex his biceps or play a duet with NEA VP Lily Eskelsen. Too bad.)

Also make sure to check out these pieces by my fellow Reporters Who Cover Teachers. Sam Dillon has the scoop that NEA didn't invite Obama administration officials to the RA this year, as well as the news the U.S. Department of Education has been placing stories about reform-minded unions.

Over at Intercepts, Mike Antonucci has the scoop on an NEA-AFT fracas in Alabama and what the heck's up with all those new business items out of California.

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The National Education Association gave its annual "America's Greatest Education Governor Award" this year to Maryland's Martin O'Malley.

As governor, he's overseen record increases in K-12 education spending, the provision of school-construction funds, and the creation of an independent labor board to handle bargaining disputes, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said during his introduction. (Formerly, such disputes were resolved by the State Board of Education.)

O'Malley's speech mostly reiterated those accomplishments. But it also contained a few interesting tidbits, and omissions:

• He took a swipe at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who's had an acrimonious relationship with the NEA's state affiliate there. "Just ask our friends in New Jersey how much difference an education governor can make," O'Malley said.
• He said that he, and apparently some other Democratic governors, like Ted Strickland of Ohio, have written to President Obama in support of the edujobs bill. An interesting move, since the president has threatened to veto the bill if it takes money from the Race to the Top and other reform programs to cover the cost, as the House-passed version would.
• He helped advance the legislation that created the new labor board, an endeavor apparently 20 years in the making. One of the members on this new body? None other than Bob Chanin, the union's beloved former general counsel.
• There was no mention of O'Malley's support for his state's Race to the Top bid, or his signature on a bill that moved the tenure-granting bar from two to three years. Both were opposed by the state NEA affiliate.

O'Malley got a standing ovation from delegates, and Van Roekel summed up: "Now if we had 50 of those, what a different world it would be."

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Christy Levings, the chair of the National Education Association's ESEA Advisory Committee, gave union members an update today on the NEA's progress in advancing changes to the law, currently known as No Child Left Behind.

Her presentation was notable more for calling on the delegates to the NEA's Representative Assembly to beef up their lobbying than for any specifics she provided on the union's progress so far. It was clear, though, that the union does not want to see the Race to the Top or the Education Department's four school-turnaround models included in the rewrite.

"We need to get ESEA done the right way. Just because ARRA [the economic-stimulus legislation that created the Race to the Top] exists does not mean that the language of ESEA has already been written," Levings said. "Congress enacts the legislation, not the Department [of Education]. That means being and staying vigilant. "

And it means that delegates and rank-and-file teachers need to be actively involved in lobbying to change the law, she said.

Delegates were asked to fill out postcards to send to their congressional delegations stating what they would like to see in a renewed law. NEA has often been accused of criticizing things it doesn't like without offering alternative solutions, so it's interesting to see that this effort takes a positive approach.

In general, the union wants the new ESEA to boost parental involvement, change the accountability system, protect teachers' bargaining rights, and let students demonstrate what they've learned in multiple ways. You can read my recent story on the union's approach if you want all the details.

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The National Education Association is quietly turning green.

For easy recycling, the representative assembly's internal newspaper, RA Today, is devoid of color and pictures and news stories this year: It prints just the resolutions. And delegates can access it through electronic channels rather than picking up paper copies.

And for the first year, the union has "green delegates." About 1,000 of the union's around 9,000 delegates have opted out of the traditional printed materials that delegates receive. Instead, they download all of the convention materials from a website. The union hopes to have even more green delegates next year.

This appears to be more than just an RA thing. Back at the ranch, the NEA's headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C. earned the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certification. It's one of only a handful of buildings in the city to hold that certification for operations and maintenance in an existing building.

Finally, there was a noticeable lack of balloon archways and confetti falls yesterday when the RA kicked off. While I haven't confirmed this yet, I suspect that it's also due to a waste-reduction effort.

While I confess to missing all of the glitz for its purely camp-tastic value, the California energy-saver boy in me approves.

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After a protracted debate, delegates to the National Education Association voted on Sunday to take a position of "no confidence" in the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top guidelines and in the use of competitive grants as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA.

It was a symbolic slam on the Obama administration. But as with NEA President Dennis Van Roekel's keynote speech, it stopped short of actually calling out the U.S. president, a supporter of the program. And the debate over the item provided the clearest picture yet of both the internal and external difficulties the NEA faces pushing against an education agenda promoted by a Democratic administration, rather than a Republican one.

For one, the item passed by a razor-thin margin. Most pass with a simple voice vote. New Business Item 2 required a standing vote, where delegates pro and con stand, in turn. The room looked to be divided almost in half, and the item very nearly moved to a roll call vote.

One delegate who opposed it noted the Tennessee and Delaware state unions' participation in their states' winning Race to the Top applications, and feared that the item's sentiment didn't accurately represent the diversity of opinion about the program.

"A number of our state affiliates have signed on to the Race to the Top, as have a number of local affiliates," she said. "To make a blanket statement that we have no confidence in Race to the Top is a conflicting message, and a disunity message."

Others worried about political ramifications. "I agree with the principle of the resolution but not with the term 'no confidence,' " the delegate said. "I'm not sure that's the way we want to go into reauthorization, throwing punches."

Yet others felt that it was time for the NEA to come out more strongly against the administration. "The worst thing that can happen is that we are divided on this, because our opposition will seize on [it]," said one delegate.

Even then, the resolution did not actually name or blame President Barack Obama for the policies. At least one delegate said he felt that those omissions were disingenuous.

"Arne Duncan was not on the ballot. The policies of the Department of Education are the policies of the Obama administration," the delegate said. "We have to step up and say that the policies of the Obama administration, we do not agree with those."

Another delegate seemed to agree, saying that even if NEA wouldn't connect the dots, the media and public would have no problems doing so. "The one line the press will pull from this convention is that we have 'no confidence' in RTTT, which translates to the Department of Education, which translates to Barack Obama," she said.

For the NEA, Barack Obama is quickly becoming the equivalent of Voldemort: He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Still, the delegates were on the whole worked up enough that they rejected an amendment to strike out the "no confidence" language and replace it with a softer phrase.

The author of the NBI 2, Phil Rumore, president of the Buffalo, N.Y., affiliate, got applause when he was introducing the resolution: "Some people are going to be mad at us if we pass this. Well let the word get out," he said. The program, he added, would exacerbate policies that "brutalize our students with standardized tests, which in my opinion is like giving someone blood tests until they die."

From another supporter: "The Race to the Top is a gun with bullets in it to take out teachers, public education, and the union itself."

Camille Zombro, the head of the San Diego affiliate, seemed to have the last word. "Teachers would never have put together a program like Race to the Top," she said. "Even in states that are trying to make lemonade, ... you were still given a lemon."

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That issue was essentially at the heart of quite a bit of protracted debate on New Business Item 1.

The original resolution would have directed the National Education Association to prepare and launch a major public relations strategy to "revive public confidence" in public schools. Major media buys put the cost of such a campaign at $52 million, or over a third of the NEA's current operating budget.

"It costs money to put this message out," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said. "It is not, 'Write it, and they will come.' "

Unless, of course, you're talking about viral social networking—Facebook, Twitter, and the like. So the delegates substituted an amendment to put out the union's message on a "social media platform" at a cost of only $125,000. And lo and behold, the resolution passed.

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Dennis Van Roekel's Keynote, take two!

Near the end of his keynote address to the National Education Association Representative Assembly, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel called for the creation of a new commission—to be called the Commission on Effective Teaching—that would address "questions that have been avoided for far too long."

"What would the profession look like if we, the union, actually controlled teacher training, induction and licensure, evaluation, and professional development? How do we ensure that all teachers are prepared to enter the profession and then are supported, especially in their first years?" he asked.

The commission, Van Roekel said, would issue a report on these topics and make recommendations to next year's Representative Assembly.

Not many more details about it at this point, but the creation of this commission could mean that the national focus on better teacher evaluations is prodding the NEA forward in these directions.

Curiously, teacher dismissal and due-process weren't mentioned in the list of topics, which means that the American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten may still be going down that path alone.

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The NEA president's keynote address is always the highlight of the first day of the National Education Association's Representative Assembly.

This year's has got to have been a particularly difficult one to put together. A lot of delegates clearly have an ax to grind with Barack Obama, and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel needed to address that. After all, it's important to show your members that their dues are going toward something.

But while it's easy enough to get delegates fired up against a Republican president, it's an order of magnitude riskier to do so when it involves a Democratic president whose ear you need to keep.

As a result, the keynote address this year had Van Roekel twisting himself into a bit of a rhetorical pretzel, widely criticizing administration policies like the School Improvement Grants and the Race to the Top (and Congress in general) with some barn-burning lines, but treading lightly with the man himself.

Take this piece, for instance. Van Roekel pointed out that Race to the Top focuses heavily on test scores for measuring student and teacher performance, while during the campaign Obama had complained about fill-in-the-bubble tests. But the union president didn't actually call out the U.S. president for this apparent contradiction.

"Mr. President, your instincts were right—the path your advisers have laid out is not! We got a system that creates too few winners and far too many losers. Our members feel betrayed, and so do I," he said.

In fact, the only time in this speech where Van Roekel explicitly called the Race to the Top "punitive" was when he was paraphrasing a letter from the National Council of Churches of Christ that condemns the program.

Most interesting of all is that the speech downplayed the fact that Van Roekel and Obama are lobbying on different sides of the edujobs bill. The House-passed version of the jobs bill would take $800 million from some of the administration's education priorities, including $500 million from Race to the Top, to help cover the cost.

Van Roekel praised Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., for mustering support for the bill and called on the Senate to pass it. But as he very well knows, Obama has threatened to veto the bill precisely because of his strong support for—and apparent ownership of—the Race to the Top.

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Several new business items to be debated this afternoon by the National Education Association's Representative Assembly focus squarely on criticizing or opposing elements of the Obama administration's agenda.

The first batch of items comes straight out of NEA's board of directors. New Business Item A takes a whack at a bunch of topics.

• First, it says that providing "basic" federal education funding through competitive, rather than formula, grants "forces local and state agencies to compete against each other for precious funding and resources." This is an interesting statement, because while the Obama administration has proposed collapsing a number of formula grants into competitive programs—including $500 million of the Title II-A teacher quality grant—the administration has underscored that it would preserve the current formula-based Title I program for disadvantaged students.
• The NBI also says that it would require NEA to "eliminate the prescriptive nature" of the current school-turnaround models, including the Education Department's "Rule of 9," which bars more than half of the schools in a district with more than nine persistently low-performing schools from using the "transformation" model. That's a problem for the NEA, which favors the transformation model over the other three. The model requires only the principal to be replaced, while the others would close schools or cause districts to take more-drastic measures, such as removing many educators.
• Finally, it would require NEA to "focus on supporting and creating great public schools, rather than supporting private charters or other programs that undermine the stability of great public schools." On reading that, you might be surprised to know that some state delegations, like Wisconsin's, are generally more favorable to charters. On the other hand, NEA's board of directors, unlike its executive committee, apportions its seats based on state-affiliate membership numbers. So perhaps this is merely a reflection of the fact that several large state affiliates like California are notoriously hostile to charter schools.

New Business Item B, a bit of a no-brainer, would require the NEA to continue advocating for its Positive Agenda for the ESEA reauthorization.

Now onto the items submitted by state affiliates. NBI 2 would call on the NEA to take a position of "no confidence" on the federal Race to the Top program and the use of competitive grants as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA. The rationale for the items says that Education Secretary Arne Duncan's policies are "undermining the education of our students and are nothing less than an assault on public education." (Ouch!)

If history is any guide, these resolutions will no doubt be the subject of vigorous debate and could emerge much less strongly worded. Remember, though there's a general feeling of cautiousness about the Race to the Top, not all states affiliates entirely dislike it. NEA state affiliates in Tennessee, Delaware, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida (for its second round) have signed onto or are signing onto their state's RTT applications.

Senior NEA national officials really seem to dislike these programs, but state affiliates are all over the map. An important dynamic to watch in the lead-up to the elections this November, and ultimately, toward 2012.

Finally—proving that no good deed goes unpunished—there is no mention in these statements about the rest of the $100 billion in education funding provided by the economic-stimulus bill, which did a lot to save teachers' jobs.

We'll keep you updated as the RA progresses.

UPDATE (5:28 p.m.): Both NBIs A and B passed with only minor alterations.

UPDATE (12/4, 12:43 p.m.): NBI 2 also passed after protracted debate. See this item for more.

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

Today, Teacher Beat heads to New Orleans for the National Education Association's annual Representative Assembly. We'll follow that by a jaunt up to Seattle for the American Federation of Teachers' biennial convention.

As we've done at Education Week for the past two years, we'll provide you with lots of up-to-the-minute coverage of these events right here on this blog, so be sure to check back often.

We'll have coverage of the keynote addresses, special awards, interesting internal tidbits, and, as always, a dash of color. Because, let's face it, with thousands of teachers converging, and Dr. Seuss hats, fabulous accessories, and "collaboration meters," there is always some color to be had. (I am still holding out for a conga line.)

In all seriousness, I'm sometimes asked why we should pay attention to the NEA and AFT conventions. The answer I usually give is that there is really no better way to understand how teachers' unions work than to attend these meetings. You could probably write a doctoral dissertation on the sociology of teachers' unions as evidenced by how they set their own principles.

Sometimes the resolutions give a good sense of how the unions view external policy developments. Even more interesting are those items that highlight differences within the unions on issues. Remember, state affiliates in the NEA and local ones in the AFT have quite a bit of autonomy, and there is little that the national offices can do to "make" them toe the party line.

With all of the moving parts, it's difficult to go into these events with a solid idea of what the news will be. But there are always a few narratives that spin themselves out over the course of a convention. Last year, for instance, marked the first time the NEA seemed to fully embrace the union label.

And a lot of things have changed in the edu-reform space since the last AFT convention, in 2008. AFT President Randi Weingarten has covered a lot of bases, and she's already put a mark on her tenure with shifts in philosophy on issues like the use of test scores in teacher evaluation. And affiliates in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Pittsburgh, among others, have new provisions on pay and evaluation that bear watching.

Now, if you're a delegate attending a convention, please feel free to stop by the press table and introduce yourself. This isn't just my jealousy of Mike Antonucci, who has a veritable fan club at this point; it's that I think you have important stories to tell. (There are some rules about when and where I can conduct interviews if you want to chat formally, but we will make it work.)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The feisty president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called this morning to give me an earful about the debate on Capitol Hill over the $10 billion edujobs fund.

As my colleague Alyson Klein reported extensively yesterday, some of those dollars would be funded by offsetting appropriations for the Teacher Incentive Fund and the Race to the Top. Now, Weingarten is furious that the Department of Education wants to preserve those programs.

"The department was all for saving jobs until it was their pet programs or pet projects that have to share in some of the pain," she said. "I'm very upset. You have an immediate, well- documented harm to children, because of budget cuts. Everyone's been trying to talk about that. All of a sudden, Congress was forced to come up with offsets, and [Rep. David] Obey did and made sure nobody was insulated, and you have this hew and cry."

To be clear, the AFT preferred the former, $23 billion version of the jobs bill that did not raid other pots of education funds. But with that bill no longer an option, the union supports the bill Rep. Obey has advanced.

Weingarten noted that continuation grants aren't touched under these proposals, nor are formula programs like Title I. The programs slated for cuts "are limited pots of money, they're not going to be spread evenly, whereas the education jobs fund goes to all states and all districts," she said.

Her union, as Alyson reported, is opposing an effort by some moderate Democratic lawmakers, like Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., to get the administration to seek cuts elsewhere, fearing it might derail the edujobs bill.

Clarification: While the AFT doesn't support Rep. Polis' efforts to exempt the three discretionary programs Obey identified, it's actually OK with seeking cuts to other programs, union officials tell me.

Now, the question is if, or whether, there are other offsets under consideration. Check Politics K-12 for breaking updates.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend