October 2010 Archives

Urban Teacher Residency United, a group that provides technical assistance to a network of teacher-residency programs, released a detailed set of standards that flesh out the core aspects of the residency approach to teacher training.

You'll recall that the teacher residency is a new kind of training model in which student-teachers have a year-long apprenticeship in an urban school setting alongside a trained mentor. There's coursework provided by a partner university, but that coursework takes a bit of a backseat compared to the field experience. Think of it a bit like the inverse of the typical ed. school program, which has a lot of coursework and a student-teaching experience of perhaps 10-14 weeks.

Reading over these standards, it's clear that this is serious stuff. There are over 70 pages, and they are quite detailed about all the aspects of a residency, e.g., how a partnership with a school district or university looks, how mentors are selected, how the programs are evaluated, and so forth.

This degree of specificity makes a certain amount of sense, when you consider the teacher-preparation field in general. Trying to define the key features of a traditional college program or even an alternative-route program is more or less an exercise in frustration. There are some basic similarities—the former tend to have student-teaching before licensure, while the latter permit teachers to begin working full time as they take coursework, for instance. But beyond that, there is a ton of variation in coursework required and other aspects of the programs.

A bunch of new residency programs won grants through the Department of Education's teacher-quality partnerships grant program. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, meanwhile, is due to release recommendations next month from a panel it commissioned to study student-teaching. All signs suggest that it will further embrace aspects of the residency approach. (NCATE is already pushing for that through a recent redesign of its own standards.)

Endorsing the residency approach is one thing, but there are still some hefty implications for the larger teacher ed. field. Will it be responsive to the idea of less emphasis on coursework, on the collection of things like value-added data and other outcomes-based measures? Indeed, what are the implications for national accreditation, now that NCATE and a second accrediting body are going to merge?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Baltimore district and its teachers' union appear poised to announce a second tentative teacher contract, Teacher Beat has learned.

Here's the backstory for you: There was a great deal of excitement earlier this month when Baltimore Superintendent Andres Alonso and Marietta English of the Baltimore Teachers Union unveiled a tentative contract that would have done away with the step-and-lane salary schedule in favor of a new system of paying teachers.

In brief, teachers were to receive raises by collecting "achievement units" for getting good performance evaluations and participating in professional development.

Hailed in some quarters as a landmark proposal, the contract also earned some snarky reaction—teachers could earn some achievement units for serving as a building rep—and the inevitable comparison with the Washington, D.C. contract. (You can read my take here on why such comparisons are a bit misleading). But in all, the contract was pretty well received in the education-policy community.

But it didn't go over well with the teaching corps, who voted down the contract by a 3-to-2 margin. The vote sent the district and union scrambling back to the bargaining table and resulted in a bunch of news stories about a perceived lack of communication between senior union folks and the rank-and-file teachers.

Now, the word on the street from sources is that the district and union have essentially finalized a second (tentative) pact—and that the BTU was essentially shopping it to its unions' building representatives today during a four-hour meeting.

"They had us all over, had us released from school, they fed us an entire meal, chicken, all this stuff, and gave us a gift at the end and sent us off with the 'newly revised' contract," a source told me this afternoon.

There appear not to be many substantial changes to the contract, merely the addition of some clarifying language, the source told me. We'll know for sure when the BTU and the district make the second tentative agreement public.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's a bunch of links to interesting stories and items to keep you a readin', a bloggin' and a-twitterin' over the weekend.

• The New York City Department of Education and the city teachers' union agreed to delay releasing to journalists reports showing the "value added" gains attributed to individual teachers, pending a Nov. 24 court ruling. Yesterday, the United Federation of Teachers sued to stop the release of the information. Meanwhile, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, said he supports the public release of the information in New York.

• A bit of Common Core State Standards Initiative drama going on. The National Governors Association et al said thanks but no thanks to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for a recent report in which it put for three potential options for overseeing the continued work of the standards-implementation process. Catherine Gewertz has analysis here. And according to Eduwonk, the under-the-radar message was not so polite.

• Important legal news for teachers: You can't use a free-speech argument to justify your curricular decisions if they fly in the face of what the school board wants.

We'll see you again next week!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The United Federation of Teachers plans to sue to prevent the New York City school district from releasing information on teachers' "value added" scores to reporters, the union said in a statement.

The GothamSchools news service reported today on its website that the district would this week provide the ratings to reporters who filed open-records requests. The news service said the district is still debating the details, such as whether it will redact individual teachers' names to the ratings, which are based on growth on student tests over two or more years.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew had some tough words abouts the district's plans.

"First, after years of boasting by the Department of Education about our kids' progress, the state declares that the tests the DOE has been citing are basically useless. Now the DOE wants to make public a group of reports based on these faulty tests, reports that also feature other incomplete and inaccurate student data," he said.

Legal questions abound, too. Can the district give out these ratings now that the data are being used in tenure-granting determinations, and now that state law permits the incorporation of scores in teacher evaluations—part of teachers' private personnel files? Alternatively, can the UFT stop a release under a public-records law if teachers' names are redacted?

Beyond just the teacher-quality world, this news is of particular interest for those of us who work in the field of education journalism: No fewer than four New York-based news organizations filed the requests for this information. (Gothamschools was not one of them.)

Ever since The Los Angeles Times became the first news organization to obtain—and publish—information on individual teachers, education reporters and editors across the nation have spent a lot of time trying to work through the complicated ethical issues presented by that work.

Stay tuned.

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

Representatives Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Susan Davis, D-Calif., introduced a bill recently that would require states to oversee new systems for evaluating teachers and principals—including consideration of "value added" estimates based on student scores, where available.

To receive their cut of Title I aid, states would have to establish model teacher- and -principal evaluation instruments that meet certain requirements, and then help districts adopt similar systems and use them to provide feedback and inform personnel decisions. Then states would have to report the percentage of educators scoring at each level of the systems and in the highest- and lowest-minority schools and highest- and lowest-poverty schools. Districts would face similar reporting requirements.

Sound familiar? That's because the bill would essentially codify what the Obama administration proposed in its ESEA blueprint and FY 2011 budget proposal: conditioning Title I aid on the establishment of a teacher-evaluation system linked to student achievement.

And according to our own Alyson Klein, Rep. Polis introduced a bill to extend the Race to the Top program and pushed back against a proposal to offset RTTT, performance-pay funding, and other Obama administration priorities. So it's a good bet that the administration has provided some measure of input into this proposal, too.

A couple of important notes. First of all, under the bill, student academic growth as measured by statewide or local assessments—or, where available, value-added analysis—would be the "predominant" factor in teacher evaluations. (The word choice here is meaningful. It leaves no ambiguity that at least 50 percent of the evaluation would depend on this, unlike the term "significant" used in the Race to the Top guidelines.) They'd also be evaluated in the classroom against a set of teaching standards several times a year by "more than one" observer.

The guidelines for principal evaluations are even more detailed. Principals would be judged, among other things, on helping develop teachers, implementing a rigorous curriculum, and collecting and using student- performance data in the school.

Teachers or principals that got poor evaluations and failed to improve would be barred from working in schools receiving Title I funding, the bill states.

Possibly in response to The Los Angeles Times' controversial series that publicly identified teachers with low value-added ratings, the bill says that the state must take steps to make sure that educators' individual performance ratings aren't made public.

A bunch of "reformy" groups have thrown their weight behind this bill: the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Equality Project, and the New Teacher Project.

Polis has already introduced a bunch of other notable education bills, including one to improve the training of principals. Davis' contributions to education policy include work on student and teacher mentoring.

This is a bill to watch. Though it probably won't advance on it own, it is a marker for language that could get wrapped into an ESEA rewrite—or added as an amendment to that larger vehicle. Remember, both Polis and Davis are on the House Education Committee that will take the lead in shaping that chamber's revision of the ESEA.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teacher Beat is back in the house, and there were some important happenings in teacher policy last week. Here's a rundown of what caught my eye while I was on vacation—and a few thoughts for you to chew on.

• Baltimore teachers rejected a contract that would have done away with traditional pay increases for longevity and master's degrees in favor of "achievement units" weighted heavily toward effectiveness in boosting student learning for earning raises. The interesting point here is that both the district and the union have already said they don't plan to make major changes to this structure as they re-enter bargaining. In other words, for rank-and-file teachers, these concepts didn't fly.

So what does that mean? Some are blaming communication issues between the district/union and the teacher corps, while others say that rank-and-file teachers' rejection of the contract is an indication that the Baltimore Teachers' Union was too far ahead of its members. Others, like The Washington Post's editorial board, are already comparing the elements of this contract with the one approved, by a wide margin, by D.C. teachers.

But it's fair to point out that these contracts were signed in very different contexts. For instance, local regulations in D.C. gave the district the ability to design the teacher-evaluation system unilaterally, whereas the Baltimore evaluation system must be worked out jointly, and accord with new state laws and regulations governing evaluation. And the proposed Baltimore contract totally re-envisioned the compensation structure, whereas the finalized D.C. contract deals with bonus pay, but not the issue of automatic "step" and "lane" increases.

• Liana Heitin of Teacher magazine writes up a study comparing the selection of new teachers in the United States with those in top-performing countries like Finland, where entry to the profession is generally much tougher than it is here.

Her article also does a good job of surfacing some of the problems with "international benchmarking." We in the education community hear a lot of praise for Finland, but it's difficult to know empirically exactly what features of that system are producing such good outcomes. Is it this issue with teacher quality? Is it, as some have asserted, the lack of standardized testing? Is it a function of a country's generally more homogenous population, its size, its social-welfare model? Notice also that most comparisons don't note some of the other tradeoffs in education systems, such as the fact that countries like Singapore generally have larger class sizes than we do here in the United States.

• The New York Times does a front-page profile on the American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten. The key questions raised in the article are still, in my mind open for debate: Is Randi's push to shift her union's thinking on things like teacher evaluation and due process a carefully crafted bid to keep the union relevant and part of the reform discussion, or is it a reaction to the teacher-effectiveness push from above? Would AFT be pushing forward on these issues if, say, a Republican president had pressed the teacher-evaluation issue?

• Alec Baldwin, who's now penning pieces for the Huffington Post, seems taken aback at the often vicious nature of discussions about teacher policy, unions, and the conversation about teacher effectiveness. Buck up, Alec; you should see the stuff that crosses my e-mail box on a daily basis.

Ok, I've posed a lot of questions to these recent happenings...let's hear your take.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Alyson Klein

Baltimore teachers said thanks, but no thanks, Thursday night to a new contract that would have based their pay on student outcomes and professional development, instead of seniority and degrees.

The contract had been touted by many in education policy as a potential new model for the state, and even the nation. Even the morning of the vote, the U.S. Department of Education had bragged about the expected deal in a press release highlighting examples of cooperation between teachers and education-redesign minded managers.

Back when the contract was announced, Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, told The (Baltimore) Sun that the agreement was "extraordinary" and squelched claims that unions are impediments to reform. And Emily Cohen, a policy analyst at the National Council on Teacher Quality, told the paper that the city went further than any other district to eliminate automatic pay increases.

Although the contract included pay raises and kept health benefits at their current levels, some teachers were skeptical of the idea that future salary increases would be tied to effectiveness and professional development, the Associated Press reported after the vote.

Marietta English, president of the AFT-affiliated Baltimore Teachers Union, told The Sun that the rejection was the result of "frustration and misinformation" about the contract. And she said in a statement that the union had been told that "some charter school operators have encouraged their teachers not to vote for this agreement."

"We negotiated a very new and different agreement at a time when fear, frustration and distrust are at an all-time high," English told The Sun. "We are confident that this is a bump in the road, and if we continue on the road of working with the administration, and listening to and respecting our members, we will soon have a great teacher contract for the city of Baltimore."

The vote drew more than 2,600 teachers, with about 58 percent voting against the contract, schools Chief Executive Officer Andres Alonso said. He issued a statement stressing that he would keep working with the union.

"The proposed contract makes a historic shift in how teachers are compensated, in the district's ability to attract and retain excellent teachers, and in the ability of schools to shape key aspects of school operations," Alonso said. "Many teachers wanted more information about all the dimensions of the contract and more time to digest what it would mean. I respect the seriousness with which teachers approached the vote and the importance of the questions they have raised."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Some housekeeping items for you this Friday.

First off, we've put together a new Spotlight publication on the topic of teacher evaluation. It has a collection of news stories, features, and Commentary pieces, exploring everything from research on effective teaching to evaluation standards to peer-assistance and -review programs run in partnership with teachers' unions. It can be all yours for the low price of $4.95.

Secondly, we're thrilled to announce a new staffer over at sister publication Teacher magazine online, Liana Heitin. Liana should be a familiar face to fans of Teacher Beat: She's so great that while she was interning one summer, I stole her away to write for Teacher Beat as a guest-blogger. So make sure to check out her posts on the Teaching Now blog. (My baby's all grown up and has her own blog! *sob*).

Finally, I'll be on vacation next week taking a breather from all things teacher-related. Keep the dialogue going in my absence and watch for breaking-news updates from my colleagues.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Protocols for observing teachers in the classroom during an evaluation should be written in such a way as to leave little room for inference so ratings are clear and objective, asserts a report released this week by the New Teacher Project.

For example, the measures should avoid vague requirements like "teacher checks for student understanding," and instead should be tightly written and specific, such as: "Students show through guided practice, exit slips, and role playing that they understand the content of the lesson."

The report lists six "design standards" for teacher evaluations, and writing clear expectations is just one of the six standards. But because all teachers are judged by a set of observation protocol, the issue deserves some special attention here at Teacher Beat.

The ongoing discussion about the appropriate place of test scores in evaluations has sucked up a lot of the air in the teacher-evaluation discussion, but figuring out what to put in observation protocols is no picnic either, as evidenced by debate here in the District of Columbia over its IMPACT teacher-evaluation system.

IMPACT's "Teaching and Learning" framework—used to guide ratings by principals and master educators during their observations—is very specific about how teachers demonstrate that they've met each and every standard. To show that they are correcting students' misunderstandings, for instance, teachers are expected to deploy strategies like "using cue cards, using analogies, using manipulatives or a hands-on model, using 'think-alouds,' " to name but a few listed in the framework.

That level of detail has raised the hackles of some, including George Parker, the president of the Washington Teachers' Union. In The Washington Post, Mr. Parker contended that the IMPACT framework reduces teaching to "bean counting."

Opinions really vary on the value of IMPACT's observation measures. A source of mine, for instance, contended that observation judgments are specific so that it's easier for administrators to document poor performance for dismissals and due-process hearings. On the other hand, some teachers—even those who aren't fans of D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee—told me that they like the detailed standards because it gives them clear targets for how to improve.

There's clearly room for a variety of different opinions on this topic. And here's a question worth asking: How do you get the right "grain size" of detail in these observation standards so that they're objective without being too prescriptive?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a development that could have implications for other school districts, the Los Angeles school board has agreed in a lawsuit settlement to curb its reliance on a strict seniority-based method for laying off teachers in the 700,000-student district.

Under the settlement, which still requires court approval, up to 45 schools meeting certain criteria would be shielded from cuts entirely. In other schools, layoffs would have to be proportional and would be capped at a certain number of teachers.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups filed the class-action lawsuit against the district several months back on behalf of students in three poorly performing schools that saw up to half of their staffs cut from the rolls during a budget crunch last year.

In general, schools with higher numbers of poor and minority students tend to be staffed by novice teachers and therefore to lose more teachers under seniority-based layoff rules.

The plaintiffs argued that the district's layoff criteria violated students' equal-protection rights under the California constitution by failing to provide them with the same educational opportunities as other students. Those students, the lawsuit alleged, were subjected to a revolving door of substitute teachers, teachers without experience in those grade levels, and teachers who had problems controlling classrooms, leading to a decline in instructional quality.

An important factor to keep in mind: California state law requires layoffs to be made on the basis of teacher seniority, but it allows some wiggle room for districts to divert from those criteria to meet local staffing needs for particular subjects and to meet state equal-protection requirements. In essence, the settlement requires LAUSD to take advantage of that flexibility.

The district faces a $270 million budget shortfall next year, and the district's superintendent, Ramon Cortines, anticipates 3,000 or more layoffs unless concessions are made with the teachers' union.

Reporters at the Los Angeles Times note that the settlement could have implications elsewhere. They quote a legal expert who points out that there's now a recognition that, in California at least, inequitable access to qualified teachers violates students' state constitutional rights.

In earlier posts, I mused that changes to layoff policies might be increasingly filtered through a civil rights lens. That certainly seems to be the case in Los Angeles.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Tea Party darling Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, is taking heat for comments he made at a recent appearance: that sexually active single women and openly gay men and women shouldn't be permitted to teach.

In this CNN blog, a spokesman for the senator says that the senator meant that elected school boards should be allowed to follow their own principles in choosing whom they hire for teaching jobs.

Forgetting for a moment all the political baggage: From a purely pragmatic point of view, would most school boards want to bar or dismiss a good portion of their current teaching force? My hunch is no, regardless of where members stand politically on these issues.

As a colleague of mine said acerbically, DeMint's idea could be subtitled: "How to create a teacher shortage in two easy steps."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

EdWeek's very own state-policy reporter has a must-read recent story and blog item on teachers' unions and their influence in state elections.

As colleague Sean Cavanagh writes, the No. 1 issue on the table at the state level seems to be maintenance of general education spending levels, not the teacher-effectiveness reforms that are garnering all the headlines. Also, the unions appear to be paying a lot more attention to state races rather than congressional ones.

A few additional thoughts. Those of us in the teacher-quality universe talk a lot about the populous union states, like California, Michigan and New Jersey. As it turns out, though, the National Education Association's centrally held political dollars can be allocated to any of the state affiliates, so even a relatively small, less-populous affiliate can wield a hefty influence on elections.

(AFT, though without a state-affiliate structure, can be quite powerful in local elections, like here in the District of Columbia.)

Finally, an interesting federal situation is brewing for the next presidential election.

The $4 billion in Race to the Top funding and $400-odd million in Teacher Incentive Fund programming are relatively small chunks of the billions of dollars the Obama administration and Democratically held Congress have put into education. But the unions have been vocal critics of the emphasis in these programs for linking student scores and teacher performance. They're also livid about plans to make more federal education funding competitive rather than formula-based

So will the unions back Obama in the Democratic primary, or will they back a challenger? A question to keep in the back of your mind.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend