November 2010 Archives

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on a proposal to ban congressional earmarks, basically insertions into appropriations bills for pet projects.

But education organizations that recruit, train and provide professional development for thousands of teachers are encouraging senators to vote "no" on the measure. They argue that their own programs would be caught up in the "broad" definition of earmark spelled out in the bill, which is being sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican.

The groups include the National Writing Project, which sponsors professional development for teachers on how to teach writing and literacy; the teacher and leadership-training groups New Leaders for New Schools and Teach For America; and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which oversees the national board-certification process. The organizations' activities are authorized in federal law and generally receive specific allotments each year in the federal-appropriations cycle.

In a letter they sent to senators last week, the groups said that their programs are "nationally structured programs with many years of bipartisan support," not spending that aids only a specific local constituency, i.e., Alaska's infamous Bridge to Nowhere.

Earlier this year, many of these same groups fought a proposal by the Obama administration, in its fiscal 2011 budget request, to merge these one-off allotments and smaller teacher-quality programs into a series of larger, competitive grants.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): The Senate on Tuesday rejected the Republican bid to ban earmarks, on a vote of 39-56, but that doesn't mean the effort is finished. The Associated Press notes that more senators supported the measure this time, compared to a 29-68 vote earlier this year, and with Republicans gaining more seats next year, the vote could be even closer in the future.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Baltimore's teaching corps just ratified, by a 1,902-1,045 vote, a new contract that does away with many of the features of its traditional "step-and-lane" salary schedule in favor of one that puts a heavier emphasis on teacher performance.

It looks like second time's a charm in Baltimore: A nearly identical proposal was put to the teacher corps last month and was soundly rejected.

There are a lot of new details in this plan, but arguably its newsiest feature is that it restructures the base-pay system for teachers, which in nearly every district in the country is based on credentials and longevity.

There won't be any more automatic "step" increases each year in Baltimore; raises will be based on collecting achievement units from good evaluations and participation in professional development.

Graduate credits, which used to grant teachers permanent "lane" increases, aren't totally eliminated, but their emphasis is much reduced in the new system. One credit is just one achievement unit, while a superior evaluation is 12. So getting good evaluations is a much faster way to increase one's pay.

Teachers can also advance up a career ladder, taking on additional roles as they earn good evaluations and pass a peer review.

The contract is important in the larger national conversation about teacher pay, too, because to date most experiments with pay have been with additive features, like bonuses, rather than changes to the base-pay salary grid. I recently wrote a story about the handful of districts that have started to look at base pay, and you can find more details about the Baltimore contract in it.

And this is another feather in the cap for Randi Weingarten and her American Federation of Teachers locals. The union and district, she said in a statement, "have shown what is possible when both sides are committed to a collaborative process that is focused on working in the best interests of kids," adding that "trust is paramount in any contractual agreement."

Baltimore CEO Andrés A. Alonso also praised the collaborative work on the contract.

"Teachers are at the very heart of everything we as a school district do, and unlike any other agreement until now—here or elsewhere in the country—this contract truly values teachers and gives them the opportunities for professional and financial advancement that they deserve," he said in a statement.

Of course, your favorite teacher-beat-blogger/gossip wants to know why teachers, who turned down the vote the first time, supported it so strongly this time around. The district's statement cites all of the outreach and information sessions for members held by the district and the Baltimore Teachers Union as a factor.

Marietta English, president of the BTU, had this to say: "We heard our members loud and clear when they said they needed more information and opportunity to give feedback."

Or maybe the yummy BTU-supplied meals did the trick.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Value-added estimates, as one component of teacher evaluations, offer important information for teachers and administrators, and their reliability is roughly on par with performance estimates used in other fields, a bunch of high-powered scholars assert in a report released today by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

While an imperfect measure of teacher effectiveness, the correlation of year-to-year value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness is similar to predictive measures for informing high-stakes decisions in other fields, the report states. Examples include using SAT scores to determine college entrance, mortality rates and patient volume as quality measures for surgeons and hospitals, and batting averages as a gauge for selecting baseball talent.

Statistical predictions in those fields are imprecise, too, but they're able to predict larger differences across providers than other measures and so are used, the authors write.

The report is notable for standing in contrast with several others issued recently, such as this one from the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI report, along with another from the National Academy of Sciences, frowns on using value-added in decisions involving teachers, due to the imprecision of the measures.

The Brookings report was written by Susanna Loeb of Stanford, who's done a lot of work using value-added to analyze teacher mobility; Dan Goldhaber and Doug Staiger, experts on value-added; and Steven Glazerman, of Mathematica Policy Research, among others.

The authors contend that many discussions of value-added conflate the value of the data with potentially "objectionable" uses, such as printing individual ratings in the newspaper. But evaluations that include a variety of measures benefit from incorporating all the best sources of information. Teachers, their mentors, and principals should have access to them, the authors write.

They go on to note that value-added is criticized by scholars, but often without consideration of the fact that there aren't alternatives that produce better estimates. And finally, much of the discussion is concerned with value-added estimates that might misidentify effective teachers as ineffective. But they don't often address the inverse problem—teachers identified as effective who in reality are not.

Bottom line from the authors:

"When teacher evaluation that incorporates value-added is compared against an abstract ideal, it can easily be found wanting in that it provides only a fuzzy signal. But when it is compared to performance information in other fields in other fields or to evaluations of teachers based on other sources of information, it looks respectable and appears to provide the best signal we've got."

The debate reminds me of a question I posed on this blog quite a while back, when teacher evaluation was first starting to come to the forefront in policy discussions: What degree of error in a teacher-evaluation system should be deemed acceptable?

Like all the analyses on the controversial topic of value-added, this one opens itself up to some criticism. For instance, it doesn't confront the very real concern teachers have about whether the use of value-added will increase the pressure on them to do test prep, or otherwise negatively inform curricular decisions.

Still, this is an interesting and important addition to the debate about value-added,especially now that there are academics and scholars lined up on both sides of the issue.

Now, let's hear your response.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teacher preparation needs to be organized in such a way that student-teaching and other "clinical" experiences in schools are prioritized, with coursework and other requirements embedded in and supplementing the on-the-job work, according to a report issued this morning by a high-powered panel of teacher-educators, teacher-quality experts, policymakers, and practitioners.

Such "sweeping changes," the report says, means the whole field of teacher education needs nothing less than a top-to-bottom restructuring, the report says.

The panel was convened earlier this year by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, a group that accredits about half the nation's ed. schools.

Among its recommendations, the report says that school districts need to be much more involved in teacher preparation, investing in partnership with local education schools to design programs that prepare teachers in response to the district's circumstances and with an eye on student learning.

In its recommendations, the report touches on a lot of hot-button issues. It says, for instance, that increased accountability for programs that prepare teachers should include consideration of test scores among other factors. That's been the subject of intense debate and controversy with respect to teacher evaluations.

Obliquely, the report also raises the question of whether the incentive system in higher education works at cross-purposes to close supervision of teacher-candidates in schools. That's an important consideration, because presumably, a leaner, more slimmed-down amount of coursework would require institutions to rethink what they value from their teacher-educators. That could be a big lift indeed, especially at research universities where publishing is given the lion's share of attention come tenure time.

As the report states, higher ed. institutions "will need to shift their reward structure to value work in schools by including clinical faculty lines in promotion and tenure requirements."

According to the group, eight states—Calif., Colo., La., Md., N.Y., Ohio, Ore., and Tenn.—have signed "letters of intent" to move to this kind of preparation model. They'll be working as part of an alliance to scale up these approaches. It's not clear, though, what such a commitment actually entails at this point.

In the meantime, some programs have already put a heavy emphasis on student-teaching. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education profiled some of them earlier this year in a volume. But the report released this morning acknowledges that such programming is "not the norm" in schools of education.

Teacher Beat's final thought: There have been an awful lot of these kinds of reports in the past. The million-dollar question for NCATE, and for all the panelists engaged in this work, is to prove that this is really going to gain traction in the teacher-prep world as a whole. The obstacles are many; Higher ed. institutions, (not just their colleges of education), are generally notoriously change-adverse. We'll be watching the fallout with interest.

Stay tuned for a longer story shortly at edweek.org.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's the president of the United Federation of Teachers last week, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he had selected publishing maven Cathie Black to run the city's schools:

"I look forward to working with Ms. Black. As a teacher, I will help in any way I can to improve the education for the children of New York."

And here he is this morning, quoted in the New York Daily News:

"I do not believe that anyone thought the mayor would speak to no one, hide it, keep it a secret, not consult any educational experts and then name someone with no qualifications to be the chancellor of the New York City school system. ... I would be appalled if a teacher was named the head of the Fire Department of New York City."

You've got to give the UFT and Michael Mulgrew credit for keeping us all on our toes, by following a bland, uninformative press release up with a two-guns-blazing speech.

The Daily News article goes on to state that UFT thinks Bloomberg abused his power in appointing Black. A bunch of groups, the UFT probably among them, will likely challenge Black's succession. She needs a waiver from state Commissioner of Education David Steiner in order to assume the top position at Tweed Hall.

Mulgrew says that his ire is directed at the mayor and not at Black. But this can hardly be the beginning of an easy relationship.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Bill Turque at The Washington Post had an important story out this weekend about the uneven distribution of the District of Columbia's top teaching talent.

This past summer, then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced results from the first year of performance-based teacher evaluations. Much blood was spilled about the 165 teachers who were being let go for poor performance, but the district also announced that 16 percent of the teaching force got the highest rating possible, "highly effective."

Turque reports, however, that the city's wealthiest ward has far more of these highly effective teachers (22 percent) than does the city's poorest neighborhood (5 percent).

It's a pattern that is almost certainly replicated in other large urban school districts because of longstanding seniority and transfer policies, the newspaper reports.

The analysis of D.C. teachers is important because most studies about teacher distribution have relied on proxies for teacher effectiveness—like qualifications and credentials—rather than on measures, however imperfect, of teachers' affect on their students' performance.

We should know a lot more about where the most effective teachers are located once Mathematica Policy Research and the U.S. Department of Education release an analysis about the location of effective teachers in select urban districts. The analysis is part of the federally funded Talent Transfer Initiative.

TTI seeks to move effective teachers into challenging, poor schools and to study them to determine whether they as effective at boosting student achievement in their new schools.

I wrote a story not too long ago about TTI and a few other projects across the nation that seek to create a more equitable distribution of teachers. This is a complicated area for reformers because it will require them to engage in a bunch of different policy areas, including recruitment and retention policies, as well as improving working conditions and school culture in the hard-to-staff schools.

For their part, D.C. officials are rolling out a performance-bonus system that gives the heftiest awards to effective teachers who work in poor schools.

Do you have any other recommendations for D.C. or for others seeking to rectify the uneven distribution of teacher talent?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A man dies and goes to heaven. Passing the pearly gates, he notices that there are plenty of folks from all professions and walks of life standing around, but no teachers.
"Where are all the teachers?" he inquires of God.
"Oh, they're in professional development," God replies. "In hell."
...

That was one of the jokes I was told by an educator when I began reporting Education Week's special series on teacher professional development, released as a special section in this week's edition. The joke is, obviously, a little over the top, but it gets at one of the subtexts of current conversations around PD: Though there are scores of great teachers, teacher leaders, researchers, scholars, and providers working deep in the trenches to change and improve the training, PD suffers from a real branding problem.

While many of the folks I spoke to over the course of my reporting said that the overall caliber of PD has improved over the past few decades, they could also all remember their worst experience. Over and over, I was told, the training just has to get better, if policy folks are going to take professional development seriously—and invest in it as a long-term strategy for boosting teacher effectiveness.

That's the basic reason why we at EdWeek decided to take a serious look at PD. You can now access all the stories online, along with some special Web-only features.

This was an especially challenging project. What we currently talk about as "staff development" in the field varies incredibly in its provision, duration, content, quality, and so forth that talking about it in a general sense is like walking through a field of land mines.

At times, I found myself feeling a bit like Alice must have felt down the rabbit hole, in that some of even my most basic assumptions, like how much the average district spends on the training, turned out to be misinformed. In the end, my colleagues and I decided that tackling some of those assumptions head-on would be a fresh way to approach the topic.

Our series is hardly a comprehensive look. Two thoughtful readers rang me this morning asking why we chose not to do a story specifically on teacher induction or on math-content professional development. I hear you, and there are still many avenues to be explored.

Some important stories are still just spinning themselves out now. For instance, a few sources wanted me to delve more deeply into the link between teacher evaluation and professional development. While there are some really interesting projects to that end—the Teacher Advancement Program comes to mind, as does the American Federation of Teachers' experimentation—it's still a novel concept.

Indeed, there were many interviews and great examples that didn't make it into the report, and I hope to follow up on some of them on this blog.

I had great help on this project from Mary Ann Zehr of Learning the Language fame, and also from my predecessor on the teacher beat, Bess Keller. Working with Bess was a particular pleasure for me, because I'd long admired her work before arriving at EdWeek.

Most of all, I found the teachers we profiled in this report to be inspiring, hardworking, and full of thoughtful opinions about the state of PD. It took a lot for them to share so honestly and openly about their experiences, so I hope you'll check out what they had to say.

I look forward to hearing your reaction to the stories.

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

Schools in the Teacher Advancement Program apparently would produce higher-achieving students in math than non-TAP schools with similar characteristics, concludes a recent analysis released by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The paper's author, Sally Hudson, a graduate student at Stanford University, looked at student growth in 151 TAP schools across 10 states. Her study uses an intriguing research methodology I've never seen before called "synthetic control matching" to create a control group of schools. In essence, she combined features from a variety of non-TAP schools in each state to create an ideal comparison school for each TAP school.

It's a creative solution for one of the common problems with quasi-experimental research studies: Oftentimes, the treatment and control schools vary somewhat in size, population, achievement levels or student makeup. Here, creating the synthetic controls keeps the control group as similar as possible to the TAP schools in question.

The study found that students in TAP schools outperformed students in the synthetic-control schools in math by about 0.15 of a standard deviation. That's roughly equivalent to a sixth to a half of a year of student growth. The study found a boost in reading scores in TAP schools, too, but that finding didn't hold up when some of the model specifications were changed.

While this study doesn't have quite the same level of "power" as a random-assignment study—after all, the comparison schools here don't actually exist in any brick-and-mortar sense—it is, nevertheless, a strong indicator that something going on in the TAP schools is producing positive results for the students in them.

The findings are good news for TAP after some less-than-stellar findings elsewhere: A random-assignment study of the program in Chicago found no differences in achievement between TAP and non-TAP schools, as I reported back in June.

There are plenty of implications here for the broader field of school improvement. But please don't go thinking that this study is somehow a counterweight to the big merit-pay study from last month, on Nashville's POINT program. POINT was a "pure" experiment, with the only major difference between treatment and control groups being the performance-pay element.

By contrast, in TAP schools, teachers also get group-based professional development, individual feedback keyed to an evaluation framework, and opportunities to take on additional roles in schools and to be compensated for them, all features that didn't apply in Nashville. So use caution in trying to compare these studies.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You've heard all of the back-and-forth on this blog about "teacher effectiveness," the Race to the Top, and performance-based compensation. What happens to those ideas, which have been heavily pushed by the Democratic administration, now that the House of Representatives and many state legislatures have turned Republican?

I've heard from a number of folks that there's room for bipartisan work on teacher effectiveness policies and support for performance pay. That is probably true in a theoretical sense, but there are practical issues that could definitely get in the way.

One of the Obama administration's proposals has been to make Title I grants for disadvantaged students contingent on states' establishment of systems for measuring teacher effectiveness. But the idea of even more strings attached to these funds may not fly with a Congress chock-full of supporters of less federal involvement in education.

Another problem: Funding. Almost all performance pay is currently funded through discretionary grants like the Teacher Incentive Fund, which means that supporting performance pay would mean ponying up to the table with more dollars. But the Republican "Pledge to America" seeks to basically reduce discretionary spending.

An alternative to adding cash is to try to re-purpose existing sources of funds, like the slushy $3 billion in teacher-quality funding the Education Department sends to states every year through Title II of the NCLB law. This fund is probably pretty safe, despite all the rhetoric of fiscal austerity, because every state and most districts get a cut of it. Clawing it away is, therefore, a no-win proposition for members of Congress. But refashioning the money into a more-prescriptive program isn't going to be an easy task, either, as I reported in this story.

As for legislative races, a couple of outcomes are particularly important. As Alyson Klein pointed out in a good blog item last week, Washington Sen. Patty Murray's victory is also one for the National Education Association. Murray, a member of the Senate education committee, has been a supporter of more funding generally speaking, and specifically for federal class-size reduction allocations. And the NEA has used her office as a conduit for affecting policy.

Ed. policy wunderkind Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat favored by the unions despite their reservations about his approach to teacher policy, also won a close election battle. He's said to be one of the administration's go-to lawmakers for education. His priorities for education legislation will be important to watch.

Overall, the biggest obstacle on the table for pushing education policy along is this: The center coalition that put together the NCLB act in the first place has been decimated, and it's unclear what will fill in the vacuum. Eduwonk has a good post up noting that the abolish-ED Republicans and the abolish-NCLB Democrats are likely to be brought into line by their respective party leaders, but that's still a long way away from coming up with a bill that can actually move in the current policy climate.

Two things help grease the way for legislation to move: money and policy agreement. There doesn't seem to be a lot of either right now in Washington.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last week, the American Federation of Teachers released results from the internal Washington Teachers' Union election, in which four candidates were vying to run the roughly 4,000-member D.C. affiliate.

You'd be forgiven for expecting a high degree of turnout given all the attention that D.C. has received in the press, but you'd be wrong: A surprisingly low number of teachers voted, just over 20 percent of the teaching force. The outcome was very close, with current WTU Vice President Nathan Saunders' slate coming out 21 votes ahead of incumbent President George Parker. A runoff commences this month with the results due out in early December.

The low turnout doesn't make the stakes any less high for the D.C. school system, though. The winner of this election will be working with interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson on the continuing implementation of the district's teacher contract, including the new IMPACT Plus performance-bonus system. And he'll have the chance to present his own contract proposals just two years from now.

So let's take a look at the candidates at this point. Despite all the media attention on the D.C school system, George Parker remains something of a cipher. He has come in for far less media attention than D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee or AFT President Randi Weingarten. He fought Rhee on a number of things, including the layoff of 266 teachers in a budget crunch that WTU officials alleged had been contrived by Rhee. More recently, he's blasted the performance-based firing of a good number of employees.

In interviews, though, he's been candid about the unusual nature of circumstances in D.C. that have prevented him from taking a harder line on traditional issues like seniority—at one point acknowledging that seniority for layoffs was already pretty much dead because of D.C. regulations.

Early on in Rhee's tenure, he appeared at events with the then-chancellor to present to rank-and-file teachers the now-infamous "red/green" contract proposal, though he ultimately never put that proposal—which would have required teachers to forgo tenure for a year for the opportunity to win bonuses—to a full vote by the WTU membership.

Still, WTU has had a lot of internal struggles and a fair amount of dysfunction under his watch: In fact, the AFT national had to step in to run the WTU's elections after multiple delays pushed it way past the original May timeline.

Saunders, a one-time ally of Parker's, has been a nonstop critic of his handling of the contract and the Rhee administration in general. He's accusing Parker of "selling out" the membership, and accused Rhee of seeking a "gentrification" of the school system's teaching force.

If Saunders wins, he'll most likely face difficulties in fulfilling some of his campaign pledges. First, he's promised to restore the teaching positions of the 266 laid-off teachers. But the WTU's own lawyer recently said in court that she couldn't find evidence in 1,200 pages of documents to back up the union's assertion that Rhee contrived the budget crisis, The Washington Post reported last week.

Saunders also said he'll work to end the IMPACT teacher-evaluation system, but it's hard to see how that would happen in the short term. Regulations in D.C. give the administration the sole oversight of the teacher-evaluation system. The contract signed earlier this year creates a panel to provide teacher input about the affect of IMPACT, but there's nothing in the contract that actually obligates the district to make any changes.

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