December 2010 Archives

By Guest Blogger Erik Robelen

John Wilson, who is stepping down in August as the executive director of the National Education Association, shared his plans for Life After the NEA in an interview yesterday. They include starting his own blog, serving (if asked) on the boards of corporations and social-justice organizations, and sharing his expertise as an adviser to politicians and what he calls "next-generation" candidates for political office. But there's apparently no golfing in his future. He said he doesn't play the game.

So, yes, at age 63, Wilson's retiring. But not really.

I, of course, started with the obvious question: Why did you decide to retire from the NEA?

"Because I can," Wilson said with a laugh. "To me, being executive director of the NEA is a pretty 24-7 job. ... I think that 10 years is really a good amount of time."

He noted that since taking the job, his intention had been to serve no more than a decade. And come next Aug. 31, his last day, it will be closer to 11 years.

In elaborating on the move, he waxed historical: "I grew up in the NEA. I've been a member for 44 years, since I was a freshman in college."

Then he waxed philosophical: "I believe in the energy of new beginnings. I think every organization needs refreshing and new beginnings, and I also believe in the power of sacrificing a job that you love, work that you do, so that you can give it to someone to take it to a higher level."

As for his plans, as mentioned, he's got plenty in mind to stay busy, and engaged.

"I will do other things in service to children," he said. "Here's what I'm hoping to do. I don't have to work, but if opportunities come along, I would be likely to sit on corporate boards, because I want to continue to influence business about how important it is for them to be in alliance with teachers and education-support professionals." He noted that he was active in helping to found the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Wilson serves on the "strategic council" for that organization alongside representatives from a variety of corporations and nonprofit groups.

He added: "I'd be willing to sit on social-justice boards, because I really believe in human rights."

In addition, Wilson said he wants to be an "idea adviser" to politicians, such as governors. "I would immerse myself in that state, and quite frankly, I do that for free for a lot of people now."

And he also wants to stay involved in political campaigns. "I'm going to help next-generation candidates, help run or manage or advise 30- or 40-year-olds running for political office, whether city council, school board, county commissioner, but set people up who are really smart, savvy, next-generation leaders because I think this country needs a lot of them."

Finally, yes, Wilson said he intends to join the blogosphere.

"I'm going to blog. I'm also going to write some Op-Eds. ... I think it would be interesting for someone from the NEA and union work to kind of step back and give a perspective about what the union really is and what the union can do, and not in a hostile or intrusive way, but in service to public education, but I do think the unions have a big responsibility to step up and ensure that children are learning."

Wilson made clear that as a blogger, he will not be speaking for the NEA. "I'll be blogging independently. ... I like the idea of being a free agent."

Wilson said he's enthusiastic that John Stocks, the NEA's deputy executive director, has been named as the next executive director.

"He has a brilliant mind. ... He has the opportunity to take a lot of things we've laid the foundation for and really move them up. ... I feel like he's been preparing for this and I really think it's a mark of a high-performing organization to do these kinds of things."

Finally, for those readers who may not have a clear idea of what exactly the executive director's job is at the NEA, as opposed to that of President Dennis Van Roekel, I asked Wilson about this.

"The NEA is a hybrid of a union and a professional organization," he explained. "We have two strong personalities, but we have different roles. ... The president is the chief spokesman, chief policymaker, and the face of the NEA."

He added: "The executive director works in support of the president, advising on policy, takes on the job of chief of staff, managing all of the staff. ... I work at the direction of the NEA executive committee, led by the president. ... I'm also responsible for coalition-building, representing the organization externally, but generally the executive and president sit down and work that out."

He added: "I've worked with three NEA presidents, and I've had a good partnership with all of them." (Wilson also made an unsuccessful bid to become president in 1989, but lost to Keith Geiger.) "I'm kind of hitting my stride now, so I love changing jobs when you're kind of at your peak, not to wait until you're exhausted or burned out."

For a little more history and background on John Wilson, a North Carolina native, check out this recent profile in the News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh, N.C.

Photo provided by the NEA.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Guest Blogger Erik Robelen

Update (4:50pm): The NEA has confirmed that John Wilson will retire from the national union in August. I'll be writing a follow-up post later drawing on an interview I just had with him. Below is my original post:

John Wilson, who has served as the National Education Association's executive director for a decade, is planning to retire in August, according to a blog post by Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel has named John Stocks, currently the union's deputy executive director, to fill the post, Antonucci says.

I've put out a request to the NEA for confirmation and comment, but haven't heard back yet.

Wilson made an unsuccessful run to become the NEA's president in 1989, losing to Keith Geiger. At that time, he was the executive director of the North Carolina Association of Educators, a job he began in 1995. Before that, he was a lobbyist at the North Carolina union, and prior to that, taught special education for many years.

I'm afraid readers of the Teacher Beat will have to wait for Steve to return from his well-deserved holiday vacation to get analysis of Wilson's impact at the NEA and the significance of the leadership change.

Here's a brief biography from the NEA website.

As for John Stocks, before joining the NEA, he was the assistant executive director for public affairs at the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Well, readers, Teacher Beat is taking a short break for the holidays. Though I won't be posting much until after the New Year, feel free to send comments, tips, and story ideas my way (click below my picture to the right to send me an e-mail).

All my best wishes to you this holiday season,

Stephen

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Reforms to tenure-granting got a lot of attention last year, and there are indications that that will continue in 2011 as well. Take a look at some initiatives bubbling up these days:

• New York City officials have advanced new tenure-granting guidelines there, requiring principals to consider several factors including student achievement before approving tenure for a teacher. The teachers' union has criticized the guidelines, saying the district should pay more attention to supporting teachers.

• A new version of the tenure bill that caused such a ruckus in Florida earlier this year is rattling around the legislature down there. Unlike SB 6, which sought to place all teachers on annual contracts, this one would allow teachers after five years to win three-year "performance contracts." As it stands now, the proposal is slightly more flexible on things like performance pay and ratings for teachers of special education. Expect much more on this in 2011.

• Even Wyoming is getting into the tenure game, with lawmakers planning to introduce a proposal to end "continuing contracts" for teachers.

Broadly speaking, "tenure reform" can mean three things: First, making the evaluations for granting tenure more meaningful; second, pushing back the number of years it takes to earn the benchmark; and finally, examining due process procedure for dismissing tenured teachers who are underperforming. Keep in mind that most tenure proposals would deal with only one or two of these factors.

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

Here's what we're reading over at Teacher Beat this Friday:

• Colleague Alyson Klein has yet another must-read item up on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to yank the Senate version of the fiscal 2011 spending bill.There is more than a little irony in Republicans suddenly peeling off from this bill, since they had every bit as many earmarks in this bill as their Democratic counterparts. But who said politics made any kind of sense? Anyway, as Alyson ably points out, this is a blow to education groups who wanted to see increases this year. It's also a disappointment to teachers' unions, who hoped to see changes to the Teacher Incentive Fund, as well as to alternative-route preparers of teachers. Under that bill, they'd have been given some "highly qualified" teacher flexibility.

• John Merrow has reported a piece on Toledo's peer-assistance and -review program. It covers a lot of the same ground as my feature on PAR from last year, raising similar questions about whether the program covers enough tenured teachers to be considered a success.

• The L.A. Times reports that the teachers' union there has laid out its bargaining priorities. They include keeping class sizes small, avoiding layoffs, and ensuring that test scores aren't a part of teacher evaluations. The latter element is particularly interesting, given that Randi Weingarten herself of the American Federation of Teachers, urged the union to consider value-added as one small part of evaluations. (United Teachers Los Angeles is a merged AFT-NEA affiliate.) I haven't taken a close look at the budget there, but given that 80 percent or more of the average district's costs are in personnel and that the district is in some dire budget straights, this seems a bit optimistic. We'll see how things turn out.

• The Hechinger Report has a piece on teacher ed. reform using Alverno College in Milwaukee as a model. It's a nice roundup of some of the tensions in play and a description of Alverno's lauded competency-based teacher ed. program. One note, though: Alverno, though widely recognized as one of the best teacher ed. programs today, produces only 80 or so teachers a year. That's a lot fewer than some of the big producers of teachers, (generally the public state universities). So what kind of reform is going on in the bigger schools?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Senate Appropriations Committee's version of the massive fiscal 2011 spending bill contains a few unusual teacher-related items tucked within its nearly 2,000 pages. Among them are changes to the high-profile Teacher Incentive Fund program and a fix meant to get around a legal ruling in California over alternative certification and the "highly qualified" teacher standard.

Colleague Alyson Klein has a great write-up of the changes to the TIF program. Someone, presumably the teachers' unions, appears to have done some heavy-duty lobbying, because this kind of language was notably absent from the final regulations for the TIF program put out by the Obama administration.

Those regs nodded toward getting input from teachers' unions, but they didn't actually specify a 60-percent-teacher-vote mechanism for adopting the plans, which is what this language seems to indicate. The unions have long said that TIF grants should be subject to bargaining or to a teacher vote.

Second, with the addition of four lines of language, the Senate is also poised to resolve that brouhaha in California over alternative certification. (See Page 1068 of the bill.)

Recall that an appeals judge sided with a group of parents and advocacy groups in a California lawsuit against the federal Education Department. The court found that the Bush administration's 2002 regulation on "highly qualified" teachers improperly broadened the No Child Left Behind statute by allowing alternative-route teachers to circumvent the definition. The statute requires HQTs to hold full certification, while the regulations permits teachers in alternative routes to be considered HQ, even without certification, if they are making progress in their programs.

Fans of high-profile alt-cert programs like Teach For America were dismayed by the ruling, while opponents, including advocates for traditional ed. school programs, cheered.

But in essence, this new Senate provision would render the whole situation moot, by formally adopting the regulatory interpretation into law.

Of course, none of this is a done deal until the bill is passed by the full Senate. (The House has already agreed to pass it if the Senate does.)

Will either of these developments get buried as things march along? Stay tuned.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Achievement is on the rise in low-performing Calif. schools receiving funding through the $3 billion Quality Education Investment Act, according to an analysis funded by the California Teachers Association and released recently.

But others who study California education policy are somewhat less sanguine about the results, saying that it's hard to determine whether the better achievement patterns can be attributed to the QEIA changes or other factors.

The QEIA reforms were funded through a settlement in a lawsuit that the union and other plantiffs, including state Superintendent Jack O'Connell, won against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Essentially, the union said that Schwarzenegger hadn't met requirements of the state's Prop. 98, which requires the state to make at least minimum annual spending increases in education.

QEIA will put $3 billion into 488 schools over eight years to support specific improvement objectives. Planning started in 2007-08 and implementation began in earnest in 2008-09. Among other things, the reforms include the reduction of class sizes—a favored strategy of the union—the placement of counselors in high schools; support for parental involvement; and the provision of time for teachers to collaborate and work with one another.

It is also, according to CTA officials, the largest single education reform program of its kind in the nation, affecting about 500,000 students in all.

Conducted by Vital Research, a Los-Angeles based group, the report says that QEIA schools, on average, experienced about 47 percent more growth on the state accountability system, known as the Academic Performance Index, than did a comparison group of non-QEIA schools. They generally also did better raising the scores of traditionally underserved populations. (Though it's not spelled out in the report, a CTA spokesman said the performance of QEIA schools was compared with non-QEIA schools scoring in the same deciles on the API.)

In 2009-10, schools on average moved up about 6.8 points more on the 800-point API. Since the program began, they've averaged growth of 62.7 points, compared to 49.3 in non-QEIA schools.

Many of the schools still quite low-performing despite these improvements, but under the conditions of the program, they're expected to continue to meet their state-set growth goals while they receive the funding.

David Sanchez, the president of the CTA, said that the report is a sign that an approach to school reform based on collaboration and engagement of the community can help improve student outcomes.

"We took a big gamble on trying to come up with this reform idea, what kind of reform is needed to improve student learning, and ensure public schools are doing the best they can," he said. "The report shows that our schools in QEIA are doing quite well. Some have gone above and beyond the targeted projections for their scores [on the API.]"

According to some researchers, though, the design of the study isn't enough to prove that the investment of cash is what contributed to the improvements. The way QEIA was implemented, all schools in the lowest two deciles were eligible to participate, but superintendents and school boards got to create the selection criteria. Many, but not all of them, used a lottery system; some did so only after they'd made a priority list. So, in other words, the selection of schools is nonrandom.

What that means is that it's difficult to determine whether the higher scores in the QEIA schools are attributable to the QEIA reforms or to something else at work in those schools, said David Plank, the executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a group of scholars at Stanford University that studies education reforms in the Golden State.

"The problem with QIEA is that the way it was implemented makes it virtually impossible to do a meaningful selection of schools," Mr. Plank said. "Class-size reduction, collaboration, professional development—those are all good things, but we can't learn anything meaningful about them because there's no control [group]."

It's still early in the QEIA implementation, and one hopes it will be possible to do a more sophisticated analysis as more and more information starts to come in from the schools. Even if the data at this point are merely observational, they're encouraging.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The National Education Association last week announced the names of 21 educators and academics who will sit on its Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, a group that will make recommendations to the union for "maximizing teacher and teaching effectiveness."

The commission was announced at this past summer's Representative Assembly, but these are the first details NEA has unveiled about what it will be doing.

According to the union, the panelists will:

• Analyze existing standards, definitions, policies and practices related to teacher effectiveness and effective teaching, and develop a teacher's definition of an effective teacher and effective teaching;
• Craft a new vision of the teaching profession;
• Write a comprehensive set of recommendations for the NEA about the union's role in advancing and promoting teacher effectiveness and the teaching profession; and
• Develop a comprehensive set of recommendations for education leaders and policymakers about the future of the teaching profession and the role of teachers in governing it.

Teachers on the panel include Madaline Fennel, 2007 Nebraska teacher of the year, and Renee Moore, 2001 Mississippi teacher of the year. Other panelists include Andy Tompkins, president and CEO of the Kansas board of regents; Kathleen Wiebke, executive director of Arizona K12, a professional-development group; and Mary Hatwood Futrell, NEA's president from 1983 to 1989. You can read the full list on NEA's website.

The panel will meet four times over the course of the next year, conduct public hearings, and survey NEA members for their input before releasing its recommendations.

It will be enlightening to see what the panel comes up with, especially whether any of its recommendations fundamentally challenge NEA's current positions on things like value-added, performance pay, premiums for teaching in hard-to-staff subjects, and so on.

UPDATE, 12/13: Or maybe not. Antonucci reports that many of the panelists aren't just NEA members, but are actually in relatively high leadership positions in the union. Interesting that the NEA chose not to identify them as such.

As I've pointed out before, nothing this panel puts out will be binding on the NEA unless it formally adopts the recommendations into its internal policy resolutions.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teachers in high-poverty schools in Florida and North Carolina are on average only slightly less effective than those in low-poverty schools. However, within schools, there's a broader talent spread in high-poverty schools, and the poorest-performing teachers in such schools are are generally worse than the least-effective ones in low-poverty schools, according to a new analysis from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER.

What's more, such differences in effectiveness seem to be exacerbated by how things like teacher experience play out in the different types of schools. For example, additional years of teaching experience seem to improve a teacher's effectiveness in a low-poverty school, but less so in a high-poverty school, the analysis states.

The bottom line of the study, according to the authors: Simply attempting to import teachers with great credentials into high-poverty schools probably won't make a long-term difference. Instead, "measures that induce highly effective teachers to move to high-poverty schools and which promote an environment in which teachers' skills will improve over time are more likely to be successful."

The analysis was conducted by scholars from several institutions: Tim Sass, Jane Hannaway, Zenyu Xu, David Figlio, and Li Feng. All are associated with CALDER, a partnership housed at the Urban Institute. For the study, they analyzed matched student-teacher data from Florida and North Carolina, the only states that have such data over many years. The analysis uses a value-added estimate, which tries to determine the effect of the teacher by screening out the impact of students' past performance, family background, peer performance, and school-level factors that might affect learning.

The researchers used a number of techniques to try to ensure that these estimates are accurate. Among other things, they didn't include classes with fewer than 10 students or more than 40, and they made statistical adjustments to deal with the nonrandom assignment of teachers to classrooms. They also ran the analysis using four different specifications to ensure that the findings held up.

Here are some of the findings:

• Under three of the four comparisons, high-poverty schools had teachers who were on average less effective than lower-poverty ones, but the differences were fairly small. What that means, the author states, is that teacher quality in high-poverty schools probably isn't uniformly worse than in low-poverty schools, as it's often thought to be.

• Before you get excited about that, however, the analysis found that the level of teacher effectiveness was more diverse in high-poverty schools than low-poverty ones, and that the least-effective teachers in high-poverty ones were worse than the ones in low-poverty schools. In sum, that means that, overall, poor kids have a greater chance of getting a really terrible teacher than kids attending more-affluent schools.

• What causes this disparity? The authors found that factors like experience continue to make a difference for teachers in the low-poverty schools past the five-year mark, but not so in the high-poverty ones. In English, that means that a teacher in a high-poverty school hits a wall at some point. The authors postulate that such teachers might not have as much access to working with excellent peers as educators in low-poverty schools, or that exposure to challenging students causes "burn out" after a while.

If you're wondering about practical applications and want to read about some policy initiatives that are trying to get at the question of whether it's possible to encourage effective teachers to transfer to—or stay in—high-poverty schools, read my feature story in Education Week.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Philanthropist Bill Gates and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made headlines a couple weeks ago for suggesting in back-to-back speeches that districts should rethink the pay premiums teachers typically receive for earning advanced degrees.

Although researchers who study longitudinal student-achievement data have known about the mismatch between teachers' degrees and student scores for quite some time, the focus on this issue by those two high-profile figures served to bring it to the attention of the public at large. (Important caveat: Most of the studies on this topic have relied on test scores, which don't capture everything we want to know about student learning.)

The American Federation of Teachers, despite having at least three affiliates now moving to pay systems that rely less heavily on master's degrees, seemed unnerved by all the attention. The union put out (twice) a release that urged caution in moving to other, untested systems.

"While we can debate the value of a particular degree, it is undeniable that the more a teacher knows—about the subject matter and pedagogy—the more effective she can be. It's also undeniable that our teacher education programs must better align their work with what teachers need," the union said in the release.

The idea of doing away with the pay bump is the topic that always seems to attract a lot of angry comments from teachers whenever we write about it here at EdWeek. And it's not hard to see why, when you consider that the current pay structure at work in the U.S. education system encourages teachers to go get these degrees. In fact, some states, like New York, actually demand it. And getting such a degree is one of the few avenues teachers can pursue in order to earn higher pay.

So teachers ask a fair question of Gates, Duncan, and others who say it's time to re-envision this system: What do you replace it with? What should teachers get raises for taking on?

They're good questions, and here are a couple of possibilities I'm seeing in the field:

Limit Pay to Specific Degrees: Over at the Education Intelligence Agency, Mike Antonucci asks the question of whether it makes sense to limit pay for holding only those degrees that are better correlated with achievement, rather than chucking out all master's degree pay wholesale. Right now, the strongest link between degree and achievement is in the content areas of math and science. Lest you think Antonucci, a teachers' union critic, speaks alone on this issue, I once interviewed a National Education Association UniServ field leader who also raised the idea of limiting pay increases to degrees in math, science, or cognitive science on student development.

This would still be a big change for the field. About 90 percent of teachers earn general degrees in "education" rather than a specific field. When you consider the lack of continuity within the teacher-preparation world, both from program to program and even within institutions, it's not hard to see the benefit of moving to a more narrowly defined set of degrees.

Link Pay to Evaluations: Though popularized through the Race to the Top contest, versions of this idea have been floating around for about a decade. Cincinnati was among the first districts to consider the idea, in the early 2000s, though the teacher corps ultimately voted down a proposal to link pay and evaluation.

Meanwhile, much attention has focused on the District of Columbia's soon-to-be-implemented performance-pay system. In addition to rewarding teachers deemed "effective" on the teacher-evaluation system with one-off bonuses, the D.C. plan also contains a mechanism whereby teachers deemed effective several years in a row can actually skip forward several "steps" on the salary schedule—which means permanent increases in pay.

Design Alternatives: John Tarka of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers told me recently that, while the new contract signed in his city does away with the master's degree pay, most teachers will still have to take graduate credits because state rules require them to take a certain number of college credit-hours every few years to maintain a current license. Tarka told me that, ideally, he'd like to see the union and district design their own recertification and professional-development courses so that they'll be better aligned to the district's curriculum and standards. That seems a basis on which to build a different pay system, too.

What other options can you think of?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Former District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has announced the launch of a new public education reform coalition called Students First.

The website says that the group represents a movement "to transform public education" (now there's something we've never heard before!) Details on the site, though, show that its goals are largely congruent with Rhee's initiatives in D.C., including putting an effective teacher in every classroom and making sure that students have access to good public schools regardless of their zip code.

It says that the group will press for "legislators, courts, district administrators, and school boards [to] create and enforce policies that put students first."

The group's goals are outlined in greater detail in Newsweek (where Rhee herself has written the cover piece). It's an interesting read, because Rhee reflects on her D.C. tenure and acknowledges that she could have done a better job communicating with teachers and parents about her goals for reform. On some issues, though, like school closures, she is unapologetic, writing that she doubts that moving forward more slowly would have minimized controversy.

And she has this zinger for the teachers' unions, all but stating that she doesn't think they are aligned with students' interests: "Elected officials, parents, and administrators implore them to 'embrace change' and 'accept reform.' But I don't think the unions can or should change. The purpose of the teachers' union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they're doing a great job of that."

She goes on to note that during the civil rights movement, advocates "didn't work everything out by sitting down collaboratively and compromising. Conflict was necessary in order to move the agenda forward."

The group will seek grassroots support with parents, teachers, students and policymakers, and will attempt to have a million members and to raise $1 billion within a year.

Rhee has been an irresistible draw for the media, and her every movement has been extensively chronicled. This new announcement is no exception: Politico, The Washington Post and Oprah are all over the story already.

The announcement rounds out a busy couple of weeks for Rhee: She is already advising Fla. Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team on education.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Some important stories for you to check out on this chilly winter Friday (here in the D.C. area, anyway):

•Tennessee officials have released a state report card on teacher preparation, the Memphis Commerical Appeal reports. It finds that teachers trained and placed through the Teach For America program outperform every other training program in the state, with the exception of math teachers prepared at Vanderbilt University.

• EdWeek's Sean Cavanagh reports on former District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's new gig: Helping to lead Fla. Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team for education.

• Though it's post-Race to the Top, Michigan legislators are now working on setting new parameters for teacher evaluations. The state Senate just passed a bill that would base 45 percent of a teacher's evaluation on measures of student growth, including both standardized-test scores and locally developed measures. But the bill's future is in question, with just a day to go before the legislature goes into recess.

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

Nathan Saunders eked out a win over incumbent George Parker in a very tight race for the presidency of the approximately 4,000-member Washington Teachers' Union, The Washington Post reports.

For months, the two men were involved in some pretty nasty back-and-forth power battles at the WTU, leading to an embarrassing episode in which the national AFT got involved to make sure the union election was run on time.

I wrote a blog item last month about the implications of this election on D.C. education policy, so be sure to check that out. Bottom line: Saunders and some of the other newly elected WTU officers, such as former trustee Candi Peterson, have been vocal critics of most of the initiatives begun during Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor of the district.

Kaya Henderson, who worked for Rhee and is now D.C.'s interim chancellor, has pledged to support Rhee's IMPACT evaluation system and pay initiatives. It will be interesting to see how her relationship with Saunders evolves.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend