February 2011 Archives

By guest blogger Erik Robelen:

AFT President Randi Weingarten yesterday announced a new framework to guide due process for teachers deemed by administrators to be ineffective.

Weingarten emphasized that the "three-step process" developed by the national union should be part of a comprehensive system of teacher development and evaluation. She made the announcement at an AFT Teacher Development and Evaluation Institute in Washington.

"No one wants an ineffective teacher in the classroom," she said in prepared remarks. "But no one should want an effective teacher tossed out of the profession because teacher evaluations are nonexistent, broken, or mishandled."

The procedures would include notice in writing of specific concerns, followed by the collaborative development of an improvement plan for the teacher that should include "clearly articulated measures of success, timelines, support needed, and periodic reviews."

The local union would have the right to object if the supports in the plan were not deemed sufficient, Weingarten said. No improvement plan could continue for more than one school year, she added.

A hearing process would determine whether the plan was successful and the teacher was performing up to the standard set. A "neutral third party" would review the recommendations put forward by an administrator and peer experts, when there is a peer-review process in place.

"The bottom line is that the hearing is really a review of the entire evaluative process to ensure fairness and objectivity," Weingarten said. "It's not a relitigation of what constitutes good teaching."

Weingarten noted that the announcement comes as the AFT executive council this month backed a new framework for handling teacher misconduct. For more on that, check out Stephen's story from January.

[Update: (11:23 am)] One important thing I neglected to mention is that Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators has agreed to help review the new due-process framework.

Here's what Weingarten had to say about that: "I'm pleased to announce that Dan has agreed to co-convene a group of leaders—from labor, management and the research field—who will look at the AFT's proposal for aligning due process with the system of development and evaluation, and consider ways to adjust, improve and ultimately implement it."

She added: "We're doing this because none of this works if management and the union don't work together."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As a condition of receiving federal teacher-quality funding, districts should develop new evaluation systems—including consideration of student achievement information—by the 2016-17 school year, and eventually use such systems to make sure that low-income and minority students have equal access to teachers deemed effective, according to a newly released set of policy recommendations.

The recommendations, released jointly by the Washington-based Education Trust and Center for American Progress, suggest "a specific set of timelines, incentives, and sanctions" for states to meet those requirements.

The proposal is one of the first major ones by D.C.'s heavy-hitting advocacy groups to take on teacher-quality spending, specifically the Title II Improving Teacher Quality State Grants. Title II always takes a bit of a back seat to the comparatively larger Title I and IDEA funds, but at $3 billion, it's far and away the largest federal teacher-quality program out there.

As I reported a while back, every state and all but about 5 percent of districts get a Title II allocation, but there's not a lot to show that the cash actually does much on the ground. The federal Education Department conducts a use-of-funds survey every year, but most of the information generated from it is pretty general. (See the most recent one here.)

Under the recommendations, states receiving Title II funds would have to develop minimum state rules for new teacher-evaluation systems, including the use of student information, observations, and at least four ratings categories, by 2016-17.

In the interim, states would report other information, including the percentage of teachers in each school who: Had more than a year of experience; taught in-field at the secondary school level; and held certification.

As for sanctions, the recommendations propose that states would use the new evaluation tools to monitor, report, and intervene to correct patterns of inequitable access to effective teachers by poor and minority students and their peers, both within and between districts.

Under the proposal, a district that didn't narrow access gaps within four years would lose half of its Title II funds and required to make up the rest with a match; after five years, it would lose its Title II allocation altogether.

That's a lot more stringent than the current Title II accountability measures, which are linked to the highly qualified teacher designation and don't have many teeth.

Last time Capitol Hill officials released draft language for Title II, in 2007, it didn't go anywhere, largely because of fears about a proposed performance-pay program. Other groups complained that the language was just too prescriptive and onerous. Will these recommendations influence a second go-around? Stay tuned.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I was traveling last week and am headed out again tomorrow, so the posting will probably be spotty here on the blog for a little while.

Lots of other news on the teacher front to catch up with, so here are a few things that have caught my attention:

• It looks like House Republicans have restored a planned cut to IDEA by proposing a $500 million cut from the $2.95 billion Title II teacher quality state grants program, Alyson Klein reports. A while back I suggested it was politically unpalatable to cut Title II, but I guess it's even more politically unpalatable to cut the federal share of IDEA dollars.

• The presidents of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council are apparently pretty upset about the plan by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report's plan to grade schools of education. The nation's ed. schools need improvement but the entire system is not failing, they wrote in a letter to members, and they pledge to couple the merger of the two voluntary accreditation bodies with higher standards.

• Things are exploding in Wisconsin over a bill to curtail public employees' bargaining rights. Sean Cavanagh at State Ed Watch has the news covered for you.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Apparently I wasn't the only one to think U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was a little vague about what it meant to revisit things like seniority and layoff policies.

At the conclusion of his big labor-management conference in Denver yesterday, several reporters pressed for more detail.

Duncan said he felt there were two ways not to do teacher layoffs: First, by targeting the most expensive veteran teachers to save costs, and second, by cutting new teachers (pretty much how it's now done under last-in-first-out, or LIFO, policies).

There are many effective veteran teachers who should be kept, Duncan said, as well as enthusiastic and effective newer teachers. Districts need to consider that as they head into what's going to be a tough budget year, with the funding cliff and all.

He cited particular concern for low-income schools where there's already a lot of teacher turnover.

"In underserved communities, we have constant turnover. Those students need stability," Duncan said. "If you have to make tough calls, particularly for unserved communities you have to figure out how to make those decisions in the best interests of students."

Seems a bit like code for Los Angeles, where civil rights groups successfully sued to stop LIFO policies from decimating low-income schools.

Overall, his remarks weren't the condemnation of LIFO policies some would like to hear. But they do advocate for differences in how layoffs are currently performed.

Generally speaking, LIFO wasn't much of a topic for discussion at the conference. But at least one of the presenting districts, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, in North Carolina, reached an agreement with the teachers' association in 2010 to alter layoff policies. Under new criteria, teachers who have been suspended for more than three days go to the top of the layoff list; then experience and teacher-evaluation scores kick in.

Photo: Education leaders gather at the Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration conference in Denver to take questions from reporters. From left: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Director George Cohen; Council of Great City Schools Executive Director Michael Casserly; American Association of School Administrators Executive Director Daniel Domenech; National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel; National School Boards Association Executive Director Anne Bryant. (Stephen Sawchuk/Education Week)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Several districts spotlighted during breakout sessions at the labor-management conference here in Denver bargain frequently, on the order of once a month or more.

Doesn't that sound like fun!

In seriousness, it's interesting to hear how often these superintendents, formally or informally, meet with the leaders of their teachers' unions to troubleshoot and tweak policy as needed.

Douglas County, Colo., officials meet on a monthly basis and update their contract a couple of times a year in a process called "living bargaining," according to the teachers' union president, Brenda Smith. The constant meetings are one of the reasons that district, union, and school board are moving ahead to update the district's 1993 pay-for-performance plan to align to a new teacher-evaluation system now being developed.

"When we finish this [plan], it won't be perfect, and that's what's great about having teachers at the table," said Dan Gerken, the vice president of the Douglas County school board. "They'll help us get it right."

This is not exactly the norm in labor relationships, where contracts are negotiated every two to five years, if not longer. Most contracts do have provisions called "openers" that allow for the parties to reopen bargaining if, for instance, there's a big decline in local revenue and changes need to be made, and a number of districts supplement contracts with memorandums of understanding. But it's less common to have these kinds of ongoing formal meetings to set policy.

In Helena, Mont., bargaining teams meet all year round and take note of changes they want to make in the contract. At the end of the year, the collection of changes is put to teachers for formal ratification.

"We were thinking, 'What about these things we never get to [in bargaining]? Do we have to wait two years to get to them again?' " recalled Larry Nielsen, a field consultant for the Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers and a former president of the Helena union.

The "ongoing bargaining" relationship involves a subset of the negotiations team, and the process began in the early 2000s, when the district started a new kind of salary schedule.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In his speech kicking off the labor-management conference here in Denver, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for more accountability for school boards and also hinted that teacher-assignment policies should be carefully examined.

Those are just two of the more interesting parts of Duncan's kick-off speech, which you can read the full text of the Education Department's website.

In sum, Duncan called on attendees to make student learning the foremost element in all of their interactions—and not just at the bargaining table or in budgets, but also in the classroom, at school board meetings, and on school leadership teams.

Duncan dealt with the elephant in the room: The term "collaboration" itself is a mushy, gooey, nicey-nice term for relationships that even at their best are complex and messy.

"We [President Obama and I] reject the idea that 'collaboration' in education is a codeword for cowardice, as if collaborating was akin to collaborating with an enemy in wartime. Just to be clear, I am not here to celebrate all union-management collaboration. I am not commending labor and management collaboration that props up a status quo that fails to serve the interests of children. Collaboration is such a friendly-sounding word. But in practice, nothing is more demanding at the district level than collaborating on issues that take you far beyond your comfort zone."

Then he commented on each of the 10 areas for collaboration listed in a handbook for conference attendees.

One area of focus was school boards. Acknowledging that teachers "have a point" when they say all the pressure for academic outcomes is on their shoulders, he called on school boards to be evaluated as well.

"This is not an area where there are a lot of examples," Duncan said. "Most school boards have to face voters. On the other hand, many school board elections have a low turnout—so we need a system where school boards also get the meaningful feedback they need from their partners, not just voters."

He waded into the teacher assignment and layoff issues without being very specific about what revisiting them might look like.

"My view is that we need to look hard at the impact of staffing rules, seniority, and funding policies on students, especially in low-achieving schools. That means recruiting the best teachers and then making sure that our state laws, labor contracts and personnel practices support these teachers and keep them in their schools. Clearly, the status quo isn't working for children," Duncan said.

Hmm, reading between the lines, does that mean seniority-based layoffs, too? After all, the economic-stimulus funding is coming to an end.

Duncan also engaged in a bit of press-bashing for ignoring this "new narrative" of reform and focusing on areas of tension (so I guess all those stories EdWeek and other papers wrote on New Haven, Conn.; Pittsburgh; and Baltimore don't count.)

"Newspapers, television, and documentaries typically portray the struggle for school reform as a tale of ceaseless conflict between labor and management. They love the yelling, the finger-pointing, the controversy—and sadly we have been content to spoonfeed them exactly what they want. In district after district I've seen people retreat to their traditional roles and I know exactly how that movie ends," Duncan said.

Overall, the speech continues a trend of Duncan using the bully pulpit to try to sway policy, as he's done recently to criticize Wake County, North Carolina's overhauled integration criteria and to encourage the permanent appointment of interim D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson. With all the Race to the Top money on its way out the door, this makes a degree of sense, since publicity is probably the next most powerful lever for the agency outside of money and laws like the economic-stimulus bill and No Child Left Behind.

Photo: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivers the opening remarks at the Education Summit in Denver on Feb. 15. (Ed Andrieski/AP)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The "Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration" conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of School Administrators, and other partners kicks off this afternoon in Denver, and Education Week is here to cover all the action.

We don't get started until this afternoon (Mountain time), but this is as good a time as any to outline the parameters of the conference.

Announced last fall, the conference brings together 150 district teams consisting of the superintendent and local union leader, among others, to share best practices around things like pay, scheduling, teacher evaluation, and reductions-in-force.

It has been otherwise dubbed "Collaborpalooza" by Mike Antonucci, the "Labor-Management Jamboree" by colleague Alyson Klein, or my personal favorite, Collaboration-A-Go-Go.

Despite the breathless headlines, this isn't the first conference of its sort, though it is the first one the Education Department's had a hand in sponsoring. The AFT hosted something similar last fall. (I wonder if Randi Weingarten is secretly miffed that the NEA and now the Obama folks are lifting her "collaboration" ideas.)

Is there more going on underneath the surface than a coming-together of like minds? Possibly. Some wags have intimated that it was also a ploy by Democrats to make nice to the teachers' unions before the 2010 midterm election (in which they ended up getting clobbered anyway).

And unions have been under attack lately from Republicans in statehouses across the nation, so they no doubt want to shift the dialogue toward cooperation. Both the AFT and the NEA have sent out a bunch of press releases highlighting the conference and the accomplishments of some of their affiliates in attendance.

Whatever the reason, though, the lineup here should be interesting. There will be some formal presentations, but much of the time is spent in breakout sessions with some of the spotlighted teams. Of those, there are some of big hitters here like Denver (duh), famous for ProComp; the Green Dot Public Schools, a unionized charter school network; Hillsborough County, Fla., the recipient of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to improve teaching; Baltimore, which just signed a new contract overhauling the salary schedule; and the ABC School District in California, which Weingarten mentions in just about every speech she makes.

But there are a lot of districts that you've likely not heard of before. What are the folks in Helena, Mont., up to? What's going on in Plattsburgh City School District, N.Y., or the Independent School District 15 in St. Francis, Minn.? Inquiring Reporters Who Cover Teachers want to know.

Some long-standing players in the reform business, like the Douglas County, Colo., school system—an early adapter of performance pay—will catch us up to speed on version 2.0 of reform.

Some folks we definitely won't be hearing from: Central Falls, R.I., New York City, and Washington, D.C. Affiliates there all either refused to come to the conference or backed out, citing uneasy relationships with their school administrators.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last week Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet sent a letter to the Obama administration urging it to create a "presidential teacher corps" to help fulfill its goal of recruiting 100,000 new teachers in shortage fields over the next five years.

Quite a while back, we here at Education Week wondered what kind of teacher-quality proposal Bennet, a Democrat and supposedly one of the administration's go-to senators on education, would put forth. At the time I suggested it might be similar to the "America's Teacher Corps" proposal put out by bunch of teacher-quality scholars last year. They suggested giving teachers a portable license that would cross state boundaries if those teachers proved their success at raising student achievement based on several measures.

Well, my trusty crystal ball still works, because the Presidential Teacher Corps idea sounds very similar. Here's a snippet from the letter:

"Teachers who serve in high-need schools and demonstrate that they are highly effective based on multiple measures of student learning and instruction could get a new kind of portable license. This benefit would allow effective teachers to move between high-need schools in participating states without facing an unnecessarily arduous recertification process."

It's unlikely that this idea would advance unless it were part of a bigger legislative package, like the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but it's a marker to keep your eyes on.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On the teacher quality front, the Obama administration's fiscal 2012 budget proposal looks very similar to its request last year, which never got enacted.

It would combine a number of smaller teacher quality allotments into three new competitive grants, and supplement that funding by shifting about $400 million from the Title II teacher quality state formula grant into the new funds.

Alyson Klein has the full budget picture for you at Politics K-12.

Read all about the details in my story on last year's budget proposal—the contours of this year's debate are likely to be very similar, though Democrats already have their hands full fighting off a Republican plan to scale back overall education aid for fiscal 2011.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The National Education Association put out a press release over the weekend praising the Obama administration for proposing in its fiscal 2012 budget proposal to target rural school districts with any future Race to the Top funding.

Given that just seven months ago, the organization took a position of "no confidence" in the Race to the Top program, this does come as something of a surprise.

"NEA supports the plan to limit Race to the Top to school districts," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in thestatement. "We commend the Administration's further refinement of this program, as long as it requires local collaboration, best practices that boost student learning, more flexibility for turnaround models without minimizing the need for results, and as long as it does not reduce the basic funding for children in poverty."

The key words here are in the second sentence: local collaboration, best practices, more flexibility. Absent those things it's hard to see why the NEA would support the program, given Race to the Top's priorities of supporting things like charter schools and the use of test scores as part of a teacher-evaluation measure—all things NEA policy eschews.

Perhaps the NEA is also banking on the fact that the Race to the Top doesn't look likely to get any additional funding for the time being.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Alyson Klein reports on a House Republican proposal for fiscal 2011 funding over at Politics K-12. The proposal would eliminate some teacher programs but leave the single largest federal teacher-quality program, the Title II state grants, intact.

Before you go getting too excited, worried, or hysterial about this, remember that at this point, it's only a proposal. It has a good shot of passing the Republican-dominated House, but is likely to get snagged up in the Senate.

Under the plan, the $400 million Teacher Incentive Fund, which supports performance pay for teachers and principals, is preserved. Republicans are supporters of performance pay, so no surprise there.

Not all programs would be as fortunate, including the $43 million Teacher Quality Partnerships program, which supports teachers' colleges and partners to improve pre-service teacher training.

Erik Robelen reports on the curriculum-related programs slated for cuts, nearly all of which have a professional-development angle.

And there are some smaller earmarks for teacher programs like the National Writing Project, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (which oversees the national board-certification process) and Teach For America also slated for cuts.

Given all that, then, you may be surprised to see that Title II emerges unscathed in the proposal. This formula program almost exclusively supports class-size reduction and professional development—two things that Republicans have historically not been big fans of. So what gives?

That's a very good question, and although there are no definite answers at the moment, a couple of possibilities come to mind.

Nearly every district gets a cut of Title II, which as I've suggested before, makes it less politically palatable to cut. And though it's got nearly $3 billion in it, there's less breathing room for districts with this fund than there is with the comparatively large Title I program for disadvantaged students.

On the ground, what this means is that cutting Title II might mean getting rid of one or two teachers' annual salaries, especially in rural, Republican districts with smaller allocations that put their cut of funds toward class size reduction. In those instances, cutting the Title II program quite literally would mean the end of Ms. Trueheart's and Mr. Goodman's teaching positions.

Interestingly, in its never-enacted fiscal 2011 budget request, the Obama administration proposed repurposing about $400 million in Title II grants to support new competitive grant teacher programs.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What would happen on the ground if Tennessee lawmakers pass a bill to eliminate collective bargaining for teachers?

This is a good question raised by Linda Perlstein of the Education Writers' Association that I should have discussed in greater detail in my recent Education Week story about Republican moves to curb or eliminate teacher bargaining.

With respect to teachers, there are five states that prohibit bargaining, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality, while in 11 other states, bargaining is permitted but not mandatory. Tennessee is unusual in that state law makes teachers the only public employees who can collectively bargain.

If the Tennessee bill passes—and it's got a shot given the Republican dominated legislature—it would severely restrict local affiliates' clout. But it wouldn't mean the end of the union or its influence, for a couple of reasons.

First, consider "meet and confer" arrangements which exist mainly in non-bargaining states or districts where the union doesn't represent enough teachers to trigger bargaining. Under these arrangements, the association has a right to discuss wages and working conditions with administrators, although nothing from the discussions is legally binding.

About 16 percent of Tennessee teachers now work under meet-and-confer arrangements, according to federal data sources.

The current Tennessee Education Professionals Negotiations Act doesn't mention meet and confer, NEA officials told me. So, while such arrangements aren't officially sanctioned, they're apparently not illegal either. (That seems to be generally the case across the nation. Richard Hurd, a professor at Cornell University, said meet-and-confer arrangements tend to be set locally or by city ordinance.)

The Tennessee Education Association, meanwhile, could continue its lobbying and advocacy. In some states without bargaining, these state affiliates remain influential organizations. The North Carolina NEA affiliate, for instance, has been instrumental in winning policies such as one that pays teachers a 12 percent salary premium if they earn national-board certification.

It's safe to say that Tennessee teachers don't want to lose their bargaining rights, but lawmakers are probably mistaken if they think getting rid of bargaining means doing away with the union, too.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Every time you turn around these days it seems that another piece of legislation is introduced by state lawmakers that would seriously affect teachers and their unions.

Colleague Sean Cavanagh has a great round-up item up updating the scene in Wisconsin, Florida, and Indiana, among other places. If you're really getting into this, read an EdWeek update on collective bargaining, and another story from Sean earlier this year.

Perhaps the most interesting development is happening in Wisconsin, where the state National Education Association affiliate says it's willing to work with lawmakers to craft new evaluation systems and pay reforms taking teacher effectiveness, and even test scores, into account. (Is this a preemptive strike based on the changing political winds? Is it better to be at the table than on the menu, as the saying goes?)

Most of the union action to change course on things like evaluation has occurred in American Federation of Teachers districts, so clearly, this is an initiative to watch.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness vary depending on the controls and statistical regressions chosen, points out a report released yesterday that uses the Los Angeles Times' controversial teacher-rating project as a case study.

Using the same data set as the newspaper, the report from the National Education Policy Center re-runs the data using a different value-added model, and reaches quite different conclusions about which teachers are effective. According to its analysis of the data, 46.5 percent of teachers in reading stayed in the same quintile of effectiveness under the NEPC model as in L.A. Times' model, while 60.5 percent teachers in math stayed in the same quintile.

The group says that the differences are due to the L.A. Times' method, which it contends didn't account for potentially important factors, like teacher "peer effects," a longer history of student achievement, and additional school factors. The NEPC, which has generally been critical of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, claims that this analysis undermines the L.A. Times' project.

It also finds evidence that the value-added method couldn't account for the non-random assignment of students to teachers, a problem researchers like Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley have also highlighted.

But L.A. Times officials said that the NEPC review didn't acknowledge that the newspaper excluded some 5,000 teachers from its analysis for some of the reasons indicated in the NEPC study.

NEPC receives funding from a National Education Association-funded think tank, the Great Lakes Center. The L.A. Times reporter covering the NEPC report is the same one who spearheaded the paper's series using value-added data. I'll leave you all to start the requisite finger pointing.

There is clearly an awful lot of he-said-she-said going on here, so for another view, check Nick Anderson's write-up in The Washington Post. He quotes several statisticians who note that there's no research consensus about which value-added regressions, methods, and controls make for the "best" or most reliable, precise, and accurate form of teacher measurement.

The NEPC study makes this point, too: "Our sensitivity analysis indicates that the effects
estimated for LAUSD teachers can be quite sensitive to choices concerning the underlying statistical model."

That's a different issue from whether they should be used at all and to what extent, which has gotten most of the ink. But it's an important thing to think about as more and more states and districts begin this work.

I've made this observation before, but it bears repeating: If value-added is to be a part of teacher evaluations—and not end up in the courts—then all parties involved, like school leaders, unions, teachers, and principals, are probably going to have to sort through all the various options and formally agree on the formulas to be used.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Many items pile up each week that I just don't have time to delve into in as much depth as I'd like. But they're the things that made me sit up and take note and will inform future coverage. So, without further ado, here is some of what I've been reading this week. Check these items out and let us all know what you make of them.

• Education Sector put out a report about measuring the effectiveness of teacher preparation. It argues that federal reporting requirements designed to get at this question have been undermined and that states are doing a lousy job monitoring their teacher education programs through other avenues like regional or national accreditation. The authors contend that several grant programs designed to subsidize teacher preparation, like the TEACH grants created in the 2008 budget reconciliation bill, don't seem to be doing such a great job.

• The American Federation of Teachers announces its 2011 priorities for its Innovation Fund. Some interesting teacher ideas here, including new criteria for tenure; innovations in teacher placement, such as school based hiring, incentives, and exceptions to seniority; and innovations in the school schedule to allow for more teacher collaboration. My recent EdWeek story touched on a teacher-evaluation project taking place in New York and Rhode Island financed by an AFT Innovation Fund grant.

• Connor Williams in The Washington Post has an interesting read about the "ed reform wars" (read: the Education Equity Project vs. Broader, Bolder) and urges more civil dialogue, cooperation, and focus on solutions than disingenuous rhetoric. "Both sides can be egregiously unfair," he writes.

We'll be back with you on Monday.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Schoolwide bonus pay for teachers in New York City's now-suspended program didn't seem to boost student achievement as a general rule—and in schools with many teachers, it may have diluted individual incentives for teachers to boost achievement growth. But in those schools with high levels of teacher collaboration and a small staff, such programs may have had some slight benefits, concludes a new study by two Columbia University economists.

In a school with lots of teachers, authors Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner wrote, "the diffusion of responsibility for test-score gains across many teachers may erode the incentive that any individual teacher has to increase effort in the classroom."

Some important context for you before we delve into these findings: For a long time, policy types have disagreed about whether performance incentives should be individual or group-based. Proponents of schoolwide programs have argued that individual pay programs would cause competition among teachers, rather than collaboration. (American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten once famously said she abhorred the individual type.)

On the other hand, others have argued that schoolwide plans would allow less-dedicated teachers to "free-ride" off of the contributions of their peers. (Before you jump all over me for writing that, the term "free-rider" comes from the research literature.)

And, of course, everyone has wondered about whether merit pay of any sort works to raise achievement. The naysayers seem to have the upper hand at the moment: Two recent plans with individual pay elements have not shown many effects in randomized experiments.

For this study, the economists looked at New York City's schoolwide performance bonus program, created jointly by the city teachers' union and the mayor in 2007. They compared results for 181 schools implementing the bonus program with those of 128 in a control group with similar characteristics that didn't implement it, and they also used school survey information collected as part of the city's accountability system. They also tested to see whether treatment effects on math and reading scores varied by the number of such teachers, since it was those teachers' contributions that most directly affected the test scores.

The details of the bonus program are complicated, but in essence, schools that reached pre-set schoolwide achievement goals received a lump-sum payment equal to $1,500 or $3,000 per teacher. Teams of two administrators and two teachers in each school had freedom to allot the awards as they liked as long as every teacher got at least some bonus payout.

Here are some of the findings:

• Schoolwide bonus pay didn't seem to affect student achievement, teacher instructional technique or absenteeism, or the quality of the teaching pool for the majority of schools. In year two, eligibility for the program actually seems to have slightly depressed math achievement in general.

• The authors found evidence of "freeloading." Participating schools with the fewest math teachers showed some slight but significant achievement growth in that subject. In plain English, these teachers appear to have stepped up to the plate, causing achievement to rise. But in schools with more math and reading teachers, where the pressure to exert an effort was weakened and where there were more obstacles to collaboration, did not see such gains and may even have seen some declines.

• An interesting caveat: Schools with high degrees of teacher collaboration (as measured by a "cohesion index" based on teacher survey reports) also exerted a slight upward pressure on math scores.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last year, a Florida bill that would have ended teacher tenure, done away with master's degree pay premiums, and tied all teachers' pay to test scores created a boatload of push-back from teachers and led to its ultimate veto by then-Gov. Charlie Crist.

Now, lawmakers in the Sunshine State are making a bid to revive the legislation, this time with some additional tweaks and a lot more public input, including that of teachers' unions and classroom teachers.

As the Orlando Sentinel reported, there appear to be a few more safeguards for teachers in this version, including multiple measures of teacher performance; at least three years of test data; preservation of the master's degree pay bump if it's in a teacher's area of certification; and efforts to grandfather in existing bonus-pay plans. (It's not clear, though, what would happen for teachers working in grades or subjects without tests. That's a big issue, as I wrote recently for a story in Education Week.)

Of course, these details are likely to change if or when the bill makes its way through the legislature. Will the teachers' unions continue to be consulted? What other compromises and additions might happen?

It's not yet clear where Gov. Rick Scott stands on the bill, although he's expressed support for a lot of these ideas. It's equally quite possible that the Florida Education Association won't much care for this version, either. But at least the union is being consulted—for now, anyway.

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