May 2011 Archives

Five states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards are beginning work on an initiative to create an open-source "platform" that would help teachers access, download, and create resources tied to the common standards, officials from the Council of Chief State School Officers told us today.

CCSSO and the states of New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Colorado will take the lead in helping design and pilot the platform, with financing promised by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Four other states—Delaware, Kentucky, Georgia, and Louisiana—are planning to take part in the near future, with the goal of implementing it in all nine states by 2013.

The idea of a resources clearinghouse, said Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of CCSSO, came in response to conversations with teachers and teachers' groups that have been providing feedback on the progress of the common-standards initiative.

"One of the early concerns that was raised [by teachers] is what kind of support are you going to give us as we try to implement," Wilhoit said. "Frankly, they told us, 'You'd better not abandon us.' "

The idea is to make a range of supports—including lesson plans, diagnostic tools, and curricular units—available for free through an online platform. That online clearinghouse would offer teachers access to tools and materials and also give them chances to network, discuss ways to use or improve them, or band together to create, upload, and share their own resources.

The designers also want to create "applications" for teachers and students to download to help them track their students' progress against the "learning progressions" outlined in the standards—basically the sequence of skills that have to be mastered along the way to attaining each standard.

Access to the dashboard would be free for teachers in those states, with many of the resources made available in a free, open-access format. And while there wouldn't be a formal quality-control mechanism, the system would allow teachers to rate and comment on the usefulness of the materials. Also, the designers envision tracking user patterns to determine which materials are most popular.

Wilhoit said that, potentially, for-profit companies could choose to make some of their resources available through the platform for a fee. But those resources, he noted, would be vetted by users in the same way, and so they'd have to be pretty compelling to compete against the free stuff.

The effort is in very preliminary stages, which makes it a bit tough to describe. The best way to picture what the designers have in mind, it seems, is a hybrid of a social-networking site, Angie's List, and the iPhone's "App Store." (My colleague Catherine Gewertz suggested calling the venture "Gene's List." Just kidding, Gene.)

Wilhoit took pains to state what the venture will NOT be: a de facto national curriculum. In fact, he suggested that the platform and the user vetting will serve as a safeguard against a national curriculum.

"What we don't want is a single curriculum or a curriculum developed by a single vendor, or organization in fact," he said. "It's a place where rich resources can be put. Ultimately judgment about utility of that would be in the hands of teachers and their students. We would like to get a bit of competition going on."

It is probably not a coincidence that Wilhoit chose to underscore this point. Common-standards supporters have faced a lot of debate among the chattering classes these days about whether the common-standards movement will lead inexorably to a national curriculum. Dozens of edu-folks recently signed a "manifesto" raising such concerns.

Both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, in New York City, have "committed" to developing the platform but not to a specific dollar amount, and they haven't doled out any cash yet for the efforts. (They'd better get their pocketbooks ready, because Wilhoit estimated that the system could cost up to $100 million to develop.) In the meantime, CCSSO folks have been in conversations with various providers, including Wireless Generation, but don't have a formal relationship or contract with any yet.

Any contractor ultimately chosen, Wilhoit said, will get funding to do the design work but would not own or maintain proprietary control over the product, which would remain open-source. And while CCSSO is coordinating the initial design work, it aims to turn the venture over to some kind of state governance structure.

It isn't entirely clear whether or how this undertaking will coordinate with other efforts to develop resources for the common standards.

Those other ventures include the Gates-Pearson collaboration to develop online courses for nearly all the grades, and the supports and tools for certain grades now being developed by the two assessment consortia that are crafting tests aligned to the common-core standards.

Will teachers feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of materials, or grateful for the array of stuff to choose from?

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Reps. Doris Matsui, D-Calif.; Tom Petri, R-Wis.; and Joe Courtney, D-Conn.; have reintroduced a bill that would tweak elements of the Troops to Teachers program, which gives stipends to veterans to get their teaching credentials in exchange for working three years in schools serving poor students.

With one exception, it's identical to a bill introduced in 2009 sponsored at that time by Rep. Courtney. The exception? The new bill does not specify a funding-authorization level (the earlier bill set one at $50 million). Money talk is definitely not in vogue these days on the Hill!

The major proposed changes are to decrease service requirements for participating veterans and to change eligibility requirements for participating districts from "high need" districts to any district receiving Title I funds. As I wrote back in 2009, this change would potentially make the program somewhat less targeted.

The bill would also create an advisory board to seek out and implement ways to improve participation in the program.

Keep your eye on the proposal as ESEA reauthorization continues. One-off bills like this are often the basis of committee or floor amendments.

UPDATE (May 27, 4:52 p.m.) Rep. Matsui has managed to attach the proposal to a defense authorization bill now making its way through Congress.

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The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group famous for generating lots of controversial reports, has stepped into the fray again with a list of ESEA reauthorization proposals focused on the law's teacher-quality elements.

Before we dig into the recs, I should note that many Hill watchers don't put a lot of hope in getting a large-scale ESEA reauthorization bill done anytime soon. House Republican leaders, for instance, have indicated that they want to reserve teacher-quality discussions for this fall and work on smaller-scale bills in the meantime.

But that's not stopping NCTQ, whose recommendations are sure to produce some impassioned dialogue in the field. Among other things, it says the feds should:

• Require states to link teachers to students and to assessment results as a condition of receiving Title I funds.

• Transform the Title II State Teacher Quality grant into a competitive-grant program contingent on states' setting a definition of a "highly effective" teacher and evaluating all teachers each year, based partly on student achievement (not necessarily measured by tests, though). Results should be used to improve teaching quality, with a set time for dismissing those teachers who don't improve.

• Require Title II dollars to be spent validating and implementing the evaluation systems with fidelity (rather than being spent on their current purpose, mainly workshops and class-size reductions).

• Revise the "highly qualified" teacher provisions to require much more rigorous or thorough content tests for teachers of all grade levels.

• Do away with the HOUSSE option for veteran teachers to become highly qualified. (HOUSSE is an alternate, state-set way for veteran teachers to demonstrate subject-matter competency without taking a test or completing additional coursework. It can also be used by rural or special education teachers, who must demonstrate subject-matter competency in multiple subjects.)

• Require the development of a teacher-quality index showing factors such as percentage of teachers on emergency credentials, percentage of teachers who failed licensure tests at least once, and other factors to ensure better distribution of talent.

• Remove barriers to alternative routes.

• Revise and strengthen the teacher-preparation accountability requirements in the Higher Education Act to prioritize value-added data (a la Louisiana, Florida, and Tennessee) and report better information on licensure test scores.

The group also passes on a couple of other hot topics. It says that making changes to the Title I salary-comparability rules could introduce perverse incentives for districts to move teachers around. And it says that it is too early to invest more heavily in teacher-performance assessments now being piloted by about 20 states.

Other groups have recently weighed in with TQ proposals, notably the National Education Association and the Education Trust/Center for American Progress, but NCTQ's are probably the most specific so far.

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Top on the list of stories that caught my attention this morning as I was catching up on last week's news was the announcement that former Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker would be joining former District of Columbia Chancellor Michelle Rhee's advocacy group, Students First, as a senior policy fellow.

In that role, he'll be talking to state lawmakers and teachers' unions' officials about the need for unions to be involved in changes to the profession, including better policing of their own members' performance.

This came as a big surprise to a lot of folks. The president of the WTU's parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, reportedly texted "REALLY?" to Parker when she found out about his plan.

When you consider the collective bargaining process in Washington that ended in a much-publicized 2010 contract, it's not hard to understand similar reactions from the field. Bargaining went on for nearly two years and was widely portrayed as a kind of cage death match between the district and union.

In reality, the situation was a lot more complicated, and Parker was the locus of some of those complications. Early on in Rhee's tenure, Parker's openness to some of her proposals made AFT officials nervous. In fact, he initially requested that the national union stay out of things, only to request formal bargaining assistance from AFT later as the bargaining process grew strained.

Parker's positions were never simplistic, and they were influenced both by pragmatism and by a deeply divided WTU membership, which made for very challenging politics.

For instance, Parker was upfront about the unique circumstances in D.C. that made getting a more-traditional contract all but impossible, and he made headlines for noting a lack of research tying teacher tenure to student performance. He ultimately lost the presidency of the WTU to Nathan Saunders because some members felt he was too closely tied to the Rhee administration.

But Parker had qualms about the IMPACT teacher-evaluation system Rhee developed in D.C., at one point saying it had formalized teachers' routines too much, turning teaching into "bean counting." And he fought back against Rhee's carrying out, in 2009, a reduction-in-force. and her 2010 dismissal of some 100 teachers.

While this partnership is certainly an example of strange bedfellows, it will be interesting to see what fruit will come out of it.

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From guest blogger Sean Cavanagh:

As states across the country look to cut pension costs, the American Federation of Teachers is calling for ending "spiking" and "double-dipping" in retirement systems, while also arguing that educators' benefits are anything but excessive.

The AFT, which has 1.5 million members, released a policy statement on the issue yesterday. It was the product of a special committee that has been studying retirement costs and benefits.

Pension spiking is the practice of sweetening compensation near the end of a employee's career to increase a pension payout. Double-dipping is defined by AFT as a worker receiving payment of both a pension and a salary after the employee retires, then is rehired by the same employer. Numerous policymakers have sought to crack down on that practice in recent years.

But AFT's report also takes issue with some of the popular claims about public workers' pensions—namely, that they're overly generous, or that they are the source of state budget woes. Read my full post for more details on the AFT document.

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Readers,

I'm taking a short break this week and will be back with you promptly on the 23rd. In the meantime, keep those comments, tips, and emails coming to ssawchuk@epe.org.

Stephen

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This week saw two more major developments in teacher effectiveness policies.

In Houston, the school board yesterday approved a new system that would base half of each teacher's rating on student growth measures, Ericka Mellon reports. Observations by principals will make up the other major component of a teacher's score.

Teachers and other stakeholders were considered in developing the system, but not to the extent that Houston's teacher association wanted; the association has been threatening to appeal to the Texas Education Agency to slow down the implementation process.

In adopting the system, which is scheduled go into affect for the upcoming school year, Houston officially becomes the largest school district to use a "value added" method in teacher evaluations. A number of states and districts are in the planning stages to do so, but most haven't actually gotten off the ground yet.

There are a lot of questions to be answered about this work in general, particularly which controls and variables should be used in value-added models, and what kinds of effects their adoption will have on teaching and learning.

Meanwhile, the Illinois legislature on May 11 completed an education overhaul tying teacher tenure, advancement and layoff policy to evaluations, including consideration of student achievement. It now goes to Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, for signature.

This was billed as a big win for "collaboration," as unions helped design the legislation in concern with advocacy groups and others. But last week it hit some snags when unions in the state, especially the Chicago Teachers Union, took issue with a few provisions having to do with striking and the scope of bargaining. They charged that the provisions didn't reflect the negotiations at hand. (Other advocates dispute this account, saying that the union just didn't read the language over very carefully.)

Unions now want lawmakers to complete a "trailer bill" to make some fixes to the proposal, and various parties involved in the original negotiations have met to craft those ideas. But at least one of them told me that it might be more difficult to reach consensus this time.

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National Education Association officials will put a "policy statement" before the union's governing body for approval that, among other things, would open the door to the use of "valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests," in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating teachers.

The statement, passed by the NEA's board of directors May 7, wouldn't take effect unless the 9,000 delegate Representative Assembly signs on to it at its meeting over the July 4th weekend in Chicago. The statement—which could be significantly modified by delegates before approval—will likely be a topic of lively debate.

It stands, nonetheless, as a major entry by the NEA to discuss issues of evaluation, tenure, and due process. To date, the national union has remained silent on most of those issues even as the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the other national teachers' union, has put forth various proposals.

"We have multiple states struggling with these issues," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in an interview. "Members want NEA to speak up and lead in this discussion."

Crafted by state affiliate members as well as national staff, the statement says that evaluation systems must be comprehensive and built on three kinds of indicators. First, they should take into account indicators of teachers' practice, such as their lesson plans and classroom-based observations about their ability to deliver instruction. Second, the systems should take into account teachers' leadership in the school, collaboration with peers, or participation in professional development. And finally, they should show how the teacher has contributed to student learning and growth.

The final element marks a departure for the NEA, which has historically opposed most attempts to tie teacher accountability to student scores. The policy statement says that measures of student growth could include student-learning objectives set with principals, like those now used in Denver's ProComp system, teacher-created assessments, and reviews of student work, but it also specifically references student test scores.

Although the union is willing to discuss the appropriate use of standardized tests, Mr. Van Roekel said he continues to believe that standardized tests are not designed to measure teacher effectiveness and that alternatives must be crafted.

The statement also notes that the indicators must "reflect that there are multiple factors that impact a student's learning beyond a teacher's control," nodding at a divisive national debate about how much teachers and schools can overcome the affects of student poverty and background characteristics.

The policy statement also outlines features of such a system's implementation. The evaluation system should provide lots of nonevaluative feedback to help teachers improve their craft, as well as a final rating, it states. And observations must be conducted by trained objective evaluators, including, potentially, mentor teachers or peers.

It calls on such systems to be fully funded and supported, noting that "our schools currently do not have enough staff trained to provide meaningful evaluative and nonevaluative feedback to teachers."

Those teachers who don't meet performance standards should be put on an improvement plan not to last more than a year and given help to meet expectations from an accomplished teacher.

Finally, the document outlines how the evaluation system should fit within the current tenure system. Probationary teachers, the document asserts, should be granted tenure if they receive satisfactory evaluations in the final two years preceding the year in which tenure is granted under state law. Tenured status should be portable from district to district, it asserts.

Tenured teachers failing to improve should be dismissed through a "fair, transparent, and efficient" dismissal process.

The statement, as currently written, conflicts with several of the union's approved policy resolutions. But if passed, it would supercede those policies, NEA officials said.

On occasion, the NEA's RA doesn't back its leaders' propositions. Back in 2000, when union leaders proposed a resolution that would have moved closer to endorsing experiments with performance pay, the union's delegates reversed course, actually tightening up language prohibiting merit pay. A similar situation remains a possibility this July.

"I'm very hopeful it will go through pretty much intact," Mr. Van Roekel said, when asked about potential modifications. "The outreach [by the writers of the proposal] to people to explain why it says what it says is going to have a powerful influence on delegates."

National policy statements notwithstanding, state and local affiliates can choose to approach things like pay and teacher evaluation however they like. Mr. Van Roekel has also indicated a willingness to support affiliates who take stances on things like merit pay outside the national policy strictures.

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By guest blogger Liana Heitin

Yesterday I had the chance to speak with several of the U.S. Department of Education Teacher Ambassador Fellows at the teacher town hall meeting hosted by the department.

TAFs spend a year working with federal officials on policy issues--some stay in the classroom and work as consultants and others take a year leave of absence to work at the department full time. The half dozen TAFs I spoke with were in their 10th month of the fellowship.

Above all, they agreed the year had given them a deeper appreciation for the complexity of policy issues. Several mentioned that there was much more back and forth--rather than head nodding--at USDOE meetings than they had imagined. They said they have felt at liberty to express their ideas, directly to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at times, and have not had to compromise their stances while working with the department.

Laurie Calvert, a fellow from Buncombe County Schools in North Carolina, said, "I wish people could see how much the department really does listen to teachers."

The TAFs also noted a gulf between policy and practice. According to Edit Khachatryan, on loan from Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta, Calif., "What policy looks like doesn't get implemented on the ground as it's intended to be."

Patrick Ledesma, who continues to teach at Holmes Middle School in Vienna, Va., while serving as a TAF (and who writes the Teacher blog Leading from the Classroom), said he's realized that many of the problems in education come down to local control issues. Crafting great, researched-based policies does no good if they are not implemented at the local level. "People want a solution to come from afar...and magically appear in classrooms," he said.

Nick Greer, who will return to teaching at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in Baltimore, Md., added he used to think policy was more top-down--that whatever the feds said, the states would do. But it's much more complicated than that, he explained.

When asked about frustration among teachers and the many negative responses to Duncan's recent open letter on Education Week, the TAFs said the frustration is understandable but often misdirected.

"Teachers are being assaulted," said Calvert, "but not by the people here. It's not the people here who are taking their collective bargaining rights."

Duncan was unable to make it to the town hall, but I'm hoping to get a response from him at some point soon about the flood of negative comments on his piece.

At the town hall meeting itself, the 2011 state teachers of the year discussed teacher-related hot topics--including teacher preparation, support, school leadership, and parent involvement--at roundtables, and then presented questions and recommendations to a panel of USDOE officials. Not much new came out of this conversation, as I saw it. Angie Miller, New Hampshire Teacher of the Year, gave a passionate appeal for making parent engagement a priority, saying parent education has a higher correlation to student achievement than any other factor. (She also said she was "annoyed" with Duncan for not recognizing how difficult it is for parents to be activists when they don't feel welcome in schools.) Carmel Martin, USDOE's assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, said she knows much of the department's funding for parent engagement programs is used ineffectively and would like local feedback on programs that work.

Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post has her take on the town hall highlights as well.

This post originally appeared on the Teaching Now blog.

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Despite its philosophical differences with such things as the Race to the Top, performance-based teacher compensation, and charter schools, the National Education Association plans to endorse Barack Obama for a second term in office.

The governing board of the union's political action committee made the recommendation, which will head to the union's Representative Assembly in July for approval. That said, an endorsement from NEA national doesn't preclude state affiliates from making their own recommendations.

Michele McNeil wraps up things at Politics K-12, so you can link to all of our EdWeek coverage of the Obama-NEA relationship there, much of it first reported on this blog. More coverage from Politico.

It's never really been in question that the NEA would throw its weight behind a Democrat given its historical support of the party—even though the union maintains that it's a nonpartisan organization. No real challenger to Obama has emerged in the primary field, and the union has been waging war against mostly Republican lawmakers who have sought to curb or eliminate teachers' unions' bargaining rights.

It's still possible, though probably unlikely, that the union's 9,000-member RA will not go along with this endorsement. As a parallel, remember that the 1998 proposed merger with the American Federation of Teachers cleared the union's upper echelons but was soundly defeated by rank-and-file delegates.

Compare this quick movement to the situation in 2008. NEA leaders then did not approve Obama until literally the last minute. The union's preliminary endorsement of Obama came the exact same day Obama clinched the Democratic nod.

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Hot on the heels of the release of an updated set of teacher standards, a different consortium has released a similar set for teacher-leaders—those teachers who now serve in the coaching, mentoring, curriculum writing, and other roles that have proliferated over the last decade.

The Teacher Leader Model Standards were created by a consortium represented by 10 national organizations (i.e., teachers' unions or other associations), eight higher education institutions, 10 educators, and 11 state education department folks. Sponsored by the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, the group took more than two years to finalize the standards.

Dialogues about teacher leadership, what it looks like in practice, whether such positions should be full-time ones or supplement regular classroom-teaching duties, and whether aspirants ought to undergo a formal teacher-leader training program (something education schools in several states now provide) are ongoing in the education field at the moment. So these standards come at an opportune time.

I'm told these standards are already in use in some states and districts. Take a look, and let us know what you make of them.

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The U.S. Department of Education is getting started on what could ultimately result in a major regulatory overhaul of the federal reporting and accountability provisions for programs that prepare teachers.

According to a Federal Register notice, the department will hold "roundtable" discussions on teacher education accountability, and on two teacher-preparation grant proposals it wants to see funded, to gain feedback from the field as it considers whether to propose new rules.

Title II of the Higher Education Act requires teacher ed programs that offer federal student aid to report on specific requirements, mainly on their teacher-candidates' licensing-test passing scores and how they identify "low performing" programs. The law permits the Education Department to promulgate regulations in those areas, though it hasn't yet done so.

But early this year, the administration laid out in the department's 2012 budget justifications plans to review—and potentially revise—the information that is currently collected, as I reported for Education Week. These roundtables are, apparently, the precursor to that process.

The budget justifications were already pretty specific about the indicators the administration wants to see as part of Title II: value-added gauges of newly minted candidates' performance, information on where they are placed, and employer surveys. It will be interesting to see whether any of those indicators change as a result of feedback from the field.

The administration will also be seeking information on the Hawkins Centers of Excellence program, which is aimed at minority-serving institutions, and the Presidential Teaching Fellows, which would help create a corps of excellent teachers with license portability across states.

At one point, the administration also was working with lawmakers on a bill to authorize the Fellows program, but I haven't seen anything introduced yet along those lines in this Congress. The Hawkins program, meanwhile, was created in the 2008 HEA rewrite, but has not yet received funding or been fleshed out through regulations.

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Michelle Shearer, a chemistry teacher at Urbana High School in Ijamsville, Md., has been selected as the 61st National Teacher of the Year, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Shearer, a 14-year classroom veteran, is certified in both chemistry and special education and currently teaches Advanced Placement chemistry at Urbana. Previously, she taught chemistry and math at the Maryland School for the Deaf. According to her application for the award, she was the first teacher to offer an AP chemistry class at MSD in the school's 135-year history.

"I make a concerted effort to reach out to students who have traditionally been underrepresented in scientific fields, i.e. our students with special needs and disabilities, our minority students, and our young women," she wrote.

While studying as a premedical student at Princeton University, Shearer began volunteering at a local school for the deaf. Based on that experience, she decided to earn her teaching certificate in addition to a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

Shearer says she is committed to preparing a broad range of students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. On her application, she wrote:

Chemistry is everywhere, and thus chemistry is for everyone. Everyone. Not just college-bound students, students of a particular ethnic group, or even students of a certain age. The teaching of chemistry can begin in a preschool classroom with household materials, as young students marvel at the bubbles, color changes, and visual "magic" inherent to chemistry. High school students demand to know, "What does this have to do with me?" I display a collection of random household items (sunscreen, laundry detergent, motor oil, shampoo, etc.) across the tops of cabinets as a constant reminder to my students of the practical role chemistry plays in their lives. When students feel connected not only to the teacher but to the subject itself, they quickly become eager to explore.

Shearer was chosen by representatives of 14 national education organizations from among the 2011 State Teachers of the Year. President Barack Obama will honor Shearer and the state winners in a ceremony at the White House tomorrow.

(This post originally appeared on Education Week Teacher's Teaching Now blog.)

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