June 2011 Archives

Delegates offered a variety of opinions on the National Education Association's teacher-evaluation policy statement at an informal "open hearing" this afternoon in Chicago, with many, though certainly not all, praising it as an important move for the union.

"This is a great step forward in defining what it means to be a great educator, a standard we can start to work toward," said Frank Laurinec, a Michigan delegate: "We have a chance in these times to act, or be acted upon."

The generally favorable reaction can probably be partly explained by a small but significant addition that the union's board of directors made to the proposal. It notes that all tests must be scientifically validated for judging both students and teachers if they're to be included in teacher evaluations.

In reviewing the proposal at the hearing, NEA Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle made it exceedingly clear that the union feels that few if any tests currently in operation meet those requirements.

"There are not many of you who know much about high-quality standardized tests," she said, earning chuckles from the crowd. "I know many of you can agree with me that most of our standardized tests right now are crap."

"What we want to do with this statement is give you the power, when it's time, for you to say 'no,' " she continued. "If those test have not proven to be valid—that they are measuring what they have been designed to measure, and are reliable, and yield consistent results over and over and over again—then those tests should not be used to punish teachers or students."

The change in language notwithstanding, some commentators felt that any reference to test scores, no matter how qualified, would set a dangerous precedent. Take this comment from delegate "Patrick," from Georgia, who referenced the cheating scandal going on in the Atlanta public schools:

"How can we really send home the message that this is not the way to go, because you're going to get a lot more in the way of teachers cheating?" he said. "How can we send the message we are not about using one-time test scores to evaluate teaching?"

The most surprising comment came from a delegate from California who liked the mention of test scores. He opined that the 5th grade science test in his state did a pretty good job of measuring higher-order skills. "Thank you for that inclusion," he said.

Finally, there were a couple of starkly divergent opinions.

Contrast the feedback from a delegate from Georgia, who said the proposal was a "good but cautious step moving the NEA into the real world out there..." (!)

... with that of "Mark" from California, who said the proposal, taken in combination with NEA's planned early endorsement of Barack Obama for president, "is like backing down in the face of [Arne] Duncan and the right-wing program for education." (!!)

(Sorry, by the way, for so many first names. A frustrating feature of the convention is the tendency folks have of identifying themselves using their first names and state affiliate only.)

So what does this all say about what will happen on July 2, when the proposal comes up before all 9,000 delegates for approval? Well, if this is an indication, expect a lot of wide-ranging discussion.

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Even before its delegates get a chance to vote on the measure, the National Education Association's board of directors has modified the union's teacher-evaluation policy proposal—qualifying what had been a seeming openness to the use of standardized-test scores as one possible gauge of teacher effectiveness.

The original statement said that high-quality standardized tests could be used as one of several indicators of a teacher's contribution to student learning. The amended statement keeps that language, but adds a new paragraph. It reads:

"Unless such tests are shown to be scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher's performance, such tests may not be used to support any employment action against a teacher and may be used only to provide nonevaluative formative feedback."

Well. That is an order of magnitude different from the original policy proposal, and rather a high bar to meet. The union's own president, after all, told me recently he doesn't really believe a standardized test can serve both purposes.

It's not yet clear when or why the NEA's board of directors made this change. It must have occurred after the proposal was unveiled in May, but before today's "open hearing" on the proposal (which is where I got a copy with the added language).

I've got a query out to the press shop for details, so stay tuned.

UPDATE, June 30, 4:58 p.m. The open hearing just wrapped up. A couple of delegates spoke approvingly of the addition to the policy proposal.

NEA Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle said that additional language represented a consensus on the use of test scores that the drafters came to, but didn't spell out, in the original proposal. "It was the intention all along, but the document you have now states it explicitly, not implicitly," she said.

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Delegates to the National Education Association's annual convention will decide whether to revamp the union's teacher-evaluation policies, among other things, beginning Saturday in Chicago.

For our fourth year running, Education Week brings you live coverage of the NEA RA. I'll be in town a bit earlier this year to catch a few pre-RA events, so start checking back with us later today.

Here's a rundown of what's likely to be of most interest at this year's event. Review this list, print it out, mark it up, and follow along with us.

• In what's probably going to be the most closely watched development, the RA will deliberate on, probably amend, and vote to accept or reject an outline on teacher-evaluation practices and reforms to due process. This is potentially a big deal. Whatever the RA approves would supersede all the union's existing policy resolutions on these sensitive topics. Read the background story here.

• Separately, the union's Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching will release its findings to the delegates. Keep in mind that despite its billing as an independent body, a lot of the teachers on this commission are or were high-level NEA leaders. On the other hand, a separate advisory body for the commission includes a variety of outside perspectives, from folks like the New Teacher Project's Tim Daly and Terry Dozier of the Center for Teacher Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, so it'll be interesting to see what the commission comes up with.

• Delegates will be asked to approve an endorsement of Barack Obama for president, a move that will trigger the union's ability to put its PAC funding and other support behind the candidate. (Remember, PAC funding is from voluntary contributions; it doesn't come from members' dues.) There may be a show of hemming and hawing about this endorsement, since many NEA members have problems with things like the Obama administration's Race to the Top program. Nevertheless, it's all but a done deal, given the anti-bargaining stance taken lately by many Republicans. As union Vice President Lily Eskelsen reportedly put it: "We have to hold this administration accountable, but we will get a choice between President Obama and our worst nightmare."

• And in what's likely to be added sweetener for the endorsement, Vice President Joe Biden will also be on hand during the convention. The political season has definitely arrived. (No GOP contenders are expected this time around.)

• Delegates will be asked to pay more from their paychecks toward union dues, with a special $10-per-year assessment to support the union's Legislative Action/Ballot Initiative Crisis Fund. This fund can be used for lobbying on policy, legislation, and other such purposes, but not for campaigns.

• We'll hear from some special committees, including the union's Elementary and Secondary Education Act commission, which helps make recommendations to the union about revising the now 9-year-old No Child Left Behind Act (the most recent iteration of ESEA).

• The union's executive-director-to-be, John Stocks, will be on hand, so we may get some insights on what his priorities are for leading the national union's staff. (Stocks is set to take over from longtime Executive Director John I. Wilson in August.)

• Compared with the American Federation of Teachers, the NEA has been practically silent about the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Where does it stand on that venture?

• Less policy relevant, but still of interest: Will NEA President Dennis Van Roekel get a theme song? Will there be any surprise guests? Will the union's Oakland, Calif., delegation submit another of its famously outre new business items? Will anything replace the now-outlawed balloon archways and confetti?

We've got it all covered for you here at Teacher Beat, so check back frequently. And, if you're in attendance, do stop by the press table to say hello.

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The American Association of School Administrators has agreed to help districts implement an American Federation of Teachers-designed system in which teacher evaluations are linked to professional development, remediation, and dismissal.

According to a release from the two groups, Michigan State Superintendent Mike Flanagan and AFT Michigan President David Hecker have committed to encouraging districts and unions statewide to use the system. Select districts and unions in Ohio and Colorado are also on board.

"Improving teacher quality can't simply be a catchphrase. It has to be put into practice," AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement.

AASA Executive Director Dan Domenech, meanwhile, said the effort was not just a policy adoption. "We make things happen where it matters, in classrooms across the country," he said.

The announcement comes as the latest step in a series of initiatives AFT has been brewing. It's complicated stuff, so here's a rundown of how all the pieces fit together:

• In January 2010, Weingarten outlined plans to streamline teacher due process. She drew a crucial distinction between cases of teacher misconduct and those of poor classroom performance, saying due process procedures could differ depending on the charge. The union tapped Kenneth Feinberg to craft a plan for expediting cases of misconduct.

• In January of this year, Feinberg released his proposed framework for dealing with cases of teacher malfeasance. In brief, it said such cases should be triggered by objective evidence and resolved within 100 days. Soon afterwards, the AFT's executive council approved the proposal.

• This past February, Weingarten outlined a plan in which reforms to teacher-evaluation systems would be coupled with due process procedures. Teachers identified as underperforming by the system would be given help and supports to improve. If they didn't improve in a year, they could be dismissed with the evidence supplied by the evaluation system informing the due process hearing. At the time, the AASA said it would review that proposal.

• The underlying evaluation system for this process would be based on principles Weingarten outlined in her January 2010 speech. The basic approach is one that would take into account teaching standards, observation procotols, multiple sources of student-achievement evidence, and the school context.

• Such evaluations would be primarily to help teachers improve their craft, the union stressed. AFT has taken pains to counter the idea of "sorting" teachers, i.e., using the systems primarily to lop off the worst performers and give the top performers bonuses. It's enough of a worry that AFT officials like to refer to evaluations as "teacher-development and -evaluation systems." (Try getting that past my editor.)

In any case, AFT has been encouraging local districts and administrators to adopt this kind of teacher evaluation, and apparently about 100 of its districts are now in that process. I've asked for that list, and the union is working on getting it to me. Now, with the help of the AASA, the union will presumably have some additional muscle behind the efforts.

Whew.

The deliverables for these new commitments aren't entirely clear. Putting these things into place is a complicated process. States, after all, have laws on their books about evaluation and due process, and there are other legislative efforts afoot in places like Michigan that are not necessarily aligned to this vision.

And let's not forget that Michigan has quite a few National Education Association members, too; that union is scheduled to debate teacher evaluation in just a few short days.

Lots of things to follow up on here in the weeks, months, and years ahead: Rest assured that Teacher Beat will be paying close attention.

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Big news today on the teacher-training front, as colleague Alyson Klein reports over at the Politics K-12 blog. In essence, a bill introduced by three U.S. senators would create a new program to aid states to set up an authority to approve teacher-preparation "academies."

Such academies could be within or outside of higher education, would serve high-needs schools and subjects, have high entry standards, require a yearlong "residency" or in-school apprenticeship, and require their teacher-candidates to show they can advance student achievement during that time.

They would also fall under a separate program-approval and -review process from other institutions in their state, and would not have to meet the credit-hour and other regulations governing credentialing.

The federal program would apparently give a lot of flexibility to states in determining what kind of academies to support. They could, for example, determine whether these academies would grant just teaching credentials or advanced degrees.

In general, the legislation seems to echo recent developments in teacher preparation in the state of New York. New York's state board of regents, in April, approved regulations allowing both universities and independent nonprofits in the state to compete to set up "clinically rich graduate-level teacher-preparation programs." Many of the requirements are similar to those in the federal bill, including high entry standards and a focus on fieldwork.

In contrast to the New York regulations, the federal bill would require any new programs to be at least affiliated with a university to offer an actual degree. The bill states, however, that a certificate of completion from a teacher academy should be equivalent to a master's degree for the purposes of teacher hiring, retention, compensation and promotion.

Nevertheless, the bill would give much more flexibility in preparing teachers than is generally the case now. While there are exceptions, many alternative routes currently use education schools to provide coursework necessary for certification. This bill would essentially support training programs that fall entirely outside of higher education.

It's far from clear that traditional education schools are going to support the scaling up of such an idea. A letter of support for the legislation includes signatories from only one traditional school of education, the University of Southern California.

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Pension plans for teachers in charter schools vary widely, ranging from the state defined-benefit plans set up for traditional public school teachers, to the defined-contribution, match-type plans used in other fields, to nothing at all, a new analysis finds.

The first-of-its-kind analysis, released this morning by the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examines data from Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, and New York. Those states allow charter schools to choose whether to participate in a state pension plan. There are actually 16 such states, but the report's authors, Michael J. Podgursky of the University of Missouri-Columbia and Amanda Olberg, a Fordham Institute research assistant, picked those six because they contain about three-quarters of the schools eligible for the study.

Using federal data, as well as data held by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the researchers examined levels of participation in the state plans. Then, they took a random, 20 percent sample of those schools that chose not to use the state plan, and surveyed the schools to see if they offered an alternative.

Among the findings:

• Participation in a state pension plan differed by type, with stand-alone charter schools more likely to use the state system than those run by nonprofit charter-management organizations or by for-profit education management organizations.

•Levels of school participation in a state plan ranged from 90 percent or more in California, to less than a quarter of charters in Arizona.

•14 percent of the schools not participating in a state plan offered no alternative retirement plan, while 9 percent offered a plan with no employer contribution.

• 77 percent of the sample offered a pension plan containing an employer contribution, with a majority favoring a dollar-for-dollar match, and the others favoring another type of matching process.

The report's authors draw no conclusions about what these findings actually mean for the field, but they suggest that future research could offer lessons and insights about how pensions might be structured.

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Taking a page from Louisiana's Recovery School District, the state of Michigan plans to take over some of the most troubled schools in Detroit and put them into a new Education Achievement System, a move that's won the support of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Reaction from the Detroit Federation of Teachers and other state unions has been lukewarm at best. Most of the details are still pretty sketchy, and as my colleague Christina Samuels reported for Education Week, DFT President Keith Johnson wants to know how this is different from a "Priority Schools" program already enshrined in the city's most recent teacher contract.

One of the question marks has to do with exactly how this new plan would affect current teachers. A FAQ for the new initiative notes that since this would be a new entity, it would get to have a new bargaining contract.

The plan intimates at hiring teachers with a "track record of success," which might mean that existing teachers would have to reapply for their jobs. It potentially hints at a "mutual consent" type of placement process, too, but those are just guesses, for now.

On her Twitter feed, the president of the DFT's national union was less than excited about the proposal. "Just read the fine print of the new Detroit schools plan—disappointing. Looks like it's written by folks who spend little time in schools," American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten writes.

The short answer to the question at the title of this blog item: We don't know. Yet.

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Illinois is the latest state to pass legislation making major changes to teacher evaluation, tenure, and dismissal process—this time through a PR-friendly effort in which politicians, unions, and school administrators came together to hash out details rather than through a fraught legislative battle. Sean Cavanagh at State EdWatch has more on the details of the bill, SB 7.

But for you Teacher Beat wonks, it's interesting to consider that this train nearly went off the rails before it reached the station.

Shortly before the bill's passage, the Chicago Teachers' Union accused lawmakers of slipping in language it didn't agree to during deliberations, while its parent union, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, said it couldn't support the bill unless changes were made. The Illinois Education Association, citing similar technical concerns, changed its position on the bill from supportive to "neutral," though it expressed optimism that most issues could be resolved.

In the end, lawmakers passed a "trailer bill" to fix most of the provisions in SB 7 that the unions objected to, in the form of an amendment to HB 1197. Among other things, this bill:

•Deletes language that could have been interpreted to curb the role of the state education labor-relations board in resolving impasse procedures.
• Clarifies that in Chicago, only 75 percent of those teachers with voting rights need to vote in the affirmative to authorize a strike (i.e., it excludes nonvoting members).
• Clarifies that impasse over the scope of bargaining would be handled differently from impasse over the shape of a contract.

The strike language is still not quite what CTU envisioned; it wanted only 75 percent of votes cast to count toward a strike.

For now, it's back to Kumbaya, as evidenced by this statement by the CTU and IFT.

An important question remains: As tenure and evaluation standards get harder to meet in Illinois, will the unions continue to support these changes? Stay tuned.

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Neither the National Education Association nor the American Federation of Teachers is a big fan of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's plan to offer relief from certain parts of the No Child Left Behind Law, in exchange for adopting a "basket" of reform strategies.

As the strongest critics of the now 9-year-old law, the teachers' unions should, in theory, like the idea of regulatory relief. After all, both unions, in 2008, endorsed a proposal to excuse states and districts from carrying out the required interventions for schools that repeatedly fail to make "adequate yearly progress." (The language never ended up going anywhere, despite efforts by its sponsors to attach it to a must-pass appropriations bill.)

So what gives? Let's look at each union in turn.

"Secretary Duncan has acknowledged the need to intervene if Congress doesn't act, but he's clearly signaled that any relief would be coupled with more unmanageable hurdles for schools and students," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement. "Relief that is not provided to every school and every student isn't relief; it's just more of the same bad patchwork quilt of disparities in our education system."

Translation: NEA wants the whole law waived, no strings attached! Something tells me that if Duncan were attaching strings like class-size reductions rather than the Race to the Top-like reforms he's likely to favor, this press release might have read differently.

[UPDATE (June 16): NEA folks clarified that the union doesn't technically want the whole law waived. It wants to see changes such as multiple measures for AYP, the end of the 2014 deadline, resetting of the sanctions cascade, etc. But, those changes would amount to a wholly different kind of law from what's in place now.]

The AFT, meanwhile, hasn't put out a formal statement on the plan. But an event held earlier this week by the Center for American Progress, AFT President Randi Weingarten said she was very concerned about a "blanket waiver" process.

"I think it creates a disincentive to get the law reauthorized," she said. "... The worst thing that happened with NCLB was not having the accountability system, but the fact that we got wrong the incentives, because very little of the system was about the hows and about building capacity. It became a test-prep law in many instances as opposed to a teaching law."

She went on to say that a revised law should not put accountability solely on teachers.

Translation: AFT probably feels like it's more likely to get changes to its liking through a rewrite than through a waivers-and-strings approach. It's certainly true that new Republican and Democratic lawmakers have a really different take on the law than did the bipartisan coalition that oversaw its passage.

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That's the big subtext of a new study by the University of Missouri's Cory Koedel, which finds that students in schools of education in public universities receive significantly higher grades than students in other academic disciplines at those universities.

For the study, Koedel, an assistant professor of economics, looked at administrative grade reports from the 2007-08 school year from three undergraduate education programs, at Indiana University, Bloomington; Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio; and the University of Missouri, in Columbia. He compared the distributions of classroom-level grades awarded by the department of education to the distributions in 12 other academic disciplines, including math and science departments, social science departments, and humanities departments.

Across the three universities, he found that the classroom-level average GPA of students in the education departments was 0.5 to 0.8 grade points higher than students in the other departments—from half to nearly a full letter-grade higher, in other words.

To show that these patterns aren't due to some kind of selection fluke, he also looked at a sample of grade distributions from 10 other unidentified public universities. They had a similar spike at the high end of the grading scale, for a total course average of 3.6, solidly in "A-" territory. And he ran a few other checks to make sure other factors, such as smaller class sizes, weren't biasing the results.

"The GPA gaps do not appear to be explained by differences in student quality across departments, nor are they driven by the fact that classes in education departments are typically smaller," Koedel writes. "The remaining explanation is that the higher GPAs in education classes are the result of low grading standards in education departments."

He acknowledged, though, that some education professors may have teaching philosophies that helped lead to the higher grades (i.e., a competency-based approach that seeks to get all teacher candidates to a certain level of skill.) Also, some practice-based courses are graded pass/fail, though that didn't really affect the findings in the case of the University of Missouri.

If this grade inflation is indeed legit, does it matter? Possibly, he theorizes. If anyone can get good grades, then the discipline's prestige is lower. And it also sends potentially inaccurate information to the teacher candidates, and to districts who hire them.

Do you agree with Koedel's conclusions, or can you think of alternative explanations for the findings? Comments section is open, as always.

Hat tip to the National Council on Teacher Quality, which featured the study on its new blog.

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The Watertown, Mass.-based Education Resource Strategies has released an interesting primer for state policymakers about what district money current buys and how it might be repurposed.

Sean Cavanagh at State EdWatch covers the goods for you, but I did want to highlight the sections in the report dealing with how teachers in the United States are compensated.

First up is the finding that most pay depends on longevity and level of education. No surprise there, if you're a dedicated Teacher Beat reader. What's really eye-opening, though, is the analysis' breakdown of the percentages for longevity v. pay. This is a function of both the overall age of the teacher force and the specific value districts and unions have placed on the two variables.

In Rochester, N.Y., for example, experience makes up more than 80 percent of teacher compensation, while pay for master's degrees makes up only a tiny fraction of total compensation. In the District of Columbia, by contrast, master's degrees make up about half the total the district spends on compensation.

Clearly, changing these pay structures would involve a different set of tradeoffs, depending on the district, its teaching force, and what its leaders value.

There's one caveat to the data: They're pulled from 13 different districts over different time periods, generally between 2005-2010, so they're not strictly comparable. Still, they give a pretty good overall sense of the landscape.

A second chart shows that the average district studied spends less than 2 percent of its teacher compensation on pay for increased responsibility, leadership, or performance. This doesn't just mean better test scores or individual merit pay; it can mean teachers who take on additional roles helping to develop curriculum or coach peers, for instance.

It is interesting to consider this finding in tandem with another report released recently, which noted that many countries couple better pay with a career-ladder system in which the best teachers take on significant additional responsibilities.

There are plenty of teachers doing extra tasks like writing curriculum and so forth here, too, but they aren't getting paid for it, and they're probably not getting a lot of release time or common planning time to fulfill such duties, either.

One of the problems of moving to differentiated teacher roles, of course, is that there needs to be a good way of identifying really good teachers for the new roles. What mechanisms do you think would be ideal? Comments section is open!

(Disclosure: Education Week's publisher, Editorial Projects in Education, has a partnership with ERS, which makes some of its resources available on our website.)

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A teacher-effectiveness industry of sorts appears to be rapidly developing, thanks to the Race to the Top and other policy efforts.

The latest sign of this interesting phenomenon comes from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story reporting that Georgia will spend $750,000 on a contract to hire an expert to develop a teacher-evaluation plan, provide training to a team that will show teachers and principals how to use it, and do follow-up surveys for the results. State officials said they didn't have the internal capacity to do the work.

The contract is apparently coming out of standard federal education dollars and not out of the state's winning $400 million Race to the Top bid. But the 26 participating RTT districts, which are supposed to implement new evaluation systems during this fall's school year ahead of others in the state, will be the immediate recipients of the training.

I wrote quite a bit about this emerging market in an Education Week story earlier this year. As I reported, systems for collecting data, auditing student work, calculating "value added" and reporting results clearly to the field are in their infancy at the moment. It's going to take money to put them in place and help them mature, but the technical expertise toward that end isn't really in the hands of the traditional educational-publishing giants.

For good or ill, there's money to be made here. Expect to see more stories like Georgia's coming down the pike.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last year, New York won a $700 million grant in the federal Race to the Top competition partly by securing an agreement with the state teachers' union on the format for teacher evaluations (20 percent state tests, 20 percent locally developed measures, and 60 percent observations or other subjective measures).

Now that it's come down to deciding what those measures are actually supposed to look like, some of that collaboration has hit the bricks.

The state Regents' board was supposed to put out regulations guiding this process, but its initial batch was rejected by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That move was supported by the state's Democrats for Education Reform chapter, which had called the initial recommendations "squishy" and lobbied for stricter ones.

Gov. Cuomo made recommendations for a second go-around of the regulations, most of which were codified by the Regents. Under this version, the state will permit local districts to use the state tests as a local measure, which means that state standardized tests could make up to 40 percent of the evaluation.

(The Regents' vote was not a unanimous one, and the outliers referenced a letter sent by test experts urging the state not to write regulations that would put too much weight on the state tests.)

The New York State Union of Teachers is furious about the move, and has formally ending its collaborative relationship with the state education department. It's also threatened to sue over the process. And it also holds what may be a bit of a trump card: collective bargaining.

State law requires most aspects of evaluation to be bargained, and so presumably, local affiliates can simply refuse to codify evaluation plans they don't like. NYSUT president Richard Iannuzzi said as much in the union's internal newspaper: "We will use the collective-bargaining process to stand up against what would be a flawed overreliance on standardized tests."

The state/local test tension here has been long in coming. Although this is somewhat of a simplification, the general rule of thumb is that standardized tests allow for more reliable and comparable information than do measures that are district- or classroom-based, but are less closely tied to curricula and measure a somewhat narrow skill set.

There have been tensions over this quandary before. Nebraska had a longstanding feud with the federal Education Department, which didn't like the local tests the state was using to meet the No Child Left Behind law's annual-assessment requirements.

In New York City, officials want to have it both ways: The city wants to develop performance-based tasks to play into teacher evaluations, as The New York Times recently reported. But the United Federation of Teachers there says it hasn't been consulted on such measures.

What does all this mean? Unclear that this point, but generally speaking, districts that don't manage to get this crucial piece of their Race to the Top plans in place could jeopardize their cut of the funding, which would be redistributed elsewhere.

A dangerous game of chicken is emerging all over New York. Stay tuned for the fallout.

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Eight state education chiefs belonging to the "Chiefs for Change" coalition today endorsed a controversial review of university-based teacher education programs now being conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report.

"Great teachers make great students. Preparing teachers with the knowledge and skills to be effective educators is paramount to improving student achievement. Ultimately, colleges of education should be reviewed the same way we propose evaluating teachers—based on student learning," the chiefs said in a statement. "Until that data becomes available in every state, Chiefs for Change supports the efforts of the National Council on Teacher Quality to gather research-based data and information about the nation's colleges of education."

Chiefs for Change is a coalition of state education chiefs that supports such reforms as teacher-evaluation reform, school choice, and school accountability. The group currently counts nine members (a tenth, former Louisiana Superintendent Paul Pastorak, resigned recently).

Eight of the nine members endorsed the review, with Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson apparently the lone holdout.

The NCTQ/U.S. News effort to grade every college of education in the country against more than a dozen standards is now well under way. It is based primarily on reviews of course requirements and syllabuses.

The groups' standards and review process have been criticized by several heavy-hitters in the teacher education community, and some public institutions are not participating voluntarily in the review.

The chiefs endorsing the review are Janet Barresi, Oklahoma state superintendent of public information; Tony Bennett, Indiana superintendent of public instruction; Steve Bowen, Maine commissioner of education; Chris Cerf, New Jersey commissioner of education; Deborah A. Gist, Rhode Island commissioner of elementary and secondary education; Kevin Huffman, Tennessee commissioner of education; Eric Smith, Florida commissioner of education; and Hanna Skandera, New Mexico public education department secretary-designate.

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