August 2011 Archives

A story out of Syracuse, N.Y., outlines an interesting and relevant conundrum: When district budgets get tight, should you keep as many teacher jobs as possible—or let some folks go in order to preserve the training that's supposed to help those who keep their jobs do their best work?

That appears to be the dilemma in Syracuse, where Superintendent Sharon Conteras and several of the education policy commissioners want to prioritize investments in professional development. Sounds great, right? The catch is that hundreds of employees lost their jobs last year, and the article notes that it's not clear where the money for the support will come from.

It is no exaggeration to say that in budget crunches, professional development is often the first thing to go, certainly before employee layoffs are considered. (Remember the old refrain, "Keep the cuts away from the classroom.") But that decision comes with tradeoffs, too, which are aptly summarized in the story by district policy committee chair Monique Wright-Williams.

"You could have 100 teachers in classrooms, if none of them know what they're doing, you still don't get any results, so I'd rather have 50 sound, solid teachers yielding positive results for our students," she said. "We're going to have to pay to get the desired outcomes that we want."

Readers, what insights can you bring to this discussion?

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And now an item for the "something to offend everybody" category!

Just when you think we're all ready to move on from the AFT's Randi Weingarten vs. (former) D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee narrative, Politico's Emily Schultheis reports that an anti-Rhee website was allegedly created on computers registered at the American Federation of Teachers headquarters.

Rhee's fundraising group, StudentsFirst, which generally favors strong teacher evaluation and changes to pay and tenure, issued an affronted-sounding press release:

"Unfortunately, this is just the latest report of an ostensibly organic, grassroots voice attacking reform proponents that has in fact turned out to be secretly backed by the teachers' unions. There are a number of disagreements between teacher-union advocates and student advocates about the future of our schools that deserve serious consideration, but there's no room for these kinds of personal and duplicitous attacks," spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said.

AFT's counter-response isn't a denial or conformation as much as it is a thrown gauntlet:

"What's the big deal? RheeFirst.com has been up since March, tracking what Michelle Rhee has said, what she has done and how the media have covered her. All the studies and articles on RheeFirst.com are well sourced and documented. ... Much of this information can't be found on Michelle Rhee's official website, such as her work with Republican governors to promote vouchers and to dismantle public education, her failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the cheating that occurred on her watch in Washington, D.C., or countless other examples."

What should we make of these latest shots in the Transparency Wars? On the one hand, it is more than a little jarring to see AFT affiliate folks out there calling for more civility in the nation's education debates, while endorsing these kinds of websites. The union has also been accused of trying to kill "parent-trigger" legislation while supporting parent involvement.

But, to be frank, Rhee's advocacy group StudentsFirst isn't exactly a paragon in the transparency department either. The group, which has set a fundraising goal of $1 billion in its first year, won't release specifics on how much it's raised toward that goal so far, or which groups have paid up. The group now counts 500,000 members, and a spokesperson told me that donations to the group average about $60 per donor. But not all members are donors, and so these figures end up telling us very little. Calling all Form 990s!

In her report, Schultheis points out that these exchanges illuminate the very personal disagreements between Rhee and Weingarten. Interesting, then, that both women have left their organizations vulnerable to a similar brand of criticism.

Correction: An earlier version of this blog incorrectly attributed the discovery of RheeFirst to Ben Smith. In fact, Politico reporter Emily Schultheis broke the news on Ben Smith's blog.

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For the next round of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants, the U.S. Department of Education plans to make some alterations to the program, officials said this week at a meeting of TIF grantees.

Don't go panicking yet. The impression from the meeting was that the changes will be relatively minor, and meant to build on the lessons learned from the first three rounds of TIF grants.

TIF is the administration's premier teacher-quality competitive grant. It was first proposed and funded under the Bush administration to help seed teacher and principal performance-pay systems. When the Obama administration came on board, it made some major changes through the federal-rulemaking process, broadening it somewhat to put more emphasis on teacher evaluations and professional development as part of the systems.

It also allowed applicants to bid for one year of planning before implementing the new systems. And the department created a separate competition allowing some grantees to get additional money for participating in a randomized field evaluation. (This kind of program evaluation, you may remember, was a requirement of the $200 million in TIF funding provided through the 2009 economic-stimulus package.)

For the fourth round of TIF, which will begin with FY 2012 funds, the department will issue a new proposed set of criteria for public input and revision, said Jo Anderson, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The proposed criteria will come out in the fall and will probably be finalized in early 2012.

And what tweaks are under discussion this time? For one, the option of a planning year will remain, but it may look a little different. The department wants to see a lot of evidence that applicants are engaged in front-end planning on their pay and evaluation systems before they go ahead and apply for the grant. (Apparently, nearly all of the Round 3 winners ended up requesting a planning year.)

Second, ED officials will eliminate the separate evaluation competition. Many interested districts found that a hard sell for their constituents.

Mr. Anderson also said he felt one mistake of the existing TIF competition was that, while the rules required districts to obtain union consent to the plans, where applicable, by the end of the planning year, they didn't require unions to participate in the drafting of the original plans. It's pretty hard for unions to feel ownership of these systems, Anderson noted, unless they're involved from beginning to end in their development.

While he didn't specify whether this will be fixed in the new set of rules, this is another area to keep your eyes on.

Finally, the first round of grantees, from 2006, is now coming up to its fifth and final year of federal funding, and many of them want to know whether they'll be permitted to re-up for the next round. Stay tuned!

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Teacher-coaching linked to a well-known teaching framework paid dividends for student achievement in the secondary grades, according to a study published today in Science magazine.

In all, the study found a 0.22 standard deviation increase in the scores of students taught by teachers who received a special form of teacher-coaching—roughly the equivalent of an increase from the 50th to the 59th percentile—relative to the students taught by teachers in a control group.

"This study shows dramatically, clearly, when you implement a [teacher] measure rigorously and couple it closely to a PD system, you get dramatic improvements in student achievement," said Robert C. Pianta, a professor at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

For the study, Pianta and four colleagues, all psychology researchers, randomly assigned 78 middle or high school teachers to participate in the special coaching intervention, or to their regular in-service training. There were no significant differences in the characteristics of the treatment or control group or in the population of students they taught. The study covered some 2,200 students in all.

Professional development was keyed to the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary, or CLASS-S. It is essentially a modified version of Pianta's well-known CLASS framework.

The key aspect of CLASS is that it focuses heavily on specific observable interactions between teachers and students, such as behavior management, productivity, and conceptual development. Originally designed for P-3 teachers, the researchers modified and tested CLASS for teachers of secondary students. In particular, they tailored it to respond better to research on adolescent learning needs, which include opportunities for them to make decisions about what they're learning and chances to work with their peers, according to Joseph P. Allen, a psychology scholar at UVA and one of the study's authors.

The training was delivered via a Web-based approach called My Teaching Partner, again devised by Pianta and team for use with CLASS. Under the system, each teacher taped his or her instruction and then uploaded it to an online portal. The tapes were then viewed by "coaches" trained on the CLASS-S domains. Then, the coaches would discuss particular interactions with teachers in phone conversations, including how they aligned to the CLASS-S framework and ideas about how to improve those interactions.

The study found that, while there was no effect on student scores in the first year of the intervention, students taught by the teachers receiving the CLASS-S support outperformed those who received regular in-service training in the following year. Further, the study found that some of the improvement could be directly linked to changes in teachers' behavior caused by the extra support.

There are a few reasons to pay attention to this study. For one, effective professional development, in general, remains a very tough education nut to crack. A random-assignment study such as this is important because it demonstrates not only that the PD is linked to student achievement, but also that it caused some degree of that achievement. It is especially noteworthy at the secondary level where research on effective professional development is quite sparse.

As I reported last year, rigorous studies of PD approaches are generally few and far between. Professional development is challenging to study. There are all kinds of potentially confounding factors, like differences in funding and implementation. And professional development is inherently a complex endeavor. Any teacher training affects students only indirectly, after it is filtered through a teacher's own practices.

It's important to note that the My Teaching Partner approach is a very specific way of analyzing and discussing teaching practices. The lesson here is that educators must devise an effective way to help teachers embody new practices and behaviors; merely selecting a set of teaching standards is not enough on its own.

"It is a model for coaching that is different from a lot of other models in that it's very prescribed, very focused on a way of constructing the coaching session, and what the coach does to identify behaviors they work on, and how the coach gives feedback," Pianta said.

Second, the study also tells us a bit more about teaching frameworks, which are being used as the basis of new teacher-evaluation systems. (CLASS is one of several models now being used.)

Scholars have been exploring whether teachers ought to be coached and/or assessed using a general teacher-behavior rubric, like CLASS-S, or one that's customized for each teacher's specific discipline or content area. This study found that the improved teacher-student interactions predicted student achievement regardless of the content area in question.

Pianta told me teachers in the study taught in four different content areas and gains were seen in all of them. Again, this is an interesting finding, especially in light of debates about whether secondary professional development should focus on additional content acquisition or on ways of better teaching content.

A variety of other scholars are also exploring this issue. At the University of Michigan, researchers are looking at math-specific teaching frameworks, while others at Stanford University are reviewing English ones. Much of the study is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching Study. (The nonprofit that publishes Education Week is a former recipient of Gates Foundation funding.)

Finally, the UVA study also raises some interesting conceptual questions about the very nature of professional development that are worth outlining. The CLASS-S approach here was purely a professional-development tool and not linked to any evaluative purpose.

Some of the most recent research on teaching frameworks, however, have been in districts such as Cincinnati, where the framework doubles as part of a formal teacher-evaluation system.

I bring this up merely to point out that the line between professional development and evaluation is not one that's been well defined or illuminated in current discussions about teaching. But it's poised to emerge as another tension point for the field, especially as more time and energy are spent on teacher evaluation.

Take the case of the District of Columbia, for instance. There, the teachers' union insisted on a formal separation between "master educators" who do some of the conversations in the teacher-evaluation system, and the district's professional-development coaches.

In general, Pianta said he thinks that much more attention needs to be paid to studying teacher-evaluation frameworks and ensuring a good link between what teachers are evaluated on and what supports they receive.

"We should be treating performance assessment with the same rigor that we treat assessment of student achievement," he said. "The risk here is that there's too much looseness on these assessments of teacher performance."

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What would happen if New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg installed American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten as the city's school chancellor?

It's a scenario posed in Steven Brill's new book Class Warfare, which traces the rise of proponents of the Race to the Top and other initiatives that have put much emphasis on "teacher effectiveness."

There is certainly no love lost between Brill and Weingarten—one of his earlier pieces resulted in AFT claiming he'd made up quotes. Don't expect that relationship to change much: In the new book, Brill suggests that Weingarten would quickly embrace stronger evaluation systems and performance pay if she was under direct pressure to improve student achievement. It's not a particularly subtle critique of the union leader.

But leave all that baggage aside for a moment. What exactly would Weingarten do as schools chancellor, especially within the constraints of a tight budget? What teacher quality policies would she focus on? What approaches would she institute to help teachers improve? What would she do to oversee the city's administrators?

I'll even go one better than Brill and say, why not simultaneously make former Chancellor Joel Klein the head of the United Federation of Teachers? What would he do faced with members nervous about a law that required 40 percent or more of evaluations based on test scores? What would he do in dealing with teachers, some good and some poor, who are entitled to legal representation in due-process hearings?

Both Klein and Weingarten are intelligent and hard-working people. Surely each would emerge with a new perspective of the freedoms, tensions, and constraints that his or her counterpart operates under.

Brill isn't the first to posit this idea. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews, who is also a former board member of the nonprofit that publishes Education Week, had a similar idea not that long ago. He proposed Weingarten as a good candidate for heading the D.C. chancellor's position.

And, of course, if Weingarten and Klein want to comment, we await their responses here.

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The Council of the Great City Schools has thrown its weight behind a controversial review of the nation's colleges of education currently being conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report.

In a letter sent on Friday, the CGCS, which represents more than 60 urban districts, said it supports the study because it's concerned that too many programs graduate teachers who are not academically prepared to provide instruction in urban school systems. The decision to endorse the review apparently took place at its recent executive council meeting in Cincinnati.

It's the second major endorsement for the review. Earlier this summer, eight of nine state education "chiefs for change" put their stamp of approval on the project, which will rate the schools on up to 18 standards.

CGCS praised the council in particular for including such factors as reading instruction, preparation for teaching English-language learners, and core-content knowledge.

"Your study has the potential of advancing the national discussion on teacher preparation and furthering our understanding of why some new teachers come to our urban classrooms better equipped to serve our diverse students than others," CGCS Executive Director Michael Casserly writes.

He also outlined a few concerns with the review. Though CGCS believes the review is being conducted transparently, Casserly writes, "we are concerned that your data-collection process may make it difficult to get a complete picture of the field, a situation prompted in part by resistance from those being studied."

The review has already generated a considerable amount of opposition from university-based programs, so much so that NCTQ is tracking all the institutions that are participating willingly and those to which it's submitted open-records requests.

Will the council's endorsement encourage more voluntary participation? We'll have to wait and see.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Federation of Teachers has landed in a bit of hot water over a presentation, given by a regional affiliate lobbyist at its recent TEACH professional-development conference, that details how the Connecticut chapter "diffused" a "parent trigger" legislative proposal in that state.

Parent triggers, as you know, generally would allow parents to sign a petition to close and reconstitute a struggling school under new governance, such as a charter school.

The Powerpoint presentation was highlighted by union critic RiShawn Biddle at DropoutNation.

The presentation characterizes the parent-trigger bill as a sub rosa attempt by charter school supporters to create more such schools, references attempts to "kill" the bill, and ultimately details how the AFT Connecticut chapter reached out to lawmakers to craft an alternative proposal. The final version of the bill created advisory bodies of parents at schools, but does not give them any actual say in school governance.

AFT national has distanced itself from the presentation, removing it and other documents from its website "because they do not represent AFT's position," according to a note now in its place. The union also issued a statement saying that the presentation didn't reflect its work in the state:

"The truth is that we created an avenue for parents in Connecticut to become involved in their children's school. As a result, parent councils are being formed all over the state, which will lead to better schools. We are proud that we were involved in passing this law and believe it will serve as a model for other states."

The situation is getting some back and forth on The Wall Street Journal's editorlal page, which accuses the union of blocking a form of school choice.

For its part, the union appears to be concerned that this move could detract from the message of collaboration that its leader, Randi Weingarten, has espoused; its statement makes a point of promoting the end result as a positive, pro-active step for parent engagement, not a reactive one.

While AFT might not have liked the tenor of this presentation, it's hard to believe that it was unaware of the details in Connecticut. After all, the presentation occurred at a session titled "Damaging Legislative Proposals and What You Can Do to Fight Them."

Second, although I can't find evidence that the AFT has publicly opposed the broad concept of a parent trigger, the union has long had a complicated relationship with charters. It doesn't oppose them outright—after all, it runs a few of its own and has organized others—but in general, it says that they should be unionized and guarantee employees due process, which was not the case in the Connecticut legislation.

UPDATED, Aug. 8, 4:35 p.m.: A source from California reminded me that the California Federation of Teachers did publicly oppose that state's parent-trigger law. In fact, that union's president, Marty Hittelman, made waves after referring to the legislation as empowering "lynch mobs."

So it shouldn't come as huge surprise that the Connecticut affiliate would seek to refashion the parent-input mechanism. I am not picking on AFT by making this point. Groups on many sides of our education reform debates go about their lobbying work in similar ways. As we like to say in Washington, this is how the legislative sausage is made.

The bottom line is that all of this doesn't really tell us much of anything new about the union's priorities or positions.

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Certain aspects of Teach For America's selection process appear to be linked to student achievement gains—a sign that it's possible to recruit candidates who are more likely to have an edge in the classroom, a new study concludes.

The study, by Will Dobbie of Harvard University, shows that the information used to select TFA candidates predicts a degree of student achievement during the candidate's first year of teaching. To give an example, students assigned to a teacher with a one standard deviation increase on the group's leadership metric score, on average, .054 standard deviations higher in math.

TFA selects its recruits through a detailed selection process that uses a mix of scored assessments, including essays, a group activity, recommendations, and a sample teaching lesson.

The qualities it measures include: achievement (academic GPA or work performance), leadership (performance in leadership role), perseverance (ability to work through obstacles), critical thinking (outlining solutions to problems methodically), organization (attention to deadlines and clarity of instruction), motivational ability (ability to keep students on task), respect (attitudes toward low-income individuals), and fit (whether the candidate believes TFA's goals are attainable).

For the analysis, Dobbie merged administrative data from New York City with TFA data from the 2007 through 2009 cohorts, coming up with some 380 teachers in all in grades 3-8.

Using a value-added method, Dobbie found that, in math, students who had TFA teachers with higher measures of achievement, leadership, and perseverance did better than their peers. The measures of critical thinking, organizational ability, motivation, and respect for others did not seem to be correlated.

In English, leadership and fit were related to gains, but these findings were less precise, and the paper notes that it is harder to draw conclusions about them.

Finally, the paper also found that students in grades 3-5 taught by a teacher who scored higher on the respect measure were less likely to have a behavior infraction.

Love or hate TFA, the idea of being more choosy about candidates has been seeing a lot of increased attention these days. Part of this discussion is being driven by all the talk of international comparisons, especially the supposition that teaching quality would improve if, as in Finland or Singapore, U.S. preparation programs did more to recruit teachers from among college graduates of high academic standing.

In the United States, TFA is not the only organization that has eyed front-end entry standards as one way of boosting its impact. As I reported in a recent Education Week story, other groups, and some school districts, are implementing "strategic hiring" practices, by using similar tools and instruments to analyze the potential of their recruits.

It's worth reiterating here that these selection criteria are in no way a silver bullet. The data show that on average teachers who score high on some of the TFA measures do better in the classroom, but not all of them do.

It is also clear that teacher quality is not an immutable characteristic. Research has shown for a long time now that teachers improve over their first few years on a job, and a more recent study indicates that quality feedback helps teachers to get better. A focus on strategic hiring, in other words, does not absolve principals or school districts of giving teachers support and professional development to improve. (TFA, for one, invests thousands of dollars in professional supports for each of its teachers.)

Finally, the paper notes that "improved selection is only beneficial to the extent that there exist effective teachers who are unhired." The bottom line here is local labor markets affect selections, and that the ability to be choosy only works when there is a surplus of folks seeking a position.

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