September 2011 Archives

Teach For America founder and CEO Wendy Kopp and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel had a substantive discussion about the teaching profession today, showing that while some of their strategies for improving it may differ, they're on the same page on many issues.

Though set up as a press conference on the Department of Education's teacher-training reform initiatives, the Q & A opportunity morphed into a conversation between Kopp and Van Roekel—with such interesting comments on both sides that we reporters eventually just sat and listened to it unfold.

Kopp and Van Roekel probably agreed on about 90 percent of the things they discussed, parting ways in only a few instances. For example, both made a point of saying they really want to get beyond negative stereotyping of the teaching profession. Kopp lamented: "For the last 20 years, we've been blaming kids and families [for poor achievement], and then ... it went to blaming teachers."

Both agreed that school systems need to do a better job of improving the teaching force, through a combination of strong preparation, recruiting practices, and teacher support.

And they even got into some pretty sticky territory, namely the argument about how much good schooling can overcome poverty. Kopp said her organization thinks poverty does matter, which is why it has been so focused on changing systems that routinely send poor children into under-resourced schools. Van Roekel said that districts and states must help remove obstacles to learning caused by poverty—such as through school-based health centers—but added that "you don't blame [poverty]" for poor results.

This kind of dialogue can't have come easily, given the uneasy rapport the two organizations have long had. NEA's Representative Assembly took a pretty hardline stance against TFA at its meeting this summer. And observers have faulted TFA for not being more outspoken against the legislative attacks on teacher collective bargaining (scroll down to Jennifer Goldstein's commentary piece in this collection).

Now, Van Roekel and Kopp did disagree on one key area, and that is essentially the two-year TFA commitment. Van Roekel said he admired the organization's recruitment strategies and wanted more TFA teachers to stay in the field. He described what he called a "Career Teachers For America" program with "the same heavy recruitment, keep them in the profession for five to 10 years." He added: "We need the same people there; the stability in that learning community is huge."

Kopp, meanwhile, underscored the leadership positions TFA teachers take. "It changes their whole life, their career trajectory, their priorities," she said. Many who go on to work in the education field help to "reshape the policy context" to make it better for students.

What will come out of this dialogue? It's anyone guess. Generally, it helps to remember that Van Roekel still faces thousands of members who made clear at the Representative Assembly that they don't like TFA, and likewise, there are probably a few TFA corps members who have had disparaging things to say about unions.

But in a climate of such contention in the field, it's refreshing to see this kind of meeting of the minds. Let's hope the dialogue continues, and filters down through their respective organizations.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan this morning formally announced a series of proposals to overhaul teacher education practices in the United States.

In brief, it seeks changes through three major pieces: Revisions to the teacher-college accountability requirements in the Title II of the Higher Education Act to make them outcomes-based; the creation a new grant program that would give scholarships to candidates at programs identified as being excellent; and the funding of an initiative for minority-serving teachers' colleges.

You can read the basics of all of this in a short Education Week story. Of course, if you're a nerd like me, what you really want are all the juicy, little-noticed details. And here they are, presented with a touch of Teacher Beat snark:

• You've got to hand it to the Education Department for getting headlines out of ideas that are six months old. Nearly everything in this proposal comes straight out of its FY 2012 budget request and justifications, which I wrote about way back then here and here and here.

• Ok, to be fair to the Education Department, they've gotten some high-profile supporters of this initiative since February. Groups like NCATE, NEA, TFA are all on board.

• What's the likelihood that these proposals are going anywhere? It's pretty good for the overhaul to the Title II reporting requirements for education schools, which the Department will pursue through a negotiated rulemaking process. This process involves appointing negotiators charged with drafting the rules, holding hearings, releasing a rule for comment, and then revising it based on public feedback. It can take six months or more to complete. Still, an Education Department official said it wants to begin the process of finding the panelists within the next week or two. Bottom line: Within a year or so, expect the federal government to require outcomes-based data, including "value-added" information on program candidates, in all of the states.

• The prognosis is somewhat less favorable for the other two key components. Congressional appropriators must agree to support the Hawkins Centers of Excellence (created in the Higher Education Act rewrite but never funded). The Presidential Teaching Fellows is an even longer shot: It needs both an authorization and an appropriation.

• Of all of the pieces of the program, schools of education seem to be least happy with the Presidential Teaching Fellows, which would replace the TEACH grants program that they fought hard to get in a budget-reconciliation bill back in 2007. TEACH was supposed to support only high-quality programs, but department officials say that a good number of programs deemed "low performing" under the current HEA rules offer them.

Meanwhile, Sharon Robinson, the president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, generally approved of the focus on teacher education, but she was less sanguine about the PTF program proposal. "We can perfect that with the Congress," she told me. (See AACTE's full statement on the propsals at its website. There's lots of important detail to chew on, including its recommendations for making TEACH more quality-oriented.)

• Another little-noticed tweak: The current HEA and scholarship requirements apply only to education schools that receive federal student-financial aid. The department wants to extend this aid, through the PTF program, to alternative route providers. This helps explain why Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA, had such a big presence at this morning's announcement. Kopp, for her part, told reporters that she feels her organization and other alt-routes should be covered under the Title II reporting requirements, so that all training regimes are held to the same standard. Kopp said she thinks a level playing field will help do away with the "alternate v. traditional" route arguments in teacher preparation.

• It must be Freaky Friday in the education community, because the two national teachers' unions have switched places on a key issue. Read on:

The National Education Association appears to be pretty supportive of the administration's efforts, despite the focus on value-added assessment data (something it's not a big fan of). When I pressed NEA President Dennis Van Roekel about this, he said value-added still gives him pause, and he doesn't support its use for evaluating individual teachers. But he added that, used in the aggregate, it might be appropriate for helping to improve education schools: "I think there's potential there," he said.

On the other hand, the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten—who endorsed the use of test-score data in limited instances long before the NEA—criticized the focus on value-added. "At the same time that the validity of using standardized tests as the ultimate measure of performance is being widely questioned, the U.S. Department of Education appears to be putting its foot on the accelerator by calling for yet another use for tests—and one for which they were not designed," she said.

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For an agency that was so specific about what it wanted to see in the teacher-quality portions of the Race to the Top program, the U.S. Department of Education has put out guidance on how states can seek waivers from elements of the No Child Left Behind Act that's surprisingly general in the TQ arena.

Michele McNeil made this point over on Politics K-12, in which she deconstructs what the peer reviewers will be asked to look for as they judge the applications. But let's take a closer look at the teacher-quality pieces.

First, the plan calls for the "sufficient involvement" of teachers and principals in the development of the state's teacher evaluation guidelines. But that's all. It's pretty much up to the peer reviewers to decide what is and isn't sufficient. Contrast that to the MOUs that districts and union leaders were expected to sign under the Race to the Top program.

Second, the guidelines ask reviewers to comment on whether the plan will be used to "inform personnel decisions". Again, this is pretty vague stuff. Compare it again to the Race to the Top, which listed tenure, compensation, promotion, and dismissal, among other things. (And keep in mind that in plenty of the states likely to apply for waivers, there are no laws on the books specifically linking evaluations to those decisions.)

The guidance also doesn't ask reviewers to check to see whether states describe how they'll use the evaluation data to update efforts to ensure equal access to effective teachers. That was another key aspect of the Race to the Top, and one step further from the NCLB statute (which required it only with regard to qualified teachers).

The guidance gives the peer reviewers arguably more latitude than they had under RTTT while making it less certain what states' deliverables are supposed to be.

And perhaps that's OK: Clearly, this waiver process is meant to be a less prescriptive model, which will probably please a lot of different stakeholders who have been pressing for more flexibility. Nevertheless, it does open questions up about what this is all going to end up looking like in practice— that's likely to worry folks who feel that the waiver process is turning the clock back on federal accountability.

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UPDATED

In many ethnically diverse school districts across the country, teachers in schools that serve the top quintile of African-American and Latino students are paid significantly less—approximately $2,500 per year—than the average teacher in such districts, according to an analysis released today by the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights.

The analysis is based on data from the OCR's Civil Rights Data Collection from 2009-10. More than 7,000 districts are included in this survey. For this particular analysis, the Education Department crunched data from some 2,200 districts in which more than 20 percent, but less than 80 percent of enrolled students, are African-American or Latino. Finally, the analysis compared the salaries of teachers in schools with the top quintile of enrolled African-American and Latino students, to the average teacher salary in the district.

Fifty-nine percent of the districts studied showed these spending disparities. And because teacher salaries make up about 60 percent or so of the typical district's budget, these data demonstrate some fairly hefty gaps in spending between schools that serve more students of color and those that serve fewer such students.

"America has been battling inequity in education for decades but these data show that we cannot let up," said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "Children who need the most too often get the least. It's a civil rights issue, an economic security issue, and a moral issue."

Some background for you: The federal economic-stimulus bill required districts receiving state stabilization funding to report school-level expenditures, including teacher salaries. Then, the office for civil rights integrated some of these new reporting requirements into a much broader and more-regular data collection.

It's so broad, in fact, that the Education Department is releasing it in two stages. Part 1, as colleague Nirvi Shah reported earlier this year, dealt mainly with inequitable access to experienced teachers, advanced courses, and other resources.

The Part 2 data, on which this analysis was conducted (conveniently in time for Duncan's appearance on NBC's Education Nation) won't be released in full until sometime in mid-November.

It will be interesting to have a more fine-grained look at these data and see what else shows up. Off the top of my head, I'd love to know whether there's a particular characteristic that links these districts with these spending patterns, for instance, perhaps in terms of how they are governed, or where they're located, or how many schools they oversee.

Part 2 will also include some first-ever data on such facts as:

• Number of students who passed Algebra I in grades 7-8, 9-10, or 11-12;
• Full-time-equivalent teachers absent more than 10 school days;
• "Zero-tolerance" expulsion;
• Instances of harassment and bullying;
• Instances of restraint and seclusion; and
• Total personnel salaries, instructional-staff salaries, teacher salaries, and nonpersonnel salaries.

Now, you may be thinking about this analysis: "Very interesting, whatever does this mean for policy?" As it turns out, quite a lot.

Various advocates have been pushing for changes to the "comparability" test in the federal Title I program for disadvantaged students. Basically, to get Title I, districts have to show that local spending between high- and low-poverty schools is equal before those districts get their Title I allocations.

But they're currently allowed to exempt salary differentials from the calculation, in essence papering over these pay disparities. So expect groups like the Education Trust and Center for American Progress, which have conducted a lot of analyses on this topic, to seize on these findings to press their case to change the Title I rules.

And, surprise—the Education Department proposed tackling this in its blueprint for reauthorizing the NCLB law, too.

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Teachers who leave the profession after their third or fourth year tend to be less effective in that final year of teaching compared to professionals who stayed on, according to a provocative new study appearing in the August/September issue of Educational Researcher.

Authors Gary T. Henry, Kevin C. Bastian, and C. Kevin Fortner began their study with an interesting question: Analyses of large sets of panel data linking students to teachers have documented fairly extensively that teachers seem to gain in effectiveness over their first few years on the job. But is that phenomenon due to improvements in their skills over this time period, or because the weaker teachers choose to leave, thus making the overall teaching pool look better?

To answer that question, the researchers used a value-added methodology to examine matched student-teacher data from North Carolina from the 2004-05 school year through 2008-09 in grades 3-12. They used statewide standardized tests or end-of-course tests, separated out by the year in which the teachers left the state's public schools.

(Value-added, you'll remember, attempts to examine how a teacher has affected his or her students' test scores, controlling for background characteristics, in comparison with similar students in other schools.)

They found that teachers become significantly more effective in their second year on the job, but for those who stay five years, effectiveness seems to level off after the third year in the classroom. Teachers who left after the first year were also less effective on average than those that stayed. So far, those findings confirm others in the research literature, showing that teachers really do get better with experience, at least early on in their careers, while those who really struggle in the field seem to go elsewhere.

Now here's where it gets interesting. The researchers ran 10 different kinds of analytical comparisons, for teachers at each grade level and for math and reading. In 6 of the 10 comparisons, the authors found that teachers who stayed at least five years were more effective during their third and fourth year than were teachers who left following that year. Moreover, the performance of the departing teachers tended to fall during that final year; in 2 of the 10 comparisons, the teachers actually performed worse on average that year than in a previous year.

The authors posit two explanations for the apparent drop in effectiveness among departing teachers. First, they note, tenure is granted after four years of teaching in North Carolina, so these data may reflect individuals who are being ushered out the door due to poor performance. Or, such teachers may simply have reduced their effort once they knew they were leaving.

The study comes to a conclusion certain to provoke debate in this day and age of school turnarounds and teacher accountability. Because of this final-year drop in teaching ability, firing teachers may be less effective in improving students' test scores than investing in efforts to improve early-career teachers' skills, the authors conclude.

They also seem a bit bewildered by the seeming flattening of teacher effectiveness after the third year of teaching.

"Are teachers' habits of mind and teaching practices so firmly in place by that stage that gains in effectiveness are uncommon?" the authors ask.

It's an important a question to think about. Why does teaching ability seem to flatten out so early, and so consistently, in teachers' careers? And more to the point, what can be done to help teachers get even better each year they teach?

Comments section, as always, open for your feedback.

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It's getting hard to keep track of all the announcements I get on teacher-evaluation systems. Here's a rundown of three of the latest briefs of this complex topic to cross my path.

The Education Trust's recently released paper emphasizes the importance of evaluations for improving teacher practice. The paper is also supportive of using value-added measures, but notes that all systems should have more than one way of gauging the impact of individual teachers on their students' progress.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has a new guide for those implementing the systems, outlining the key areas for discussion all the way from identifying who should be consulted in the development of the systems through applying standards consistently. The report's formal launch will come during a webcast on Oct. 3. Among other things of note, the report outlines five areas that should be measured based on the NPBTS' core propositions for its own advanced-credential scoring system.

Finally, the Forum on Educational Accountability, a group with ties to standardized-test critic FairTest, has a short brief on teacher evaluations aimed at Congress. Its major message: Don't use test scores in any way, shape, or form! The group also opposes making federal teacher-quality funds contingent on the establishment of such systems. And even for a competitive-grant program, it says the feds shouldn't specify how heavily student achievement should be weighted in the systems.

Your take, readers?

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UPDATED

Our Politics K-12 reporters have the goods for you on the Education Department's proposal to allow states to waive portions of the No Child Left Behind Act in exchange for instituting certain reforms.

On the teacher-quality front, they must agree to institute "basic guidelines" for evaluations for measuring teacher and principal effectiveness, and to use the results of such systems for personnel decisions. Details beyond that are pretty sketchy at this point, such as just how specific the guidelines have to be and how closely districts will be expected to adhere to them.

We do know, however, that contrary to rumors, states will still have to abide by most of the "highly qualified" teacher rules.This shouldn't be too much of a burden for them, seeing that 97 percent of teachers already meet the definition.

Update, 6:15 pm: New details are coming in. We now know that states and districts will be expected to have at least three performance categories in their teacher evaluation systems, with student growth as one measure. (These details, by the way, are identical to the Education Department's reauthorization Blueprint.) States will have to adopt the guidelines this school year; districts will have two years to develop and pilot aligned evaluation systems.

The basic HQT rules will stand, but districts will be exempt from the restrictions on use of Title I and Title II funds outlined in the law if not all of their teachers are highly qualified. (Those were more or less the only teeth in the law regarding the HQT provisions and were never particularly exacting to begin with.)

Teacher evaluation reform has been a part of the administration's priorities from day one: witness the Race to the Top program, the economic-stimulus bill, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the Blueprint.

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By now I hope you've had time to check out a story I did recently about some interesting new groups that are trying to give teachers avenues for shaping policy decisions on the issues that most affect them.

As I stated in the story, all of the groups have very different origins, purposes and philosophies. Some of the newest, such as the Los Angeles-based NewTLA, a caucus within the teachers' union, are still working out the positions they want to take and what they want to accomplish.

But the bottom line is that it's significant to see teachers getting so involved at the macro-level where policy is made. After all, teachers are already all but consumed by the demands of their own individual classrooms and students, so belonging to these kinds of organizations really means something. Perhaps it's a sign that they are more and more invested in having their say in the many changes to the profession coming down the pike.

My story, of course, was not an exhaustive list of all of the different groups that have sprung up to give teachers a voice, and since the story ran I've heard from several others with similar projects. Here's but a sampling:

• Accomplished California Teachers, a California-based group,has released policy papers on teacher evaluation. It's supported by the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation, as well as the Stuart Foundation; the latter played a major role in supporting the Center for Teaching Quality's New Millennium Initiative, which I featured in my story.

• A couple of other groups, including the New York Collective of Radical Educators and the Grassroots Education Movement have sprung up in New York City. Both hold very different opinions than the Educators 4 Excellence group I wrote about, and believe there's too much high-stakes testing and corporate philanthropy in education. NYCORE also helped develop a film to counter the "Waiting for 'Superman' " documentary.

• Finally, The VIVA Project is an online community of teachers that have issued policy briefs, and maintain a blog and discussion boards. Several of its teachers will be featured on NBC's Education Nation Town Hall this September.

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Teacher attrition among first year teachers may be as high as 10 percent, according to a new data analysis from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.

It's the first release of data from the NCES' Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study, which was begun a few years ago to track the career paths of beginning teachers from 2007 and 2008. It reflects the first three years of data in the study, which will continue for a minimum of five years.

About 2,000 teachers were included in the original cohort.

Among the findings:

• Almost a tenth of teachers who began teaching in 2007 or 2008 left teaching after the first year.

• In 2009-10, three-quarters of beginning teachers stayed in the same school they'd taught in the previous year, but the others had moved to another public school or even another school district.

• Of those beginning teachers who were assigned a mentor, 8 percent were not teaching in the following year, compared with 16 percent of those who were not assigned a mentor.

• A slightly higher proportion of teachers with salaries of $40,000 or more were still teaching the following year, compared to those with salaries below that figure.

This data isn't causal, so it's difficult to draw firm conclusions about it. We don't know, for instance, whether the presence or absence of a mentor affected the mobility patterns seen. But the data certainly raise some interesting questions for discussion.

Readers, your take?

(Thanks to Twitter's @KenMLibby @EduGlaze for putting this on my radar.)

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Politics K-12's intrepid Alyson Klein reports on a bunch of proposals for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that are being introduced this week by Senate Republicans.

Our interest at Teacher Beat, as always, is on the teacher-quality implications. So far, the big takeaway is that the bills would do away with the unpopular "highly qualified" teacher requirements.

The summaries also make a particular point of playing the "no federal interference" card that seems to be a core education tenet among Republican lawmakers these days. Among other things, the proposals would:

• End the highly qualified teacher requirements. These, as you'll recall, require states to end emergency certification and to ensure all teachers are fully certified, demonstrate subject-matter competency, and hold a bachelor's degree;

• Target teacher and principal training to a local needs assessment (which, oddly, districts are already required to complete under the terms of the current Teacher Quality State Grants, or Title II-A program).

• Set up a competitive grant program for "private-sector" organizations such as nonprofits to provide teacher training and professional development. (Expect lots of screaming from those who fear the so-called "corporate reform" movement.)

• Encourage states and districts to develop teacher/principal evaluation systems based significantly on student academic achievement, and prohibit the feds from "regulating or controlling" those systems.

• Require data reporting on the quality and effectiveness of teachers and principals.

• Authorize the Teacher Incentive Fund, a performance-pay program that's been funded since 2006 but never set down on the books.

Nothing yet on the issue of equitable distribution of teachers, which has become a bigger issue over the last couple of years. And so far, the teachers' unions have been tight-lipped about their reaction to these proposals.

Alyson will have much more for you soon at edweek.org.

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The folks that oversee the popular Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) school-reform model are broadening out their work to provide states and districts with technical assistance on teacher evaluation, according to a release yesterday from the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching.

They plan to help educators with implementation and support of the systems, including their design, the management of data systems, and the certification and training of evaluators to ensure inter-rater consistency. (In plain English, that means ensuring that two reviewers are able to watch a teacher and arrive at the same conclusion about his or her performance.)

In addition, NIET will make available to those states and districts it services a web portal that allows educators to access video examples of teachers' lessons and how they're scored against the TAP teaching framework, a five-category rubric for measuring teacher skills.

Until now, NIET hasn't really endorsed the use of single pieces of the TAP model, a complex school improvement program that tightly knits together teacher evaluation, professional development, a career ladder, and performance bonuses.

Over the last decade, though, NIET has collected and analyzed information on teacher evaluation, and refined all of the practices that go along with it, and it's looking now to share those lessons with states and districts.

The state of Tennessee has already contracted with NIET to train 5,000 evaluators for the teacher-evaluation system it is creating to fulfill the parameters of a state law and its winning Race to the Top bid.

The move also makes NIET, a nonprofit, a player in the teacher-evaluation technical assistance arena. As I wrote about not long ago, a number of other publishing houses, professional-development shops, and evaluation firms have also started to provide these services.

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A number of charter and public school networks have begun to train teachers, a phenomenon that adds an interesting wrinkle to the teacher-preparation debate.

Generally, these programs use a hands-on approach to training, giving the prospective teachers an introduction to the values and the often-intense culture in those systems.

The Aspire Public Schools charter network has an arrangement with the University of the Pacific. It began the second year of its teacher-residency program this fall, with 19 new candidates on board. Candidates get priority for placement in one of the Aspire schools and commit to working in the charter network for four years.

New Visions for Public Schools, a network of 76 public schools (including two charters) in New York City, now trains educators through a partnership with the city's Hunter College. Graduates of the 14-month teacher-residency program have an opportunity to work in a New Visions school and are asked to commit to four years of teaching in such schools.

Finally, the Success Charter Network in New York City uses a program called the "T-School" to train and provide professional development to newly minted teachers, returning teachers, and those new to the SCN network. In essence, the program has the teachers observe lessons taught by school leaders and then have a chance to replicate those techniques with small groups of students, and to be coached in real time by experienced colleagues.

What's particularly interesting about these approaches to teacher training is that they give these school networks an opportunity to see candidates over the course of their training, something that probably gives them a lot better sense about each individual's instructional strengths and shortcomings. That's a much richer mine of information than what's typically gathered during the recruiting process.

As a source once pointed out to me, the hiring practices in place in most districts often don't give a lot of information about teaching skills—resumes and background checks, after all, only tell you that a teacher applicant holds a bachelors' degrees and isn't a criminal.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Qualifications such as certification and holding a master's degree bear no relationship to a teacher's performance as measured by growth in student test scores, concludes a new brief released by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The brief summarizes a study conducted by senior fellow Marcus Winters and two colleagues, which is slotted for publication in the Economics of Education Review. For the study, the researchers looked at four years of longitudinal data from Florida that link elementary teachers' training and student learning gains. They found no correlations between any of the teacher characteristics studied and student learning, with the exception of small benefits for teachers who engaged in certain pedagogy courses.

The finding on experience is probably the most interesting, as many other studies using panel data of this type find that experience does make a difference in the first few years of teaching. And on master's degrees, studies have linked higher achievement with teachers who hold content-specific degrees in math and science, though those studies didn't always correct for students' prior achievement histories. For more, see a summary I wrote not long ago for the Education Writers' Association.

The authors of the brief assert, not surprisingly, that this should be a wake-up call to change the current modes of teacher pay. It can also be read, however, as yet another reason to take a close look at teachers' preparation and professional development.

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Already one of the biggest campaign spenders in the nation, the National Education Association is poised to become still more influential through its creation of a super political action committee, which has no set limits on how much the union can spend on political activity.

There were quite a few breathless headlines last week when Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, a labor umbrella organization, announced it would set up a super PAC and funnel less money directly to Democrats. The NEA beat the AFL-CIO by 10 months, filing the papers to create a super PAC last October.

There are a few key differences between traditional PACs and so-called super PACs. Traditional PACs have been around since the mid-20th century and allow direct campaign contributions, subject to specific rules and spending caps. Notably, they can only be funded through voluntary donations by union members, not through dues deductions.

Super PACs sprung up in the wake of the ruling in last year's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. They cannot be used to directly fund candidates, but they can be used to advocate for and against candidates in other ways. And, of course, there are no caps on this spending.

So far, the union has spent some $4 million through the super PAC, mainly to finance groups opposing Republican candidates. Find out more at opensecrets.org.

As far as I can tell, the American Federation of Teachers has not set up a super PAC of its own.. But as an AFL-CIO member, the AFT will probably be able to influence the spending of that group's Super PAC dollars. (Despite some rapprochement, NEA remains officially unaffiliated with the AFL-CIO.)

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