November 2011 Archives

Certain schools in Los Angeles would gain new freedom to hire teachers in their building, to avoid certain district directives, and to waive parts of the teachers' contract under a new agreement brokered by the district and its local teachers' union.

The terms are set out in a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Superintendent John Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher, but it must still be ratified by the district's teaching force. The vote is scheduled to occur in early December.

The two men appeared at a joint press conference coinciding with a school board meeting yesterday to announce the news.

"Teachers and parents are uniquely qualified to have a relationship with their school," Deasy said.

Added Fletcher: "Promising beginnings are a good thing."

The MOU is the fruit of several months of negotiation between the district and UTLA. Both parties appear to have won several shifts in policy that they've been seeking.

For instance, participating schools could implement a staffing policy to ensure that no teacher or principal would be force-placed. Instead, a "personnel team" at each school, composed of the principal, teachers, union chapter chair, and parents, would have to agree on whether or not to accept such a teacher. This kind of "mutual consent" staffing has gained ground in other urban locations, and has been widely sought by administrators.

But the agreement would, for its three-year duration, end the ability of charter-management organizations and outside operators to bid to run low-performing schools under L.A.'s Public School Choice program. The UTLA has bitterly opposed that policy, going so far as to successfully organize teachers to form cooperatives to run such schools.

Among other district and union policies that schools would be permitted to waive without seeking approval from either party:

• Interim and benchmark assessments, which have long been criticized by teachers;
• Work rules, including school schedules and hours, subject to state and district minimums;
• Curriculum choices, again subject to minimum parameters; and
• Professional development and teacher-assignment policies.

The changes would appear to continue a recent trend toward decentralization in the nation's second-largest school district. It would presumably provide even more control to the school site councils that increasingly exercise control over how discretionary school funds, and even some federal funding, are currently spent. You can read more about that movement in a story of mine from a few years back.

The district and UTLA still have to work through other contractual issues, including the development of a new teacher-evaluation system and whether student achievement will be included in such a system.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Only five of the 11 states that have applied for ESEA waivers have a firm mechanism in place for implementing teacher-evaluation systems statewide, according to a review of the plans.

Those guidelines, and systems for helping districts adopt them in a timely fashion, are the core teacher-quality requirement in the U.S. Department of Education's application.

This isn't a dealbreaker for getting a waiver. At least in theory, states only need to have plans in place regarding evaluations. But plans and requirements are, obviously, two very different things—just ask Hawaii, which won a Race to the Top bid, but hasn't come to agreement with its teachers' union on evaluations.

It's something that the peer reviewers could take into account as they review the applications, though the review guidance isn't particularly explicit on this point.

Anyway, without further ado, here's Teacher Beat's rundown.

Colorado, Tennessee, Indiana, Florida, Oklahoma: All five of these states have laws on the books requiring new evaluation systems. Colorado's guidelines have been developed and are now being piloted in select districts. Tennessee's new statewide evaluation system is operational, but has hit bumps in the road of late. Florida's law was extremely controversial and opposed by the state teachers' union. Nevertheless, it is very specific about what the evaluation process will look like. Indiana's law was passed this year, and while piloting is just starting, it has developed a statewide system. Oklahoma's state board is scheduled to adopt a statewide model in December.

Massachusetts: This state has adopted regulations for teacher evaluations that require all districts to create systems based on principles outlined by the state. The success of that all happening seems very dependent on the collective bargaining process, and it's not entirely clear based on my preliminary read how those two factors interact. (Please weigh in if you know more.)

Georgia: This state has statewide guidelines, and it won a Race to the Top grant. But only 26 districts out of about 180 are participating, so the evaluation plans only go that far at the moment. The application states that it will "offer" other districts the chance to adopt the new evaluations next school year (good luck with that one, Georgia!). It says that with the support of the legislature and board of education, all districts will eventually adopt the system. That probably means that the state will need either legislative or regulatory action to make it happen.

New Jersey: This state points to its evaluation task force, which has been drafting principles for evaluation, but there's no mention at all of the state teachers' union, with whom Gov. Chris Christie has constantly feuded. It's hard to see how these evaluations are going to happen absent local bargaining or a state requirement.

Minnesota: The state passed a piece of legislation this year requiring new teacher evaluations statewide, but it is only beginning the process of convening work groups to flesh out the law, which is fairly skeletal. An interesting feature of this state's law is that it allows for a portfolio-assessment process similar to National Board certification to substitute for the regular observation and student-growth process.

New Mexico: State officials have outlined the contours of an evaluation system, but need the state legislature to pass a law to overhaul its current tiered-licensing system in favor of annual evaluations.

Kentucky: This is an unusual case. According to the application, the state plans to introduce regulations that would allow it to pursue statewide adoption of a model, rather than leaving this up to local districts. An interesting feature of this plan is that, unlike the other applications, it's also quite specific with regard to what activities the state will spend its federal teacher-quality cash on. It explicitly says it wants to move Title II (teacher quality) dollars away from getting teachers to achieve "highly qualified" status and class-size reductions—the primary focus of the funding in most states—into helping teachers become more effective on new evaluation systems.

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I recently filed quite a long story on the teacher education reforms under way at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

The bottom line here is that this story has implications far beyond ASU, because the questions the school's leaders are wrestling with are those that all schools of education are, increasingly, going to be under the gun to think about. Many of the changes at ASU are illuminating the core tensions today in teacher education: the role of theory vs. practice, research vs teaching, how to define and measure good teaching, among others.

There were plenty of things in my notebook that I didn't have room to feature in the story, and one of them is the role of coursework. Especially in mathematics and probably for science, studies show that content-knowledge preparation makes a difference for K-12 student achievement.

So, one part of ASU's $43 million federal Teacher Quality Partnership grant is to revamp the nature of lower-division courses to increase the amount of content knowledge prospective teachers have.

Right now, prospective elementary teachers meet undergraduate distribution requirements by taking a variety of arts and sciences courses. As part of the project, ASU will design (or change) 40 content courses across the subject area for prospective K-8 teachers. The idea is to eventually make these classes requirements for teachers, which will in essence mean more content classes and fewer electives for elementary majors.

The university's president, Michael Crow, told me one of his goals is to stop the education degree from being, in his words, "a math-science avoidance degree."

"You shouldn't be attracting teachers because they're trying to avoid something," he said. "You want them to come because they are interested in everything."

There are five consortia working together to design eight new courses apiece for English language arts, math, social studies, science, and the arts. The consortia are composed of education faculty, arts & sciences faculty, and faculty from local community colleges. (Such colleges will also offer the classes, since a good number of transfers to ASU come from such institutions.)

The revamped courses aren't meant to be "dumbed down" classes for prospective teachers, the faculty told me, but rather to avoid the problem of current lower-division classes serving too many functions.

The new classes will be taught using an online element, and the leaders designing them want students not just to improve their grasp of content, but also to think about the process of learning content and how to demonstrate that learning—something that will, the leaders hope, help them become better instructors in the subject.

ASU recruited Lee Hartwell, a Nobel-prize-winning scientist to help the science consortia develop a course on sustainability issues, which will be required for all elementary majors. He told me the course will be designed to help students develop an intuitive sense of quantitative relationships.

In all, there will be six new science courses for teachers, taught in part by scientists. "It's pretty different," he said. "Most science departments wouldn't stoop to do that. They'd consider it below them."

Again, the proof will be in the pudding here. Will these classes be as rigorous as traditional math and science classes? How will they connect to the revamped student teaching? What will the impact be on the type of student who enrolls in the school's education programs, as Crow alluded to in our conversation? All those questions will need to be studied and analyzed.

As the dean of ASU's education school, Mari Koerner, told me, this is a work in progress. Some things will probably need to be revisited and changed. But the school is asking a lot of important questions. We'll be watching for the answers with interest here at Teacher Beat.

You can read much more about the course reform at ASU's website. The new courses are being piloted now and through 2012.

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I had a few moments the other day to speak to new United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher about an initiative by some of the city's teachers to quicken the union's pace with respect to developing a new teacher-evaluation system.

In brief, Fletcher said that he liked the ideas the "New Unionism" teachers brought forth, but timing continues be tricky because of legal disputes with the district over a pilot evaluation program.

"On the ministerial side we need to make sure this process moves forward. [The teachers] want this matter brought before the membership, they have an absolute right to it, and we're going to do it," he told me. "It's certainly hard to argue with the idea of a teacher-driven evaluation system, and it's certainly hard to argue against the concept that RIFs have done huge harm in our district the last several years. So this is something where the elements of it are all very fine elements."

But, he said, it's difficult to move on the issue right now, because the unions has filed an unfair-labor complaint over the city's pilot teacher-evaluation program, which was not bargained with the district. That pilot, you may remember, includes consideration of value-added, student-growth measures, which the union doesn't favor.

"When it comes to bargaining, we're all dressed up with no where to go," Fletcher said. "All we want to do is bargain, but there's a padlock on that door."

The district's point of view is that the pilot is voluntary, doesn't carry consequences for participating teachers, and therefore isn't subject to bargaining.

In the middle of all this, there is also a separate lawsuit underway by parents. They say the district and union have already failed to adhere to state law on the evaluations, which they argue must explicitly consider student academic growth. (Both the UTLA and an administrators' group oppose this lawsuit.)

One of the complicating factors still to be resolved here, it seems, is what will eventually be included in any new system. The "New Unionism" teachers who have pressed for the referendum weren't particularly specific about the composition of a new evaluation system.

It's one thing, in other words, to say evaluations should be a paramount issue of discussion, and another thing entirely to come to agreement on specific measures.

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We here at Education Week are happy to announce a new special report, Joining Forces, on the concept of labor-management collaboration, reported and written by myself and several of my colleagues.

Just as with last year's special report on professional development, this is a very conceptual topic to write about. Scratch below the surface and you'll find a lot of different ideas about what the term "collaboration" means in an education setting, how to do it well, even whether it's a good idea.

While the report doesn't come to any firm conclusions about these issues, we've tried to get you thinking about them in somewhat deeper, more meaningful ways.

Though it wasn't an intentional decision, several of the stories deal with the issue of teacher evaluations. In retrospect, that makes some sense, given that it's an area in which, to be frank, neither districts nor unions have done a particularly good job leading the way.

Not long ago, I had a chance to ask the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, about this issue, and she acknowledged evaluations as a critical area in which both unions and administrators have fallen short:

"What we should have been doing—which we did not do—was to take ownership of the professional development and evaluation of teachers. And when management didn't do its job, we turned a blind eye," she said.

There are a couple of other things worth pointing out here. Pragmatism came up a lot in these stories; you see a lot of teachers' unions really working outside their comfort areas on things like evaluation, sometimes eagerly and sometimes a bit begrudgingly, but always at the table.

The initiatives have pressed administrators in new ways, too: On more than one occasion while performing interviews for these series, I'd be chatting with one of them and an issue would come up, and the administrator would need to drop everything and get on the phone with his or her union counterpart. The moral of the story: You'd better up that cell phone contract if you plan on collaborating, because you'll need it.

I am also glad that I had a chance to feature the Lucia Mar district in California. Of the three profiled in the report, the district is in my opinion probably dealing with a local context and set of issues that is most representative of the average U.S. district. Most districts, after all, are not the size of Memphis, Tenn.; thinking about what collaboration looks like on a smaller scale is a really important part of this conversation.

The district is in the beginning phases of implementing the TAP school improvement model, the first such instance in the state of California. It's really going to come under the microscope as a result of pioneering this. Nevertheless, I did get the sense that despite the many moving parts, both union leader and superintendent want the effort to be successful and embraced by teachers.

Most of all, I want to thank the teachers who shared with us openly and honestly about their experiences on the ground working through some of these new initiatives.

Enough of my babbling—read the series and let us know what you think.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Both a value-added method and principal observations tied to a teaching framework identified the same teachers as particularly high or low-performing under Chicago's teacher-evaluation pilot, a new study concludes.

But principals struggled to provide high-quality "coaching" and support to teachers based on the results, the report says—a finding that gives a sense of just how difficult it will be to use the new teacher evaluation systems springing up across the nation to improve teaching and learning.

Released last weekend, the report from the Consortium for Chicago School Research is the year two analysis of Chicago's pilot teacher evaluation system (follow the embedded link here to read my write-up of the year one findings.)

In brief, the study looks at the performance of teachers in select elementary schools in which the system was piloted over the period of 2008-09 to 2009-10. The system uses the Framework for Teaching developed by Charlotte Danielson.

To determine reliability, the study's authors compared ratings given by principals with those of external evaluators. To look at the system's validity, they analyzed the relationship between principals' observations and value-added estimates for the teachers, where available.

Value-added, you'll remember, is a statistical technique used to estimate how much growth an average student makes in a year and then compares that to actual performance, the idea being that those students who made more or less than the predicted amount must have had a particularly good or weak teacher.

Finally, the authors conducted case studies in eight of the pilot elementary schools.

Here's a rundown of the findings, plus a discussion to help you situate them within the literature on teacher evaluations.

• Across most of the framework standards, students showed the greatest growth in test scores in the classrooms in which teachers received the highest observation ratings from their principals, and the least growth in those where they received the lowest ratings. This finding is similar to the conclusion of several studies on Cincinnati's teacher-evaluation system.

• Principals and observers gave similar numbers of lower scores, but principals gave the top rating more often than the other observers did, across all 10 of the evaluations standards. Interestingly, much of this variation disappeared when researchers controlled for the teachers' prior evaluation scores, suggesting that principals may be drawing on background knowledge in assigning scores. While this doesn't exactly fit the narrative of vindictive principals, it does show that who you get as an observer potentially matters.

• Most of the principals were close to the external observers in terms of how strictly they applied the evaluation standards, but there were a few outliers on both ends. Eleven percent of principals regularly rated teachers lower than the observers while 17 percent tended to rate them higher. Another reason to consider more than one observer in a teacher-evaluation system.

• The case studies revealed that teachers and principals generally reported more meaningful discussions about teaching practice than the old "checklist" evaluation did, and that the conversations were more evidence-based. Teachers' experiences were largely dependent on whether they felt the principal had applied the framework fairly.

• Principals struggled to ask high-level, complex questions during evaluation conferences to elicit better reflection from teachers on their scores. Principals felt they weren't given enough training on this "coaching" aspect, and they tended to dominate the conversations.

Much more in the report, so check it out. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how this pilot informs the development of a new teacher evaluation system in the city, which has lurched back and forth now between a couple of different frameworks. We'll be watching here with interest.

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A collection of Los Angeles teachers plans to force a vote among the district's teaching corps that, if passed, would require their union to advocate for "teacher-led" changes to the teacher-evaluation system—and for a moratorium on layoffs while it's implemented.

The teachers, part of a coalition called "Teachers for a New Unionism," are making use of a provision in United Teachers Los Angeles' constitution that allows for a bargaining-unit-wide referendum if 500 signatures are gathered. Today, they'll be turning over some 630 signatures to UTLA President Warren Fletcher.

Once the signatures are certified by the union, a process they estimate could take a week or more, the question would be put to the full membership. If it passes, the resolutions would override existing UTLA policies on these issues.

"What we are attempting to do is fully democratize our own union from within," James Encinas, a teacher at Westminster Elementary School who'll be delivering the signatures, said in a release. "We are tired of watching our leaders fail to truly listen and lead on reform issues."

Teacher evaluations are already expected to be a major subject of looming contract negotiations with the district. So far, though, UTLA hasn't been very specific about what it wants such an evaluation system to look like—other than that it eschews the use of student test scores as an element, something that Superintendent John Deasy supports.

The bottom line, it appears, is that these teachers are trying to pressure the union to move much more quickly on this issue. And, they also want the union to create something of a hold-harmless for the first 2.5 years of the new system's implementation, so that teachers aren't in jeopardy of losing their jobs to future staff reductions. (The link between the two isn't entirely clear, but presumably a new evaluation system could inform layoffs, so the teachers want to be sure it's reliable first.)

A few things of note here. Many of the teachers involved in this effort are active in something called NewTLA, a caucus within UTLA's House of Delegates that seeks to encourage more rank-and-file members to become active in union leadership and governance.

It's important to note, however, that this initiative is not a formal NewTLA project. (I wrote a bit about NewTLA in an Education Week story earlier this year.)

The effort is receiving logistical support from something called the Future Is Now Schools, essentially a spin-off of the Green Dot Public Schools, a Los Angeles-based charter-management organization whose schools are all unionized. One of FIN Schools' projects, called New Unionism, has goals quite similar to those of NewTLA, and its director, Michael Stryer, was a founding member of NewTLA. (He is on a yearlong leave of absence from classroom teaching.)

"It was the view of many members that UTLA has not really taken a proactive role in developing a revised evaluation system that is fair and meaningful," Stryer told me. "One thing many teachers realize is that if they don't pay a major role in the development of an evaluation system, it will be imposed from the outside in one way or another."

FIN schools receives support from a number of philanthropies, including the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the New Schools Venture Fund.

UTLA officers were busy in other negotiations when I reached out for comment, so I'll be sure update this post when they get back to me for their take.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A little-noticed amendment that the Senate Education Committee approved in its recent ESEA bill stands to have a major impact on how teacher-quality funds are distributed among states.

Bear with me, there's some wonky background here before we get to the juicy stuff. Every state and something like 90-odd percent of districts receive allocations through the federal Title II state teacher-quality grant program. It's a popular fund because states and districts can do practically whatever they want with it as long as it's teacher-quality related.

Formula grants like this one tend to have "hold harmless" provisions whereby every state is guaranteed a base allocation. Title II is no exception; no state gets less than they got under the two programs that preceded its creation in 2001. Additional funds are allocated by child poverty rates and population in the states.

The problem? Title II has been cut by about $400 million over the past few years, so the hold-harmless allotment makes up an increasing portion of the overall state allocations. Clearly, this disadvantages states that have grown in population or have increasingly high incidence of child poverty.

So, during the committee-amendment process, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., introduced an amendment to yank out this language from the Harkin-Enzi reauthorization bill. It passed fairly comfortably.

(Small and less-populous states and territories would still get a minimum allocation under the change. Wipe away your tears, Sen. Enzi!)

Most states wouldn't see drastically different allocations, but removing the hold harmless does create some notable winners and losers. Here's a rundown of those states that stand to gain or lose $10 million or more under the proposed change:

WINNERS: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina (surprise!), Texas.
LOSERS: Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania.

Important caveat: These calculations assume Congress doesn't add additional funding to the Title II pot.

So far, this amendment doesn't seem to have garnered much attention. But you can bet your bottom dollar lawmakers from those less-favored states will be fixin' to get mad if this bill moves closer to passage.

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By guest blogger Anthony Rebora

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the independent nonprofit organization that bestows advanced certification on qualifying educators, has named Ronald Thorpe as its new president and CEO.

Thorpe, who is a well-known education advocate, began his career as a private school teacher and administrator working under Theodore R. Sizer, and was later a program director at education foundations. Since 2003, he has been vice president for education at WNET, New York City's public television station. In that position, he helped create and direct the annual Celebration of Teaching & Learning conference.

Thorpe joins the NBPTS at a complex juncture in the organization's history. More than 90,000 teachers nationwide have now attained National-Board certification, and the organization's credentialing process has gained visibility (at least among teachers) at a time when policymakers are fervently seeking news ways to measure teachers' effectiveness and development.

At the same time, however, a number of states have sought to scale back subsidies and incentives for teachers who go through the Board-certification process. To gain standing in current education-policy discussions around teacher effectiveness, meanwhile, the NBPTS is being urged to consider incorporating standardized test scores and other measures of student-learning growth in its criteria for certification.

This post first appeared on Teacher Magazine's Teaching Now blog.

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Teachers' unions are among the groups that have been actively involved in supporting the Occupy Wall Street protests that have sprung up in U.S. cities from coast to coast.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew made an appearance at the (actual) Wall Street protests in New York, and the union was in fact one of the organizers of that Oct. 5 rally, according to UFT superblogger Leo Casey. The union has also donated space and supplies to support the protest.

Boston teachers joined a "grade-in" at the tents of protesters there. The Chicago Teachers' Union, meanwhile, has marched with the protesters, and its house of delegates has endorsed the Occupy movement in the Windy City.

The Occupy Los Angeles coalition put out a statement airing grievances against the superintendent similar to those voiced by United Teachers Los Angeles, whose board recently voted to support the protest there, the Huffington Post reported.

The Wall Street Journal has a broader look at the relationship between labor and the Occupy protests. Unions see opportunities to recruit a new generation of activists and leaders, the story asserts.

Teacher's unions do appear to see this movement's protests as compatible with some of their favored policies, such as progressive income taxes. And their complaints about the influence of private corporations and philanthropies in education dovetail with the basic philosophy of these protests, which contrast the 1 percent of top earners with "the other 99 percent" of workers.

But will this participation help unions advance specific education policies and ideas? That remains to be seen. The Occupy folks have made it clear that they don't support a single, unitary policy agenda. And teachers' unions have increasingly been pressured to offer more solutions, or at least participating in shaping policy, than saying 'no.'

We'll be following these developments with interest.

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A group of Los Angeles parents are threatening to sue the school district unless it begins to conduct teacher evaluations that comply with state law.

In a letter sent from an attorney to the district (hat tip to Eduwonk), the parents argue that the district has effectively avoided its obligations to evaluate teachers under the Stull Act, which set the state's current teacher evaluation parameters.

They cite a portion of the law requiring performance reviews to consider student progress against academic standards, as measured by criterion-based tests where applicable, noting that the district—like others in California—does not do so. And they demand that the district begin doing so, or face a lawsuit.

The letter comes at a particularly sensitive time for labor-management relations. The district and United Teachers Los Angeles are scheduled to negotiate a new contract. UTLA, however, has been adamantly opposed to the use of test-score data in teacher evaluations (and even sued, unsuccessfully, to end a pilot program doing so).

Superintendent John Deasy has said he won't approve a contract that doesn't integrate student achievement.

Howard Blume at The Los Angeles Times has the goods for you. He notes that the letter has the backing of a group called EdVoice, which counts philanthropist Eli Broad as a board member.

The big question, one Blume also raises in his story, is what this portends for education reform in general. Will we see an increasing trend of various groups and parties turning to the judicial system to force changes to education policy, especially where teacher quality is concerned?

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Can you improve parental involvement by making engagement with parents part of a teacher's formal duties? A handful of districts are giving it a try in Idaho, according to an interesting story from the Associated Press.

To comply with a new state law, every district had to implement a differentiated pay plan this school year. Many are using guidelines created by the state, AP reports, including consideration of value-added test information.

But several districts, especially in rural locations, are also basing the performance bonuses on whether the teacher engages meaningfully with his or her students' parents.

The plan in Challis, Idaho, requires teachers to make one "general" contact, like a note sent home, and one "personal" contact, in which a parent is informed about how his or her child is performing, over a three-month period.

The state teachers' union is a bit concerned, noting that parental involvement can be limited by factors outside of teachers' control. It opposes the merit-pay program in general.

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