January 2012 Archives

Question for the White House: Are the teacher proposals President Obama outlined last night new ones, a twist on old ones, or what?

Crack reporter Alyson Klein does a great job outlining the education contours of last night's speech and some of the reaction to it. The teachers' unions, in particular, seemed to like the bit of red meat thrown to them in reference to stopping "teaching to the test."

But what exactly is the administration talking about with this new proposal? According to a summary put out by the White House, it will seek to "comprehensively reform" the profession to make teacher education more selective, reshape tenure, create teacher-career ladders and leadership positions, offer retention incentives in schools, and align pay to responsibilities. That is a lot to take on in one program.

Perhaps the administration means to seek revisions to programs already on the books that appear to get at similar aims. One of them, as Alyson mentions, is the Teacher Incentive Fund, which doles out grants to get states and districts to set up new evaluation and differentiated-pay systems. The Education Department has made changes to this program before and has hinted at doing so again.

Meanwhile, the Teacher Quality Partnerships grant is the main federal teacher education reform grant program. But the Obama administration has proposed folding this into other funding. And House Republicans, led by Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, have introduced an Elementary and Secondary Education Act proposal that would quietly repeal TQP.

Another possibility: The Obama administration put out several proposals to help reform teacher education in last year's budget request. For the most part, they require congressional authorization and/or funding.

We'll keep our eyes peeled for details and be sure to bring them right to you.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A pair of new reports outlines how districts can think about using revised teacher evaluation systems to improve the quality of the teaching force.

The subtext in both reports: It isn't enough to just hire and fire your way to a better teaching corps. Teaching quality should be looked upon as a mutable characteristic that most teachers can and should strive to improve, with the proper supports.

First up is Craig Jerald's paper for the Center on American Progress. In the paper, he outlines two main thrusts of the evaluation system: One focused on recruiting effective teachers and dismissing poor ones, and the other for using on-the-job training to help each teacher improve his or her skills. (I've written about this tension between "summative" and "formative" purposes of evaluations on this blog, too.)

Policymakers arguably have spent too much time on the first point and not enough time on making sure the second element works well, Jerald writes. He outlines some of the latest high-quality research on professional development and suggests ways districts might think about to link these two functions.

Second is the Aspen Institute's Rachel Curtis and Ross Weiner, with this report.

It's probably better described as a template or workbook of sorts, as it asks lots of questions that districts can use to determine who should be involved in setting up the systems, how the goals of the system should be communicated to the pubic, and so forth. Again, though, the focus is on improving teacher skill. From the introduction:

"[T]his guide is organized to help school systems develop evaluation systems that foster
professional growth and improved teacher practice. Meeting this goal cannot be done at the expense of accountability or other goals, but it is done with the understanding that supporting teacher growth and development is the primary purpose to which other
goals must align."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

At Day Two of the U.S. Department of Education teacher-preparation negotiated-rulemaking session, negotiators dealt with a fresh host of issues, including the always-tricky area of scope: whether the Education Department risks overextending its authority in some of its areas.

As with our Day One coverage, I'll attempt here to give you a rundown of the key themes and points of tension. That way, when the proposed rules come out, we'll be able to try to connect the dots between the discussions and the language put out by the department and the negotiators.

If this is all too wonky and detailed for you, I've filed a somewhat broader story for Education Week, which should be up on the website soon.

Without further ado:

Legal scope: Day Two's discussion dealt with the Title II requirements for states to set up assessment systems for identifying "at risk" and "low performing" teacher-preparation programs. Though the law lets states pick the criteria, the department wanted negotiators to consider whether there should be a set of minimum criteria or basic parameters for these assessments.

The agency got some pushback on this issue, with some suggesting that new prescriptions in this area could get dangerously close to overriding, or in any case interfering with states' programs-approval and -accreditation processes.

The Education Department can perhaps be forgiven for wanting some clarity here, though. There is no single, publicly available clearinghouse of state program-approval standards and processes. You have to go to every state to get this information.

Mismatch of federal/state systems: As alluded to above, it has never exactly been clear how the federal Title II system is supposed to coordinate with the state program-approval process.

All those Title II reporting requirements we talked about earlier in the week, after all, are not actually required by law to inform the state assessment or program-approval process. States can choose to use the Title II information for such purposes (and that was the congressional intent in setting up this reporting system), but they very rarely do.

They actually seem to operate in parallel rather than in tandem: Several of the negotiators representing teacher education programs, in fact, brought up instances where state officials advised programs to close for poor performance—but those programs never landed on the state's low-performing list.

Some negotiators said that the current Title II assessments are too blunt—a particular division or program may need to be shuttered, rather than an entire teacher college. (Teacher Beat factual aside: As I look at past HEA reports, it's clear that states can choose to look at the programmatic level, not just the institutional level, in making these designations.)

Assistance vs. accountability: Should the goal of the Title II assessment system be to help offer assistance to low-performing programs or serve as a trigger to shutter them? A negotiator from the District of Columbia school district, Scott Thompson, felt that the two goals aren't incompatible. Just as with teacher evaluations, he said, the systems should help most programs figure out where to do better and also determine which ones really need to have the plug pulled.

Financial aid: The Title II law says that a state can pull its approval if the program is deemed low-performing under the assessment system. (Again, this rarely happens.) Still, the law says that such a program would no longer be permitted to enroll students receiving financial aid.

Negotiators generally agreed that more details in this area are necessary, such as how to define an "enrolled student" and whether to protect students already enrolled in the program from being penalized.

Defining a "high quality" teacher-preparation program: This is the final issue on the table, which negotiators were dealing with this morning. (Other commitments, sadly, prevented me from being able to attend.)

Federal statute says that only "high quality" programs should be permitted to offer TEACH grants, but right now pretty much any institution that wants to offer this aid can do so. The problem is that "high quality" has never been defined by law, so negotiators discussed how this term should be coordinated with the Title II-required assessment system.

After this week, the negotiators won't reconvene until February. In the meantime, the Education Department is supposed to draft rules and send them to the negotiators, and that will serve as the basis of the next go-round of discussion.

With the diversity of opinions shared during the last two days, predicting what ED will put out is going to be tough.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The panelists selected to revamp federal teacher education reporting requirements certainly have their work cut out for them.

They've wrapped up day one of negotiated rulemaking on the requirements in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Even as this item is published, we are starting day two.

This part of federal law is not particularly well known. In brief, Title II calls for states, the federal government and programs that prepare teachers to release "report cards" on the state of teacher preparation based on a variety of factors, particularly pass rates and scale scores on licensing tests. The data requirements differ based on the level of reporting, and there are lots of data points collected—more than 400 for institutions alone.

Any changes the panel considers carry some big implications for teacher education. The U.S. Department of Education hopes to integrate its push for outcomes-based "teacher effectiveness" policies into the teacher preparation sphere through this revamp of the requirements, including consideration of value-added impact data. Most of the current requirements are input-based.

Negotiated rulemaking, or "neg-reg" as it's known in Washington parlance, is a complex process in which a group of panelists come up with draft guidelines for the federal agency. Then, the agency releases a proposed rule for public comment and revision, and ultimately publishes a new, binding final rule.

Let's take a look at the issues on the table.

First, although this week's meetings are just the first day of what will be a several-months-long process, it's worth reviewing the basic mandate. Essentially, the ED wants to discard some of the more obscure pieces of information currently collected under HEA Title II education in favor of more relevant data that takes into account the impact of teacher preparation on candidate effectiveness.

Second, it wants to make sure that only programs deemed "high quality"—a definition never set down in law—can offer TEACH grants, which subsidize tuition for candidates who agree to serve in high-needs schools for four years.

Yesterday's discussion was a bit loosey-goosey at times, so I'll do my best to outline what seemed to be some of the big themes of the Day 1 discussions. Ultimately, they focused on the current Title II reporting system, its flaws, and proposed tweaks to those measures.

Mixed utility: Teacher education reporting requirements were first instituted in the 1998 HEA, with the goal of establishing some national data about where teachers are trained.

In yesterday's rulemaking session, however, the negotiators spent a lot of time weighing the various purposes these reports could be used for. Should they be used for program accountability? To help programs identify strengths and weaknesses so that they can improve their training? Or should they serve as a consumer tool, to help potential teacher candidates, parents, and school districts compare the strengths of various schools and programs?

As one negotiator, Beverly Young of the California State University system, pointed out, data collected for one purpose may not be particularly helpful for another purpose.

Accessibility & Transparency: This point was underscored by Sarah Almy, a negotiator from the Education Trust, a Washington-based advocacy group. She noted that at some level, it doesn't matter how much you tweak the data points if the resulting information is obscured, hard to find, or otherwise not accessible. (The institutional-level reports in particular, are difficult to come by.)

Will negotiators make an effort to emphasize how programs should report, or create standards for dissemination—and can they do that under the scope of current law?

Existing data limitations: Panelists said many of the current reporting requirements are not particularly useful, like the one about whether a program collects resumes as part of the admissions process, because they don't seem linked to a process for creating effective teachers.

An important point was made by Jim Cibulka, the president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. He noted that the research literature on teacher education identifies is pretty sparse on specific attributes of training programs that seem to correlate to improved student achievement. That's obviously something of a problem when you're trying to design a reporting tool that gets at this issue.

Still, Cibulka outlined three discrete features of teacher education, highlighted in a 2010 National Academies research report as being linked to program effectiveness: Candidate qualifications, content knowledge, and clinical experiences. Those seem likely to guide future discussion.

The current reporting does touch on these requirements. But the problem, Cibulka said, is that the way data on these issues are currently collected obscures more than it reveals.

For instance, the HEA statute requires states and programs information on program admissions. But right now, the Education Department only teacher preparation programs to answer "yes" or "no" to questions about whether they have minimum admission requirements or require an interview. They don't actually have to spell out the substance of those requirements.

Another example: Programs are asked to submit "assurances" that they prepare teachers on technology and how to work with diverse populations. Most programs, of course, simply say "yes."

At least a couple of panelists, David Steiner of Hunter College and George Noell of the Louisiana Education Department, suggested revisions in this area. For example, a school could report the average grade-point average of teacher candidates as well as the minimum score, and so on with entrance-test requirements, they said.

Test scores: The HEA requires heavy reporting on licensure test score results by programs. Several panelists opined that such exams, while producing reliable data, aren't particularly valid—that is, they don't capture all that much of what beginning teachers should know and be able to do.

There was also debate about how they are currently used. When the Title II reporting requirements came into effect in 1998, programs only needed to report pass rates on the tests. But soon after, there was a perception that programs were inflating pass rates by making the tests an entry rather than exit requirements of their programs.

This perception of gaming—fair or unfair—prompted changes in the 2008 rewrite of the HEA, which required data broken out by the time frame at which candidates took the test, such as after coursework, or after completing the program. Negotiators had varied opinions about whether this change was an improvement on the original law—or made things even worse.

Also, quite a few negotiators, mostly those representing higher education institutions, pushed for some acknowledgement in the rules of performance-based licensing tests, such as the Teacher Performance Assessment 24 states are now helping to develop and pilot.

Clinical fieldwork: Negotiators just touched on this "black box" element of teacher education, and there will probably be a lot more discussion of it. Cibulka of NCATE said he found many of the current requirements on this topic—such as the number of full-time clinical instructors at each program—unhelpful, and suggested several improvements, which you can see in the list below.

New suggestions: Here's just a sampling of some of the ideas that were thrown out for possible inclusion in new reporting requirements:

• What are the mean and the minimum high school GPA/college GPA/college entrance exam scores, and how do they compare to those of the institution as a whole?
• What is the percentage of minority students enrolled in the program, and how does that compare to the institution as a whole?
• What are the training or qualifications for the selection of supervisors of student teachers?
• What is the graduating GPA of candidates, compared to those in the institution as a whole?
• Does the teacher prep program determine student teaching placements for all candidates?
• What is the protocol for evaluating candidate performance in clinical work?
• Are there formal partnerships with school districts where candidates are placed for clinical experiences?

A few other things worth mentioning: Even on this rulemaking panel, there seems to be a bit of disagreement about the state of teacher preparation and whether it's in drastic need of improvement or is mostly doing an OK job. There were a couple testy exchanges between negotiators on this point.

Likewise, there was an interesting moment at the end of the day when Eric Mann and Katie Hartley, the two current teachers on the panel, recounted their student-teaching experiences. Both said they had little to no supervision in their student-teaching experiences and felt there should have been more accountability on their colleges to oversee and guide their practice.

But two other panelists, both teacher-educators, suggested that these teachers' experiences weren't representative of teacher ed. as a whole—and certainly not of their own institutions.

Clearly, this all leaves a lot of room for debate. And one of the hardest issues hasn't even been discussed yet—whether "value-added" test scores can appropriately be introduced as a new way of gauging teacher preparation programs.

Reaching a "final consensus" on all of the issues is important, however, because of the way negotiated rulemaking works: All the negotiators have to agree in order to commit the Education Department to putting out proposed rules aligned with that consensus.

Otherwise, the Education Department can put out what it wants. And that, one suspects, is a prospect that would be pleasing to no one on the panel.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As you may know, I'm tied up covering teacher-education rulemaking this morning.

Fortunately, State EdWatch's Sean Cavanagh has some important news for you on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's bold attempt to spur teacher-evaluation reform in the state by conditioning state aid on the finalization of such systems.

Sean writes:

As part of his budget plan, Cuomo said that school districts will not be eligible for a boost in funding he's offering unless they have implemented the new teacher-evaluation process by Jan. 17, 2013. (See page 27 of the budget document.)

In order for that to happen, the state and the NYSUT would presumably need to reach an agreement. The governor said he would give the them 30 days to do so, or he will ask the legislature to approve a brand new teacher-evaluation law.

"I believe if we implement this system, the federal government will accept this and will not withdraw our Race to the Top money," Cuomo said in a speech outlining his plan. "The equation is simple at the end of the day--no evaluation, no money."

Read his full item for more.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Hawaii's teachers will vote Thursday on a new, six-year contract that would establish a new teacher-evaluation system, tie pay raises partly to evaluations, and end a 5 percent salary reduction that Gov. Neil Abercrombie enforced last July.

And the labor agreement could potentially help the state make its case to remove some of the conditions that the U.S. Department of Education put on its $75 million Race to the Top award. As colleague Michele McNeil has reported, the state has been in the doghouse with the Education Department for failing to reach agreement with its teachers' union on the shape of a new evaluation system, one of the core promises in its RTT application.

Here's a rundown of what teachers will be asked to vote on in the tentative agreement:

• As of June 30, 2013, the 5 percent wage reduction would be eliminated and salaries restored to 2009 levels.
• On July 1, 2013, a new teacher evaluation system would replace the current system, which reviewed teachers only once every five years.
• Also on July 1, 2013, a new salary schedule would provide annual "step" movements based on a teacher's annual overall performance evaluation.
• Beginning in school year 2012-13, new teachers would serve "six semesters" of probation before receiving tenure. Once they earn tenure, a teacher would be eligible for a $2,500 bonus.

There are still a lot of details left to be fleshed out here, of course. For instance, although the contract stipulates a new teacher-evaluation system would be in place by 2013, it isn't clear specifically what components will make up this system, although Honolulu Civil Beat reports that half will be based on student achievement growth and half on ratings of teacher practices.

The contract would also, apparently, increase the amount of time it takes for a teacher to earn tenure to "six semesters," which works out to three years—up from just one year under the current system.

The pay reforms are also a bit fuzzy, but it sounds like teachers will earn a 1 percent step increase each year if they get an "effective" rating. A base step salary would still be in effect for all teachers, it appears.

We also don't know whether this will help smooth things over with the Education Department. A look at the state's RTT plan and Scope of Work shows that it had planned to take a new evaluation system statewide in 2013-14 and use it for "high stakes" decisions, i.e., salaries, the following year. And its Board of Education was to set policy on the new compensation model by August of this year.

So while the contract seems like a step in the right direction, there's not a lot of wiggle room on timing, especially when it comes to piloting the new evaluation and compensation systems. We'll be following this closely here at Education Week.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On one of the sleeper Elementary and Secondary Education Act issues—within-district fiscal equity—the American Federation of Teachers appears to be hedging its bets.

Quick catch-up for those new to the issue: Before districts can get their share of federal Title I dollars for disadvantaged kids, they have to certify that local spending between high- and low-poverty schools is comparable, which is why this whole issue is better known as "comparability."

Under the current comparability calculation, districts are allowed to exempt teacher salary differentials. The problem is, however, that factors like high turnover in high-poverty schools result in a concentration of novice teachers in such schools—and therefore, less per-pupil funding overall. The resulting disparities can be quite large in dollar terms.

Efforts in 2007 to require districts to account for (and equalize) salary differentials didn't make much of a dent. But the policy landscape has shifted considerably since then, for three reasons:

More data: The U.S. Department of Education has put out an analysis based on the first-ever national data collection of school-level expenditures (including salaries), showing that schools with lots of low-income students tend to get shortchanged on local funding.

New proposals: Civil rights groups have signed on to support a bill to close the "comparability loophole" in federal law, sponsored by Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., in the House and a companion bill by Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Thad Cochran, R-Miss., in the Senate. And a comparability fix was included in the ESEA bill that the Senate education committee recently cleared.

NEA Support: In what's probably the most important signal of shifting winds of all, the National Education Association has signed on in support of revised comparability language. NEA's support was, apparently, garnered by assurances that districts would be discouraged from transferring teachers to achieve comparable spending.

This leaves us with the important question: Where does the American Federation of Teachers stand on comparability nowadays?

The union's basic take is that "it will take more than an accounting rule change" to make progress on equitable funding for students.

In an interview, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that within-district inequities are dwarfed by larger disparities, such as those among districts in the same state. Changing the Title I comparability rule could exacerbate "churn" among schools, as principals seek to balance the costs of their teaching forces, she contended.

"Think about this as Theraflu vs. prevention," she said. "It's like treating a symptom, rather than the long-term problems. When you simply try to mandate one technical fix, and try to force one thing instead of actually addressing the real issues, then you can have unintended consequences."

Creating incentives and improving working conditions to keep senior, experienced teachers in low-income schools is a more promising strategy, she said.

So while the union hasn't formally opposed the ESEA proposals on this issue, it has concerns about them.

It's likely there are other factors at work here, too. Changes to the comparability rule seem likely to affect large, urban districts with lots of schools more than smaller or rural districts—in other words, the exact places where AFT's teachers are located. And comparability raises questions about seniority-based staffing policies, which are still in place in lots of AFT districts.

To be fair to AFT, there's a debate in the research community about how big of an issue intra-district disparities, like comparability, are vs. inter-district disparities, which are generally a function of school-finance formulas.

School-finance expert Bruce Baker writes that "improving within-district comparability of resources across schools is only a very small piece of a much larger equity puzzle. It's a drop in the bucket," and has some data to make his point.

On the other hand, analysts for the Center on American Progress suggest that the problems posed by within-district inequity vary quite a bit from place to place, depending on the size of the district.

Raegen Miller, a senior policy analyst, found that, in California, only 30 percent of the disparities in average teacher salary could be traced to inequities within districts in funding. But in Florida, nearly half these disparities were within-district ones. This may be related to California's proliferation of small districts and Florida's large, county-wide districts, he told me.

All that said, AFT still has a bit of a decision to make on this issue. After all, if one of these federal bills begins to move, the union's choice will become clear: whether to throw its weight behind a comparability fix—or not.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

New York City schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott has lobbed the next volley in an escalating conflict with the teachers' union—and the state department of eudcation—over a new evaluation system.

He plans to convert many schools using the "transformation" School Improvement Grant model— the least aggressive of the U.S. Department of Education's four options—as well as those using the "restart" option, to a "turnaround" model that would require schools to replace at least half their teachers.

In a letter today to John B. King Jr., the state commissioner of education, Walcott writes that the district plans to use the rehiring process to screen teachers' competencies, essentially allowing for an end run around the issue of teacher evaluation. (Thanks to GothamSchools for the link to the letter.)

"As a requirement of the turnaround model, the [city education] department is committing in these schools to measure and screen existing staff using rigorous, school-based competencies, and to rehire a significant portion of them using this criteria. We believe that this requirement is achievable within the DOE's current collective bargaining agreement with the UFT," he writes.

The district believes this shift will allow it to meet the criteria of the SIG grant, which does not require teacher evaluation as part of the "turnaround" model. (Evaluations are required under the "transformation" model.)

King recently decided to withhold SIG funding from New York City, and other school districts, because they have not struck an agreement with their teachers' unions on the details of such a system.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew clearly thinks that the switch will not pass legal muster. "As far as the 'turnaround' model goes, the mayor knows perfectly well that under state law these kinds of initiatives have to be negotiated with the union," he said in a statement.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg clearly supports this step; he referred to it in his "State of the City" address, in which he also proposed a plan to give the best teachers up to $20,000 in bonuses. More coverage of the speech and its fallout can be found at GothamSchools.

No word yet on how Commissioner King will respond to this latest turn of events.

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

The U.S. Department of Education has selected the panelists who will write new regulations for the reporting requirements for teacher preparation programs.

The requirements are housed in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Rewriting them to make them more outcomes-based is one of the steps in the Education Department's policy prescriptions for teacher education.

(See Education Week coverage here and here for details on the plan, and here for more information on what kind of information is currently collected under Title II.)

There are a couple of interesting picks here, including folks with a lot of experience with value-added information, one of three factors the Department proposes for inclusion in Title II reporting. (Information on candidate placement and surveys of school districts who hire candidates are the other two.)

They include a representative from the Cal State system, which uses value-added for internal improvement efforts; a representative from Louisiana, one of only two states that currently use value-added methods for tracking the effectiveness of teacher education programs; a teacher from Ohio with experience using value-added data; and representatives from the National Education Association, Teach For America, and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, all of which have endorsed the ideas in the Education Department's teacher education plan.

The first negotiated-rulemaking session will be held next week, and, of course, we'll be there to bring you all the details.

Without further ado, the panel members are:

Eric Mann, student teacher, Sandpoint High School, Idaho;
Katie Hartley, middle school math teacher and value-added specialist; Miami East Junior High, Ohio;
Segun Eubanks, director, teacher quality department, NEA;
Joseph Pettibon, associate vice president for academic services, Texas A&M University;
Julie Karns, vice president for finance, Rider University;
George Noell, executive director for strategic research and analysis, Louisiana Department of Education;
Glenn DuBois, chancellor of Virginia's community colleges;
David Steiner, dean, Hunter College School of Education;
David Prasse, dean, school of education, Loyola University Chicago;
Meredith Curley, dean, college of education, University of Phoenix;
Cindy O'Dell, chair, education department, Salish Kootenai College;
Leontyne Lewis, dean of education, Fayetteville State University;
Beverly Young, assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs, California State University System;
Heather Harding, vice president of research and public affairs, Teach For America;
Jim Cibulka, president, National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education;
Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality, the Education Trust;
Scott Thompson, director of teacher effectiveness strategy, District of Columbia Public Schools; and
Sophia McArdle, U.S. Department of Education.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As usual, ace Politics K-12 reporter Alyson Klein does a great job outlining the contours of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act proposals recently put out by House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline. And as usual, I will follow in her footsteps to offer analysis of the bill's teacher-quality provisions, which would make some big changes to provisions to the current No Child Left Behind. Here we go!

Teacher Evaluation

The bill would require school districts to put new teacher-evaluation systems into place (or to adopt a statewide model), and would give parents the "right to know" about evaluation results for their child's teachers.

This is a bit of a surprise, because it arguably expands federal teacher quality oversight, something that is certainly not in vogue among Republicans these days. Kline's counterpart in the Senate, Lamar Alexander, pushed (with help from the teachers' unions) to make teacher evaluation an allowable use of district funds, but not a requirement, in the bill that passed out of the Senate education committee late last year.

"Highly Qualified Teachers"

These ESEA requirements are gone from the draft.

Teacher-Quality Funding

Sleeper story alert! The bill makes some major changes to how federal teacher-quality funds are allocated. First, it does away with the "hold harmless" in the Title II state teacher quality formula grant, just as the Senate's ESEA bill does; and furthermore, it would base each state's allocation on a 50-50 split of population size and child-poverty level, rather than the current 35-65 split. This stands to have a dramatic impact on state-level allocations, and stands to benefit states that have grown in population.

Secondly, the bill would limit to 10 percent the portion of each district's Title II allocation that could be spent on class size reduction. The teachers' unions, it's safe to say, are going to hate this limitation. (Currently, districts on average spend about 38 percent of their Title II allocations on class-size reductions.)

Third, the bill would reserve 18 percent of the Title II pot to create a second program, under which states would competitively award funds to districts for professional development, differentiated-pay plans, expansion of alternative certification routes, mentoring, teacher-residency programs, and other activities. This program would effectively take the place of existing competitive teacher programs, including the Teacher Quality Partnership program in the Higher Education Act.

Other Changes

The bill would transfer Troops-to-Teachers to the Department of Defense and make alternations to the eligibility criteria.

The bill requires districts to address "disparities in the rates of low-income and minority students" taught by ineffective teachers. (Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for the catch!)

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel is taking a beating from some members for daring to pen an op-ed piece with Wendy Kopp, the president of Teach For America, in which they agree on some very (repeat, very!) general principles for improving the teaching force.

It's brought some criticism from Teacher blogger Anthony Cody and Daily Kos' Ken Bernstein, among others. Their criticism implies that Van Roekel has been compromised or co-opted by TFA in helping craft the op-ed. It points out that NEA's governing body rebuked TFA last summer, and recently an internal NEA commission posed teacher-training recommendations that appear to be at odds with TFA's own training regime. Even "Save Our Schools" hero actor Matt Damon and his mother have gotten in on the action.

Over at Intercepts, union-watcher and critic Mike Antonucci is enjoying the spectacle with a tub of popcorn (and a Snuggie?).

I decided to check in with Van Roekel himself to get his take on the situation. He told me in no uncertain terms that NEA and TFA still have a "fundamental difference" in belief on how teachers should be trained. (NEA wants a yearlong apprenticeship, while TFA's model allows its teachers to become instructors of record after their summer training.)

Van Roekel said that he and Kopp also disagree on aims: Where TFA makes producing future leaders a priority, NEA thinks that a two-year commitment won't, over the long run, help to build the teaching profession.

Those positions, by the way, are entirely consistent with what Van Roekel and Kopp discussed back in September.

NEA remains involved with the Coalition for Teaching Quality, which supports changes to the "highly qualified teacher" standard in ESEA that would have drastic consequences for TFA, if enacted. So bottom line, it's hard to argue seriously that NEA has changed its approach to teacher training.

That said, Van Roekel said he found some things to admire in TFA, including its recruiting strategies and its yearlong mentoring support for its teachers. And he said that the union still thinks that using value-added measures as one component of looking at teacher training holds promise, because it's being done in the aggregate, not to rate individual teachers.

When I asked Van Roekel if he was surprised by the reaction in the blogosphere, he said he was "a little taken aback that the criticism mixed and matched things." At the same time, he added, he appreciates the dialogue, and says he's willing to work with anyone who shares a commitment to improving teacher quality.

"I've said many times this is way too important for me to talk only to people I agree with at all times," he said. "The list becomes too short."

And what of Teach For America? Well, Kopp penned a missive to TFA staffers to offer her take. LIke Van Roekel, she seems to be calling for nuance. Here's a selection:

"We will continue exploring ways of strengthening our own program and also share the NEA's view that we should encourage new approaches and pathways for developing the diverse teaching force we need. Still, I believe we should proceed with caution. The studies that have been done on existing residency models, including Boston's pioneering urban teacher residency and Tennessee's adaptation of it, do not show positive impact on student achievement within teachers' initial two years. I also worry that such a resource-intensive approach may not be possible on a very broad scale, and our own research shows that the longer up-front teaching commitments required by residency models will turn away some of the diverse, highly sought-after individuals we need in our classrooms.

In joining together to call for greater investment in teacher recruitment and development, and in high standards for teacher preparation, the NEA and Teach For America weren't throwing under the rug some lingering questions we have about each other's approaches but were instead working to build support for areas where we strongly agree. Implicitly, we were acknowledging the need to move beyond the too often rancorous and misinformed debate about 'traditional' versus 'alternative' approaches to teacher preparation and to embrace a shared mission of continuous improvement."

What do you make of it, readers?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's a ton of new data on the state of teacher education beginning to come out, and it's ripe for analysis, if—and it's a big if—you know where to look.

The 2008 rewrite of the Higher Education Act changed many of the reporting requirements for teacher colleges, which are housed in Title II of that law. (See the embedded sidebar in this story for a summary of those changes.)

Now, those requirements have begun to generate data, beginning with the U.S. Department of Education's newly released report on the teacher preparation and credentialing in the U.S., and filtering down to states' and individual institutions' reports. Let's look at all of these in turn.

The new report out this week is ED's national report required under Title II. (It's supposed to be annual, but the agency said that the transition to the new requirements required it to smush together data collected in 2008, 2009, and 2010.) Even then, the 2010 data in this report is uneven because not all states and programs were able to provide the new information.

Nevertheless, there are some interesting new stats in here on, for instance, the teacher-preparation pipeline. (ED urged caution in interpreting 2010 data because of the aforementioned uneven reporting):

• In 2010, 71 percent of teacher-preparation programs were "traditional," 21 percent were "alternative" programs based at teacher colleges, and 8 percent were "alternative" programs not based at higher education institutions.
• A total of about 724,000 were enrolled in teacher-preparation programs in 2008-09, with 89 percent at traditional programs, 6 percent at university-based alternative routes, and 5 percent at nonuniversity-based alternative routes.
• Alternative programs, both in and outside of higher education, were more likely than traditional programs to require a minimum undergraduate GPA for admission to a postsecondary program, but less likely to require it for an undergraduate program.
• Alternative programs in 2008-09 required 725 to 900 hours of student teaching, while traditional programs required about 514. (Of course, states defined these aspects differently.)

New information on some continued requirements: States identified 38 programs as "low performing" or "at risk" in 2010; and in 2008-09, pass rates on licensing tests averaged 96 percent for traditional programs and 97 percent for alternative ones.

Arguably even more useful are the state report cards, also required under Title II, which are submitted every fall. The newest ones, from 2011, have not yet been posted on ED's Title II website, nor have all states made them available yet.

A good representative example of what we'll ultimately be able to learn from the new requirements can be found in California's report, which is available from its credentialing board.

The reports contain information on teacher preparation and alternate-route programs' admission requirements for every institution in each state. And in one of the big sleeper stories of the HEA rewrite, states must now list the average scale scores on licensing tests, not just the passing rates on those tests.

Why is this an important distinction? Take a look at California's report. Average passing rates on the exams are quite high, usually in the 80 percent to 100 percent range. But for almost every test here, the average scale score is higher than the exam's cutoff score. That means the state has set the passing bar on these tests generally quite a bit below what the average test-taker scores on the test.

Finally, HEA requires the institutional-level report cards, which each higher education institution by law must report annually. Here's an example of one from Washington state. Though they're supposed to be made publicly available, they're often hard to find on the institutions' websites. (Kansas, helpfully, puts all its institutions' reports in one place.)

Institutions were supposed to set numerical goals for training teachers in shortage subjects and fields—for instance, increasing the number of special educators trained by 20 percent, or helping three new secondary science teachers get credentialed. In the institutional-level reports, you'll find the goals each institution set and whether or not they met them.

There's lots of fodder for analyses. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

•For which subjects, and to what extent, are states low-balling their teacher-test cut scores?
•Are institutions responding meaningfully in their goal-setting, taking into account the needs of local school districts?
•Which programs have the most detailed admissions requirements?

I'll certainly be looking into some of these questions. Will you?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend