February 2012 Archives

Federal negotiators have pushed back on the U.S. Department of Education's attempts to tie together the Title II accountability system for teacher preparation with eligibility for the TEACH grant program. (The two policies are housed in different federal statutes.)

TEACH is a grant program that subsidizes tuition for candidates who agree to teach in high-needs fields in low-income schools for four years.

States must identify "high quality" programs for the purpose of TEACH, and the Education Department has also proposed making that label the top tier of a four-tiered system states would be required to use to classify their own programs under Title II of the Higher Education Act.

But a handful of negotiators argued that the definition should be strictly limited to the TEACH grant programs. They contend that the term is too loaded; usurps states' prerogative to define their own categories for the purpose of Title II; locks states into the designation; and, probably most importantly of all, would potentially bar too many institutions from receiving TEACH grants.

When it comes to addressing the important needs identified in the TEACH grants, "I'm not sure why ... only those that are the crème de la crème of teacher preparation get to qualify," said David Prasse, the dean of Loyola University of Chicago's school of education. "If you're [deemed] sufficient, if you're satisfactory, why would we eliminate those institutions from eligibility?"

There's now a proposal from some negotiators to separate the Title II classification system from the TEACH "high quality" designation. Under TEACH, those institutions scoring at the top two categories on Title II would meet the designation, and be eligible for a grant.

But that's raised red flags for other negotiators, who argue it's too similar to the current system, under which few programs have been identified as low performing.

"You run a risk of perpetuating a fundamental problem. In my judgment, given the choice between effective and ineffective, a state will plunk a lot of institutions in the effective category, and that's it, end of story," said David Steiner, the dean of the Hunter College school of education.

And the Education Department itself seems to have similar qualms. "We have a concern that so few schools are designated as 'low performing' and 'at risk', and that having such a broad category of 'effective' and 'distinguished' would be too broad," said Sophia McArdle, the ED's representative on the panel.

Ow. My head hurts.

We'll see what ED comes back with tomorrow.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

Negotiators trying to hash out new federal regulations for teacher-preparation programs seem to have hit the first major stumbling block on the road: Should the evaluation of teacher education be based primarily on output measures, or should it be coupled with measures of "inputs," like how much student-teaching candidates receive?

The U.S. Department of Education's draft proposal, which negotiators are marking up this week, proposed three new outcomes-based measures, on top of whatever criteria states currently use to evaluate programs as required by the Higher Education Act. The measures are employment outcomes, student outcomes, and customer-satisfaction surveys. They would be used as part of a four-tiered system for rating teacher preparation programs as "low-performing," "at-risk," "satisfactory," or "high quality."

On Monday and again this morning, some negotiators criticized those measures as too narrow. A caucus of negotiators, led by the National Education Association's Segun Eubanks, have proposed three new measures that would be used to judge programs: candidates' content and pedagogical knowledge; quality of field experiences; and exit qualifications based on performance exams.

"If we are going to use these output standards to determine quality of programs, then these additional measures are absolutely essential," Eubanks said. "You could in fact determine your teacher ed. program is failing without ever visiting an institution, without ever interviewing a graduate, simply by looking at these mathematical formulas. ... We've been down this road with teacher-preparation programs and even AYP."

Qualitative data of the sort the caucus is calling for are collected in some form or fashion as part of the Title II state and institutional report cards. But remember, those data don't actually inform the designation of program quality.

The input proposal hasn't gone over that well with other negotiators, who say that adding a bunch of these factors would potentially muddy the waters on teacher-preparation effectiveness.

"The outputs are going to outweigh the inputs no matter how high caliber they are," said Thalia Nawi, the director of the Denver Teacher Residency. "I'm interested in whether a teacher can advance student learning, and I think that's where we need to sit here in terms of reporting."

And David Steiner, the dean of Hunter College's school of education in New York and another negotiator, believes they'd also prove to be unworkable.

"It's just inappropriate to be able for a state to judge whether several thousand programs, at several hundred schools of education, inculcate in students a "love of learning,' " he said. "It's not about it being difficult, it's about the misappropriation of it into a realm that I don't think is capable of doing it well."

Is there a compromise on the horizon? Stay tuned as the caucus returns to the negotiating table. Watch this item for updates.

UPDATED, 12:21 p.m.: The negotiators agreed to incorporate a fourth required indicator for classifying programs. This indicator would require states to weigh either accreditation or a state program-approval that takes the three proposed input criteria into account.

UPDATED: 1:50 p.m. Or maybe not. A few negotiators now are pushing to prevent states from making the fourth, input-based indicator the predominant weight in the performance system. Stay tuned.

UPDATED: 2:41 p.m. The caucus has reconvened (again) and proposes that no program be deemed "satisfactory" or "high quality" if they don't get a satisfactory rating on the student-outcomes portion of the program evaluation. They also deleted teacher retention as an employment-outcome measure. How will this go over with negotiators? Discussion is resuming now.

UPDATED 2:52 p.m. Halleluiah. The negotiators have tentatively agreed to this change.

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A set of draft federal regulations under discussion this week proposes requiring states to classify their teacher-preparation programs into four categories, from low- to high-performing, based in part on outcomes indicators such as surveys of graduates and school districts; teacher placement and retention rates; and student-achievement results.

The draft would also restrict states to permitting only those programs scoring at the highest level to offer federal TEACH grants, which subsidize training for candidates who agree to serve in high-needs fields.

Though still preliminary, the draft gives the clearest sense to date of how the U.S. Department of Education envisions refashioning the reporting and accountability requirements for teacher education housed in the Higher Education Act—one of the pieces of a comprehensive policy proposal for teacher education unveiled last fall.

The draft is a product of the negotiated-rulemaking process. Under this process, negotiators selected by the Education Department can alter the draft, but by the end of the rulemaking process—which continues through March—they must all agree on its format. If they don't, the department can issue its own rules. (See prior EdWeek coverage of this rulemaking here, here, and here.)

In essence, the draft would unite the TEACH grants with the federally required reporting under Title II of the Higher Education Act, two areas that are currently not joined by law.

Title II requires all states to issue report cards on teacher preparation consisting of dozens of indicators, including licensing-test scores, and to identify "at-risk" and "low-performing" programs using a set of state-defined criteria. Some states have never identified any of their teacher-preparation programs as such, while other states have permitted such institutions to offer TEACH grants, even though, by law, they are only supposed to go to "high-quality" programs.

The draft would require states to classify programs in one of four categories: "low-performing," "at-risk," "satisfactory," and "high-quality."

Their classification decision would be based on data generated from three new outcome indicators, in addition to the current state-chosen indicators. The outcome indicators include:

• Student learning outcomes, such as growth in achievement as measured by state standardized tests; alternate measures like student-learning objectives; or results from teacher evaluations;
• Customer satisfaction survey outcomes, based on surveys of graduating teachers and employers of those teachers; and
• Employment outcomes, based on the teacher placement and retention rates.

It's worth noting that these requirements would, to some extent, reintroduce the concept of program rankings or classifications. Title II accountability requirements, first instituted in 1998, required rankings of institutions based on passing rates on licensing tests, but those rankings were dropped from the 2008 rewrite of the HEA.

Of particular interest, programs would need to be nationally accredited in order to receive the "high-quality" designation for the purpose of receiving a TEACH grant; only about 900 of the nation's approximately 1,400 teacher preparation programs are so accredited.

The regulations also say that if a state withdraws program approval from a "low-performing" program, then that program could no longer receive federal professional-development funding, enroll students receiving federal financial aid, and would have to disclose its status on its website. But few—if any—states have chosen to use Title II reporting to inform program-approval or closure decisions, a state function.

As for the state and institution "report cards" required under the law, draft changes to the template would eliminate a number of data points not required by statute, but expand the reporting to include the minimum and median GPA, SAT, and ACT scores of candidates, and the median GPA for program completers.

Watch this blog item for updates as reaction comes in this week from the negotiators.

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New York City will release to news outlets tomorrow "value added" reports that purport to estimate a teacher's impact on his or her students' standardized test scores—an action certain to thrust discussion of these measures into the public eye once again, and one that also raises big questions about journalism ethics.

The city teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, has doggedly tried to prevent such a release. But its last legal defense fell last week, when the state's supreme court declined to hear the union's appeal to a ruling requiring such a release under open-records laws—with teachers' names attached.

That means that it will be up to individual news outlets in the state to make a determination about how, and under what conditions, they will use this information or make it available.

This is a more complicated question than you might think. If they do choose to make the information available, with teachers' names attached, will there be disclosures about the limitations of these data? Will it include margins of error around the results? The Shanker Institute's Matthew DiCarlo has an interesting discussion about many of these factors.

Stepping into the fray, seemingly as a preventive measure, is Bill Gates. He penned an op-ed in The New York Times that calls publicly revealing individual teachers' scores "a big mistake."

"Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming," Gates writes in the piece.

This is an important development on several accounts. Mr. Gates, through the foundation that bears his name, has been supportive of the use of value-added. His Measures of Effective Teaching project shows that such measures are generally predictive of how teachers will do in other classrooms. (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also underwrites coverage of industry and innovation in Education Week.)

Baseline predictivity, of course, is a different question altogether from whether these things should be used for teacher evaluation, and at what weight. Though the Gates Foundation hasn't yet released its prototype tool, Gates has indicated he supports value-added use to some degree in these systems.

The letter, though, really bangs on the drum on coupling such measures with observations and coaching to help teachers improve specific skills. You could argue, as does Dana Goldstein, that this is evidence of a recent shift in Gates' thinking about teacher evaluations. To me, the situation seems more an awareness that value-added information can be used wisely or poorly, and that while that divide is still blurry and murky, some lines may have to be drawn given recent events. (Insert your tired metaphor here: Genie out of the bottle, Frankenstein's monster, etc.)

Of course, as Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk fame points out, there still are many more policy details that need to be fleshed out. Even if you don't agree with publishing these ratings, is there ever a circumstance in which such information should be made public? It's worth noting, for instance, that under No Child Left Behind, parents already have a right to know about the qualifications of their child's teachers (wonks, see Sec. 1111(h)6). Should evaluation results fall under similar requirements?

New York's teacher-data reports have had a very complicated life. Originally created under an agreement with the UFT, they were supposed to be used only by principals and teachers for improvement purposes, not for any kind of formal accountability purpose. Then, former Chancellor Joel Klein decided to use the information as part of the tenure decisions; and furthermore, the city's department of education decided that the data fell under open-records requests, both of which brought about lawsuits by the UFT.

Finally, there's another aspect worth bringing up here. Now that newspapers are getting this information, what's incumbent on them to consider as they choose whether to release it? What ethical issues are at play?

As one who writes about teachers, I can attest that when The Los Angeles Times did its value-added project last year, which included releasing teacher names and scores, it caused a lot of hand-wringing among education reporters in general. And I don't think there is a definite consensus yet about how to handle this topic moving forward, either. Columbia School of Journalism's LynNell Hancock had a story about these issues. She reported that only one New York outlet, GothamSchools, had pledged not to publish the scores with names attached.

Others, like the Gray Lady herself, appear to be moving forward. The New York Times will permit teachers to comment on their scores, which will appear alongside the data.

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Even as there are more and more novice teachers in the ranks of the profession, states' teacher induction policies are generally piecemeal, contends a new report by the New Teacher Center.

The report by the Santa Cruz, Calif-based group, which works to help districts institute induction systems, is billed as the first comprehensive examination of states' teacher-induction policies. States were reviewed against 10 standards, which include such factors as how mentors are selected and trained, induction program delivery, and whether there is dedicated funding for the mentoring.

Among the group's findings:

• Though 27 states require some form of teacher induction, only 11 require it for two or more years.
• States are much less likely to require induction for administrators; only 17 states require it to some degree.
• Twenty-nine states state who is eligible to serve as a mentor teacher, with criteria generally based on holding a professional license and years of experience. Fewer require demonstration of teaching effectiveness;
• Only nine states' policies specify the following three delivery criteria: minimum contact hours between mentor and teacher, the collection of data on teacher practices based on standards, and classroom observation; and
• In 2010-11, 17 states provided dedicated funding for induction.

The report acknowledges that the presence or absence of these standards in state policy doesn't necessarily mean that states and districts will or won't have a good induction program. But it asserts that those states that have a clear roadmap in policy are more likely to ensure that new teachers receive on-the-job help.

There's a lot more detail in the report, so check it out.

It's interesting to note that many of the report's findings parallel the teacher-evaluation discussion. For instance, the report notes that state policies are often very unspecific about content or delivery of training for mentor teachers. Teachers' unions have raised similar concerns about the principals and other observers who are to perform formal observations for the purposes of teacher evaluation.

The kind of mentoring NTC envisions is not all that different in theory from evaluations. Both systems include observations keyed to a teaching framework and the sharing of feedback with teachers, with the main difference being that evaluation carries stakes and induction doesn't.

More funding for induction could be a heavy lift in this economy, especially given that research has found that it takes more than two years for high-quality induction to have an impact on student achievement. Costs include the training, release time for mentor teachers, and the hiring of replacements.

For my two cents, this review raises a lot of cost-benefit questions for policymakers and key supporters of induction, including teachers' unions. Where should induction fall in the list of budget priorities? Is preserving and strengthening these programs the role of states or districts? How should it be weighed in comparison to other budget items, such as professional development, curricula, and salaries?

Comments section is open!

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Wondering what the U.S. Department of Education has in mind for teacher-quality programs in its budget request? Here's a cheat sheet of the major themes—though keep in mind that the chances of any of this happening lie in the hands of appropriators.

Also, make sure to check out Alyson Klein's broader look at the budget request.

The new $5 billion program: Probably the biggest news to come out of the budget is a proposed one-shot, $5 billion competitive grant program to reform schools of education, teacher professional development, teacher pay, and certification. That's about all we know at the moment. The Obama administration is holding a press conference tomorrow about this initiative.

The Title II set-aside: Title II is the massive $2.5 billion annual formula grant that nearly all districts receive funds through. Over the last couple of funding cycles, appropriators have reserved a fraction of this for a competitive grant program. It was more or less created to allow programs that lost their earmarks, like Teach For America, the National Writing Project, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, to recoup some federal funding. Now, the administration proposes raising this from just 1.5 percent of the Title II pot to 25 percent of the fund, or some $600 million. About $80 million of this amount would also be reserved for science and math teacher training.

Program consolidations: Much of the budget request reiterates the administration's long-standing push to fold a number of different programs into three teacher-quality competitive grants. The administration has proposed this idea before, but it's never gone anywhere with Congress.

Teacher education reform: These proposals are the same as last year's budget request. They would replace the TEACH grant program with a $190 million Presidential Teaching Fellows program. Under this initiative, states would grant $10,000 to candidates who attend selective teacher education programs, and would also allow them to recognize "master teachers" with a portable credential. More in the department's budget justifications here.

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The U.S. Education Department did ask the 10 states receiving waivers from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind) to provide more clarity about their plans to institute teacher- and principal-evaluation systems. But in many cases, they remain promises, at best.

And as we know from the Race to the Top states of Hawaii and New York, promises can be really difficult to keep, especially when it comes to the accelerated timelines called for in these documents: adoption of evaluation-system guidelines by the end of this school year, pilot by the 2013-14 school year, full implementation by the end of the 2014-15 school year.

In sum, reading over the Education Department's peer-review comments and the revised applications, many of the unanswered questions about how this is going to work are looming.

Let's take a bit of a look at some of the applications. The Education Department's peer reviewers felt that the Massachusetts plan, for instance, didn't put enough emphasis on connecting student growth to evaluation outcomes or aligning professional development to the system. In response, the state provided information on the implementation guides it's providing to districts to help coordinate professional development.

Georgia and Minnesota were asked to provide more information on how teacher reviews would factor into personnel decisions. Georgia assured the department that its board of education's authority in this area is broad; Minnesota said its teacher-evaluation work group would provide "guidance" about what districts should do if teachers were not making "adequate progress" on improvement.

States that have already passed laws or regulations regarding evaluations were also asked for more information. Reviewers questioned, for instance, whether Indiana could scale up a pilot evaluation program from just six districts to the entire state in a short period of time.

Collective bargaining states, where procedural details and sometimes the format of evaluations themselves remain to be bargained locally, would appear to bring even more challenges.

"New Jersey provided a comprehensive plan for developing teacher- and principal-evaluation guidelines; however, there are concerns about timeline and complexity of implementation across 600 school districts," reads the summary document from the department on the peer-review comments.

That's a pretty diplomatic way to put it. Consider that a state teachers' union official and Gov. Chris Christie, who's pushing hard on the new evaluations, have spent most of the last week calling for each other's resignation, as just one reason why this might prove more than a little difficult in the Garden State.

In Minnesota, the original plan did not address "the challenge districts face in negotiating collective bargaining agreements that are consistent with the forthcoming guidelines," the peer reviewers said.

So while there are more details now about timelines and plans and so forth, states are promising a lot of follow-through here. There are a ton of moving parts to keep track of. And as with the Race to the Top, it remains to be seen how the Education Department will step in regarding states that do not manage to meet their timelines and commitments.

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Could teacher evaluations begin to offer us the best portrait yet of what instruction actually looks like in America's classrooms? And what changes might such information spur in teacher preparation and on-the-job training?

Those are implications raised by a couple of different papers looking at teacher evaluations. I've written about them on this blog before, but only from the technical aspects of the systems. In reviewing the reports again, it strikes me that they also have a lot to say about instructional quality—some of which seems frankly troubling.

First up is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's most recent release from its Measures of Effective Teaching study. As part of the study, observers scored thousands of taped teacher lessons against a bunch of different teaching frameworks.

The key data are in the charts on Pages 26-7. In essence, no matter what framework was used, teachers got higher scores on procedural tasks like planning and behavior management, but relatively low scores on things like "analysis and problem solving," "using investigation/problem-based approaches," "student participation in making meaning and reasoning," and "relevance to history and current events."

Second, the Consortium on Chicago School Research recently released final results from that city's pilot implementation of the Danielson Framework for Teaching and found similar results. Here, too, teachers generally scored lower on the domains of "using questioning and discussion techniques" and "engaging students in learning" than on managing the classroom. (See Page 14 of the report.)

It's worth pointing out, by the way, that the Chicago study also found that principals were not much better at using these techniques than teachers: They struggled to ask questions to elicit good information from teachers on their practice during the post-evaluation conferences.

The findings would appear to highlight some fairly consistent weaknesses in instruction and raise big question marks for teacher and leadership preparation—especially since the common-core state standards call for teachers to help students master precisely these kinds of higher-order reasoning and analytical skills.

Most educators in our field would agree that teachers should enter the classroom with a good repertoire of pedagogical techniques. Equally important, principals should know how to get appropriate assistance for a teacher who isn't quite up to snuff.

There's room for other interpretations in these findings, of course, such as whether the No Child Left Behind Act's focus on basic-skills tests has shifted the focus of instruction. We do know that the NCLB law has caused changes in teacher practices, but we don't know all that much about what the instructional process actually looks like in most places.

(Education Week receives Gates grant support. )

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The American Federation of Teachers' executive council unanimously voted today to endorse Barack Obama for U.S. President.

While this endorsement was never really in question given the lack of other Democratic candidates (both of the national teachers' unions have historically strongly supported Democrats), it does remain to be seen how the 1.5 million-member union plans to get teachers out on the ground to canvass in support of Obama's reelection.

Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, has supported "labor management collaboration," true. But let's not forget that this is the same president who endorsed the Central Falls, R.I., firing of AFT teachers, conceived of the Race to the Top program, which is deeply unpopular among many AFT members, and whose administration has also hinted at other areas of disagreement with AFT on specific policies, such as seniority-based layoff policies. And the administration is gung-ho on the issue of within-district financial equity, while AFT is still on the fence about proposed changes.

AFT President Randi Weingarten seemed to nod at some of those disagreements in a statement put out by the union.

"While we have not agreed with every decision President Obama has made, he shares our deep commitment to rebuilding the middle class and ensuring everyone has an opportunity to achieve the American dream," she said.

Meanwhile, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association voted to endorse Obama at its 2011 Representative Assembly, in Chicago. That endorsement came with a degree of hand wringing, too. In fact, union delegates there had to fend off a proposal to delay the endorsement vote.

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Arizona lawmakers are scheduled to begin debating a host of bills today that would, among other things, prohibit collective bargaining for public employees and make it even more difficult for unions to deduct money that could go towards lobbying, the Associated Press reports.

Arizona's legislature is dominated by Republicans at the moment, so there's a distinct possibility that the measures could pass. While not a required-bargaining state, Arizona school districts can choose to bargain collectively with unions if they want.

Last year, Ohio lawmakers passed a law to outlaw collective bargaining in the state. And Wisconsin Republicans pushed through a bill to limit teacher bargaining to wages, and even then all increases would need to be indexed to inflation. Both efforts faced massive resistance from unions, and the public: the Ohio measure was repealed in a ballot initiative, and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin appears headed toward a recall election.

Elsewhere, AP reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are also considering doing away with collective bargaining and automatic dues deductions from workers' paychecks.

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