April 2012 Archives

Four teachers have been announced as the first recipients of the Fishman Prize from the New Teacher Project (TNTP), a teacher-training group. They'll each be awarded $25,000 and get the chance to participate in a summer internship with the organization.

Before you say, "not another teacher contest," this one is interesting because TNTP has designed it with the idea of spreading effective teaching practices. The summer residency program—designed so the winning teachers don't miss any class time—will involve working with other teachers to improve technique and producing a paper to be published by TNTP. Shira Fishman, a 2011 District of Columbia teacher of the year for whom the contest is named, will be on hand for the six-week internship.

The winners are:

• Katie Lyons, a 6th-9th grade literacy and social studies teacher at National Teachers Academy in Chicago;
• James Irish, an 8th grade math teacher at KIPP Central City Academy in New Orleans;
• Leslie Ross, an 9th grade biology teacher at Ben L. Smith High School in Greensboro, N.C.; and
• Whitney Henderson, a 7th grade writing teacher at KIPP Central City Academy in New Orleans.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Hannah Rose Sacks

Starting this fall, Mississippi's Ocean Springs High School will offer a two-year academic track for students interested in teaching as a profession, reports WLOX-TV.

The program, Teacher Academy, provides firsthand experience and skills-based learning opportunities to prepare students for a teaching career. The objective is to better prepare students so they not only enter the teaching profession, but remain long-term educators, according to the State Secondary Teacher Academy.

A framework document cites Mississippi's projected demand for elementary, secondary, and community college teachers greatly exceeding the number of students enrolled in teacher-preparation programs as the motivation to attract more students to the profession.

Teacher Academy is expecting to:

• Recruit high-quality high school students for the teaching profession.
• Give qualified high school students an opportunity to begin a career path to teaching.
• Provide a framework for developing solid partnerships with area institutions of higher education and offer new options for the district's students.

The program will allow students the opportunity to shadow and assist teachers. Academy enrollees will also learn some of the fundamental skills required for teaching, including lesson-planning, in addition to the two-year curriculum.

The curriculum covers three major areas of study: Teachers as Professionals; Principles of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment; and the Learning Environment.

According to the academy's framework document, the program is based on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Praxis standards, and the Mississippi education department's Subject Area Testing Program, as well as college-readiness and technology standards.

Entrance to the Teacher Academy will involve a selection process that includes an evaluation of students' academic and behavioral records, reports WLOX-TV.

Posted by Hannah Sacks at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Although neither of the teachers' unions is crazy about efforts nationally to undo the weight given to seniority in various personnel decisions, the question seems to be emerging as a particular issue in cities and states with American Federation of Teachers affiliates.

This may be a function of AFT's tilt toward urban districts, some of which have been quite hard hit by the economy compared with the more suburban locales served by the National Education Association. But in any case, two new examples crossed my desk this morning.

First, the Providence Journal reports on a piece of state legislation being debated that would base layoff decisions (and recalls) on evaluations results ahead of seniority, move the pink-slip deadline (one of the earliest in the nation) from March 1 to June 1, and probably most controversially of all, tie the tenure-granting process to a succession of evaluations. The Rhode Island AFT chapter opposes the bill.

In Pittsburgh, the school board has announced plans to enter negotiations with the city teachers' union about basing layoffs on performance rather than seniority; the union seems less than excited about the idea. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quotes the union president there as saying that seniority is the "only fair way" to do layoffs.

It's worth noting that a disagreement over seniority in Pittsburgh a few years back resulted in the scuttling of a district- and union-designed teacher-residency program.

AFT has been hard at work beginning projects on teacher evaluation and due process, but it has been less clear about the follow-through: the related implications for tenure, seniority, and placement.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The organized labor movement may not like the movement toward super PACs that have multiplied in the wake of recent campaign-finance decisions, but their motto for now seems to be, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

We reported last year that the National Education Association had set up its own super PAC. Now, the NEA has re-upped, moving $3 million from its PAC to its super PAC, called the "NEA Advocacy Fund," according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks federal campaign-finance issues.

The American Federation of Teachers, meanwhile, gave $1 million to the Super PAC run by the AFL-CIO labor coalition, of which it is a member.

PACs, or direct donations, are typically limited to $5,000 per candidate each election cycle at the federal level. Super PACs, on the other hand, can spend unlimited amounts to sway elections—typically on negative advertising—because they are not coordinated with candidates' political committees.

It isn't clear whether state and local affiliates of the unions are also moving to set up such bodies. But in any case, the unions aren't the only ones that have tumbled to this strategy for influencing elections.

The StudentsFirst advocacy group begun by former D.C. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, for instance, partners with one Super PAC in New Jersey, and has set up another in Michigan.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Following a three-hour telephone call with negotiators during which consensus seemed frustratingly out of reach on new teacher preparation accountability rules, the U.S. Education Department declined to extend the rulemaking process any further, meaning it will craft the rules on its own.

The final wedge issue on the conference call ended up being a familiar one: student-achievement outcomes.

Several negotiators said they didn't feel that such measures as "value added" were ready to be used to judge program quality.

The breakdown in the process came as an abrupt about-face from last week, when negotiators seemed somewhat closer to an agreement.

But by the beginning of the conference call held this afternoon, the divisions among negotiators seemed to have grown more deep-set, with consensus far from imminent.

Student Outcomes

The Education Department's proposal would have required states to classify their teacher-preparation programs into four categories, using a mix of measures including student-achievement information. Only those in the top two categories would have qualified to offer TEACH grants for low-income students who commit to teaching in hard-to-staff schools.

The student-achievement piece has been a thorny one from day one. But during the second rulemaking session, the negotiators appeared to have reached a compromise on the matter.

Unexpectedly, the issue raised its head again today.

"Personally, I have not seen a research base to put [these measures] in," said Beverly Young, an assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs for the California State University system.

Other negotiators objected to using such measures in part to determine eligibility for TEACH grants.

"There's not enough research at this point in time to suggest that this has enough validity and reliability across the country or state by state, and yet we're trying to put it into ... regulations that will now deny students financial aid based on something that is yet to be proven as valid," said Joseph Pettibon, an associate vice president for academic services at Texas A&M University.

A variety of alternatives were offered. At one point, a caucus of negotiators pushed for a five-year pilot to test out the new student-outcomes criteria, but that didn't sit well with everyone.

"There's not much of a research base at all about how to effectively measure the impact of teacher preparation, and I don't know that waiting five years to figure that out is the right way to go," said the National Education Association's Segun Eubanks.

Futile Discussions?

The Education Department suggested giving states a nonrenewable one-year waiver of the new reporting and accountability requirements. But other negotiators wanted such a waiver to be renewable.

There was some palpable frustration among negotiators that student achievement should be back on the table, especially since last week's disagreements had centered on a rather different issue: whether TEACH grants should be at all tied to the designation of teacher-preparation-program quality.

In the end, Education Department officials appeared to think that any further discussion would be futile. They were joined in that assessment by several panelists, mostly those who have been more bullish about student-outcomes data.

"To me, we have to have a resolution about what it would take for people to be comfortable accepting student-outcome measures as part of the [system], and if not, it's time to call it," said George Noell, a professor at Louisiana State University.

Hunter College (N.Y.) Dean David Steiner summed up:

"Simply based on the discussion today, I don't think a few hours [of additional negotiations] would do it and I don't think a few weeks would do it," he said. "Long-standing divisions have re-emerged, and I don't see a [likely] consensus on anything close to what the department has in mind."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A cash incentive appears to have helped seven school districts attract effective teachers to low-income schools, though the longer-term impact of the transfers on teacher retention and student achievement results remains to be seen, a recently released analysis concludes.

The results are the first findings from the Talent Transfer Initiative, a U.S. Department of Education funded project. There's a short description of the initiative in this Education Week story. The basic idea is to offer bonuses of $20,000 to teachers with high-value-added scores to transfer to positions in a low-achieving schools and to study the results, in up to 10 districts.

It has long been argued that such schools have a harder time attracting effective teachers, partly because they are often staffed by novices still at the beginning of their learning curve. So far most of those analyses have been based on credentials, which aren't very predictive of classroom performance.

There are only a handful of studies that look at this question from the standpoint of classroom effectiveness. A Mathematica study from a little while back showed that students in low-income middle schools seem to have less access to the best teachers. This may be partly because low-income schools seem to have a wider distribution of teacher quality, including the very lowest-performing teachers.

The TTI study, also being carried out by Mathematica, builds on these two efforts. It's designed to examine whether the transfer incentive helps to attract and retain teachers with high value-added scores. Secondly, it uses a random-assignment design to determine whether the transferring teachers' students do better than those taught by teachers in a control group. It will also look to see whether the teaching team to which the transferring teachers are assigned does better on the whole than a comparison team.

We don't have answers to those questions yet, but this early report gives us a few interesting tidbits:

• The project was successful in attracting the teachers to the low-income schools, but it took a large pool to secure enough teachers; only a third of eligible applicants attended an information session, 24 percent submitted an application, and 6 percent transferred, on average, across the districts studied.
• The transferring teachers were about five years more experienced than the teachers who would normally have filled their positions.
• The transfers do not appear to have disrupted school culture, as no differences were reported from principals in the receiving schools.
• The transferring teachers were less likely to have a mentor than those in the control group, but they spent more time mentoring their other colleagues.

Check out all the findings here.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a somewhat anticlimatic conclusion to a week of stressful negotiations, the brokers crafting new federal teacher-preparation rules have managed to convince the Education Department to consider giving them more time.

They plan to have a conference call next week, during which the agency will determine whether or not to hold a fourth negotiating session

At today's session, the Education Department and the non-federal negotiators were not able to come to an agreement about the key hot-button issue—whether to attach the federal reporting and accountability system for teacher preparation to a federal financial-aid program known as TEACH, which supports teachers in high-needs schools.

Part of the problem was that this issue did not come to the table until the very last hour of discussion. There were a slew of last-minute proposals by a caucus of negotiators and counter-proposals by the Education Department, but ultimately time ran out.

That prompted a lot of handwringing from negotiators who didn't want to throw in the towel just yet.

"At this point ... we don't feel that the work is done, and I don't think we as a group are ready to put our name to something that is incomplete," said Eric Mann, a teacher candidate representative on the panel.

Some negotiators faulted ED's tendency over the last three days to introduce new issues and draft documents every day of the negotiations.

"I do think consensus is possible, but right now there's a lot of frustration in the group about the organization [of the rulemaking] and how it's been handled," said Beverly Young, the assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs for the California State University System.

Education Department officials initially said they couldn't host a fourth negotiating session. And Michael Dannenberg, a senior policy adviser and counsel in ED's postsecondary division, at one point referred to the Education Department's last draft as a "final offer." But in the end, the agency relented.

So there's more to come, and we'll be here to bring it to you.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Negotiators seemed not much closer to reaching consensus on new federal teacher-preparation rules, after another day of discussions that continued to expose fractures among the panelists.

As with yesterday, the elephant in the room continues to be whether the U.S. Department of Education's proposed revamping of the teacher-preparation accountability provisions in Title II of the Higher Education Act should be tied to the TEACH grant program, which supports candidates who agree to teach in high needs schools and subjects. The Education Department has proposed allowing only those who score at the top category on a proposed four-tiered ratings system to be eligible to offer TEACH grants.

This has been a concerning idea to many in the higher education community. It would, after all, be a major financial-aid precedent if only certain institutions that reached some standard of quality were permitted to tap federal financial aid.

The issue of linkage never even surfaced at the negotiating table today. But don't mistake that to mean that the issue wasn't discussed. It was, but behind close doors by a caucus of negotiators.

(Under the negotiating protocol, only the negotiating sessions that involve all the panelists are public. When a member of the negotiating team calls a caucus or subcommittee, he or she can exclude the press and other experts if (s)he chooses to.)

Your excluded (and subsequently somewhat cranky) blogger, therefore, wasn't privy to these discussions. Fortunately, I did manage to track down draft language that emerged from this caucus. Under the proposal, states would define their own definition of "high quality" programs for the purpose of TEACH, separate from the Title II categories.

In what seemed like a compromise, though, institutions deemed "at risk" and "low performing" on the Title II reporting system would not be able to participate in TEACH.

The proposal would also give states five years to establish the validity and reliability of the criteria and categories of the rating system, in what seemed like a nod to the objections of many deans within the higher education community.

It's unclear whether the Education Department is going to like these ideas. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Retention and Placement Rates

Among other topics, negotiators spent much of the day fielding various definitions in the law, and debating whether to include teacher retention and placement rates in the measures of teacher preparation program quality.

This debate seemed to break largely down based on whether the negotiator was representing a traditional vs. an alternative route. For instance, programs like residencies guarantee placement and are likely to look good on a teacher-placement measure. On the other hand, traditional programs probably stand in some instances to do better on retention rates, especially over three years, than an alternative program that only requires a two-year teaching commitment.

When we ended, several panelists had already been tapped to write compromise language.

It's worth noting that at this point, I'm hearing a lot of behind-the-scenes grumbling that the Education Department is trying to run out the clock on negotiations, so as to avoid a consensus and thus be free to write its own rules.

Whether that's rumor or fact, here's where we are: The panel has come down to the wire, and there is only one half-day more of negotiating.

Photo: Blackboard scribble left by negotiators during a closed-door lunch session.
Photo Credit: Stephen Sawchuk/Education Week

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The panelists charged with rewriting federal teacher-preparation rules faced a grueling day today during which major tension points emerged with little resolution, all of which served to call into question whether they will be able to reach consensus by Thursday.

You don't have to take my word for it: During some of the breaks, I spoke to a handful of negotiators—they all, reasonably, wanted to speak on background since the process isn't finished yet—and by and large, they weren't optimistic:

"It seems doubtful." "Probably not good." "I don't know." "I think the answer is probably no."

If the panelists don't reach a final consensus, the U.S. Department of Education gets to go it alone when writing the regulations.

Some of the tensions that emerged today have been brewing under the surface for a while, but as of the last session, there at least seemed to be agreement on the Education Department's proposal to classify their teacher-preparation programs into four categories: "low performing," "at risk," effective," and "exceptional," based on a mix of input- and output-based measures.

So what happened today? First, the USED put a few new proposals on the table that weren't well received. And on top of that, the panelists were bombarded by no fewer than four letters from groups of higher education deans criticizing various aspects of the teacher-quality proposals, in what seemed like a concerted effort to introduce even more doubt into the process.

Sticking Points

Two major sticking points emerged in today's discussions. One is an attempt to tie the rating system, which is currently only used for reporting, to a financial-aid program known as TEACH. The panelists differed on how high preparation programs should have to score in order to be eligible to receive the grant, with some saying the top two categories, while others, including ED, arguing for just the top category.

The other is the place of "value added" outcome measures, which would be one of the possible ways programs could show their graduates are having an impact on student learning.

The U.S. ED's representative on the panel proposed giving way on the first issue, potentially opening TEACH eligibility to more programs—but only provided those in the "effective' category also proved their students made at least a year of growth on the student-achievement measure.

That idea didn't go over well with some of the panelists, who noted that in prior sessions, the panelists had agreed to weigh student achievement outcomes as one of four total measures. And it led to an entire discussion on the merits of value added. One negotiator, New Mexico State University Dean Michael Morehead, read a prepared statement intimating he wouldn't support any proposal to include them.

"Trying to review several thousand sets of scores and relate them back to teacher education cannot be completely valid or reliable no matter how sophisticated the statistical analysis," he said. "If the [Education] Department wants accurate assessments to guide the reviews of teacher education programs, this measure is certainly not one of them, and I oppose its use as presently being considered."

(Other panelists, in private, disagreed with Morehead's depiction of value-added.)

A second proposal by the Education Department, to make elements of a previously drafted definition of "quality clinical preparation" optional rather than mandatory in states' teacher-preparation quality reviews, seemed to alienate even those panelists who have thus far seemed to be most on board with ED's plans. It took quite a bit of massaging of the language to get ED's concerns fixed before the agency withdrew this idea.

Deans Weigh In

As if that weren't enough on its face, a bunch of prominent teacher educators weighed in with letters sent to the committee. It's hard not to see this as evidence that higher education, having finally woken up to these discussions, is not at all happy with how they are going.

There's really far too much in these letters to outline here on the blog, so I"ll just post them here and here for you to chew on. In essence, they say that the proposals are too expensive and burdensome for states, rely on flawed or untested methodology, or aren't based in research.

Two of the letter-writers are worth pointing out: Michael Feuer, the dean of George Washington University's education school, and Camilla Benbow, the dean of Vanderbilt University's education school.

Their names should ring a bell. Both are currently working on other projects to set teacher-preparation evaluation standards. Feuer is heading a National Science Foundation-funded project to devise a new system for evaluating teacher preparation. And Benbow is a co-chair of the panel that has been tapped to set the standards for the new, merged national teacher education accreditation body.

It's probably fair to say that these two individuals' positions on the federal rulemaking outline how far they'll be willing to go on things like value-added measures on their own projects.

Two additional letters came from groups representing minority-serving institutions. One, from the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, protested the value-added piece particularly. Such measures would negatively affect their programs, prevent them from receiving financial aid through TEACH, and lead to a less-diverse teaching force, it said. The other, from the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, protested the entire rating system on similar grounds, saying it would disproportionately affect minority-serving institutions.

On top of all that, rumors are floating around that the American Council on Education, a powerful higher-ed lobby, has been working on an alternative proposal for grading teacher education to present to the negotiators tomorrow, but we don't know yet if that's going to come to fruition or not.

Miles to Go

After this morning's problems, the afternoon was filled with quite long discussions about technical problems of sample sizes for small programs and a fair bit of wordsmithing, e.g., "clinical fieldwork" vs. "student teaching" vs. "practicum," etc. (The gentleman sitting behind me started doodling flowers on his iPad's drawing program at about this point.)
Best quote of the day during this part of the rulemaking goes to National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education's Jim Cibulka for acknowledging what I'm sure a lot of us in the peanut gallery were thinking: "Here we bump against the failing of our field to define basic terms."

But on everyone's minds, I assume, are the unresolved questions from the morning session. Will the negotiators manage to pull this difficult work off? Stay tuned to Teacher Beat.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Tennessee is poised to pass a law exempting teachers' evaluations from broad disclosure under the state's open-records laws. And next up could be the state of New York, where a similar proposal is under discussion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Last weekI wrote this piece for Education Week pointing out that this information could be made available in 18 states and the District of Columbia, under open-records laws.

As I explained in that story, this is quite a complex issue. While there appears to be a general consensus emerging among education movers and shakers that newspapers shouldn't publish teacher-performance information wholesale, opinion seems to be more divided on whether parents should have the ability to access these evaluations. (They can already view teachers' qualifications, for instance.)

Tennessee is taking a fairly aggressive stance on the issue, since under its proposal, it appears that only school officials would get to view the evaluations. In New York, lawmakers appear to want to find a way to permit parents a degree of access.

"Information and evaluation should be out there for parents to know," Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who will likely spearhead any such policy, said on a radio broadcast. "But beyond the parents, I'm not sure."

It's hard to know exactly how other states will thread the policy needle on this topic, but it bears watching. In many states, this issue seems to be one open-records request away from a lawsuit. Stay tuned.

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