Iowa teachers will have the opportunity to assume new roles as "model," "mentor," and "lead" teachers, along with additional pay, under a bill passed May 22 and headed to the Governor's desk for signature.

This piece of legislation is a long time coming. It has been a major priority of Gov. Terry Branstad for several years, and is something of a feather in the cap for departing schools chief Jason Glass, who had a big hand in shaping it. (Glass will return to head up the Eagle County, Colo., district where he previously held two different positions.)

In brief, the bill creates a fund that would help districts institute, or come up with their own alternative versions, of a career path for teachers. Funds would pay for salary supplements, release time for the teachers who take the new positions, and longer school-year contracts for them.

Through a review process at each school, districts would designate "model," "mentor" and "lead" teachers; the positions come with extra pay (up to $10,000 annually for lead teachers) and some new responsibilities, such as serving as the head of an instructional team or evaluating peers.

The positions were influenced in part by similar systems in Singapore and other international countries. But it's also worth noting that Glass, while in his first stint in Eagle County, helped implement a similar professional-development and -pay program in schools there.

Among other teacher-related actions, the bill also:

• Raises the base teacher salary to $33,500.
• Authorizes a teacher-preparation program at two teacher colleges that would include a yearlong student-teaching experience.
• Creates a council to study and make recommendations on a statewide teacher-evaluation system.

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There must be something in the water: Performance pay, after going through a fallow period following a 2010 study that found few effects on student learning, all of a sudden seems back on policymakers' radar screens.

To be fair, some of the new plans, like this New York one to pay $60,000 over four years to certain math and science teachers, are really gussied-up professional-development and induction programs: New York recipients would helping mentor and train their colleagues.

In the same vein, Nevada's former schools superintendent, Jim Guthrie, has presented a provocative plan to pay 2,000 teachers in the state the eye-popping salary of $200,000, according to Las Vegas Sun reporter Paul Takahashi. Such teachers, as in New York, would be expected to share their teaching practices with colleagues.

This one seems a lot less likely to become actual policy anytime soon, Takahashi reports, because there isn't a good measure for identifying which teachers would be eligible for the huge bonuses and some lawmakers want to invest in other costly programs, such as preschool.

A Michigan legislative panel, on the other hand, took a step May 22 toward making teacher performance the "primary" factor in teacher compensation, and also would base the performance measure "primarily" on student-achievement growth. "Primary" and "primarily" are the key words here, since it means that more than half the evaluation would be based on student achievement, a higher figure than anywhere else in the nation.

The Michigan proposal is interesting for another reason: It would allow districts to factor in advanced degrees only if the degree was earned in the content area, for secondary teachers, and in elementary education, for grade school teachers. This is likely to be opposed by many of the state's teacher colleges (master's degrees are often granted in leadership or curriculum, for instance) but it is somewhat more in line with research on teacher credentials.

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About 250 math and science teachers in New York will be eligible for $15,000 in extra pay in exchange for mentoring new colleagues under a newly announced New York program.

Unveiled May 20 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, the program will pay each participating secondary math and science teacher a total of $60,000 over four years. They will be trained in State University of New York education schools on how to mentor novices and teacher-candidates.

Interested teachers must submit applications in order to be chosen. To be eligible, such teachers also have to have at least four years of experience, spend the bulk of their time teaching math and science, and earn a "highly effective" score on their 2012-13 teacher evaluation, the Albany Democrat and Chronicle reports.

The $11 million initiative was included in the state's 2013-14 budget.

At first, the "Master Teacher Program" will be limited to teachers in the regions of North County, Mid-Hudson, and central and western New York, but it's supposed to go statewide in 2014-15.

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The president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, has won a second three-year term, with about 80 percent of the vote in her favor. Vice President Jesse Sharkey was also re-elected.

Lewis defeated Tanya Saunders-Wolffe, a school counselor. Wolffe hails from a different group within the union that has accused Lewis' Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators of not getting enough concessions out of the district during last September's seven-day teacher strike.

The strike ultimately did win teachers pay raises and additional flexibility on provisions regarding assignment and "recalls." Among the strike's subtexts was the imminent closing of dozens of schools, which the union under Lewis' leadership has gone on to vigorously oppose.

One of the reasons this situation bears watching is because of how the rise of Lewis and CORE have had reverberations throughout the American Federation of Teachers, CTU's parent union.

AFT has played the card of being the more accommodating of the two national teachers' unions with respect to national policy movements, such as teacher evaluations based partly on student achievement. But Lewis has shown that outright resistance and opposition can work in some contexts, too, and that has proved to be an attractive option for some.

Opposition groups modeled on CORE have sprung up in the AFT's affiliates in New York City and Newark, among other places. And they seem to be having an effect on AFT, which has taken a much more strident tone on standardized testing and school closures lately.

Photo: Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, pauses at a rally during last September's teachers strike as union members chant their support for her leadership. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP-File)

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Delaware lawmakers have passed a bill that would raise admissions standards for entry into the state's teacher-preparation programs, among other changes. Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, is expected to sign it.

The bill would require prospective teachers to hold a grade point average of at least 3.0, or a GPA in the top 50th percentile for coursework completed during the most recent two years of education, whether in high school or college. Alternatively, they could achieve a minimum score on a standardized test normed to the general college-bound population. (Many teacher exams are set at the secondary level for content knowledge.)

There's a bit of flexibility built in: Preparation programs could waive these admissions requirements for up to 10 percent of the students admitted.

The bill also would require candidates to pass a performance-based assessment before being granted their initial, three-year teaching license; require teacher-preparation programs to report on the performance of their graduates; and require them to assess their candidates on an ongoing basis using a system aligned to the statewide teacher-evaluation system.

As I wrote for a recent Education Week story, raising entry standards for teacher preparation is controversial partly because of fears that such requirements will harm the ability to recruit minority candidates who are already in short supply in K-12 education.

You may wonder how Delaware's new requirements stack up to other states. Surprisingly, there's no public database that lists what states' entry-requirements are: States guard this stuff like it's the last of the Easter candy.

Here, compiled partly from National Council on Teacher Quality records and partly from our own research, are state minimum grade point averages for admissions into undergraduate teaching programs. (The list doesn't include basic-skills tests or any requirements set at the institutional level.)

It's not a comprehensive list, so if you have a minute, please leave your own state's policies, with citation, in the comments field, so we can get the full picture.

Alabama: 2.5
Arkansas: 2.5
Connecticut: 2.7 (can be waived)
Florida: 2.5
Georgia 2.5
Kentucky: requires cumulative GPA of 2.75 or a 3.0 GPA for last 30 hours of credit completed
Michigan: requires a "C average"
Mississippi: 2.75 for premajor coursework, 3.0 for each cohort
Missouri: 2.5
New Jersey: 2.5
Oklahoma: 3.0 (can waive out with passage of a test)
Pennsylvania: 3.0 in prior coursework, or 2.8 with qualifying scores on a test
South Carolina: 2.5, but program directors can go as low as 2.25
Tennessee: 2.5
Texas: 2.5, but candidates must also pass an exam normed to the college-going population
Wisconsin: 2.5, but programs can accept 10 percent of candidates that do not pass basic-skills tests

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The Tennessee education department last week announced plans to offer financial bonuses to teachers with top evaluation scores who work in low-performing "priority schools."

Using its share of federal School Improvement Grant funds, the state will give $7,000 signing bonuses to teachers from nonpriority schools who transfer, and agree to stay for two years, in the priority schools. It will also give $5,000 retention bonuses to high-performing teachers already working in such schools.

The state has 83 priority schools, defined as the lowest-performing 5 percent in the state. Most of them are located in the Memphis district.

Nationally, low-performing schools have tended to have teachers with weaker credentials and less experience. Rectifying that imbalance has long proved to be a particularly difficult policy challenge to solve. We'll be watching with interest to see what happens in the Tennessee schools that get an infusion of new teachers.

The idea hasn't gotten an enthusiastic reception from everyone, though. The president of the teachers' union in Memphis said that the plan wouldn't help improve academic achievement unless larger social-support programs accompanied it, earning a rebuke from the education commissioner, Kevin Huffman.

As always, the topic of making pay contingent on performance is a tricky one. And The Tennessean reports that the plan is just one part of a larger proposal to move away from traditional salary scales based on credentials and experience, a shift unions have traditionally opposed.

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By guest blogger Liana Heitin

This post originally appeared on Education Week Teacher's Teaching Now blog.

While teacher salaries continued to increase on average during the recent economic downturn, they did so at a much slower pace, according to a new study from the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality.

The NCTQ study was based on salary schedules from 2007-08 (when the recession began) to 2011-12 for 41 of the 50 largest public school districts in the United States. In analyzing the data, NCTQ looked at annual adjustments and step increases for accumulating a year of experience. (The analysis did not include increases for earning advanced degrees or credit hours.)

Between 2007-08 and 2008-09, the study found, teachers received an average 3.6 percent pay increase. However, over the next three years, raises totaled between one-half and one-third that amount. The average pay raise hit a low point of 1.1 percent between 2009-10 and 2010-11, as indicated in this chart from the report.

Districts were most likely to cut or freeze annual adjustments as a means of reducing raises, NCTQ explains in the report, with about three-quarters of districts doing so.

NCTQ also found that teachers in 80 percent of the districts experienced a cut or freeze in total pay at least once over the four-year period. From 2007-08 to 2008-09, 88 percent of districts raised teacher pay and 12 percent froze pay. Two years later, 49 percent of districts raised teacher pay, 37 percent froze pay, and 15 percent made cuts.

Only two of the 41 districts had a net decrease in teacher pay over the four years—Dekalb County, Ga., and Albuquerque, N.M. Just eight districts had an increase in pay each year—Fort Worth, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; Milwaukee, Wisc.; New York City; Jefferson County, Ky.; Fresno, Calif.; Chicago; and Baltimore City, Md.—.

Interestingly, the district that reported the highest pay raise over this period was Chicago, at 6.5 percent. As our readers remember, Chicago teachers went on strike in September 2012 over a variety of issues, including a revoked 4 percent salary increase. The agreement between the union and the district that ended the strike included a 3 percent salary increase (for the first year, and 2 percent for the next two years), in addition to increases for experience and advanced credentials.

The NCTQ report notes that "teachers' raise reductions were on par with almost all of the comparable professions we examined. Architects, accountants, and mechanical engineers were harder hit than teachers, but not significantly so."

For the district-specific findings, see the entire report here.

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Every state sets the cutoff score on its teacher-licensing tests below the mean of test-takers, according to federal data—a pattern suggesting that most of the tests are probably pretty easy for a majority of those candidates taking them.

Released in an annual report issued last week by the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill requirements in the Higher Education Act, the data compare the average cutoff scores on teacher exams against the average performance of candidates taking the test. The gaps range from a low of 10.1 points in Arizona to 22.5 points in Nebraska. For the nation as a whole, the average certification-test cutoff score is set nearly 15 points below the mean score of candidates.

Use caution in comparing the gaps, though: Some states use ETS' Praxis series for their licensing tests, and others use state-specific exams designed by Evaluation Systems Group, a Pearson entity.

The data represent test-taking from the 2009-10 year.

A little over a year ago, I reported on this very same phenomenon for Education Week using preliminary data and came to a similar conclusion. (It's always nice to have one's hunches confirmed by federal data.)

Here's a bit of history for the policy nerds like me who want to know how we got here: State reporting on passing rates on teachers' tests has been required since 1998. But only in the 2008 rewrite of the HEA did lawmakers require states to report both passing rate and the average scaled score of all test-takers on each test.

The overall pattern means that states appear to set relatively low bars for passing these exams. But, as the Education Department report dutifully notes, large gaps could alternatively mean that the test-takers are generally high performing, and small gaps, relatively low performing. As I reported last year, it's impossible to know exactly how "difficult" these tests are without knowing the spread of scores on the tests' scales.

Also, most states permit teachers to take certification tests multiple times, and it's not clear from the state-generated data how that policy affects the scaled scores.

All this raises lots of questions for the state panels that determine where to set the bar on the exams.

For one thing, most of these tests merely measure whether a teacher knows some specified content, not that he or she will actually be able to teach it, so it's not at all clear that moving the bar higher would result in better instruction. There are some pretty sensitive political factors going on, too: Given what we know about historical performance trends by teachers with different characteristics on licensing tests, raising the bar significantly would almost certainly mean fewer teachers of color passing the exams.

Think this is a pretty obscure policy area? Think again. It's going to come up more and more now that states are discussing raising the bar for admissions into teacher-preparation programs, as I report in a story in this week's issue of the newspaper.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

In the wake of several states releasing large sets of "value added" data on individual teachers to media outlets in the past few years, I wrote a widely read story for Education Week on whether formal teacher-evaluation records are publicly accessible. We found quite a lot of variation in the scope of states' open-records laws.

A lot has changed since 2012, with at least five states altering their laws since the story ran. So we wanted to give you a sense of where things stand now.

Tennessee, previously a state in which evaluation results were open, passed a bill in 2012 that closes evaluations off from public disclosure.

New York legislators, in June, passed a law narrowing eligibility for accessing these records. The bill specifies that, on request, parents can view the final effectiveness rating for each teacher in the building to which a student is assigned.

Though case law in Massachusetts already tilted in this direction, a law signed last June explicitly puts teacher evaluations under the definition of "personnel information" exempt from disclosure under open-records laws.

Utah passed a bill in March 2012 (just days after our earlier story went to press) strengthening existing prohibitions on the release of personnel evaluations.

UPDATED, May 15, 9:00 a.m.: Thanks to New Jersey officials for reminding us of this change. New Jersey's teacher-evaluation-reform law, passed last August, also requires evaluations to be confidential and not released to the public.

Readers brought to our attention laws under education code, rather than open-records code, in Georgia and Arizona prohibiting the release of evaluations, so we've updated the data for those states, too.

Keep in mind that some of these states, Utah and New York among them, require the aggregate reporting of scores on district report cards, usually by the percent of teachers in each category.

In the meantime, action in this area of policy continues to bubble. There's debate in Utah over apparently conflicting language in its statutes and a Florida measure seeking to exempt the release of growth-measure data is stuck in a house committee.

As always, let us know if we've missed something.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A lawsuit filed Tuesday against the California Teachers Association and its parent union, the National Education Association, asserts that, in California, union fees charged of nonmembers are being used for political ends, in violation of their First Amendment rights.

The suit was filed by the conservative Center for Individual Rights, on behalf of several California teachers. It seeks to overturn the law in California permitting agency fees to be charged of nonmembers. (California is one of 22 states with such laws.)

Agency fees are charged to cover that portion of bargaining from which nonmembers benefit, such as negotiations over wage increases. Those teachers can typically opt out of the portion that would be put toward political activity like lobbying or supporting ballot initiatives, allowable uses of unions' general treasury funds.

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up many, many suits on agency fees, free speech, and whether or not nonmembers should have to affirmatively opt out of the political portion of dues. But this case seems to go further, asserting that the collective bargaining process itself, as well as the CTA's support for certain liberal causes, violates nonmembers' beliefs and free-speech rights, and therefore that the state's agency-fee law should be overturned.

"In the course of collective bargaining, unions frequently take politically controversial positions that contradict the deeply held beliefs of some teachers, who do not believe the policies advocated by unions to be in their best interest, or in the best interest of society at large. For example, unions consistently 'bargain' for provisions requiring increased state spending, and against important educational reforms which some teachers believe would benefit teachers, students, and taxpayers," the lawsuit argues.

Even if this doesn't result in a Supreme Court case, the suit's location in generally union-friendly California also guarantees that it will have a fair few eyeballs on it.

It's important not to confuse this issue, by the way, with donations to a union's PAC, which are voluntary, but can also be automatically deducted from paychecks in California. Opting out of such donations is yet another process.

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