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.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

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

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

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.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

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.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

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.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Sean Cavanagh
This item originally appeared on the Marketplace K-12 news blog.

Coursera, a major player in the world of providing "massively open online courses" in higher education, is making its first move into the world of K-12 schools through an effort to provide free training and professional development to teachers in the United States and other countries.

The move appears to represent one of the clearest indications of the role that "MOOCs," which to date have been primarily a higher education phenomenon, could play in the world of elementary and secondary education, a question that technology advocates and school officials have been debating for some time.

In college and university settings, MOOCs have allowed institutions to post courses online, allowing for the academic content provided by faculty to be shared with new audiences on a huge scale. The forums have also met resistance in some quarters, from those who say the forums create the potential for sharing weak content, and in some cases from faculty and others who aren't comfortable with their institutions giving others free access to their courses, without any constraints.

Some have speculated that MOOCs' greatest potential value in K-12 settings might come through the sharing of courses and curricula for students, but Coursera's announcement this week heads in a different direction, focusing on building the skills of classroom educators.

In addition to marking Coursera's first step into early childhood and K-12 education, the company said the new arrangement is the first time it has partnered with non-degree-bearing institutions in making their resources available online.

Seven institutions and organizations have agreed to partner with the Mountain View, Calif.-based company in posting professional-development and teacher-training resources online, Coursera officials said. They are the University of Washington's college of education; the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education; the Johns Hopkins University school of education; Match Education's Sposato Graduate School of Education; Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education and Human Development; the Relay Graduate School of Education; and the University of California, Irvine.

Initial courses will cover areas such as content development, curriculum associated with the Common Core State Standards, character education, putting in place "flipped classrooms," and using blended learning, the combination of online and in-person instruction.

The promise to provide training for teachers on making wise use of technology in classrooms would, at least in theory, meet a major need in the K-12 community. Many school officials and technology advocates have bemoaned educators' inability to make intelligent use of tech tools in classrooms. (Though others have also said that some of the blame is with companies churning out tech products of little practical value in school settings.)

Coursera currently offers 220 courses from 33 institutions, and it has about 2.8 million registered users, according to estimates company officials provided earlier this year.

Like the university courses Coursera already offered online, the new arrangement with schools of education will offer video lectures, peer forums, supplementary materials, and other interactive components to support meaningful educational experiences. In addition, the courses will offer the option for K-12 districts and schools to weave the new content into existing professional development programs, through blended learning.

"We want to help K-12 students by helping their teachers," Coursera Co-Founder Andrew Ng said in a statement. "Many schools just don't have the resources to provide teachers and parents the training and support they need. By providing free online courses on how to teach, we hope to improve this."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

More than a decade of research on teacher characteristics shows that, on almost every quality measure you can think of, schools with large populations of low-income, minority, and low-achieving students get shortchanged. They have fewer experienced teachers, fewer teachers teaching within their field, and teachers who show greater variations in effectiveness, including more of the worst performers.

A new paper indicates that these patterns may be more entrenched than we knew: Even within schools, this kind of "systematic matching" of teachers to students appears to occur, likely the product of both principal and teacher decisions.

Published this month in the Sociology of Education, the paper, by Stanford University researchers Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb, and Tara Béteille at the World Bank in Washington, finds that within schools, less experienced and minority teachers are more frequently assigned classes with lower-achieving students than their more experienced or white colleagues.

That pattern could have negative effects, because prior research indicates that assigning novices to lower-achieving students can exacerbate teacher turnover. It's also likely to compound achievement gaps within schools given that, while experience isn't a great proxy for performance, teachers with three or more years of experience do better on average than those in their first year.

The researchers looked at a set of data on teacher assignments from the Miami-Dade County, Fla., school district from the 2003-04 to the 2010-11 school years, linked to the students and courses taught by those teachers. They also drew on a survey of some 6,800 teachers in the district. Only a few prior studies have probed this question before, and the current paper looks at more teacher and student characteristics, grades, and years.

Among the findings:

• Teachers with 10 to 20 years of experience had students with average prior achievement that was .10 to .20 standard deviations higher, relative to students assigned to first-year teachers, at both the elementary and secondary levels.
• Teachers who graduated from more-competitive colleges also tended to be assigned to higher-achieving students.
• Experienced teachers tended to receive "better" assignments, especially when they were in schools with a higher proportion of more-experienced colleagues.
• Black teachers generally had the most challenging assignments, particularly when they taught in schools with more white colleagues.

It isn't entirely clear what's behind these patterns, though the paper explores several possibilities. The researchers suggest that, for the third finding above, the norms of schools can shape assignments: Senior teachers seem to build up a political capital of sorts allowing them access to higher-achieving classes. Some minority teachers want to work with minority or low-achieving students, while others are probably assigned, possibly on the belief that they can establish better relationships with such students.

There's also the troubling possibility that principals are rewarding or punishing teachers through their choice of assignments and even that some kind of bias may be at work.

"Overall, the patterns of teacher assignment we observe likely result from a complex process whereby school leaders attempt to respond to teacher, parent, and organizational preferences," the researchers conclude.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Michael Mulgrew easily won re-election to the presidency of the United Federation of Teachers yesterday, defeating challenger Julie Cavanaugh, a chapter leader. But the win, capturing 84 percent of those voting, was still somewhat lower than his 2010 election victory, at 91 percent.

You are probably thinking: Yawn. Union elections are typically low-turnout and not particularly newsy affairs. And this one wasn't even close. Why are you bothering me with this on a Friday?!

The answer to that question takes some explaining of the UFT's political structure. Here's the Cliffs Notes version: One of the union's internal political parties, Unity, has long dominated the union's decisionmaking positions. Membership in the party is often seen as a prerequisite to rise within the UFT. That factor, coupled with the lack of term limits, has given Unity a lot of power. (Gothamschools and the Hechinger Report recently did a great series outlining how this all works, so you may want to check that out for all the details.)

Opposition "caucuses," as they're known in UFT jargon, include New Action (which endorsed Mulgrew for president but a different slate for other positions), and the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, which backed Cavanaugh. A separate teacher-voice group, Educators 4 Excellence, did not run a slate.

There have always been opposition groups in UFT, but they seem to have gotten more vocal following UFT's endorsement of mayoral control in 2002 and approval of a contract including performance pay in 2005. MORE, in particular, wants to reduce the stakes given to standardized tests, push the union to issue a moratorium on school closings, and win better contract terms. The group is modeled on a Chicago group out of which rose Chicago Teachers' Union President Karen Lewis, who recently led a successful strike there last fall.

According to MORE backer Norm Scott, MORE increased its share of the vote in several key categories. So essentially, the results from the election indicate that it may slowly be gaining some more significance.

Whether or not that will have an effect going forward on UFT's policies, and Unity's, remains to be seen.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend