An Early Read on the Race to Top Winners Education Week August 24, 2010 Posted by guest blogger Sean Cavanagh, with contributions from Sarah D. Sparks and Stephen Sawchuk.
The results are in, and the list of Race to the Top winners in Round Two includes an eclectic mix of 10 states that had put together very different kinds of applications in their funding bids for the $3.4 billion in remaining federal funds.
The winners in this second and final round announced by the U.S. Department of Education today: the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island. They join first-round winners Delaware and Tennessee.
A few common threads among the 10 victorious Round Two applicants include their promises to take bold approaches to turning around low-performing schools, and in evaluating teachers.
...Rhode Island's bid, for up to $75 million... will not allow districts to assign a student to a teacher deemed ineffective two years in a row.
Several notable finalists were left off the winner's list: California and Colorado, as well as Arizona, which had greatly improved its score from the first go-around. Colorado lawmakers had revamped their state's laws on teacher evaluation since Round One, ensuring that half of an educator's rating will be based on student performance and that ineffective teachers could be dismissed more easily.
But my colleague Stephen Sawchuk notes that Colorado's level of union buy-in dropped significantly from the first round—the reviewers didn't look favorably on that disconnect in Round One.
Union leader calls on L.A. teachers to boycott Times A.J. Duffy objects to the paper's analysis of the effectiveness of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers. By Jason Song and Jason Felch Los Angeles Times August 15, 2010
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a "massive boycott" of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.
"You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.
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Based on test score data covering seven years, The Times analyzed the effects of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers on their students' learning. Among other things, it found huge disparities among teachers, some of whom work just down the hall from one another.
After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.
The district has had the ability to analyze the differences among teachers for years but opted not to do so, in large part because of anticipated union resistance, The Times found.
The newspaper plans to publish an online database with ratings for the more than 6,000 elementary school instructors later this month.
...The powerful union has thrown its support behind Scott Barnett, a Republican who used to be the head of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association.
Zombro believes Barnett will reign in school spending so that it focuses on the basics and not on big reforms.
“(Quality education) is not a flashy program or a big consultant or a big splash. What it takes is a positive place for children to learn, for parents to interact with their schools, and for teachers to teach.”
Whatever the outcome, the board will have to manage the second largest school district in the state with a lot less money. It will also have to push for better academic results while dealing with a persistent achievement gap.
MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.” ...
Last week I reported that San Diego Unified is planning to reverse changes to its central offices that were made by former Superintendent Terry Grier, returning to a system that looks a lot like what it had before.
Now there's another sign the era of Grier is over in San Diego Unified: The school district will no longer be using a controversial interview tool that Grier introduced to choose principals.
Grier had touted the Haberman interviews as a way to measure would-be-principals' values. We wrote about it nearly two years ago when Grier introduced it:
The interview is modeled on the teachings of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor Martin Haberman, who studies disadvantaged students and the educators who help them best. Principals applying for new jobs were interviewed as well. San Diego Unified signed a $23,000 contract with the Haberman Educational Foundation to train staffers in the interview process, which includes problem-solving scenarios and is meant to reveal the applicants' core values. Two people ask open-ended questions during a tape-recorded interview and score the answers.
No more. The Haberman interviews will no longer be used in San Diego Unified. Jeannie Steeg, executive director of the union that represents principals and other school managers, said her group lodged complaints about the interview method and how it was being used to judge principals...
And the highly anticipated Round One finalists are...
Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
The Final 16 beat out 25 other states and earned the highest scores from the peer reviewers, who awarded points based on a 500-point grading scale that judged states' commitments to improve teacher effectiveness, data systems, academic standards, and low-performing schools.
The list of finalists is supposed to reflect U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's promise that he would set a very high bar for this education-reform competition, which has become one of the Obama administration's most high-profile policy levers. At stake is $4 billion from the economic-stimulus package approved by Congress last year, not to mention bragging rights.;;
The president of the nation's second-largest teachers union is proposing a new way to incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations and has asked a well-known mediator to develop methods of expediting disciplinary cases against teachers, according to the text of a speech made public Monday night.
Randi Weingarten of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers plans to deliver the speech Tuesday. Union officials describe it as a major effort to address flash points in labor-management relations.
The AFT, Weingarten said, wants "a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers. But [we] know we won't have that if we don't have an evaluation system that is comprehensive and robust and really tells us who is or is not an effective teacher." ...
Surprise: The American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the country, is going to propose including students' test scores in teacher evaluations and finding ways to speed up disciplinary cases against teachers. The Washington Post and USA Today explain why this is such a big deal. Bob Herbert at The New York Times contends that the union had better follow through.
As bargaining grinds on between San Diego Unified and its teachers union over its expired contract, a public debate has erupted over a few paragraphs of legalese.
Teachers and their union say a new proposal will help kids by preventing teachers from being overloaded with new duties. Opponents say it will allow the union to veto any changes to what teachers do -- even small ones -- by enshrining all existing practices in the contract. It has pitted the principals union against the teachers union, divided and perplexed parents.
Yet both its backers and its critics point out that the proposal, known as "maintenance of standards," is nothing new...
...In New York State, a similar rule has sometimes been frustrating for Assistant Superintendent Cora Stempel at the Hyde Park Central School District. For instance, the union invoked it when counselors switched from paper forms to an electronic system to change students' classes, contending that it was new work, Stempel said. It hasn't halted change in the school district, but it has made it more difficult.
Hyde Park now gives the union two weeks' notice before making significant changes, which often allows them to work out any problems in advance and avoid grievances. Even if a grievance was filed, Stempel said that wouldn't necessarily stop schools from making changes, unless the union ultimately wins and forces them to reverse it. But it may slow down or alter its plans.
If the union balks completely, it can sway the school district to hold off on an idea to avoid grievances that the union might win. The threat of a grievance -- and the desire to avoid it -- can steer their decision.
"It's just good practice to work towards consensus anyway," she said. "But there are times that there are things I'd like to do, and I should be able to make that decision. It's sometimes a struggle."
One of the largest school districts with such a policy is Jefferson County Public Schools, a Colorado system with more than 80,000 students. Union leaders said they used it to push the school district to discuss -- not bargain -- changes to the date teachers were paid. Robert Archibold, Jefferson's executive director of employee relations, said it hadn't been a problem for them because few issues weren't covered by their contract, which is highly specific. No new programs had been blocked, he said.
Still, "it puts the brake on the district just going around changing things without having a conversation with us," said Lisa Elliott, the union's executive director. She might invoke it to challenge whether the district can immediately change how it handles pay errors. "But it's only related to working conditions and pay. It's not saying, 'You can't get a new set of textbooks.'"
Some of the worst clashes over the rule are documented in Wisconsin. The Salem Joint School District tried to remove a similar rule while bargaining with teachers in 1992, complaining that the union had objected to schools encouraging teachers to help at a lunchtime salad bar and requiring teachers to make their own photocopies. It stated that six grievances were filed based on the clause in a single year, compared to just one that had gone as far as a hearing in earlier years...
