Group items tagged

This article takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers who were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With these data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

I write to express my growing concern about the implementation and implications of the new APPR for principals and teachers. I express these concerns as a middle school principal, a member of the Regents Task Force and the president of the Regional Association of School Administrators representing 650 members in Westchester and Putnam counties.

When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, lawmakers set a goal widely recognized as impossible - that every student in the country be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Now, South Dakota and other states are creating their own school accountability systems and setting their own goals under a waiver system established by the Obama administration. The U.S. Department of Education, which will give final approval to the plans, wants to see states set "ambitious but achievable" annual targets for individual schools.

I have never been asked by an administrator how the work in my class will help to create informed and powerful citizens that can boost the health of our democracy. But isn't that the point of public education? If not that, then what? Shouldn't we come to some consensus about the goal before we create the means towards that end?

New York's draft of its request for a waiver of ESEA requirements is now ready for review and public comment. By submitting this request, New York is requesting flexibility through the waiver of specific ESEA provisions and their associated regulatory, administrative, and reporting requirements.

Russo's underhanded dig is followed up with his suggestion that billionaire funded astroturf groups like StudentsFirst, Stand For Children, and TeachPlus have the potential to correct what he perceives as an "imbalance." For Russo, the corporate education reform astroturf need to step up and post comments under articles, use twitter, blog, and avail themselves of social media. It simply isn't enough to be funded by the likes of the wealthiest one percent including names like Walton, DeVos, Broad, Bradley, Gates, Koch, Hastings, Dell, Powell-Jobs, Scaife, Tilson, et al. It's not enough to have the unwavering support of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus at every level of government including the most anti-public education administration and Department of Education of all time. It isn't sufficient to have the unquestioning editorial support of every mainstream media outlet-not to mention Rupert Murdoch's vast propaganda empire-all of which spew a nonstop stream of privatization propaganda with nary a dissenting note. This last point is of paramount importance, since it's often forgotten that outside the realm of privilege that has regular access to the Internet, there's a majority that obtains their information from more traditional sources.

As the No Child Left Behind Act turns 10 on Sunday, the bill's future remains uncertain, with Congress and the Obama administration divided over how to update the controversial law. Meanwhile, NCLB has been largely irrelevant to two of the major trends in national education policy-making over the past three years: the push to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student achievement data, and the move toward a Common Core curriculum in math and English. (The main lever pushing those changes is the Obama administration's deployment of billions of federal grant dollars to states that agree to adhere to those priorities.) Nevertheless, NCLB has had a profound effect on what students experience in the classroom and on the way the American public talks about its schools. Here is my assessment of how NCLB has changed American education over the past decade, both for the better and for the worse.

I would also ask you to please stop promoting the myth that unions are abusive and make it impossible to fire bad teachers. Unions only ensure that all teachers have due process to protect them from abusive admin. (And no, I am not saying that admin. is abusive, but just as there are poor teachers out there… there are poor administrators.) It is not the unions job to evaluate teacher performance. But it is the unions job to be be sure that disciplinary action is justified by requiring proper steps to be taken.

GIA announces the release of a comprehensive US report on the Charter Schools market. The proportion of students attending charter schools is on the rise. Over 30% of public school students attend charter schools in the four urban districts of Washington DC, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Detroit in the US. Following a marginal setback during the recession, which was instigated by reduced funding, the charter school market bounced back in 2009 with government support and revival in financing options. Growth in enrollment is expected to increase in the following years, given the increasing importance given by the Obama administration to charter schools.

This paper takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers that were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With this data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

A group of local principals is rallying Hudson Valley educators to push for changes to some of the state's education reforms. Six principals from Sleepy Hollow, Scarsdale, Clarkstown and three other other school districts met Thursday at Sleepy Hollow High School to gather support for a petition against a law that makes student test scores a part of teacher and administrator evaluations.

In education, teacher evaluations are supposed to gauge what is and isn't working in teachers' practice, and provide feedback to ensure teachers are at the top of their game. Even though administrators have always had this responsibility, teacher evaluations have rarely met that standard. They often are little more than quick snapshots, taken by a principal sitting in the back of the classroom with a checklist once a year. Yet these snapshots-"drive-by evaluations" as they are known-frequently serve as the basis for decisions to keep or dismiss teachers. More recently, so-called reformers have pushed to replace that inadequate snapshot with another kind-once-a-year standardized student test scores in math or English-even though such tests are not designed to evaluate teachers and the majority of educators teach subjects not currently assessed by standardized tests.  Neither of these limited approaches makes any sense-for neither one does anything to improve teacher practice or increase student learning. And after all, isn't that the point?

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

An Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization has crafted a sweeping plan for reworking the 33,000-student Indianapolis school system that would place the district under the control of the city's mayor, pare down the money spent in central administration, and give principals broad authority to hire and fire teachers. The reform plan created by the Mind Trust organization would transform the district's schools into what the report calls "Opportunity Schools," which would be given "unprecedented freedom over staffing, budgets, curriculum, and culture," as long as they continued to meet high standards. Those schools would compete for students who live within the district's boundaries.

During a week in which the Bloomberg administration has embraced an independent, landmark study that linked its hallmark policy of small schools to increased student success, a group of parents and elected officials took to the steps of City Hall on Friday to denounce the administration's education agenda, particularly its decisions to close or phase out city schools and its policies to address low college preparedness rates for minority students.

City principals are increasingly unhappy with their jobs, according to the union that represents them. In the latest newsletter from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, President Ernest Logan reported that 73 percent of union members are not happy with their workload, compensation, and job security. That's up from 68 percent the last time the union surveyed its members, in 2009.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label. This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

Unfortunately, the proposed Treasury Department regulations, if adopted as currently written, would make it very difficult for state and local teacher plans to admit charter schools and retain their governmental plan status. Indeed, if these regulations are implemented as written, the prudent course of action for any state or local plan administrator, faced with possibility of losing governmental status, would be to throw charter schools out of the plan.

Charter school advocates have sounded a warning about an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking from the Obama administration that they say could undermine the ability of teachers in those schools to participate in state retirement plans. The notice, released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service in November, says that federal officials are seeking to clarify what kinds of pension systems quality as "governmental plans," which would affect the regulation of them. Details of what's in the works drew a strong response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which issued a statement saying the changes "would force states to prohibit public charter school teachers from participating in state retirement plans."