Group items tagged

New York State's educational community has come together in an unprecedented show of support for the broad education reforms detailed in the State's Race to the Top application.  Thanks to the leadership of the Governor, the State legislature, and the Board of Regents, New York State passed new legislation in May 2010 that will usher in a new era of educational excellence in the State and ensure that we are able to fully execute the innovative, coherent reform agenda outlined in our Race to the Top application. The new laws: (1) establish a new teacher and principal evaluation system that makes student achievement data a substantial component of how educators are assessed and supported; (2) raise our charter school cap from 200 to 460; (3) enable school districts to enter contracts with Educational Partnership Organizations for the management of their persistently lowest‐achieving schools and schools under registration review; and (4) appropriate more than $20 million to the State Education Department to implement its P‐20 longitudinal data system.

Just three years ago, the relationship between the Memphis school district in Tennessee and its teachers' union was fairly typical: The two entities worked together during contract negotiations, and while there were no spectacular disagreements, there weren't any major partnerships, either. Much has changed since that time.

Now, in studies that threaten to shake the foundation of high-stakes test-based accountability, Mr. Stroup and two other researchers said they believe they have found the reason: a glitch embedded in the DNA of the state exams that, as a result of a statistical method used to assemble them, suggests they are virtually useless at measuring the effects of classroom instruction. Pearson, which has a five-year, $468 million contract to create the state's tests through 2015, uses "item response theory" to devise standardized exams, as other testing companies do. Using I.R.T., developers select questions based on a model that correlates students' ability with the probability that they will get a question right. That produces a test that Mr. Stroup said is more sensitive to how it ranks students than to measuring what they have learned.

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

This is a letter I wrote to members of the Virginia General Assembly on the eve of their vote on HB576 which would eliminate tenure, or the "Continuing Contract" as it is called here.

Principals new to their schools face a variety of challenges that can influence their likelihood of improving their schools' performance and their likelihood of remaining the principal. Understanding the actions that principals take and the working conditions they face in the first year can inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention, but the research on first-year principals' experiences is limited. This report examines the actions and perceived working conditions of first-year principals, relating information on those factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. This report presents findings from an analysis of schools led by principals who were in their first year at their schools. Throughout this report, we define first-year principals as principals in their first year at a given school including those principals with previous experience as principals at other schools. The study is based on data that were collected to support the RAND Corporation's seven-year formative and summative evaluation of New Leaders. New Leaders is an organization that is dedicated to promoting student achievement by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. The findings will be of interest to policymakers in school districts, charter management organizations (CMOs), state education agencies, and principal preparation programs, in addition to principals themselves and teachers. This research was conducted in RAND Education, a unit of the RAND Corporation, under a contract with New Leaders.

For a short while yesterday - more than I would have liked to - I followed the circus of testimony and tweets about proposed education reform legislation in Connecticut. The reform legislation - SB 24 - includes the usual reformy elements of teacher tenure reform, ending seniority preferences, expanding and promoting charter schooling, etc. etc. etc. And the reformy circus had twitpics of of eager undergrads (SFER) & charter school students (as young as Kindergarten?) shipped in and carrying signs saying CHARTER=PUBLIC (despite a body of case law to the contrary, and repeated arguments, some lost in state courts [oh], by charter operators that they need not comply with open records/meetings laws or disclose employee contracts), and tweeting reformy platitudes and links to stuff they called research supporting the reformy platform (Much of it tweeted as "fact checking" by the ever-so-credible ConnCAN). Ignored in all of this theatre-of-the-absurd was any actual substantive, knowledgeable conversation about the state of public education in Connecticut, the nature of the CT achievement gap and the more likely causes of it, and other problems/failures of Connecticut education policy.

Let's face it. The past few contracts have seen a major erosion of core rights for teachers, and not just here in NYC.  I am a chapter leader, so I have little time to write these missives in the blogoshphere, as I engage in daily combat for my members trying to protect what rights they have left. So, I think alarmist reactions are in order, especially given anything of complexity negotiated by our union.  I have been around long enough to remember a document called Teaching for the 21st Century. Most UFT members of unaware of its existence. Yet, it was the primary driver of their Article 8 rights, which include how teachers are to be observed and assessed as professionals. It came out in the late 90s and was heralded with much fanfare as a great collaboration between the Board of Education and the UFT.

"The windowless basement meeting room buzzed with excited, nervous chatter. Rival schools were about to sit down to get to know one another, rather intimately. Nine schools in the Providence School District have agreed to consider converting to charter status, by partnering with one of Rhode Island's excellent charter schools. Together they'll adapt the charter-school's educational strategy, write up their co-created new design, and apply for charter status from the state. The new joint-venture schools will remain district-run and unionized. These sorts of district-school conversions are not terribly common, but they do exist -- mainly because faculties get so frustrated with certain district policies, curriculum or labor-contract provisions that they want the flexibility that comes with charter status. In Providence's case, the district itself is encouraging the conversions."

"Since the first charter school was established in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., the model has rapidly taken hold in cities across the United States. As of December 2011, about 5 percent of U.S. students attended the nation's 5,300 charter schools. A charter school is a public school governed by a nonprofit organization under a contract-or charter-with a state or local government. This charter exempts the school from selected rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards as defined by its charter. There are as many types of charter schools as there are educational approaches. But a common difference between charter schools and traditional schools is that charter school teachers are not typically unionized. Another is that their day-to-day administration is sometimes managed by a for-profit corporation."

"Dear Governor Christie, Yesterday I took the opportunity to come hear you speak on your campaign trail. I have never really heard you speak before except for sound bytes that I get on my computer. I don't have cable, I don't read newspapers. I don't have enough time. I am a public school teacher that works an average of 60 hours a week in my building. Yes, you can check with my principal. I run the after-school program along with my my classroom position. I do even more work when I am at home. For verification of this, just ask my children. I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories. Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response "I want more money for my students." Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years. "

"Few people realize that the struggle for civil rights and racial integration had a northern component and many battles were fought in the New York metropolitan area. Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey would not permit African Americans in its famous saltwater swimming pool until 1961. Levittown on Long Island originally required homebuyers to sign a contract that they would not sell or rent to Blacks. Many local battles of the Civil Rights era took place in Hempstead, so Dawn Sumner and Claire LaMothe had students learn about these struggles. "

Calls are growing in New York for government officials to review and reject multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts let by the state and New York City education departments to Rupert Murdoch's beleaguered News Corp.

Teacher pay is an entirely artificial concept unrelated to anything but union contracts and reference tables on the number of years spent teaching. Other than, say, relating it to the hourly scale for babysitting, teaching has no inherent market value. Sure, studies show the hours teachers put in, the value of good educators on student lives, and the horror show of failed school systems. But no one has figured out--or wants to figure out--a good way to measure teacher pay.

The state and city teachers unions called on the state Education Department to throw out a $27 million no-bid contract it is set to award to a News Corp. affiliate.

Below is an update sent to Manhattan Community Education Councils this morning

Next, Wednesday, August 17th is the next Panel for Education Policy (PEP) meeting at Murry Bergtraum High School, and on the agenda are contracts and the budget. Does anyone besides me notice a glaring omission from the agenda? What about the educational crisis surrounding the recently released test scores

Tonight, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on contracts for six Educational Partnership Organizations to take over a group of low-performing schools through the federal "restart" model. One of the restart schools is Banana Kelly High School, which EdVox wrote about last May. Banana Kelly High School is a small high school in the Bronx that seemed to have been set up to fail by the NYC Department of Education (DOE) which assigned rising populations of the highest-needs students and an increasing enrollment to Banana Kelly, yet allocated the school a declining budget. This year, the school was placed on NY State's list of Persistently Lowest-Achieving schools.

Kelly Fischer, one of the plaintiffs in a special-education discrimination lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, says last year she was discouraged by a number of charter schools from enrolling her now 10-year-old son Noah, who is blind, autistic and eats from a tube. While charters are free from many of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional districts, such as union contracts and limits on the length of school days, they must follow U.S. antidiscrimination laws, just like other public schools.

A State Education Department commissioner took a roughly $2,000 junket financed by the charity of a learning firm that later won a $32 million state contract.