Group items tagged

Spurred by the U.S. Department of Education's $4.35 billion Race to the Top grant competition, more than a dozen states have passed laws to reform how teachers are evaluated and include student growth as a component. For most students, that growth will be measured on standardized tests. But for special education students that is considerably more complicated.

For the second time, the state's labor relations board has ruled that the city must accept mediation in its teacher evaluation talks with the United Federation of Teachers. The board, the Public Employees Relations Board, first decided in March to heed the UFT's request and appoint a mediator to broker negotiations about teacher evaluations in the 33 schools that until December had been receiving federal School Improvement Grants. But the city appealed the decision, arguing that it was no longer planning to negotiate a separate evaluation system for just those schools. Now the board has affirmed its stance and once again ordered the city into mediated talks with the union.

Alert readers (as Dave Barry likes to say) will have noted that I haven't blogged in a while. The reasons are multiple: heavy travel schedule, writing for the newest book, and full days of work on two large projects. But the key reason is anger. I have been so angry about the head-long rush into untested and poorly-thought-out value-added accountability models of schools and teachers in various states all around the country that I haven't found a calm mental space in which to get words on paper. Let me now try. Forgive me if I sputter. Here's the problem in a nutshell. Value-added Models (VAM) of accountability are now the rage. And it is understandable why this is so. They involve predictions about "appropriate" student gains of performance. If results - almost always measured via state standardized test scores - fall within or above the "expected" gains, then you are a "good" school or teacher. If the gains fall below the expected gains that you are a "bad" school or teacher. Such a system has been in place in Tennessee for over a decade. You may be aware that from that test interesting claims have been made about effective vs. ineffective teachers adding a whole extra year of gain. So, in the last few years, as accountability pressures have been ratcheted up in all states, more and more of such systems have been put in place, most recently in New York State where a truly byzantine formula is being used starting next year to hold principals and teachers accountable. It will surely fail (and be litigated). Let me try to explain why.

The New York Times online indexes the article "$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies" as education. It probably should have been listed under politics. After three years of demonizing teachers as the problem with American education with its Race to the Top program, the Obama administration apparently now realizes it will need teacher union support and teacher and public school parent votes to be reelected. Suddenly, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to "work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy." Other than promising respect, the proposal is called the RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, the Obama-Duncan team is offering teachers very little. The title of the program is apparently taken from a top of the pop charts song sung by Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. What Duncan seems to have missed is that the song is actually a complaint because as a woman she is not receiving any respect.

One year into the US Department Of Education's 4 billion dollar School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, giving an average of half a million dollars to 800 'failing' schools, the preliminary results are in.  Anyone who understands school reform should know that looking at 'test scores' after one year doesn't really tell you much.  It is like checking the score of a basketball game two minutes into the game.

More than a dozen school districts are taking part in a leadership fellowship sponsored by the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter network, in order to learn how the network trains its school leaders. The KIPP Leadership Design Fellowship, which is funded through a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation grant, has also brought together representatives from charter management organizations and educator training programs.

You know what one of my great pet peeves is? When prominent people, who are granted a prominent place in our society's discourse, cite "research" without telling us what that research is. Case in point: Newark Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson: Research shows that effective teachers put students on an entirely different life trajectory - toward college, a higher salary, even a more stable family life. I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong teacher in every classroom and great leader in every school. Based on my 20-plus years in education, I know we must significantly change how we recruit, select, develop and retain our educators. [...] Some research shows that we lose our best teachers to charter schools and other professions because they feel they are not growing and they become disheartened seeing students in ineffective classrooms. After multiple poor ratings validated by several people, we should presume that these few teachers are ineffective and partner with the union to manage them out - efficiently. [emphasis mine] I would dearly love to see this "research." I would love to evaluate it for myself and decide whether it's think-tanky nonsense or serious work done by serious people. But I can't, can I? Because Anderson won't tell me what it is, and the Star-Ledger thinks it's enough for her to cite it without checking it for themselves.

On Tuesday, I posted a blog titled "Spinning the Numbers on Turnarounds: School Improvement Grant Controversy Brews." In it I questioned the very limited information Secretary Duncan had released the previous week, when he claimed positive results for the program. I even went so far as to question what the numbers could mean. I had written to the Department of Education asking for clarification on Monday, but had not received any reply. Thursday, an entry was posted at the Department of Education's Homeroom blog, which contained further information that clarified the issue. I immediately updated Tuesday's post to include this. Yesterday, I received a formal response, with the request that I share it with my readers. What follows is that response.

State University of New York officials on Monday granted a hefty fee increase to the charter school company run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. The SUNY Board's Charter Schools Committee decided - without a vote - to allow Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools to increase its per-pupil fee from $1,350 to $2,000 to run charter schools in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

"I hope over the next several months to compile a series of posts where I look at what states have done to achieve their executive granted waivers from federal legislation. Yeah… let's be clear here, that all of this starts with an executive decision to ignore outright, undermine intentionally and explicitly, federal legislation. Yeah… that legislation may have some significant issues. It might just suck entirely. Nonetheless, this precedent is a scary one both in concept and in practice. Even when I don't like the legislation in question, I'm really uncomfortable having someone unilaterally over-ride or undermine it. It makes me all the more uncomfortable when that unilateral disregard for existing law is being used in a coercive manner - using access to federal funding to coerce states to adopt reform strategies that the current administration happens to prefer. The precedent at the federal level that legislation perceived as inconvenient can and should simply be ignored seems to encourage state departments of education to ignore statutory and constitutional provisions within their states that might be perceived similarly as inconvenient. Setting all of those really important civics issues aside - WHICH WE CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE DOING - the policies being adopted under this illegal (technical term - since it's in direct contradiction to a statute, with full recognition that this statute exists) coercive framework are toxic, racially disparate and yet another example of misplaced blame."

The School Reform Act ("SRA") grants the D.C. Public Charter School Board authority to hold D.C. public charter schools accountable for fulfilling their duties and obligations under the Act.  The PCSB has developed these Guidelines to outline the process by which it will evaluate the performance of the charter schools, including how the PCSB will ensure that each school complies with its charter agreement and applicable law and how the PCSB will track the progress of each school in meeting its student academic achievement expectations. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have agreed to a new pact granting local schools more autonomy over hiring, curriculum and work conditions and virtually ending a 2-year-old policy that allowed charter operators and others to take over low-performing and new campuses. The agreement, tentative until union members vote on it, doesn't resolve key contract disputes, including whether teacher evaluations should include students' standardized test scores, a provision L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy is seeking. And teachers will continue to work under the terms of the larger labor contract that expired July 1.

A nonprofit body set up by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers has been granted the authority to charter schools, in what's apparently the first such arrangement of its kind in the nation. An charter authorizer, let's be clear, is not the same thing as a charter-management organization. It does not act as management or get involved in the operations of such a school. Its main goal is to approve the new schools to open, to monitor them, and to shut them down if necessary if they fail to meet academic or financial benchmarks.

Embattled faculty members at Bronx High School of Science are rejoicing after a state judge ruled to erase an unsatisfactory rating from a former teacher's record. In a decision last Wednesday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Paul Feinman granted a petition to overturn a "U"-rating for Peter Lamphere, which he received from principal Valerie Reidy during the 2008-09 school year.

By 2015, with the help of a $50 million federal grant, program recruits could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation's highest need school districts. The program also is expanding internationally. That growth comes as many districts try to make teachers more effective. But Teach for America has had mixed results.

The Education Department will spend about $5 billion on the program, and even if you're thinking, hey, I could use $5 billion, consider this: New York won the largest federal grant, $700 million over the next four years. In that time, roughly $230 billion will be spent on public education in the state. By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform. That includes rating teachers and principals by their students' scores on state tests; using those ratings to dismiss teachers with low scores and to pay bonuses to high scorers; and reducing local control of education.

State Education Commissioner John King spent most of his time before legislators today going to bat for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed schools budget. But on one key point, he said the Board of Regents would prefer a change. The Regents would rather not hinge so much of the state's funds on a competition among districts, King said. Cuomo proposed using $250 million of a proposed $800 million school aid increase to reward districts for strong academic performance and management efficiency. King said the Regents, whose agenda is similar but not identical to Cuomo's, would slash that number by 80 percent. They would still hand out $50 million through a competition but think the remaining $200 million would be better used helping high-needs districts cover their expenses, he said.

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

The data summit is part of the Data Quality Campaign, which is a national effort by dozens of organizations and funded by grants and contributions from a variety of foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, AT&T, and the Birth to Five Policy Alliance. The campaign, the website says, works to "encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement." There's nothing wrong and there can be a lot right with using high-quality education data to improve achievement, of course, but data can never be the whole story. Ensuring that data is high quality, knowing how to use it - and understanding its limitations - is still not the science. A lot of the data we have is junk, but we use it to inform important decisions anyway.

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education's role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C's (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school's closing). Equally important, however, was the DOE's decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year - Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE's threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school's community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district's own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city.