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Percentage of public school districts that had salary schedules for teachers and among those that had salary schedules, the average yearly teacher base salary, by various levels of degrees and experience and state: 2007-08

As most people know, the majority of public school teachers are paid based on salary schedules. Most (but not all) contain a number of "steps" (years of experience) and "lanes" (education levels). Teachers are placed in one lane (based on their degree) and proceed up the steps as they accrue years on the job. Within most districts, these two factors determine the raises that teachers receive. Salary schedules receive a great deal of attention in our education debates.

Teachers, students and parents-one after the other - implored the Fond du Lac Board of Education to consider the impact of enacting a schedule change that would result in less contact time between staff and students before and after school.

"On Monday, the city's 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers' unions across the country. If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file. Newark's deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state's tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform. If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations - similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers' strike last month."

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.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously), who was a student in an online science course.  Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. He didn't read a word of his textbook, didn't participate in discussions, and still he got an A. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. He doesn't cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up. Bob's online cheating methods deserve some attention. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor's efforts to prevent cheating online. The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test). But the design of the test had two potential flaws

"New teacher evaluations, based in part on student achievement, will be introduced in schools across the state in this school year - and with them will come more student testing. To evaluate teacher effectiveness, schools must measure how much progress students make in each course. So schools are adding locally developed tests to their existing schedule of state tests and course exams."

NCTQ has made some big changes to our TR3 database, where you can compare the local policies and state laws governing teachers in over 100 school districts in the United States.  This database allows you to compare districts on almost any factor that affects teachers. We've pulled this data from state laws, teachers' contracts, school board policies, school calendars, salary schedules, and teacher evaluation handbooks and more. We've sorted through thousands of documents so you don't have to.

Now a new study, scheduled for release on Thursday, says the administration's numbers were wildly overstated. The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration's education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation's 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing under the law this year.

New York has the most effective school-choice system of any of the nation's largest school districts, allowing students and parents the most freedom and providing them with the most relevant information on educational performance, according to a new Brookings Institution report scheduled for publication online Wednesday. But even New York got a B under the report's A-to-F grading system, with Brookings saying the city provided the least useful online information for comparing schools and giving it low scores in several other categories.

...this year's crop of seniors is the third-to-last that will ever graduate from Columbus. The school is in the process of being closed because of its low performance, despite valiant efforts to fend off the city's decision that included hearings, lawsuits, and two attempts at charter school conversion. This year, no new ninth-graders enrolled, and Columbus is scheduled to graduate its last students in 2014. It is now just one of seven schools sharing space in the four-story stone building that once housed it alone.

The other day the New York State Education Department (SED), which oversees the education in the state in which I reside, put out the ELA and Math testing schedule that will affect all of the K-8 students. For three days each week for two weeks our students will be tested. Six days of high stakes testing.

Many if not most local districts and their unions that are supposed to have agreements by now are struggling to come to terms on how to evaluate the area's 11,000 or so teachers. Syracuse, which is on an accelerated schedule, recently was penalized by the state for not reaching an agreement, but it is not alone. The state penalized nine other districts, too, (none local) and is under pressure from the federal education department to get its districts to launch new evaluation systems. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called the state effort to change the system a failure.

Some people have the unfortunate idea that unionism is somehow antithetical to or incompatible with being a professional. This notion is particularly salient within education circles, where phrases like "treat teachers like professionals" are often used as implicit arguments against policies associated with unions, such as salary schedules and tenure (examples here, here, here and here). Let's take a quick look at this "conflict," first by examining union membership rates among professionals versus workers in other types of occupations.

A new report released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation's largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and-mortar schools. These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates. "Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags," said NEPC Director Kevin Welner. The report's findings will be presented in Washington today to a national meeting of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), where the report's lead author, Dr. Gary Miron, is scheduled to debate Dr. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The report is titled, Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools.

Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city's 80,000 teachers-names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.

To the editors: In "Firing Line: The Grand Coalition against Teachers," Joanne Barkan makes a compelling case for why we should be concerned about the direction of the current education reform movement. There's no doubt that an increasingly powerful group of self-styled "education reformers" have come to blame teachers and their unions for the problems ailing public schools. They contend that unions protect ineffective teachers from being dismissed, allow for evaluation systems that fail to differentiate teacher performance, and promote a salary schedule that rewards seniority rather than teaching excellence. Accordingly, they accuse union leaders of using their political power to thwart flexibility and stifle innovation.

Late this Friday afternoon, only 4 days before the law was scheduled to go into effect, word came that a judge in Missouri has issued an injunction against implementation of the Missouri anti-social networking (Facebook) law between teachers and students. Here is a local story on it (thanks to my good friend Dave Doty @canyonsdave). Also, thanks to the Missouri State Teachers' Association, who filed the suit, for following up on twitter with their press release.  First, this is just a preliminary injunction. This is not a final judgment and the matter is still to be decided. 

Gov. John Kasich signed a two-year budget that imposes a performance-based salary schedule on school districts that receive Race to the Top money, raising questions about the impact on individual union agreements that were negotiated to win the $400 million federal grant-and also on the state's eligibility for the money.