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It was the best of teachers.  It was the worst of teachers. But how much better are the best teachers than the worst teachers?  Well THAT'S a tough one, but one that is very important to answer.  The corporate reformers believe that the gap is great so a feasible solution is to fire those bad teachers.

Now another Michigan lawmaker has doubled down on the GOP attack on public school teachers. In an interview with the Gongwer News Service, state Sen. Randy Richardville, the majority leader, slammed the MEA-the state's main teachers' union-as focused on "big-paid, high-honcho people." Then he claimed that teachers are "more than greedy," presumably for demanding health insurance, retirement benefits, and modest increases in their even more modest salaries. (The average teacher in Michigan made $54,088 a year in 2009, the highest in the nation.)

So--let's say you're a teacher. Not "just a teacher," but one of those special teachers we hear about in news and policy discussions-- the supposedly rare educator who has passionate disciplinary expertise, a toolbag full of teaching strategies and genuine caring for their students. You're in education because you want to make a difference, change the world, raise the bar. You actually love teaching, finding it endlessly variable and challenging. You plan to spend a long time in the classroom.

Educational reforms enacted through federal policies are directly impacting the voice of children, teachers, and teacher educators. The recently introduced bi partisan bill "Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for teachers and Principals Act" frames a plan for state accreditation for teacher training academies based on student achievement. The newly introduced Race to the Top (RTT) competition, focused on early childhood, includes motivating states to receive some of the $500 million allotted to create ratings systems to score early childhood programs, write standards and related standardized tests, and expectations of what an early childhood teachers should know. Both the proposed bill and RTT competition are positioned to regulate with market driven ideology, reinforcing and reproducing social injustice and undermining democratic ideals.

"Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers' control can influence student performance from year to year - or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year. Fortunately, there's a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction - in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day. "

"I have worked in education for much of my life. I have met with thousands of teachers in great schools and struggling schools, in big cities and small towns, and I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do. I know that most teachers did not enter the profession for the money. You became teachers to make a difference in the lives of children, and for the hard work you do each day, you deserve to be respected, valued, and supported."

The future of the fight over public schools has a fresh, highly visible face, and it's called StudentsFirstNY. But the new school-reform supergroup, founded by former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and ex-D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, is in fact not that new at all. It builds directly one of the biggest lobbying forces in New York State, called Education Reform Now. In the last two years, Education Reform Now and the associated Education Reform Now Advocacy have spent more than $10 million to influence state law on hiring and firing of teachers, as a counterforce to the state's two major teachers' unions. Those funds helped force a change in teacher evaluations that unions had opposed, and also backed Mayor Bloomberg's push for layoffs based on teacher performance in place of the current system, in which the most recently hired teachers must be the first to be let go. The $10 million is as much money as StudentsFirstNY director Micah Lasher - until now, Mayor Bloomberg's chief Albany lobbyist - says the new group will spend to influence the next mayoral election.

What effective CMOs do rely on heavily is trust, relationships, and clear communication. In well-run charters, there is a common belief about teaching and learning, and teachers are hired and retained based on whether they share that belief. teachers know they are getting ongoing feedback and no surprises. They know that the principal doing their observations and evaluations is a master teacher operating on the same definition of good instruction as they are. They know that every other teacher in the building is a potential collaborator. In other words, they trust their coworkers and operate in a culture of common understanding and mutual respect. Evaluation is understood to be more about organizational improvement than about passing judgment on an individual. In fact, some CMOs have tried and dumped merit pay because they felt it disrupted this collaborative culture.

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

Scapegoating is a powerful tool to sway public opinion. That's why I'm not surprised that teachers unions are consistently being singled out for the shortcomings of public schools ("Can teachers Unions Do Education Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 3). After all, they are such an easy target at a time when the public's patience over the glacial pace of school reform is running out. The latest example was an essay by Juan Williams, who is now a political analyst for Fox News ("Will Business Boost School Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28). He claims that teachers unions are "formidable opponents willing to fight even modest efforts to alter the status quo." Their obstructionism is responsible for the one million high school dropouts each year and for a graduation rate of less than 50 percent for black and Hispanic students. Williams says that when schools are free of unions, they succeed because they can fire ineffective teachers, implement merit pay, lengthen the school day, enrich the curriculum and deal with classroom discipline. These assertions have great intuitive appeal to taxpayers who are angry and frustrated, but the truth is far different from what Williams maintains.

Teachers at the New York French American Charter School in Harlem will be allowed to unionize, a state agency decided on Wednesday, overriding objections from the school's administration. The United Federation of Teachers had filed a petition with the state's Public Employment Relations Board in December to represent Teachers and other staff members at French American, a Harlem charter school with bilingual instruction that opened in 2010. But the school challenged the petition, arguing that three Teachers had been coerced into joining the union.

The Metlife survey of American teachers has been much discussed in recent weeks. The biggest red flag I see waving here is the 70% increase, over the past two years, in the number of teachers who are likely to leave the profession in the next five years (from 17% to 29%). Assuming this data is accurate, this amounts to more than a million teachers who are preparing to march out of our classrooms. And this is in addition to the roughly one million baby boomers approaching retirement age! I wonder if the teaching profession as it is now being redesigned and redefined is one that any of us would have chosen when we began teaching? And I especially wonder who would choose to teach in a school with a high level of poverty?

The big headline from the recent Gates/Scholastic survey of teachers is that only 28% of teachers see standardized tests as an essential or important gauge of student assessment, and only 26% say they are accurate as a reflection of student knowledge. Another question reveals part of the reason this may be so - only 45% of teachers think their students take these tests seriously, or perform to the best of their ability. We have been stuck in an accountability rut for the past decade, with most reform initiatives revolving around test scores of one sort or another. Even the concept of student learning has been subtly redefined to mean "achievement on end of year tests." There are several assumptions that have driven this.

Yes, teacher tenure needs reform, but state Sen. Teresa Ruiz's bill places too much weight on the teacher evaluation system under development in New Jersey. Firing teachers based on two consecutive years of poor evaluations is not going to improve teacher effectiveness or student achievement.

Connecticut's SB 24 appears to be little more than boilerplate reformy legislation which, like similar legislation in other states, creates a massive smokescreen concealing the very real problems facing Connecticut school districts. I addressed in a previous post my concern that SB24′s emphasis on charter expansion as a solution for high poverty districts is misguided, mainly because most of those successful charter schools in CT are currently achieving their successes at least in part by NOT serving high poverty populations. And another part may be the additional resources of these schools, used for such things as increased school time, supported by increased teacher salaries.  But SB24 comes with few resources attached. The other major elements of SB24 involve teacher "effectiveness" with significant emphasis on use of student performance measures for teacher evaluation. For numerous posts on this topic, see: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/category/race-to-the-top/value-added-teacher-evaluation/ A few points are in order before I move on.

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for Teachers. He envisioned teams of Teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of Teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where Teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.

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.

The Center For American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, has largely bought the educational agenda of "the billionaires' boys club." It seeks a balance, with just enough union-baiting to appease corporate powers. The CAP does its share of teacher-bashing, apparently in order to parrot the word "accountability" over and over, but it does not want to spark a stampede of teaching talent from inner city schools. Two new reports, "Designing High Quality Evaluations for High School teachers," and "Teaching Children Well," embody the tension inherent in the CAP's "Sister Souljah" tactic of demonstrating its independence from Democratic constituencies by beating up on educators. Both document the potential of improved professional development, informed by data and enhanced by video technology, to improve student performance. One also asserts that test score growth must be used to evaluate teachers, but the other is largely silent on that issue.

Last night I had the honor of speaking to an audience of several thousand teachers from the greater Sacramento area, at an event that featured State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, California teachers Association vice president Eric Heins, Linda Darling Hammond and the woman who has emerged as the champion for teachers, Diane Ravitch. Nine area teacher union locals cooperated to organize the event, and in spite of driving rain, the huge Sacramento Convention Center was packed with more than 3,000 people. This was by far the largest crowd I have ever addressed. Here is the message I shared.

It is a view as ubiquitous as it is simplistic: To improve public education, pay teachers more-a lot more. Union officials, education reformers, scholars, laypeople, and politicians of all stripes endorse this principle in one form or another. However, as we determined in a study released Nov. 1, 2011, by the Heritage Foundation, "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School teachers," the average public school teacher already is paid more than what he or she is likely to earn in the private sector. Although some may well be underpaid, the typical public school teacher makes roughly $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.