Steve Sawchuk writes in yesterday's Education Daily ($) about states' progress in meeting the NCLB requirement that 100% of teachers in core academic classes be highly qualified.

There's more progress than you'd think. Sawchuk writes, "Several states have submitted preliminary 2006–07 data to the Education Department indicating that all core academic classes are now taught by highly qualified teachers."

Several states?  All core academic classes?  Yowza!  Universal proficiency should be right around the corner then. 

The article breaks down the national numbers:

• In high-poverty elementary schools, 93.5 percent of courses are taught by HQTs, compared to 96.7 percent in low-poverty elementary schools.

• In high-poverty secondary schools, 88.6 percent of core classes are taught by HQTs, compared to 95.3 percent in low-poverty secondary schools.

Of all the rich-poor gaps in our society, thess have to rank among the smallest. We know teacher quality, not to be confused with HQT status, affects student achievement, but we this kind of statistical information raises more questions than it answers.  Here are a few: 

Has NCLB done anything to improve teacher quality for children in poor neighborhoods?

What can a reauthorized law do to improve teacher quality?  (The AFT has a few thoughts on that.)

Does the law's definition of "highly qualified teacher" have any connection to teacher quality?

Do these small gaps in HQT explain all or some of the achievement gap?

How much more effort should we expend trying to narrow the rich-poor HQT gap and reach 100%?

And, of course, Is our children learning? 

A friend raises the important point that these national figures, which look pretty good, may hide some districts with much lower numbers or much larger gaps.

Posted by John at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bwaaa haa haaa, if I can just get this formula right, I know I can create gold and rule the world.

Florida's merit pay system was designed by mad scientists politicians instead of teachers, and most school districts have rejected it.  Not surprisingly, the formula isn't quite right: "Hillsborough, the largest district to enact merit pay, has discovered that teachers in the most affluent schools are the ones benefitting the most."

Damn those unions.  Why aren't they open to great ideas like this?

(Photo by Flickr user practicalowl used under a Creative Commons license.)

Posted by John at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of days ago Kevin Carey compared Bill James’ work in baseball statistics to value-added assessment while taking on Steve Koss.  Kevin writes:

“Moreover, Koss doesn't know what he's talking about. The NYC value-added measures are not "derived from a single variable," they're exactly the kind of complicated multi-variate measure he describes.”

He then goes on to describe the complexity of the New York value added model.

“The NYC model uses something like 12 discrete variables, and the HLM version of value-added pioneered by Bill Sanders is so complicated that you need a PhD in statistics and a special computer at SAS headquarters to run it. It's more complicated that anything Bill James does, as it should be.”

In both baseball and education the goal is to try to use statistical evidence to gain insight about the performance of someone like Mets centerfielder Carlos Beltran, or my 10th grade world history teacher Ms. Grist, (both perennial all stars).  For Beltran, we can look at how his actions directly affect the game, and to do that we can then control for how the environment affects that performance. How does he do with runners on? How does he do on the road? Vs righty or lefty pitching? In different counts (i.e. one  strike, two strikes) Etc etc.   Ditto Ms. Grist, using all the variables Kevin describes in his post.  So far, Kevin’s logic holds.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Edweek's Quality Counts for '08 is on your newstands now. As usual, there is a wealth of good information and a lot to think about. I'm particularly fascinated by the state rankings on teacher professionalism.  But I want to start blogging on the piece I know the most about: teacher pay.   Quality Counts does a state-level analysis of how teacher pay compares to pay for folks in comparable professions.  They find that teachers are making 88 cents on the dollar overall.  If you look at the AFT salary survey you'll find this is the result in part of recent trends wherein growth in teacher pay has lagged growth in pay in the private sector.  Simply put, we're falling behind. 

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..."   I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure.  If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field.  People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall.  I do have a lot of concerns about how to do it right.    My experience with pay for performance is that you can't trust that the investment will be real and sustained.  What you get then, are new burdens, but really no new rewards.  As for the song, click on the pic to go old school with KRS-One and DJ Scott La Rock (and note that this implies no endorsement of either side in the bridge wars -- Wikipedia is a strange and sometimes marvelous place)

Posted by Ed at AFT at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eduwonkette points to a recent Dallas Morning-News article, "DISD bonus plan draws few teachers to struggling schools."

While she focuses on Eric Hanushek's comment about the huge bonuses needed to attract the best teachers, what jumped out at me was the news that a kindergarten teacher had received a $6,000 bonus to teach high school English. 

Well, I'm glad the teacher is taking on the challenge and getting what is probably a much-deserved pay increase.  But is switching kindergarten teachers to high school part of a smart pay-for-performance plan?

Posted by John at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month's PISA results showed students in the U.S. lagging behind many other developed countries on science tests.  Our friends at Free Exchange on Campus describe a Texas proposal that would NOT solve the problem.

Posted by John at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a post this morning, Eduwonk calls performance pay for teachers, which has been the hot education topic in presidential debates, "just one piece of the school improvement puzzle."  I'd take that a step further: Performance pay, even the broader issue of teacher compensation, is only a piece of the teacher quality puzzle.

Here are 10 recommendations for teacher preparation and induction, that, taken together, would have a much greater positive effect on teacher quality than tweaking teacher compensation:

1. Requre core liberal arts courses
2. Institute higher entry criteria
3. Institute a national entry test
4. Require an academic major
5. Devlop core curricula in pedagogy
6. Strengthen the clinical experience
7. Institute a rigorous exit/license test
8. Take a five-year view of teacher preparation that would include more opportunities early in pre-service training to observe and work in schools and an intensive clinical training (and paid) internship, conducted in close collaboration with the public schools.
9. Strengthen induction so that it includes a quality selection process for identifying and training mentor teachers; adequate training and compensation for these mentors; and time for them to genuinely teach, support and evaluate beginning teachers.
10. Require high standards for alternative programs.

It's easy to turn teacher compensation, and even education policy, into a litmus test: Will you buck the unions on performance pay?  Easy, but wrong.  It's harder -- and smarter -- to identify ideas and implement policies that will have an impact. 

The good news is, you don't have to start from scratch: These recommendations are in "Building a Profession," which the AFT published way back in April 2000, and there are other good ideas here. These recommendations may not be as sexy as performance pay, but they might actually, you know, make a difference in the classroom.

Posted by John at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can tell it's Thanksgiving week, because there has not been much buzz in the edublogosphere about Hillary Clinton's recent comments on pay incentives for teachers. Clinton is correct in saying that most teachers perceive merit pay to be "demeaning" and insulting in that it presumes teachers will only work hard if you dangle the carrot. The term has a negative connotation and arouses teachers' suspicious nature over, as Clinton notes, "who decides." And, as Joan Snowden reminds us in her recent paper for the Center for American Progress, the single salary schedule was developed, in part, to get away from:

"a system where arbitrary favoritism was rewarded, men made more money than women for the same work, whites made more than blacks, and high school teachers made more than elementary school teachers."

Given this history, it is understandable that most teachers want to proceed with caution. At the same time, Clinton recognizes the kind of incentives that teachers are more open to and that can work in the school setting: pay for shortage areas, tough assignments and for successful collaborative work. It's time the teacher compensation debate moved beyond the confines of "merit pay" to a fuller discussion of paying teachers as the professionals that they are.

Update: Edwize here, Campaign K-12 here, Sherman Dorn here.

Posted by Michele at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am very late out of the box on this one, the recent Fordham Foundation policy brief by Kate Walsh on alternative route programs. Walsh makes a strong case that alternative route programs are, well, not really alternative and often require as much of candidates as do traditional route programs.  Chief among her complaints is that the coursework requirements do not focus on what is immediately relevant to new teachers. While I don't disagree, I was disappointed that the brief did not discuss in any detail what coursework is essential to new teachers, other than providing a partial list that included early reading instruction, grade-level seminars, methods and classroom management. In my view, this is where the rubber hits the road.  Rather than focus on pathways into the classroom, we need to focus on what the core curriculum for teaching should be.

To listen to The Nitty Gritty by SCOTS, click here.

Posted by Michele at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In response to a post by Beth last week, blogger Alexander Russo wrote: "...it's easy to read this and end up thinking that teachers are losing their jobs over kids' test scores. They're not."

He was disagreeing, sorta kinda, with Beth, who had raised concern about the issue before concluding, "Teachers are not yet losing their jobs because of students’ poor test performance." 

It turns out that at least one teacher did lose her job because of test scores, according to this comment on Beth's post:

FYI: I did lose my job because of student test scores. I taught at a public inner-city high school with a 95%+ poverty rate and large numbers of recent immigrant students. When we failed to make AYP for two years in a row, all teachers were fired.

Posted by John at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yep, that is a finding from this recent survey of California teachers (16 percent cite salary and benefits as the reason they entered teaching; 81 percent cite wanting to make a difference for children and society.)              

The report includes some sobering and interesting findings, including some that should be useful for policymakers:

• 21 percent of those who left high-poverty schools said that their student teaching experience did not prepare them to be successful, compared to 4 percent of those who left low-poverty schools.
• 28 percent of those who left teaching would consider returning if working conditions were corrected, even if they were not offered a higher salary.  Conversely only 17 percent would consider returning if salary improved but working conditions did not.
• The number one reason teachers cited for leaving the profession was bureaucratic impediments (excessive paperwork, unnecessary meetings, frequent classroom interruptions). The other top reasons were poor district support, low staff morale, lack of resources and an unsupportive principal.  Poor compensation and benefits followed all of those.
• Among special education teachers leaving the profession, 13 reasons were cited ahead of poor compensation and benefits as reasons for leaving.  These include inadequate support for special education students, too little time for planning and collaboration, and IEPs and related paperwork.

The bottom line is that better compensation matters to teachers, but better compensation alone is not likely to improve teacher retention rates.  Teaching and learning conditions are equally relevant to teachers staying at their schools.

The survey report is well worth a read as is this thoughtful commentary by Diane Ravitch

Posted by Beth at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

EdWeek did a nice piece on the online professional development offerings of the AFT and the NEA, showcasing what we often say but no one listens to: unions are not big, bad and mean.  We actually care about helping children and strengthening instruction.

The AFT’s current online professional development offering is www.t-source.org. Participate in the discussions and check out the timely information.

Plus, we’ve got this great blog…

Posted by Beth at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the purposes of the AFT’s decision to have a blog was to start some conversations on issues.  What’s interesting is that a lot of the best conversations that we’ve helped start are on other blogs, and we are very thankful to those who have helped out in this regard.  I want to particularly call your attention to a diary by Teacher Ken over at Daily Kos that builds from some of the data in our salary survey.  One point from Ken that brings it home:

Meanwhile, if we do not want to continue digging ourselves into a deep hole educationally, we need to address the issue of the compensation of the teachers we currently have that we want to keep. The more experience we lose the harder it will be to expect that other educational policies will result in more learning. If teacher compensation continues to lag compared either with inflationary pressures or with the increases available in other professions, we will find an increasing number of experienced teachers leaving the field while they could still be productive, and fewer qualified people willing to enter the field. 

There are more than 200 comments, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, I appreciate seeing them.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If we can name an airport after President Reagan, who busted the air traffic controller's union, I suppose we can name the University of Florida's College of Education after former Gov. Jeb Bush.  (Via Wonkette)

Posted by John at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Carey raises a point about Master’s degrees.  The purpose of the Master’s degree is to provide a teacher with appropriate professional development.  The effort to achieve this development and the results from it are what justify the increase in compensation that teachers typically accrue from it.  Although I think you can take the argument too far, I agree with Carey that there is evidence that the Master’s is an imperfect instrument in this regard. But it is part of an accountability compact of sorts. When we tweak it, we need to bear that in mind.  So you won’t see me saying let's dump the degree to use it on health insurance payments or straight compensation instead.  That would be a tremendous political trap. And it’s just a good idea to try to link pay to professional development.

The other day I wrote that the creation of a three tiered teacher pay system in New Mexico was one of the recent education policy accomplishments in the Land of Enchantment.  Under this program a teacher’s pay status is based on whether they have an introductory license (Level I), a professional (Level II) license or an advanced license (Level III).  All teachers have to move from the introductory level to the professional level in three years. This is roughly akin to passing probation, except that it is based on successful completion of both a mentoring program and a professional development dossier that is based on the teacher’s professional development plan.

Teachers at the professional level can choose to maintain their license or to move on to Level III after a certain number of years.  It's true that a master’s degree can be a part of that process, but teachers can use National Board certification as a substitute for the Masters Degree. And there is also another professional development dossier that must be completed.  It’s a new compensation system that allows new teachers to advance more quickly and does more to link advancement to the teacher’s specific professional development needs than the traditional system.  You never need a Master’s degree, although you could still gain benefits from pursuing one. We’ve been pretty vocal in our support for this plan in large part because it links advancement to meaningful professional development.  If you want to look at ways AFT has worked to move beyond the Master’s, I’d suggest that this is one.  

Posted by Ed at AFT at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That’s the answer to the question “How Strong Are Contractual Provision on Seniority and Transfer in California?” according to some new research by William Koski and Eileen Horng.  One of the basic raps on collective bargaining is that the seniority provisions in teacher contracts allow experienced teachers to bump inexperienced teachers out of desirable assignments (i.e. classes with lots of middle class kids) and thus they doom the poorest public schools in each district to constantly getting the greenest and least qualified teachers. 

My colleague Howard Nelson has looked at the data in the federal Schools and Staffing Survey. He found that districts with collective bargaining had lower rates of transfer generally, and that high poverty schools in districts without bargaining had a lot more turnover.  

Now comes Koski and Horng with some new data that’s part of the big set of studies on California education policy that were released a few days back. They look at the relationship between collective bargaining and teacher distribution within and across every California district.  Here are some findings from their empirical work:

• “Districts with more determinative transfer and leave provisions have greater percentages of credentialed teachers even after controlling for a wide range of other district characteristics, suggesting that strong collective bargaining agreements may put school districts at an advantage in hiring and retaining quality teachers.”
• “Those schools with greater percentages of minority students, those with more students, those that are growing, and (somewhat surprisingly) those with smaller class sizes have fewer certified and fewer experienced teachers. Yet we find no convincing evidence that this problem is worse in those districts with strong transfer and leave provisions.”

In other words, strong contractual language on transfers is associated with higher teacher quality overall and it is not associated with maldistribution of teachers within districts.

Koski and Horng chose to measure contract provisions by creating a 14 point scale based on 6 questions about seniority, transfers and hiring that assess the extent to which experienced teachers had advantages over less experienced ones.  The average score on the scale was 4.87. No district scored higher than a 10.  This pretty much jibes with our look at contracts for our largest locals showing that seniority is not an important factor in particular for voluntary transfers. 

The research also includes interviews with HR staff, and these reveal some complaints about how contractual provisions limit management, but they also portray the labor management relationship as nuanced and pretty flexible. Apparently the California state legislature’s inability to come up with a budget on time is a much bigger problem for them than are teacher contracts.

It's also true that strong transfer language isn’t associated with having higher quality teachers in the poorest schools in a district, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. We need to evaluate other provisions such as whether contracts offer incentives or allow for teachers to have greater say on working conditions to find those kinds of benefits from bargaining. And we need to negotiate more of those kinds of provisions.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by John at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Senate Education Committee is moving faster than the House in the NCLB reauthorization process, meaning that they held their second hearing today, while the House has not begun their hearings. For bettors on the NCLB reauthorization date, I think this slows things down considerably. The House is more likely to move a bill, but not if they don’t begin the process. The Senate moves slowly even when three presidential contenders are not on the education committee.                

Back to today’s hearing. The topic was attracting and retaining teachers, and there were nine witnesses, so maybe it was supposed to be a two-day hearing. Sprinkled in with the usual all stars were a couple of teachers. Here are the three things that Pam Burnett of Lake County, Florida, named as having been effective in attracting and retaining qualified educators in her community:

• a Teaching Center;
• National Board support system; and
• regular professional development.

And what are the top two supports that make a difference to educators in Ms. Burnett’s community? Working conditions and strong school leadership.

Read the full testimony here.

Posted by Beth at 07:58 AM | Permalink

The Aspen Institute's NCLB Commission recommendation that 25 percent of teachers be deemed "ineffective" every year caused me to wonder what percentage of teachers are dismissed from the teaching profession annually.  Michael Podgursky has looked at the dismissal rates of teachers for poor performance at public charter, regular public and private schools.  Charter schools had the highest dismissal rate at 7.5 percent, then private schools at 3.7 percent and, finally, regular public schools at 1.1 percent. 

Does this mean, as Podgursky argues in his conclusion, that "regulatory freedom, small size of wage-setting units,and a competitive market environment make pay and personnel practices more market and performance-based in private and charter schools as compared to traditional public schools"?  Not necessarily.  The lower dismissal rate at public schools may, instead, reflect the fact that teachers in these schools were better prepared for the teaching profession and are therefore less likely to be dismissed for poor performance.  In fact, Podgursky points out that, "Multivariate analysis of the charter school dismissal rate finds that it tends to decline sharply with the age of the charter chool and approaches the rate of private schools after several years of operation."

Still, a dismissal rate for poor performance of less than 4 percent is quite a bit less than the Aspen Commission's proposal to rate 25 percent of teachers as ineffective.  I realize that the Aspen folks weren't proposing that those teachers be dismissed, but the Podgursky paper illustrates just how arbitrary the 25 percent figure is.  And it shows that, even in the private sector, schools are not dismissing teachers at a very high rate.  Maybe there are fewer "bad apples" in the profession than some seem to think.

Posted by Michele at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor have updated this paper which examines the link between teacher credentials and student achievement and builds on their previous research on teacher-student matching.  Part of what makes their research unique is that it is based on administrative data for the entire state of North Carolina.

Their main finding is that "teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement."  And, like most of the research in this area, the effects are larger for math than reading.  It's a rich paper with much to be parsed out and used, of course, to one's own devices.  Some, I am sure, will make hay out of the fact that yet another study shows having a graduate degree does not improve teaching, while others (say, me for example), will point out that this study, like many others before it, does not look at the correspondence between the subject taught and the focus of the master's degree.

Given the recent back-and-forth between Edwize and The Quick and the Ed regarding the value of teacher experience, I think it is also worth highlighting the findings of Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor based on the five statistical models they ran:

Compared to a teacher with no experience, the benefits of experience rise monotonically* to a peak range of 0.092 (from model 4) to 0.119 (from model 5) standard deviations after 21-27 years of experience, with more than half of the gain occurring during the first couple of years of teaching.

Or, for those who prefer the layman's version, the authors later explain that "close to half the achievement returns to experience arise during the first few years of teaching but returns continue to rise throughout most of the experience range."  This finding indicates that the benefits of experience extend beyond 10 years and, therefore, this paper will enrich the debate on paying teachers based on experience.

*In case you are wondering, monotonic means--I think--"consistently increasing."  Yes, I had to look it up. JD2178--WDYT?

Posted by Michele at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed goes to great lengths to tell us what the RAND study on value added assessment and teacher accountability really says.  Clearly, he is unhappy that many folks--advocates and researchers alike--have taken RAND's findings to mean proceed cautiously in using value added assessments to evaluate teachers.

Well, perhaps Carey would be more persuaded by Dale Ballou's reservations on value added and teacher evaluation expressed very succinctly in Education Next, back in 2002.  For those who don't know, Ballou co-wrote this book with Michael Podgursky in which they argue that increased teacher salaries and teacher quality are not linked.

So, what does Ballou think of value added assessment?  He believes it is useful for diagnostic purposes, but he worries:

The more serious difficulties arise when value-added assessments are used to hold schools and teachers accountable, with high-stakes personnel decisions to follow. The danger is that such assessments will be used to supplant local decisionmaking, rather than to inform it. Unfortunately, our instruments of assessment are not precise or dependable enough for this purpose.

It's a short piece, so certainly read it yourself, but his technical critiques of using value added for teacher accountability are:

• Measured gains are noisy and unstable.
• Gain scores may be influenced by factors other than school quality.
• Similar gain scores are not necessarily comparable.

Ballou concludes:

Sanders’s assessment system has been a beneficial diagnostic tool in Tennessee. But those who look to value-added assessment as the solution to the problem of educational accountability are likely to be disappointed. There are too many uncertainties and inequities to rely on such measures for high-stakes personnel decisions.

Hmm, sounds similar to the concerns expressed by Leo Casey at Edwize at the end of this post.  Maybe Carey will now be persuaded that Casey's concerns are legitimate?  Alas, I think not.  Blog discourse rarely leads to a change of heart.

Posted by Michele at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In writing about the Aspen Commission report, Eduwonk linked to a USA Today story about Zakia Sims, a National Board certified teacher who teachers in DC Public Schools. One of the things I noticed about her comments was the extent to which the Commission’s work, and much of the NCLB debate, is immaterial to the work she does every day.  The last paragraph got to me:

Sims actually welcomes the Aspen idea to judge her by her kids' work--with a caveat: The school board and superintendent had better come up with the money to get her all the supplies and help she needs. And parents had better get their kids to school on time, rested, well dressed and well fed. "All the stakeholders need to be involved," she says. "It can't just be teachers."

Last November, budget cuts forced Garrison to cut one teacher's job. Overnight, Sims' class grew by nearly 50%, from 16 students to 23--big for first grade.

How did she deal with it?

"You just open your arms up a little bit more," she says.

With the exception of the sheer grace of that last quote--I’d be ticked about the seven new kids in the middle of the year--I might have said the same thing fifteen years ago while I was teaching.  And, commenting on Michele’s post about teacher evaluation recommendations in the Aspen report, a teacher named Kate wrote:

Alas, the whole system ignores those dedicated teachers that take the hardest jobs with the fewest rewards and the least tangible improvement in test scores. 30 percent of my students don't finish the year with me. 30 percent started the year with someone else, so my teaching really isn't the issue, is it? I continue to think it just sad that we can't have a realistic conversation about the real issues, poverty and lack of support or even an understanding of the value of education for huge portions of our population. It's tough to convince a kid who's parent is in jail and who doesn't have a place to sleep that civics is really all that important

Again, this is something that could have been said by me fifteen years ago. And it's not like there haven’t been efforts to reform schools since then. The fact is, too many of our schools are functioning in such a way that our teachers’ work won’t be able to take center stage and become THE issue.  NCLB has certainly helped highlight some of those problems, but as Michele has noted here, it hasn’t done that much to give real support to the people on the frontlines. These teachers aren't asking to be let off of the hook because the system is failing them, but they are asking for a debate that focuses on helping them do the job they want to do.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update: Eduwonk says a competitive grant program cannot be "thrust" upon you.  Well, if you are the district that's true.  However, if you look at it from the teachers' perspective, if your district applies and chooses not to involve you in the process, then the program will, in fact, be imposed on teachers.

Eduwonk asks, where is the AFT on the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF)?  OK, I'll bite.   First, in communicating with our leaders, the AFT has provided this guidance:

Some districts employing AFT members have applied for TIF grants and worked with their local union in developing their plans. This was the case in Ohio, where AFT locals in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo were involved in the creation of the programs that were approved for funding by the Department.

The union believes that any district applying for a TIF grant should involve the union. Absent this collaboration, the AFT is concerned that the program would be used to impose misguided compensation plans that are not effective in recruiting and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

I reiterated this point in my December 2006 post, because I believe it to be true, not because someone told me to write it.

Third, the Greg Toppo piece in USA Today on the Aspen NCLB recommendations, which Eduwonk says is a must-read, includes this from an interview with AFT Executive Vice President Toni Cortese:

But what about the teachers who already are experimenting with pay-for-performance plans? Cortese holds out hope for those experiments because teachers chose them, and they weren't thrust upon them by Congress.

"The difference is that teachers agreed through collective bargaining that they'd walk down this route and really explore it," she says. "When they run into a wrinkle, it's an easier thing to adjust than some federal law."

Cortese is referring to places like Denver, Douglas County and Minneapolis, but also to the TIF programs in places like Ohio. So, that's where we are.  Thanks for asking.

Posted by Michele at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I missed the Center for American Progress event on Teacher Compensation in Charter and Private Schools, but I did manage to read the paper presented at the event.  The paper's subtitle is Snapshots and Lessons for District Public Schools.  Snapshots seems accurate--the authors did some interviews with school officials at assorted charter and private schools that provide some insight into their compensation practices.  Lessons?  I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's a "glass half full/glass half empty" kind of thing, but if almost two-thirds of charter and private schools use a salary schedule, it's hard to really see them as blazing the trail for change.  Plus, almost half of private school enrollment is in Catholic schools, and over 90 percent of these schools use a salary schedule.  The data instead imply that, for most charter and private schools, it is perhaps easier or more fair to use a salary schedule than to negotiate individually with every teacher.

Even the authors themselves seem to be a little confused by what they are saying.  In the Executive Summary, they say that "many charter and private schools do not use a schedule at all," but then on page 7, they write that "many charter and private schools report using a salary schedule."  Which is it?

Can we learn from any school--private, public charter or regular public school--about what paying teachers "differently" means for public education?  Sure. But one thing I didn't get from this paper was whether the various pay incentives "worked."  That is, did they lead to improved instruction and, therefore, student achievement gains?  Nancy Van Meter from the AFT served as a respondent to the paper and raised this issue and others in her comments (see here).  Isn't this the primary argument for changing how teachers are paid? (Well, not for Rick Hess, but for most people.)

Final word: much of this debate seems to boil down to how motivated folks are by incentives.  I have worked in environments with a salary schedule for most of my adult life, where performance incentives are not available, and it doesn't really bother me.  It would, though, bother me if a colleague of mine doing similar work with the same level of expertise and years of experience made a lot less than I did.  Sara Mead at The Quick and the Ed, on the other hand, thinks these are private matters. People are different.

What motivates most teachers?  If someone chooses teaching, where more often than not they will work under a salary schedule, is their motivation primarily intrinsic?  If so, are they somehow not motivated to improve student achievement?  Is that why ed reformers think we need to attract folks into the profession who are motivated by performance incentives, because these teachers will focus more on student achievement?  I don't have all the answers, but these are questions worth debating, so if this paper continues the debate, I guess that's a good thing.

* This title also makes me think of the expression, Is the Actor Happy?, and this album of the same title.  Vic Chestnut is great--if you have never heard of him, give him a listen.  And, I will send an AFT t-shirt to the first (only?) person who can identify the movie in which Chestnut has a cameo.

Posted by Michele at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The saga continues in Houston regardng the school district's ill-conceived pay-for-performance plan.  More than 300 teachers protested against the plan at a school board meeting yesterday, and 40 teachers were given time to address the board.  Among the concerns voiced were that the plan hurt school morale at a critical time, when state testing is soon to commence, and that some groups of teachers, such as those who teach PreK, were not adequately compensated.  Stay tuned.

Posted by Michele at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Center on Education Policy has posted a summary of two closed-door meetings it held this past fall on the distribution of highly qualified teachers.  I accompanied AFT Executive Vice President Toni Cortese to these meetings.  Much as I would like to say that the AFT, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Ed Trust and the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights all held hands and sang Kumbaya (this is my new favorite thing to say), I can assure that did not happen. 

The fact remains that for some education groups, the focus should be on improving the professional working conditions at hard-to-staff schools, while other groups believe the emphasis should be on getting the "best" teachers into hard-to-staff schools through incentives or other means (and perhaps against their will--although no one said that directly).  I won't say "and never the two shall meet," but some big unresolved issues remain to be hashed out, and they will be during NCLB reauthorization.  (I'm guessing it won't be pretty.)

To see where the AFT stands on this issue, read the short memo we submitted to CEP for the meeting. And if you don't want to read the whole memo, here is the important part:

Although our research shows that transfer provisions do not cause distribution problems, the AFT is still committed to determining:(1) the magnitude of the teacher distribution problem in urban districts; (2) its root cause(s); and (3) workable remedies. And, in those districts where teacher distribution is a problem, the AFT is committed to working with our local affiliates to make the necessary changes to rectify the situation.

Update: See the ECS State Notes on Equitable Teacher Distribution/Working Conditions.

Posted by Michele at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, wants to give principals greater power, but he unwittingly highlights principals' failure to wield properly the power they already have.

He writes, "Above all, a principal must have control of who teaches in his or her building. All other reforms depend on it."

In the same article, he writes, "A big accountability problem nationwide is teacher tenure, which is almost automatically awarded whether a teacher is good or not."

Note the passiveness of  "teacher tenure...is almost automatically awarded."  Alter doesn't know -- or pretends not to know -- that it's a principal's responsibility to evaluate teachers early in their careers and make decisions about which teachers should be awarded tenure. 

Alter's argument, which we've heard before, amounts to this:  Principals lack the fortitude and ability to say a young teacher should not be granted tenure, so we should give principals more power -- specifically, the power to fire more experienced employees without due process.

Teachers who are struggling should be given extra help.  If they don't respond to the help and haven't been granted tenure, they can be let go.  If they don't respond to the help and have been granted tenure, then principals can begin the procedures for dismissal outlined in the contract that the teachers and the school district have agreed upon. 

If you think the due process provisions are meant to slow down teacher firings, you're right. Principals often fail to accurately evaluate new teachers or fail to act on their evaluations by providing help or denying tenure. So we shouldn't trust them to make correct evaluations later on.

Posted by John at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You gotta love a blogger that refers to the Manhattan Institute as "some outfit."  Check out this post at Assorted Stuff on the latest from Jay Greene.  Pretty much says it all.

Posted by Michele at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As if stumbling on agreement between the Fordham Foundation, the AFT and Ed Sector wasn't enough, now this?  In a letter to the editor of Ed Week, Michelle Rhee of The New Teacher Project writes in response to Linda Darling-Hammond's recommendations regarding a "Marshall Plan" for teaching:

Recent unbiased and quantitatively rigorous research from Mr. Kane and his colleagues, as well as from James H. Wyckoff and colleagues and Mathematica Policy Research Inc., has demonstrated conclusively that pathways into teaching (traditional certification, the New Teacher Project’s fellows programs, Teach for America) are, in one important way, much more similar than dissimilar—all bring comparable numbers of teachers across the spectrum of effectiveness into our nation’s classrooms.

The challenge for the educational research and policy community is now laid out clearly before us: How can we get more and better teachers into our schools, regardless of their route of entry? If the differences in quality within each pathway are 10 times as great as the differences in quality between pathways (as the Kane group estimates), then it is time to spend 10 times more energy answering the real questions before us than we do rehashing the tired and irrelevant “pathways” questions.

In last month's newsletter, the Center for Teaching Quality--usually more in accord with Darling-Hammond than Rhee--made a similar argument citing different research:

The differences between alternative routes into teaching and traditional schools of education are smaller than the extreme positions on either side of the debate would have us believe.  Meanwhile, the need to improve both alternative and traditional pathways into the classroom remains disturbingly large.

 . . . In reality, most studies reveal that there is more variation within traditional and alternative preparation programs than there is between them. Daniel Humphrey and Marjorie Wechsler found that teacher-candidates’ success hinges on “the interaction of three forces: their personal background (academic record and previous classroom experience), their formal training (the coursework they experience), and the context of their school placement (principal and mentor support, professional community, and availability of materials).” These factors shape a teacher’s future even more so than whether they entered the profession through a traditional university-based preparation or an alternative certification program. Humphrey and Wechsler conclude, “The line between alternative and traditional certification is an illusion.”

At last, some consensus! So, can we now agree on what constitutes a core curriculum for teaching and how to deliver it through various pathways?

Posted by Michele at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Beth 

Breaking news….teaching and learning conditions matter. We’ve long known that teachers think so. See here and here. And now, it appears that most states agree. Or, at least according to this handy compilation by ECS, they do. In their recently-submitted plans to equitably distribute qualified teachers, 32 states offer strategies to improve working conditions and increase teacher retention in hard-to-staff schools.

That’s good news, though we’ll have to wait and see what gets implemented. A lot of these "plans" seem long on nonsense and short on a precise implementation timelines or action items.

Posted by Guest at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ed Week reports that the percentage of black teachers achieving National Board Certification increased by 24 percent in 2006, while the number of Hispanic teachers also went up by 13 percent in that year--good news for minority and low-income students who are more often taught by Black and Hispanic teachers.

Those who have gone through the process will tell you that obtaining certification is more than just achieving recognition for excellence in teaching, the experience actually makes you a better teacher in the process.  Rebecca Palacios, who has previously written for this blog, remarks:

Since becoming a National Board Certified Teacher, I use more inclusive strategies to meet diverse learners and learning styles, more rubric-based assessment for students . . . and I have become more active in incorporating the standards into my daily teaching.

Interested in becoming a National Board Certified Teacher?  Check out this section of the AFT Web site.

Posted by Michele at 05:15 PM | Permalink

Jenny D. has started a conversation about how teachers become experts.  Her question prompted me to revisit this chapter, "How Experts Differ from Novices," from How People Learn, published by the National Research Council. It's also an important question to consider in the current policy environment where ill-conceived merit pay plans are resurfacing, the Bush Administration has proposed expanding the Teacher Incentive Fund program and folks from various quarters would like to see a measure of "teacher effectiveness" added to NCLB's definition of a highly qualified teacher.

The chapter examines studies of experts in chess, physics, mathematics, electronics, and history. The authors propose six principles of expertise are proposed.  The one I found most fascinating was how experts construct meaningful patterns of information. Chess masters, for example, use their wealth of experience playing the game to "recognize meaningful chess configurations and realize the strategic implications of these situations; this recognition allowed them to consider sets of possible moves that were superior to others."  Expert teachers use similar schemas, as articulated by Deborah Ball in this Fall 2005 American Educator piece.

Intrigued? If so, also check out this chapter, "Effective Teaching: Examples in History, Mathematics and Science."

Posted by Michele at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Houston provides an object lesson this week on how NOT to do pay for performance.  Yesterday, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) began distributing $14 million in bonuses to teachers and other school staff through its new pay for performance system. This system was developed with no real input from teachers and--surprise--it turns out that teachers have no clue why they did or did not receive bonuses. 

Needless to say, emotions are running high across the district and HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra is starting to feel the heat.  So how does he respond?  Stokes the fire, natch.  At a press conference yesterday, he said those who received bonuses were, "the cream of the crop." The rest, mmm, not so great. 

According to the Houston Chronicle, Saavedra is busy doing damage control today, explaining that some excellent teachers "did not receive bonuses under the district's formula, which is based on student test scores and favors those who teach core subjects such as reading and math."  (Sounds like the Houston system is based on the 22 percent solution.)

While some have suggested that staff initiate a sick out, Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon dismissed this strategy, pointing out that it is against state law and could result in teachers losing their jobs and their certification if such an action were perceived as a strike.  Instead, she is encouraging teachers to speak out at the Feb 8th school board meeting.

I foresee tough times ahead for Saavedra.  The Houston Chronicle published a list of teachers and how much each received because:

"It's a matter of public record," Managing Editor John Wilburn said. "Which teachers get bonuses, and how much they get, is of great interest to our readers, particularly parents of HISD students."

Come springtime, when classroom assignments are made, parents will be lining up at the superintendent's door, demanding that their child be assigned to one of the "cream of the crop."  What's the expression, "you made your bed, . . . "

Posted by Michele at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In his State of the City speech two days ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg included a proposal for tenure reform to "make sure that ineffective teachers are not awarded the privilege of tenure and the near-lifetime job security that comes with it."  Randi Weingarten, President of the United Federation of Teachers responded yesterday, saying, "The truth is that probationary teachers are supposed to be observed and evaluated six times a year during their first three years. That means a principal has 18 opportunities to determine if a new teacher should be tenured."

Andrew Wolf of the New York Sun seems to agree that the mayor's argument for tenure reform is pretty weak:

What has taken him [Bloomberg] so long? Principals currently have three years, which can be extended to four, to determine whether a teacher is worthy of retention.

If poor teachers are being granted tenure, in a system that the mayor has controlled for nearly five years, the blame must fall squarely on Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein. I'm sure that Mr. Bloomberg, in his previous incarnation in the business world, needed a lot less time to evaluate his new employees.

So where does this tenure reform proposal come from?  Eduwonk thinks it sounds like Robert Gordon, a Klein adviser, is the source. As you may recall, Gordon co-authored a paper with Tom Kane and Doug Staiger that argued for reforming teacher evaluation systems.  But the reasoning presented in this paper is not very impressive:

Even though school districts have the opportunity to discharge nontenured teachers, they seldom do so. . . The problem may be, in the words of Michael Ward, North Carolina's superintendent of public instruction, the limited "willingness of school leaders to confront unpleasant tasks associated with dealing with performance problems."

Pardon me, but that seems a bit lame to me (lame is a technical term).  We should revise teacher evaluation systems because principals don't do their job?  Here's a novel idea: how about ensuring proper implementation of the negotiated teacher evaluation system before proposing tenure reform.

Posted by Michele at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Stephanie over at Change Agency has a post up about effective practices for hiring school faculty which provides some helpful tips to school teams making recommendations on new hires.  Here is an interesting one:

Create an “Ideal Candidate Profile” — What personality characteristics fit best with your school’s mission, vision, values, culture, and climate?
Someone may be a very good teacher, but if they prefer working in isolation then they may not be the best fit for a school that operates as a highly collaborative Professional Learning Community where all teachers work and plan together. Focus on characteristics that are least likely to change — personal beliefs and values. Instructional practices can always be improved if you hire candidates who match the philosophy and values of the school.

Stephanie is looking for additional suggestions, so head over to her blog and give her some ideas!

Posted by Michele at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Dan 

We appreciate that Paul Hill is such a big fan of this blog.  With any luck, he’ll read this post and join the debate.

Hill gets some important things wrong in his recent Education Week letter criticizing the AFT's study on teacher transfers.  His main assertion is that experienced teachers routinely exercise their “seniority-transfer rights” in collective bargaining agreements to move from higher- to lower-poverty schools in the same district, even when the lower-poverty schools are only slightly less poor than the higher-poverty schools.  Poverty is relative, Hill argues, and teachers want to teach in more advantaged schools whenever they can.

Hill assumes that teachers are remarkably calculating, deliberately seeking to move from a school where the student population is, say, 93% poor to one that is 77% poor.  Do teachers really distinguish between two schools that have such a marginal difference in the poverty rate? If a teacher were that averse to teaching poor children, wouldn’t it be simpler to just get a job in the suburbs or to not take the job in the first place?

Hill makes other assertions that are contrary to the facts.  For instance:  

• He seizes on the wrong problem. The AFT report shows that within-district transfers are very rare across the board—less than one in 25 teachers transfer within the same district during any given year. In contrast, more than twice as many urban teachers (8.7 percent) leave the profession altogether each year. 
• As David Hecker explained in this post, collective bargaining is actually a stabilizing influence in public schools, associated with lower turnover and fewer transfers. How, then, can collective bargaining agreements be the culprit?
• AFT’s review of contracts in 14 large urban districts shows that not one gives teachers an unfettered right to claim a vacant position, let alone a position occupied by another teacher.  At best, seniority might guarantee an interview in the case of layoffs or vacancies.

While the facts might be inconvenient for union critics, it is imperative that policy decisions be based on hard data, not misguided and unsubstantiated assumptions.

Posted by Guest at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Howard 

Do teachers love to play PowerBall? Or do teachers prefer to gamble on the small chance of a high financial reward? While it doesn’t fit the risk-averse, altruistic personality archetype of teachers, that, in a nutshell, is the conclusion of the paper, "Individual Teacher Incentives And Student Performance" by David Figlio and Lawrence Kenny.  The first draft of the paper was completed in 2003, and the revised version, available at the National Bureau of Economic Research's Web site since October, is just now starting to get media interest.

Figlio is an alumnus of my graduate school, the Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin, where other economists with an interest in education--such as Larry Mishel, Leanna Stiefel, Robert Berne and, alas, Mike Podgursky--have emerged.  He is not a partisan, so his paper merits a close reading.  The paper is:

• About old-fashioned merit pay (which we sometimes call crony-pay at the AFT