The District of Columbia seeks Master Educators to serve as third-party evaluators of teacher performance and to provide teachers with targeted support. Important implications for the city’s new teacher evaluation program.
Teacher Quality
Education Sector's teacher quality work focuses on policies that are designed to use teacher effectiveness as an important indicator of teacher quality. Quick and the Ed blogger Elena Silva directs Education Sector's teacher quality work.
Spreading Teacher Talent
Brookings released a report calling for a national corps of teachers—a new federal program estimated to cost about $200 million per year to support about 19,000 teachers. The idea behind “America’s Teacher Corps” is to give recognition, more money ($10,000 annually) and a portable credential to teachers who have shown strong performance based on a [...]
Debating Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has been getting a lot of attention lately. This morning, she and I debate the book over at The New Republic. Preview: I don’t like it very much. See earlier entries in the discussion from Ben Wildavsky and Richard Rothstein here.
The View From Sarah’s Classroom
Last week, we received a classroom “view” from Sarah Garb, a second grade teacher from Two Rivers Public Charter School here in D.C. We’re thrilled to revive our “View From Your Classroom” series with Sarah’s view. Sarah wrote a whole post about her classroom view (excerpt below) on her blog “Dead Class Poets.” (Sarah’s blog is great and well [...]
Washington State Enters the Race to the Top
Congratulations to education reformers from my home state, Washington, for helping to pass a package education reform bills that take a significant step forward for a state that did not even bother to apply for the first round of Race to the Top. Basically the state knew that it did not have a chance of [...]
Cliffs Notes to Race to the Top Applications
Trying to figure out what the 16 Race to the Top Finalists are doing that your state is not? Too lazy to read the thousands of pages of applications to figure it out. You are in luck. The Partnership for Learning in Washington state has summarized it for you. If there are other summaries out [...]
Story of the Week
It’s definitely worthy of a longer blog post but for now I’ll just say that Elizabeth Green’s New York Times Magazine story, “Building a Better Teacher,” is really an excellent piece of work that you should read. It made me think and changed my mind — while the implementation issue are obviously vast, I’m not [...]
Teacher Video Clubs
An interesting article in the February, 2010, technology-focused JSD ($$, see list of contents) from the National Staff Development Council. Viewer Discussion is Advised describes video clubs that focus teacher discussion on student learning:
Each month, these seven teachers get together and watch video clips from their classrooms on computer monitors or television screens….A video club [...]
Engaging Elephants in Education Reform
I recently read Switch: How to change things when change is hard, a soon-to-be released book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Switch is in many ways a typical org/psych book filled with real-world metaphors to explain why change is so hard, and inspirational stories to show that the author’s theory of change can work [...]
Valuing Good Teaching
Research has shown time and again that experience matters in good teaching. What it hasn’t shown is that every experience matters equally. In fact, a teacher’s first few years on the job are by far the most important, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the vast majority of teaching improvement comes in the first [...]
Highly Qualified Effective Teachers
The intrepid EdWeek bloggers Alyson Klein and Stephen Sawchuk caught a passage in President Obama’s latest budget proposal that would require states to, “develop a definition of ‘effective teacher’ that is based in significant part on student learning, and to put in place a system that links the academic achievement and growth of students to [...]
The Other Case for TFA
Debate over Teach For America has resurfaced recently in response to Amanda Ripley’s Atlantic Magazine article “What Makes a Great Teacher?” Ripley reports that some surprising characteristics, such as teachers’ extracurricular college activities and life satisfaction, are likely to foreshadow teaching success, while things most people assume to be important, such as prior experience working [...]
Top-Down Federal Programs
Teachers unions in two states have apparently decided their best route to attack the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund, the largest discretionary federal investment in public education ever, is to impugn it as “top-down” management.
I don’t get it. Aren’t all federal programs inherently top-down? Isn’t that what makes it federal, as opposed [...]
Pennsylvania Pension Problems
Question: What do you get when you add a bad stock market + equally bad state budgets + generous pension benefits + an enhancement of those benefits + rising health costs + an aging workforce?
Answer: A large unfunded liability.
Example A is Pennsylvania, which recently announced they will be increasing the employer contribution rate for retired [...]
Teaching is the Worst Job on Earth
Education Week recently ran a commentary by Teach for America corpsmember Kerry Kretchmar. Kretchmar starts out by recalling her first year teaching 32 kids in a rat-infested South Bronx basement. This is exactly the type of call-to-action that attracts young well-educated service-minded people to make a difference in the lives of poor children. It’s a [...]
The View From Your Classroom
We’re delighted to share two photos today from Kristi Thomas, Mt. Vernon Woods Elementary School’s band director.
Ms. Thomas writes of her school and photos:
Mt. Vernon Woods Elementary School is nestled in a neighborhood in Alexandria, Va., and is a Fairfax County Public School. Our school is a diverse one—students come from many countries and backgrounds. It has [...]
The View From Your Classroom
Today’s view comes to us from Professor Edward Hsieh’s classroom. He’s an economics professor at the California State University, Los Angeles (He’s also Education Sector intern Tiffany Hsiesh’s father). Nice umbrellas!
Keep those views coming! E-mail or flickr.
The View From Your Classroom
Check out the view from Kimberly Wilson’s classroom. Wilson is a 7th Grade math teacher at Plymouth Educational Center in Detroit, Michigan:
If you look closely, you can see Detroit’s skyline in the far distance. Check out past views here. And, don’t forget to send in your views for upcoming posts.
The View From Your Classroom
Second Grade Teacher Ashley Tugman (also fiancé to ES’s Forrest Hinton) sends in two views from her classroom at Noyes Elementary School in northeast Washington D.C. Since her class borders the playground, the “shade-drawn view” is a more regular occurance.
Keep sending in your classroom views! Check out past views here.
Who Lost the Heartland?
“Use student achievement to measure teachers” is a catch-phrase or headline you might expect to hear or see working on education policy inside the beltway, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected to see waking up Sunday in Des Moines, Iowa. But, lo and behold, teacher evaluations were the focus of the front and back [...]
Extending School Time
A new report by the Center for American Progress on district-union partnerships to extend school time profiles three models, including Brooklyn Generation. More about Brooklyn Generation and the Generation Schools model, which extends time for students but not for teachers, in this ES report and on our online discussion, which you can read here.
Also, tomorrow [...]
The Link Between School Design and Quality Teaching
Generations Schools has found a way to redesign teachers’ work, ending the isolated classroom, enabling ongoing teacher collaboration and planning, and giving teachers time to learn from each other and to learn from their work. It has extended its school year to 200 days for students—20 more than the national average—without having to extend work [...]
Finn: Saving Teacher Jobs = Stalinism
Checker Finn describes my critique of his neo-Hooverite views on education policy and the stimulus bill as a “particularly dated defense of Keynesianism,” and asserts that borrowing money to prevent pro-cyclical mass layoffs and deep cuts in state and local education spending amounts to “Stalin-style job creation.”
This is a case of conventional wisdom failing to [...]
Conservatives Denounce Obama for Saving Jobs, Economy
At the National Review, Rick Hess and Checker Finn denounce the Obama administration for using stimulus funding to save the jobs of 400,000 teachers and college professors on the grounds that…this was a bad idea. Really:
It’s a fact that employment was an explicit purpose of stimulus funding — Congress said as much — and with [...]
Gritty Teachers
The Journal of Positive Psychology recently put out an article called Positive Predictors of Teacher Effectiveness. In it, the authors suggest that novice teachers working in poor public schools do better if they have certain traits like grit. One of the authors of the paper, UPenn psychology professor Angela Lee Duckworth, has researched the “grit [...]
The View From Your Classroom
Today’s “view” comes to us from a technology classroom at Sunset Park Preparatory Middle School in Brooklyn, N.Y. Thanks for sending in this great photo, Ms. Apfel!
Got a classroom? How’s the view? Send us your photos! Alternatively, upload your photos to our Flickr pool. See previous posts here and here for more on what we’re looking for.
The View From Your Classroom
Last week, we introduced the new feature “The View From Your Classroom.” Inspired by Andrew Sullivan’s “View From Your Window,” we asked educators from across the country to show us the what they see from their classrooms. We’ve gotten some wonderful submissions so far and we’re very happy to present this Halloween-inspired classroom “view” from Leslie [...]
The View from Your Classroom
This week we launch a new feature: The View from Your Classroom. Based on Andrew Sullivan’s wildly popular The View from Your Window, we’ll showcase views from classrooms around the country, like the one below from Brian Woodward, an English teacher at Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville, Md. (He’s also ES Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva’s husband).
We hope you will share [...]
How much is too much to pay for saved jobs?
Earlier this week the White House released a report that said that the stimulus package has saved or created 250,000 education jobs so far. Fortunately the roundness of the number suggests its level of accuracy. But, lets assume for a minute that the number is right. The question to ask, is what did schools do [...]
The Way It Could Be
Two out of five of America’s teachers are disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, says a new study by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates.
But, as I argue here, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are better designs for teaching, designs that can improve teacher satisfaction and effectiveness at the same time. Read [...]
Can You Support “Growth” and Oppose “Value-Added”?
The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teacher’s union, opposes the draft regulations for the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund primarily because of language requiring states to be able to link teachers with student test score results. They cannot support it because:
Reviews of research on value-added methodologies for estimating teacher “effects” based [...]
Education at a Glance: International Comparisons
On Monday the OECD released its 2009 version of its international educational comparisons. This is the latest version of the report that uses population surveys to show the United States has slipped in higher education degree attainment, falling from 1st in the portion of 55-64 year-olds with a postsecondary degree to 14th in for 25-34 [...]
The Best Interests of Teachers
As Chad notes, Steven Brill’s New Yorker article on the New York City “Rubber Room” for outcast teachers is a terrific piece of journalism, definitely a must-read. Chad highlights the mind-bogglingly expensive and attenuated “due process” procedure for removing an incompetent teacher. In this and other things—like the fact that Rubber Room teachers who can’t [...]
Two to Compare
On Friday night the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, released its public comments on the Department of Education’s Race to the Top proposed guidelines. It reads pretty convincingly at face value, but there’s a lot buried under the surface. Here’s a suggestion from the NEA:
For (iii) related to tenure and dismissal based [...]
Rifts in RIFs
As school districts faced budget cuts all across the country, they were contractually obligated to issue Reduction in Force (RIF) notifications to teachers they might not be able to afford in 2009–10. The process districts must go through to layoff workers is typically spelled out in the negotiated agreements. Here’s the relevant passage from the [...]
Updated: Fewer Students, More Teachers
A couple weeks ago the Census released a report compiling expenditure data for states and localities, but its value was buried in a handful of stories with the headline, “Census: Feds Contributed Little to Schools in 2007,” the premise being that the federal government contributes, on average, 8.3 percent of all K–12 dollars. The articles [...]
Willful Misunderstanding
Over at the National Journal’s group edu-bigwig blog, they’re debating the question “Are the Race To the Top Requirements Fair?” A lot of the discussion centers on the RTT requirement that states eliminate prohibitions against linking student test score data with individual teachers. Most of the bloggers are in favor of this, on the grounds [...]
Why Teach for America and The New Teacher Project Exist
If you stop and think about it, Teach for America (TFA) and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) are well-functioning, non-profit, national human resource departments for schools. They recruit, screen, and hire candidates, all functions of a traditional HR department. TFA and TNTP do provide a lot more induction and support for their hires, but at [...]
Charter Schools and Unions—One Size Fits All??
Unionization of charter schools seems to be the hot topic these days. A recent NYT article raises the critical question:
“…whether unions will strengthen the charter movement by stabilizing its young, often transient teaching force, or weaken it by preventing administrators from firing ineffective teachers and imposing changes they say help raise achievement, like an extended [...]
Golden Parachutes
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article recently about pension spiking, a practice where workers use the calculation of their pension benefits to their advantage:
Pete Nowicki had been making $186,000 shortly before he retired in January as chief for a fire department shared by the municipalities of Orinda and Moraga in Northern California. Three [...]
Teachers Unions Don’t Matter
Some say. Others argue that unions matter more than ever, not just for job security but also to push necessary reforms. Our survey last year showed a mix of opinions on the role of unions in improving public schools. Now we’re digging in deeper with a small group of public school teachers from around the [...]
Advertising Reform
I finally opened my copy of Diplomas Count, an annual publication from Education Week devoted entirely to issues around high school graduation, and I didn’t get far before something caught my eye. It wasn’t the article on Florida’s data system, the piece on ensuring graduation rates mean the same state-to-state, or the map of graduation [...]
The Condition of Education: Master’s Degrees in Education
Over the last decade, the number of teachers in this country has increased faster than student enrollment. This is due almost exclusively to class size reductions at the elementary level: while the student/ teacher ratio in secondary schools was almost identical in 2006 to what it was in 1990, in elementary schools it has fallen [...]
Comparable Difficulties
New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been [...]
Teach For America Growth
There’s a cottage industry of journalists and commentators who criticize Teach for America (TFA) as being unscalable. Their main complaint is that, while a worthy program (and they always acknowledge TFA’s success), the number of teachers entering the profession through this route is tiny compared to the total workforce. In a piece that is typical [...]
Another Piece of Evidence for Mayoral Control
There’s a short video going around the Internets of Michael Bloomberg speaking about mayoral control of a city’s public education system. Here’s the video in full:
Most of it is general arguments for mayoral control, bolstered by Bloomberg’s claims at the beginning about rising test scores in New York City. Whatever you feel about the authenticity [...]
Salary Schedule Slopes
At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay [...]
Survey Says…
Next week the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) will be releasing results from a poll regarding ongoing contract negotiations with the District of Columbia Public Schools. I was able to get a look at the survey instrument (.doc), and it’s what you might kindly call “one-sided.”
When asking about the general conditions in DC public schools, it [...]
Superlatives and Scales
A friend from the business world responds to my recent post on teacher evaluations in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to describe her company’s personnel assessments:
We rate employees on a 5 point scale with 1 being the best. So, say out of 100 employees, maybe 10 would be a 1. There would be a lot of [...]
Not Exactly
Fred Hiatt sat down with Bill Gates to talk education reform, producing a pretty straightforward reformist summary in the Post yesterday. One point, however, deserves clarification. Hiatt said:
In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master’s degree or teacher’s [...]
The Difference Between Knowing and Caring
Frank Heppner, honors professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island, wrote a good column in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago that nicely illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of problems. Heppner’s essential point is that because universities value research more than teaching, teaching suffers, hurting students and the university [...]
Teacher Pensions
Call it the chart that launched a conference. In 2007 Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell released a report called “Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio’s Teacher Pension System.” The report, and the attention spawned by it (including a two-day conference Thursday and Friday last week), was driven by one simple chart.
The chart shows the [...]
Hired, Not Hired
Here are descriptions of two teachers hired for the 2008-2009 school year in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD):
Bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Studies of Health Science from U of Texas – Arlington, with no advanced degree, applied August, now teaching Special Education.
Philosophy graduate from Florida International, with graduate degrees in Digital Media and Buddhist [...]
I Hate the Way You’re Not Around
There’s nothing that will turn over preconceptions in today’s IES report that found no difference between reading and math scores of students taught by teachers certified through traditional or alternative routes. The main conclusion is that there’s simply not that huge of a difference between traditional and alternative certifications.
Part of the reason the certification route [...]
The Burden of Proof
Paul Basken (one of the best higher education reporters in the business IMHO) filed a short piece($) in the Chronicle a few weeks ago about struggles to improve the quality of teaching in engineering. He wrote:
After a close-up look at 40 American engineering schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has released a [...]
Big Edu-cuts Proposed for Stimulus Package, Maybe
The latest tin can to come flying out of the maelstrom over the Congressional stimulus package is a document purporting to be recommendations for education cuts by the staff of centrist senators Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, and Republican Susan Collins of Maine, increasingly key players in the stimulus debate.
Passed along by folks with a [...]
Bill-Board
Bill Gates, borrowing a tradition from his mentor Warren Buffett, has published his first Annual Letter, his reflections on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been full-time since leaving Microsoft last summer.
Education commentators have focused on what they’ve characterized as a quasi-mea culpa in Gates’ discussion of the foundation’s [...]
Good Point
Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education observes that if the great recession forces school districts to cut their personnel budgets under “last in, first out” rules, they’ll end up firing substantially more teachers than they otherwise would, because the last in tend to be younger and lower-paid and thus you have to [...]
"No, we don’t cheat. And even if we did, I’d never tell you."
Tommy Lasorda was talking baseball, but there are edu-implications. Gotham Schools is covering some back and forth about the process of grading the New York state ELA (English Language Arts) assessments. Eva Moskowitz says it’s easy and shouldn’t take so long, but teacher/grader/blogger “Miss Brave” says it’s disorganized and potentially unfair. Scoring problems are not [...]
ContreDemps
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama White House are facing an early test of their school reform street cred. Earlier this week the Senate Appropriations Committee, where Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over education, stripped out of the stimulus package several provisions being pushed by school reform groups, [...]
Merit Pay for College Teaching?
As the Chronicle reported a few days ago and InsideHigherEd reported today, Texas A&M has proposed giving professors bonuses of up to $10,000 based on student evaluations. Predictably–and in my mind, appropriately–many people have raised serious objections to the this. Student evaluations aren’t necessarily reliable measures of student learning, some studies indicate that they’re biased toward [...]
A Very Bad Good Idea
In the course of composing what sounds like the winning entry in a Thomas Friedman column parody contest, Thomas Friedman wrote the following in his new column:
“One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers.”
Look, being [...]
The Nature of Teaching
Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November ‘08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled “Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?” Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included ”a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of [...]
The Gladwell/ Kane Theory of Teacher Recruitment
Overheard: a business CEO will hire any Harvard MBA before they even begin the program. It isn’t the education itself that makes them valuable employees, in this estimation, it’s the screen that let them in that proves their quality. In education, it turns out all of our traditional screens, and even some untraditional ones, don’t [...]
Which Teachers?
All the top consulting, legal, financial, and engineering firms keep a list of schools from which they recruit students each year. They don’t attend job fairs at Directional State University, because (supposedly) DSU graduates aren’t at the same caliber of those from Harvard, Yale, or other elites. What if you could test it, though? What [...]
Finland Cont’d.
As you’d expect, Finland’s child care policies are more generous than ours; Matt Yglesias explains more here and here. Meanwhile, on the teaching front, all K-12 teachers are required to go through rigorous university-based training, in most cases through a master’s degree. But only 10 – 12% of applicants to university teaching programs are accepted. [...]
The Ryan Leaf Syndrome
What do leaders in other industries do when they aren’t certain about which credentials matter for success? If the markets for football quarterbacks and financial advisers are any indication, as Malcolm Gladwell argues they should be, education leaders must be willing to interview and try out many candidates for teaching jobs.
Making professional sports predictions based [...]
Are Value-Added Effectiveness Measures Good Enough to Use for Compensation Decisions?
There’s a great deal of attention being given to using test scores to measure teacher performance these days, recent announcements from the Gates foundation ensure this will be high on the national agenda in coming years. But recent studies show that the value-added measures contain significant amount of error. Which raises questions: how can imperfect [...]
Perspective
Alan Odden says that Michelle Rhee’s proposal to give DC teachers the option to trade job security for a lot more money, if they want to, or not, if they don’t want to, “would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan change.”
The only real eyebrow-raising element of this is that it’s national news. [...]
Magnitude
Expanding on something I alluded to in the post below about training and certifying teachers vs. attracting and selecting them: the way these issues are often discussed reveals one of the weak spots in the way research is applied to policy. Essentially, people don’t properly account for differences in magnitude.
All rational people want education policy [...]
g(t)?
Writing in the Boston Globe (per Matt Yglesias), Harvard economist Edward Glaeser cites Tom Kane’s research on teacher quality, saying:
The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some [...]
The Performance of Performance Pay
With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the [...]
Four-Day Weeks
Budgets are tight and schooling is expensive. So it’s not surprising to see state officials proposing new ways to cut costs in education. But this idea to eliminate the required 180-day schedule—something South Carolina state superintendent Jim Rex is proposing—is surprising. This will give districts more options for how they set up their school schedules. [...]
Standards
The DC Board of Elections publishes a voter guide that includes brief statements from each of the candidates. Here’s one from a Ward Eight candidate for the State Board of Education. Ward Eight is the poorest area in the city.
The statement of a candidate that declares my information deemed necessary to protect the qualified experiences [...]
Principles
Although Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn are treating it like news, the case of Art Siebens was actually cited by Leo Casey of the UFT on Edwize back in August. In brief, Siebens is an AP science teacher in the District of Columbia who recently lost his job. Supporters have created a Web site making the [...]
The Teacher Autonomy Paradox
In addition to the longer article on How the Dems Lost on Education, the American Prospect also published a shorter semi-companion piece I wrote today, on-line, called “The Teacher Autonomy Paradox.” Unlike the longer article, it hasn’t appeared in any format before today. The argument is that while at first it might seem like the interests [...]
Michelle Rhee’s "Plan B"
It looks like Michelle Rhee wants to bypass the teacher’s union and link teacher licensure to “effectiveness” as determined by OSSE. The union has already tripped up, in my opinion, by rejecting the principle of the idea and upsetting people like Kevin.
But really, they have a point about the nuts and bolts problems of teacher [...]
"would not benefit…"
A little after noon today, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, sent an email to its members that begins as follows:
Dear [member],
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed regulations that would require a DC Public School (DCPS) teacher to demonstrate effectiveness as a condition [...]
Reality Time
Matt Yglesias observes the spate of union-sponsored Fenty-bashing at the Democratic national convention, driven in large part by the Fenty administration’s proposal to pay teachers a lot more money in exchange for more accountability and less job security, and doesn’t like what he sees. (Side note: let’s all agree to apply some standards of objectivity [...]
Birth of the Cool (New Teacher Pay Policy)
One of the fun things about living in Washinton, DC is watching the Fenty/Rhee school reform juggernaut in real time. After decimating the bloated central office bureaucracy, closing low-enrollment schools, and generally bringing a sense of urgency, leadership, and strategic thinking that DCPS has long lacked, the chancellor is now moving directly to the teacher [...]
Strike Out
Yesterday’s Denver Post shows why we won’t, or at least why we shouldn’t, see a teacher’s strike unfold later this month as the city plays host to the Democratic National Convention. The article has many demonstrative points as to why the union has little grounds for a strike. The district’s proposal would:
Increase first-year [...]
Economic Theory in Teacher Salaries: Why the ProComp Negotiations Matter
Imagine you have complete control over a new school district. You need to design a salary structure that fits what we know about education. Empirical evidence suggests that:
Teachers have steep learning curves, making dramatic improvements in the first few years, but showing few gains, or possibly even slowing, as they near retirement.
Teachers, as [...]
The NEA Wants Your Stories
I subscribe to the NEA’s email list, and the latest one had this eye-catching opening:
Have You Been Caught on YouTube?
A student videotaped a teacher at Malibu High School who lost control of the class and raised his voice while students laughed at him. Another video showed an angry high school teacher [...]
The Math of Merit Pay
Bured in yesterday’s Ed Week write-up ($) of McCain’s speech was a quote that nicely sums up the common concerns over merit pay:
Bettye Oldham, a retired teacher from Cincinnati, said she had mixed feelings about the merit-pay proposal.
“I think it’s a good idea if it’s run correctly,” she said. “But you can’t judge teachers the [...]
Un-Advanced
John McCain spent a lot of time in his NAACP speech in Cincinnati yesterday talking about the many teacher reforms he’d put in place–performance pay, a greater role for principals in staffing matters, and peer evaluations, among them. If McCain’s education advisors had been on the ball, they would have told the presumptive Republican presidential [...]
Where’s Rick, Someone Call Rick
“All I can say is that President Weingarten’s early signals do no credit to Al Shanker’s legacy.”
in no other industry
In no other industry is a man allowed to etch a cross into a child’s arm and keep his job. Only now, six months later and a lawsuit filed, did the district seek to fire 8th grade science teacher John Freshwater.
This story is ripe with missteps. The principal dealt with 11 years of [...]
Everyone’s favorite sound bite
Eduwonkette’s post this morning on the long-term effects of teachers needs explanation. In attempting to report on a new study, the crux of her argument is thus:
It’s everyone’s favorite sound bite: good teachers alone can close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. But if the entire teacher effect doesn’t persist from year-to-year – that [...]
Grab That Cash With Both Hands And Make A Stash
Joel Packer, chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has started a blog. (Technically, a transcript of a podcast, but close enough.) Eager to counter the impression that the teachers union agenda begins and ends with a bottomless appetite for new funding without accountability to match, he quickly put up [...]
More Teachers See Unions as "Absolutely Essential"
In recent decades, America has experienced a steady de-unionization of the private sector workforce. This is a real problem, particularly in an era of declining economic security and increasing inequality (problems that partially stem from de-unionization itself). The public sector, by contrast, has pretty much maintained a steady level of unionization, in part because governments [...]
Teacher Voice: How Teachers See the Teacher Quality Debate
This podcast features leading experts discussing a new Education Sector survey of public school teachers, detailing how teachers feel about a variety of reforms aimed at improving teacher quality.
Participants:
Greg Ahrnsbrak, Teacher, Denver Public Schools
Ann Duffett, FDR Group
Steven Farkas, FDR Group
Ellen Halloran, Teacher, New York City Public Schools
Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools
Steven Smith, President, [...]
NYC Tenure Cont’d
NYC Educator disagrees with my take on the NYC tenure debate, and a previous post in which I cited his recitation of the many transcendently bad teachers with which he’s had the misfortune to work as evidence that the tenure process in New York should be improved.
For the most part, I like NYC Educator’s take on [...]
Teaching, the Null Hypothesis, and the Status Quo
I’ve had a couple of off-line conversations in the last week–one about measuring teacher effectiveness, the other about college graduation rates–that both led me to try answer the eternal question of : Why are academics so often wrong about public policy questions?
The short answer is: they’re trying to answer the wrong question.
The somewhat longer answer [...]
Hearing Back on Benwood
I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the report about the Benwood Initiative that we recently released. Some who appreciated the “nuance” of the findings, others who had great methodological questions, and a smattering of folks who offered terse commentary that can be summed up as “you’re saying it takes everything to change the [...]
Haters vs. Critics
One of the more difficult things about adopting a left-leaning but essentially reformist stance on K-12 education is that you end up arguing with teachers unions a lot, not because you’re anti-union, but because teachers unions are the most influential and vocal representatives of the existing education establishment that you’re trying to reform. There’s a [...]
Union Busting
AFTie Ed flags this story from Illinois, where it appears that when teachers in a newly-opened charter school attempted to unionize, the school responded with various heavy-handed and probably illegal tactics including loyalty oaths, etc. In my mind, if a charter school opens its doors, the teachers are happy working there without being represented by [...]
Eggs
Firing another salvo in the baseball / teaching debate in response to this post from Matt Tabor, Leo Casey begins with an ode to the pastoral nature of the game, pivots to a defense of baseball unionization and Curt Flood–which no one is disputing–before seizing on word that Tabor quotes someone else using: commodity. “We [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.