Yesterday Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a speech calling the process to remove teachers “glacial” and reiterating that student test scores should be a part of teacher evaluations. How did the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union respond? Jay Matthews has it:
[The NEA's director of teacher quality] said [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'NEA'
Fun With Words
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 [...]
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 [...]
Duncan Takes the Hill
At first, I didn’t think my Education Sector colleagues and I were going to get into Arne Duncan’s Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. Arriving at 8:00 for the 10:00 event, we were surprised to find a line of 50 people already camped out in the hallway. They were a pretty disheveled crew, and they weren’t exactly [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Winerip on Poverty, Etc.
Micheal Winerip covers a new ETS report in the Times today, exploring the relationship between out-of-school factors like single parenthood, TV watching, reading at home, etc. and student achievement. The report–which I have no quarrel with, Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham was a reviewer–finds, to the surprise of no one, that these things make a [...]
Exposing the Teachers Unions’ Corporatist Pro-NCLB Agenda
The new issue of Phi Delta Kappan is well worth reading, and not just because it reprints an article I wrote about high-performing community colleges early this year. There’s also a priceless debate (not online, unfortunately) between Susan O’Hanian, self-styled “educational activist,” and Joel Packer, head lobbyist for the NEA, wherein O’Hanian–along with University of [...]
Comparability, Continued
AFTies Ed and Michele return from summer vacation and weigh in with a pair of thoughtful posts (here and here) on the “comparability” debate. They’re right in saying that forced transfers aren’t an ideal–or in many cases, even practical–solution to the teacher distribution problem, and that we ought to focus on creating schools for low-income [...]
Nothing to See Here
Bill Richardson has a remarkably useless op-ed in USA Today today, calling for the abolishment of No Child Left Behind. Why does he want to “scrap it”? I have no idea. The piece is just a series of unsupported cliches and selective statistics that could be rearranged in random order to no discernible effect. If [...]
Lies My Teachers Told Me
Over at the Huffington Post, Marc Lampkin from ED in 08 notes that the NEA’s characterization of the merit pay conversation at the recent Democratic presidential debate in Iowa was…less than accurate. The NEA press release said:
“Democrats running for president reject any mandatory pay-for-performance schemes as part of the reauthorization of the federal No Child [...]
Tortured Logic from Teachers Unions, Cont’d.
The National Education Association has been circulating some talking points trying to refute findings in the paper Education Sector released last week describing how the NEA has been giving money to a wide range of organizations, not always in a transparent manner, in its fight against NCLB. (See the comments section here). Some are absurd [...]
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
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman Aldeman's False Fronts is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
03/08/10 | Andrew Rotherham's Eduwonk post on RTT finalists is quoted on Class Struggle.
03/07/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted on the success of MATCH in The Times-Picayune.
03/06/10 | Eduwonk's reaction to Ohio's status as a RTT finalist is cited in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York's status as a Race to the Top finalist is cited on National Journal.