The “Upside” of the “Downturn,” The Potential Impact of the Glut of Teachers in Times of Economic Stress.

 

Arne Duncan, Joel Klein and Randi Weingarten all agree that the single most important ingredient in improving student performance is the classroom teacher.

 

When I started teaching I met many old timers who had prepared for careers in law and accounting and engineering, and, ended up as teachers; it was the Great Depression, and they took the highly competitive Board of Examiners exams, received high enough grades, and spent careers in the classroom.

 

The sixties saw the migration to cities, the introduction of federal funding and the retirement of the depression era teachers, and opened many classroom slots, with a paucity of applicants.

 

For over thirty years the school system struggled to fill classrooms with teachers. Many were uncertified, for others it was a temporary job. The schools with the poorest, lowest achieving kids had rotating staffs, uncertified teachers, teachers teaching out of license, and, too frequently, vacancies.

 

Not surprisingly, achievement/growth/progress in the poorest schools was sparse.

 

In the mid-nineties 17% of teachers in NYC were uncertified.

 

Recently the situation has undergone a dramatic change. The Teaching Fellows Program, Teacher for America, the New Teacher Project combined with significantly higher salaries has resulted in a flood of prospective teachers. There are now, for the fist time since the depression, many, many applicants for each position.

 

This leads to a number of crucial questions:

 

1. Can we predict who is going to be an effective teacher? in other words, can we identify who is going to be highly successful in the classroom during the pre-service training process?  High GPA, high SAT/ACT scores, race, ethnicity, what is the impact down the road on pupil achievement? Dan Goldhaber points to some research … but still calls it a “mystery.”  There are research based  as well as entrepreneurial companies that promise success in hiring highly qualified teachers here  and here. With so many applicants we have the opportunity to select teachers who have the best chance of raising achievement.

 

2. What is “teacher value-added”? Can we analyze student progress data and determine the impact of a specific teacher? Can we compare the impact, the “value added, of Teacher A to Teacher B? Can we “rank” teachers by “value-added”? and, if so, what are the implications? 

 

The teacher union, the UFT has decried these efforts and last April was successful in passing legislation that in the short run will prevent tenure decisions being made based on student achievement data.

 

The Department carried out a pilot project and produced the Teacher Data Initiative Project,  reports for teachers in grades 3-8 in ELA and Math. These reports are a “rough.” first attempt, to measure individual teacher “value-added,” are shared with teachers but may not be used for any evaluation purposes. The UFT blog, Edwize rails against the entire concept of using student data to evaluate teacher performance.

 

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the “Tipping Point,” and one of the most creative thinkers today has turned his attention to the hiring and evaluation of teachers in a recent New Yorker article. He challenges college degree and seniority based compensation systems as well as current time based tenure determinations.

 

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year.

 

 … with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

 

Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before….. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

 

The tools for assessing teacher performance, “value-added,” will get better and better. Yes, a range of other non-cognitive factors that can’t be measured impact teacher effectiveness, but, student progress by teacher can be measured. Should it be part of teacher assessment? Should it be used in the granting or removal of tenure? in devising compensation schedules?

 

Should teaching, as Gladwell suggests, become a “high risk, high reward profession?”

 

As the pool of applicants blossoms these questions will become the essence of a national debate.

Marley’s Ghost and Visions of a Bleak Future, How Will the Union Respond?

 

“The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and he spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice … Bah! Humbug!” 

A Christmas Carol, 1843.

 

 

In the spring of 1975 I was elected by the UFT Executive Board to serve on the fifteen member negotiating team.  It was intimidating, sitting around the bargaining table with Al Shanker and the other founders of the union … since I didn’t know any better I argued with them … a little. Teachers were anxious to make up for the cap on salaries in 1972 as a result of the Nixon imposed wage-price freeze. In those days demands came from individual schools, divisional committees as well as the floor of the Delegate Assembly – we had hundreds of demands.

Someone asked Al Shanker, “How much would it cost for all the demands?”

Al hesitated, and replied, “A gold ball the size of earth.”

The negotiations dragged on into the summer, with continuing rumors of dire fiscal problems for the city. I thought it was simply a negotiating ploy.

We negotiated with Board of Education apparachniks, increasingly Central Board members sat in, representatives of the community school boards were being consulted by the central board, and the mayor, invisible at negotiations, ultimately, had to approve the dollars. It was a cumbersome system, with no clear accountability on the management side.

At that time the union had a “no contract, no work” policy. As we approached the Labor Day weekend we heard that layoff letters were going out to teachers. Was it a tactic? After a vituperative negotiating committee meeting, by a close vote, we recommended to extend the contract for a month to assess the situation.

When we got to the Delegate Assembly we heard story after story of total chaos at schools with masses of layoffs – we withdrew our contract extension position and the strike was on …

The city seemed to welcome the strike – the lost wages and 2:1 Taylor penalties were a boon, and, Herman Badillo was arguing for a city default, so that city labor contracts and pensions laws could be rewritten.

The strike ended after five days, and, in October the union agreed to bail out the city by having the Teachers Retirement System buy city bonds.

 

Shanker, shrewdly, ended the strike quickly, without any core losses in the contract, and bailed out the city.

 

A few days ago I read a local blogger musing about the next contract and the “pattern” set by the DC 37 agreement.

 

Guys, the problem is not the next contract. The problem is the failing economy.

 

Tax revenues are falling every month in both the city and the state. The mayor has already instructed city agencies to plan a 5% cut for the next fiscal year, then an additional 7%. The state is looking to cut 15 billion dollars from a 147 billion dollar budget.

 

Cries for a statewide property tax cap, for a new pension tier with lower benefits, for retirees to pay part of health plans, and, the abandonment of additional fiscal equity law suit dollars are widespread

 

Bob Herbert, in an excellent op ed piece in the NY Times  says this is not the time to “punish” teachers.

 

These are perilous times with a very uncertain future. No one can dispute the seriousness of our economic problems. On the eve of the layoffs in 1975 teachers did not believe that the city was on the edge of default. Teachers today do not see the seriousness of the current morass. After all, no one has been laid off, each crisis has been resolved. Each assault by the mayor or chancellor has been repulsed, the union suffers from too much success. A “don’t worry, Randi will solve it,” attitude, and, on the other hand, “what has she done for us lately?”

 

The recession/depression will run it’s course, a few years, or, perhaps, longer. For many this is an opportunity to pry away contractual benefits, to restructure pensions and health plans, an opportunity to take advantage of weakness and restructure school management and school funding.

 

Creating a “cheaper” school system will impact achievement in classrooms, it is an assault on the children we teach.

 

The management theory types, the Educational Equality Project folks, the voucher crowd, will all say dollars don’t matter; proper management and teachers matter. In a disastrous economy the line for teaching jobs will be endless. They will argue we no longer need high salary and benefit packages to attract teachers.

 

Can Randi “fix it?”

 

Is this an opportunity for the union to refocus and work as real partners with school systems, or, will unions battle to retain core member benefits alone?

 

I’ve heard senior teachers say, “I don’t care about layoffs, young teachers don’t stay, I want raises and job protection,” and, younger teachers proffer, “senior teachers only care about themselves and don’t care about the kids.”

 

Ebenezer Scrooge  was taken into the future by Marley’s ghost … he saw a bleak landscape, and was “scared straight.” 

 

How will the union respond?

Sleeping with Arne: Promiscuity and the Battle for Education Policy

 

 

After seemingly endless weeks of speculation Obama made a safe choice for Ed Secty,  his home boy, Arne Duncan.

 

Praise of the Duncan selection moves across the education policy spectrum ,  from Rhee and Klein and the “ed reformers,” to Randi Weingarten, virtually the entire range of “players” on the national education scene. The only criticism seems to come from within Chicago, from Pure Parents, a well respected parent advocacy coalition and Alexander Russo, a frequent commenter at This Week in Education.

 

After the lovefest we may face that period of postcoidal depression. The “big thing” will be the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, if they keep the title it remains a Bush legacy, so, the contest begins: the new name for the law. And, oh, yes, that content thing …

 

1. Moving from proficiency to growth: the “easy” part of the reauthorization will be moving to a growth model, especially since the current Bush Ed Department has approved models in a number of states. The New York State application is pending.

 

2. How will the new law deal with targets and sanctions? This is the core issue that States have resisted, no matter how you measure, progress or growth, what happens when a school simply does not meet targets? Give them more money, or, close the school? Or, some creative new, yet undiscussed option?

 

3. Will the Barack/Arne team move toward national standards, a national curriculum and an agreed definition of graduation rates? The graduation rate definition is already in progress, driven by a Gates initiative. The discussion of nation standards, etc., inevitably results into the “do we need a national exam” debate … a rather toxic discussion ….

 

4. Will Arne want to touch the merit pay and the “value added” morass? We are moving closer to be able to measure the impact of individual teachers on student achievement … do we reward highly effective teachers with a bonus? do we use the data in the evaluation of teachers? in the dismissal of teachers?

 

5. Arne signed both the major agendas, the Broader, Bolder and the Educational Equality, how will he respond to the core values embedded in each of the agendas?

 

I suspect Arne will spend the first months logging frequent flyer miles … flitting from city to city shaking hands and setting the stage for whatever …

 

If Arne wants to move from one night stands to stable relationships he’ll have to address all those “major” issues … or, maybe, he likes those one night stands and will steer clear of content as Barack grapples with world peace and avoiding the economic abyss.

The Agnes Humphrey School (PS 27) and the Ballad of Narayama Theory of Education: Abandoning the Weakest in the Name of Effective School Management

 

“if it snows, she’ll be released from pain”

The Ballad of Narayama, 1983

 

Poverty, race, ethnicity and language are significant barriers for children. The data is stark: lower graduation rates, higher placements in Special Education, higher pregnancy rates, higher rates of incarceration, and recently, higher foreclosures. Poverty and school success are inexorably combined.

 

In a school system that defines school success by “progress,” schools have learned to be wary. Every principal knows that the path to success, defined as an “A” or a “B” on your Progress Report is having the “right kids,” and that grade depends on your student body.

 

I was standing in the office of a high school, a parent was speaking with the school secretary. The placement office had assigned a student to the school, it was his fourth year since entering high school, his third school, with only a handful of credits. The secretary spoke on the phone and told the parent the school had “no seats available.” After the parent and child left the counselor told me, “If we take him into the school he counts against our data.”

 

Very few schools want to deal with the most fragile kids.

 

Bushwick Community High School, a transfer high school, accepted students with no credits. An extremely caring and dedicated staff, one of the few schools that accepts kids on the edge of dropping out. The State Ed Department response: placing the school on the SURR list for “low graduation rates.”

 

PS 27, the Agnes Humphrey School might be the only pre-K to 12 school in the City. The school serves the Red Hook projects, 12% of the students are ELL and 31% are children with Special Needs. 97% of the students are Title I eligible. The school received a grade of “proficient” on their October, 2008 Quality Review. There is no question that the school is struggling with issue of academics on both the City and the State Reports.

 

Principal Sara Belcher-Barnes and the teachers have chosen to work with challenged youngsters in a very poor community. Rather than chasing away “difficult” students they have welcomed them. And, hanging over the school is the full implementation of Fair Student Funding in the 09-10 school year, and a 1.1 million dollar budget cut!

 

Does the Department congratulate the school and assist them? No, they close the school and scatter the kids to the winds … many of the high school kids will simply drop out.

 

The current Department philosophy reminds me of a 1983 movie, The Ballad of Narayama, in a poor rural Japanese village the aged are lead up above the snow line and abandoned. What happens to challenged youngsters … no one wants them, and most schools twist and squirm to avoid them.

 

The funding formula should provide additional funding for children at risk: children who live in housing projects, who live in foster care and group homes, are coming out of incarceration, or are chronically absent, and extra credit on Progress Reports for moving these youngsters.

 

The real world for too many children is cold and cruel enough without the Department adding additional obstacles.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why 16,000 School Board Members Are Wiser Than Any Secretary of Education.

 

The Pope,

How many divisions does he have?

Joseph Stalin, 1935.

 

In a few days President-elect Obama will nominate a Secretary of Education. The drum roll resonates across the op ed pages of major dailies and the blogosphere is reaching a crescendo. From David Brooks, the conservative columnist in the NY Times to Dan Brown, a Huffington Post blogger and Charter School teacher in DC.

 

What self-styled sages fail to comprehend is that the Secretary of Education doesn’t appoint any of the fifty State Commissioners of Education, or, any of the school board members on the 16,000 schools boards that spread across the breath of this nation. He or she doesn’t negotiate teacher contracts, or vote on school budgets.

 

Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are the exception, they run school districts in cities without school boards, as long as they satisfy the mayor who appointed them, they do as they please. For the rest of the nation ordinary citizens serve on school boards, as they have for hundreds of years. There is something to be said for the Wisdom of Crowds, those folk on the 16,000 school boards.

 

Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM calls for the collapsing of the 16,000 school districts into seventy districts. There is a better chance of the National League adopting the designated hitter. There is certain irony, schadenfreude  perhaps, as we listen to the CEOs prescribe for us, and wonder how they failed so badly in driving our economy into ruin.

 

For better or worse the founding fathers left education in the hands of the locals. Ordinary people, neighbors, parents, tax payers, make policy for our school districts. The Bushes, the Kleins, the Rhees are entranced by “no nonsense” business models … the thousands of school board members around the country reject Joel, Michelle and friends, and, are sharply critical of the punitive aspects No Child Left Behind.

 

I would expect the President-elect to nominate a “non-controversial” Secretary. Sweeping policy pronouncements make headlines … education improves in the classrooms, teacher by teacher, kid by kid.

A Crossroads: Does the Demise of the UAW Offer Lessons for Teacher Unions? What Path Will Obama Take? Who Will Define “Change?”

 

It is both sad and depressing to watch the disintegration of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union before our very eyes. The once proud union did what unions do … they negotiated with management as well as working with management, unfortunately, management made a host of decisions that created an inviable business model. 

 

Two years ago, Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Automobile Workers union, offered a grim prognosis for the auto industry to union members at the group’s convention in Las Vegas.

“This isn’t a cyclical downturn,” Mr. Gettelfinger told the silent crowd. “The kinds of challenges we face aren’t the kind that can be ridden out. They’re structural challenges and they require new and farsighted solutions.”

Now, The New York Times’s Micheline Maynard writes, Mr. Gettelfinger and his union, representing 139,000 workers at the Detroit carmakers, are under pressure to find more drastic solutions that even he could not have anticipated. Since the U.A.W.’s 2006 convention, Detroit automakers have lost more than $80 billion, including one-time charges, and shed more than 119,000 workers.

It is a fair question to ask: are teacher unions on the UAW path?

Teacher unions are under assault, from their enemies as well as their “friends.” No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the law that has been attacked since passage by both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is not a Bush/Republican bill, it is a law created by Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller, both staunch supporters of labor.

The blogs and the media have focused on the upcoming Obama choice for Secretary of Education while the real battle is the direction of the Obama administration.

Some teachers argue that unions should stand firm, after all they played a major role in the Obama election campaign. The “enemies” are clear: the Klein/Rhee Educational Equity Agenda folk, as well as the business community. Don’t give an inch! Hold rallies, demonstrations, fight back … draw a “line in the sand” and make it clear to electeds, they’re either for us or against.

For others the situation is more nuanced, i.e., school-wide bonuses were negotiated in NYC, avoiding the issue of individual teacher bonuses. The conflict over the ATR pool was also negotiated, maybe creating a plan to diminish the pool. Spar, retreat, avoid, buy time and create coalitions.

Younger teachers, Teach for America types aver the union and the Klein/Rhee reformers should engage in direct negotiations, rather than pay scales based solely on seniority, “teacher value-added” should play a role in teacher remuneration.

We must remember that there are 16,000 or so independent schools districts, where required by law, each negotiates separate collective bargaining agreements.

The Klein/Rhee “reformers” are making a major push to set the agenda on the national scene. Rhee is on the front page of the current Time magazine. The Wall Street Journal carries an interview with Joel Klein and Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM. Gerstner proffers,

 The first thing I want to ask the president-elect to do is to ask the important question: Why? Why have we failed to reform the public schools after all this time?

The first possibility is that we don’t know what to do. Well, let me assure you, we know exactly what to do to fix the public schools. We need high, rigorous standards, we need great teachers supported by high compensation for the very best teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need more time on task, we need a longer school day, we need a longer school year, and we need accountability and measurement in the system so we can constantly adjust what’s going on. That’s it, it’s all we need.

  I’m going to say to the president-elect that the fundamental thing we have to do is change the governance model and accountability and execution model for education in this country. And what I’m going to suggest is that he convene the 50 governors, and the first thing they do is they abolish the 16,000 school districts we have in the United States. Sixteen thousand school districts are what we’re trying to cram this reform through.Now, the governors could decide, we’ll keep them as advisory, we can keep them as community support, but they will not be involved in the fundamental direction of public education in America. Second, this group of governors will then select 50 school districts, plus I’d say 20 major cities, so we got 70 school districts. Seventy instead of 16,000.

They will within one year develop a national set of standards for math, science, reading and social studies. Twelve months after that they will develop a national testing regime, so that there’ll be one day in America where every third, sixth, ninth and twelfth grader will take a national test against a national curriculum.

Third, these governors and mayors will come together and develop a program of national certification for teachers. Teachers must have the capacity to teach, they must prove that they can teach, they must be tested that they can teach, and then we’re going to put a program in to pay the best teachers incredibly higher salaries — $40,000 to $50,000 more than they currently can make for the very best teachers.

Is this an attractive agenda? Should the President, the Congress, the Governors and Unions sign on?

And finally, we’re going to then allow all the school systems in the U.S. to innovate, to go out and figure out how to get it done. Let those principals and teachers in those schools figure out all the possible ways that they think they can meet those standards, and stop choking them with regulations and requirements. And so, we will do what we would do if we were trying to create a change in an organization. We would set very clear goals, and then we would free up our people to go and deliver, and if they don’t deliver we change them.

Wait a minute, if he saying, in a roundabout fashion, that teacher contracts are part of the problem rather than the solution?

The communards in the teacher unions are ready to fight to the bitter end. The newest, youngest, and, probably among the brightest are attracted by the Gerstner agenda. Can the unions, the NEA and the AFT be nimble? Can unions create consensus among their members?

And, how much does Obama care? A recession edging toward a depression, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India/Pakistan, a health care crisis, maybe education is so far down the list that it may be easier to punt …to avoid making any significant changes in the first presidential term.

Then again, who knew a few years ago that the UAW and the auto industry was being sucked into a black hole?

The Rising and Setting of the Sun: Can the Mayor, the Chancellor and Union Change Together?

 

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.

James Gordon, MD.

 

I had a dream: Joel Klein standing on the beach at Rockaway at dawn, holding a major news conference, announcing,  ”In three minutes, the sun will emerge from the sea  …”

 

A reporter asks, “Chancellor Klein, doesn’t the sun rise every morning.” The Chancellor responds, “It is my Children First Initiative that guarantees the rising of the sun, do you think if the sun was unionized it would rise every morning, do you think if the sun was burdened with work rules it would rise, the West Coast is burdened with work rules, with unions, the sun sets on the West Coast, that’s not an accident.”

 

New York University has just issued a Report:

 

The study … found that students living in public housing are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to graduate in four years than those who do not live in public housing.

It also showed that fifth graders living in public housing did worse on standardized math and reading tests than fifth graders who lived elsewhere. Researchers found this disparity in fifth-grade test scores even when comparing students at the same school who shared similar demographics, like race, gender and poverty status.

The researchers suggest that public housing’s culture of poverty offers young people few role models to stress the importance of education, limits their resources and exposes them to crime or widespread peer pressure from those not doing well in school.

Those of us who teach children are well aware of the pernicious culture of public housing, aka “the projects.” The crack epidemic devastated public housing: gangs rule too many projects, grandmothers raising grandchildren, deteriorating buildings … the Report underlines what have seen for too many years.

The response of the Department: trash the Report.

Andrew Jacob, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, said officials there will review the study. He said that student test scores had gone up significantly since the 2002-3 academic year …

“We’ve seen an upward trend across the city in test scores, and the gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers has narrowed,” Mr. Jacob said. “What the chancellor is focused on is making sure that every student, wherever he or she lives in the city, has the opportunity to get an excellent education.”

The claims of rising scores across the city have been debunked numerous times by Eduwonkette and Diane Ravitch, among others.

The teacher union has focused on an agenda starting with Community Schools, to address the issues beyond the walls of school buildings. Richard Rothstein and the Broader, Bolder Agenda folk point to the limitations of the “schools alone can eradicate the achievement gap” faction.

Too many teachers; however, use social status, race, class as “excuses,”… how often have you heard, “if only parents were more involved, if only the kids came to school on time, if only they paid attention …” An irony: teachers in the heart of Brownsville, and in the suburbs utter the same “if only” laments.

Teachers and unions must be careful, teachers, whomever they teach should make progress, and, management has an obligation to measure that progress.

The Department and the City must work together to create a synergy, to recognize the impact of poverty and create approaches that strengthen schools by strengthening families.

Teachers must accept that student progress and teacher value added are intertwined: some teachers are more skilled than others, a few schools actually encourage peer evaluation. The current New York City teacher school-wide bonus plan may presage the development of tools that measure individual teacher value added.

The Department, the City and teacher unions may be tip-toeing on the edge of substantial change, and change is the one tide that can never be stopped.