Whispering in Arne’s Ear: Is He Joel/Michelle in Drag, or, Will He Listen to the Folks in Classrooms?

 

Arne Duncan

Secretary of Education

Washington, DC

 

Dear Arne

 

It was nice to see you in New York: but praising Mike, and Joel and Randi  is a little hollow, like a Chicagoan saying he roots for the White Sox and the Cubs.

 

Your agenda, as reported by the media is troubling.

 

Data systems are the reform du jour, don’t get me wrong, collecting and analyzing data is important to evaluate progress. However, we worry that accountability-based systems and the resultant data sets and will lead to the use of regression analysis and neural networks, which will, in time, enable schools systems to incorporate this data into the hiring, promotion, tenure and discharge discussions.

 

If you can get Joel and Randi to agree upon the use of this data I have an assignment for you in the Middle East.

 

At the school level the key question is whether technology and the use of data to drive instruction improves outcomes. If the $85 million ARIS system is an example, I have my doubts. My experience has been that ARIS data is no surprise to teachers, and after exploring the data they use the system less and less.

 

Teaching is as much art as science, perhaps you can use those stimulus dollars to search for that elusive “teaching” gene?

 

Arne, incentive plans do not make for better teachers. I fear your enthusiasm presages the use of bonus plans to remunerate teachers. Yes, teacher quality is the path to student achievement, the keys are the pool of prospective teachers. The Great Depression and the GI Bill created such pools, maybe an upside of the current recession/depression will also create such a pool.

 

I know you feel Joel is a “good, good friend,” but, according to NAEP New York City data has been flat for the entire term of Joel’s stewartship.

 

Rather than leaning on Joel, or heaven forbid, Michelle, a few suggestions:

 

* Labor-Management Thin Contract Experiments: Do teacher union labor agreements interfere with schools/school district ability to improve student achievement? A January, 2009 Study  says not really. The charter school movement appears to be based upon averting union and school district regulations. A “thin contract” in New York City is not a reality because teachers don’t trust Joel Klein; perhaps, just perhaps, you could use your discretionary dollars, and your office to encourage such experiments.

 

* Social Service-School Collaborations: You have created/supported Community Schools in Chicago, the Child’s Aid Society supports some schools in New York, and the AFT supports Community Schools on the national scene. Do Community Schools impact student achievement? In New York the data has not been encouraging, but, why? Anecdotally, hospital affiliated school health clinics are more effective than CBO-based clinics, do we have examples of a wide range of city social service agencies working closely with schools and families? Corridors of collaboration …Once again, a worthwhile effort.

 

* Teacher Generated Action Research: I know your “good, good” friend Joel lauds the imposition of Inquiry Teams, mandated Action Research teams in each and every school. Action Research can drive programs in schools, however, when driven by the folks at the top they are rarely “sticky.”  How do you encourage states to establish goals and encourage parents/teachers. principals at the district and school level to craft programs, perhaps Action Research projects, to achieve those goals?

 

Quick, can you name five Secretaries if Education? With each passing month the Secretary of Education more and more resembles a cheer leader who is less and less relevant to the lives of teachers and their students.

 

Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee have created Montagues and Caplets,, Jets and Sharks, armed camps, distrustful and willing to fight to the bitter end. (You should pick your friends more carefully)

 

Your boss has reached across political, racial and ethnic divides, he has gained the trust of most Americans. Teachers look at their class on day one with hope … don’t disappoint us.

 

Fraternally

 

Ed

Mindless Accountability and the Subprime Mortgage Debacle: Ignoring Poverty is a Cruel Hoax …

 

If Joel, Arne, Michelle and Andres were lounging and sipping, and you were a fly on the wall, they would agree that the keys to improving student achievement are teacher quality and school leadership and the major impediment: teacher unions.

 

For decades the problem in urban, inner city schools was simply covering classes. Salaries were low and teaching was not fashionable. In the last decade salaries have risen, 43% in the last two teacher contracts in NYC, teaching is attracting a different cohort of teachers, as evidenced by Teacher for America and the Teaching Fellows Program.

 

Data systems allow teachers to differentiate instruction and, in time, allow school systems to differentiate teachers, to identify effective, less effective and ineffective teachers, and, to align pay scales to teacher effectiveness.

 

ARIS  provides a wealth of student achievement data that is readily accessible to school staff and ACUITY provides periodic predictive assessments to inform instruction. This wealth of student achievement data will, in time, allow management to develop tools  to measure student achievement by individual teacher.

 

The next set of contract negotiations will be “interesting.”

 

Leadership programs are no longer left to the universities but actually run by school systems, i.e., the NYC Leadership Academy, or contracted to like-minded not-for-profits, such as New Leaders for New Schools NLNS) or the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM).

 

Charter schools offer union-free environments as a counter balance to unionized schools, and higher charter school achievement provides arguments to reduce the power of unions and the limitations of union contracts.

 

In NYC Joel has skirmished with the union, lost some battles and won others, some think he is winning the war. In Chicago Arne, with some criticism, foisted his agenda onto the school system. In Baltimore Andres is popular and quietly building consensus  while in DC Michelle went to war with the union, although she may be backing off a bit. Different leadership styles, the same agenda.

 

On some days UFT/AFT President Randi Weingarten stands arm in arm with Mayor Bloomberg to advocate for the stimulus package, even though the package contains substantial discretionary funding  for Arne  to direct to his favorite programs.

 

 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will have a $650 million kitty he can use to fund “innovative” states, school districts, or non-profits.

 

Will Arne decide to fund Community Schools, as advocated by the AFT, or data development programs as advocated by Joel and his homeboys?

 

We may have forgotten that in August, 2007, Repesentative George Miller released a 400 plus page draft of his proposed changes to NCLB. Miller was pilloried, from the right and the left, by the unions and the states, and his draft never gained any traction.

 

Miller appears to be a strong supporter of Duncan and sees the stimulus package as a launching pad  for re-energizing a “new” No Child Left Behind.

 

Miller fully expects Congress to continue increased support for programs like the Teacher Incentive Fund, state data systems, and probably even Secretary Duncan’s new “race to the top fund,” which is aimed at rewarding states and districts who are boosting student achievement.And, in our brief conversation, Miller really stressed the importance of state data systems, and emphasized that they’re also a big priority for Duncan. Some educators, including in Miller’s home state of California, are wary that state data systems could be used to tie teacher pay to student progress, but it sounds like the education chairman views them as a good way to measure student learning and wants to press full steam ahead.

The reauthorization of NCLB, under whatever the new name is, offers a once in a decade opportunity. Whatever direction the new law takes will be with us throughout the Obama years. My fear is that the attractiveness of “mindless accountability” will have traction. 

I agree that teacher quality and leadership are crucial, however, we cannot simply ignore the impact of poverty. We can identify schools and kids at an early age whose chances of school success are slim.  Recent chronic absenteeism studies, both nationally and in NYC point to early childhood grades where frightening percentages of kids are ”chronically absent” during a school year. Why? What is the relationship between poverty and school attendance?

Another study shows that kids living in housing projects have significantly lower test scores and graduation rates.

Part of the data approach should be to replace the free lunch form metric with a school poverty index to determine the flow of Title One funding.

High concentrations of schools with kids with high asthma rates, AIDs, teenage pregnancy, incarceration, temporary housing, foster care, etc., all contribute to lower school achievement. Schools divert resources to deal with the social issues surrounding the school.

Michelle Rhee argues

“With these kids, my kids, their neighborhoods did not change, who their parents were did not change, the violence in the community did not change, their diets did not change. What changed were the adults who were in front of them every single day in school. And that made every bit of difference.”

No Michelle, it does not make “every bit of difference,” teacher quality without addressing the surrounding community is an uphill treadmill .. .  a chimera.

Promising school success, and ignoring poverty, sounds like the current subprime mortgage debacle.

Driving to the Rim: Can Arne Change the Game? Or, Do We Face More Mindless Accountability?

 

 

A year ago Super Tuesday days away … Hillary was going to be the big winner … and coast to the nomination … Bloomberg’s term was expiring …oh well,  the best laid plans …

 

Now, the question is whether union leaders will have a real role “at the table,” or, be back in the crowd at the bill signing.

 

The unions paid obeisance to the new Ed Secty  … and as the stimulus package moves toward passage it is clear that Arne Duncan has taken his Chicago agenda to DC.

 

The House bill contained a number of items dear to the hearts of the “reform” caucus  … in a phone conference, George Miller,  the Chair of the House Ed Committee explains

 

And he told us that those ed-reformy programmatic choices—including a $200 million boost for the Teacher Incentive Fund, which doles out grants for performance pay, $250 million for state data systems, and a $25 million fund for charter school facilities—were sought by the Obama administration.

Those provisions didn’t make it into the Senate bill, a development Mike Petrilli over at Flypaper bemoaned yesterday.

But Miller seems to think they’ll stay in through conference.

“These are the priorities of President Obama,” Rep. Miller said. “I believe they’ll make it through and I hope they’ll make it through.

In not too many months the House Ed Committee will begin debating the reauthorization of No Child left Behind … and you can bet it’ll get a different name!!

In the waning moments of his first press conference Obama riffed on his ed philosophy … charter schools, performance pay and “firing bad teachers.”

Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform, and have argued only money makes a difference. And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said no matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let’s just blow up the public school systems.

And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we’re going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we’re also going to need more reform, which means that we’ve got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.

So my whole goal over the next four years is to make sure that whatever arguments are persuasive and backed up by evidence and facts and proof that they can work, that we are pulling people together around that kind of pragmatic agenda.

Earlier in the day Ed Secty Duncan, was speaking at the American Council on Education, he hailed the House version of the stimulus bill and spanked the Senate for removing school construction dollars. He went on to sketch policies

We have to start by recognizing that our system of education is not aligned. Every state has different high school standards.

If we accomplish one thing in the coming years—it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.

I know that talking about standards can make people nervous—but the notion that we have fifty different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous.

A high school diploma needs to mean something—no matter where it’s from.

And, he continued with a little slap at teacher unions.

He tells unions that with American education in crisis—we can’t be limited by ideology.

We all must honestly acknowledge failed strategies of the past and explore new ones—from charter schools to performance pay—and if they’re not working we must be honest about that also.

I must say the Obama/Duncan ed plan, as little as we have seen, looks a lot more like the Klein/Education Equality Project than the AFT/UFT/Broader, Bolder Coalition.

The hardest lift will be national standards. The accountability aspects of NCLB were an attempt, albeit a failed one, to move the nation’s school to a “proficiency” standard. Unfortunately the path was left to the states, with the feds holding a club over non-performers. In New York City and Chicago the reaction has been the closing of “failing” schools, without any evidence that the successor schools, and especially the students in those “failing” schools have benefited.

“Performance pay” or “performance incentives” are vaguely defined with relatively little research.  The NYC plan  is a bonus plan rather than an individual pay for performance plan. As data improves the research will increase and, in time, we will have firm data on teacher performance. The unanswered question: will pay for performance “incentivize” teaching?

The stimulus bill, hopefully, will pass, TARP 2 will on the agenda, and in the weeks ahead Congress will get down to the mundane tasks of legislating. At the State level huge deficits hover, with possible teacher layoffs still a real possibility.

Will Barack and Arne engage with Randi and Joel and Michelle and Wendy? or, will the economic morass push ed policy into the background? Are we, once again, facing years of mindless accountability, this time with a velvet glove? Will Arne/Barack ignore the impact of poverty on academic achievement?

As the crocuses peek into a February sky we hope that Arne will not be a continuation of Spellings, with a dash of Joel and Michelle.

Noblesse Oblige or the Sans Culottes: School Governance As An Exercise in Democracy As Two Views of Governance/Management Collide, Should Governance Be Topdown or Bottomup?

On Friday, February 6th the New York State Assembly Education Committee held the second of five borough based hearing on the reauthorization of the mayoral governance law.

 

First, kudos to Chair Cathy Nolan, the hearing kicked off at 10:05 am and petered out at 8:30 pm with two five minute breaks. About forty folks gave testimony, ranging Joel Klein to just plain old folk. Nolan sat through each and every speaker, was gracious and patient, and incisive with her comments.

 

Surprisingly, the committee has not interviewed the Chancellor in three years, especially since the committee will recommend the future of mayoral control. The Chancellor, Deputy Mayor Walcott, deputy Chancellor Grimm and CEO of the School Construction Authority Sharon Greenberger “testified,” and responded to committee questions for two hours, as reported in the New York Times  and the New York Times City Room blog.

 

Klein’s position was clear:

 

“Divided authority and a local rather than a citywide focus often leads to interest-group politics in education, and those with power or access to power typically prevail,” Mr. Klein said. “There are, in short, as is often the case, winners and losers. But we cannot afford losers in education.”

 

Assemblyman Maisel asked whether the chancellor would accept a proposal: Community Engagement Panels would interview applicants for superintendent and principal positions and recommend five candidates to the chancellor who would make a final selection.

 

The chancellor responded he favored consultation, but, final decisions must be his and his alone.

 

Mayoral control, as defined by Bloomberg and Klein, treats the Department as a city agency, with the Mayor appointed commissioners having total authority in all matters. The Mayor seems to be calling for civil disobedience  if mayoral control is amended, “rioting in the streets,”  if mayoral control is not reauthorized.

 

“My assumption is there will be a bill called mayoral control passed by the Legislature,” the mayor continued. “I think that the, if they didn’t do that, I think that there’d be riots in the streets, given what’s the improvement. I mean, parents have choices. For the first time we’re funding all the schools equally.”

 

The core question: is mayoral control working? what does the data say? does the Department use the same transparent policies that the rest of the city agencies use?

 

William Thompson, the NYC Comptroller, and  probably a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, accused the Department is simply refusing to comply with transparency guidelines , the Department is sometimes a State agency, and sometimes a City agency, and continues to evade/ignore whatever regulations it doesn’t like.

 

Diane Ravitch, a historian of the NYC school system challenged the core of the Bloomberg/Klein argument: that the school system has gotten measurably better under their stewardship. Ravitch, using the national NAEP data, as well as pointing out the Klein uses data that preceded his chancellorship to point to gains, avers that scores under Klein are flat.

 

UFT President Randi Weingarten appointed a Task Force in April, 2007, that held public hearings attended by over 1200 parents, teachers and advocates, met innumerable times and issued a Report  that was approved by union delegates on February 4th. The union Report , with a host of recommendations, called for a change in the makeup of the Central Board: currently the Mayor appoints eight of the 13 seats, the union plan called for the mayoral appointees to be reduced to five, with one each by the Borough Presidents, and three appointed by the citywide elected officials, the Comptroller, the Public Advocate and the president of the City Council.

 

Late in the afternoon Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s appointee to the Board testified. It was riveting!

 

The Board is “managed” by the Chancellor: no agendas to the day before the meetings, or the day of the meeting, no minutes of meetings, vacancies on the Board abound, the Chancellor has emasculated the Board, that, in reality, has absolutely no function, and, any attempts to question any actions by Klein are rejected by Klein. The Board is a Potemkin Village .

 

The last hearing will take place on March 20th, and with the huge budget issues hanging over the city it will be months before the legislature confronts the governance bill.

 

It is increasingly looking like the law will be amended … perhaps the core is the simple issue of “eight” out of 13, or “five” out of 13.

The Layoff Pas de Deux Begins: Mike and Randi Dance Around the Edges of Disaster

 The Mayor’s budget address was stark and directed to UFT/AFT President Weingarten. Mike threatens fifteen thousand Department of Education layoffs, mostly teachers, unless the stimulus package dollars going to the State are directed to the City, and, with a great deal of flexibility.

 

Bloomberg hints that pension reform (a new Tier 5) and reauthorizing unfettered mayoral control are tied to potential layoffs.

 

Joel Klein, in testimony to the NYS legislative committees  laid out the specifics: special ed mandate relief, much greater flexibility in use of targeted state dollars, pension system changes.

 

The union responded to the Mayor’s layoff talk with a strongly worded press release , a vigorous “protect the schools” program culminating in a March 5th City Hall Rally.

 

In light of the mayor’s proposal today to lay off 15,000 educators in September if the city does not get the state and federal aid it seeks, it’s now more urgent than ever that every member turn out for the budget rally at City Hall on March 5. We will not be able to protect our jobs, our schools and essential public services unless we show the politicians in Albany and City Hall that New Yorkers are united and determined to get a fair budget.

 

The stimulus package has passed the House and debate in the Senate is beginning … with a mid-February target date for passage.

 

The stimulus package will direct many billions to the State for this year and next year.

 

The State legislature is about to take on the current fiscal gap … the gap in the budget that ends March 31 … they have to cut 1.6 billion, before they take on the 15.8 billion dollar gap in the next budget.

 

In previous years budget gaps were treated as “fill the hole,” find dollars to fill the hole in the budget and ignore the financial structure of the State. The world has changed, the very structure of the budget is unworkable … the current recession/depression is not going to “go away” in a year or two, the State has to restructure the way it does business … and … the biggest targets are education, medicaid and support for a property tax cap, a la California’s disaster Proposition 13 .

 

It has an Herculean task.

 

The NYC budget will be held hostage by the NYS budget, which is due April 1, however, it is altogether likely the discussions will drag further into the spring.

 

The NYC budget is due before July 1st, usually the second or third week in June.

 

Principals will probably receive their budgets in mid May, based upon a “guess” on the part of the DOE … and, maybe  a “layoff” budget to increase the stakes. Principals will allocate their dollars, and the DOE, right about the budget deadline in June, Tweed could release “proposed” layoff numbers based on the estimates.

 

Layoffs lead to “bumping,” in Dallas,  the school district laid off 375 teachers in October, and another 460 teachers were bumped from school to school. Quite chaotic. The Democratic primary is in early September and the election in November … would layoffs and the chaos help or hurt the incumbent mayor? Would they be fuel for his Democratic challenger? Weiner versus Mike over schools …?

 

And, of course, school governance is the invisible gorilla in the room.

 

Will Mike and Randi work out some sort of compromise? Will the pas de deux result in a settlement that is good for kids and teachers? or, are we are entering a Gaza period, never ending senseless warfare … with the kids as victims …?