Branding the de Blasio-Farina Vision of Education: Can the “New Guys” Create a Vision for the School System?

New administrations, whether in politics or business, attempt to brand themselves – attempt to set themselves apart from the administration they replaced.

“the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of building loyalty among customers… a fulfillment in customer expectations and consistent customer satisfaction”

Sometimes a simple phrase, FDR’s New Deal branded the new administration. For de Blasio the “tale of two cities” theme has resonated through his policy choices, from ending “stop and frisk,” to a “living wage,” more “affordable housing,” and, of course, ”Universal Pre-Kindergarten,” the campaign to embed the de Blasio brand.

Days after de Blasio took the oath of office the city restarted contract negotiations with the teachers union, removing the impediment of angry teachers and other city workers was crucial.

After Cuomo refused to grant NYC the right to raise taxes to fund PreK the State budget agreement provided adequate dollars for Universal Pre K, although the time frame to implement was short.

As the summer began, and six months into her chancellorship, the whispers started, when was the new administration at Tweed going to lay out its vision, what was going to change?

The old guard, the Bloomberg-Klein devotees worried, for good reason, everything they built would be dismantled, after all, that’s what the Bloomberg administration did; they trashed everything that proceeded.

The Bloomberg administration branded themselves, dismantling decentralization and creating mayoral control, the closing of scores of schools and the creation of hundreds of new schools, supporting new charter schools, the co-location of charter schools in public school building, the letter A to F School Report Cards, all policies, according to Bloomberg, improving a dysfunctional school system: he branded himself: Michael Bloomberg, the educational mayor.

Last week de Blasio fulfilled a campaign pledge, he changed the School Report Card from A to F letters grades to a four-page “Quality Snapshot” and a multiple page “Quality Guide” for staffers with new school descriptions, “exceeding, meeting, approaching or not meeting standards.” Schools, also, will no longer be ranked.

See sample Reports here: http://schools.nyc.gov/Accountability/default.htm

Chalkbeat reports the criticism,

Groups that supported the previous administration and have been critical of Fariña called her speech a disappointment and said it failed to address head-on the city’s many struggling schools. Even people who praised the new evaluations said it was troubling that the city did not say how it will use the ratings to prop up low-performing schools.

Joseph Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College, said the evaluation shift represents an improvement from the previous administration’s “top-down approach to reform.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “it does not outline a real plan for what [this administration] intends to do with failing schools.”

Chancellor Farina is enormously popular with teachers, her praise of staffs, her emphasis on trust and collaboration, her refusal to close schools, and looked upon with suspicion by the Bloomberg crowd and the “reform” elites.

After all, didn’t they sharply increase graduation rates, close dysfunctional schools, challenge the union, and train dynamic young principals?

While the Bloomberg team was effective in branding themselves as educational innovators and reformers, the NY Post was in their pocket and the NY Daily News usually supportive, and, the NY Times occasionally critical, usually supportive. On the national scene Bloomberg was the education mayor: changing the direction of education in the city.

In reality, the credit recovery fraud, the packing of at-risk kids into schools targeted for closing, questionable marking of regents papers all cast doubt on the increases in graduation rates, and the appalling college and career readiness rates, the disastrous completion rates in community colleges all question the accuracy of the graduation rates.

de Blasio can’t wait a decade to assess the impact of pre-Kindergarten; Farina can’t wait a couple of years to see if reading and math scores jump…

de Blasio and Farina have to take ownership, to brand their approach, to convince the public that their vision of education is best for their children. And, if the vision is unclear, if the new vision looks like older visions, if the Post and the Daily News and elites and decision-makers and the political power structure lose confidence the entire administration can be in trouble.

“Tenure Protects Bad Teachers” and Branding: The Fight for the Hearts and Minds of the Public

We never order a gelatin dessert, we order Jell-O, we don’t ask for a petroleum gel, we buy Vaseline, the advertising gurus successfully brand products. A political application: only dyed in the wool democrats refer to the Affordable Care Act, we call the law Obamacare, branding a law by tying it to an increasingly unpopular president is an effective strategy.

The branding of a product is the embedding of a “sticky idea.”

According to Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die there are six principles that help you craft a sticky message:

Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories

By Simplicity the Heath’s mean, keep it simple and profound.

“We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission — sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that the individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.”

Tap into emotions to convey your point. We’re wired to feel things for people, not abstractions:

“How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something … Research that we are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.”

Tell stories to get people to act on your ideas:

“How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. … Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps up perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”

“Tenure protects bad teachers” has been embedded in the minds of the public, it is a sticky idea. The Silicon Valley billionaire and the judge hearing the case are victims of a successful campaign, they have allowed an idea, a deeply flawed idea, to enter and embed in their subconscious.

Diane Ravitch, in her inimitable fashion, tells us that the data that the judge relied upon is fatally flawed, Jesse Rothstein, in a NY Times op ed (“Taking on Teacher Tenure Backfires” writes,

… Eliminating tenure will do little to address the real barriers to effective teaching in impoverished schools, and may even make them worse.

The lack of effective teachers in impoverished schools contributes to [the achievement] gap, but tenure isn’t the cause. Teaching in those schools is a hard job, and many teachers prefer (slightly) easier jobs in less troubled settings. That leads to high turnover and difficulty in filling positions. Left with a dwindling pool of teachers, principals are unlikely to dismiss them, whether they have tenure or not.

A NY Times editorial (“A New Battle for Equal Education”) supports the decision, and, sort of begrudgingly, supports “reasonable due process rights for teachers,”

Teachers deserve reasonable due process rights and job protections. But the unions can either work to change the anachronistic policies cited by the court or they will have change thrust upon them.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the public the West Coast teacher unions and the New York teachers unions took vastly different approaches. The California Teachers Association has battled for years to prevent any changes in tenure laws – the California law grants tenure after serving an 18 month probationary period and the procedures for removing tenured teachers are complex and the process lengthy, it can take years. The result: almost every teacher achieves tenure and the dismissal of a tenured teacher is exceedingly rare. The attrition rates, especially in the schools teaching the poorest kids are high – half of new teachers leave voluntarily within five years.

The image of kids failing in high poverty schools and the California tenure laws allowed the “messagers,” the framers of public opinion to embed the sticky idea, “tenure protects bad teachers.”

The New York City teacher union has been led by Randi Weingarten, currently the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and now by Michael Mulgrew.

The AFT has taken a different approach which Weingarten calls “solution-driven unionism,”

Solution-driven unionism is rooted in solving problems, not winning arguments. AFT affiliates are pursuing this approach, and we are encouraging many more to follow suit. We know that this tough climate — marked by increasing poverty, continuing budget cuts, and a recession-fueled resurgence in attacks on unions and public services — can’t stop us from having a proactive quality education agenda. To the contrary — while we will continue to fight for the resources children need, we must also devise innovative, creative and new approaches to help all children succeed.

The UFT has worked diligently with a wide range of citywide and community-based organizations, from the NAACP to parent groups across the city. This type of coalition-building embeds “sticky ideas,” A Zogby Analytics poll,

New Yorkers now trust the oft-maligned teachers more than they trust the mayor’s office: almost half of all respondents said that teachers should “play the largest role in determining New York City’s education policy,” compared with 28 percent who thought that the mayor-appointed schools chancellor should.

In 2009 the NYC Department of Education changed the administrative procedures for the granting of tenure. After a three year probationary period the vast percentage of teachers received tenure, the Department changed the process – principals received data sets linking pupil performance to each teacher, teachers were required to submit “artifacts,” examples of student work as well as a review of supervisory observations.

Rather than a major public battle the union provided workshops across the city, every probationary teacher had the opportunity to meet with a union expert to assist in creating their portfolio and well as how to respond in meetings with their principals. While the number of teachers with extended probationary periods increased significantly the percentage of teachers who were denied tenure only increased by one percent.

A just-released study finds, (

“The receipt of tenure had become an expectation for nearly all teachers.’Tenure was rarely based on strong evidence of accomplishment.’

.. the percent of teachers granted tenure dropped from more than 90 percent to less than 60 percent while a substantially greater share of teachers had their tenure period extended. While denial of tenure increased from two percent in 2008 to just three percent in 2012, teachers whose probationary period was extended rose from less than 5 percent to over 40 percent of teachers. Extended teachers were given an additional year to demonstrate effective teaching consistent with the Effectiveness Framework.

Despite not altering the proportion of teachers denied tenure, the tenure reform meaningfully affected the composition of teachers. Researchers found that teachers who were extended were more than 50 percent more likely to transfer to another school within the district or to exit teaching in the district than otherwise similar teachers who were granted tenure. The authors compared the effectiveness of extended teachers who transferred or exited to all teachers entering these schools to assess whether the quality of teachers improves as a result of the policy.

“The extended teachers who leave their schools were less effective than the teachers likely to replace them” said Susanna Loeb, professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, a coauthor. “Likely replacement teachers are much more likely to be rated Effective or Highly Effective than the extended teachers who leave.

The New York State Teacher Union (NYSUT) fully participated in the creation of a teacher evaluation law – moving from a system solely based on principal assessment at the school level to a multiple measures system that involves measuring all teachers against similarly situated teachers across the state. The exceedingly dense system, in the first year, only found 1% of teachers ineffective.

In New York City the union negotiated changes in the teacher disciplinary procedures to expedite the process.

The recent teacher contract received a “thumbs up” from the editorial board of the NY Times,

There was no snarling at City Hall when Mayor Bill de Blasio and the teachers’ union announced a very significant labor agreement on Thursday Dispensing with the unproductive tension that tarnished the Bloomberg administration, the two sides showed that real progress can be made — on both the fiscal and the educational sides of the contract — when there is good will instead of disdain. On the whole, the agreement represents a good deal for the city and its students.

Even the Citizens’ Budget Commission, the self-proclaimed guardian of the City coffers gave the contract a qualified approval.

The tentative agreement between the city and the teachers union resolves major uncertainty surrounding the city’s financial plan and ensures some stability in labor relations with a major segment of the city workforce for the next five years.

It establishes a reasonable pattern for other city workers, but its affordability rests on ensuring concrete savings from health care costs.

Union leadership cannot be guided by the anger of members, in California teacher anger over attempts to modify tenure rules was popular, and a losing position. “Solution-driven unionism,” means pragmatism driven unionism; picking your fights and understanding that crafting solutions is far more effective than a win or lose approach.

Every year the UFT gives a million dollars in scholarships to deserving high school graduates, the UFT is supporting legislation to change the multiple choice test score method for admission to specialized high schools (Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, etc.), which results in only a handful of Black and Hispanic students passing the test, to a multiple measures system, a change strongly supported by the NAACP.

Union leadership in New York City has created a climate in which the public sees the union at the forefront of working to create better schools in partnership with parents, in spite of a snarky barrage of negative articles in the print media. Teacher tenure is not an issue.

Every day, on Twitter, on Facebook, in blogs, in computer downloads the battle goes on … the battle for the hearts and minds, in the battle to convince legislators, to convince parents and voters, the battle to brand policies, to embed sticky ideas, the teacher union works to brand themselves as allies and partners of parent and families.

And, no, it is not obvious, the public is overwhelmed with messages, we have moved from a 24-hour news cycle to a 24-second news cycle. The “winners” will not be decided by the best ideas, the “winners” will be decided by those who can change public opinion, to build consensus, to win over the hearts and minds of the electorate.

BTW, eliminating tenure would probably increase a district budget. Howard Wainer, the author of Uneducated Guesses: Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies, in a brief, powerful paper identified a district that ended tenure for superintendents, over the years after the elimination of tenure the teacher-superintendent salary gap widened significantly. To attract superintendents the district had to increase salaries, when given a choice teachers would clearly choose to work in districts with tenure and the only way to attract teachers would be to pay them more than in non-tenure districts.The elimination of tenure: a perfect example a “misguided education policy.”