NYT Supports AFT Direction - References TNTP

AFT President Randi Weingarten's recent speeches on the direction of the union as it relates to teacher evaluations is being welcomed by a broad cross section of leadership nationally. NYT recently wrote the ditorial below, but this is just one of many from major media outlets. This editorial references The New Teachers Project, which recently conducted a study in Cincinnati Public Schools. Their recommendations are aligned with Weingarten's comments and really position Cincinnati to take action in the emerging contract negotiations that make it a national leader in innovation. We need to be encouraging both the union and district administration to be bold in building on the innovative ideas that are often lost to many in the current contract.....and then support effective implementation of what emerges so it makes a difference for kids every day!

January 17, 2010
Editorial Sunday New York Times
Walking the Walk on School Reform

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.
The federation’s president, Randi Weingarten, set the contrast quite effectively with a speech last week in Washington, in which she offered a proposal to reform teacher evaluation. She not only echoed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call for evaluation systems that take student achievement into account but also expressed support for “a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers.”
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
The process shortchanges students, who are saddled with ineffective teachers. It also hurts the careers of the talented beginners who rarely get the help and guidance they need to become master teachers.
Ms. Weingarten called for a new collaboration between schools and unions that would replace this “perfunctory waste of time.” She called on the states to adopt basic professional teaching standards that would spell out what teachers should know and be able to do.
She rightly warned against using test scores in crude, statistically invalid ways, and proposed a sophisticated analysis to determine if students were showing real growth under a given teacher. Just as important, Ms. Weingarten said districts that so often take a sink-or-swim approach to teaching should develop support and mentoring programs that both improve teachers’ abilities and keep them from leaving the profession.
These proposals should help to change the national conversation on the subject by putting pressure on the N.E.A. At the same time, critics of unions who are pleased to see Ms. Weingarten talk the talk will be watching closely in the coming months to see if she walks the walk.

A Skills Recession?

A recent article in the Huffington Post discusses the jobs outlook and suggests that the highest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years is here to stay for the forseeable future.

The fastest growing occupations require a college degree or some type of postsecondary career training, and according to another recent report out of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, there are over 88 million adults that do not have the basic skills necessary for 90 percent of the jobs in the these industries.

The current recession is unlike any that we have seen in quite a long time, and education is a critical factor in our ability to be competitive in the long run. The following chart is from the Calculated Risk Blog and depicts unemployment rate by education level.
















Will a 'Skills Recession' Prolong Unemployment Woes?

Julian L. Alssid
Posted: January 12, 2010 03:28 PM

Despite some hopeful signs of recovery in late 2009, Americans welcomed a new decade with the realization that the highest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. In December, jobless claims unexpectedly rose, keeping the national unemployment rate at 10 percent.

While high unemployment continues to be a hallmark of the so-called "Great Recession," an interesting dichotomy has arisen. According to a survey of recruiters released in October 2009 by the Human Capital Institute, a global professional association, more than half of the respondents said that their greatest challenges include "quality of candidates" or "availability of candidates" when it comes to filling their employment rolls. This is in line with what we have been hearing around the country from health care, energy and advanced manufacturing industry representatives that rely on skilled workers who have some level of post-secondary certification or degree.

In his November 30, 2009 piece on HuffPost titled, "Job Creation Agenda Must Include Low-Skilled Workers," Bob Giloth of the Annie E. Casey Foundation noted that 88 million adults do not have the basic skills necessary for 90 percent of the jobs in the fastest-growing industries. A recent study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce underscores this dilemma. It finds that the percentage of the workforce requiring some college or above is expected to increase from 59% in 2007 to 63% by 2018. The Center warns that "unless we increase output from postsecondary institutions, the demand for college talent will exceed its supply."

What's more, based on retirement, dropout, skill, and demographic figures, the U.S. Department of Labor is predicting a labor shortage of more than 35 million skilled and educated workers over the next 30 years. It also predicts that between 2010 and 2020, 70 million Americans will retire.

While it may only partially explain today's record high unemployment rate, I believe this "Skills Recession" poses a long-term workforce challenge for our country that should be addressed as part of our current job creation efforts.

What we need is to make our workforce development programs more demand-driven, and our education system more supportive of this effort. There is a need to focus on high-level skills training for career track jobs that exist now and in the foreseeable future.

Breakthrough Speech by AFT President

AFT President Randi Weingarten laid out the clearest vision to date on the role she believes her union can help to play to improve teacher quality. Pushed in part by the dramatic changes the Obama Administration is pushing for as part of the Race to the Top grant, she stated in no uncertain terms that she was willing to link student performance to teacher evaluation. This has a direct impact on the Cincinnati Public Schools contract negotioations, giving some room to move in building upon a contract many around the country already see as innovative.

You can find the article on the speech at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/01/12/18aft_ep.h29.html

Changing Demographics

Just recently, a landmark deomographic shift was realized in the South. The NYT carried the story below with supporting stats from Ed Trust. This challenges all of us to see that while education should have transformed already, in the face of a rapidly changing student population it simply has to if we are to achieve our shared goals of every student succeeding. KnowledgeWorks Foundation worked with the Institute for the Future to assess what education would be forecast (not predicted) to look like in the next ten years. One clear insight is that students will come to school with more "baggage" from the environments in which they live, not less. Are we going to blame this factor for low performance or transform the system to actually meet their needs?

Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
January 7, 2010
By SHAILA DEWAN New York Times
ATLANTA — The South has become the first region in the country where more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are members of minorities, according to a new report.
The shift was fueled not by white flight from public schools, which spiked during desegregation but has not had much effect on school demographics since the early 1980s. Rather, an influx of Latinos and other ethnic groups, the return of blacks to the South and higher birth rates among black and Latino families have contributed to the change.
The new numbers, from the 2008-9 school year, are a milestone for the South, “the only section of the United States where racial slavery, white supremacy and racial segregation of schools were enforced through law and social custom,” said the report, to be released on Thursday by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit group based here that supports education improvement in the region. But the numbers also herald the future of the country as a whole, as minority students are expected to exceed 50 percent of public school enrollment by 2020 and the share of students poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches is on the rise in every state.
The South, desperate for a well-educated work force that can attract economic development, will face an enormous challenge in tackling on such a broad scale the lower achievement rates among poor and minority students, who score lower than average on tests and drop out more frequently than whites. Four of the 15 states in the report — Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — now have a majority of both low-income and minority pupils. Only one, Virginia, has neither.
“This is the beginning of a very clear trend that has enormous implications,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. “When we realize that the majority of graduates of our schools in the long run are going to come from backgrounds with educational deprivation, it makes it imperative that schools be improved.”
School districts in the South are already struggling to adapt, but it is not clear which methods are most effective.
“That’s the question that Congress, the legislature, the Gates Foundation — everybody’s trying to solve that,” said Arthur C. Johnson, the superintendent of the Palm Beach School District in Florida, which has gone from 40 percent minority students to 63 percent in 15 years. Remedial programs, career-centered academies, and intensive teacher training have helped, Mr. Johnson said, but have not closed the gap in achievement and graduation rates.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Maryland have been among those states where poor and minority students have shown the most improvement in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. From 2003 to 2007, black fourth-graders in Alabama showed the most improvement of any state in reading on the National Assessment of Economic Progress, though they still rank slightly below average.
In Tennessee, where many districts have seen Hispanic enrollment increase by factors of 10 or more, districts have scrambled to hire more teachers of English as a second language. In Mississippi, which has no publicly financed preschool, some schools have used federal money for poor students to prepare 4-year-olds for the classroom.
In Louisiana, a recent study has tried to determine which teacher-training programs are most effective. Districts are experimenting with ways to attract more experienced teachers to high-risk schools.
“We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools. “An affluent 5-year-old has about the same vocabulary as an adult living in poverty.”
More minority students in a district does not mean that classrooms are more integrated, said Richard Fry, a senior research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center, whose research shows that most white children in the South attend predominantly white schools and an even higher percentage of black and Hispanic children attend predominantly minority schools.
Southern schools are far more segregated now than they were at the height of integration in the ’70s and ’80s, a period that saw a narrowing of the achievement gap, said Gary Orfield, the co-director of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at U.C.L.A. The South has the lowest percentage of children in private school of any region, Mr. Orfield said.
Minority schools tend to be larger, have higher student-teacher ratios and have higher poverty rates, Mr. Fry said. For some education advocates, such correlations raise the possibility that politicians will be less likely to adequately finance public schools as they fill with poor and minority students.
“We have a history of providing the least educational resources to the students who need the most,” said Steve Suitts, the vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and the author of the study. “The people in the South have to be concerned about all children, not just their own grandchildren.”
On the other hand, Southern politicians are keenly aware of the need for an educated work force. Spurred in part by school financing lawsuits, more than half the 15 states included in the study already provide more state and local financing to heavily poor or minority districts than to affluent or low-minority ones, according to figures compiled by Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington. But schools often layer programs on top of programs without analyzing which are effective, said Daria Hall, the trust’s director of K-12 policy.

Public Schools Time to Shine

USA Today had an interesting story yesterday about the population shift from private to public schools as a result of the economy. See:

http://www.usatoday.com/_ads/interstitial/2008/page/interstitial_new.htm?http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-01-06-1Apublicprivate06_CV_N.htm

The story actually contains interesting insights from peopel who have made the shift and highlights how tough the transition can be....and how the public school environment can be positive for kids despite the challenges they often face. The class size issue is of particular interest for me. My girls have 24 students in their kindergarten class in Cincinnati Public, which seems very big to me. But I ask one of my daughters who she worked with that day and she names almost all the other kids, who happen to come from different backgrounds and every corner of the globe. I can then see the value.....as long as the teacher is able to work effectively with so many children demanding attention!

Placement on High Quality Teachers in Cincinnati Public Schools

Research clearly shows teacher quality is the most important factor in determining student academic success. Cincinnati Public Schools in blessed with a high number of National Board Certified Teachers, one means of recognizing high performing teachers. But according to this Enquirer analysis the Board Certified teachers are not as present in the schools rated as in "academic emergency" by the state. What are we going to do to ensure students in these schools have access to the highest quality teachers possible?

There are options to incent placement in high need schools. The recent report from The New Teachers Project highlighted two options: incentive pay for teachers willing to serve in these schools and performance bonuses for increased academic growth at the classroom and school levels. What other options do you think should be considered?

Top teachers assigned unevenly
Elite CPS instructors gravitate to high-achieving schools
By Ben Fischer • bfischer@enquirer.com • December 20, 2009
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20091220/NEWS0102/912210333

Breakdown of Number of National Board Certified Teachers by School Rating Groups

Rating group: Excellent or Ex. w/ distinction (5 schools)
Total Student Enrollment: 4,259
Number of Nationally Board Certified Teachers (NBCT): 20
Students/NBCT: 213

Rating Group: Effective (9 schools)
Total Student Enrollment: 5,730
Number NBCT: 26
Student/NBCT: 220

Rating Group: Continuous Improvement (14 schools)
Total Enrollment: 7,109
Number NBCT: 22
Student/NBCT: 323

Rating Group: Academic Watch (16 schools)
Total Student Enrollment: 8,929
Number NBCT: 26
Student/NBCT: 343

Rating Group: Academic Emergency (13 schools)
Total Student Enrollment: 6,584
Number NBCT: 6
Student/NBCT: 1,097

CPS total
Total Student Enrollment: 33,121
Number NBCT: 111
Student/NBCT: 298

Note: Does not include Hughes STEM High School. Nine NBCT are not in the classroom.

Louisiana as Model in Teacher Assessment

Secretary Duncan is pointing to Louisiana for how they are assessing teachers by including achievement scores.....what do you think?

Louisiana Serves as Model in Teacher Assessment - Through an initiative that Educ. Secretary Arne Duncan calls a model for the nation, Louisiana has become the first state to tie student test scores into a chain of evaluation that reaches all the way to teacher colleges. Programs that fail to perform on this new metric could face shake-ups or, in extreme cases, closure. Univ. of Louisiana – Lafayette, a major teacher producer already is working to fix possible flaws in its program that the state board of regents identified based on 3 years of test data of 1st and 2nd year teachers. Thus, it will offer professional development to any alumni with gaps in teaching skills, and increase writing and grammar instruction for undergrads. [Topic: Teacher Accountability] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/12/AR2009121202631.html