The Colorado Teachers Union Has It Wrong Again
The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand up
MICHAEL MULGREW is an amiable sometime Brooklyn vocational-high-schoolhouse teacher who took over last year as caput of New York Metropolis's United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to concord public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in course, every bit measured in part by pupil exam scores. Mulgrew's 165-folio wedlock contract takes the opposite arroyo. It non only specifies everything that teachers will do and volition not practice during a half-dozen-hour-57 ½-minute workday merely likewise requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the chore. In one case they've been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all only a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. "Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent," I asked Mulgrew. "Should you be able to fire him?"
"He's not a teacher," Mulgrew responded. "And I need to be able to pick my ain person for a job like that." Then he grinned, adding: "I know where you're going, but you don't understand. Teachers are just different."
That is the kind of story that makes Jon Schnur smile. Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based schoolhouse-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the Us. They have been edifice in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in schoolhouse districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Teach for America'due south founder, Wendy Kopp; and the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein could exist considered the patron saints of the network.
Over the concluding several months, Schnur and the well-positioned fellow travelers on his speed dial accept seen the cause of their lives accept center phase. Why the sudden shift from long-simmering wonk argue to political front end burner? Considering there is at present a president who, when it comes to school reform, actually does seem to be a new kind of Democrat — and because of a clever idea Schnur had last year to parcel what might otherwise have been just another federal grant programme into a media-alluring, if cheesy-sounding, competition called Race to the Peak. It has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $four.iii billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could stop up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Political party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled Schnur's network to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers' unions: they argue that a land that spends more than per educatee than any other but whose student functioning ranks in the bottom third among adult nations isn't failing its children for lack of resource just for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front end of the course.
Schnur, who is 44, became interested in education when, equally an editor of his high-school newspaper, he read a draft of an commodity from a pupil who had transferred from a Milwaukee public school to his school in the suburbs. "She was savvier than whatever of us on the editorial board, but the draft was just so terribly written," he told me. Schnur added that "the more I got to know her, the more I became obsessed with why public education hadn't reached people like her." Later on graduating from Princeton, he worked in the Clinton campaign so landed an education-policy job in the Clinton administration.
Schnur recalls that when he met Barack Obama before his Senate campaign in 2004, and heard him talk almost education, "I figured this guy could exist the nifty didactics president — in 2017." When Obama moved upwards the timetable, Schnur joined his 2008 campaign as a policy adviser. Six months later, he was working every bit a counselor to Instruction Secretary Duncan. As the Obama administration prepared to spend $80 billion in education assist as function of the economic stimulus program, Duncan and Schnur diverted $4.three billion to the contest aimed at encouraging greenbacks-strapped states to overhaul their public schools. Schnur came up with the name and pushed the overall spin of the contest, and it was clear from conversations with people in the school-reform movement that he is the one person who seems to know everything happening on all fronts, from the White House to legislative chambers in Albany or Sacramento to lease schools in New Orleans. Joel Klein, for example, said he talks to Schnur almost one time a calendar week.
The winners of the Race would exist those states that submitted the best blueprints for fulfilling the reform agenda, which includes allowing school districts to accept over failing schools, improving curriculum standards and encouraging school innovation (which ways, in part, allowing charter schools to flourish). But what the reformers have come to believe matters most is good teachers. "It'due south all about the talent," Secretary Duncan told me. Thus, the highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers' union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent chore security. To win the contest, the states had to present new laws, contracts and data systems making teachers individually responsible for what their students achieve, and demonstrating, for example, that budget-forced instructor layoffs will be based on the quality of the teacher, not merely on seniority. (Fifteen states, including New York and California, at present operate under union-backed state laws mandating that seniority, or "last in/first out," determines layoffs. These quality-blind layoffs could strength a new generation of teachers, like those recruited by Teach for America, out of classrooms in the coming months.) To enable teacher evaluations, another 47 points would exist allocated based on the quality of a state's "data systems" for tracking student operation in all grades — which is a euphemism for the kind of total-bore testing regime that makes many parents and children cringe just that the reformers argue is necessary for whatsoever serious effort to track non only student progress just also teacher effectiveness.
Past late March, when the first round of the Race ended, it was clear that Schnur's spin had worked "better than any of us imagined," he says. Thousands of local news stories across the country speculated about how particular states were faring, some of them breathlessly referring to the "March Madness" as governors, state legislators and bureaucrats rushed to consider reforms that might amend their chances. Forty states and the District of Columbia entered the commencement round. Fifteen, including such union strongholds as California, Ohio and Michigan, passed laws or revised regulations aimed at boosting their chances. Before Duncan had dispensed a nickel, the country had seen more schoolhouse reform than information technology had in decades. And still more is being debated as the deadline for a 2nd round of proposals looms next week and states, including New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, hustle to practice more to heave their scores.
When the starting gun for the Race went off, four forces that had been edifice came together and gained force from one some other.
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Start in that location's the ascension of the reformers who seem to be in daily communication through e-mail and blogs. The standard profile is someone who went to a prestige higher, joined Teach for America for a two-year stint and constitute the work and the challenges then compelling that he or she decided education should be more than a layover earlier a existent career. And so they did more instruction or became involved running a charter school or a reform group, and then kept moving up the ladder equally sympathetic political leaders, including Democrats (about in this network also seem to exist Democrats), took over cities or states and looked for people to overhaul school systems. One exception is Schnur. "I was in Wendy'due south class in Princeton in 1989, and then I couldn't exercise T.F.A. considering it didn't exist nonetheless," Schnur says, referring to Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in 1990 based on a senior thesis she wrote envisioning a Peace Corps-like core of immature college grads.
Although Schnur is a cheerful, modest type, at that place is a strain of cocky-righteousness that runs through the reform network. Some come off as snobs who assume any wedlock teacher is lazy or incompetent and could be bested by young, nonunion Ivy Leaguers total of energy. And others see tying teachers' pay to their students' comeback on standardized tests as a catholicon. Merely most — especially those who have taught and appreciate how hard it is — sympathize that standardized tests are far from perfect, and that some subjects, similar the arts, don't lend themselves to standardized testing. They know that most teachers want to be constructive and that information-based functioning assessments should be combined with classroom ascertainment and other subjective measures not only to agree teachers answerable but too to help them improve their performance.
The second force at piece of work is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country— including President Obama — who seem willing to challenge the teachers' unions.
Third, there's the boost given to school reform by high-powered foundations, similar the Gates Foundation, which have financed important inquiry and pilot reform projects, and by wealthy entrepreneurs, who have poured seed money into charter schools.
And quaternary, there's the lease-schoolhouse movement, which has yielded an increasingly large and vocal constituency of parents whose children are amidst the more than than 1.five million students attending more than than 5,000 charter schools.
Put those forces together with the Race, and you take education reform moving into prime time. Parents marched and lobbied in Tallahassee, Albany and Los Angeles, enervating that their schoolhouse systems be reformed the way Obama's instructions for winning the Race said they should. Newspaper editorial boards of all political stripes joined in their crusade; "Union Lackeys" was a typical championship of a Las Vegas Review-Periodical editorial about recalcitrant Democratic legislators.
If unions are the Democratic Political party's base, then teachers' unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers' unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.half-dozen million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the all-time field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers' union members. In the concluding 30 years, the teachers' unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is well-nigh 30 per centum higher than any single corporation or other marriage. And they accept typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. Almost 95 percent of information technology has gone to Democrats.
Before they successfully organized in the 1950s and 1960s, teachers endured meager salaries, political favoritism, tyrannical principals and sex discrimination against a mostly female person work force. Information technology's that sense of needing to stick together against real or potential mistreatment by direction, plus a sincere — and accurate — belief that nigh teachers do teach for reasons across simply making a living, that drives Mulgrew and other union leaders. There's also the reality that their ain power comes from making certain that the all-for-one-one-for-all contract that they negotiate remains the determining cistron in a teacher's professional life.
Withal, almost all the states that submitted first-round applications proposed school reforms that a year ago would have been seen as pushing beyond what the teachers' unions would permit. Some moved further than others either because the lure of the Race to the Acme money trumped the unions' opposition, or because political leaders and educators were able to persuade union leaders to get on the train instead of standing in front of it.
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ON MARCH 4, Duncan appear that sixteen applicants were finalists for the first round. And he said that they all were examples "for the land of what is possible when adults come together and practise the right thing for children." One of those finalists was New York, which finished 15th but where the wedlock's clout was such that the application failed to accost the core requirements of Duncan'southward calendar. Joe Williams of Democrats for Educational activity Reform sent an email bulletin to the network — addressed "Love Education Warrior" — saying he was "baffled" past Duncan's apparent leniency in giving states like New York a laissez passer. But by the end of the calendar month, Duncan had redeemed himself with the reformers. He picked simply 2 states, Delaware and Tennessee, for the first round of awards. Those states had scored highest (455 and 444) on the 500-point calibration. Georgia and Florida (434 and 431) were close backside, simply Duncan told me he wanted "to set a high bar."
School officials in Delaware, which will receive $100 million, take been working on reform projects for more than a decade, and the state already has a comprehensive student-performance information arrangement in place. "We worked on the awarding all summertime, built on a 10-year legacy of reform," Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, said. And so, in its application, the country was able to point to regulations that had been beefed up for the Race. In Delaware, no teacher at present volition exist rated "effective" who does not meet targets connected to educatee test-score improvement (every bit well as other subjective measures, like evaluations of lesson plans and classroom management) over the school year, and teachers could be removed if they are rated "ineffective" or "needs improvement" two years in a row. "We know testing has to be part of the evaluation procedure," Diane Donohue, the head of the Delaware state teachers' association, says. "This is a culture change that has been happening over the years and came to a head with Race to the Meridian." In fact, Donohue was one of the v people picked to present Delaware'due south proposal in Washington.
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In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen, too a Democrat, pushed the Legislature to laissez passer laws allowing more lease schools and making pupil exam scores l percent of annual teacher evaluations. The statewide teachers' union ended up supporting both bills.
Bredesen explained the new politics of didactics in his state this way: "For me at that place's a little fleck of a 'Nixon goes to Cathay' feel most it, because I had washed a lot of things that teachers were quite happy with over the years. My statement to them was that this is coming from a Democratic administration. This is not a Republican idea anymore. I told them that I know this goes at the core of what you and your colleagues have been protecting over the years," Bredesen continued, referring to how he broached the subject of teachers being evaluated and paid based on private performance ratings. "Only at present, we're all going to have to evolve. It's coming, and you can either help to structure it, or you can fight it, and information technology won't exist as good."
Bredesen points to an earlier development in his land that, he says, had "broken the ice." In 2009 the Gates foundation provided a $ninety million grant to the Memphis school system — the country'southward largest — on the status that teachers there permit 35 percent of their performance ratings to be based on student test scores. Bredesen's icebreaker was emblematic of the forces of reform coming together around the Race. Projects like the 1 in Memphis financed in the last decade by Gates and other foundations and the work of reform policy groups like the New Teacher Projection, which has been involved extensively in Delaware, paved the style for reform, as has the ascent of less ideological, more executive-minded Democrats like Bredesen.
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THE PERSON IN accuse of preparing New York's application was John King, the senior deputy commissioner of the state Education Section. Schooled in Brooklyn (where his begetter was the first blackness principal in a Brooklyn school), King is an alumnus of Harvard and Yale Police force School and was a founder of the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Massachusetts.
King works for David Steiner, the land pedagogy commissioner. Just the Teaching Department is largely under the control of the Legislature, which appoints the State Board of Regents, which oversees the department. The Legislature has also passed — and could repeal — statutes that essentially guarantee lifetime teacher tenure and that mandate teacher layoffs strictly on the basis of seniority. The key leader of the Legislature is Associates Speaker Sheldon Argent, who, like many New York Democrats, held an election-nighttime victory political party at the U.F.T. headquarters. The U.F.T.'s Web site calls Silver "our partner" and quotes him as declaring at a spousal relationship rally, "I and my colleagues in the Assembly majority volition be your best friends . . . in Albany."
Male monarch says that "navigating all of the competing interests in New York is a lot different than any other job I have had." Thus, he explains, that with "all of the limits we had with the laws and collective-bargaining agreements in place and the political reality of the Legislature," preparing New York'due south awarding "was difficult and frustrating."
I frustration centered on charter schools. Charters are publicly financed schools open to whatever child by lottery merely run by entities other than the conventional local school district. Typically they are operated past nonprofit organizations that rely on donations to provide seed coin but then use the same per-pupil money doled out to the public schools for ongoing operations. Those who run charters are answerable for the school'south performance, merely they are free to manage as they wish. That includes the freedom to hire teachers who are not spousal relationship members. A law allowing lease schools in New York was passed in 1998 over intense opposition from the teachers' wedlock. It survived considering there was a Republican governor, George Pataki, then only considering Pataki fastened it to a bill giving a pay raise to legislators. Moreover, to placate the union, legislators capped the number of charters to exist issued statewide.
The Race to the Top reopened the charter fence. Although other reform criteria count for much more, the contest measured a state'southward amenability to charters, giving up to 40 of the 500 points to charter-friendly states. With New York State 12 charters abroad from hit its 200 cap (and probable to hit it with new charters to be issued this year), not lifting the cap threatened the state's application.
Charter schools are not always better for children. Across the state many are performing desperately. Merely when run well — equally near in Harlem and New York's other about-challenged communities announced to be — they can brand a huge difference in a kid's life. So past the fourth dimension the Race rules were issued, the charter cap had become something that many New York parents, specially in neighborhoods with underperforming schools, cared a lot near. In Harlem, for example, about 20 percent of all historic period-eligible children are now enrolled in charters, and in April, 14,000 other children submitted applications in the lottery for next year's 2,700 open seats. This ways that more than than 11,000 kids just in Harlem were turned away. Across the city applications were up 25 percent, and 43,000 students were turned away.
Nib Perkins, who represents Harlem in the State Senate, is the Legislature's leading opponent of charters. Sitting side by side to a poster of Barack Obama with the headline "Brothers for Barack" in his function on 125th Street, Perkins, who has enjoyed teachers' matrimony support, says it's "stupid and unfair to blame unions when the reason the schools in this community are failing is that they lack resource. . . . the president is wrong." In Feb, Perkins was faced with a march on Albany organized by the lease schools to protestation his and his colleagues' opposition to lifting the charter-school cap.
A edifice on 118th Street is 1 reason that the parents who are Perkins'southward constituents know that charters tin work. On one side in that location'southward the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there's a regular public school, P.Southward. 149, with 438 pre-One thousand to 8th-grade students. They are separated simply past a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and deli. Schoolhouse reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education — the wedlock, large-arrangement bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.
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On the charter side, the children are placidity, dressed in uniforms, hard at work — and typically performing at or in a higher place grade level. Their progress in a diverseness of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percentage more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.yard., ends at iv:30 to 5:thirty and begins in August. The teachers have iii periods for lesson preparation, and they must be bachelor by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a machine service abode if they stay belatedly into the evening to work with students. There are special didactics sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is and so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Cognition Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in "Yale 2026" for one kindergarten grade I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $eighteen,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, edifice maintenance and even "debt service" for its share of the building.
On the other side of the fire door, I run across well-nigh a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their schoolhouse day at about eight:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching alimony contributions paid to the lease teachers that cost the schoolhouse $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a alimony program that is now costing the city $ii,605 per yr per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, simply $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would price $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would nonetheless exist voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city's records on spending per student mostly and in whatsoever item school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that information technology costs at to the lowest degree $xix,358 per year to brainwash each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.
But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.Southward. 149 is rated past the city every bit doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the metropolis'southward schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Notwithstanding, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative case, 51 pct of the third-form students in the public schoolhouse last year were reading at class level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at form level, 5 per centum were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the country, surpassing such high-end public school districts every bit Scarsdale.
Aforementioned building. Same customs. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions' and Perkins'south "resources" argument — that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most departure. (That'south also the bedrock of the union refrain that what's expert for teachers — hiring more than of them — is ever what's practiced for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers' statement, and the essence of the Obama arroyo to the Race to the Acme, is that a slew of inquiry over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most departure is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the Academy of Washington, reported, "The effect of increases in instructor quality swamps the affect of whatsoever other educational investment, such as reductions in grade size."
This edifice on 118th Street could exist Showroom A for that conclusion.
"I've got ane kid in a charter and have had two in public schools," says Bernice Wynn, who runs an optician's store on Lenox Avenue with her hubby, and whose daughter, Tiana, is in the Harlem Success Academy. "In that location is no comparison. Tiana is in first grade and already reading chapter books and writing stories."
"Someone like Perkins has to know that we know that," DeJuan, her husband, adds.
Perkins argues that "we have to focus on improving the public schools for anybody." Klein'south response is that while charter schools tin never be a substitute for a public school system, they can demonstrate how public schools tin be improved, while creating healthy contest for a system that used to exist a monopoly. "Parent pick tin can simply make all schools better," he says, paraphrasing a favorite line on the placards of the parents who picketed Perkins in Albany last wintertime and in Downtown Manhattan last month when he held a hearing about charters. Perkins himself benefited from parent choice; he graduated from Collegiate, the prestigious W Side private boys' school, something he says "is irrelevant." "There is null wrong with a mother wanting her children to become the best education," he says.
Two weeks ago, the reform network was buzzing with the news that the political consultant Basil Smikle had appear that he was running against Perkins in the Democratic primary this September and that Perkins's opposition to charters would be his main issue. Mulgrew of the U.F.T. was quoted in The New York Mail service praising Perkins as a "staunch supporter of all the children of Harlem. That volition weigh heavily in our endorsement process."
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AS JOHN Male monarch struggled to gear up New York's application, he knew that the entire school organization could do good from Race to the Top money if the state lifted the charter-schoolhouse cap. That's why Male monarch was pushing for the change so urgently, as was Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.
That is also why, at virtually midnight on Saturday, Jan. 16, Tisch answered the phone in her flat on the East Side of Manhattan and let out an earsplitting shriek. She recalls that her husband, James Tisch, who is the main executive of Loews Corporation, thought someone must have died. What she was reacting to was a draft of a bill concerning charters that had merely been released by the State Assembly.
The offset paragraphs seemed to lift the cap. But a closer reading revealed so many conditions that information technology would be no easier to commencement new charters than under the current law. With three days left before New York'south application was due, Silvery and the Democrats were choosing to side with the union over winning a possible $700 meg that the Race offered her financially strapped state. Thus, Tisch'south shriek.
"I'g told that the people from Nysut" — New York Land United Teachers — "and the U.F.T. drafted the poison-pill provisions," Tisch said. Silver denied that, adding, "If it's something someone doesn't agree with, they telephone call it a poisonous substance pill." Silver told me he "supports charters, but to me the real demand remains supporting public didactics with the resources to lower class size."
Paradigm
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ALTHOUGH THE final-minute crunch over the charter cap grabbed headlines all over New York, it turned out to exist the least of the problems in the state's proposal. Its application featured comic overstatements — New York has been recognized for its "ability to move poor performing teachers from the classroom," for example — and far more than significant omissions and misstatements, all of which were the product of King's game try to finesse the grip the unions accept on public education in New York.
For instance, the states were instructed to check boxes on a grid to betoken which of their local school systems had signed a memorandum of understanding, or Chiliad.O.U., agreeing with the land to implement each of the many initiatives their plans promised if the state got the Race money. To make this expression of commitment unambiguous, the Race application included the exact M.O.U. that was to be signed. The competition instructions likewise stated that if the wording of the M.O.U. for any local school system was changed to make it "conditional," the box should not be checked.
New York checked all the boxes for all of its school districts for all of the initiatives on the grid it submitted. But in a 403-page appendix to its 348-page application, New York included the Thou.O.U. that actually had been signed by all of its schoolhouse districts. It was worded almost exactly equally the federal government'southward G.O.U. — except that after reciting everything that would exist done to link student tests to teacher evaluations, and to compensate teachers and move them upwardly on a career ladder according to those evaluations, the New York Yard.O.U. inserted this qualifier: "consistent with any applicative collective-bargaining requirements." The same phrase was also inserted later the promise to "ensure the equitable distribution of effective teachers" — a reform aimed at allowing school systems to assign their all-time teachers to the schools most in need. And so for good measure at the terminate of the entire K.O.U. this judgement was added to cover everything: "Cypher in this Thousand.O.U. shall be construed to override any applicable state or local collective-bargaining requirements."
Of course the U.F.T.'s collective-bargaining agreements in New York Urban center, besides every bit union contracts in much of the rest of the land, explicitly prohibit exactly the reforms promised in the application. Changing that is the point of Duncan'southward contest. When I asked Tisch nigh this, she pointed to another added sentence, in which each school organisation and the matrimony agree to negotiate whatever necessary contract changes in "skillful faith." That's the "way we solved that," she says.
"Correct," Klein says. "That'southward like telling a woman you'll marry her in the morning."
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MOREOVER, IT TURNS out that Mulgrew of the city'south U.F.T. refused to sign fifty-fifty that contradistinct Thousand.O.U. Instead, shortly before the applications were due in Washington, he submitted a completely redone version that outlined a teacher-evaluation program that would exist completely voluntary and that independent a provision declaring that "student performance data shall not be a factor in decisions regarding individual teacher compensation."
I asked Mulgrew over breakfast, "If Arne Duncan was sitting hither with a bank check ready to give to New York, and he said he'd give it to you lot if you promise to permit exam scores to be tied to compensation, would you brand the hope?"
"No — I'd tell him we take to negotiate with the guy upward the street," Mulgrew replied, referring to Klein, "to come up with a fair system showtime. Just I could not hope him that we could."
"Would yous promise to back up a repeal of the state constabulary requiring layoffs to be washed just on the footing of seniority?" I asked him, referring to what has now get another controversial upshot.
"No, that's the police," he said.
However, the box signifying the U.F.T.'south understanding to the standard K.O.U. was also checked.
Klein says he didn't want to sign the K.O.U. considering the caveats made it meaningless, just he ultimately went along and so as not to "seem like a spoilsport."
David Steiner, the commissioner for the New York Country Department of Didactics, signed the awarding. He offered no caption for why the boxes were checked other than that his staff has since looked at other applications and establish that Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois also checked the boxes "based," he said, "on a future commitment to collectively bargain." He'due south right. California did the same thing, every bit did lots of other states, including the kickoff-round winner, Delaware. (In Delaware's example, however, the cadre of its commitments — like how teachers volition be evaluated — did not require a union sign-off, explained Donohue, the Delaware state teachers' union president. The collective-bargaining caveat in the 1000.O.U., she said, "has to practice with other, smaller aspects of the plan, like extending school days at turnaround schools, which I am certain we will concur on.")
Epitome
When it came time for King and four others representing New York to make a presentation to the Race'due south vetters in Washington, King's performance, as seen on a video I reviewed of the session, looked a bit like a hostage tape. "We were all struggling," King recalls. "We thought we had a cracking proposal in terms of what we could control — like curricula standards and information systems — but the areas nosotros could not control because of the contracts and laws were difficult."
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EVEN IF THE Marriage still has support in strongholds similar Albany, matrimony leaders similar Weingarten and Mulgrew seem to have realized that the political pressure the Race has generated means they take to yield in some places and in some means. In mid-Apr, Mulgrew agreed with Klein to streamline the teacher-bailiwick process in a mode that, past the finish of the yr, volition shut New York's and so-called safe rooms, the infamous "reassignment centers" where the New York Metropolis teachers charged with the nearly extreme incompetence or misconduct (currently 600 out of 80,000) are sent to do nothing while they await tenure-protected arbitration hearings. Until this agreement, the arbitration procedure lasted an average of three years, during which the teachers remained on the payroll and accumulated pension entitlements. Only a handful of teachers were always dismissed at the end of the process. It will now still probably take at least a year to remove these virtually egregiously incompetent or misbehaving teachers, and there continues to be no broader process in identify in New York for evaluating, promoting or removing teachers based on performance. Nonetheless, this is a concession that the union had repeatedly refused to make.
Weingarten has always embraced instructor accountability in theory, but with the caveat that the organization has to be fair, after which she adds that there'southward no way to guarantee that linking student progress to testing will exist fair because tests don't have subjective factors into account, nor would assuasive subjective evaluations by principals exist fair. To the reformers, Weingarten's refrain has until lately seemed a way to duck reform while appearing to favor information technology. Only last month, she took an important, if muted, pace toward the reformers: she ended a high-contour confrontation in Washington, D.C., by like-minded to the elimination of tenure-based task security.
"When I came here, all the adults were fine; they all had satisfactory ratings," says Washington'south schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, referring to the teachers. "But only 8 percent of 8th graders were on grade level for math. How's that for an accountable system that puts the children first?"
In 2008, Rhee — a Klein protégée, who founded the New Teacher Projection after teaching in Baltimore for Teach for America — proposed huge salary increases for those teachers who would give up lifetime tenure guarantees and lockstep compensation and agree to have their performance linked to student test-score improvements. Those who didn't volunteer could continue their electric current pay scales and job security. For ii years, the union refused to allow Rhee'southward offer to exist put up for a vote. Rhee persisted — "I'yard not big on the collaborative, warm and fuzzy approach," she says — and became a hero of the reformers.
Despite efforts by both sides to save face for the union by preserving the language of tenure, the deal that Weingarten and Rhee negotiated in April actually achieved more Rhee sought in her original offering. The new contract unambiguously, if subtlely, strips tenure of its core chore-security protections. Two clauses now make it possible for Rhee to fire whatever teacher with tenure, no matter which track he or she chooses (lockstep compensation or performance-based pay), if the teacher is evaluated as "ineffective" for i year or "minimally effective" for ii years. The criteria used to define "ineffective" or "minimally effective" are, according to another clause, "a nonnegotiable item" determined solely by Rhee and her staff. Rhee withal has catching up to practice when it comes to the data systems that other Race finalists demonstrated, simply this new contract — which New York'south Klein calls "a dwelling house run for Michelle" — gives the District of Columbia a better shot for the 2nd circular. (Washington placed 16th in the offset circular.)
The teachers' unions have become accepted in recent years to fighting off reform efforts by Republicans and call up-tank do-gooders. They ignore the rhetorical noise, while sticking to the work of negotiating protectionist contracts with the politicians who run school systems and depend on their political support. But what happened terminal calendar month in Washington could signal a new era in which the unions have to worry that Democrats, like Washington's mayor, Adrian Fenty, not only won't yield in contract negotiations but will as well support laws and programs aimed at forcing accountability. That is the threat posed by the Race. "Deliberately or not, President Obama, whom I supported, has shifted the focus from resources and innovation and collaboration to blaming information technology all on dedicated teachers," Weingarten says.
Certainly, the political math has changed. "My basic calculus of school reform is that I know I accept every Republican vote and at least some of the Democrats," says Mike Johnston, a Colorado state senator who is a Democrat and avid reformer (and another Teach for America alumnus). Equally with Bredesen's Tennessee First to the Top Act, Johnston got lopsided votes for a Race-friendly nib he sponsored in Feb that not only ties student test scores back to teachers but also names the educational institutions that trained the teachers, and then that educational activity schools, too, would exist held accountable.
Merely Colorado is more than marriage-friendly than Tennessee, and Johnston's math only got him then far terminal winter in a state where Democrats are the bulk in both houses of the Legislature. He also pushed for a bill that would make 50 percent of annual instructor evaluations depend on examination scores. Still, Gov. Nib Ritter, another Democrat, instead submitted an executive club setting up a quango to define effectiveness and create an implementation plan that would and so be presented to the Legislature. That probably explains why Colorado — whose largest school system, in Denver, already has potent instructor-accountability rules — did not win in the first circular; the state was a finalist but came in 14th.
"I'm going to try to get the neb passed in May," Johnston told me in April. "Not winning the first round should help." Terminal calendar week, despite a pushback from the marriage that included demonstrations and radio ads, his bill passed by a wide margin with votes from both parties. And in a evolution that would have seemed surreal half-dozen months ago, Weingarten endorsed the bill after Johnston agreed to minor amendments, including an appeal process for those tenured teachers judged ineffective. (The larger teachers' wedlock, the National Education Association, opposed it.) Colorado now seems probable to win in Round two of Race to the Tiptop.
Asked if Colorado and the District of Columbia didn't represent some pretty significant concessions, Weingarten told me, "Anyone who knows me knows that I have always favored what's good for children and fair to teachers, and that'southward what I stood for here."
Prototype
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DUNCAN'S Difficult LINE in the first-circular awards apparently helped Johnston. Merely other reformers worry not only that Duncan praised the many states with weaker proposals than Colorado'south that made it into the outset round of 16 finalists, like New York, but also that he has promised that there will be "10 to 12" more winners in the 2nd round to share the remaining $3.iv billion. With that money to exist awarded this September — at the tiptop of the Congressional election season, when dispensing pork might be tempting — would Duncan reach far enough downward the scoring charts this time to honour states that aren't serious about his reform goals? Would a unproblematic ready in the New York police force capping the number of lease schools, perhaps passed on the eve of the second application's June one deadline, be enough to mask the more central deficiencies in the New York plan? Indeed, three weeks ago the Democratically controlled Country Senate did exactly that, in what Klein calls "a curve in history's arc caused by the Race." (The Associates had not acted every bit of this writing.)
Moreover, on May 11, Tisch and Steiner announced that in anticipation of the June one borderline for the second circular of Race applications they had gotten the unions to agree to a iv-tiered evaluation system for teachers — "highly effective," "constructive," "developing" and "ineffective" — that would supervene upon the erstwhile satisfactory-unsatisfactory regime. In role the evaluations would be tied to state standardized test scores, though they would count for simply twenty to 25 percent of an evaluation. This would seem to make information technology easier to remove ineffective teachers, because the agreement calls for a instructor's removal if judged ineffective two years in a row, and, as such, it's a reform that would have been unimaginable four months ago when the first-round application was filed — or even two months ago, when Mulgrew and I had breakfast. Simply it still does not allow for these evaluations to be linked to teacher compensation, and the pocket-sized print allows for a drawn-out collective-bargaining process over what the other 75 to 80 percent of the evaluation criteria would be — before which the evaluations could apparently not begin. Withal, it will make New York's 2d-circular application stronger.
One reason New York may take gone even as far every bit it did in the first circular could be that good intentions tin't guarantee perfect execution in a federal bureaucracy. Joanne Weiss, who runs the Race program for Secretary Duncan, began last summer to recruit experts, called "peer reviewers," to score the applications in a way that would inoculate the decisions from charges of political favoritism. Five vetters were assigned to each application, and the score was the average of their individual scores. Duncan would reserve the right to override the point scores, but if he did, he would have to explicate himself because the scores would be released publicly. (He told me that he doesn't plan to override the vetters.) Department of Education regulations required that the scorers not only have no financial interest in the issue of their decisions, merely not even an appearance of a conflict, both in terms of money and potential bias. This pretty much eliminated people involved in operating schoolhouse systems or those who are active in Schnur's reform network, yielding vetters who were academics, didactics foundation staff members (but not at places similar the Gates Foundation that finance reform projects) and long-retired educators.
"When I found out that the reviewers would be people who are not direct involved in K-through-12 education, I got concerned," recalled Paul Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent who is widely admired in reform circles. Pastorek'southward application included impressive details of what Louisiana had already achieved in creating data systems, described the state's overhauling of New Orleans schools following Hurricane Katrina and presented a comprehensive programme for more than progress. Pastorek and I had this chat about the scorers almost 3 weeks before he plant out that his state came in 11th. According to the tallies, he'd have come in much higher only for the rating he received from one scorer, who gave Louisiana a surprising 349, which was lower than New York'due south average score.
Notwithstanding the mechanics of the process might be improved in the second round, some of the reformers were too concerned, equally three of them told me, all using the aforementioned phrase, that Duncan's linguistic communication was "besides collaborative." What they meant was that by emphasizing how the unions had bought into the plans of the two starting time-circular winners, Delaware and Tennessee, he was suggesting that the unions could block a state from winning by not signing on.
When I talked to him in April, Duncan denied wanting to send that signal, noting that Georgia and Florida, with no union sign-offs but far-reaching plans, finished tertiary and fourth in the first circular. And he nodded when I speculated that Florida's chances seemed even better for the 2nd round because a new law — passed by both houses of the Legislature after the first round ended — would force accountability on all teachers without the union's agreement. "What we want are the plans that touch the nigh children," Duncan said. "Ideally we desire the adults working together, but at the stop of the twenty-four hours, this is about doing reform."
After we spoke — in another sign non only of the turmoil caused past the Race simply likewise of the union'southward continued power — Florida'south governor, Charlie Crist, who is in a hotly contested Senate race, vetoed the teacher-accountability beak. He said he did so because "the people spoke, and they spoke loudly." Those on the other side pointed to a ferocious lobbying campaign past the state teachers' union that generated more than 100,000 e-postal service messages and phone calls to Crist's function.
As the Florida fight suggests, this is non a boxing that is going to end before long. In fact, even as the boxing lines have at present been drawn in communities and state capitals across the country, the fight is about to come dorsum to Washington, where turning a grant plan into a competition started it all. President Obama was so pleased with the reaction to the Race that he recently proposed a new $1.iii billion contest after the kickoff two rounds are completed, this time directed at individual school districts instead of states. More than meaning, Duncan has said that some of the billions in more traditional annual federal aid that has flowed to states co-ordinate to population formulas should at present be based on Racelike competitions aimed at various pieces of the reform agenda. "This is the hazard of a lifetime," Duncan says. "We have to move the country in a primal, dramatic way."
In a Congress controlled by Democrats, that could exist a struggle. When Duncan's testimony broached the broader idea at a March Congressional hearing, the Business firm Appropriations Committee chairman, David Obey, a Democratic representative from Wisconsin — which finished 26th out of 41 entrants in the first round of the Race — reminded Duncan of the states' dire need for basic funds and signaled his skepticism about the Race reforms, declaring, "When the sailboat is sinking, my top priority would non be to put a new coat of varnish on the deck." (Obey recently appear he will retire next year, perhaps making Duncan's reform path easier.)
"Every Democrat knows the president really cares about this," Schnur says. Which suggests that the Nixon-to-China dynamic that prevailed in states like Tennessee may work in Washington. Obama could most likely get some, probably many, Democratic votes, while winning support from Republicans on an upshot they have championed so strongly in the past that taking a flat-out anti-Obama approach would be particularly awkward.
"That President Obama did this is a full game changer," says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. "If he actually sticks to this, education will never exist the same."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html
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