RT @John_Bailey N.J. Ed. Commish: Race to Top’s First Casualty? http://ht.ly/1Uf3V
Proposed Pittsburgh contract aims to benefit teachers, students http://sbne.ws/r/4Rl1 (from ASCD)
RT @USNewsEducation What May Change in Upcoming College Rankings http://bit.ly/c0wmD6
Incentive pay for at-risk Houston students — http://tinyurl.com/27gt75m
Making college freshmen read — http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/04/books
RT @D_Aarons End of the Road for 21 K.C. Schools http://bit.ly/9wi4J1
DC teachers overwhelmingly approve merit pay plan — http://tinyurl.com/2ckuk6u
NYC cuts budget, raises but saves teachers’ jobs — http://tinyurl.com/2dddusl
RT @wpnick: Rhee and 54 other big-city supes endorse common core standards. http://ow.ly/17zJfZ
Resistance to a three-year college degree? http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/03/aacu
RT @getschooled Vicki Phillips has a new blog post up about common core standards http://ow.ly/1Tgei see the standards at http://ow.ly/1Tgfa
It is now official. Yesterday afternoon, the Washington (DC) Teachers Union revealed the vote on DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s ambitious plan to move toward merit pay for all teachers in the nation’s capital. While some suspected the vote would be close (with new teachers voting yes and the many veteran teachers having doubts), it wasn’t close at all. The new contract was ratified 1,412 to 425, giving the Rhee agenda a nearly 4:1 win.
The Washington Post’s Bill Turque offers us the full story here.
We’ve come a long way from when Rhee first offered up the plan back in 2007. When the DCPS Chancellor first arrived in Washington nearly three years ago, she was brimming with ideas and innovations. One of them was merit pay, offering huge incentives to teachers who could boost student achievement (as Rhee says she did as a Teach for America teacher in Baltimore two decades ago). At the time, few school districts had been able to truly do merit pay well. In fact, Denver’s ProComp program probably stood as the only true exemplar in the field.
Rhee was offering five-figure bonuses to teachers in a district that was already perceived as paying its teachers, particularly its veterans, extremely well. To get to her end game, Rhee enlisted the help of the philanthropic community, which pledged tens of millions of dollars to make this all happen.
Along the way, there were missteps. A Time magazine cover story with a broom. Significant teacher layoffs in the name of budget, then under the banner of misconduct. Concerns of the financial stability of the promise of such incentives. And, of course, the worry of what happens to all of that outside support should Rhee (or the mayor) move on. (And Eduflack is thinking, perhaps, of Rhee going to the Gates Foundation to do nationally what she has just done in the District of Columbia, but that’s just me thinking it fits nicely with Gates’ human capital push and the work currently being done at Gates by John Deasy.)
What was particularly telling about the ratification was the sentiment offered up by Kurt Schmoke, the former Baltimore mayor and the consigliere brought in to make peace between Rhee and WTU. As reported by Turque, in regard to merit pay, Schmoke said, “The ideas have gained currency at the national level … What was seen as bold is now reform, not revolution.”
It is a very interesting thought, and one the entire education community should reflect on. Just a few years ago, what Rhee proposed was seen as true revolution by most, and a breaking of an urban teachers union by quite a few. Since then, we’ve seen Houston beat DC to the punch on such a plan (though Houston doesn’t have to deal with unions the way DC does). We’ve seen threats of massive teacher layoffs and a growing feeling that last hired, first fired is no way to run school systems looking to boost student achievement. And we’ve now seen 40 or so states pledge to adopt ambitous teacher quality efforts in pursuit of the $4 billion Race to the Top grail. One can now argue that the DC teacher deal is no longer revolution, and may no longer even be reform. It is just keeping up with the Joneses.
Don’t believe Eduflack? Take a look at the public statements offered yesterday. Rhee, who should be declaring victory from every rooftop in the District, offered a very muted statement here. (And based on past experience, this was the right approach. Rhee should let others declare her victory for her.) AFT President Randi Weingarten, as to be expected, praised DC teachers here for putting their students first. And, interestingly, WTU still does not have a statement posted on its website, with interested readers being directed to last month’s missives on the “tentative” contract. This was far from a bold pronouncement of revolutionizing the education sector. In many ways, it read like DCPS has changed its chalk provider.
The real celebration (or protestation) will come next year, as teachers start feeling the 21 percent pay increases and start anticipating those $20,000 to $30,000 performance pay bonuses. The real fun is now in seeing if other urban school districts (particularly those in AFT cities) decide to “borrow” from the DC model and enact similar plans, or if we wait a few years to see if the DC approach works.
Looking at the history of real reform and improvement in the education sector, DC is likely to be extremely lonely in this pool for a bit.
“Glee” summer camps could help fill music-instruction void for students http://sbne.ws/r/4Q0K (from ASCD)
RT @emilyschoolsyou
SFChron on teachers union influence in the state superintendent race: http://is.gd/cyxlg
RT @saramead rebuilding Haiti’s education system: http://alturl.com/66pi Interesting on-the-ground post from early ed watch.
Justice O’Connor fails US schools on civics — http://tinyurl.com/2uee6pt
@edreform‘s #RttT “Reality Check” — http://tinyurl.com/32sk7k8
RT @njleftbehind NJEA and Schundler Embrace Ed Reform?: http://bit.ly/bF4Pd9
Romer: ARRA supported 400k teachers’ jobs across nation — http://tinyurl.com/342tf7s
For nearly a year now, school districts across the nation have been eagerly anticipating a piece of the Investing in Innovation grant program. The promise of $650 million to continue innovative approaches to school improvement is too big a lure for many to pass up. While districts and non-profits worried about how they could get their applications done, where they would find the staff time, and what to promote, they were not going to forgo the opportunity.
Final proposals were due this month, and by US Department of Education count, nearly 1,700 applications were submitted. These applications range from the large (those seeking $50 million) to the small (those seeking $5 million or less for their plans). They include proposals from urban, rural, and suburban school districts, consortias of school districts, colleges and universities, not-for-profits, and blends of all of the above.
Every one of them optimistic of their chances to get a piece of the $650 million i3 pie. And that optimism was only heightened when the final i3 RFP and regs were released earlier this year, and ED talked about plans to award up to 300 grants (up to 100 in each of the three categories) before the end of the coming fiscal year.
That expectation (up to) 300 grants had Eduflack scratching his head a little at the time. Expecting that most applicants would seek the maximum dollar amount for their category, By my meager math, I could only see 40 or so winners. Think about it. Development grants allow a max of $5 million, validation grants a max of $30 million per, and scale up grants a max of $50 million per. If you awarded just eight grants in each of those three categories, you had already exceeded the $650 million available. Account for a few winners asking for less than the max, or a few more development awards and a few less scale ups, and you might push 40 up to 50. But 300 grants was never a possibility, at least not under Phase One of i3 (assuming, as most do, that EdSec Duncan will get Congress to offer up new funds for new rounds of i3). You’d need billions ot hit that mark, unless applicants were just asking for a fraction of the available money.
This reality was confirmed earlier this week by none other than the good EdSec himself. According to the usually reliable Eduwonk, Duncan revealed, at a Wednesday meeting that he expects 70 total i3 awards to come this fall. So nearly 1,700 enter the i3 steel cage, with 70 or so emerging as victors.
Surprisingly, this declaration hasn’t been widely reported. But it throws a real splash of cold water on the whole i3 process. Even expecting 300 winners, the odds for most applicants was pretty low. Winnow that down to 70, and many districts would have been better off buying scratch tickets or hosting a car wash to fund some of their “innovative” plans.
It appears that ED is building the i3 path based on the same blueprint it used for Phase One Race to the Top. The goal is to award funds to those with the highest chance of success. One IDs just a fraction of the 1,700 applicants, gives them the seed money, and watches it blossom. Let those 70 or so winners show how i3 can be sucessfully used, how to measure ROI, and how to actually boost student achievement. Reward some of those rural districts who feel left out of the Race. Encourage partnerships. And, most importantly, require all those enjoying i3 to both demonstrate real research findings to date and provide even stronger research moving forward.
We’ll show you the money if you can show us the data, if you will.
Further STEM advances in CO — http://tinyurl.com/39vqt2k
RT @sgermeraad RT @TeacherBeat ED to Expand Salary-Data Collection http://bit.ly/aPDi3I
RT @dviadero Study: Charter Schools Still Get Fewer Public Dollars: Stop the presses. A new study finds that charter schools ge… http://bit.ly/cZw2Yb
Duncan defends $23B edujobs push — http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37804.html
For weeks now, we have been hearing about states that have decided they will not pursue Race to the Top, Part II. Over at Politics K-12 , Michele McNeil has a dozen or so states that either have decided not to apply or are dangerously close to not applying before next Tuesday’s drop-dead date for the final taste of the $4 billion pot.
This shouldn’t be surprising. More than 40 states put in hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to prepare their Phase I apps. Two states, Delaware and Tennessee, won in the early round. Those remaining states were left with detailed judges’ scores to help guide a redo due June 1. But some states simply don’t have the stomach for it, offering a host of reasons not to pursue.
Perhaps one of the most interesting reasons for declining was offered yesterday by Eduflack’s home state of Virginia. According to the Washington Post, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is not entering the Race because of the Common Core Standards. The chief executive of the Old Dominion claims that Virginia’s current academic standards are “much superior” and he doesn’t see the need of tinkering with 15 years of work to establish the current Standards of Learning.
I understand a state like Massachusetts, which is known for having some of the top performance standards in the nation to be wary of common core, but Virginia, really? When discussions turn to state standards and the leaders and laggards, one really hears about Virginia’s SOLs being at the top of the class.
Earlier this month, Eduflack wrote about the dangers of states that have reduced their standards to show performance gains on AYP. Unfortunately, we see far too many states that tout impressive records of student acheivement on their state exams and measured against their state standards, only to see that performance plummet when compared to a common yardstick like NAEP.
So let’s take another look at the data offered by Gary Phillips, a vice president at American Institutes for Research and the former acting commissioner at NCES. How does Virginia stack up? According to the SOLs, 82 percent of fourth graders in Virginia were proficient in math. But when we look at the NAEP scores, that number drops to the low 40s. It is even worse for eighth grade math, where the SOLs put proficiency at 79, but NAEP puts it under 40.
Why is this important? The NAEP is a common measure. It lets Virginia see where it stacks up compared to other states. And the numbers there are startling. In fourth grade, we are in the middle of the pack, far behind states like Massachusetts, South Carolina, Missouri, Washington, Vermont, and New Hampshire. By eighth grade, Virginia is near the bottom of the pack in such performance, only posting better numbers that seven states.
Is that really “much superior?” Are we really declaring “mission accomplished” when we are mediocre at fourth grade and drop to the bottom quartile by eighth grade? The bar we’ve set on academic standards is … at least we are better than Oklahoma?
New Jersey seeks support for second-round Race to the Top bid http://sbne.ws/r/4N4F (from ASCD)
Eduflack By Patrick R. Riccards 