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Slam dunk, home run or Hail Mary
April 22nd, 2010. By SCORE StaffWhat is it about education reform that trots out the sports analogies? Yesterday,we heard from the Economic Policy Institute about how Race to the Top’s scoring resembles the point scales in Winter Olympics figure skating. Today in the Huffington Post, another Beltway think tank urges Education Sec. Arne Duncan and other national reformers to take a page from the NFL draft. The Forum for Education and Democracy’s Sam Chaltrain delivers a nuanced argument against tying teacher performance to a “single measure of student success.”
We agree. That’s why in Tennessee, 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on two or more measures of student achievement. The other half will be based on other measures, including classroom observation. The state’s new teacher evaluation advisory committee – including several members nominated by the teachers’ unions – are busy hammering out the details over the next few months.
Education’s Holy Grail
April 22nd, 2010. By SCORE StaffThe elusive answer to the teacher effectiveness question is still, well, pretty much hard to find. Harvard’s EducationNext takes on teacher quality in its summer edition Q&A with Education Trust chief Kati Haycock and Stanford University and Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek. Meanwhile, over at EdWeek’s Straight Up, Rick Hess questions the ultimate value of value-added data in evaluating teachers. “We have a tendency to fall in love with new solutions and then dismiss skepticism as opposition,” Hess writes. “That would be a serious mistake.” Agreed, Rick. But let’s also not let healthy skepticism inadvertently bolster the status quo.
Michigan soul-searching
April 21st, 2010. By SCORE StaffMichigan schools superintendent Mike Flanagan delivered a blunt mea culpa regarding the state’s failed Race to the Top application. Grand Rapids News columnist Dave Murray reports that Flanagan likened the process to a terminal illness. “I had cancer. I thought that was tough,” Flanagan reportedly said at this week’s Governor’s Education Summit in East Lansing. “Then there were the MOUs. I’m not going to botch them again.”
Not long ago, Flanagan showed a self-deprecating sense of humor after Michigan missed the cut in the first round of Race to the Top.
Think tank blasts Race to the Top
April 21st, 2010. By SCORE StaffIn a surprising missive against the Obama administration, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute blasts the Race to the Top competition’s scoring system. EPI, whose board of directors includes national labor luminaries like SEIU’s Andy Stern and AFT’s Randi Weingarten, calls the complex 500-point scoring system “subjective and arbitrary” – claiming that Tennessee and Delaware’s victories were “more a matter of bias or chance than a result of these states’ superior compliance with reform policies.” At one point, EPI even compares Race to the Top’s scoring to the mysterious point scales used in figure skating at the Winter Olympics. Ouch.
The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet reviews the dustup, which likely has the Obama folks wincing a bit. Unfortunately, EPI altogether ignores key facts – including a unique new state law in Tennessee requiring that teacher evaluations be heavily based on student gains. If EPI’s definition of “bias” means Washington rewarding those states that implement broad statewide policies, versus funding ideas with markedly less-than-statewide scope, then perhaps the Obama crowd is guilty as charged.
Teachers matter
April 20th, 2010. By SCORE StaffMemphis’ Commercial Appeal profiles efforts of The New Teacher Project and Teach for America to recruit top educators. In the last few months, the New Teacher Project has been in contact with 1,400 prospective teachers interested in 50 to 75 program slots, and Teach for America will accept only about 10 percent of national applicants in placing 100 teachers in Memphis classrooms. There’s a high level of interest in Memphis on the part of “young people wanting to be part of the education reform movement,” TFA Tennessee Executive Director Brad Leon told the Commercial Appeal. The high levels of investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Race to the Top add up to a city where teachers “are going to be at the heart of education reform for the next four to five years,” Leon said.
Meanwhile, the Chattanooga Times Free Press looks into the challenges of balancing education reform and teacher tenure. Between professional development reforms underwritten by Race to the Top and changes drafted by ongoing work of the Tennessee Evaluation Advisory Committee (TEAC), teacher evaluations and tenure decisions are on track for a full-scale overhaul in the coming years. Tennessee SCORE’s own Will Pinkston told the Times Free Press: “Nobody wants to tinker around the edges of tenure when we’re not doing a good job right now evaluating teachers.”
Duncan speaks
April 20th, 2010. By SCORE StaffNPR’s Neil Conan delivers an in-depth interview with Ed Secretary Arne Duncan on Talk of the Nation. Duncan tells listeners that no single state has everything figured out – not even Race to the Top winners Tennessee and Delaware, as both states scored in the neighborhood of 90 percent of possible points and still have room for improvement. Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s recent veto of a divisive merit pay bill was briefly discussed, but Duncan made no commitments about the veto’s effect on the Race to the Top competition’s second round.
Fallout from Florida veto
April 19th, 2010. By SCORE StaffFlorida Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto of controversial teacher tenure and merit pay legislation is igniting an already volatile national education reform conversation. The New York Times notes the merit pay battle in Florida has “made for a season of strange bedfellows” between conservative and liberal reformers, and the Wall Street Journal outlines the partisan dynamics at play, predicting the futures of both the bill and of Crist’s next political steps. The veto is splintering the Sunshine State’s Republican Party. Former Gov. Jeb Bush said Crist’s action “jeopardized the ability of Florida to build on the progress of the last decade” in education.”
Next door in Alabama, the Mobile Press-Register rounds up nationwide legislative efforts to reform teacher compensation and tenure – including Tennessee’s First to the Top Act – and calls on Alabama and Mississippi lawmakers to pay attention.
It’s official: Unions resisting the Race
April 16th, 2010. By SCORE StaffEfforts to compete in the second round of Race to the Top are touching off a flurry of activity in state legislatures – some of which are running into staunch opposition from teachers’ unions. This week’s bill vetoed by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is just the tip of the iceberg. In Colorado, a bipartisan reform measure would tie teacher evaluations and tenure to student academic growth. But the Colorado Education Association is threatening to withhold its support of the state’s Race to the Top application if the bill becomes law.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ second-largest teachers’ union is boycotting Race to the Top altogether. The Boston Globe calls on the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers to rethink its “irresponsible position.” Eduwonk suggests that the dust-ups in Colorado and Massachusetts may signal an “emerging unholy alliance” between the unions and critics of Race to the Top who question the use of stimulus funds to rapidly engineer state policy changes.
Data was the driver
April 14th, 2010. By SCORE StaffTennessee’s Race to the Top win was literally driven by data, writes J.E. Stone for Education Next. While analysts of Race to the Top have ascribed Tennessee’s success in part to buy-in from education stakeholders including teachers, Stone opines that our infrastructure of education data was the primary contributor to the victory.
“The real story is that a critical mass of Tennessee officials and their constituents had long suspected that some schools are far more effective than others, but only recently did they realize that they have the means to measure and prove it,” Stone writes. “An increasingly widespread understanding of Tennessee’s Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS) is at the heart of this change.”
Stone is president of the Education Consumers Foundation, which works extensively with TVAAS data.