Category Archives: Teachers

About a month ago, I pointed out to you the somewhat disturbing views about parents held by certain figures within the education establishment. Well, here’s going way out on a limb to guess the same crowd won’t be lining up in excitement to watch the new movie Won’t Back Down: The feature-length film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter is a story about parents who take charge of transforming their children’s failing inner-city school. In other words, it’s a real Hollywood movie with a powerful education reform message that should resonate with American families facing challenging educational circumstances. Maybe it can pick up where Waiting for Superman left off.

Progress in education reform, like so many other areas, is never final. Just as bad policies can be undone, so can good policies. Simply put, we can’t rest on our laurels. I’m sure that Idaho superintendent Tom Luna and the team behind his Students Come First program are well aware of that reality now. Last year I told you about the yummy tater tots of education reform coming out of the Gem State — a few key pieces of legislation that, among other things, spurred some great innovative local pay-for-performance projects. But a report this week from Education News’ Julie Lawrence, the teachers union and other reform opponents collected enough signatures to put the reform items on the ballot for voters to reconsider:

No time to opine today, but the attention of the K-12 education world is on the continuing Chicago teachers strike. A lot of pixels are being used to cover the topic, but I believe the following are the most informative and insightful:

From Todd Engdahl’s story yesterday in Ed News Colorado, at least 23 school districts in the state are going to local voters this year to ask for one or more tax increases–mill levy overrides for various operating costs, and/or bonds or BEST matching grant requests to pay for capital construction or renovation projects. (In the unusual case of Aspen, voters will decide on a sales-tax increase to fund schools.) The proposals follow one year after a historically-high 26 out of 38 local school tax proposals went down to defeat. Notably, this year five of the state’s nine largest school districts, cumulatively enrolling more than one-third of Colorado’s public K-12 students, are seeking voter approval of various tax increases. Some of them represent significant amounts (descriptions from Ed News in quotes): Jefferson County: “$99 million bond for a variety of building upgrades; $39 million override to maintain class size and protect some programs.” Denver: “$466 million bond for maintenance, technology, renovation and upgrades; $49 million override for enrichment, student support services and other programs. DPS also is an alternate for a $3.8 million BEST grant to renovate South High School, and some of the bond issue would provide a match.” Cherry […]

Today’s big education news comes from The Windy City, where thousands of Chicago Public Schools teachers have walked out on strike. Students pay the price as the American Federation of Teachers union affiliate turns down an offer to boost an average salary of $71,000 (or $76,000?) by 16 percent over the next four years. Even if CPS officials wanted to be so generous and approve across-the-board-raises for educators who already make about 50 percent more than the average Chicago worker with a college degree, the money isn’t there. I can’t help feeling a connection to the story. After all, friends of my Education Policy Center friends are on the case. The Illinois Policy Institute’s labor policy director Paul Kersey posted the facts and some scary pictures from a Labor Day union protest march. While many of the 400,000 CPS students may be cheering today to be out of school, the 50,000 attending non-union charter schools are not affected. Which interestingly prompted Chicago union president Karen Lewis to say: “Real school will not be open [Monday]….” That certainly sounds like she has a low opinion of many parents’ public school options. Too bad for her. But I wonder what the anti-reform […]

It’s Friday, so instead of making you read a lot, kick back and enjoy this 4-minute video from Reason TV, explaining how teachers unions’ influence on education politics works like a well-oiled machine:

I’m guessing that 2012 has been fairly busy for education policy researcher Dr. Marcus Winters. He started with the launch of his book Teachers Matter, which included visiting Denver as the first-ever speaker in the Independence Institute’s Brown Bag Lunch series. And he since has published work on school innovation and productivity, and the effects of Florida’s reading retention policy. This week he has released a Manhattan Institute report that should help inform Colorado’s ongoing implementation of Senate Bill 191, Transforming Tenure: Using Value-Added Modeling to Identify Effective Teachers. Winters looked at key Florida teacher data to help determine the effectiveness of value-added measures (VAM) in educator evaluations.

Stop for a moment and picture a classroom of 20 little Eddies and Edwinas (girls, I know, yeck). The nice teacher one day gets up in front of the room and hands out permission slips for a field trip. “Field trip? Yay!!!” we shout. “Where are we going? The zoo? The science museum? The fire station?” After she finally gets our class settled down, the teacher says: “No, this is going to be a great new kind of experience. We’re going to go hang out with Occupy Denver! ….” Huh, what? This imaginary scenario must take place in Denver Public Schools (DPS), because of some very real new language being used to evaluate teachers. High-achieving DPS instructors may want to keep their “distinguished” rating by encouraging students “to question and challenge the dominant culture” and “to work for social justice”? The newly-revised evaluation framework makes these items a priority for DPS teachers in 2012-13. Perhaps now you can understand what would upset my Education Policy Center friends so much:

Have you ever played the “one of these things is not like the other” game with only two things? The results usually are neither too difficult nor surprising. But playing a quick game, like we’re about to do, can still be informative in its own way. Okay, let’s go. The first item comes compliments of the Colorado Springs Gazette‘s Kristina Iodice, who shares the good news that Falcon 49 elementary teacher Melanie Dolifka has been nominated as a finalist for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Congrats to Ms. Dolifka, one of the brightest stars in an innovative non-union district, for the great honor! The second item comes from a new Colorado Watchdog story:

Believe it or not, it’s been a whole three days since I last shared some thoughts on the exciting goings-on in Colorado’s third-largest school district. An arbitrator ruled that Douglas County leaders couldn’t get back all the tax-funded union leave dollars because they didn’t get a change to the collective bargaining agreement in writing. So Tuesday night at the Board meeting, one of the directors offered a peaceful compromise: [Craig] Richardson said he wanted the district to “pursue every remedy until we have our money back … and I will not relent.” That is, he said, unless the union accepted his challenge – to move what he described as the $52,000 balance from a union political account into a fund created by board members to help teachers pay for classroom supplies. (You can read Richardson’s entire statement online here.) Keep the money in a political fund or donate it to cover the costs of teacher supplies? An interesting choice faces the local AFT union leadership. The $52,000 in question comes out to slightly less than $20 per Dougco teacher. But every little bit helps.