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Policymakers react to StudentsFirst’s ‘F’ for California
California’s policy efforts to improve student achievement earned an F from StudentsFirst, the Sacramento-based advocacy group led by Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor. The state ranked 41st in the nation on education policies in three major areas involving teachers, parents and school finance and governance. No state earned an A, and more than two-thirds of states received D’s or F’s on the group’s State Policy Report Card. “While there is great momentum for … Read entire article »
Filed under: Advocates for Education, Evaluation, Reporting & Analysis, School Choice, Systemic Change, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Tenure
Analysis shows differences in teacher effectiveness in LAUSD
In Los Angeles Unified, novice teachers tend to be assigned students who are academically farther behind those assigned to experienced teachers. Before they depart, usually after only two years, Teach for America teachers have a bigger impact on students than that of other new teachers. And National Board Certified teachers significantly outperform other teachers in LAUSD. These are among the findings of an extensive six-year study of about a third of teachers in LAUSD by the … Read entire article »
Filed under: Evaluations, Featured, Preparation, Reporting & Analysis, Tenure, Tests & Assessments
Far-reaching plan to strengthen teaching in California
To reinvigorate its force of teachers and principals, California doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. It could start by fixing the one that’s bent and broken because of years of neglect. That’s one of the messages from Greatness by Design, an extensive report from Superintendent Tom Torlakson’s 48-member Task Force on Educator Excellence, cochaired by Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and Long Beach Unified superintendent Christopher Steinhauser. On Monday, the task force released its 90-page … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commission on Teacher Credentialing, Featured, Preparation, Reporting & Analysis, Teacher Collaboration, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Tenure
Court backs union, sends LAUSD layoffs case back to judge
Handing United Teachers Los Angeles a significant procedural victory, a state appeals court has overturned a landmark ruling challenging the contractual rights of teachers in Los Angeles Unified. In 2010, Superior Court Judge William Highberger ruled that massive layoffs of teachers with limited or no seniority at three of the district’s lowest-performing middle schools had violated the constitutional right of students in those schools to an equal education. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Featured, Reporting & Analysis, Teacher Unions, Tenure
San Francisco Unified blazes civil rights path for California districts to follow
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) As an education civil rights organization, we are far more accustomed to seeing school districts violate the rights of underserved students to a quality education than protect them from harm. But sometimes a school district’s leadership takes such a strong and courageous stance on behalf of their most vulnerable students that it takes your breath away. This was the type of courage shown by Superintendent Carlos Garcia and five members of the San Francisco Unified School Board when they voted to protect 14 of their highest-poverty schools from teacher layoffs in the coming year. Last year The Education Trust-West published a report, Victims of the Churn, that revealed that high-poverty schools in California were far more likely to experience teacher layoffs. Because layoffs are typically based … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commentary, Tenure
Facing some inconvenient truths about reforming teacher evaluations
(Brentt Brown, senior writer at Pivot Learning Partners, co-authored this post.) Good teaching matters. Yet most teacher evaluations are compliance-driven checklists that have little or no impact on teaching and learning. The question is not whether teacher evaluation should be improved, but what the goals of the new processes we seek should be. The received wisdom is that better evaluations would provide teachers with useful feedback and also improve decision making about tenure and retention. Critics also note that in a better system, evaluations would be more frequent, more focused on evidence of student learning, more effective at sorting teachers into multiple performance categories, and more valid, in that evaluators would be highly trained. All of these are worthy goals, but hardly inevitable ones. Not only are they expensive, but they … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commentary, Evaluations, Teachers, Tenure
Districts will lay off some of their best and brightest today; that must change
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) Kaitlin Donovan, Nicholas Melvoin, Emilie Smith, and Tyler Hester didn’t expect to get a layoff notice. They were the kind of teachers typically romanticized in Hollywood movies. Young, energetic, and idealistic, they sought out the challenge of teaching in high-poverty urban schools and set high expectations for their students. Yet, each of them went to their teacher mailbox and found a pink slip. As a young teacher in San Francisco in the ’90s, I experienced a similar layoff. Reading the pink slip was a like a punch in the gut. It said to me, “Nothing you’ve done matters to us.” That feeling was echoed more than a decade later by Emilie, who said, “It was like getting an F on a paper you didn’t write. It … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commentary, Equity issues, Teachers, Tenure
Undiscussed in Chicago: Recruiting the best to teach the poorest
September 23rd, 2012 | 13 Comments | By Benjamin Riley
“Our most glaring problem is still recruitment/preparation of good teachers & principals and that’s no closer to being solved.” So tweeted Seth Lavin (@SethLavin), a teacher in Chicago, in reaction to the recent settlement of the high-profile teachers strike in that same city (a strike he supported). Not only do I wholeheartedly agree with Seth, but I believe the entire political-spectacle-slash-debacle we just watched unfold in the Windy City illustrates everything, and I mean everything, that … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commentary, Commission on Teacher Credentialing, Evaluations, Featured, Teacher Pay, Teacher Unions, Tenure