Seattle Schools Community Forum

Yet another misguided, misinformed, mistake of an editorial from the Seattle Times: Gov. Gregoire: Don't veto teacher performance bill . The comments are significantly more thoughtful than the editorial (as usual).

Will it ever end? Norm Rice says his piece at the Times. I guess the Times is going with the old adage of saying it enough times (and tapping your heels together three times) will make it come true. As a community, we need to determine if Seattle will be an early adopter or a laggard in education reform. And there's nothing in-between like careful consideration of what we do and the people in charge of enacting it (as the State Auditor questions their commitment to rules and regulations and oversight)? But he does say: The union and the school district need to come together and agree on what can be done now — controllable, deliberate steps we can take to improve education. Okay, Norm, so can you allow the union a chance to think about what they are asking members to do? Research shows that outside of parents, an effective teacher is the most important factor in determining whether children will succeed in school. Yay, Norm. More than just a factor in compensation, evaluati...

This from KUOW-FM producer, David Hyde: President Obama's talking about education reform, and so are we: If you could change one thing that would make you a better teacher, what would it be? Call our feedback line now at 206 221 3663. If you (or a teacher you know) wants to be live on the air please include your daytime contact info for tomorrow (Wednesday) at 12:20 pm. Here's a chance to weigh in on teacher performance.

The odious survey by the Alliance for Education is back, but this time as a phone survey. After they get you to say what's wrong with Seattle Public Schools, they ask you to rate a list of possible solutions. But all of the solutions they offer are all "Teacher Quality" issues. They don't offer authentic community engagement as a solution. They don't offer improved curriculum and materials. They don't offer early and effective intervention. Nope. Instead, it's Teach For America, merit pay and more sophisticated performance evaluations. I know it because I just took the survey. These people suck. Their survey is biased and bogus and any results from it should be rejected for the garbage they are. Moreover, this shows that their willingness to stop the survey was false. It was a deception. They are big, fat, ugly liars.

Update: Want some real insight into better teachers (and helping teachers with that effort)? Read this from the New York Times Magazine, Building a Better Teacher . Several readers here have suggested it and I echo it. Long but great. There are issues to be considered like how we educate our teachers (how we turn regular folks into teachers), the innate ability to teach, incentives etc. I just finally got around to looking over the Alliance for Education survey called "Teaching Quality Community Survey" . What were they thinking? (Sorry to be a little late to this party but I was out of town last week.) I'm not going to even provide a link. I answered every question "don't know" so I could read through the whole thing. Just from a survey standpoint, it's a mess. There are multiple values in questions starting with the very first one. It's about (1) redesigning the salary schedule AND (2) eliminating coursework incentives AND (3) ...

You can't say it more plainly than that so I reprinted the headline from this NY Times article . Apparently NYC already uses test scores as a factor in teacher/principal bonus pay (yes, they have that too), for the grade a school gets (A-F) and for which schools are closed because of poor performance. A lot of this effort is to get Race to the Top money. The article suggests that the Mayor (he just won his third term despite having said he would follow the law that he couldn't run again - he got that changed) may put forth his political capital to take on the teachers union. And from the article of interest to us: "The mayor also said the state should allow teacher layoffs based on performance rather than seniority, as they are now." “The only thing worse than having to lay off teachers would be laying off great teachers instead of failing teachers,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “With a transparent new evaluation system, principals would have the ability to make layoffs base...

[Here's a link to the Gates Foundation page with the links to each district.] Just an update on the Gates Foundation's new grants for studying how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure. Here's an article from the NY Times. From the article: "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced its biggest education donation in a decade, $290 million, in support of three school districts and five charter groups working to transform how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure. A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities, including New York, seeking to answer the question that has puzzled investigators for decades: What, exactly, makes a good teacher effective? The twin projects represent a rethinking of the foundation’s education strategy, previously focused largely on smaller grants intended to remake troubled American high schools. With these new, larger grants, the foundation is seek...

The Alliance for Education wasted $14,000 on a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality that doesn't say anything different from what the NCTQ always says and doesn't recommend anything different from what the NCTQ always recommends. The Alliance could have spent that money in classrooms improving outcomes for children and the NCTQ could have made their recommendations for free. This is no different from the evaluation of your insurance from the insurance salesmand that indicate - shockingly - that you need more insurance. Except that the insurance salesman does the evaluation for free. The full report is available on the Alliance web site , right here . According to this story in the Seattle Times , " The report focused solely on policies that affect teacher quality, such as how teachers are hired, paid, assigned, trained and evaluated. " That's a remarkable statement since none of those things, except maybe training, actually affect teacher quality. A...

The editorial board at the Times weighs in this morning (and I mean a heavy-handed weigh-in) in an editorial on the subject of merit pay for teachers. They imply that all threats of strikes would be gone with merit pay. Don't teachers sometimes strike over other things? "There would be room to discuss other workplace concerns that, let's face it, don't compel teachers to hit the pavement." And this: "We might actually get somewhere on education reform if the first word out of the gate wasn't money, particularly in a recession." First of all, it's always about money, teachers or no teachers. Second, this country, this district isn't moving forward on education reform because of teachers? Because that's the implication I read into that sentence. Their suggestions? "Professional standards for judging teachers ought to include not just test scores, but classroom observations and — taking a page from higher education — feedback from p...

As I mentioned elsewhere, contract negotiations between the district and the SEA (Seattle Education Association) have resumed. The deadline is August 31st and if they don't reach a contract, well, we could have a strike. The issues are myriad and the district has a job on its hands convincing the teachers both from what the tide is nationally and some of the district's own handiwork. Some of the issues: apparently classified staff haven't had a raise in quite awhile the national trend towards teacher assessments. This is very touchy to teachers, Bill Gates recently chimed in (discussed in a previous post) and I think parents have mixed feelings. teacher pay teacher use of The Source And many others (and chime in here). I think the district hurts its negotiations with the teachers by crying poor (close schools, lay off teachers/staff) and then hiring staff at headquarters. The newest parent/teacher group, Stand for Children has an online petition for parents to sign i...

In yet another speech, more opining from Bill Gates; we need better data. From an article in the AP: "The U.S. must improve its educational standing in the world by rewarding effective teaching and by developing better, universal measures of performance for students and teachers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Tuesday. Speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual legislative summit, Gates told hundreds of lawmakers how federal stimulus money should be used to spark educational innovation, spread best practices and improve accountability." Sadly, I don't believe any stimulus money will be used for innovation but likely to backfill sagging budgets. Best practices? How come we know things that work and don't replicate them? "It's not possible." "They have a different district." Okay, so which best practices? That's what I wish the Gates Foundation would help with; not creating new things but spreading exis...