Talk Priority Schools

By Keith Gambill
President, Evansville Teachers Association

Conventional wisdom says that unions and school administrations are like oil and water—they don’t mix. But, the Evansville Teachers Association likes to challenge the norm. And, because of our bold partnership with the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation, I’m thrilled to announce that released this month were the results from the EVSC’s ISTEP scores, highlighting escalating results in our Equity Schools.

The three Equity Schools in Evansville are Delaware and Howard Roosa Elementary Schools and McGary Middle School, which were the corporation’s lowest performing schools.

But in just under a year, substantial gains were seen in the passing rate. When it comes to English /Language Arts, Delaware’s fourth graders saw a whopping 22 percent gain. Fourth and fifth graders knocked the ball out of the park in the category of math—each grade saw an increase of 29 percent increase. Howard Roosa’s fourth graders increased its English/Language Arts score by 10 percent. And, McGary Middle School eighth graders increased its reading and math scores by 7 percent. No small feat for schools considered low-performing a year ago!

Equity Schools started through a collaborative arrangement between the corporation and ETA. We spent several days of professional development learning about communication styles, making building decisions, developing action research projects and designing new, engaging classroom activities. Then, teachers were given the autonomy to decide the length of the school day; the number of days students and teachers would attend; how the school day would be structured; and strategies to be used.

These gains are proof that students can succeed when teachers and administrators come together to decide what’s best for kids.

Read more about Evansville at neapriorityschools.org.

The latest community outreach activity by the Jefferson County Teachers Association in Louisville, KY began when staff and leaders there decided members could benefit from new programs on the subject of diversity. For assistance, they turned to the National Education Association’s training on the subject; a proprietary series of modules that help educators build awareness of the diversity in their lives and classrooms and manage their own actions and relationships with others.

JCTA wanted “to take a shared approach to help members manage diversity issues with other faculty and in the classroom; and to help forge relationships with principals and the school district,” says Patricia Wright, a senior policy analyst with NEA and coordinator of the organization’s National Diversity Training Cadre.

But an interesting thing happened after a select group of JCTA members completed the rigorous NEA “training of trainers” and began work – they attracted clients outside the education world.

“We have a number of community outreach activities we do, but we were thinking of this much more in terms of our own internal professional development offerings, but we found after we trained the cadre that it went well beyond the Association and others involved in the community have been interested in participating,” said Brent McKim, JCTA president. “It’s been a little bit of a surprise, but a pleasant one.”

In addition to inviting community members into trainings, the Association has been approached about providing training to corporate and foundation groups in Louisville.

Interviewed this week at the summer meeting of the National Council of Urban Education Associations, McKim said, “I think it’s critical for the Association to reach out to the community and certainly our diversity training cadre is a great way of doing that. It allows us to make connections, it allows the community to see the role we play in helping to improve the quality of instruction. It improves the sensitivity of our members to the diversity that makes our schools the rich places they are – and it really just allows us to showcase the good work that we do.”

- Steve Snider

Thirty members of the Wyoming Education Association will begin making their way to Chicago next week, joining more than 9,000 colleagues and fellow NEA members  at the 149^th Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly (RA) to collaborate on critical issues in public education, including priority schools. Kathryn Valido, president of the WEA, spoke to Sheridan Media this week about the campaign: “Valido says the program has been ‘hugely successful’ in those states that do not fund programs that need funding.”

The largest democratically-elected decision-making body in the world, the Representative Assembly takes place during the final four days of the Annual Meeting. The theme of this year’s Meeting is NEA Standing Strong: for our Students, for our Schools, for America. Before the actual deliberations, debates and decisions of the RA, delegates will meet for a variety of policy and professional development sessions, including several with Priority Schools Campaign workshops and conversations.

At the Joint Conference on the Concerns of Minorities and Women, June 28-29, the theme is Empowerment from Within: Educators Take Action. According to organizers, “at every Joint Conference session in 2011, participants will be asked: “What actions will you take?” Our focus will be more on action, less on analysis. We will identify the actions that affirm who we are and what we stand for. In the past, we have discussed reducing stress. This year, in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ we will explore actions that create stress—actions that foster such a tension that the people who scorn us will have to listen and will have to negotiate.”

The conference program includes a June 29 “Learning Labs” session entitled Advocate, Organize, Realize: Follow the Priority Schools Campaign Framework to Student Success. The session is led by Dr. Sheila Simmons of NEA, director of the Priority Schools Campaign.

On July 1, NEA’s first ever Day of Learning includes a variety of learning opportunities about critical issues, including PSC. Two of the workshops – Transforming Schools is Union Work and Union Success: Involving the Community in School Transformation feature a local affiliate presidents, state staff, local school leaders and NEA staff.

For WEA’s Valido, the bottom line of the Priority Schools Campaign is a needed resource whether onsite, “on paper” or online as Wyoming is using. As she told her radio audience; The Priority Schools Campaign is “an opportunity for school districts to access resources that the NEA has to help with special needs schools – schools that have high numbers of very challenging students or situations. They can as I said, offer resources both to the school and the teachers.”

– Steve Snider

By Brenda Alvarez

For public schools in Romulus, Michigan, the third time was the charm recently as voters renewed an existing business tax to support education that was rejected twice before.

The Detroit Free Press said the school funding was “desperately needed” and the measure passed earlier this month had the support of both the Romulus Education Association and the school district. Officials said that without the critical funding, Romulus Middle School, an NEA Priority Schools site, would have been forced to close.

School Board member Robert McLaughlin told Detroit’s WXYZ-TV, “If we’re not able to get it renewed, basically, with the other cuts the state has imposed on us, within 18 months, we’d close.”

The odds were against passage. The community had twice rejected the assessment in 2010 and local leaders faced opposing messaging calling the measure “ a new tax” without having effective messaging of their own.

Working locally with the Priority Schools Campaign, supporters developed and distributed fact sheets and other materials, including video messaging, newspaper ads and a phone bank designed to change the focus of the community conversation to center on “community” and “students” and show that the revenue was not a new tax and cost homeowners nothing. See an excerpt of the flyer below. read more »

At the same time educators in several states face legislation to strip their right to bargain with school districts on most issues, teachers and support professionals in those states and across the country have entered a new era of collaborative reform with their school districts.

Despite the deep-pocketed promotion of an anti-union narrative in media and government, in state after state, unions are showing the way, not only in education reform, but specifically in strategies to close the achievement gaps and raise student achievement in struggling schools, what NEA calls Priority Schools.

• In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Education Association Council developed a plan for pay differentials and evaluation aimed at ensuring effective teachers in every classroom. The state’s governor is now trying to break the union’s right to bargain despite WEAC’s open offer to do its fair share in compensation and benefits to meet the state’s budget shortfall.
• In Hamilton County, TN an initiative formed around five inner-city middle schools that tended to perform less well than the other middle schools. The district and union together formed networks to share and implement best practices throughout the district. Since the program was expanded to every one of Hamilton’s middle schools in 2005, the percentage of middle school students passing the state’s reading exam increased from 84% in 2005 to 90% in 2009.  The percentage of middle school students passing the state’s mathematics exam increased from 86% in 2005 to 89% in 2009.
• In Nevada, the Clark County Education Association initiated the Empowerment School Project. Under collaborative management teams, teachers were able to choose textbooks, they organized the day around a block of focused reading in ability-level groups, and initiated small-group tutoring after school. When Paul Culley Elementary joined the empowerment school project in 2005, fewer than a quarter of its students read on grade level. By 2008, 57 percent did.
• Just five years ago, John Muir Elementary in Merced, CA was the lowest-performing elementary school in California’s Merced City School District. Now, thanks to a new focus on professional development and collaboration – and a seven-year grant from a union-backed program – John Muir is now one of Merced’s top-performing elementary schools. The school uses California’s Quality Education Investment Act funds to focus on professional development, reducing class size, and a boot camp where kids who were falling behind could receive additional instruction.
• In Indiana, Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation and the Evansville Teachers Association jointly developed a plan called Equity Schools, targeting two elementary schools and a middle school where scores on the state test were low and falling. The plan includes increased professional development designed jointly by teachers and the district, and compensated longer school days and a longer year. The district and union bargained the changes, including a requirement that, beginning in the 2010 school year, teachers wanting to work in the three schools were required to first pass through a rigorous Equity Academy program designed by the district and the union. More teachers applied than there were positions available.
• In Illinois, three unions representing more than 230,000 education employees, the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Chicago Teachers Union jointly developed a proposal to streamline the process for removing underperforming teachers and resolve teacher dismissals in a much shorter time, helping to reduce costs associated with dismissals for both districts and employees. The unions also proposed that evaluations be clearly tied to a teacher obtaining due process rights, usually known as “teacher tenure.”

Steve Snider

Forsyth County Association of Educators President Tripp Jeffers was in Denver this week for the Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration conference, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

Jeffers was part of a presenting team, along with Donny Lambeth, Chairman of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education and Donald Martin, Superintendent of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. The three have a worked to build a collaborative relationship that has allowed WSFCS to move forward on a number of innovative projects in North Carolina, which is a non-bargaining state.

During the presentation, Jeffers shared an example of how collaboration guided the union and the district through a difficult Reduction in Force (RIF) policy that bases RIF decisions both on a teacher’s work experiences as well as performance on evaluations.

read more »

By Sara Jones

First, I’d like to set the stage for you a bit. Utah is not a collective bargaining state. We are also a local option state. I’m going to give a little bit of background and then talk about where I think we’re going, because I think for us the Priority Schools Campaign is a real opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to build relationships in our locals, it’s an opportunity for our locals to build better relationships in some school districts that have had poor relationships, and it’s an opportunity to change schools that we’re hearing from our local leaders need to improve. The Utah Education Association (UEA) wants to help in that process of improvement. So, all of this coming together is a great thing for us. read more »

By Peg Dunlap

This work actually started before the School Improvement Grant process. Because we had a number of districts on improvement for Title One, the Kansas State Department of Ed decided that since they didn’t have the capacity to provide assistance they would contract with an outside entity, they chose to use Christopher Cross and Scott Joftus, who have a consulting group, to come in and work with the school districts to help them figure out what could they be doing that would make it more likely that schools in their districts would be successful.

They started with a cohort of five school districts and then in the second year they added another group of about 15 and then in this third year, which is the current year, they’ve added another group of eight, based on the districts on improvement.  What they did was to bring in a protocol that’s kind of a self study for the school districts, and it focus at the central office.  It really asks the district to look at its hiring practices, its administrative procedures, its curriculum alignment, you know, all of those things that tend to happen centrally that can often get in the way of schools being successful with students and teachers being successful. read more »

By Kathleen J. Skinner, Ed.D.

I know many of us quote  that revered philosopher Pogo. ‘I have seen the enemy and he is us.’  I would rather say, ‘We have seen the solution and it is us.’  I think that’s sort of a refrain that we walk into this work with. Eight or nine years ago Massachusetts became involved with the Priority School Initiative.  And we used the initial opportunity to work with middle schools over a three year period in what we called the PSI KEYS Initiative, because we used KEYS as sort of a baseline to help identify the one or two big problems that – if they weren’t solved – made what else they did irrelevant.  And we had a lot of success with some schools and we learned a lot from our mistakes with others.  And I always think, quite frankly, failure is a better teacher than success.

The Center for Education Policy and Practice has four professional staff, support staff and a field of 12 professional development associates who work across the state on professional programs.  Based on that experience and with a lot of encouragement, we made a decision to found an education management organization, The Priority School Redesign Center. read more »

By Paula Monroe, NEA Executive Committee

In the end, as so many had heard and didn’t want to believe, the Denver Public Schools School Board voted 4 to 3 to “reconfigure Montbello High School and its five feeder schools”. The decision came at approximately 1:30 a.m. on November 18. The Board meeting room was still packed. Students from Montbello who held up posters signed by the MHS students that read – Montbello High School 30 years old too young to die! – were in tears. Teachers and staff left in tears. It was very disheartening and disappointing.

That being said, DCTA did a great job of organizing community support and building a community coalition around saving these schools. read more »