Talk Priority Schools

In a new piece at  A2Politico, blogger Chris Savage looks at Michigan Republicans’ attacks on teachers. He also looks at how educators are working hard to make things better for schools, particularly those facing the biggest challenges. Here’s what he has to say about NEA’s Priority Schools Campaign.

 Teachers unions are also working to help poorly-performing districts improve their programs. Last year, the National Education Association (NEA) started the Priority Schools Campaign. This campaign aims to bring all education stakeholders together to help failing schools.

This week, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel [pictured with crutches]visited Michigan as part of NEA’s “2011 Back-to-School Tour.” During his five-day, seven-city tour, Van Roekel is visiting a number “priority schools” and stopped by Romulus Middle School which had received a $5.3 million grant as part of the federal School Improvement Grant program. One of the efforts by the NEA’s Priority School Campaign was to help get a millage passed to support the Romulus school system, a millage that had been twice defeated prior to the NEA’s involvement.

While in Michigan, Van Roekel took time to meet with local administrators, teachers, parents, and other union & community leaders to discuss the benefits of collaboration. I spoke with him and Steve Cook by phone.

“It’s great to get out into these schools and meet face-to-face with the people working hard to improve them,” Van Roekel told me. “The minute you walk into these priority schools, you can feel the energy and you can see that things are getting better. You see the effect of what money can do when combined with cooperation & collaboration between administrators, teachers, students and parents.”

Teachers working with school administrations, parents and the community to improve schools. It’s not sexy. It’s not confrontational. But it’s making a difference. In Romulus, the new funding has allowed them to improve their technology program & equipment and to revamp their curriculum. But, that doesn’t make the news.

Despite the NEA’s effort to draw attention to the “Priority Schools” initiative and the fact that Van Roekel met with the editorial boards of both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, the only mention of it from either newspaper was a post on the News’ blog The Watercooler, where the focus is on the MEA’s Cook calling Right to Teach “revenge.” Sensationalism! Confrontation! [The picture above is from Van Roekel's meeting at the Free Press. Editorial Page Editor Brian Dickerson is the one reclining]

When I asked Cook about the effort to allow school districts to outsource/privatize teaching, he said we should “draw a distinction between Senator Pavlov’s bill and what actually works.”

Indeed, a study released this week by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) shows that billions of dollars every year are wasted in the USA through the hiring of contractors.

POGO’s study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. Our findings were shocking—POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services. Specifically, POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.

While this study looked specifically at federal employees, the results are reflected in other studies as well.

What most of us know, and what the NEA’s “Priority School” initiative shows, is that teachers are not greedy, self-interested people on the whole. They care about kids and they care that kids get the best education possible. Every one of us can point to a teacher in their past that motivated them to achieve more than they would have otherwise. We all have a teacher who inspired us to be better and pointed us in the right direction. They are a value to society, not parasites on it.

I’ll finish with an excerpt of something I wrote recently about this. It sums up my feelings on the effort to demonize teachers and how that hurts our kids and our country as a whole.

In any rational society, teachers are not considered “costs.” They are considered assets….Republicans have done an amazingly effective job of turning the public’s perception from seeing teachers as valuable assets to seeing them as parasitic leeches on the jugular vein of society. Rather than valuing them for the important role they play in our society — that of educating our children — they are now coming to be viewed as a “cost,” something to be cut when times get hard.

We have cut their pay, increased their healthcare co-pay amounts, reduced their retirement benefits and made it nearly impossible to bargain on their own behalf. And yet we expect them to effectively educate our children. We do this to help pay for massive tax cuts for businesses. And then we expect them to come to work each day, stand in front of the next generation of leaders and scientists and parents and doctors and trash collectors and make them ready to take their place in society.

Meanwhile, we scream collectively that our schools are failing our children.

I’m not sure how doing all of the things we are doing to our teachers constitutes “making our schools better,” to quote Speaker Bolger. What I do know is that a society that devalues its educators is destined to slowly circle the drain until it glugs down into an empty, fetid tub of ignorance and stupidity….

We are at a turning point in our society with regard to the education of our children. What is happening in Michigan and in Wisconsin to our teachers is going to be our nation’s future unless we act soon. We cannot continue to cast teachers as a “cost” to be cut whenever possible. We must turn around our country’s way of thinking about our educators and their value to society. Because, if we don’t, we will become a nation of uneducated fools. When that happens, our destiny will be controlled by the countries that do value education, not by us.

Read more of Chris Savage’s writing at Eclectablog.

By Amy Buffenbarger and Staci Maiers

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel joined U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in announcing plans today to convene a national education reform conference on labor-management collaboration early next year.

The conference will highlight examples of progressive collective bargaining agreements across the country and identify opportunities for further reforms at the state and district level. Participants will include national, state, and local union leadership as well as school superintendents and school boards from across the country. read more »

A nice piece on PSC in the September edition of Worlds of Education, the magazine of Education International, based in Brussels. EI is a global union federation, including NEA, of 348 member organizations in 169 countries. One of the largest labor organizations in the world, EI advocates for quality public education for all, defends international human rights standards with a focus on labor rights, and helps generate understanding and action regarding the lives and working conditions of more than 30 million teachers and other education employees around the world. The piece was written by Tim Walker, a staffer with NEA Interactive Media, who has covered international affairs extensively for NEA, including reporting on the ground in Morocco covering educator efforts to rescue students from child labor situations. read more »

From Columbus Education Association

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel stopped in Columbus on Wednesday, Aug. 25, as part of his week-long, multi-city, back-to-school tour. The veteran high school math teacher arrived at West HS at 6:20 a.m. on the first day of the new school year to meet and greet the staff.

West HS is one of seven CCS Priority Schools designated by the Ohio Department of Education. The seven schools could receive a total of $20 million in additional federal funding over the next three years as recipients of School Improvement Grants (SIGs). President Van Roekel spoke with teachers and administrators of West’s Innovation Team tasked with using SIG monies to facilitate the transformation of teaching and learning at the school.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, OEA President Patricia Frost-Brooks and CEA President Rhonda Johnson traveled from West HS to join Gov. Ted Strickland, Supt. Gene Harris and other dignitaries at South Mifflin STEM Academy to announce the award of a $550,000 service learning grant from the federal government.

Awarded by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the “Bringing Learning to Life” grant partners include NEA, OEA, CEA, CCS and The Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology.

“Teachers will receive professional development to help them create more effective hands-on learning opportunities for students,” stated Van Roekel. “We look forward to seeing the work that comes out of this project; it is our hope that we will be able to replicate it in other places.”

“The grant is vital to the Columbus community,” agreed President Johnson. “It will allow the members of the Columbus Education Association to receive professional development that will help them continue to lead the way in restoring schools to their traditional roles as community hubs.”

After a tour of South Mifflin STEM Academy, Van Roekel, Frost-Brooks and Johnson traveled to Champion MS. The visit to Champion MS illustrated NEA’s Positive Agenda and Priority Schools principles. Teachers recruited to staff this high-needs school are paid an extra $4,000 a year.

From Columbus Education Association

By Steve Snider

Recent reporting in the Los Angeles Times linking standardized test scores to individual teachers and threatening to label thousands of teachers by name as “effective or “ineffective” based on the scores, has ignited debate far and wide. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s letter to the editor in Friday’s Times, called the paper’s plan “irresponsible” and “misleading.” A former high school math teacher, Van Roekel said the value-added approach to measuring effectiveness is “famously inconsistent. In one case, 30% of math teachers who ranked in the bottom quintile one year were above the median the following year.”

Cynthia McCabe’s excellent reporting on the controversy at NEAToday.org found a wide range of critics across the spectrum. A little closer to the ground in LA, the United Teachers Los Angeles held their Leadership Conference over the weekend. While presenting information about NEA’s Priority School Campaign, we had a chance to catch up with a UTLA member who provided real 101 on the controversy and the issue beyond.

Alex Caputo-Pearl is Lead Teacher at the Social Justice and the Law Academy at Crenshaw High School in West LA and here’s what he had to say about the LA Times, about measuring teacher effectiveness and more importantly, about using evaluations to make a real difference in students’ lives:

“In a nutshell, the Los Angeles Times is an institution in the city of Los Angeles that has typically and historically been anti union, using a tool, this value added measure, which uses standardized tests in a high-stakes way to say whether a teacher is quote, unquote effective or quote, unquote ineffective. The problem with it is that we know standardized tests are one important thing to look at in student development, in teacher formative assessment; they can’t be used in a high-stakes way with kids or teachers. Every study that’s been done on that says that you can’t just rely on that single measure because it’s not reliable and it’s not even made for that purpose.

“What we’re trying to do at UTLA – we have a teacher effectiveness group that’s been working since this spring. We are trying to come out with policy for the UTLA House of Representatives to adopt in the Fall and then move into a plan and political strategy. What we want to do is take a proactive approach to this issue and we take the best of what’s out there in terms of Linda Darling Hammond’s work up at Stanford, Diane Ravitch’s work, work that we have here in LA like the Institute for Standards, Curriculum and Assessments; take the best elements at work and propose a real plan for teacher support, development and evaluation. And we’ve got some real allies in that fight – we’ve got West Ed working with us. It’s not an issue of us not wanting to put something out there; it’s going to happen. It’s complicated to put that together; it’s a complicated issue.

“The way the Los Angeles Times spins it and the way that some of the most anti-union board members spin it is that this issue is only about teachers who need to be dismissed, the so-called ‘bad teachers.’ One of the things we have to do is reframe it and say that’s actually not true at all; this is an issue about the 10 percent 15 percent, 20 percent of teachers who are exemplary and how they can help others; the few on the bottom end who are right now ineffective but need support and then the huge number in the middle. The real question for teachers and for kids is ‘how do we move the mediocre teacher to a place where they’re good? How do we move the good teachers to a place where they’re very good?’ – those are things that will make a difference. It’s not going to be dismissing 200 teachers out of a system of 45,000 – so we’re trying to take a comprehensive view and really talk about what kind of formative evaluation for a teacher over time supports their development and what kind of ultimately summative evaluation do we need to put in place where in fact you can dismiss teachers if they haven’t responded to support.”