The Notebook

• A teacher who is moving on to a new school takes a photo tour of his classroom. (Rational Expressions)
• A study of New York City’s school surveys says teachers give more useful data. (Inside School Research)
• Teachers Arthur Goldstein and Gary Rubinstein won Class Size Matters’s Skinny Awards. (Ed Notes)
• Overhauled versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are under debate. (Politics K-12)
• Here’s a detailed rundown of the devastating budget cuts facing Philadelphia schools. (In These Times)
• Tom Vander Ark lists strategies that smart districts can use to maintain top teachers. (On Innovation)
• Bill de Blasio released a comprehensive policy agenda including an education platform. (GS In Brief)
• New Yorkers for Great Public Schools is attacking Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson. (City & State)

Charlene Jackson, a teacher at P.S. 64 in Manhattan, was among the first UFT members to exit a meeting to endorse Bill Thompson for mayor with a poster supporting his candidacy.

The United Federation of Teachers’ months-long process to endorse a mayoral candidate ended today with a warm embrace between President Michael Mulgrew and Bill Thompson, the former Board of Education president who will get the union’s support.

Thompson got the nod after a series of meetings that concluded with a vote by thousands of delegates in which the vast majority supported endorsing him, teachers said. Afterwards, teachers were handed bright posters touting the candidate, which many brandished as they exited the union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters.

At a press conference after the endorsement vote, Thompson was coy after he was asked whether he was worried that the union’s support could prove to be a “kiss of death,” as Mayor Bloomberg alleged earlier this week.

“If I received a kiss from the UFT today, I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy,” he said.

Speaking to the delegates, Thompson delivered a seven-minute speech that focused on his respect for teachers. “I know how hard you all work!” he said, citing the example of his mother and daughter, who each taught in city schools.

“When I’m mayor, I’m going to fight day and night for the teachers of New York, because you’re critical for the future of New York,” Thompson said, to cheers.

Several teachers said the energy in the room was electric, particularly after Mulgrew announced that the endorsement was official. “When he said it, it amped it up 100 percent,” said John Leftridge, who teaches at P.S. 93 in Brooklyn.

“It was kind of like Obama in there,” said Charlene Johnson, a teacher at P.S. 64 in Manhattan.

But some teachers said the time to discuss whether Thompson was the right candidate to support had been too short, and several noted that only one person had spoken out against endorsing him before a union official called a vote.

“I think there should have been more of a debate,” said Rosie Frascella, a teacher at the International High School at Prospect Heights. “This is a huge issue for our union and I think there needs to be more member voices heard.”

Frascella is part of the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, a minority faction in the union which handed out a fact sheet indicating that Thompson might not be the best candidate for teachers. But she said she was willing to support Thompson, although she worried that the labor movement had divided itself by endorsing different candidates. “I want a new mayor and would like to see a Democrat in office,” she said.

Other delegates said they were satisfied that union leaders had carefully vetted the candidates during candidate forums in each borough, a citywide forum at the union’s spring conference, and behind the scenes. “They had to pass muster, and it wasn’t easy,” said Paula Washington, a music teacher at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art & the Performing Arts.

Teachers said they were prepared to man phone banks and knock on doors to get out the vote for Thompson. Deborah Sherlock, a teacher at P.S. 305 in Queens, and John Kamps, who works at I.S. 5, also in Queens, each took a stack of posters and a bag of pins to hand out to their colleagues. “It’s great to know that there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel,” Sherlock said, referring to the Bloomberg years.

“It was exciting, with the chanting,” Kamps said. “It felt like we were all united behind one man.”

After a back-to-back series of meetings, the United Federation of Teachers is throwing its weight behind Bill Thompson, the former school board president, in this year’s mayoral election.

Thompson spoke to teachers at a union meeting before meeting the press with UFT President Michael Mulgrew this afternoon at the union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters.

“As mayor, I’m not going to demonize teachers. We’ve had enough of that,” Thompson said, alluding to Mayor Bloomberg’s sometimes harsh comments about teachers. “I’m going to help them teach by giving them the resources they need and bringing them back into the decision-making process of how we run our schools.”

The endorsement caps several months of internal discussions within the union. Mulgrew was looking for a candidate who would advance teachers’ interests, inspire UFT members to get out the vote, and, most importantly, have a clear path to City Hall. The UFT has not picked a winning candidate since 1989, and Mulgrew is hoping that this year will break the bad luck.

“We need to make sure that this entire city school system is about helping teachers help children, and we now have the candidate we know will do that,” Mulgrew said. “And we will fight with him and for him — because he is the next mayor of New York City.”

Rebecca Kantor, dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver, argues that newly-released ratings of teacher training programs are deeply flawed.

Courtesy BigStock.com

Yesterday, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), an advocacy group with no official status, issued a report that rates most of the nation’s initial teacher preparation programs for licensure as inadequate, including most of Colorado’s teacher preparation programs. The nation’s education leaders are highly critical of this group’s methods, as well as their obvious political agenda.

We at the University of Colorado Denver are not only committed to the evaluation of our teacher education programs, we are, in fact, leaders in assessing and demonstrating the outcomes and impact of our preparation. That is, we have created a robust and comprehensive data-based approach to program evaluation to assess our candidates at graduation, and to measure their impact on K-12 student achievement. By contrast and by their own admission, the criteria for NCTQ’s measurement are incomplete, limited and reliant solely on course syllabi.  

Furthermore, in our case, the NCTQ ratings are simply wrong in three critical areas. First, the reviewers based their ratings on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of licensure options at the University of Colorado Denver. Our students are either undergraduates in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences taking their licensure courses in the School of Education and Human Development, or they are post-baccalaureate students taking the exact same licensure courses as graduate courses.  That is, we do not have separate programs or courses for undergraduates and post-baccalaureate students. Ironically, NCTQ graded our ability to meet the standards though our courses with one to four stars in the undergraduate option and rated the post-baccalaureate program with a “consumer alert!” In other words, looking at the same syllabi, they arrived at different ratings.

Even more problematic, NCTQ completely disregarded our full-year internship requirement, making the claim that we do not have student teaching. In fact, we are one of 5 percent of programs in the nation with a full residency model embedded in 20 years of partnership with our school districts; this is the gold standard of clinical experience. Teams of professors, teachers and school-based personnel mentor our teacher candidates over this full year. Yet, NCTQ gave us a zero on student teaching!

Lastly, the report gives us a poor rating for selectivity; yet, University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education & Human Development is one of the most selective teacher education programs in the state. The typical candidate entering our program has well over a 3.0 undergraduate GPA. Our selection process includes interviews during which our faculty and school partners look broadly at teacher leadership potential, and commitment to teaching in high need areas. We also require that all potential candidates pass the state required content exam. We are one of a few programs in the state that require this for admission.

We value program review and constructive feedback on our programs and seek quality data for continuous improvement. For example, just today we received data from one of our major urban partner districts confirms the quality of our graduates:  First year teachers prepared by UCD outperformed other novice teachers in the district on 10 out of 12 of the indicators on the district teacher effectiveness rubric!

About the author

Rebecca Kantor is dean at the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver. She brings a robust career as an early childhood teacher, researcher, professor of teacher education, education policy reformer and public university administrator to her role. She has published numerous articles, book chapters and books.

Can two schools with different philosophies happily co-exist in Denver where the term “colocation” has sparked near riots?

Choose North Now protesters hit the sidewalk with signs and chants before the DPS board meeting when a controversial co-location plan was expected to be approved.

Well, yes, according to a short report by district staff and shared with the school board this week. And that’s important as the district continues to explore shared campus options as a way to maximize efficiencies and promote school choice. There are now 15 campuses in DPS that house 42 schools attended by more than 12,000 students, or 14 percent of the district’s student population.

“Schools on a shared campus that have intentional events to get staff together have expressed greater collaboration between the two schools,” said Liz Mendez, director of operations and support services.

Key components of a happy marriage, according to interviews by staff with people at several shared campuses in the district, include:

• Frequent communication between school leaders through regular team-building meetings;
• Including all schools – especially if there are more than two  – in communications regarding the campus;
• Providing each principal with equal say in building use, regardless of school size or tenure 
on campus.
• Planning intentional events for all campus staff and students so collegial relationships can be forged.
• Sharing behavioral support staff, such as school deans, to create a fair and balanced campus culture with consistent behavior expectations for all students regardless of school affiliation.
• Dedicated areas for each school, such as wings, pods, hallways and  floors so that the school can build identity and culture.

Of the schools on shared campuses, most – or 34 – are at the secondary level.

Mendez told the board that the arrangements save the district money.

For instance, it would have cost the 350-student Creativity Challenge Community elementary school $11 million to buy land and build a school. It only cost $680,000 to renovate Merrill to accommodate the school.

Similarly, renovations at Gilpin Montessori Public School cost $107,000 compared to an $11 million price tag had Denver Montessori Junior/Senior High had to buy land and build a school, or the $1.5 million cost for a three-year lease in another facility.

But board member Arturo Jimenez pointed out that it would cost the district less if charter schools provided their own facilities.

Board member Jeannie Kaplan also raised concerns about how the district helps charter schools secure locations.

“We’re building new facilities for a lot of our charter entities,” she said. “It’s something I really struggle with. I appreciate trying to be equitable, but I think we’ve leaned over the other way and it’s more equitable for the charter schools.”

Superintendent Tom Boasberg said schools like Merrill would not have gotten the facelifts they needed and additional educational resources without the impetus of the shared campus and a robust student body to glean efficiencies.

There’s no doubt the school mergers are not always harmonious – especially at the time of proposal.

The community at North High School was not pleased with the idea and ultimate approval by the school board of a new STRIVE Prep High School joining them in the fall 2013. But Mendez said work is underway to ensure a smooth transition. She said the sports teams will be merged with coaches from both schools. A joint booster club is also in the works. The schools will also share a nurse. STRIVE will use the North gym only for special events. STRIVE’s physical education classes will occur in their own multi-purpose room, Mendez said.

The board will take up possible changes to its campus sharing policy at its regular  meeting Thursday. Board member Happy Haynes said she would like to see more information and data from campuses shared by different age groups.

Cole Arts & Sciences Academy Principal Julie Mergel said things have worked out well between her school and DSST at Cole. Cole serves elementary school students; and DSST is a middle school.

“We, from the beginning, have structured [the campus] around the language of one not two schools,” she said. “It’s one school with two programs.”

The two school leaders meet once a month at a minimum, but usually more.

The schools have worked hard to make a harmonious lunchtime since elementary school students are mixed with middle-schoolers. Eighth-graders eat on their own.

However, school leaders acknowledged they could have done more in the beginning to bring staff together.

“It would have been more powerful and created more ownership among the team,” DSST Cole Middle School Director Jeff Osborne.

Van Schoales, head of A+ Denver, argues that our current requirements for high school graduation aren’t rigorous enough to ensure the highly-educated workforce we need. 

Just a few weeks ago, thousands of Colorado high school students donned black gowns, heard their names read, and proudly walked across a stage to take hold of their high school diploma.

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00104 / Pahl, Georg / CC-BY-SA

But what is the value of that diploma? What did it cost in terms of time and learning? How can it be used? In many ways, the diploma is currency. However, that currency has far different value depending on what you look like and where you went to school.

On one end of the spectrum, about 20,000 Colorado students from the class of 2013 will not be able to take a community college class or enroll in the military because their literacy and/or numeracy skills are too limited. For comparison, the Pepsi Center only seats 18,000 people.

One the other end, a few thousand students will graduate from high school with college courses already completed and the skills to succeed regardless of whether they enter a trade, the military or college. Some will even have an associate’s degree — having already knocked off the first two years of college.

In Denver, where I live, more than one third of students that graduated had an ACT of 15 or lower – a score that wouldn’t meet to the minimum requirements of the military ASVAB test. (See charts below on what a particular ACT scores means and what the distribution is for DPS students),  Meanwhile, fewer than one in five students could pass credit bearing courses at CU Denver.

By granting a student a high school degree, we are implying that they are ready for the world. But are they?

What does it take to get the degree?

A little over a hundred years ago, a distinguished body of university presidents and the Carnegie Foundation argued for a standardized unit of study based on a 120-hour block of time (five hours per week for 12 weeks for two semesters).   The Carnegie Unit was designed to help standardize teaching and curriculum across high schools.

These time units were used to define the metrics for high school diploma. For example, high schools would require four units (or years) of English, two units of science, etc.  The system signaled that the US was taking “high school for all” seriously, and the value we placed on having an educated public fueled much of America’s remarkable development throughout the 20th century.

The problem with this industrial model of schooling was that it was designed so that a small percentage of the population would be prepared for highly skilled jobs and college, and the rest would work in factories and fields. There were few formal means of measuring students’ knowledge or skills, and diplomas were mostly about punching the time or Carnegie clock. We now have access to all sorts of student data, but the American high school diploma is still all about punching the clock. Meanwhile, both factories and fields rely on advanced machinery, and need far fewer high school graduates.

While we’ve been coasting along, the rest of the world (or at least another 20 nations or so) realized that the key to their long-term economic development was having a highly educated workforce. They created or reformed public education systems where students have to demonstrate what they know and do before getting the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Denmark is an excellent example of a country that realized it would be left behind as many of their 20th century industries (like textiles) moved offshore.  While the Danish system still uses time to guide course development, it is the demonstration of a students’ competencies, skills and knowledge that are used for credentialing students.  Not surprisingly, many of these nations are not only educating more of their own populations to higher levels than we Americans do, but most of their citizens would find greater access to the “American Dream” than the typical American has now.

Let’s match degree requirements to what kids will need to know to succeed

The Colorado State Board of Education recently passed a set of “guidelines” requiring districts to set a minimum standard for a diploma starting in 2021.  It appears we may need to make adjustments soon to these fairly mild new requirements because both the current and new “guidelines” do not align with the Common Core.   The reason the timeline is so long — seven years! — is that districts are concerned that they do not have resources and expertise to get the current crop of middle and high school students prepared for the most basic college course.  They are afraid that many students will drop out if the standards are raised, even though there is little evidence of this in other states like Indiana and Massachusetts.

Despite the long timeline, the decades that districts have been working on “standards-based reform,” they have kept the graduation bar low. Not a single school district, school board or the groups representing teacher unions, administrators or school boards publically supported the idea of raising standards across the state. The education establishment prefers to leave it up our locally elected school boards to set the standards for what students should know and do. Unfortunately, locally elected school boards in Colorado have done nothing to raise graduation standards other than an occasional tweak of credit or time requirements and there is no reason to believe they will voluntarily decide to increase standards. After all, if fewer kids graduate or more are held back, it could be seen as a black mark on their performance.

As school boards know, the tough part isn’t raising standards, it’s redesigning our entire system to ensure kids are learning at higher rates and in a more efficient way. Having a clear bar may finally force the system to get serious rather than adding some new program band-aid that only masks some of the fundamental problems. Redesigning our education system will be difficult, but when it comes down to it, most students are bored a lot of the time. Many teachers are unhappy or bored or dissatisfied, unappreciated, and principals feel overloaded and overworked.

What about this broken system is worth saving? It’s time to have a more serious conversation about how to re-build the system as other nations have done over the last fifty years.

In the end, our education system — like all others — will be judged not on the inputs or time that students put into school, but on the legacy they leave after high school and throughout their lives. We have to keep the Colorado currency strong if we are to trade and compete on the international stage. It’s way overdue to tie our diploma to a competency standard as most industrialized nations have done for decades. We need a gold standard for our high school currency.

About the author

Former teacher and principal Van Schoales is the chief executive officer of A+ Denver, an advocacy group supporting improvement in Denver Public Schools. Previously, he was executive director of Education Reform Now, a national education policy and advocacy non-profit organization.

Sweeping and serious problems with a new system for grading high school Regents exams persisted today, the date by which one set of tests was supposed to be completely graded.

The new system, designed to curb score inflation, requires teachers to report to central sites to grade answers that have been scanned and meted out by McGraw-Hill, the testing company. Educators from across the city are reporting that teachers were sent back to their schools early again today from grading sites because there were not enough essays to score. At other sites, scorers said they were told to stay put but not given papers to grade.

“We arrived at scoring today at 8:30 only to be sent away at 9,” wrote a commenter posting as AlvySinger in response to our story about the grading issues from Tuesday.

“1:08 pm. Nothing to grade,” another commenter wrote. The story has received nearly 50 comments from educators and others who are distressed about the scoring situation.

Several readers noted that a solution exists to a different issue that left some essays unreadable in the computer system — but that the fix requires compromising the anonymity of the exams, a main reason for the new scoring system in the first place.

“By simply hitting ‘zoom out’ on the computer settings, the student’s name, school and ID number (if they wrote it) is revealed — worked on EVERY test, EVERY time,” Queens wrote. “However, it allowed for the ‘blocked out’ parts from bad scans to be seen as well.”

The scoring delays are important because some seniors need to earn passing scores in order to graduate. The Department of Education told principals late Tuesday that they should bend the rules and allow seniors who have fulfilled all other requirements to participate in graduation ceremonies, with the caveat that they must be told that they won’t get a diploma until they have a passing exam score.

A teacher who is coordinating his school’s graduation ceremony, which takes place on Monday, said he’s been fielding calls from students who need to pass their Regents in order to graduate. They’ve called to ask if they can pick up their cap and gown or reserve seats for their parents, which they couldn’t do under the regular rules.

“If you’re a senior on the fence, waiting to see if you’re going to graduate, you’re pretty nervous” the teacher said. He estimated that 20 students, or about 10 percent, of students at his school are affected. ”There’s not much I can tell them,” the teacher said. “We’re forced to tell them that it hasn’t been graded.”

The teacher called the situation at his testing center “a nightmare, to put it bluntly.” He said mornings have been busy — he’s graded about 40 essays per day — but that scanned tests slow to a trickle in the afternoon. He said he graded three essays yesterday between 12:30 and 3 p.m. Normally, he said he would be able to grade about 20 essays per hour.

Other problems with the electronic scoring system — being used for four frequently taken tests, in Living Environment, Global Studies, U.S. history, and English — have teachers concerned that students’ scores could be negatively affected.

Those issues could be compounded as the department searches for educators to score exams after school and over the weekend. (McGraw-Hill will cover the overtime pay from its $3.5 million contract for the year, city officials said on Tuesday. Its total contract is for $9.6 million over three years.)

“I was just informed that I have been scheduled to grade the Geometry Regents over the next few days. I have taught High School ENGLISH for 14 years–why do I need to spend two days at another location grading a test I have no business being involved with?” wrote Kelli, a GothamSchools commenter.

“Exactly,” wrote Science Teacher, in response. “I was sent to grade Living Environment and I have never taught LE. Granted I am a science teacher and I understood the material, [but] there were other teachers way out of their own subject who were not well versed in the subject.”

The UFT printed campaign posters for all major mayoral candidates in advance of today’s meetings to endorse a candidate, so that materials are ready as soon as the choice is made. The union posted the photo to Twitter on Monday.

For education voters, the mayoral campaign season has been building in large part to today, when the United Federation of Teachers will announce which candidate it is supporting.

But the decision, which will come out around 5:45 p.m. today, hardly ends the education election. Instead, it simply opens a new phase, one in which education policy’s prominence is far from assured.

Until now

From the time that campaign season kicked off so many moons ago, all of the Democratic candidates have been careful not to alienate the UFT. While the union’s picks don’t always win — as Mayor Bloomberg pointed out on Monday, it hasn’t backed a winning mayoral candidate in over two decades — the UFT endorsement does confer money, cachet, and bodies to fuel a ground game that will be essential in the coming months.

Even candidates seen as unlikely to win the union’s support, such as City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, whose help letting Bloomberg suspend term limits four years ago put her at a sharp disadvantage, were careful to infuse their education platforms with union-friendly positions. And all of the candidates who attended a forum the union held at its annual spring conference were effusive in their praise.

In recent weeks, though, only Thompson and de Blasio — and, to a lesser extent, Comptroller John Liu, whose campaign has been hamstrung by scandal — have actively seemed to be angling for the nod. When the city announced new graduation rates on Monday, they were the only candidates to release statements, all criticizing the Bloomberg administration for not helping students more. Thompson announced that he would guarantee at $200 a year to every teacher for discretionary materials, something the union has long sought. And de Blasio was the only candidate to stand beside Mulgrew at a press conference announcing a platform for reducing the city’s emphasis on standardized testing.

In de Blasio, the union would get a candidate with liberal bonafides and the chance to consolidate some the labor movement’s support. But with Thompson, it would be choosing a conciliator with education credentials who is seen as having a strong chance of becoming mayor.

What happens today

The union wants to advance a policy agenda that matches its vision for education and benefits its members. But even more than that, it wants to support a winner in November’s election, breaking a three-decade cycle of failure and ensuring that City Hall’s occupant feels beholden to the union. That’s why — even though, in a show of openness, the union has printed campaign posters for all major candidates — it would be a real surprise if anyone other Thompson ends the day with the union’s support.

But even though the decision appears to have been made, there is still a process the union must go through to make the choice official. That process includes some room for union members to express dissent, and their voices could be quite strong.

The union is using the same process that it goes through whenever it makes major policy decisions. First, Mulgrew will tell his closest advisors which candidate is his favorite. They’ll recommend the choice to the union’s 89-member Executive Board, which includes some representatives of minority parties within the union. Then the Executive Board’s recommendation will go to the 3,400-member Delegate Assembly for a floor vote, in which delegates from each school and chapter will hold up cards to signal whether they support the recommendation. Advocates and, potentially, opponents of the decision will make their cases until a majority of delegates support the resolution.

The union anticipates this process going quickly. The three meetings are scheduled back to back to prevent news from leaking before the end of the day. The Delegate Assembly meeting is scheduled for 4:45 p.m., and a decision is expected about an hour later, union officials said.

One reason the union can expect quick support for its leadership’s recommendation is that a strong majority of delegates are affiliated with Unity, Mulgrew’s party within the union. But a sizable number are not, suggesting that debate could be fierce if Mulgrew allows it to be. Some members are unhappy with Thompson’s relationship with Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who helped engineer the state’s new teacher evaluation rules, and the fact that he has cozied up to charter school supporters even as he has worked to woo the union. In borough forums, de Blasio and Liu, seen as more left-wing candidates, received widespread support.

When the principals union voted to endorse Thompson on Tuesday, it did so with just 40 percent of the executive board behind him. President Ernest Logan suggested that while Thompson had garnered twice as many votes as the next closest candidates, at least four candidates had received wide support. The UFT has a stronger infrastructure for managing dissent and it won’t be tallying support for runners up, so it’s unlikely that the numbers will end up being quite so divided. But what happens inside 52 Broadway today is worth watching.

Not an end but a beginning

A divided union UFT would undermine one of the union’s chief goals in endorsing a candidate, which is to reassert its might in the city’s political ecosystem. According to a story in today’s New York Times, Mulgrew has devoted himself since first becoming president four years ago to bolstering the union’s political machine, once seen as capable of delivering candidates with ease.

That machine has a sizable war chest to help the endorsed candidate pay for campaign ads, including some that could potentially tilt the race into more negative territory. The machine should also have no trouble coming through with volunteers to make phone calls for the winning candidate and support his (or her) ground game. The union’s strong cadre of retired teachers in particular — known as the “daytime union” because they can step up when active members are at work — are notable for being willing to do what they are asked to.

But many retirees do not live in the city, and many current teachers do not, either. Combined with the fact that not all members will fall into line with the UFT’s pick, exactly how many votes the union will deliver in September’s primary and then in November’s general election is unclear.

What happens tomorrow, and for the next two and a half months until the primary election, could make the difference. It could be that the candidates begin to differentiate themselves more strongly on education, without the prospect of UFT support keeping them close to the union line. It could also be that they stop talking about education at all as they try to win over new constituencies. Candidates also have a reason to distance themselves from the union if they aren’t receiving its support. In office, a new mayor will have to weigh all of the city’s interests each time they sit down to bargain a single union’s contract. The high costs of health care and back pay, which the UFT wants, could be hard to deliver.

One role the union’s pick will play is to make sure that issues that are important to teachers do not fall off the radar, and to entice other candidates into making commitments that the union would like them to make. Mulgrew believes he can deliver this election, but he surely won’t mind insurance.

Understanding that the Chicago Public Schools district leadership and Board of Education faced difficult decisions regarding the school actions, we, the Federation for Community Schools’ members, staff and board, have a serious concern about those closings and the transitions of children to new schools. 

We are concerned about the severe reduction or total loss of high quality wrap-around support services for children in our highest needs communities as they transition from one school to another. Particularly, the loss of support provided by the existing services coordinated and managed under the leadership of local agencies working in partnership with some of the closing schools will have grave and detrimental impacts on students transitioning to new schools.

We are equally concerned about the new demands for such services in the schools to which these children will transition – and the welcoming schools’ capacities to meet these new demands without additional support.  Almost all of the impacted schools are in neighborhoods serving children who need not only high quality schools but also multiple kinds of academic and non-academic services and supports. As such, the transition plans – in the case of each and every school – must take into account not only the use of space in a facility, but also the supports (mental and physical health services, out-of-school time programs connected to classroom learning, resources for families, and more) organized by the closing schools, especially those that are community schools.

Community schools are schools that actively engage and coordinate an array of resources to strengthen the learning and development of their students, and to engage families as partners in children’s educations. Some of the closing schools have long-term partners – community-based organizations or social services organizations, oftentimes – working to provide coordination of and access to services, such as arts and enrichment programs, academic supports, health supports and supports to adults and families in the communities served by the school. Because community schools are so effective in these efforts, $1 invested in a community school yields a $1-$3 return in the form of supports that would otherwise be disconnected from the school and not accessed by students and families.

We are concerned that those supports will be interrupted and possibly lost for these children and families moving from closing schools.  The welcoming schools may or may not have these supports or the resources to expand them considerably to accommodate new students and families. In addition, the welcoming schools – including those that were already community schools – will be asked to provide more supports and services both to their current students and to the students that will join them in the fall.

Detrimental impact?

Specifically, three critical questions have emerged in our conversations with our members about the impact of the closings on the access to and availability of supports:

1) To what extent does each plan for closing and “welcoming” schools address these multiple services and ensure that they will not be lost to the children and families who need and depend on them?

2) To what extent do new schools know about the services that transitioning children accessed at the closing schools and do the welcoming schools have plans for putting supports in place for all the new children and families entering their communities? 

3) To what extent do the schools have individuals in place – dedicated staff members – to coordinate services across multiple providers and partners, and a plan to work in partnership with school leadership to facilitate the engagement of these services during and after school hours? 

Successful transitions and sustained academic improvement at the welcoming schools will not be dependent on how many partners can provide how many programs during the 2013-2014 school year. Instead, success will hinge upon the level of coordination that exists to maximize each partnership, to ensure that programs are effectively and efficiently reaching students in need, and to connect new resources to the welcoming schools. This is not about more partners and programs; it’s about creating long-term strategic partnerships that realign resources in ways that best meet the needs of students and families – during the transitions over the 2013-2014 school year and beyond.

Chicago has been a national leader in utilizing the community school strategy to put in place coordinated supports and partnerships for more than 15 years.  The Federation and its members, including nearly 50 community school lead partners, urge CPS build upon and sustain the its strong history of community school work and address students’ and families’ needs in coordinated, efficient ways.

Melissa Mitchell is the executive director of the Federation for Community Schools.

COLORADO

• Colorado teacher education programs criticized the methodology of a new report that gave low marks to many of them. EdNews Colorado 
• The former spokesperson for the Douglas County schools, now a vocal critic of the board, says she will advise school board candidates rather than run herself. Our Colorado News
• A program in Colorado Springs is designed to introduce disadvantaged, first-generation and non-traditional students to the idea of college. The Gazette
• The Adams 12 Five Star school district is requiring its sixth graders to buy Chromebooks instead of school supplies. 9News
• A longtime volunteer in the St. Vrain school district has decided to run for school board. Longmont Times-Call

NATION

• U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told states that are introducing new standards that they could postpone introducing teacher evaluations based on student test scores. New York Times
• Boston could be the latest school district that allows condoms to be distributed in high schools. New York Times

OPINION

• Commentary: Barbara O’Brien, who is now running for the Denver school board, played a major role in bringing charter schools to Colorado. EdNews Colorado
• Editorial: The Washington Post argues that despite the controversy around ed school ratings, they could prompt needed reforms.

 

Rise & Shine

Each weekday morning, we search websites of various media, comb through RSS feeds and peruse Google alerts to bring you a roundup of the day’s top education headlines, in Colorado and across the country, by 8 a.m. If you’d like to suggest a story we’ve missed or a source we should add to the list, please email us at ednews@ednewscolorado.org.

Chicago Public Schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett offered an upbeat vision of the district's future during a Tribune-sponsored event Tuesday night, a dramatically different take from that given by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis in a speech earlier in the day at the City Club of Chicago.

Byrd-Bennett went so far as to predict an end to an often-contentious relationship with the teachers union. Lewis offered a more stark assessment, saying she feared the layoffs of 850 CPS teachers and workers announced last week were "just the tip of the iceberg" for a system facing a $1 billion deficit.

CHARTER GAINS: Illinois elementary charter school students made more academic gains than students in comparable district-run schools, according to a new report from Stanford University. Latino charter students posted the most impressive results, in math. Yet there are plenty of caveats to be gleaned from the report’s other findings, especially for African American students, who continued to fare worst academically in both traditional schools and charters. To download a copy of the state report, click here. (Catalyst)

MONEY FOR EARLY EDUCATION: The Robert R. McCormick Foundation will be awarding nearly $6 million in grants over two years to 19 nonprofit organizations to support a quality system of early care and education in Illinois. The Foundation will be awarding Illinois Action for Children a $250,000 grant to support improvements in Chicago’s early education programs. Action will collaborate with Chicago Public Schools and the Department of Family Support Services, which together operate more than 700 early-learning programs, to help align standards and advance a more unified early childhood system. The grant will help identify early education programs with high needs and will create group trainings and learning communities to support quality improvement. (Press release)

TEACHER PREP UNDER FIRE: An effort to rate the quality of teacher preparation programs around the country is drawing fire from local colleges of education. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released a similar report on Illinois universities in fall 2010, panned a majority of the 1,100 programs it reviewed, saying they lacked important elements needed to train high-quality teachers. (Catalyst)

IN THE NATION
To help schools meet the new requirement to evaluate teachers based on student achievement, Virginia officials created a method for calculating how much students learned in a year. By extension, they believe that the same method can show how well teachers are doing their jobs. (The Washington Post)

Chicago Public Schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett offered an upbeat vision of the district's future during a Tribune-sponsored event Tuesday night, a dramatically different take from that given by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis in a speech earlier in the day at the City Club of Chicago.

Byrd-Bennett went so far as to predict an end to an often-contentious relationship with the teachers union. Lewis offered a more stark assessment, saying she feared the layoffs of 850 CPS teachers and workers announced last week were "just the tip of the iceberg" for a system facing a $1 billion deficit.

CHARTER GAINS: Illinois elementary charter school students made more academic gains than students in comparable district-run schools, according to a new report from Stanford University. Latino charter students posted the most impressive results, in math. Yet there are plenty of caveats to be gleaned from the report’s other findings, especially for African American students, who continued to fare worst academically in both traditional schools and charters. To download a copy of the state report, click here. (Catalyst)

MONEY FOR EARLY EDUCATION: The Robert R. McCormick Foundation will be awarding nearly $6 million in grants over two years to 19 nonprofit organizations to support a quality system of early care and education in Illinois. The Foundation will be awarding Illinois Action for Children a $250,000 grant to support improvements in Chicago’s early education programs. Action will collaborate with Chicago Public Schools and the Department of Family Support Services, which together operate more than 700 early-learning programs, to help align standards and advance a more unified early childhood system. The grant will help identify early education programs with high needs and will create group trainings and learning communities to support quality improvement. (Press release)

TEACHER PREP UNDER FIRE: An effort to rate the quality of teacher preparation programs around the country is drawing fire from local colleges of education. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released a similar report on Illinois universities in fall 2010, panned a majority of the 1,100 programs it reviewed, saying they lacked important elements needed to train high-quality teachers. (Catalyst)

IN THE NATION
To help schools meet the new requirement to evaluate teachers based on student achievement, Virginia officials created a method for calculating how much students learned in a year. By extension, they believe that the same method can show how well teachers are doing their jobs. (The Washington Post)

• Eighth graders at a Brooklyn school were told they flunked exams that were in fact misplaced. (Post)
• Officials are racing to fix glitchy grading on high school exams before graduation. (GothamSchools)
• The UFT’s preparations to endorse and support a mayoral candidate are unprecedented. (Times)
• More siblings are getting preference in the city’s elite gifted programs than two years ago. (WSJ)
• BiIll Thompson, who is seeking the union’s pick, has courted Bloomberg allies, too. (GothamSchools)
• A top Bloomberg aide cast a preemptive shot at Thompson for his Board of Education tenure. (Post)
• The principals union endorsed Thompson a day before teachers make their pick. (GothamSchools, WSJ)
• Arne Duncan told states with new standards they don’t have to impose evaluations yet. (Times, HuffPo)
• New York, a state that hasn’t slowed down, approved a new “enhanced” growth model. (GothamSchools)
• A first-ever report on teacher prep schools found many of New York’s programs lacking. (Times Union)
• Washington Post: Despite its controversial reception, the report could lead to groundbreaking reforms.
• Boston is poised to become the latest city to make condoms broadly available in schools. (Times)
• Parents want the city to remove their principal after learning he made threatening remarks. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says the DOE should easily be able to remove school staff who threaten student safety.
• Salad bars were installed in Staten Island school cafeterias, bringing the borough total to 50. (Advance)
• One of Bill de Blasio’s new ideas is to model 100 new schools on Harlem Children’s Zone. (Times)

• Sometimes, school space-sharing plans stir up controversy. Sometimes, they don’t. (Brooklyn Bureau)
• A special education teacher recounts the saga of waiting for an observation that never came. (Miss Rim)
• Joel Klein is still not sure how the market will respond to Amplify, but he’s optimistic. (Fast Company)
• A new video profiles two schools that are teaching Asian languages to their students. (Asia Society)
• Houston is considering using student surveys for up to 30 percent of teachers’ ratings. (Joanne Jacobs)
• A city teacher who once backed the Common Core says she has changed her mind. (Living in Dialogue)
• In a new video, the State Education Department tries to win over Common Core skeptics. (GS in Brief)
• The city is opening 29 new dual-language programs this fall: what they are and where. (Insideschools)

A slew of glitches in the city’s electronic grading for Regents exams have delayed scores for several subjects, just days before high schools are set to begin holding graduation ceremonies.

The problems represent at best a significant inconvenience and cost and at worst a threat to students’ scores and graduation status, according to educators with knowledge of the grading process.

This is the first June that all Regents exams taken at city high schools are being graded through “distributed scoring,” an arrangement devised to prevent teachers from scoring tests taken by students at their schools. Until last year, teachers graded their own students’ exams, but under pressure to show that test scores are not inflated, the state barred that practice. The city’s scoring system extends the state’s rules.

After a pilot last year, the Department of Education opted to have four of the most-taken tests — Living Environment, Global Studies, U.S. History, and English — scored electronically. McGraw-Hill, the vendor administering the process, collects the exams at schools, transports them to a scanning site in Connecticut, and then distributes answers one by one to teachers stationed at computers in city grading centers.

The company is getting $3.5 million this year from the city to administer the distributed scoring program, part of a $9.6 million, three-year contract to manage the logistical acrobatics that the new arrangement requires.

The process resulted in quicker and scoring during the pilot, according to Adina Lopatin, the department’s deputy chief academic officer. She said teachers moved more quickly through exam responses because they did not have to shuffle through papers.

But the time savings have been more than negated by serious glitches as the city has scaled up electronic scoring to include all high schools this month. At some schools, exams were not picked up until days after they were taken, teachers said. Teachers have reported to scoring sites daily, only to be sent back to their schools after being told that not enough items had been scanned for them to grade.

And even when there are answers to score, bandwidth issues have prevented teachers from grading them quickly in some schools, and in others, McGraw-Hill’s efforts to redact identifying information about students left answers partially obscured. One teacher said his site had graded just 20 exams on Monday and another 50 today because of the problems.

The cumulative result is that three exams required for graduation will not be graded by the department’s expected deadline. Niket Mull, who directs the Office of Assessment, sent an email to principals on Monday explaining that the Living Environment exam would be scored not by Wednesday but by Friday. Instead of being scored by Thursday, the history exams will not be complete until the end of the week or even Monday.

Schools begin holding graduation ceremonies on Thursday, although most are scheduled for next week. Schools are also in the process of determining who needs to attend summer school and what courses students should take next fall, decisions that can’t be made until scores are in.

One principal who estimated that at least 50 students at his school need scores to graduate that seem unlikely to arrive in time for the school’s commencement. He said he would be asking their parents to sign a form indicating that they understand that graduation is conditional on the test scores.

“I’ve never had to do that before,” the principal said. “I’m pretty strict about allowing kids to walk if they haven’t met the requirements. … But this is different.”

That’s the process that the department will be advising principals to use, softening a normally hard and fast rule that students cannot walk at graduation if they have not met all of the requirements, according to Erin Hughes, a spokeswoman.

Hughes said McGraw-Hill would pay for teachers’ overtime pay if scoring has to happen over the weekend, something she said she was not sure would happen.

When the department put out a call for teachers to grade the global history exam in January, only about 60 percent as many signed up as were needed, and the city was forced to drop the requirement that schools not grade their own tests. Many, many more exams are taken in June.

A teacher who was sent home early from a Brooklyn grading site on Monday after exhausting the answers in the online system said he was told that weekend scoring would be inevitable. Only about a quarter of the city’s 60,000 global studies exams have been graded, he said administrators at the site told graders today.

He said he also worried that the electronic scoring system would adversely affect students’ scores. Many of the essays he saw had the first several lines blocked out by McGraw-Hill’s effort to obscure details about students, and he said he marked all of the essays as unreadable.

Another issue, teachers said, is that graders might have marked essays as unwritten if students began them in the wrong place in the test booklet, or as not responding to the question if students wrote the wrong essay in each space.

“Back in the paper days you could flip around the booklet to see what else the student wrote, and figure out if the first essay was in fact the DBQ, and the essay in “Part IIIB” page was the thematic,” said a teacher with eight years of experience grading Regents exams, referring to the two essay types on history exams.

And a third teacher said bandwidth issues meant that several minutes elapsed at times between when graders asked for the next page to load and when it appeared on their screen. “This is asking a teacher with tired eyes from staring at a computer screen to remember that essay they were reading and pick up later,” the teacher said. “I can’t imagine this … having no negative effects on students.”

Overall, teachers said, the glitches raised serious questions about the city’s decision to outsource a grading process that had always been done in-house.

“We could have done this already if we’d had the exams in the school,” one teacher said. “It’s very unsettling and not good for the students.”

An effort to rate the quality of teacher preparation programs around the country is drawing fire from local colleges of education. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released a similar report on Illinois universities in fall 2010, panned a majority of the 1,100 programs it reviewed, saying they lacked important elements needed to train high-quality teachers.

“The results were dismal,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The review centered on criteria like course content and length, selectivity, and the quality of the student teaching experience.

“The quality of training in the U.S. for elementary math… is so far below international standards for training teachers as to be a grave, grave concern,” Walsh added.

Overall, not one elementary education program in the U.S. earned the highest-possible rating of four stars, and just 20 earned at least three stars. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education issued a statement blasting the report, saying it is "based on a review of documents with such inconsistent participation and fragmented inputs that it would not be published by a credible, professional research organization."

Yet the review also raises concerns about whether teachers have enough content knowledge to teach to the Common Core State Standards. Using measures like the number of subject matter courses students are required to take and their incoming standardized test scores, the review asserts that just one in nine elementary education programs ensure that students know the material they’ll need to teach.

Another issue it found was a lack of safeguards to ensure the teachers who work with student-teachers are master practitioners. “When a student teacher has a great experience, it’s primarily because they lucked out,” Walsh said. Schools “simply say we’ll take anyone a school district might offer, as long as they have three years of experience.”

Illinois’ schools of education did better in some areas and worse in others. Three-fourths of the state’s programs were as selective as the review’s standards called for.

But just 6 percent of Illinois programs, versus 19 percent nationwide, had strong elementary math components. Just 8 percent of the state’s programs were met criteria for classroom management, compared to 23 percent nationwide.

And just 4 percent met NCTQ’s standards for secondary content-area preparation, compared with 35 percent nationwide – likely because of differences in state requirements.

Programs not happy

Vicki Chou, dean of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s College of Education, said that “the whole exercise was an enormous waste of money, time, (and) resources.”

She added: “The universities are doing excellent work trying to prepare good teachers. It’s discouraging that these distractions come up.”

Southern Illinois University’s Acting Director of Teacher Education, Kelly Glassett, notes that a number of schools of education decided not to participate in the review.

As a result, the findings note that some of the ratings are based on information that NCTQ collected in 2010, and may be out of date. In other cases, “they counted zeroes because we didn’t give them any data,” Glassett says.

And, he points out, schools of education are now in the middle of revamping their curricula to meet new state requirements – among them, including more emphasis on reading instruction, an area where many programs nationwide lost points.

He was also concerned about the ratings’ focus on just five elements of effective reading instruction, saying it could lead to prospective missing out on the larger context of how, for instance, a child’s exposure to language at home affects their reading development.

Perry Schoon, dean of Illinois State University’s College of Education, says that his school sent NCTQ the information they asked for.

“Their approach was very thin, with sweeping conclusions,” he said. “We completely disagree with the inaccurate assessment and the rankings. We don’t believe they can draw the conclusion they did from the information they had.”

Illinois universities were rated as “not applicable” for program effectiveness because the state doesn’t yet publish data on ties between teacher preparation programs and student achievement. But, he noted, many universities keep their own data on effectiveness and improvement.

Rationale for ratings

Walsh, on the other hand, said that schools of education “believe that their charge is to prepare a teacher who will have the professional disposition, the confidence…. to come up with their own system for teaching children, for managing children.”

This, she asserted, leads to too little “imparting specific knowledge and skills that will allow a teacher to be ready to teach on day one.”

She also blamed academic freedom, the tradition of professors being allowed to choose their own course content, for teacher preparation’s challenges.

“There were 866 textbooks that were used to teach readers how to teach reading. You wouldn’t find that in any other field,” Walsh said.

She admitted that the ratings were “not a deep review.”

“There’s a lot of really great teachers who come out of weak programs. The wrong message for you to get today is that an institution is turning out bad teachers if it gets low rankings from us,” Walsh said.

Illinois elementary charter school students made more academic gains than students in comparable district-run schools, according to a new report from Stanford University. Latino charter students posted the most impressive results, in math. Yet there are plenty of caveats to be gleaned from the report’s other findings, especially for African American students, who continued to fare worst academically in both traditional schools and charters.

The study expands on a previous, much-cited 2009 report that looked at Chicago charter schools--the vast majority of those in Illinois--as well as charters in another 16 states and found that the city’s charters performed better overall. Both reports are part of ongoing research on charter school effectiveness at CREDO, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which plans to publish a full study covering 26 states next week. (The reports can be found at CREDO’s website.)

The gains touted in the latest report, which covers 2008 through 2012, are statistically significant in research terms, albeit modest in the real world. On average, Illinois elementary charter school students gained two additional weeks of learning in reading and one additional month of learning in math over the course of the school year, according to the study. And only about one in five charters performed significantly better in reading than traditional schools.

Those findings might not be striking, especially to charter critics. Andrew Broy of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools acknowledges that. “One thing revealed by this report is that we don’t have enough high-performing schools of any type in Chicago," he says. "We view charters much more as part of the solution [than critics do]. But that doesn’t hide the fact that we all have to do better by our students.”

Chicago’s older charter schools drove much of the improvement. Newer charters have a positive effect, but less than in the 2009 study, according to Dev Davis, research manager at CREDO. However, the new report does not provide breakdowns for the two groups.

The study used the same methodology as the 2009 report, comparing reading and math scores for Illinois elementary charter school students, in grades 3 through 8, with a “virtual twin”--a demographically similar student from a traditional district-run school that the charter student would have attended. (The report included 65 charter campuses and 18,689 students.)

Other findings:

-- In reading, 21 percent of charters performed worse than traditional schools, while 20 percent did better and 59 percent showed no difference. In math, 21 percent of charters did worse, 37 percent performed better and 42 percent showed no difference.

-- Black and Hispanic students continued to lag behind white students in reading, and received “no significant benefit or loss from charter school attendance” compared to students in traditional schools

-- Latinos in charter schools made far more significant gains in math than in traditional schools, even when compared to white students, effectively erasing the achievement gap in the subject.

-- Low-income charter students made slightly more gains in reading than low-income students in traditional schools, but had similar performance in math.

“Clearly, there is room to grow,” says Broy. “We have substantial achievement gaps, especially with black students, poor students. The same challenges as faced by public schools are faced by charters.”

The study also found that students in their second and third years at a charter performed better than new, first-year charter students. English-language learners in charter and traditional schools had similar performance.

The study found evidence that charter students were more likely to hold students back, and retained students made stronger gains in charters than in traditional schools. Still, the study says that the difference can’t be considered significant, since retained students are a small group whose academic performance varied widely.

State test scores won’t count more toward the evaluations of elementary and middle school teachers next year, according to an amended proposal that a Board of Regents committee passed unanimously on Monday.

The proposed model, which was formally approved on Tuesday, included a methodology to calculate student growth that was nearly identical to the “value-added” model that State Education Commissioner John King brought to the board in April. Both models add new data points to the formula used to approximate how much each teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

But under state law, any model termed “value-added” would have required, controversially, that its weight increase from 20 to 25 percent on some teacher evaluations. King’s alternative this month was for the state to adopt an “enhanced growth model” that adds virtually all of the same data points but doesn’t have the value-added moniker. Spurning the name allows the state to avoid increasing the weight of test scores until all districts have at least one year of implementation under their belts, something the state teachers union has asked for.

“I would have thought that adding all these factors would qualify as ‘value-added,’ but this distinction was always opaque,” said Jonah Rockoff, a Columbia University economist who advised the state on its methodology “If the commissioner wants to keep the weight at 20 percent for another year then staying within the ‘student growth’ framework seems like the simplest way to do it.”

Both models will factor in more complex student and classroom characteristics to calculate learning on those state tests. But the April proposal was met with resistance from members who questioned the methodology’s reliability and opposed increasing the weight from 20 percent to 25 percent. The increase was one that lawmakers envisioned would take place for the current school year when they enacted the teacher evaluation legislation in 2010.

King’s proposal would stay in effect through end of the 2013-2014 school year, until New York City, which lags behind the rest of the state, has a chance to implement its teacher evaluation system for the first time.

With barely a peep of opposition, the board voted to adopt the “value-added” model at 25 percent beginning in the 2014-2015 school year. The changes affect only elementary and middle school teachers who teach English and math, who together make up less than 20 percent of the state’s teachers.

Chancellor Merryl Tisch first signaled that King’s proposal in April was in jeopardy last week, saying that forgoing the added weight of state test scores was a concession the Regents were willing to make.

“This is not the stuff that I feel we go to war over,” Tisch said.

The state teachers union was quick to claim credit for the amended proposal, issuing a lengthy statement that praised Tisch and the Board of Regents. In a sign that the chilly relations between the union and the State Education Department have not thawed, the statement does not mention King.

“NYSUT, as the voice of teachers across the state, remains committed to working as partners with the Regents and other policymakers toward our shared goal of raising standards and improving outcomes for all students,” said Dick Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers.

New York City Department of Education Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said the city did not stake out a strong position on the issue.

“Honestly, it makes no difference,” he said. “I know this was a big issue for the state teachers union, but it really makes no difference between 25 and 20 [percent]. It isn’t what’s going to impact the teacher’s final score. It doesn’t change the data in a substantive way, so we don’t have strong opposition or support for the change.”

The state teacher’s union release refers to the “untested, unreliable Value-Added Model,” but the growth model that the Board of Regents formally approved today isn’t all that different. The basic growth model in place currently takes into account just four individual student variables: previous years’ test scores, whether a student is learning English, whether he has a learning disability, and whether his family is in poverty.

The “enhanced” growth model — as with the value-added model — takes into account many new and more complex variables. Now, the test scores of a student who was held back a year or who is new to a school will be weighted differently. Previous test scores in other subjects will also be considered.

Growth ratings will also be weighted based on how many special education or English language learning students a teacher has in her classroom.

The state will also count the test scores of students who were in attendance at least 60 percent of the school year, a change from the 2011-2012 school year that could account for nearly 150,000 students. Their scores will be weighted in part based on their rate of truancy.

Two factors that were part of the “value-added” proposal that got nixed from the newer version were a teacher’s class size and the number of overage and under-credited students. Those factors will be considered in 2014-2015 when state tests incrase to 25 perent. King said that there might be other data points to review with its contractor, American Institute of Research, to further refine the growth model.

 

A day before the teachers union is set to endorse a mayoral candidate, New York City’s principals union has backed former Board of Education president Bill Thompson while acknowledging that they don’t agree on all policy issues.

“I don’t know if we’ll always agree on what’s best,” said Ernest Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators. ”But that’s the difference here — having someone talk to you and be collaborative and listen to you.”

He added about Thompson, “He respects school leaders … and we’re not getting that” under Bloomberg.

Logan signaled that the union’s executive board was not at all unanimous in its decision. Thompson had twice as many votes as the next closest candidate, Logan said, but he won just 40 percent of the board’s vote.

The UFT’s endorsement is due out Wednesday afternoon. A CSA spokeswoman, Chiara Coletti, said the unions had not consulted each other on their picks. The last time the UFT and CSA endorsed the same candidates was in 2001, when both endorsed then-Public Advocate Mark Green in the general election. But the principals union stepped out in 2005 to endorse Fernando Ferrer for mayor, when the UFT sat out the election completely.

Logan said his union had been ”encouraged by [Thompson's] promise to call a moratorium on the co-location of new schools within older ones.” While Thompson has called for a temporary ban on charter school co-locations, he has also cozied up to the charter sector by supporting its expansion and declining, as some other candidates have, to call for charter schools that operate in city-owned buildings to pay rent.

Other reasons CSA chose Thompson, Logan said, include his pledges to cede control of the Panel for Education Policy, install an educator as chancellor, and return power to community superintendents.

The union endorsement confers cachet for the candidate, and it also suggests that CSA will work to turn out its members to campaign for Thompson. Logan said he would do everything he could to help Thompson get elected.

When Logan was asked what separates Thompson from mayoral candidate and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — another top contender for tomorrow’s UFT endorsement — Logan said, “Bill and Bill… have always been good friends of public education. … What separates them is our members have voted to endorse Bill Thompson.”

Only a few probationary teachers whose contracts were not renewed next year would be banned from teaching for life by the Denver Public Schools under policy tweaks discussed by the school board Monday.

Melissa Valverde McKibben, a recently blacklisted kindergarten teacher from Force Elementary, says the “do not rehire” policy should be overturned at a DCTA press conference Monday.

The remaining 70-plus teachers placed on the so-called “do not rehire” list this year could have a shot at returning to Denver schools in three years if they can demonstrate improvement in another district or charter school.

But the teachers union said teachers should be immediately able to apply for other district jobs if there are principals willing to hire them. And school board members who discussed the controversial practice at a work session said they wanted more specifics.

“It’s a good first stab,” board member Jeannie Kaplan said. “But there is a lot of un-specificity. It doesn’t give me great cause for celebration.”

At a midday press conference in front of the DPS administration building, Denver Classroom Teachers Association President Henry Roman said the changes proposed by staff are headed in the right direction but don’t go far enough. He said he agreed that teachers should be blacklisted for “egregious and criminal actions.” But the DCTA believes a three-year waiting period is too harsh.

“We want to make sure [DPS] grants immediate rehiring eligibility for our teachers without a waiting period of banishment from the district,” Roman said. “And we want to make sure the board gets to review information based on recommendations.”

Roman complained that many of the 220 probationary teachers whose contracts were not renewed this spring were not given adequate help and support — even when they asked for it.

“We absolutely want a highly effective and qualified teacher in every classroom,” he said. “This ‘do not rehire’ policy assumes everything wrong in Denver Public Schools is because teachers are not working hard enough, which is absolutely not true.”

Following the press conference and again later to the board, Superintendent Tom Boasberg reiterated the same points he has made in response to teacher complaints about the practice.

“This affects fewer than 2 percent of our teachers,” Boasberg said. “This is based on teachers where there are very significant performance issues. It’s based on multiple observations…It’s based on growth…We look at every one of these cases very carefully.”

Boasberg said this approach is more fair than the old way of doing business, which was to either give a probationary teacher tenure after three years or fire them. Now, probationary status can be continued indefinitely.

“Our sole interest to have the best teachers in the classroom,” Boasberg said. “The research is so clear that nothing matters more for students than the quality of our teachers.”

Boasberg said it would be wrong to allow a teacher who had repeatedly shown no  student growth to be shipped off to another Denver school.

“We can’t go back to the days when political pressure meant more to performance in terms of who is teaching our kids,” he said.

Teachers complain of power wielded by some principals

However, several teachers who spoke at the press conference said they still felt that personal vendettas by principals could determine a person’s fate as a teacher.

CMS Community School parent Angela Rodriguez complains about the number of probationary teachers whose contracts were not renewed at her school at a DCTA news conference Monday.

Darcy Bauer, an early childhood educator, said she was blacklisted by DPS in 2012.  She said two other Denver principals were willing to interview her, but they couldn’t due to her being on the “do not rehire” list.

“Quite frankly, we’re treated like criminals,” she said. “When this happened to me, it was a shattering experience. It was unfair and deeply disturbing.”

Melissa Valverde McKibben, a recently blacklisted kindergarten teacher from Force Elementary, said she had demonstrated results with her students but described being “lied to” by her principal and the district after being promised help and support but not receiving it. She also said she is not a “yes man” and said nothing could make her principal like her after she spoke up.

“Only after I was non renewed and labeled ‘do not rehire’ did they take a look at my data,” said McKibben, who spoke as her family stood behind her.  “I was shut out for an ambiguously vague reason, ‘We didn’t see what we were looking for.’”

Angela Rodriguez, a mom of three students at CMS Community School, said 27 teachers from her school were not renewed based on the recommendations of a first-year principal whom she said lacked the experience to make the recommendations.

“We as parents should have a say so whether these teachers should stay or not,” Rodriguez said. “We know the value they bring to our children.”

Proposed changes to practice

The proposed change to a longstanding district practice came in the wake of vocal outcry from the teachers union and many of the 80 probationary teachers who were blacklisted this year.

The initial do not rehire was not part of any official policy but was a well-known practice in Denver.

Under proposed changes, the district’s Department of Human Resources, in consultation with the teacher’s supervisor and the instructional superintendent, would be responsible for determining whether a teacher whose probationary contract has been non-renewed will be eligible for rehire within the district.

District staff made it clear that the changes have nothing to do with teachers in good standing whose positions are eliminated or those who are simply not a good fit at their current school. Those teachers are immediately eligible for rehire in the district. Still, board member Happy Haynes said the proposed changes should clarify what “fit” means.

“I don’t have any expectation it would cover every single circumstance, but I would like to get a reasonable understanding of what ‘fit’ is,” Haynes said.

To be permanently blacklisted by DPS, on the other hand, the teacher must have committed a serious crime, presented a risk to colleges, mistreated students, been involved in workplace misconduct, or have demonstrated issues with integrity.

Teachers whose probationary contracts have been non-renewed or teachers who have resigned in lieu of non-renewal of their probationary contracts due to significant performance issues would be “conditionally eligible” for rehire within the district. This means the teacher would have to show three consecutive years of “demonstrated successful teaching performance” at a charter school, which is exempt from district hiring policies, or in another district.

School board members said they wanted clarity about what constituted “successful teaching performance.”

Boasberg said it referred to classroom performance, professionalism and student perception surveys. But board members wanted more specifics before they discuss and fine-tune the changes Thursday.

Under the proposed tweaks, if district staff agreed the teacher had improved, he or she could apply for jobs in DPS.  No job would be guaranteed, though, and teachers would start anew on the probationary teacher pathway if they were re-hired.

Under Senate Bill 10-191, which goes into effect this fall, all Colorado teachers who demonstrate effectiveness for three consecutive years will be granted non-probationary status.