UW study questions seniority-based teacher layoffs

By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP

Associated Press

SEATTLE —

A study of Washington state teachers has found that deciding layoffs based solely on which teachers have the least seniority has a significant impact on students' ability to learn, adding to a growing chorus calling for schools to take a hard look at union contracts dictating who gets to keep their jobs.

The study comes as tens of thousands of teachers around the country stand to lose their jobs next year as federal stimulus money dries up. In most places, union contracts and other policies generally dictate that the least experienced teachers are the first to go.

But that comes at a price, according to the study released exclusively to The Associated Press on Thursday.

The Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington, which studies the relationships between education policies and student outcomes, looked at the 1,717 Washington state teachers who were given layoff notices in either of the past two school years.

Most of those teachers were given notices because they had the least seniority; nearly all of them ultimately kept their jobs, but many face layoffs next year as federal stimulus money used to retain them dries up.

Researchers compared the actual layoff notice list with a list of teachers who would have been laid off using a measurement of effectiveness known as "value-added," in which teachers are judged by the improvement of their students on standardized tests.

Lacking seniority didn't necessarily equate with doing poorly on the value-added measurement; about 275 teachers were on both lists.

Using teachers' past performance, the researchers predicted the performance of two hypothetical school systems: one in which the teachers receiving notices had actually lost their jobs, and one in which more than 1,300 of the lowest-performing teachers had been fired instead.

Dan Goldhaber, lead author of the study and the center's director, projected that student achievement after seniority-based layoffs would drop by an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 months of learning per student, when compared to laying off the least effective teachers.

"If your bottom line is student achievement, then this is not the best system," Goldhaber said.

But determining who are the best and worst teachers is also problematic, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country's largest teacher unions.

She criticized the research, saying it could further push school districts toward evaluating teachers strictly on student test scores. Teacher unions criticize the value-added method, pointing to research showing it leads to inconsistent and inconclusive results.

"This report is actually going to do a tremendous disservice. It will stop the real work that needs to be done to development comprehensive evaluation systems," Weingarten said.

A state education research expert said Goldhaber's conclusions would be useful in the discussion about national education policy.

"We'd like to see more research and more information on these areas," said Joseph Koski, research and policy analyst, for Washington's Professional Educator Standards Board.

A young teacher in the Chicago suburbs who received a layoff notice last spring but kept his job said he likes the idea of keeping the best teachers, but wonders how schools can be sure they're keeping the right people.

"You're letting go of the people who probably know the most about connecting with students," said Hemant Mehta, 27, who is in his fourth year teaching high school math in Naperville, Ill. Age and test scores are not the only ways to evaluate teachers, he added.

The research found that using a strict seniority system for layoffs has a variety of other consequences, including:

- School districts lay off more teachers to meet their budget goals because junior teachers are paid less.

- Some districts lay off teachers in high-demand and hard-to-fill areas such as special education.

- Seniority-based layoffs disproportionately hit schools where the most needy kids are and the least senior teachers usually work.

The value-added method of evaluating teachers has its detractors, including Goldhaber. He said the method is less accurate for teachers with shorter careers and more accurate when comparing teachers who have the same amount of experience.

The researchers were able to explore this issue statewide, instead of using data from a single school district, because Washington state is ahead of most other states in tracking student and teacher data.

The research drew support from others opposed to laying off teachers with less experience.

A class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the Los Angeles Unified School District argues that the district's seniority-based layoffs denied students a fair and adequate education because so many of the junior teachers taught in low-income areas where teacher turnover is high and attracting good teachers is difficult.

"It confirms the common sense and backs it up with evidence that many teachers being forced out in the current approach are superstar teachers," said David Sapp, an attorney for ACLU-Southern California. "It's further exacerbating the inequity that exists."

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Online:

Center for Education Data and Research, http://www.cedr.us

Proficiency of Black Students Is Found To Be Far Lower Than Expected

By TRIP GABRIEL

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.

But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.

“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.

The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower.

The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.

The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.

What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.

The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” Mr. Casserly said.

Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is “really good teaching.”

One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent four years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier.

Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts’ homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts — “almost like an electrical charge” — when a student misses several days of school.

“Hispanic kids and African-American kids this year had a lower dropout rate than white kids,” Mr. Alonso said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 12, 2010

An article on Tuesday about a report on the achievement gap in schools between black male students and white male students in reading and math referred incorrectly in some editions to data from Baltimore’s urban school district. The information for the district’s progress in dropout rates and graduation rates for African-American boys in the last academic year was compared with data from three years ago, not four years ago. The article also referred imprecisely to the significance of the number of black men in college. While black men made up “just 5 percent” of college students in 2008, that figure did not represent one of the areas in which blacks showed a lack of achievement, given that black men make up only about 6.5 percent of the general population.

Michelle Rhee Does the Unthinkable

I've heard many people who've become frustrated with teacher unions, including myself, ask "why aren't students their first priority?" That's a great question, but I'm not sure if students are SUPPOSED to be their first priority.  Unions are created to serve their members, and in the teacher's union, that so happens to be the teacher.  Should their priorities change because students aren't getting a fair shake in our broken education system - no. Does that sound strange - sure. But supporting the concept of a union and supporting the improvement of our schools are two different arguments.  I've made the point for quite some time now that the solution is not in trying to change the teacher's union,  but rather, to create a counterweight with a constituency consisting of our priority - the students.

With that being said, I was so excited to hear that Michelle Rhee's next endeavor is not to repair another city's dysfunctional system, but rather to create a lobby of over one million individuals and one billion dollars on behalf of students to counter the teacher's union lobby.  She calls it "StudentsFirst," and I truly believe that with the momentum today in education reform and with key individuals on board (Obama, Zuckerberg, Oprah, city mayors, etc), we are going to be seeing dynamic changes in education across America.

Below is Rhee's article explaining her reasons behind StudentsFirst. Also, you can find her Oprah interview on youtube.

Why I'm Not Done Fighting For Kids
By: Michelle Rhee

After my boss, Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty, lost his primary in September, I was stunned. I had never imagined he wouldn’t win the contest, given the progress that was visible throughout the city—the new recreation centers, the turnaround of once struggling neighborhoods, and, yes, the improvements in the schools. Three and a half years ago, when I first met with Fenty about becoming chancellor of the D.C. public-school system, I had warned him that he wouldn’t want to hire me. If we did the job right for the city’s children, I told him, it would upset the status quo—I was sure I would be a political problem. But Fenty was adamant. He said he would back me—and my changes—100 percent. He never wavered, and I convinced myself the public would see the progress and want it to continue. But now I have no doubt this cost him the election.

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. The new movie Waiting for Superman—which aimed to generate public passion for school reform the way An Inconvenient Truth had for climate change—premiered in Washington the night after the election. The film championed the progress Fenty and I had been making in the District, and lamented the roadblocks we’d faced from the teachers’ union. In the pro-reform crowd, you could feel the shock that voters had just rejected this mayor and, to some extent, the reforms in their schools.

When I started as chancellor in 2007, I never had any illusions about how tough it would be to turn around a failing system like D.C.’s; the city had gone through seven chancellors in the 10 years before me. While I had to make many structural changes—overhauling the system for evaluating teachers and principals, adopting new reading and math programs, making sure textbooks got delivered on time—I believed the hardest thing would be changing the culture. We had to raise the expectations that people had about what was possible for our kids.

I quickly announced a plan to close almost two dozen schools, which provoked community outrage. We cut the central office administration in half. And I also proposed a new contract for teachers that would increase their salaries dramatically if they abandoned the tenure system and agreed to be paid based on their effectiveness.

Though all of these actions caused turmoil in the district, they were long overdue and reaped benefits quickly. In my first two years in office, the D.C. schools went from being the worst performing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress examination, the national test, to leading the nation in gains at both the fourth and eighth grade in reading as well as math. By this school year we reversed a trend of declining enrollment and increased the number of families choosing District schools for the first time in 41 years.

Because of results like these, I have no regrets about moving so fast. So much needed to be fixed, and there were times when I know it must have felt overwhelming to the teachers because we were trying to fix everything at once. But from my point of view, waiting meant that another year was going by when kids were not getting the education they deserved.

I know people say I wasn’t good enough at building consensus, but I don’t think consensus can be the goal. Take, for example, one of our early boiling points: school closures. We held dozens of community meetings about the issue. But would people really have been happier with the results if we had done it more slowly? I talked to someone from another district that spent a year and a half defining the criteria that outlined which schools would close. But when the results were announced, everyone went nuts. They had seen the criteria. What did they think was going to happen? That’s when I realized there is no good way to close a school.

Still, I could have done a better job of communicating. I did a particularly bad job letting the many good teachers know that I considered them to be the most important part of the equation. I should have said to the effective teachers, “You don’t have anything to worry about. My job is to make your life better, offer you more support, and pay you more.” I totally fell down on doing that. As a result, my comments about ineffective teachers were often perceived as an attack on all teachers. I also underestimated how much teachers would be relying on the blogs, random rumors, and innuendo. Over the last 18 to 24 months, I held teacher-listening sessions a couple of times a week. But fear was already locked in. In the end, the changes that we needed to make meant that some teachers and principals would lose their jobs in a punishing economy. I don’t know if there was any good way to do that.

Some people believed I had disdain for the public. I read a quote where a woman said it seemed like I was listening, but I didn’t do what she told me to do. There’s a big difference there. It’s not that I wasn’t listening; I just didn’t agree and went in a different direction. There’s no way you can please everyone.

But it’s true that I didn’t do enough to bring parents along, either. I saw a poll of people who live in a part of the city where the schools experienced a significant turnaround, and everyone agreed that they were overwhelmingly much better now. But when they were asked, did we need to fire the teachers to see this turnaround, they said no. We didn’t connect the dots for them.

After the shock of Fenty’s loss, it became clear to me that the best way to keep the reform going in the D.C. schools was for me to leave my job as chancellor. That was tough for me to accept. I called the decision heartbreaking, and I meant it, because there is a piece of my heart in every classroom, and always will be. To this day, I get mail from D.C. parents and kids who say, “Why did you leave us? The job wasn’t done. Why did you give up on us?” Those kinds of letters are really hard to read and respond to. I loved that job. But I felt that Mayor-elect Vincent Gray should have the same ability that Fenty had to appoint his own chancellor. And I knew I had become a lightning rod and excuse for the anti-reformers to oppose the changes that had to be made.

After stepping down, I had a chance to reflect on the challenges facing our schools today and the possible solutions. The truth is that despite a handful of successful reforms, the state of American education is pitiful, and getting worse. Spending on schools has more than doubled in the last three decades, but the increased resources haven’t produced better results. The U.S. is currently 21st, 23rd, and 25th among 30 developed nations in science, reading, and math, respectively. The children in our schools today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than the previous generation.

When you think about how things happen in our country—how laws get passed or policies are made—they happen through the exertion of influence. From the National Rifle Association to the pharmaceutical industry to the tobacco lobby, powerful interests put pressure on our elected officials and government institutions to sway or stop change.

Education is no different. We have textbook manufacturers, teachers’ unions, and even food vendors that work hard to dictate and determine policy. The public-employee unions in D.C., including the teachers’ union, spent huge sums of money to defeat Fenty. In fact, the new chapter president has said his No. 1 priority is job security for teachers, but there is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interests of children.

You can see the impact of this dynamic playing out every day. Policymakers, school-district administrators, and school boards who are beholden to special interests have created a bureaucracy that is focused on the adults instead of the students. Go to any public-school-board meeting in the country and you’ll rarely hear the words “children,” “students,” or “kids” uttered. Instead, the focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes. The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children.

The teachers’ unions get the blame for much of this. Elected officials, parents, and administrators implore them to “embrace change” and “accept reform.” But I don’t think the unions can or should change. The purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that.

What that means is that the reform community has to exert influence as well. That’s why I’ve decided to start StudentsFirst, a national movement to transform public education in our country. We need a new voice to change the balance of power in public education. Our mission is to defend and promote the interests of children so that America has the best education system in the world.

From the moment I resigned, I began hearing from citizens from across this country. I got e-mails, calls, and letters from parents, students, and teachers who said, “Don’t give up. We need you to keep fighting!” Usually, they’d then share with me a story about how the education system in their community was not giving students what they need or deserve. I got one e-mail from two people who have been trying to open a charter school in Florida and have been stopped every step of the way by the school district. No voices have moved me more than those of teachers. So many great teachers in this country are frustrated with the schools they are working in, the bureaucratic rules that bind them, and the hostility to excellence that pervades our education system.

The common thread in all of these communications was that these courageous people felt alone in battling the bureaucracy. They want help and advocates. There are enough people out there who understand and believe that kids deserve better, but until now, there has been no organization for them. We’ll ask people across the country to join StudentsFirst—we’re hoping to sign up 1 million members and raise $1 billion in our first year.

Studentsfirst will work so that great teachers can make a tremendous difference for students of every background. We believe every family can choose an excellent school—attending a great school should be a matter of fact, not luck. We’ll fight against ineffective instructional programs and bureaucracy so that public dollars go where they make the biggest difference: to effective instructional programs. Parent and family involvement are key to increased student achievement, but the entire community must be engaged in the effort to improve our schools.

Though we’ll be nonpartisan, we can’t pretend that education reform isn’t political. So we’ll put pressure on elected officials and press for changes in legislation to make things better for kids. And we’ll support and endorse school-board candidates and politicians—in city halls, statehouses, and the U.S. Congress—who want to enact policies around our legislative agenda. We’ll support any candidate who’s reform-minded, regardless of political party, so reform won’t just be a few courageous politicians experimenting in isolated locations; it’ll be a powerful, nationwide movement.

Lastly, we can’t shy away from conflict. I was at Harvard the other day, and someone asked about a statement that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others have made that public-school reform is the civil-rights issue of our generation. Well, during the civil-rights movement they didn’t work everything out by sitting down collaboratively and compromising. Conflict was necessary in order to move the agenda forward. There are some fundamental disagreements that exist right now about what kind of progress is possible and what strategies will be most effective. Right now, what we need to do is fight. We can be respectful about it. But this is the time to stand up and say what you believe, not sweep the issues under the rug so that we can feel good about getting along. There’s nothing more worthwhile than fighting for children. And I’m not done fighting.

A Mission to Transform Baltimore's Beaten Schools

By SABRINA TAVERNISE NYTimes

Published: December 1, 2010

BALTIMORE — For years, this city had one of the worst school systems in the country. Fewer than half its students graduated, enrollment had fallen precipitously and proficiency levels were far below the national average.

In 2007, the school board hiredAndres Alonso, a Cuban immigrant with a Harvard degree and strong views on how to change things. In three years, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of the school system, closing failing schools, slashing the central office staff by a third and replacing three-quarters of all school principals.

Not everyone likes Dr. Alonso’s methods, and many find that his brassy self-confidence can grate. But few are arguing with his results. Since he was hired, the dropout rate has fallen by half, more students are graduating and for the first time in many years, the system has gained students instead of losing them.

For Baltimore, such bragging rights are rare, given that it has lost more than a third of its population since the 1960s, as the middle class — both white and black — has fled to wealthier, safer suburbs.

“We were just about as low as we could be,” said Mary Pat Clarke, chairwoman of the education committee for the Baltimore City Council. “He blew into town with a suitcase full of ideas. Now the school system’s in motion.”

The city is a particularly stark laboratory for urban school reforms. It is a fraction of the size of New York, where Dr. Alonso was a deputy to Chancellor Joel I. Klein, and more troubled than Washington, whose many private schools and status as the nation’s capital have complicated overhaul efforts.

What is more, Baltimore’s troubled schools may be just as much a cause of the city’s problems as a result. The high dropout rate feeds a drug industry that has led to a landscape of boarded-up buildings and despair. The school system is 88 percent black (compared with the city’s 63 percent black population), and 84 percent of students are on free or reduced-price meals, a measure of poverty.

The murder rate here is six times that of New York City.

For Dr. Alonso, 53, those statistics made the job attractive, rather than a reason to run. When the school board offered him the job of superintendent in 2007, he took it without ever having set foot in the city. Nine commissioners met him three times in different places in Maryland, in order to avoid talk that he was leaving his job in New York.

“It’s a test case for what’s possible,” Dr. Alonso said. “There were incredible opportunities because the troubles were so big.”

The system had churned through six superintendents in six years, so Dr. Alonso’s priority was to persuade people that things would be different this time. For his changes to work, he needed a lot of support, but that took some convincing.

“The community felt alienated,” said Bishop Douglas I. Miles, a pastor at Koinonia Baptist Church and a major sponsor of youth programs in the city. “There was a sense that we weren’t wanted except to do bake sales.”

So Dr. Alonso held public meetings, inviting parents, librarians and leaders of nonprofits and churches. He directed community organizers to knock on doors in a campaign to bring back high school dropouts. Students as young as fifth graders were allowed to choose their schools in a boisterous annual fair.

“Everything was about creating a surge of energy into the schools,” he said. “I wanted people to have to push to get past each other.”

Next he took on the culture of the schools, which relied heavily on suspensions for discipline, a practice Dr. Alonso strongly opposed. “Kids come as is,” he likes to say, “and it’s our job to engage them.”

Now school administrators have to get his deputy’s signature for any suspension longer than five days. This year, suspensions fell below 10,000, far fewer than the 26,000 the system gave out in 2004.

Instead, schools handled discipline problems more through mediation, counseling and parent-teacher conferences, and offered incentives like sports and clubs. Mental health professionals were placed in every school with middle grades.

“There was a lot of punishment energy focused on the kids,” said Michael Sarbanes, executive director of community engagement. “We were trying to overcome a perception that had built up over years that we don’t want you.”

Some of the system’s 198 schools were beyond rescue, and Dr. Alonso closed them, all 26. Many new ones were opened in their place.

In one school that was closed, Homeland Security Academy, a middle school with a security-industry theme, students regularly set fires in the bathrooms.

“There were two and three fires a day and you couldn’t really teach,” said Deanna Delgado, who taught English there.

Even so, the closings drew resistance. Jimmy Gittings, a vice president for the American Federation of School Administrators, which represents school principals, argued that closing schools simply moves around a problem, and leaves its root cause — poverty — untouched.

“The foundation in the development of a child begins at home,” Mr. Gittings said. “We are not getting that foundation. That’s why our schools aren’t strong.”

The reorganization was also speeding the retirement of many older black educators, and though only about 15 percent of new principals were from outside Baltimore, people noticed.

“They come in with these high credentials, and you say, wow,” said the Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway, pastor at the Union Baptist Church. “But then you realize they’re literally moving through the city with a GPS.”

The politics of urban education reform can be fragile, but Dr. Alonso is relatively well protected because the board that chose him is appointed by both the governor and the mayor, making it all but impervious to political winds.

He took full advantage of that freedom, making fast changes. Under the old system, principals fulfilled directives from the central office. Now principals have full control over the schools’ budgets and are held accountable for performance. They are required to consult with a committee of parents and community representatives when deciding how the money will be spent.

The approach, not unlike the one taken by Mr. Klein in New York, has its critics. Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” argues that making individual principals more accountable shifts responsibility away from those who run school systems.

Valerie Johnson, who has been teaching in Baltimore since 2005, said she felt uncomfortable with the approach at first. “But because I saw so many dysfunctional schools just existing on their own, I’m more in favor,” she said.

Dr. Alonso, she said, has “gone more to the root of the problem,” instead of focusing solely on test scores.

And Baltimore teachers, who were initially opposed to Dr. Alonso’s methods, last month approved a contract that enshrined them. Now teachers are compensated based on performance, not longevity.

In an era when school reformers have become household names in their cities, Dr. Alonso clearly sees himself among them. He talks loftily of historical forces and once remarked that he felt like a character from “War and Peace.”

Dr. Alonso’s personality is large, but so are Baltimore’s troubles, and his supporters argue his confidence is an asset. Parents, for their part, appreciate the changes.

Bernadette Smith, a 43-year-old mother of five, calls the opening of Green Street Academy, a small environmentally themed school in the building of the defunct West Baltimore Middle School, “a divine intervention.”

Students, called scholars, change classes in single-file lines. Homerooms are named for the colleges the teachers attended. The principal, Edward E. Cozzolino, has drawn a dedicated following of Teach for America alumni. And while it has the feel of a charter school, a full third of its students have special needs.

When Ms. Smith took her fifth grader to see the school, Mr. Cozzolino “got down to my son’s level and looked him in the eye. My son said to me, ‘Mom, this is it.’ ”