TeacherTown Cuts Teacher Pay by $10,000 and Erases Annual Increases: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

CorpEd at Work

With every bad instrument in the corporate education toolbox being thrown into the creation of a new schooling Frankenstein for "educating" Memphis and Shelby County children, the introduction of test scores to determine teacher pay was inevitable. 

• Gone are annual scheduled salary steps, which have been replaced by annual bonuses based on student test scores.   
• Maximum salaries have been reduced from $73,000 to $63,000.
• Teachers will max out after 18 years, with no salary increases after that.
• Teachers who teach non-tested subjects must rely upon test scores averaged for those in the school who teach tested subjects to determine their pay raises.

Meanwhile, teachers in Shelby County are represented by a teachers' association that is an affiliate of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN).

The TURNcoats work hand in glove with CorpEd to make sure that the Broad, Walton, and Gates agendas are pushed ahead of teachers, children, and parents.

MERRY CHRISTMAS SHELBY COUNTY TEACHERS!!

Newark Teachers: Reject Weingarten's Betrayal of Teachers

Everywhere AFT's lead lawyer goes to "help" negotiate for teachers, she leaves a wake of destruction for the profession.  But, then, that is what she is paid to do, as she works off her debt to Bloomberg and the plutocrats for making her president of AFT in the first place.

In Newark, she has now added to her impressive list of betrayals by cutting a deal with Cory Booker and the Facebook chief twink to offer a meritless bonus pay plan that has a demonstrated failure record in New York, Chicago, and Nashville, where paying teachers for higher test scores did not raise test scores.  What it can do is end job security for teachers and create an endless stream of temporary pedagogical sharecroppers that school CEOs can manhandle in their corporate reform schools.

Weingarten and her traitorous lieutenant, Joseph Del Grosso, are telling teachers this is good deal because they are ones who can apply the lipstick to this pig.  In other words, teachers will be given the  detailed checklists developed by the corporate reform schoolers to score their colleagues.  What the membership does not know is that the checklists provide no leeway for professional discretion in evaluating a teacher based on a what a small cadre of corporate crackpots consider good teaching.

If Newark teachers ratify this contract, they will have proved themselves as stupid and/or desperate as Weingarten believes them to be.  Newark teachers need to consult with their Chicago colleagues for their next steps, dump the traitorous Del Grosso, and run Randi Weingarten back across the Hudson River before they tear up this contract and start over.  Once they allow their pay to be determined by test scores, years of work will be unraveled overnight and their profession will be further denigrated.

Newark teachers need to stand up and say what is good for students in order to earn the respect of their communities.  This is not good for students, and parents will view ratification as a cheap sellout by teachers more interested in cash than caring, compassion, and collaboration.

Story from the NYTimes:           

By KATE ZERNIKENEWARK — On one side of the table was the union firebrand Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. On the other was the state education commissioner handpicked by Gov. Chris Christie, who became a star among fellow Republicans for aggressively taking on public employee unions.

During months of intense and late-night negotiations for a new teachers contract for the chronically troubled Newark school system, the parties settled on what they believed would be a landmark compromise.

At the center of it was merit pay — the idea of paying teachers based on performance that has long been a flash point between critics of teachers’ unions who believe it would increase accountability, and union leaders who fear that performance would be based on test scores rather than the subtleties of classrooms.

Though Ms. Weingarten had criticized what she calls “merit pay schemes,” she and the other union leaders agreed to embrace the concept in exchange for a promise that teachers would have a rare role in evaluating performance, declaring it a way to rebuild respect for a $1 billion school system that has bled students and money to the suburbs and, increasingly, to charter schools.

Joseph Del Grosso, the leader of the local union who was jailed for striking 40 years ago, has been telling his members that approving the contract will turn them into “heroes.”

But suspicion tends to run high in this New Jersey city, long rived by politics of race and class. Many teachers worry that the bonuses will never appear. And a faction has staged an insurrection against union leaders, saying the contract will weaken job security and pit teacher against teacher.

“This is how they will break our union,” said Renee Pulliam, a high school special education teacher in her 24th year in Newark.

On Monday, the city’s 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers’ unions across the country.

If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file.

Newark’s deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state’s tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform.
If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations — similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers’ strike last month.

From novices to the most senior, Newark teachers would remain among the highest paid in the nation, earning average raises of more than 13 percent in the three-year contract. But teachers evaluated as “ineffective” would have to improve before they could earn the raises that under previous contracts have come automatically every year.

Teachers could earn bonuses of $5,000 if they are evaluated as “highly effective,” and an extra $5,000 if they agree to teach in the district’s lowest-performing schools, or an extra $2,500 for teaching subjects like math and science that have a lack of qualified teachers. The money for bonuses will come from the $100 million gift that Mark Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, pledged to the city in 2010.

As the union has mounted a push to pass the contract, Ms. Weingarten has insisted that the bonuses are not strictly “merit pay,” wanting to avoid the impression that the union sold out on a long-held principle.

The local president, Mr. Del Grosso, worries less about semantics. “I’ve always found it strange that any union, when it heard the word ‘pay,’ would reject it,” he said in an interview.
In presentations to members last week, Mr. Del Grosso argued that the contract would affirm teachers as professionals, like doctors or lawyers.

“The doctors take away another doctor’s license, lawyers disbar lawyers,” he said. “Why shouldn’t teachers be the judges of their own peers? My doctor tells me he gets bonuses, lawyers at law firms get bonuses. Why shouldn’t teachers?”

But at the first meeting last week, teachers challenged Mr. Del Grosso, calling him a “liar” as he tried to argue the merits of peer review.

“I’ve been a distinguished teacher for years; I’ve bought kids clothes,” said Donna Tollinchi, an eighth-grade math teacher, still shaken outside the meeting, at a performing arts center downtown, where she confronted Mr. Del Grosso. “For them to turn around and say I don’t deserve my salary?”

Some teachers, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, argued that few will actually get the performance bonuses — not because they are ineffective, but because the system has had a way of wasting money fast. Others worried that even peer evaluations could be unfair.

And even supporters of the contract acknowledge that there are about 650 teachers — those with more seniority or advanced degrees — who will lose the potential to earn as much as they did under the old contract. Those teachers could opt for a separate salary scale that pays somewhat more generously but does not offer the potential for performance bonuses.
Branden Rippey, 41, a high school history teacher, is one of those.

“I’m opposed to the principle of merit pay, and losing money to a new contract,” he said. The proposal, he argued, would just pave the way to staff the schools with young Teach for America teachers, “who get six months training and don’t work for more than 3, 4, 5 years.”

He is among a coalition of union members who held their own meetings last week, urging their colleagues to vote no, oust Mr. Del Grosso and choose new leaders to negotiate a better deal.

“I can’t believe I have counted on this union to negotiate all this time,” said Ms. Tollinchi, the math teacher. “This is the best they can do?”

Supporters of the contract reply, bluntly, yes. (Trying to emphasize their respect for the teachers’ union, and its autonomy, the Newark schools superintendent, Cami Anderson, and the state commissioner, Christopher Cerf, have declined to comment on the contract in advance of the vote.)

Governor Christie recently warned the city that it will see a significant cut in state aid next year. The state is struggling with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates and lagging economic growth.

Given the alternatives, is it not better, Mr. Del Grosso asked, to be known as the union that embraced change?

“I’ve heard the people who call the Facebook money ‘blood money,’ ” he said. “But if I don’t take the money, I wonder who will get it.”

The REAL Race to the Top

While Bill Gates and Eli Broad fire up corporate editorial boards and reporters to hammer politicians toward changing state laws in order to beg for some chump change from Arne Duncan's little pot of federal bribe money, the REAL Race to the Top proceeds, entirely unsullied by the tens of millions of unemployed Americans or the shrinking public coffers that reflect the dwindling tax revenues from the Great Recession--brought to you by the makers of Wall Street.

The entire $4.3 billion set aside by Duncan's Office to fuel the unlimited growth of segregated charter chain gangs and pay-per-score teacher bonus plans is less than 15 percent of the real bonuses that will be paid out this happy holiday season to the crooks of just three Wall Street corporations. The total for the three companies? $29.7 billion. From Bloomberg News:

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record bonuses this year.

The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates. That’s up 60 percent from last year and more than the previous high of $26.8 billion in 2007. The money, split among 119,000 employees, equals $250,400 each, almost five times the $50,303 median household income in the U.S. last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.. . . .

. . . .“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”. . . .

Gingrich Joins Duncan On the Unending Need to "Incent"

Would you call this pay not to play? From Raw Story:

The man who dubbed Vice President Joe Biden a socialist last September for arguing that paying taxes is "patriotic" appears to have some government redistribution ideas of his own.

Newt Gingrich, often cited as a Republican prospect for president in 2012, says the state should consider paying teenager girls not to get pregnant.

He also says that states should consider paying teenage girls who become pregnant to take prenatal vitamins to forestall paying additional health expenses for neonatal care down the road.

The remarks were made during a tour of Michigan on Wednesday. Gingrich is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation, a not-for-profit group advocating the partnership of private and public interests for health care reform.

Along with his remarks about pregnant teenagers, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives also said Wednesday that state legislators should consider paying poor children to read and individuals not to smoke.

"We need to develop a health-based health reform," Gingrich said, according to AP. "Free of the usual bureaucracy." . . . .

Roosevelt Economics, Reagan Education Policy

When Presidents require an easy outlet for taking some names and kicking some ass, they know the schools, the kids, and the teachers are always waiting to get beat up.

The President reminded us tonight that we are going to offer hundreds of billions more to bail out the banks AGAIN, but if the overpaid and lazy teachers expect a raise, they are going to have to prove they can wring out higher test scores for a couple of thousand dollars a year. And as the President reminds us, "from the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age," we are now ready to sacrifice that system for a ragged collection of cheap corporate charter schools without public governance.

Will national school walkouts be required to save public educations? Arne Duncan picketed at every public appearance? Refusal to give tests? Parents keeping their kids home on test days? It is clear that the President is listening to his Secretary, and we know he is listening to people who never listen. Drastic measures will no doubt be required.

Weingarten Hides Behind Failing Economy to Talk Capitulation on Tenure and Teacher Pay

Almost perfect timing, except that Ms. Randi, as I noted yesterday (speaking of timing), had already bowed to Bloomberg on bonus pay for test scores before the economy went south.

Is this what Randi calls bipartisanship? From today's Times:

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that given the economic crisis, her union would be willing to discuss new approaches to issues like teacher tenure and merit pay.

“Faced with declining tax revenues, state and local governments are cutting” education budgets nationwide, Ms. Weingarten said in a speech to education policy makers in Washington.

“In the spirit of this extraordinary moment, and as a pledge of shared responsibility, I’ll take the first step,” she said. “With the exception of vouchers, which siphon scarce resources from public schools, no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers.”

It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten’s speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.

“Randi said she was willing to talk about these things,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the number of effective teachers. “But from my experience, the A.F.T. and its locals have always been willing to talk about tough issues. The problem is that they’re not often willing to give in on them.” . . . .

And where did Dillon get that description of NCTQ, the "nonprofit group that seeks to increase the number of effective teachers."??? More appropriate would have been the nonprofit group (which includes Andy Rotherham) that seeks to make schools to profit corporations, or the nonprofit group that seeks to replace professionally-prepared teachers with non-prepared warm bodies with bachelors degrees? How about the nonprofit group that used Federal grant money to illegally pump their "merit pay" and anti-ed school propaganda into the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers? And they still haven't paid the money back, as demanded in the OIG report (Inspector General's report Word version).

Here is part of an earlier piece I did on Kate Walsh, who has spent the Bush years trying every angle to crush the teaching profession. Sadly it looks like she and her minions might have found a union president who can help in the process.

From 2005:

Those readers who were floored by the allegations that the US Department of Education would fund their own school privatization campaign through paying off high-profile commentators like Armstrong Williams, hold on to your seats. The $240,000 that Williams garnered for his NCLB PR efforts is chump change compared to the $4,686,574 shoveled out ED's doors to a number of groups to carry the school privatization message and the public school failure message across the country, especially into minority communities. Here is a story run on Sept. 3 by USA Today.

Even though the Inspector General's report on the investigation does some fancy parsing to avoid the conclusion that ED engaged in "covert propaganda," anyone reading the report, besides Maggie Spellings and her lawyers, may conclude that the 4.5 mil went to do just that.

The following excerpt from the Inspector General's report (Word version) shows that Paige and Hickok were looking for organizations to front their message before they had even printed the stationery for the OII (Office of Innovation and Improvement):

Although we did not find evidence to conclude that Department officials awarded grants with the intent of influencing public opinion through the undisclosed use of third party grantees, or directly approved or encouraged the specific activities that resulted in improper expenditures, the level of involvement from the Secretary’s office in the approval of unsolicited proposals and the oversight of unsolicited grants in the FIE program raised some concerns. The Department procedures in place at the time stated:

If the unsolicited application proposes activities that can be funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Education (FIE), the Senior Officer should immediately forward the application to [the] Deputy Under Secretary in the soon-to-be-created Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII). OII will then notify the applicant and process the application under the above procedures. FIE supports nationally significant programs to improve the quality of elementary and secondary education.

The “above procedures” referenced in the preceding quote did not indicate that the Office of the Secretary was to be directly involved in the process of screening unsolicited proposals. However, the Secretary and his senior staff appear to have made the significant pre-award decisions on many unsolicited applications received by the FIE program, including determining which initial proposals deserved further consideration. The Secretary, or staff in his office, also determined which unsolicited proposals were to receive funding. Once the grants were awarded, FIE program staff provided the Secretary’s office with monthly progress reports from grantees. (pp.17-18)

So even though ED did not engage in the legal definition of "covert propaganda," they were given monthly reports from these outfits on how well they were doing in spreading the education gospel according to Bush and the privatizers. That seems to a difference that doesn't make much of a difference.

Nonetheless, ED did not get away with this entirely. Most of the grantees listed in the Inspector General's report published propaganda without the required EDGAR disclaimer, which requires the granting agency to recover associated expenditures:

The Department’s grant regulations at 34 C.F.R. § 75.620 require grantees to include a disclaimer on any publication: “the contents of this (insert type of publication: e.g. book, report, film) were developed under a grant from the Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.” If a Department grantee uses grant funds for publications and does not include the required disclaimer language, such activity would violate the condition of the grant and the Department should, if appropriate, recover associated expenditures. (p. 5)

Tomorrow I will publish the list of offenders, but for now here is the Inspector General's conclusion reached on just one grant to the Oquirrh Institute and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) worth $677,318. It provides a chilling view of how these organizations planned to infiltrate the mainstream media with their propaganda. It is interesting to look at the Board members of these organizations--one can begin to see some familiar names (Doug Carnine, for one) associated with other areas of education profiteering:

We did find that the Oquirrh Institute and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) initially submitted independent proposals to the Department. A senior official in OII contacted NCTQ and suggested that it work with the Oquirrh Institute because both focused on teacher quality issues. NCTQ confirmed that this conversation occurred and stated that the OII official did not help with the content of the proposal. NCTQ subsequently decided to submit a joint proposal with the Oquirrh Institute.

In each instance the grantee was provided with a copy of the EDGAR regulations. The failure of these grantees to include the required disclaimer appears to have resulted in an improper expenditure of grant funds that should now be recovered.

ß Grant U215U030007-04, Oquirrh Institute and National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (Appendix A, Item 1)

The Oquirrh Institute and NCTQ submitted a joint proposal with three clearly stated goals: 1) increase the American public’s exposure and understanding of the research and full spectrum of ideas on teacher quality; 2) advance the research on teacher preparation and licensure processes, broadening the nation’s experience of and perspective on these issues; and 3) help state policymakers make the necessary reforms to their licensure systems. According to the proposal, the grantee’s strategy for accomplishing the first goal included “widely publish[ing] op-eds on teacher quality issues” with an ultimate objective of having “at least 100 published works, reaching every state” (p. 21). Further, the proposal narrative, on page 14, specifically states:

[W]e will tailor our writing to the issues that a particular state or community is currently debating … Our preference will be to persuade newspapers to publish our writing as op-eds but, if not, we will also submit letters to the editor.

In the monthly progress reports provided to the Department, we found that the only grantee activities associated with the first goal involved the production of, and attempts to publish, op-eds.

According to the grantees’ monthly progress reports, they were able to publish op-eds in at least 11 newspapers. We have been able to obtain copies of only three. Kate Walsh, the president of NCTQ, authored the three op-eds published in the Mobile Register (Alabama) on 11/21/04, in the Grand Island Independent (Nebraska) on 12/02/04, and in the Sacramento Bee (California) on 02/06/05. Each focused on proposed changes in teacher reform and NCLB.

The op-eds can be construed as advocating a particular point of view. In the op-ed published in the Mobile Register, Walsh states that the NCLB requirement that all teachers be rated “highly qualified” in the subjects they teach “is not overly demanding or unfair.” She later states “[t]he inability to reach consensus over these minimal requirements signals a resistance, however unintended, to putting the needs of children first.”

Similarly, in the other two op-eds, Walsh advocated policy positions. In the op-ed published in the Grand Island Independent, she advocated changes in teacher qualification requirements in Nebraska. In the op-ed published in the Sacramento Bee, Walsh states: “[p]utting merit pay decisions in the hands of states or even school districts [sic] officials still will lead to excessively complicated formulas that suppress the potential benefits that merit pay could achieve.”

None of the op-eds we reviewed disclosed the role of the Department. Prior to the initial publication of the op-eds, a Department grants specialist reviewed a draft op-ed and reminded the grantee that the Department’s regulations at 34 C.F.R. § 75.620 require a disclaimer on all grant publications. The grant specialist did not know why the published op-eds did not contain the disclaimer.

As these op-eds were published without the EDGAR disclaimer, the funds used to produce them may have resulted in an improper expenditure of grant funds. If all of the produced op-eds are similarly silent on the role of the Department, then all of the expenditures associated with goal one of the grant may have been improper.

Top 10 Reasons Why Teaching Jobs Based on Test Scores Is A Bad Idea

It was just a few months ago that Randi Weingarten earned the blessing of Bloomberg for her AFT Presidential bid by endorsing the Bloomberg/Klein/Business Roundtable bonus pay plan for NYC teachers based on test scores. Weingarten patted herself on the back at the time for negotiating the stipulation that bonuses would go to schools rather than individuals. Increased productivity (higher test scores) would be judged on a schoolwide basis, thus assuring Weingarten, at least, that individual teachers would not be evaluated based on test scores. And Bloomberg's lawyers did the ropeadope all the way to the signing table.

That capitulation by Ms. Randi signaled the beginning for a feeding frenzy by the BR and Chamber of Commerce, so that just a few months later, we are faced with the BR's leading media stooge, Jay Mathews, now, today, greasing the slippery slope toward the teachers-on-production model by extending the argument of bonus pay for higher test scores into the dystopian ideal of keeping your teaching job based on higher test scores:

People who have studied the public schools that have significantly raised the achievement levels of impoverished students tend to accept the idea that teachers' salaries and jobs must eventually be tied to classroom results. "Of course," said Andrew Rotherham, an education think tank founder, blogger and Virginia Board of Education member who, at 37, is likely to be a major player on this issue for years to come.

Notice the luridly-misleading style of propaganda. Which "people who have studied" is Mathews referring to, and in which journals are their "tendencies" reported? To say nothing of the sloppy writing. "Of course," what, EduWink? What we can know is that Mathews is as full of digested corn as the Thanksgiving turkey he is planning to eat next week.

Yes, the Jays and Andys and Congressman Millers of the edu-world want to make sure that the teachers who are working in these poverty-blighted schools are earning the big money they are being paid. Just like in the private schools where their children and grandchildren are educated, yes? Here are a few reasons, guys, why this is a bad idea:

10. Teaching jobs based on test scores will hasten the flight of the remaining good teachers from the poorest schools where the best teachers are already in the shortest supply.

9. Teaching jobs based on test scores will attract only the most desperate teachers to the poorest schools.

8. Teaching jobs based on test scores will contribute to cutthroat competition among teachers for positions most likely to produce the best test results.

7. Teaching jobs based on test scores will decimate teamwork and collaboration among teachers.

6. Teaching jobs based on test scores will push the curriculum into a smaller and smaller box based only on what is tested.

5. Teaching jobs based on test scores will further poison the educational climate in schools that is now almost unbreathable.

4. Teaching jobs based on test scores will exacerbate the cheating and corruption associated with high stakes policy implementation.

3. Teaching jobs based on test scores will damage learning for knowledge, skills, and understanding by placing further emphasis only on memorization and short-term learning gains that can be demonstrated with paper and pencil tests.

2. Teaching jobs based on test scores will extend the view of children as raw material to be exploited for their monetary worth.

1. Teaching jobs based on test scores will encourage the marginalization and discarding of the raw material that can't be exploited.