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.”

Broadie PerfPay Plan Gets Smacked Down

by Jim Horn and Anonymous Knoxvillian


The Broad Agenda for Tennessee public schools was crippled last evening when Knox County Commissioners rejected the McIntyre school budget increase to fund a meritless performance pay plan for teachers.


For months now the Broad Machine, steered in Knoxville by Supt. Jim McIntyre, has been on a non-stop PR campaign to waste public dollars on a tried-and-failed merit pay plan.  Despite unerring support by the TN Business Roundtable, the local Chamber of Commerce, the local corporate media (print and non-print), and untold millions in behind-the-scenes funding of astroturf groups pretending to be education advocates, the $35 million dollar plan did not even make it to the floor for a vote at last evening's County Commission meeting.


Numerous commissioners and the mayor all went on record stating that they had been contacted by hundreds of teachers who were against the budget but feared for their jobs by saying so.  Although KNS spun the story to make it look like "school employees" were speaking in favor of the plan prior to the meeting, 90% of those speaking were from the Support our Schools astroturf group and their Chamber of Commerce cronies.  The few legitimate school employees (maybe 5) who spoke in favor were either "dead ended" principals looking for a Central Office slot or well-meaning but naive classroom teachers who fell for the constant bullying from McIntyre's board to "be seen" or else.


Time will tell as to how McIntyre proceeds from here.  As the KCS budget HAS been funded well in excess of "maintainence of effort" for FY2013,  any threat of additional teacher layoffs, pay freezes, or program cuts will obviously be seen as unnecessary - and disingenuous and manipulative on McIntyre's part.  As for PerfPay, McIntyre set that as policy in August 2011 on the assumption that it WOULD be funded.  Now that it is NOT funded, who knows what will happen?  


It has been discovered through some good detective work by local bloggers that one of McIntyre's local Broad Residents, Nokia Townes (formerly of Wachovia Bank) purchased the "APEX" perfpay plan last summer from Battelle for Kids, Inc.  How many school board members knew this??


In a letter to school employees today, McIntyre does not mention the crushing defeat of the de-funded perfpay scheme.  Instead, he claims victory for the $7 million increase that Commissioners did approve, mainly for parrot learning direct instruction programs for Knoxville's poorest children (do follow the link if you don't know what this brand of bare-knuckled mind scrubbing is about).  


Perhaps Broad will find a new home for his loyal stooge, one where the citizenry doesn't mind having its schools run an ancient oligarch three time zones away.

Sixty-Five Percent of Tennesseeans Do NOT Want Their Teacher Pay Based on Test Scores

How much plainer can the message get for Arne and the Oligarchs who appear hellbent on tearing down public education?  Will the Spirit of Cairo take hold in America?  Do we have it in us to end the corporate dictatorship of American education policy?

From the Tennessean (ht to Monty Neill):

A Vanderbilt University statewide poll  shows 65 percent of Tennesseans do not favor paying teachers whose students do well on tests more than teachers whose students do poorly. Only 35 percent of residents support paying teachers whose students do well on tests more money.

The poll results may be the upshot of parents' not wanting to see schools so focused on standardized testing. . . .

Let's Have Performance Pay for Economists Who Muck Around in Education Issues

The NYTimes blog, Economix, has a posting by Harvard economist, Edward Glaeser, on a recent conference in Cambridge to air some of the research on teacher pay based on test scores.  The conference brought together the customary lineup of pro-corporate and pro-privatization forces, those described by Dr. Paul Peterson as the good against the evil (see Bush v. Holmes (Fl. Sup. Ct.) for some background on Peterson's self-described "small band of Jedi attackers, using their intellectual powers to fight the unified Death Star forces led by Darth Vader, whose intellectual capacity has been corrupted by the urge for complete hegemony”(p. 3).

This illustrious group of Jedi warriors are now ensconced at Harvard within The Program on Policy and Governance (PEPG), whose Advisory Committee is headed by Jeb Bush and whose members include the Who's Who of research chefs and ideologues who earn their bread by manufacturing reports to support the corporate vision of schooling.

Since there was no U. S.  research presented at the conference to support the current plan to base tenure and pay on test scores, Glaeser focuses on a rehash of a study done ten years ago in Israel and a more recent one done in India, both of which show some evidence to support performance based pay. 

Glaeser also focuses on a study by Jedi warriors, Jay Greene and Scott Buck, that found that local administrators and teachers often subvert the intent of pay per score plans.  Glaeser also fumes that teachers will probably cheat to make their increase their pay, since they hate the performance pay plan, anyway.  While there is good reason to believe that teacher cheating will indeed occur when money for test scores comes to town, Glaeser offers no such warning when he presented the Israeli and Indian studies mentioned earlier.  Obviously, cheating is only a problem in the U. S. and in systems where pay per score is unpopular.

What Glaeser does not mention at all is the research presented at HIS conference by Goodman and Turner from Columbia that shows the New York pay for performance plan has not worked.  Valerie Strauss has a rundown that includes other recent evidence that would make any sane national policymaker change course from the full speed ahead that Arne's Oligarchs have chosen:

Just the other day we heard that a program in Chicago that attempted to link teacher pay with student standardized test scores wasn’t working, at least not in the first two years.

A 2009 analysis of a major program in Texas that also linked teacher pay to student achievement gains on tests showed no evidence of success. The multi-year Texas Educator Excellence Grant involved teachers at about 1,000 campuses, with a total of more than 140,000 students in lower-income neighborhoods. It was discontinued because of “design problems.”

Now, a paper prepared by two Columbia University researchers for a recent education conference at Harvard University said that the New York City Bonus Program, which attempts to raise student achievement by paying teachers for it, was -- you guessed -- also unsuccessful.

The researchers, Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner, investigated the impacts of group-based incentive pay over two academic years (2007-2008 and 2008-2009) on a range of outcomes that included teacher effort, student performance in math and reading, and classroom activities. Also evaluated were impacts on the market for teachers by examining teacher turnover and the qualifications of newly hired teachers.

“Overall, we find the bonus program had little impact on any of these outcomes,” the researchers concluded.

In each of these reports, the authors noted that the design of the program was flawed in some way. Teachers weren’t paid enough or they were not paid individually or some other part was not well conceived.

The Goodman/Turner study says, for example, “We argue that the lack of bonus program impacts can be explained by the structure of the bonus program. Group bonuses led to free-riding, which significantly reduced the program’s incentives.”

Maybe. But maybe not. And this is our problem: Nobody yet knows.

That hasn’t stopped performance-based pay from becoming the new mantras in school reform. It was, in fact, a key part of the new teachers' contract negotiated in Washington, D.C., by Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and just ratified by members of the Washington Teachers' Union. It is also part of a number of school reform laws recently passed in various states to win favor -- and federal Race to the Top dollars -- from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. . . .

More Research on Teacher Performance Pay for Duncan to Ignore

One has to wonder what it will take for the corporate edu-idiots to notice that there is no evidence to support any, i. e., ANY of their "reform" proposals.  The most recent bad news for the billionaire boys club, reported by Valerie Strauss:

A study released today by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. shows no evidence that the Chicago Teacher Advancement Program improved student math and reading tests when compared with a group of similar schools that did not use the system, Education Week reported.

Chicago’s program is a version of the national Teacher Advancement Program, or TAP, which was first implemented in Chicago in 2007-08, when Duncan led the schools.

The analysis looked at the first two years of a four-year program, which has multiple steps, including increased teacher development, and an incentive payment scheme in which teachers are paid more when their students do better on standardized test scores.

The concept ignores the fact that standardized tests in schools today were not designed as teacher assessment tools and aren’t valid measures, but that isn’t stopping a headlong rush into implementation in school districts across the country.

Remind Governor Ritter to Be a Real Leader and Not a Follower of Ideology

136 State Capitol, Denver, CO 80203 | (303) 866-2471

(Please feel free to copy and paste the letter below).



May 15, 2010

Dear Governor Ritter:

As Governor we know that you have earned the reputation of leading the nation in cutting edge ways. Please be a fearless leader again by choosing to be the first governor to use scientific evidence and the best scientific opinion to "just say no" to the dangerous and undocumented education bill, SB 191, which was passed by the Colorado legislature last week with no evidence or testing to show that the policy therein will do more good than harm.

An important report has just been issued by the National Academy of Education. Please have your staffers read it, and then ask them if SB 191 satisfies the major or minor concerns of the National Academy and the National Research Council regarding the use of value added testing models to make high stake decisions regarding teacher evaluations. If it does not, please veto SB 191. If it does, we encourage you to sign quickly.

Be the first governor in a long time to put science ahead of ideology, while protecting the taxpayers in your state from the lawsuits that are sure to filed in the event that SB 191 becomes law. Now that would be a real leader!

Respectfully,

Jim Horn

Rothstein Educates Pay Per Score Advocates

From Ideas in Action:

On "Demerit Pay"

LA English teacher, Dennis Danziger, considers how pay-per-score might work, or not. From HuffPo:

In the spirit of generosity I've been thanking the gods that private school teachers' salaries are not connected to students' standardized test scores. Else Malia Obama's science teacher at the Sidwell Friends School might have lost her job faster than you can say "grade inflation."

On November 3, 2009, the one-year anniversary of his election, President Obama, speaking at a middle school in Madison, Wisconsin, told his audience that First Daughter Malia had recently come home from school with a 73 on a science test, but after renewed educational vigor she aced her next test. This was the same day President Obama reiterated his call for public school teachers' merit pay to be based in part on student performance on standardized tests.

I'm a 17-year veteran English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, so naturally I thought, "Yep, change has finally come."

After numbing my students with No Child Left Behind tests for the past seven years, I can now depend on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to turn it all around.

But Secretary Duncan's not going to hand over any federal grant money willy-nilly. No sir. No money changes hands until the states beat down those all-powerful teacher unions (and if you want to see how powerful teacher unions are, just drive by your local public school and check out the cars in the faculty parking lot. The Cash for Clunkers program rejected my 1997 Toyota Corolla and most of my colleagues' cars as well).

I'm confident that connecting teacher salaries to standardized scores will so excite students they'll turn off their Play Stations and Xboxes and begin to memorize their times tables; that's how much they're certain to want their teachers to receive that extra $1200 a year.

The merit pay provision undoubtedly will make poor students with full-time jobs and little parental support more alert in class. It'll make their parents serve them healthier breakfast foods. It'll encourage parents to turn off ESPN and help their kids perfect their five-paragraph essays and give up drinking so they can pay for educational perks.

Public school students, realizing they do have the power to move their teachers from a rented apartment into ownership of a condo, will wake at dawn on Saturday mornings and work a few Sudokus; then they're likely rush to be first in line when the library doors open.

Of course, Secretary Duncan's plan might motivate some students to intentionally tank these tests so that their teachers eat it. Call it, "The Revenge of the D-Minus Students." I hope the government will factor in these scores so innocent teachers don't lose their credentials and their health care.

I look forward with curiosity and wonder to the system the Department of Education is devising to measure teachers' effectiveness. I'm all for merit pay, but I can't figure out how it will work. How does a test measure teacher effectiveness when we teachers teach different subjects to different groups of kids in vastly different universes?

For example, in my wing of the building, I teach English to 12th graders; only three of 42 are applying to college. My next door neighbor teaches ESL to kids who've just immigrated. All day I hear her saying, "This is my pencil. This is my eraser. This is my bottle of Prozac."

In the room next to hers, our AP Physics teacher works with only those students who are applying to universities.

And just outside our building the varsity volleyball coach teaches drills.

How does a test compare students' mastery of spiking a volleyball with their ability to understand the properties of an atom?

While I wait for the federal government to grade my colleagues and me, my heart goes out to Malia's science teacher. What was she supposed to say to the Obamas when the First Daughter came home with a C?

"Well, Mr. President, Michelle, allow me to be straightforward. I think you sir, are spending way too much time golfing on Martha's Vineyard. And ma'am what's with the Double Dutching on the White House lawn? You need to spend more face time with your daughter. Or at least give her a turn."

Might the teacher have had the guts to say, "Malia's a bright and wonderful child. But frankly, I think her grade is a cry for help. Enough with flying off to Copenhagen in the middle of the night. Stay home and read to her."
My guess is that Malia's Sidwell Friends School teacher did the prudent thing; the next time she administered a science test, she made sure it was easier, and she thanked her lucky stars her pay wasn't tied to Malia's "C."

Duncan's BTTF (Bribe To The Flop)

Since last Fall Bush and Obama have handed over 3 trillion dollars (give or take a few hundred billion) in taxpayer money to save American business from the ruin that corporate greed and profligate behavior would have otherwise guaranteed the entire country, except for those with foreign bank accounts, of course.

In comparison, 2.5 percent of that $3 trillion, or $100 billion, went to the education bailout, and a sliver of that $100 billion (4.3% of it) has been given to the Secretary of Education to "incent" states to change their laws so that they will be in line with the Broad/Gates corporate education reform based on paying teachers for test scores, creating mammoth data surveillance systems, opening up the floodgates to "alternative" teacher preparation programs such as ABCTE and TFA (for the urban and rural poor), and expanding corporate charter chain gang schools to become the dominant model for schooling in urban America.

Even though the Dunc has been hawking the BTTF for months now, the President, himself, was on the road yesterday in Wisconsin to announce the race has really started now. Ready, set, yawn.

Not only is no one excited, but most believe that none of 4.3 percent of the 2.5% of the corporate bailout will improve education or close the achievement gap or accomplish any of the blah-blah about competitive global economies. What it will likely do is continue shrinking school curriculums into the box built by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, weaken the teaching profession and teacher unions, make test scores even more high stakes and certainly more high profit, and solidify the education industry as the dominant voice for urban school matters in America. That's pretty good bang for your buck, or some excellent leveraging, as Bill and Eli might chuckle.

And all of it is going full steam ahead despite what the preponderance of evidence tells us about these proposals.

• For instance, the only peer-reviewed large-scale study of charter schools,

for example, a 14 state study out of a Stanford research center reported that 17% of charters did better than public schools, while 37% did worse. The reason that charters do no better, and frequently do worse, than public schools is that they do not provide the promised innovations, have higher turnover and less qualified staff. Also clearly emerging from the findings is that charter schools segregate by wealth and race. It is troublesome that our leaders who promised to be "evidence-based" have not based their initiatives on the evidence.

• A study of performance pay in Texas reported yesterday in the Dallas Morning News found this:

For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.

But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents – including Gov. Rick Perry – hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.

"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.. . . .

• This comes four weeks after the National Academy of Science's National Research Council offered this warning in the Press Release to their Report regarding Duncan's pay-per-score plan:

Evaluations must be appropriate to the specific program being assessed and will be easier to design if grantees provide a "theory of action" for any proposed reform -- a logical chain of reasoning explaining how the innovation will lead to improved student learning. Evaluations should be designed before programs begin so baseline data can be collected; they should also provide short-term feedback to aid midcourse adjustments and long-term data to judge the program's impact. While standardized tests are helpful in measuring a reform's effects, evaluations should rely on multiple indicators of what students know and can do, not just a single test score, the report adds.

. . . .

One way of evaluating teachers, currently the subject of intense interest and research, are value-added approaches, which typically compare a student's scores going into a grade with his or her scores coming out of it, in order to assess how much "value" a year with a particular teacher added to the student's educational experience. The report expresses concern that the department's proposed regulations place excessive emphasis on value-added approaches. Too little research has been done on these methods' validity to base high-stakes decisions about teachers on them. A student's scores may be affected by many factors other than a teacher -- his or her motivation, for example, or the amount of parental support -- and value-added techniques have not yet found a good way to account for these other elements.

• And alternative certification to add an unending suply of cheaper script readers in the urban schools that need the most experienced and qualified teachers? A study by Mathematica, commissioned by the bogus take-a-test-to-teach outfit, ABCTE, found an increasing supply of incompetents that Jeb's boys in Florida are turning loose on the poor and the disenfranchised in Florida schools. The leafy, er, the palm frond suburbs? They will not look at an ABCTE "certified teacher," and for good reason. From the Mathematica report out in September 2009:

Using data on 30 ABCTE teachers in Florida over two years, we found no differences in student gains in reading between students of ABCTE and non–ABCTE teachers. However, students of ABCTE teachers scored lower than their counterparts on the state math test. The difference was equal to an effect size of 0.25 and was statistically significant [approximately 10 percentage points], although the estimate varied slightly depending on how the matching was conducted and how the statistical model was specified. Limiting the sample to subgroups of teachers, such as novices or ABCTE teachers who scored high or low on certification exams (and their matched counterparts), did not change the overall conclusion either (p. 1).

This is just a sampling of the hard data that should give pause to Duncan and Obama's capitulation to the corporate ed reform oligarchs, whose ideological agendas are driving education policy, evidence be damned. The question faced by states: is it worth it to jeopardize public schools for what amounts to chump change, just to expand the education industry and to create a new unaccountable and unregulated corporate bureaucracy to be in charge of the children we have essentially thrown away?

Arizona now has corporate prisons to house poor adult lawbreakers. Will nationalized corporate chain gang schools be the cheap solution to urban and rural poverty among those too young for prison?