UPDATE: Bloomberg Says 2,500 Teacher Lay-Offs Loom / Ed. Comm. King's February 15 Evaluation Deadline

UPDATE: AMNY: BLOOMBERG SAYS 2,500 NYC TEACHER LAY-OFFS LOOM IF NO EVALUATION DEAL -SCROLL TO END Bloomberg, scolded, keeps blame for the lack of a teacher deal on the union | Capital New York


"Let us rate every month." --New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg
Has a kind of Marie Antoinette ring to it.

DANA RUBINSTEIN Jan. 28, 2013

From the get-go this morning, during what was his final testimony on the state budget as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg went on the attack against the teachers union and the state education department.
Near the start of his testimony before a joint session of the Assembly Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees in Albany, Bloomberg derided the "state Education Department's outrageous pandering to the [United Federation of Teachers]," described U.F.T. tactics in its negotiations with the city as "shameless ploys" and said the teacher evaluation system as proposed by the U.F.T., would have created "an unworkable sham and a fraud on the public."
And he was just getting started.
The issue at hand was the city's failure to reach an agreement with the teachers union on a teacher evaluation system by the state-mandated January 17 deadline.
The city was one of just a handful of state districts that failed to reach an agreement with its teachers union by the deadline, endangering up to $450 million in state and federal aid.
Today, the mayor said the ensuing loss of funding could lead to the loss by attrition of 700 teachers this school year and another 1,800 next, in addition to fewer after-school programs, fewer substitute teachers and fewer teacher aides.
The state has since set a new deadline, February 15. If the city and union don't reach a deal by then, state education commissioner John King has threatened to suspend the city's ability to spend another $830 million in federal aid.
Following his testimony, Bloomberg endured multiple rounds of questioning from the assembled politicians, including a particularly heated interrogation from Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, an ally of the UFT.
"Don't you feel some responsibilty for this disaster?" she asked him. "And it is a disaster."
"Now we're sitting here, and I have to look at my son, who is a freshman in a New York City high school and say to him he's gonna be punished because the adults couldn't work it out?" she continued, now yelling at the billionaire mayor as if he were an errant schoolboy.
The mayor offered a long response in which he pointedly declined to take any responsibility.
"What is your strategy for accepting some responsibility as the head of the local school district under mayoral control for this debacle?" Nolan asked again.
The mayor responded that the evaluation deals reached in the rest of the state are "just jokes, Cathy," because they expire after just a year, and getting rid of a failing teacher takes two years in New York State.
"People are saying they did something and they didn't do it," he said.
"But incremental progress is how government works," she countered, before returning to the trope of her son.
"What do I tell my son? It's my son who's in a New York City public school that I chose to send him. What do I say?"
"Cathy, you can change the law," said Bloomberg. "Let us rate every month."
"Everybody else made an agreement but the city," she said.
"Yes, because everybody else is just interested in getting the money and committing what I call fraud," he responded.
RELATED TAGS:
POLITICS, ANDREW CUOMO, CATHERINE NOLAN, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, STATE BUDGET, TEACHER EVALUATIONS, UFT

AMNY, JAN. 29, 2013: NYC MAYOR BLOOMBERG SAYS 2,500 TEACHER LAY-OFFS LOOM
As reported in AMNY print editions, speaking before the New York State Legislature in Albany, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said that 2,500 teacher lay-offs loom by 2014 if there is no New York City teacher evaluation deal.

AMNY's web edition tonight (Jan. 29) reports that Bloomberg, when speaking of the city's budget, cited the $250 million lost state funds as thre reason for an anticipated 2,500 teacher layoffs. CAPITAL NEW YORK REPORTS $724 AS TOTAL LOST STATE AID

At risk is $724 million in state funding over the next two years, and possibly, another $1 billion on top of that.

Should there be no teacher evaluation deal by the second deadline, the mayor predicts the city will have to get rid of some 700 teachers this school year by attrition, and another 1,800 next year, not to mention lots of extracurricular activities, afterschool programs, and school supplies.

Whatever pain the city might suffer "is more than worth it" in pursuit of a good evaluation deal, said the mayor.

There was also some more generalized carping about the state's shrinking contributions to city education.

In 2002, when the mayor took office, the city and state split non-federally funded education costs. Now the state only funds 39 percent.

A Chicago Observer's Analysis of DOE-UFT Evaluation Talks Collapse

From Fred Klosky, an ally of real education reform in Chicago, cites the MORE caucus in "Watching from a distance. NY teacher evaluation blows up. Updated.", January 18, 2013:

Watching from a distance, I responded with a smile when I heard that the negotiations over teacher evaluations between the UFT and New York’s Mayor Bloomberg blew up yesterday.

Governor Cuomo had put a deadline for an agreement to evaluate teachers based on student test scores, a stupid idea to be sure.

We’ve covered that territory before.

Cuomo threatened that without an agreement the city schools would be denied $250 million.

Now some in the NY press [the NY Post] are screaming that the teachers (read the Union) cost the schools all that money.

Not that $250 million is chump change. But really it is.

It’s probably not much more than the total value of all of Bloomberg’s homes.

Here’s a question: Why should adequate funding of New York’s public schools be dependent on an evaluation agreement between Bloomberg and the teachers?

NY teachers have been without a contract since 2009, before Bloomberg’s re-election.

Many of my NY friends were justifiably concerned that UFT President Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership would cave to the bully-boy Mayor on this.

You can read UFT leader Leo Casey’s description of the bargaining here.

Maybe we can thank Bloomberg for being too big a jerk for even that to happen.

NY’s Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) which organized a street protest of the deal yesterday, said:

The passing of the January 17 deadline for a new evaluation agreement is not an ending but a beginning. Now the DOE will work overtime to spin doctor the failure to reach an agreement on new teacher evaluations, mandated by New York State’s version of Race to the Top, as the fault of Michael Mulgrew and union leadership. This despite the fact that every indication shows it was Bloomberg who failed to negotiate in good faith.

While we applaud the UFT leadership for standing their ground, the MORE Caucus has no intention of giving up the fight to prevent our teachers and students from being given over to the standardized testing regime. We know there will be efforts in the future to convert our schools into low-level thinking factories and our teachers into low-skilled, low-paid bureaucratic functionaries.

UPDATED: One Thousand Evaluation Petition-Signing Teachers Can't Be Wrong --The Real Story Behind the Evaluation Talks Collapse

UPDATES AT END: GOTHAM SCHOOLS LINKS WITH MORE ANALYSIS OF EVALUATIONS TALKS COLLAPSE - MULGREW CONTINUES TO MISS POINT - SPITEFUL NYC GOV'T SENDS INSPECTORS AFTER THE UFT The New York City are news was abuzz since 2:00 pm with news that talks between New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and United Federation of Teachers Michael Mulgrew over teacher evaluations had broken down.

Some main points lost in the discussion:
UFT president Mulgrew has basically changed his posture on the question of the teacher evaluation system.

Developments seemed all pointed towards go for the high-stakes test based evaluation system (20 percent of a teacher's rating from state tests, 20 percent from local --read, city-- assessments). Then in a mid-December delegate assembly of the union, the MORE caucus advocated a democratic vote by the rank and file members of the union. The Daily News was rare among news outlets to catch the significance of the action, albeit, in a December 29, 2012 editorial, and without naming the active party involved:

Far more pertinent, at a union delegate assembly, a motion opposing Mulgrew’s authority to reach an evaluation deal with Chancellor Dennis Walcott — demanding instead that the matter be put to the membership — won a stunning 30% of the votes. A union president accustomed to 95% support then ran scared. Before that, by some accounts, Mulgrew and Walcott appeared to be progressing toward a deal even though Mulgrew veered far and wide, wanting to discuss even next year’s school closures.

But then, last week, he demanded that the city and the union must first settle how the new system will be implemented and rolled out, and how teachers will be trained in it . . . .

(Read more at the Daily News.)
Published yesterday morning, January 17, 2013, before the early afternoon announcement of the evaluation talks breakdown, "Potent Mix of Politics Shapes Current Education Debate" in the New York Times Schoolbook, Tim Clifford, a New York City teacher penned another distinctively accurate representation of the MORE strategic position in Mulgrew's changing posture. He pointed out that MORE's activities around the evaluation have Mulgrew nervous, as his Soviet-style 91 percent victory could be difficult to replicate unless he make some moves to co-opt the mass energy pushing back against the value-added test-based evaluation system. Truthfully, the hand-writing was clear at the start of the week, with MORE's announcement of a rally (for a membership vote) outside UFT headquarters, set for half an hour before the delegate assembly. Here is the latter part of Clifford's Times article, with the crucial election year elements included:

It’s likely that both the city and the UFT want an evaluation deal. For Bloomberg, this could be his last chance effect a major change in how teachers are hired and fired after several failed attempts to get rid of LIFO (Last In First Out) rules for excessing and layoffs. Yet he has insisted that the deal must include a means of holding teachers’ “feet to the fire” by making evaluations public, which is not required by state law. For its part, the UFT had a hand in crafting the new Annual Profession Performance Review (APPR) in the first place, helping limit efforts to make standardized test scores count for more than 25% of a teacher’s grade.

But there are other underlying political factors that may hinder an agreement. Foremost among these is the upcoming UFT election. Last time, Michael Mulgrew, then basically an unknown among teachers, won a staggering 91 percent of the vote as the protégé of outgoing president Randi Weingarten, facing no meaningful opposition. This time around, a new caucus has been gaining traction. This caucus, called MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators), opposes any teacher evaluation agreement based on standardized test scores, which critics argue have a wide margin of error and other problems.

MORE’s candidate for president, Julie Cavanagh, is a well-spoken, well-regarded educator who is beginning to make a dent in Mulgrew’s hold on leadership. MORE’s recent resolution to have members vote on any evaluation deal, rather than union delegates mostly loyal to Mulgrew, garnered a significant amount of support. Said Cavanagh: “It is unacceptable that he (Mulgrew) does not recognize the truth: That the highest decision-making body of this union is its rank and file members. We should decide if ‘we as a union’ accept this: Because we are our union.”

Membership unrest in Chicago due to evaluations led to the ouster of the leadership there and conferred near hero status among unionists to Karen Lewis, who stood up to education reformers; the same could happen here if teachers are dissatisfied with the evaluation deal. And lest the potential mayoral candidates feel too sanguine, the story of Adrian Fenty, who was booted out as mayor of Washington, D.C. due largely to his support for test-obsessed Michelle Rhee, should act as a cautionary tale.

Complicating matters further is the teachers’ contract. The current deal expired in October, 2009, and the UFT did not receive the 4 + 4 percent over two years that other city workers got at the time. There is pressure on the union to settle a contract right away by tying evaluations to a new contract with higher wages, but there is also considerable sentiment that the UFT should wait out the Bloomberg era and try to get a favorable deal from the next mayor.

If Bloomberg and Mulgrew fail to come to terms on a contract, pressure will brought to bear on the current crop of mayoral hopefuls as to what kind of contract, with what kinds of wage increases, they’d be willing to sign. Democratic candidates are sure to vigorously court the UFT’s endorsement but by doing so they may risk losing financial support from Bloomberg, who will likely try to keep his reforms intact.

Other issues face the schools as we enter a new year. A bus strike is upon us. The city is looking to close 26 more schools, and is certain to be met with a fight. Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped into the fray in his State of the State address, calling for a teacher “bar” exam, as well as a longer school day and year that could add 300 hours to the school year without a clear means of financing those initiatives, which easily would cost billions of dollars in an age when school budgets have been cut every year for the last four years.

While the outcomes may not be certain, one thing is: 2013 promises to be a contentious year in education in New York. Whoever wins their political battles this year will likely affect the city’s schools well into the foreseeable future.

This writer is pleased that Mulgrew is speaking truth to power, calling mayor Bloomberg's assertions lies, however, the wish remains that he would directly and comprehensively reject the illogic undergirding these tests. Click again to the original, now classic, Gary Rubinstein statistical analyses of New York student test performances.

Why critical thinking is important: (Critical thinking ... something missing in the Common Core and the other new trends ... hmm.)

This chart of Value-Added Measures, from an article by math instructor Gary Rubinstein, demonstrates how no real correlation can be drawn between the scores of students in one year with generally the same students in another year. (Actually, good fortune of down servers preventing access to the original Rubinstein post brings us to another mathematician's quite scattered plotting of test results. See below.)

* * *

Moreover, this writer points out that Mulgrew is still enthusiastically defending the indefensible: see "MULGREW TELLS DELEGATES SCUTTLED NEW EVALUATION SYSTEM WOULD BE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD" at the ICE-UFT blog.

This blog said the following last week: "The UFT is willing to concede on almost everything but Bloomberg's people may make it so humiliating that President Mulgrew would not even get a fig-leaf out of this. On the other hand, the Union could demand real safeguards (a right to grieve any unfair evaluations) so the DOE would reject any agreement." We were almost completely right except it looks like it was the mayor and not the DOE that inserted the poison pills. The fig-leaf was the two year sunset clause and the expedited arbitration if procedures weren't followed.
Trust me these were not great gains.

What happens next? I see the UFT going over the mayor's head to the state to try to get the system into law. What should people be doing? Call, email or talk to your union representatives, particularly Unity Chapter Leaders, and tell them you want no part of this and the real fight in Albany and Washington DC is to change the law so that no part of any teacher's rating is based on junk science.

* * *

UNITY-UFT STANDING IN THE WAY OF A MEMBERSHIP VOTE

Yes, there is no new evaluation system. But the UFT leadership remains tarnished for blocking a membership-wide vote on the system. For, contracts are voted on by the membership. The evaluation system has contract-like effects and significance.

Additionally unsettling is that the Unity leadership used its staff director lecture the delegates back in December about what the democratic representation scope is for the delegates. Certainly, a great error in principal. This excerpt from the ICE-UFT blog's report of that earlier Delegate Assembly:

Leroy Barr was called on to refute Kit's points. Leroy said that the membership elects Delegates and Chapter Leaders to represent members and the DA has a proud history of these duly elected representatives doing their job.

UPDATES:
Back to the analysis of the talks breakdown, Mulgrew still won't own up to the reality that his tentative evaluation agreement --yes, it is debatable as to whether there was some deal ready in the middle of the night-- was morbidly flawed, given that it was resting on illogical premises of the VAM testing models. His complaints have been around secondary, yet still important, side-issues. (The same can be said for Leo Casey writing at EdWize. He still has not rejected the fundamentally flawed VAM basis for the evaluations.) It's understandable that they will not own up to the essential core flaw of the high-stakes test-based evaluation system, for they has to save face.

The MORE caucus on its website, "Post-Mortem: The Non-Deal Between the UFT and DOE," has cited three critical reasons behind the failure of the evaluation deal, with discussion of each reason:
--Reason #1: Race to the Top is Bad Policy
--Reason #2: A Growing Backlash against Education Reform
--Reason #3: High-Handed and Un-Democratic School Leadership

We cannot entirely rest and must be watchful. There are rumors that the UFT might try to squeak in a deal in the next few weeks.

THE PERSISTENT PROBLEM OF THE UFT'S TOP-DOWN, UN-DEMOCRATIC MANNER
It is being argued, and rightly so, that the UFT ought to release the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), so that the UFT members may see what teacher evaluation agreement almost was agreed to. And just as the Great Powers' problem of secret negotiations and World War I, there is a major problem for democracy when the issues in the MOU are being kept from the members, as though we are young children.

New York City sends inspectors after the United Federation of Teachers after the breakdown of evaluations talks, UFT president Mulgrew tweets.

Right-minded teachers ought to oppose this harassment, this intimidation of our union.

LI's Newsday: Teacher evaluation systems proving costly

Teacher evaluation systems proving costly

Originally published: November 22, 2012 8:39 PM
Updated: November 22, 2012 9:27 PM
By JO NAPOLITANO jo.napolitano@newsday.com

The newly mandated teacher and principal evaluation system is costing Long Island school districts tens of thousands of dollars per year in training, testing and materials, even as they struggle with effects of the property-tax cap and putting in place other required education reforms.

The expense varies by district depending on its size and how it plans to satisfy the state's demands.

Go to the Newsday site for the remainder of the article.

Chicago Suburb Teachers Strike, As CTU Vote on Formally Settling Strike

From Mike Klonsky's blog, Test-based evals, 'merit" pay at issue in Evergreen Park strike

As Chicago teachers prepare to vote today on their new contract, teachers and support staff in the predominantly white, working-class Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park went on strike this morning. Negotiations have been dragging on since April. Highland Park and Crystal Lake teachers could follow suit later this month if they are still without a decent contract.

Among the things at issue are forced cuts in health care and retirement benefits. The board is also trying to force a new evaluation plan on teachers using "merit pay" based on students' standardized test scores. Seems to be a pattern here. Here's hoping the EP teachers get some real backing from IEA leaders who were conspicuously invisible during the Chicago teachers strike.

Chicago teachers are expected to vote overwhelming to accept their hard-won contract. A yes vote would also represent a strong show of support for the CTU leadership and Pres. Karen Lewis. Here are the details of the new contract.

I had to chuckle at yesterday's Sun-Times editorial telling Chicago teachers which way to vote today. As if anyone gives a crap what the S-T editors want. Likewise for the members of a tiny ultra-"left" sect who've been trying their best to get in front of T.V.cameras, calling the union leadership "sellouts" and telling teachers to vote no.
Posted by Mike Klonsky at 5:29 AM

Research Shows: Value-Added Teacher Accountability Not Ready for Prime Time

In Alternet research cited by supporters of the Chicago Public Schools' quest for value-added modeling (VAM) actually deflate pro-test arguments: "researchers were unable to compare the long term results of high value-added teachers with results of teachers who excelled in other ways that might, conceivably, have even larger impacts on long term outcomes."

Other research concluded: "It concluded that holding teachers accountable for growth in the test scores (called “value-added”) of their students is more harmful than helpful to children’s educations."

What does help? [This point is not the focus of the Alternet article.] A diverse curriculum and attention to children's basic health needs. These concerns are among the objectives of the Chicago Teachers Union strikers, and a fuller discussion can be read in their report, "The Schools Chicago's Children Deserve."

Writing in Alter Net, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute raises another concern, so far, little addressed, even among observers that are critical of the link of testing to teacher evaluation: will principals, when they are informed of teachers' value-added scores, use that information in a biased manner against the teachers to skew their own observations of teachers?
"But according to the Chicago district proposal, the observations will be conducted by principals, who will know the value-added scores of teachers they are observing. How principals will be influenced by this knowledge cannot be known—will they tend to give high ratings to teachers with high value-added scores in order not to call attention to possible flaws in their observational skills, will they tend to offset value-added conclusions in order to save favored teachers who have low value-added, or will they tend to sink unfavored teachers with high value-added?"

Rothstein wondered how widespread teacher discontentment is. One specific kind of discontent, that over test-based teacher evaluations, is sure to grow exponentially, as legislation mandating such evaluations spreads like wildfire across the United States. This legislation has been spurred on by President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's signature reform, Race to the Top. As of October 2011, when the National Council on Teacher Quality published a study, these 17 states and the District of Columbia are using "student achievement" as an "objective" role in assessing teacher performance: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, D.C., Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

Richard Rothstein debunks assumptions in the drive for value-added modeling teacher accountability in "Is 'Teacher Accountability' Ready for Prime-Time?," from Alter Net, September 17, 2012

Economic Policy Institute / By Richard Rothstein
Is 'Teacher Accountability' Ready for Prime-Time?
Though Rahm Emanuel wants to put student test scores at the center of teacher evals, there's little proof such measuring sticks make any sense.
September 17, 2012

It was bound to happen, whether in Chicago or elsewhere. What is surprising about the Chicago teachers’ strike is that something like this did not happen sooner.

The strike represents the first open rebellion of teachers nationwide over efforts to evaluate, punish and reward them based on their students’ scores on standardized tests of low-level basic skills in math and reading. Teachers’ discontent has been simmering now for a decade, but it took a well-organized union to give that discontent practical expression. For those who have doubts about why teachers need unions, the Chicago strike is an important lesson.

Nobody can say how widespread discontent might be. Reformers can certainly point to teachers who say that the pressure of standardized testing has been useful, has forced them to pay attention to students they previously ignored, and could rid their schools of lazy and incompetent teachers.

But I frequently get letters from teachers, and speak with teachers across the country who claim to have been successful educators and who are now demoralized by the transformation of teaching from a craft employing skill and empathy into routinized drill instruction using scripted curriculum. They are also demoralized by the weeks and weeks of the school year now devoted to gamesmanship—test preparation designed not to teach literacy or mathematics but only to make it seem that students can perform in an artificial setting better than they actually do.

I suspect, but cannot prove that the latter group of teachers is more numerous and that teachers in the discontented group are more likely to be seasoned, experienced, and successful. I suspect that teachers in the group supportive of standardized testing are more likely to be young, frequently hired outside the usual teacher training stream, and conditioned to think of education as little more than test preparation.

The research evidence is weighty in support of the discontented view; two years ago, EPI assembled a group of prominent testing experts and education policy experts to assess the research evidence on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. [Eva L. Baker, Paul E. Barton, Linda Darling-Hammond, Edward Haertel, Helen F. Ladd, Robert L. Linn, Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, Richard J. Shavelson, and Lorrie A. Shepard, "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers"] It concluded that holding teachers accountable for growth in the test scores (called “value-added”) of their students is more harmful than helpful to children’s educations. Placing serious consequences for teachers on the results of their students’ tests creates rational incentives for teachers and schools to narrow the curriculum to tested subjects, and to tested areas within those subjects. Students lose instruction in history, the sciences, the arts, music, and physical education, and teachers focus less on development of children’s non-cognitive behaviors—cooperative activities, character, social skills—that are among the most important aims of a solid education.

Recently, however, some have made claims to the contrary that there are great benefits to holding teachers accountable for standardized test scores. One study, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, administered a higher quality test of reasoning and critical thinking skills to students who had also taken their state’s high stakes standardized test of basic skills. The Gates researchers found that teachers whose students had high value-added scores on the standardized basic skills test also tended to have high value-added scores on the test of reasoning (i.e., teachers’ value-added on the two tests were positively correlated). This was a potentially important finding because it suggested that narrowing the curriculum as a consequence of high stakes testing is not something about which we should be concerned. If we know that teachers who are effective at teaching basic skills are also effective at developing reasoning skills, then we can hold teachers accountable only for basic skills and be confident that their students are getting both.

But although the teacher results were correlated, they were only weakly correlated. True, more teachers who had high value-added scores on a basic skills test also had high value-added scores on a test of reasoning, but it wasn’t many more. If you fired teachers who did poorly at teaching basic skills you would get rid of many teachers who did poorly at developing reasoning skills, but you would also get rid of many teachers who did well at developing reasoning skills. The first group (those who did poorly) would be larger than the second group (those who did well), but not much larger.

The second highly publicized study, done by a group of Harvard researchers, concluded that teachers whose students had high value-added test scores were also those whose students had better long term adult outcomes—better earnings, for example. This was a potentially important finding because it suggested that these tests had not become ends in themselves, but rather that success for students on these tests made the students more likely to be successful as adults, and if you put pressure on teachers to increase their students’ test scores you would also be putting pressure on these teachers to improve their students’ adult success. And that would be a good thing.

The flaw here is that the researchers were unable to compare the long term results of high value-added teachers with results of teachers who excelled in other ways that might, conceivably, have even larger impacts on long term outcomes. For example, the researchers could not say whether teachers who are more effective at developing their students’ cooperative behavior, or reasoning skills (and we know from the Gates study that only sometimes are these the same teachers who are more effective at teaching basic skills) might have students who have even better adult outcomes—like earnings. If this were the case (and we have no reason to believe it one way or the other), then getting teachers to shift their attention from teaching reasoning or cooperative behavior to standardized test preparation might be lowering their students’ future earnings, not raising them.

In short, the two recent studies most heavily promoted by supporters of the Chicago district’s plan to evaluate teachers in part by their students’ test scores do not confirm that the district’s position is wise. It may be, but it also may do great harm.

The Chicago district, and other promoters of teacher evaluation based in large part on student test scores, have become aware of these problems. And so they now emphasize that they support evaluating teachers by “multiple measures”—not only their students’ test scores but by the performance by students of assigned tasks under the supervision of experts, by observation of teachers by their principals, and sometimes (for high school students, for example) by student reports of teacher effectiveness.

This is a fine balanced approach in theory, but is very difficult to implement in practice. For example, when the Gates Foundation study also showed a correlation between a teacher’s value-added test scores and a rated observation by instructional experts, it conducted this experiment by providing the experts with videotapes of teachers conducting instruction. The experts watching (and evaluating) the videotapes did not know the value-added scores of the teachers on the tapes, so the two measures (value-added scores and expert observation) were independent. But according to the Chicago district proposal, the observations will be conducted by principals, who will know the value-added scores of teachers they are observing. How principals will be influenced by this knowledge cannot be known—will they tend to give high ratings to teachers with high value-added scores in order not to call attention to possible flaws in their observational skills, will they tend to offset value-added conclusions in order to save favored teachers who have low value-added, or will they tend to sink unfavored teachers with high value-added? One thing of which we can be certain: Armed with knowledge of teacher value-added scores, it will be much harder for principals to observe and evaluate teachers objectively. In times past, when student test scores did not have high stakes for schools or teachers, principals with knowledge of test results could use this knowledge constructively to guide their observations; principals would visit classrooms where test scores were poor to see if they could determine something being done poorly, or visit classrooms where test scores were good to see if they could learn what was being done right. With high stakes now attached to the test, such constructive evaluation is less likely.

With a rush to implement test-based accountability before these systems have been tested experimentally, or even thought-through carefully, the Chicago district proposal is in some respects silly. What about teachers who don’t teach math or reading and so who don’t have standardized value-added scores? Or those who have not had students for a full year, or who have not been teaching the same subject for sufficient time to have value-added scores? The district proposes to evaluate these using their school-wide average value-added scores. Perhaps, with this proposal, the district is acknowledging that a teacher’s impact on a student is not only the result of her own efforts, but of the school’s entire teacher corps, working collaboratively. But if so, then individual teacher evaluation-by-test-score makes no sense (even if individual teacher data happen to be available), and student growth data should be used only to evaluate schools as a whole.

The impact of teachers’ practice on each other is apparent. Should, for example, a fifth grade teacher’s value-added score be adjusted if her students had come from a class the year before with a fourth grade teacher whose value-added score was unusually high or low? With similar students, a fifth grade teacher will have an easier (or perhaps harder) time if her students had a more effective teacher in the fourth grade. It could be easier if students had a more effective teacher the previous year, because the skills students learn in one year can give them an advantage in learning in subsequent years. Or a teacher’s job could be harder if students had a more effective teacher the previous year, because students who learn more in one year will have less room to grow in the next year. Nobody, no educational theorist or practical policy maker has an answer to this problem, and the Chicago proposal ignores this obvious source of distortion.

News reports suggest that the Chicago strike may be settled soon. The district’s latest proposal is that value-added test score data could ultimately make up 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, with student growth on some yet-to-be-defined “performance” tasks—writing an essay, for example—comprising another 15 percent. This is far better than what some districts around the country are attempting to do, with standardized test score data making up half of a teacher’s evaluation. The union will likely agree to something close to the district proposal, with an appeals process that is stronger than what the district has thus far proposed.

Although the Chicago teacher evaluation system will not be the worst in the country, it will still rely on methods that are not yet ready for prime time. Whether the Chicago strike slows down the rush in other places to implement a terribly flawed system, or the settlement encourages other places to try it, remains to be seen.

Richard Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley.

Historic Karen Lewis Announcement of CTU Strike, 9/9/12 Press Conference

[Scroll to end for more on need for air conditioners.]

Click on the video at right for the complete Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis press conference announcement 10 PM Sunday night, September 9, 2012, of the strike of the Chicago Public Schools, to begin on Monday, September 10. Video is from NBC, WMAQ, Channel 5, uploaded at WBEZ Chicago.
NYC Eye's Full corrected press conference transcript:

"Negotiations have been intense but productive, however we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike. This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided. Throughout these negotiations have I remained hopeful but determined. We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve.

“Talks have been productive in many areas. We have successfully won concessions for nursing mothers and have put more than 500 of our members back to work. We have restored some of the art, music, world language, technology and physical education classes to many of our students. The Board also agreed that we will now have textbooks on the first day of school rather than have our students and teachers wait up to six weeks before receiving instructional materials.

“Recognizing the Board’s fiscal woes, we are not far apart on compensation. However, we are apart on benefits. We want to maintain the existing health benefits.

“Another concern is our evaluation procedures. After the initial phase-in of this new evaluation system it could result almost 6,000 teachers (or nearly 30 percent of our members) being discharged within one or two years. This is unacceptable and leads to instability for our students. We are also concerned that too much of the new evaluations will be based on students’ standardized test scores. This is no way to measure teacher effectiveness at all.

Further, there are too many factors beyond our control which will impact how well some students perform on those standardized tests. Those factors include poverty which no one wants to talk about, exposure to violence which over this past summer we all know has increased exponentially, homelessness, hunger and other social issues beyond our control. Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children that we do not control.

“We have talked seriously about job security. Job security is stability for our students. Despite a new curriculum and new, stringent evaluation system, CPS proposes no increase (or even a possible decreases) in teacher training. This is notable because our Union through our Quest Center is at the forefront teacher professional development in Illinois. We have been lauded by the District already and our colleagues across the country for our extensive teacher training programs that help emerging teachers strengthen their craft and increased the number of nationally board certified educators.

“We are demanding a reasonable timetable for the installation of air-conditioning in student classrooms--a sweltering, 98-degree classroom is not a productive learning environment for children. This type of environment is unacceptable for our members and all school personnel. A lack of climate control is unacceptable to our parents.

“As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day and an elected school board. Class size matters. It matters to parents. In the third largest school district in Illinois there are only 370 social workers -—putting their caseloads at over 1,000 students each. We join them in their call for more social workers, counselors, audio/visual and hearing technicians and school nurses. Our children are exposed to unprecedented levels of neighborhood violence and other social issues, so the fight for wrap-around services is critically important to all of us. Our members will continue to support this groundswell of parent activism and grassroots engagement on these issues. And we hope the Board will not shut these voices out.

“And while new Illinois law prohibits us from striking over the recall of laid-off teachers and compensation for a longer school year, we do not intend to sign an agreement until of the matters of our contract are addressed.

“Again, we are committed to staying at the table until a contract is place. However, in the morning no CTU member will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines. We will talk to parents. We will talk to clergy. We demand a fair contract today, we demand a fair contract now. And, until there is one in place that our members will accept, we will be on the line.

“We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the state and the country who are currently bargaining for their own fair contracts. Most people don't understand, it is not just Chicago it is file intent to strike. Let's be clear --in Illinois we have at least five AFT locals and twelve IEA locals.

“This announcement is made now so our parents and community are empowered with this knowledge and will know that schools --real schools-- will not open tomorrow. Please seek alternative care for your children. And, we ask all of you to join us in our education justice fight—for a fair contract—and call on the mayor and CEO Brizard to settle this matter now. Thank you.”



And for the need for air conditioners for the students and their teachers --remember, everything is being measured: From the New York Times:

Unfortunately, studies by Shin-ichi Tanabe, a professor of architecture at Waseda University in Tokyo who has long been interested in “thermal comfort,” found that while workers tolerated dimmer light just fine, every degree rise in temperature above 25 Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) resulted in a 2 percent drop in productivity. Over the course of the day that meant they accomplished 30 minutes less work, he said.

Other studies have found that with office temperatures between 82 and 86 degrees, symptoms like headache, drowsiness and difficulty concentrating increase, which may explain the drop in performance.

Worse still, perhaps, Mr. Tanabe calculated that the suffering was all for naught: When offices were kept above about 82 degrees, so many people were using inefficient fans at their desks that the total electricity consumption could be higher than if the building had been better cooled. “That’s just stupid,” he said.

Standardized test scores are worst way to evaluate teachers - Chicago Sun-Times

Standardized test scores are worst way to evaluate teachers - Chicago Sun-Times

[Thanks to blogger Mike Klonsky,who posted this this yesterday, and who uploaded this link in his March 27, 2012 on CREATE's "Open Letter of Concern Regarding Chicago’s Implementation of Legislation for the Evaluation of Teachers and Principals"]
Op-ed by Isabel Nunez, September 12, 2012

As a university professor and educational researcher, I sometimes feel like I’m in that old ’50s horror movie, “The Blob.” Remember that one, where an invader from outer space grows with everything it eats, until it is a giant monster that threatens the entire town? Testing has done the same to education, harming students and schools — and is now poised to bring down the whole enterprise by taking over teacher and principal evaluation.

I am part of a group called CReATE, or Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education, which is trying to unite the voices of academics in opposition to these changes and to the corporate takeover of public education. We are trying to spread the message that what is happening in our schools today is not supported by the research.

Standardized testing has become monstrous, which brings us to the proposed changes to teacher evaluation: the latest and worst use of testing so far. The Chicago Public Schools are planning to implement evaluations based in part on student test scores this school year. Terror at this prospect prompted CReATE to gather 88 signers on an open letter criticizing the plan, which we hand-delivered to the mayor, schools CEO and the Board of Education.

This new evaluation plan alone makes a strike no “choice” at all.

First, testing is not the way we should measure student growth. Large-scale educational testing was born in the early 1900s at a particular time in history: the industrial revolution. Some might argue that this was appropriate when preparing for the early 20th century work force, but in today’s globalized, information-based economy, “student growth” must be more meaningfully defined and assessed.

Next, if we are going to make the mistake of reducing student growth to a line graph, we must at the very least abide by the principles of measurement. The discipline of testing, called psychometrics, is governed by rules, and the new system of evaluation breaks some of the most fundamental rules.

The first important consideration of testing is purpose. The process of test construction is so specialized that an instrument designed for one purpose cannot be used for another. Even if we use the best tests possible, it is a core truth of psychometrics that no test is completely reliable: Error is part of every score.

For this reason, test developers, academic bodies and professional associations alike warn against attaching severe consequences to performance on any test.

It gets even worse from there. The way that CPS plans to use test scores in teacher evaluation, referred to as value-added, is so incredibly flawed that almost no one with a knowledge base in this area thinks it’s a good idea.

The National Research Council wrote a letter to the Obama administration warning against including value-added in Race to the Top federal grant program because of a lack of research support. The Educational Testing Service, an organization that stands to benefit tremendously from any expansion of testing, issued a report concluding that value-added is improper test use.

These are the people who know the statistics, and none of them thinks the models work. There is a list of obstacles:

One: A correlation does not mean a causality. Researchers have found fifth-grade teacher “effects” on fourth-grade scores using these models. Ridiculous, right?

That’s because the models don’t work. For one thing, there must be random assignment of students for this kind of comparison among teachers to work — and no administration that cared about students would ever do that. There are deep statistical problems, and no way to reduce the amount of error to an acceptable level. The biggest problem of all, though, is that this is a ranking. So half of all teachers will always be below the 50th percentile. That’s math.

This is setting teachers up for failure. This will ensure regular turnover, keeping the teaching force young and inexperienced, afraid and compliant. This is only one of many ways that teaching is being turned from a vocation to a job — and a low-paid, temporary one at that.

The Fordham Foundation issued a report this year, on teachers in the age of digital instruction, which talked about how we need to harness the power of technology to give students across large areas access to “media-genic super-instructors.” It literally proposed having “star” teachers onscreen, with “monitors” in the classrooms.

It suggested that teachers unions should look more like entertainment-industry unions, with “stars” commanding market rates, and the rest guaranteed minimum wages and benefits. These conservative think tanks are where policy is being formulated nowadays. Isn’t the personnel office in CPS now called the “talent office”? Thank goodness the Chicago Teachers Union is standing up to this madness. Teachers, working people and concerned citizens around the country are watching you, like heroes on a movie screen, with hope.

Isabel Nunez is associate professor at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago.

Standardized test scores are worst way to evaluate teachers - Chicago Sun-Times 

Valerie Strauss: Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are Wrong about Teacher Evaluation

Posted at 12:53 PM ET, 09/12/2012 at the Washington Post
Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation
By Valerie Strauss, The Answer Sheet column

You know things are going very badly for public school teachers when The New York Times editorial board calls a bad teacher evaluation system a “sensible policy change.”

The Times ran an editorial on Wednesday that smacked Chicago teachers for striking against a school reform package pushed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff of President Obama. It says in part:

Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea. The strike that has roiled the civic climate in Chicago— and left 350,000 children without classes — seems particularly senseless because it is partly a product of a personality clash between the blunt mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the tough Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis. Beyond that, the strike is based on union discontent with sensible policy changes — including the teacher evaluation system required by Illinois law — that are increasingly popular across the country and are unlikely to be rolled back, no matter how long the union stays out. The Washington Post editorial board has also supported test-based teacher evaluation, including in this piece on the strike.

The Post editorial says that “the system developed by Chicago officials, on which they offered to work with the union, is careful to measure student growth. That means teachers aren’t blamed if their students start out behind but instead are evaluated on their ability to make progress during the year they have responsibility.” Well, a single test is hardly the way to tell whether a child has made progress. How many of you have had a headache or been sick or emotionally upset and bombed a test? There are ways to measure how students are achieving without a standardized test.

Think what you want about the Chicago teachers strike. But that doesn’t change this:

The Times can say that using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers is a sensible policy and Obama can say it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan can say it and Emanuel can say it and so can Bill Gates (who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it) and governors and mayor from both parties, and heck, anybody can go ahead and shout it out as loud as they can.

It doesn’t make it true.

Can all these very smart people be wrong? Yes, according to many experts on assessment who have done extensive research on the subject.

These experts have said over and over and over that the method by which test scores are factored into an evaluation of how effective a teacher is are dramatically unreliable and unfair. Some say it will destroy the teaching profession because it will identify effective teachers as ineffective and ineffective teachers as effective. Some bad teachers will be fired but some good ones will too. Others will leave in disgust.

That’s what happened, for example, in New York City when Carolyn Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, learned that her “value-added” score made her the worst eighth grade teacher in the entire city. The score of course didn’t reflect that her students already scored near 100 percent proficiency and were doing advanced math — but the formula didn’t care.

The value-added formulas actually compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance, as Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas wrote here. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, he wrote, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.

No, Abbott’s case wasn’t an aberration. Lots of scores are wrong. Yet state after state insists on foisting this on teachers and even principals.

This isn’t just about the adults. Kids suffer when good teachers are said to be bad and bad teachers are said to be good, and especially when standardized tests have such high stakes that teachers feel forced to tailor their teaching to the test.

And think about this: If teachers are evaluated on test scores, there has to be standardized test for every class. What happens when tests have such high stakes? Kids learn how to pass tests rather than how to solve problems and think creatively.

Even the former education commissioner of Texas, Republican Robert Scott, recognized this and said earlier this year that all of this testing is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be.

Of course teachers should be evaluated — and evaluated better than they have been in most places for decades. Yes, bad teachers should be removed from the classroom, sooner rather than later. There are ways to do this that is fair, and it is already being done in places such as the high-achieving Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland.

In fact, The New York Times’ own columnist Michael Winerip wrote about that evaluation system last year in this story, which noted that then-Superintendent Jerry Weast had rejected $12 million in Race to the Top money because it required districts to use test scores to evaluate teachers. Weast was quoted as saying: “We don’t believe the tests are reliable. You don’t want to turn your system into a test factory.” Most Washington D.C.-area superintendents still think it’s a bad idea, including Weast’s successor, Joshua Starr. (Unfortunately Winerip doesn’t write about education anymore for The Times.)

In a Q & A with area superintendents, I quoted Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Edgar Hatrick as saying, “It is troubling that we will now take tests we’re not sure are good measures of student performance and extrapolate teacher performance from student scores.”

The Illinois law calls for an evaluation system in which at least 20 percent is based on student standardized test scores. Emanuel wants fully half of the evaluation to be based on the test scores.

(Incidentally, former Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee instituted a teacher evaluation system a few years ago that had 50 percent of individual assessments linked to student test scores — in courses where standardized tests were given — but her successor, Kaya Henderson, just dropped it down to 35 percent because of problems with the system.)

Read this from a letter that scores of researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area sent to Emanuel warning against the “value-added” system of teacher involvement, which uses complicated formulas to factor test scores into an evaluation:

As university professors and researchers who specialize in educational research, we recognize that change is an essential component of school improvement. We are very concerned, however, at a continuing pattern of changes imposed rapidly without high-quality evidentiary support.
The new evaluation system for teachers and principals centers on misconceptions about student growth, with potentially negative impact on the education of Chicago’s children. We believe it is our ethical obligation to raise awareness about how the proposed changes not only lack a sound research basis, but in some instances, have already proven to be harmful.

Professors in Georgia sent a letter to their governor against value-added evaluations. More than 1,500 New York principals and more than 5,400 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens have signed an open letter blasting that state’s value-added evaluation system, the letter which can be found here.

The National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, issued a major report last year on this issue that said:

The standardized test scores that have been trumpeted to show improvement in the schools provide limited information about the causes of improvements or variability in student performance.This would be true, presumably, for any school system that use standardized tests as a measure of achievement.

Mathematicians have said that value-added models are hardly ready for prime time as teacher evaluation tools, and that includes John Ewing, president of Math for America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving mathematics education in U.S. public high schools. In this post he said:

The most common misuse of mathematics is simpler, more pervasive, and (alas) more insidious: mathematics employed as a rhetorical weapon—an intellectual credential to convince the public that an idea or a process is “objective” and hence better than other competing ideas or processes. This is mathematical intimidation. It is especially persuasive because so many people are awed by mathematics and yet do not understand it—a dangerous combination.

The latest instance of the phenomenon is valued-added modeling (VAM), used to interpret test data. Value-added modeling pops up everywhere today, from newspapers to television to political campaigns. VAM is heavily promoted with unbridled and uncritical enthusiasm by the press, by politicians, and even by (some) educational experts, and it is touted as the modern, “scientific” way to measure educational success in everything from charter schools to individual teachers.

Yet most of those promoting value-added modeling are ill-equipped to judge either its effectiveness or its limitations. Some of those who are equipped make extravagant claims without much detail, reassuring us that someone has checked into our concerns and we shouldn’t worry. Value-added modeling is promoted because it has the right pedigree — because it is based on “sophisticated mathematics.” As a consequence, mathematics that ought to be used to illuminate ends up being used to intimidate.

That’s what value-added is doing: Intimidating teachers, and many of them believe that it will be the end of the teaching profession. Who would want to go into a profession where a big part of the evaluation system is faulty?

Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet.

By Valerie Strauss | 12:53 PM ET, 09/12/2012, the Answer Sheet column at the Washington Post

BREAKING: STRIKE IS ON!: Live Blogging the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Strike

UPDATE: CTU PRESIDENT OUTLINES THE ISSUES THAT THE CPS REFUSES TO COOPERATE ON, ISSUES DEALING WITH THE SCHOOLS THAT CHICAGO'S SCHOOLCHILDREN DESERVE -
READ RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW -
CPS PRES. DAVID VITALE TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS -
GLORIA STEINEM TO WEAR RED IN SOLIDARITY WITH CHICAGO TEACHERS -
FULL CTU PRESS RELEASE ANNOUNCING CPS' FAILURE TO PREVENT STRIKE

The eyes of the world (doubt it?, just check with the UK Guardian of Manchester, which again said this today) are on Chicago, to see if the Chicago Teachers Union strikes.

Tune into Chicago radio stations at 10:00 PM (CDT) / 8:00 (PDT) / 9:00 (MDT) / 11:00 PM (EDT) to hear news conference of Karen Lewis, president of Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

YOU CAN PICK UP CHICAGO STATIONS ON CLEAR CHANNEL STATIONS:
Clear channel (not to be confused with the commercial network) radio stations, accessible over the air far from Chicago (This is useful for the greater Midwest. Listeners in the Northeast will have to get a live stream online):
WSCR - 670 - Sports (CBS affiliate, Fox Sports, Yahoo sports)
WGN - 720 - News/Talk/Sports (Tribune, also owners of the Chicago newspaper)
WBBM - 780 - 24 hour News (CBS affiliate)
WLS - 890 - News/Talk (ABC affiliate)
WMVP - 1000 - Sports (Disney, ESPN Radio)

You can pick up a live stream from WBBM, Chicago's CBS news radio station. 780 AM and 105.9 FM.

NYC Eye's full corrected transcript of President Lewis' press conference:

"Negotiations have been intense but productive, however we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike. This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided. Throughout these negotiations have I remained hopeful but determined. We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve.

“Talks have been productive in many areas. We have successfully won concessions for nursing mothers and have put more than 500 of our members back to work. We have restored some of the art, music, world language, technology and physical education classes to many of our students. The Board also agreed that we will now have textbooks on the first day of school rather than have our students and teachers wait up to six weeks before receiving instructional materials.

“Recognizing the Board’s fiscal woes, we are not far apart on compensation. However, we are apart on benefits. We want to maintain the existing health benefits.

“Another concern is our evaluation procedures. After the initial phase-in of this new evaluation system it could result almost 6,000 teachers (or nearly 30 percent of our members) being discharged within one or two years. This is unacceptable and leads to instability for our students. We are also concerned that too much of the new evaluations will be based on students’ standardized test scores. This is no way to measure teacher effectiveness at all.

Further, there are too many factors beyond our control which will impact how well some students perform on those standardized tests. Those factors include poverty which no one wants to talk about, exposure to violence which over this past summer we all know has increased exponentially, homelessness, hunger and other social issues beyond our control. Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children that we do not control.

“We have talked seriously about job security. Job security is stability for our students. Despite a new curriculum and new, stringent evaluation system, CPS proposes no increase (or even a possible decreases) in teacher training. This is notable because our Union through our Quest Center is at the forefront teacher professional development in Illinois. We have been lauded by the District already and our colleagues across the country for our extensive teacher training programs that help emerging teachers strengthen their craft and increased the number of nationally board certified educators.

“We are demanding a reasonable timetable for the installation of air-conditioning in student classrooms--a sweltering, 98-degree classroom is not a productive learning environment for children. This type of environment is unacceptable for our members and all school personnel. A lack of climate control is unacceptable to our parents.

“As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day and an elected school board. Class size matters. It matters to parents. In the third largest school district in Illinois there are only 370 social workers -—putting their caseloads at over 1,000 students each. We join them in their call for more social workers, counselors, audio/visual and hearing technicians and school nurses. Our children are exposed to unprecedented levels of neighborhood violence and other social issues, so the fight for wrap-around services is critically important to all of us. Our members will continue to support this groundswell of parent activism and grassroots engagement on these issues. And we hope the Board will not shut these voices out.

“And while new Illinois law prohibits us from striking over the recall of laid-off teachers and compensation for a longer school year, we do not intend to sign an agreement until of the matters of our contract are addressed.

“Again, we are committed to staying at the table until a contract is place. However, in the morning no CTU member will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines. We will talk to parents. We will talk to clergy. We demand a fair contract today, we demand a fair contract now. And, until there is one in place that our members will accept, we will be on the line.

“We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the state and the country who are currently bargaining for their own fair contracts. Most people don't understand, it is not just Chicago it is file intent to strike. Let's be clear --in Illinois we have at least five AFT locals and twelve IEA locals.

“This announcement is made now so our parents and community are empowered with this knowledge and will know that schools --real schools-- will not open tomorrow. Please seek alternative care for your children. And, we ask all of you to join us in our education justice fight—for a fair contract—and call on the mayor and CEO Brizard to settle this matter now. Thank you.”

CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey then took questions.

David Vitale, just on WBBM, says impasse continues. Says that CPS has offered all that city can offer, pending budget constraints. Says latest, best offer, 3 % in year one (COLA + increase). On merit pay, city not proposing merit pay.
Have retained the steps that will give more pay to experienced teachers.
Have retained lanes. (????)
Will continue 7 % employee pension contribution.
Health care: rates for singles, couples, unchanged; CPS proposing more equity between singles, couples. Have taken wellness program off the table.
Sick days. Employees will retain sick day banks. Offering free disability program.
On layoff and recall area, and regarding school consolidations, teachers will follow students to the new positions.
Teachers will have the right to recall positions.
Teachers losing positions in school closing will go to a reassigned teacher pool. Will have to apply for jobs. Will get preference. Principals will have to explain if they reject applicants.
Will go to a single calendar, replacing the two calendar; proposing CTU contribute.
On teacher evaluation, will not use high-stakes tests. Will only be used to evaluate, to improve teachers.
Full proposal on the table is online at CPS site.

CTU website reports that writer, publisher Gloria Steinem will wear red in solidarity with striking Chicago Teacher Union members.

Gloria Steinem, Co-Founder of the Women’s Media Center, released the following statement this evening:

“Tonight, I proudly wear a red t-shirt in support of the Chicago Teachers Union strike. They have been forced to strike – for the first time in 25 years – by the false economy of firing and penalizing the experienced teachers most needed by the students and by new teachers; by lengthening the school day as warehousing without educational services, healthy school buildings, and paid teachers; by what they have the knowledge to call the “apartheid-like system” of differential discipline policies; and by what seems to be a national tactic of demonizing teachers in order to turn public schools into corporate profit centers.

“For instance, three years ago, a Stanford Study found that ‘students in charter schools are not faring as well as students in traditional public school.’ I’m glad to see that in a recent poll, twice as many Chicagoans trusted the Chicago Teachers Union, not the Mayor, when it comes to public education.

“As an 87% female workforce, and one that is nearly half African American and Latino, the Chicago Teachers Union know what their students need. This is why this country needs unions, collective bargaining, and mayors who recognize, honor and fairly pay the people our children know – and who know our children.” Steinem continued, "I join my colleagues at The Women's Media Center, in calling on the media to ensure that women are part of this story — as teachers, parents, union members, and as journalists.”

The CTU website also published a detailed statement echoing president Lewis' press conference statement.

Press Release: CPS Fails To Negotiate Fair Contract To Prevent First Strike In 25 Years
09/09/2012

More than 29,000 teachers and education professionals will not report to work today 9/10

CHICAGO— After hours of intense negotiations, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent the first teachers strike in 25 years. Pickets are expected to begin Monday at 675 schools and the Board of Education as early as 6:30 a.m. Teachers, paraprofessionals and school clinicians have been without a labor agreement since June of this year.

Union leaders expressed disappointment in the District’s refusal to concede on issues involving compensation, job security and resources for their students. CTU President Karen Lewis said, “Negotiations have been intense but productive, however we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike. This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could avoid. Throughout these negotiations have I remained hopeful but determined. We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve.

“Talks have been productive in many areas. We have successfully won concessions for nursing mothers and have put more than 500 of our members back to work. We have restored some of the art, music, world language, technology and physical education classes to many of our students. The Board also agreed that we will now have textbooks on the first day of school rather than have our students and teachers wait up to six weeks before receiving instructional materials.

“Recognizing the Board’s fiscal woes, we are not far apart on compensation. However, we are apart on benefits. We want to maintain the existing health benefits.

“Another concern is evaluation procedures. After the initial phase-in of the new evaluation system it could result in 6,000 teachers (or nearly 30 percent of our members) being discharged within one or two years. This is unacceptable. We are also concerned that too much of the new evaluations will be based on students’ standardized test scores. This is no way to measure the effectiveness of an educator. Further there are too many factors beyond our control which impact how well some students perform on standardized tests such as poverty, exposure to violence, homelessness, hunger and other social issues beyond our control.

“We want job security. Despite a new curriculum and new, stringent evaluation system, CPS proposes no increase (or even decreases) in teacher training. This is notable because our Union through our Quest Center is at the forefront teacher professional development in Illinois. We have been lauded by the District and our colleagues across the country for our extensive teacher training programs that helped emerging teachers strengthen their craft and increased the number of nationally board certified educators.

“We are demanding a reasonable timetable for the installation of air-conditioning in student classrooms--a sweltering, 98-degree classroom is not a productive learning environment for children. This type of environment is unacceptable for our members and all school personnel. A lack of climate control is unacceptable to our parents.

“As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day and an elected school board. Class size matters. It matters to parents. In the third largest school district in Illinois there are only 350 social workers—putting their caseloads at nearly 1,000 students each. We join them in their call for more social workers, counselors, audio/visual and hearing technicians and school nurses. Our children are exposed to unprecedented levels of neighborhood violence and other social issues, so the fight for wraparound services is critically important to all of us. Our members will continue to support this ground swell of parent activism and grassroots engagement on these issues. And we hope the Board will not shut these voices out.

“While new Illinois law prohibits us from striking over the recall of laid-off teachers and compensation for a longer school year, we do not intend to sign an agreement until these matters are addressed.

“Again, we are committed to staying at the table until a contract is place. However, in the morning no CTU member will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines. We will talk to parents. We will talk to clergy. We will talk to the community. We will talk to anyone who will listen—we demand a fair contract today, we demand a fair contract now. And, until there is one in place that our members accept, we will on the line.

“We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the state and country who are currently bargaining for their own fair contracts. We stand with those who have already declared they too are prepared to strike, in the best interests of their students.”

“This announcement is made now so our parents and community are empowered with this knowledge and will know that schools will not open on tomorrow. Please seek alternative care for your children. And, we ask all of you to join us in our education justice fight—for a fair contract—and call on the mayor and CEO Brizard to settle this matter now. Thank you.”

###
The union is not on strike over matters governed exclusively by IELRA Section 4.5 and 12(b).

The Chicago Teachers Union represents 30,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in the Chicago Public Schools, and by extension, the more than 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third largest teachers local in the United States and the largest local union in Illinois. For more information please visit CTU’s website at www.ctunet.com

[WBBM initially reported at 9:28 PM (CDT) that there would be no strike tomorrow because it would require house of delegates meeting and they were not convening then.]

Click to my previous blogpost for the Sun-Times' publishing of Chicago Public Schools' advice guide to replacement workers / scabs.

Teacher Job Satisfaction Plummets -Survey

Kenzo Shibata, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, wrote earlier this week in the Huffington Post, that teacher alienation has worsened to the point that one in three teachers is considering quitting the teaching profession in the next five years, and increase over the one in four teachers that was considering leaving in a survey three years ago.

According to a report on a survey commissioned by Met Life last spring, morale among the nation's teachers is at its lowest point in more than 20 years. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years. According to the report, just three years ago, the rate was one in four.
Met Life's results did not shock me. I often felt powerless as one teacher, advocating for the supports my students needed to succeed. In my first two years, not a week went by that I didn't consider changing careers and that had nothing to do with my students or their parents -- it was the system.

And read this posting by Valerie Strauss from The Washington Post, August 7, 2012:
Teacher job satisfaction plummets — Survey

This was written by Kevin G. Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. The center is housed at the university’s School of Education and sponsors research, produces policy briefs, and publishes expert third party reviews of think tank reports.

By Kevin G. Welner

It’s not fun to be repeatedly punched in the gut. And we can now quantify how not-fun it is, at least when teachers are the punchees.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That’s according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it’s also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman, the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed “scores” that purport to evaluate teachers based on students’ test results — an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Similarly, teachers see states and districts implement policies that largely base their performance evaluations on student test scores. These new policies are layered on top of No Child Left Behind and the subsequent years of narrowed curricula and teaching to the test. Teachers have been watching sadly as the sort of engaging learning that attracted them to the profession is increasingly squeezed out. Further, teachers in many states are facing attacks on their collective voice in education policy by anti-union governors such as Walker (Wisconsin), Scott (Florida), Christie (New Jersey), Daniels (Indiana), Kasich (Ohio), and Brewer (Arizona).

While all those governors are Republican, the trashing of teachers has been a bipartisan effort, led by groups that include Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children. In fact, President Obama is widely viewed as part of the problem. He will never achieve a Santorum-esque level of anti-public-school rhetoric, but Race to the Top and related policies have continued the drive toward privatization and test-focused instruction. Although the title of a U.S. Department of Education press release from a few weeks ago read “Obama Administration Seeks to Elevate Teaching Profession,” the headline a couple years ago was, “Obama Official Applauds Rhode Island Teacher Firings.”

None of us would want to have our job performance judged on an outcome that we don’t really control. Research suggests that a student’s teacher for a single given school year influences as little as 5 to 10 percent of her or his test-score growth. Sensible policymaking does not leap from “teachers are important” to “teachers can be evaluated as if they are the only thing that’s important.”

Similarly, none of us would want to have our evaluation based on an outcome, like test scores, that we know represents only a fraction of what we do and why we do it. And we wouldn’t want to pursue a good evaluation by doing our job in ways we think unwise or even harmful.

But that’s where teachers now find themselves. Maybe we should feel grateful that their job satisfaction only dropped 15 percentage points.
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By Valerie Strauss | 12:01 AM ET, 03/07/2012