Here are a few articles over the summer worth checking out.
New Groups Giving Teachers Alternative Voice
In times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for
them? The question is almost axiomatic in its simplicity, but the answer
is far less clear-cut.
The teachers’ unions remain the most visible, powerful, and
probably the most important advocates for teachers. But over the past
few years, a number of new efforts have sprung up purporting to give
teachers a say in policy, and their emergence is extending discussions
about “teacher voice” in unexpected ways.
In general, the groups’ origins, goals, and purposes remain
diverse, and their work continues to evolve. Where the groups seem to
converge, though, is that their members are gradually becoming involved
in conversations about policy, ranging from teacher evaluation to
seniority to professional development.
Groups include the Los Angeles-based
NewTLA, which operates as a caucus within the city teachers’ union, and the
Educators 4 Excellence group in New York City, which has purposely worked outside the teachers’ union.
Two other efforts, one begun by the Boston-based Teach Plus
nonprofit organization and the other by the Carrboro, N.C.-based Center
for Teaching Quality, have gathered together teachers in multiple
cities. Their approaches are similar: providing those teachers with
research on issues of interest and avenues for interacting with
policymakers.
“There are so many teachers out there who want change and have
great ideas, but they’ve had so few venues and vehicles to be heard,
understood, and embraced,” said Barnett Berry, the president of the
center. “They’re itching for the research knowledge to help them
articulate the connections between policy and practice.”
New Majority
It is hard to point to just one factor that has led to the surge in such groups.
NEWTLA
Caucus within United Teachers
Los Angeles
No. of Teachers: N/A
Location: Los Angeles
TEACH PLUS POLICY FELLOWS
Nonprofit organization
No. of teachers: 2,000
(current fellows and alumni)
Locations: Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, Tenn.
NEW MILLENNIUM INITIATIVE
(Center for Teaching Quality)
Nonprofit organization
No. of Teachers: 85
Locations: Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Illinois; San Francisco Bay Area; Seattle
EDUCATORS 4 EXCELLENCE
Nonprofit organization
No. of Teachers: 2,500
Location: New York City
One important influence, though, could be demographic
changes. According to an analysis of federal data conducted by Teach
Plus, 52 percent of teachers now have 10 or fewer years in the teaching
profession, a phenomenon the group refers to as “the new majority.”
Teach Plus’ founder, Celine Coggins, began the organization in
2007 to give such teachers leadership opportunities and, ultimately, to
help retain them in the profession.
“Having a say in how our schools look and function will play a
role in their decisionmaking about whether they’re going to stay for
another 10 years, or two, or five,” Ms. Coggins said.
The Center for Teaching Quality’s efforts date to 2003, when it
began an initiative to assemble a cadre of accomplished teachers to
discuss the broad issues facing the profession. Gradually, the idea has
evolved into the
New Millennium Initiative,
in which local networks of teachers work to make their voices heard on
topics of local interest, such as the implementation of new state laws.
Support from a variety of private national and local foundations,
including the Joyce Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
and the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation, have helped in the
transition. (The Joyce Foundation underwrites coverage of improvements
to the teaching profession in
Education Week, and the Gates Foundation provides grant support to Editorial Projects in Education, the newspaper’s parent company.)
Jessica Keigan, a high school language arts teacher in Denver
participating in the initiative there, said she was excited not just
about having her voice heard, but also in learning the details of how
education policy is made.
“I’d never immersed myself in policy before,” she said, “and it’s
been a great way to see how decisions get made and to feel I had some
awareness and also some say.”
The Educators 4 Excellence group was formed by Evan Stone and
Sydney Morris, who were frustrated by a lack of control over district
policy decisions while teaching in a traditional public school in New
York City. Their decision to form a group for like-minded colleagues, in
2010, quickly attracted other teachers.
“There are all these new changes created at the 30,000-foot level
pushed down to you,” Ms. Morris said. “It’s our mission to include
teachers in creation of those changes.”
Whither Unions?
The traditional teachers’ unions have had a variety of reactions
to the emergent organizations, ranging from respectful to uneasy.
NewTLA, for instance, began as a group of Los Angeles teachers who
were frustrated with the local union’s failure to put forth proposals
on teacher evaluation and professional development.
In the union’s recent internal election, NewTLA-affiliated members
won a significant number of seats on the United Teachers Los Angeles’
governing body.
NewTLA co-founder Jordan Henry turned down several interview
requests, saying that the caucus would be putting together a more
specific agenda and set of initiatives this fall. The group’s website
says that its priorities will be “determined and decided solely by
dues-paying UTLA members,” and that it “improves union governance
through greater representation of the many voices.“
The Educators 4 Excellence group, by contrast, is unabashedly
working outside New York City’s United Federation of Teachers. Its
founders say they didn’t feel their interactions with the union were
productive.
“It became very clear in those conversations that the union needs
to have one stance on every issue,” Mr. Stone said. “We didn’t feel that
on the issues where we disagreed there was room for debate, or
discussion, or dialogue. We felt the opportunity to have buy-in needed
to be outside the established organization.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Coggins of Teach Plus underscored that her group’s
theory of action is that improved engagement for teachers in the issues
that affect them will result in improved student achievement. Often,
that means more participation in teachers’ unions, and the organization
encourages such work.
Alex Seeskin, a policy fellow with Teach Plus’
Chicago cohort,
was initially skeptical of becoming more deeply involved with the
Chicago Teachers Union. But after joining a union committee on teacher
evaluations, he found diverse opinions among rank-and-file teachers,
rather than hard and fast dogma.
“The more I’ve read, the more discussions I’ve had, the more I’m
able to see not only a teacher’s point of view, but also a union
delegate’s point of view and administrator’s point of view, and realize
most of the time, these issues are more complex than one- or two-line
sound bites,” Mr. Seeskin said of his participation with Teach Plus and
the CTU.
“The education debate we have, both local and national, has become
hyperpartisan, and there isn’t much room for moderates,” he continued.
“Teach Plus has helped me figure out how we can help find middle ground,
especially locally.”
Affecting Policy
Each of the groups has made its mark on local policies, and many of them explicitly describe their work as “solutions-oriented.”
The Center for Teaching Quality’s Denver teachers, for example,
are providing input into the implementation of a Colorado bill that
passed last year that overhauls teacher-evaluation and -tenure
provisions. They’ve submitted early comments for rulemaking on that
bill. The state education department, state lawmakers, and the Colorado
Education Association have all invited the group’s input.
“There’s been so much frustration and mistrust among the different
groups,” Ms. Keigan, the high school teacher, said. “I hope we can find
that common page to be on.”
In New York, the E4E group pushed to base layoffs in the city on
three criteria, rather than the reverse-seniority provisions in state
law. Those changes were included in a state Senate bill. (The measure
passed the Senate but was not introduced in the Assembly.)
Teach Plus’ policy fellows
have selected a variety of hot topics for study, such as the unequal
distribution of talent and the difficult nuances of teacher-evaluation
systems. Its
Boston fellows
helped craft a model to encourage highly effective teachers to transfer
to, and stay in, challenging schools, a venture now in its second year.
(
"Teacher Teams Help Schools Turn Around," April 20, 2011.)
In Indianapolis, Teach Plus members proposed changes in layoff
policies to the Indianapolis Federation of Teachers, which were
ultimately codified in a new collective bargaining agreement in 2010.
And in Chicago, the policy fellows have called for a peer-assistance and
-review program, in which experienced teachers help coach novices. They
have also weighed in on teacher evaluations, an area in which the city
is currently in limbo, having scrapped a pilot program in favor of a new
framework.
‘Astroturf’?
The policy issues tackled, as well as the groups’ goals and origins, have made several of them fodder for criticism.
Some observers have referred to the new groups as “astroturf,” a
pejorative term for a grassroots organization that is actually a front
for a vested interest. E4E, in particular, has fought against that
claim.
To become a member of the E4E group, which received some $160,000
in start-up funding from the Gates Foundation, individuals must sign a
declaration asserting, among other beliefs, that teachers should be
evaluated based on student progress and that tenure policies should be
rethought. Those positions are generally consistent with the
teacher-effectiveness philosophy expounded by Gates.
E4E’s members “have a thin grasp of education policy”
outside of hot-button issues favored by self-styled reformers, contended
Leo Casey, the vice president of academic issues for the United
Federation of Teachers. “They don’t really have to a lot to say about
instruction.”
But Ms. Morris said the group is not anti-union, and further, that
its declaration is merely a starting point for conversations. “Some of
the items are newer ideas, I think, but there is a lot of room to
discuss and debate the details,” she said. Its board of directors, she
added, is entirely staffed by teachers.
In 2009, Teach Plus received a $4 million grant over several years
from the Gates Foundation. But Ms. Coggins says the foundation has
merely helped increase the number of policy-fellow teams and has in no
way influenced their work.
Ms. Coggins attributes criticism of Teach Plus to the sensitive problems the teachers have chosen to address.
“Frankly, the process [the teacher teams] experience in generating
new ideas, helping to see them through to a point of viability,
figuring out the funding for them and the conditions of success is
always tricky and different,” she said. “There’s not exactly a formula,
and sometimes we’re looked upon with suspicion” by outside organizations
and pundits.
Policy fellows sometimes choose not to endorse high-profile policy
efforts championed by philanthropies, Ms. Coggins noted. For instance,
the Chicago fellows didn’t support a recent bill overhauling teacher
tenure and evaluation rules in Illinois, over concerns about a provision
curbing the right of Chicago teachers to strike.
The Gates Foundation has in the past also donated to both national teachers’ unions, though in proportionally smaller amounts.
Staying Power
The test of the new groups’ ability to help reshape the teaching
profession will come in part from their staying power, as well as what
their teacher members go on to do.
“I think our influence is just starting now,” said Noah Zeichner, a
high school social studies teacher in Seattle who works with the New
Millennium Initiative team there. “Teachers are invested in the
classroom, and they are always engaged in the complexity of teaching,
which I think is easy to forget and difficult to understand, if you
don’t experience that reality every day.”
For now, Mr. Seeskin says participating in Teach Plus has given him a new outlook on the profession.
“I was in Southeast Asia and spent a beautiful afternoon inside
writing a long essay for the Teach Plus message board, and my wife was
like, ‘Please stop, we’re on vacation,’ ” Mr. Seeskin recalled. “It was
the first time that I really felt about policy, ‘This is so cool. I love
this.’ ”
==================
Mike Antonucci at EIA:
Posted: 11 Aug 2011 08:36 AM PDT
On the pages of
Time, Andrew Rotherham examines the various reform-minded groups that have sprung up
within the ranks of the big-city teachers’ unions. Sarah Rosenberg at
The Quick and the Ed
follows suit. Rotherham calls them “insurgents” while Rosenberg refers
to “a revolution.” While I applaud any publicly stated diversity of
thought within NEA and AFT, I am considerably less sanguine about the
prospects of major internal reform.
There are two
problems. One is that in any corporate culture radical changes in
direction are frowned upon, if not suppressed. In unions, whose very
hallmark is solidarity, this reluctance to entertain unorthodox thought
is ratcheted up several levels. The relative electoral success of
NewTLA
is remarkable, but such victories don’t usually result in further
gains in subsequent elections. I admit we are operating in
extraordinary times, so maybe things will be different and I’ll be
surprised.
Second, everyone is an insurgent until he or she achieves power. If you think this is an easy transition, ask
Karen Lewis in Chicago. Or ask
Bob Chase
how that new unionism thing worked out for him. The teacher union
reform field is littered with the bodies of those who sought to alter
the union’s primary mission – protecting teachers – and found themselves
ousted in favor of challengers who promised to get tough with
administrators.
You say you want a revolution?
Well, you know…
--------------------------------
A Revolution from Within
http://www.quickanded.com/2011/08/a-revolution-from-within.html
The
40,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles is not known as a leader in
education reform. In fact, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a
former teachers union employee, characterized UTLA leaders as standing
as,
“one unwavering roadblock to reform.” But reform is brewing within the UTLA.
NewTLA,
a progressive caucus within UTLA, currently holds 90 of the 350
elected leadership seats in UTLA’s official governing body. With over
25% of the seats, NewTLA holds considerable power to shift UTLA policy
towards
NewTLA’s priorities
which include: comprehensive teacher evaluation, meaningful
professional development, and quality-based criteria for determining
layoffs and dismissals. Earlier this year during a
hotly contested runoff election for union president,
NewTLA endorsed underdog and self-described change agent Warren
Fletcher over UTLA vice-president and front-runner Julie Washington.
Fletcher won the election, cementing NewTLA’s reputation as a player in
UTLA politics.
Many believe that teachers unions, designed to
safeguard jobs and pay, will not play a role in reform or will only
engage in the face of significant outside pressure. NewTLA, however,
demonstrates that being reform-minded and union may not be mutually
exclusive. According to Jordan Henry, cofounder of NewTLA, many
members of NewTLA are experienced teachers with strong union ties.
Henry believes that, “the fact that many [active union members] have
chosen to throw down with NewTLA as a political caucus now gives
[NewTLA] a lot of credibility within the union.”
Henry, a Teach
For America alum, is profiled in the current issue of the Teach For
America alumni magazine. In an article conspicuously titled “A More
Perfect Union”, Henry describes the role of unions: “Unions should be
protectors of not just employees but the institutions in which they
work. A teachers union needs to protect public education as well.”
Teach For America’s choice to profile Jordan Henry is not surprising. In the wake of the
NEA vote
accusing TFA of placing corps members in districts with no teacher
shortages, TFA wrote to corps members and alumni that the vote was “a
signal that we must strive harder to build positive relationships and
partner with our valued colleagues in the teaching profession.” Of
course, the article also makes a subtler point: As more TFA alums stay
in the classroom and become active members in local unions, NewTLA may
be a sign of what’s to come.
-----------
Quiet Riot: Insurgents Take On Teachers' Unions
By
Andrew J. Rotherham
Quick: Which group consistently tops the list of U.S. political donors —
bankers? Oil barons? The Koch brothers? Nope. Try schoolteachers. The
two major teachers' unions, despite all the rhetoric about how teachers
have no influence on policy, collectively spent more than $67 million
directly on political races from 1989 to 2010. And that figure doesn't
include millions more spent by their state and local affiliates and all kinds of support for favored (read: reform-averse) candidates.
For years, union leaders have lambasted as antiteacher pretty much every proposal to expand charter schools,
improve teacher evaluation and turn around low-performing schools. Yet
these reform issues have moved to the mainstream as even the Democrats,
traditionally labor's biggest allies, have gotten fed up with union
intransigence to structural changes to improve America's schools.
Meanwhile, states as diverse as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio
and — you guessed it — Wisconsin are attacking union prerogatives
such as valuing seniority over on-the-job performance and collectively
bargaining for benefits. At the same time, black and Latino parents are
growing increasingly impatient with lousy schools and are organizing in
an effort to provide a counterweight to the unions. Just last week, the
nation's second biggest teachers' union, the American Federation of
Teachers, was embarrassed when a PowerPoint presentation surfaced on the
Web outlining strategies for undercutting parent groups. Sample quote:
"What helped us? Absence of charter school and parent groups from the
table."
But perhaps the biggest strategic pressure for reform is starting to
come from teachers themselves, many of whom are trying to change their
unions and, by extension, their profession. These renegade groups,
composed generally of younger teachers, are trying to accomplish what a
generation of education reformers, activists and think tanks have not:
forcing the unions to genuinely mend their ways. Here are the three
most-talked-about initiatives:
The takeover artists. The Los Angeles teachers' union, United
Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), has long been regarded as one of the
nation's most hidebound. But Jordan Henry, a 12-year veteran teacher,
wants to change that, so last year he co-founded NewTLA. (Get it? Rhymes
with UTLA? C'mon, this is education reform — we must find little bright
spots wherever we can.) Henry has managed in short order to build a
large dissident faction within the union. After the last union election,
NewTLA holds 90 of the 350 seats in the union's house of
representatives, an impressive feat of organizing given how challenging
it is for nonmainstream candidates to get much traction within the
union. And although Henry is trying to change the union from within, he
is not shy about criticizing it publicly, recently telling the Teach For
America alumni magazine that, "I don't think my local affiliate is a
leader in reform, as much as it says it might be." NewTLA is already
taking on tough issues like seniority and urging UTLA to move from its
narrow focus on the teachers' contract to a broader one about how to
improve schools.
(See what makes a school great.)
The outsiders. Educators for Excellence (E4E) is a group of more
than 3,500 New York City teachers that is to trying to change laws and
policies by going straight to policymakers. For instance, when New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed doing away with the current system of
laying off the most recent hires first, the union attacked any notion of
letting principals unilaterally pick which teachers get booted. But the
newly formed E4E forced its way into the conversation and sought a
middle ground, proposing an alternative that took into account such
things as how often teachers had been absent, whether they were actually
in front of students or in nonteaching "reserve" roles and also factoring in performance ratings.
The union wasn't enthusiastic about this approach either, but the idea
got traction in Albany. And although the city and the teachers' union
cut a deal on layoffs, the episode established E4E as a voice in
education policymaking. E4E's leaders say they don't want to create a
parallel organization to the unions; their goal is to "generate an
elevated profession of teachers who want to be accountable," according
to Sydney Morris, one of two New York City teachers who founded the
group last year. Still, given the divergence between its positions and
ethos and those of the teachers' unions, E4E seems destined to be an
outside agitator for a while. Look for it to expand to other cities to
"demonstrate that there are teachers across the country who feel this
way," says co-founder Evan Stone. "It's not isolated bubbles."
The hybrid. Teach Plus is a network of teachers with chapters in
Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis and, starting this
fall, Washington. The group recruits accomplished teachers who want to
take on leadership roles within their schools or to advocate for public
policy changes without leaving their classrooms. More than 4,500
teachers are involved so far, and about 250 have gone through selective
12- and 18-month fellowships. Teach Plus says it wants to partner with
unions — albeit by bringing reformers inside the tent. Celine Coggins, a
former middle-school science teacher in Massachusetts who founded the
group in 2007, says many teachers often tell her that the unions "seem
like my grandfather's union,
not necessarily mine." That's why Teach Plus is offering a home for
teachers interested in an organization, as Coggins puts it, "with a bias
toward high performers" — eduspeak for wanting to support and reward
the best rather than focus on defending the worst. Teach Plus is
starting to make a dent: its members are now serving in leadership roles
within the Boston Teachers Union.
It's too early to tell whether any of these groups — or even all of them
working in tandem — will succeed in changing the teachers' unions. Will
the uprisings bring about a transformative revolution like in Tahrir
Square or a deadlock like in Libya? And while ridiculous seniority
policies provide easy targets, more complicated issues such as teacher
evaluation and creating a genuinely professional culture within schools
lie ahead for them. Union leaders, meanwhile, bristle at the upstarts
and so far seem less inclined to help them than to co-opt or marginalize
them. And there is an obvious structural hurdle facing the insurgents:
like all unions, teachers' unions exist to protect their members,
creating a natural conflict between, say, maintaining job security for
everyone and implementing measures that differentiate based on
performance or create real accountability for results.
(See "Back-to-School Special: 5 Tips on Picking a Good School.")
But when you talk to progressive union leaders and the teachers at the
vanguard of this new movement, it's striking how much they have in
common — even accounting for disagreements around specific policies.
Most notably, they share a frustration with the education conversation
today and a desire for actual change.
Over the past two decades, the demand for reform has caused the
teachers' unions to do little more than budge on a few issues. AFT
President Randi Weingarten admitted to CBS News earlier this year that
in some places teacher tenure
does amount to a job for life, and her union has put forward its own
teacher-evaluation proposals. Still, it's not yet the kind of dramatic
change needed to create genuinely high-performing schools. So although
significant reforms in education have traditionally come from outside
the education field, perhaps with these budding alternaunions, the best
hope for change is now coming from within.
Disclosure: Two of my partners at Bellwether have done executive search
and strategy work for Teach Plus, and I have advised the organization
informally.
Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk,
is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit
working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School
of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.
When
parents and school districts go to court trying to win fair funding for
under-resourced schools and the opportunity to learn for all children,
Dr. Rick Hanushek, an economist at the conservative Hoover Institution,
usually gets a phone call. All across the country, State defendants pay
him to testify as an expert witness in lawsuits seeking educational
opportunity for urban and rural kids. 