What the Chicago strike is really about

Michael J. Petrilli / September 13, 2012

I had a reporter ask me this week if I could remember a teachers’ strike as “confusing” as the one in Chicago; it was so hard, she explained, even to know over which issues the teachers were striking.

Mike broke down the significance of the Chicago teachers' strike on "The Kudlow Report" last night.

That’s not an accident. The local and national unions surely realized, after an onslaught of negative coverage, that complaining about 16 percent raises on top of $75,000 average salaries was not a winning argument during a period of 8 percent unemployment. So they changed their talking points: Now the teachers were upset about evaluations that would link their performance reviews with students’ test scores. But that position is unpopular, too—and puts the union at odds with President Obama—so now they are striking over…class sizes and air conditioning?

Right.

This is akin to the Republican defense of the dubious “Voter ID” laws: That they are necessary to protect against voter fraud. Everyone knows they are a cynical ploy to suppress the participation of poor and minority citizens—likely Democratic voters. But GOP officials can’t admit that. So they obfuscate.

So it is with the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s the meat-and-potatoes issue of pay and benefits

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What the Chicago strike is really about

The Xerox effect

Kathleen Porter-Magee / September 13, 2012

Perhaps the most seductive trap in all of education reform is the idea of replication, a.k.a. “scaling.” A charter school is high achieving? Turn it into a CMO! A curriculum is achieving big results? Bring it into every classroom in its district! An instructional strategy is clicking with teachers? Take it nationwide! In theory, this makes sense, best practices and all that. We should multiply success and shun failure. If something is working, why not replicate it?

Copying success doesn't always lead to success. Photo by Andre W.

Too often, though, replication falls short of these high expectations. It ends up more like an old-fashioned Xerox, where each new copy is a little fainter and blurrier than the one that came before.

In education, the Xerox effect often stems from a shift in focus. In the high achieving schools and classrooms so many seek to copy, teachers and leaders work together with their eyes firmly trained on the goal of improving student achievement. In replication schools, however, that focus is too often diverted from student outcomes to the faithful implementation of “proven” programs, systems, and tools.

What’s more, feedback in replication schools is too often aimed at how well the program is being implemented, rather than on whether—faithful to the

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The Xerox effect

Chicago and Boston: Different endings, same beginning

Tyson Eberhardt / September 13, 2012

Drawing parallels is irresistible: Yesterday, the Boston Teachers Union reached a tentative contract agreement with the Boston Public Schools. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of striking teachers picketed outside Chicago public-school buildings as that city’s strike entered its third day. Two large urban districts serving predominantly poor and minority students, months of contentious negotiations between district and union officials that had sputtered over disagreements about teacher evaluation and pay; yet in Beantown a pact was reached that increased the use of student achievement in teacher evaluations while 350,000 CPS students waited on adults so they could return to class. True, crucial differences exist—for one thing, teacher strikes are illegal in Massachusetts. But remember one key similarity: In each case, the union-district squabbles are really the conclusions of battles fought years ago at the state level. The use of student achievement in teacher evaluation was already guaranteed in both states by Race to the Top-driven changes before these contracts came up for renegotiation. As union and district leaders quarrel over specifics of student-data use for teacher evaluations (the core of both disagreements), it bears remembering that, however the struggles in cities around the country like Boston and Chicago play out, the spark that ignited them was lit two years ago by a certain teacher-union-backed president and his Department of Education.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Teacher evaluations at center of Chicago strike,” by Sophia Tareen, Associated Press, September 13, 2012.

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Chicago and Boston: Different endings, same beginning

There's news outside Chicago?

The Education Gadfly / September 13, 2012

Los Angeles charter-school advocates are questioning the legality of a proposed moratorium on new charters. LAUSD's budget and achievement woes have many sources and underperforming charters are one of them, yes. Shutting out all new charters rather than shutting down the worst of the existing ones, however, is a bit like solving a technical disagreement over teacher evaluations by shutting down an entire school district. Ok, bad example.

A Los Angeles Times editorial accused the Adelanto Elementary School District of deliberately obstructing an effort by parents to take control of an elementary school using California’s “parent trigger” law. Well, yes, but did parent-trigger proponents really expect the district and other opponents to acquiesce without resorting to easy bureaucratic and legal stalling tactics? If the parent trigger has become the “lawyer trigger,” is it time to admit the limits of this idea?

Louisiana plans to launch a marketplace for publicly funded courses next year that would allow students to select from online and in-person courses outside of their schools. Kudos to the Bayou State for developing a creative way to guarantee access to the increasingly diverse ways that education can be delivered in the digital era.

Gadfly's prediction: The Chicago strike will end soon (perhaps today?) as national Democrats pressure both sides to end the potentially politically damaging struggle before Republicans can make too much hay from the episode. Gadfly's hope: The spat will

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There's news outside Chicago?

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

Pamela Tatz / September 13, 2012

Carmakers hang their hats on J.D. Power and Associates’s annual safety ratings. Television stations live by Sweeps Week. And those interested in international educational competitiveness have the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report. This vast compilation of data reports on the output of educational institutions (including achievement, graduation rates, equity, and labor-market outcomes); the resources invested in education (financial and human-capital, at the K-12 and higher-ed levels); access to education (including for pre-K youngsters and adult learners); and the “learning environment” (meaning class sizes, teaching time, examinations, etc.). The facts are interesting all by themselves. For example, the U.S. spends 7 cents less of each education dollar on teacher compensation than the OECD average (63 cents), but 8 cents more than average on non-teaching personnel (16 cents). (Caveat: While pension benefits are factored into this analysis, health-care benefits are not.) Further, the authors find that, even though evidence of the effects of class size on student achievement is weak, the student-teacher ratio has decreased in more than two-thirds of the countries studied, with a concomitant impact of education expenditures. Partake seriously of the data, but be careful not to overindulge in the report’s policy recommendations. While a few are palatable—adjust policy to allow effective teachers, irrespective of seniority, to spend more time teaching and mentoring their peers, for example—many others are stale.

SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators (OECD

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Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation Schemes

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / September 13, 2012

Education reformers have long argued against step-and-lane salary structures and defined-benefit pension systems, lamenting that they keep burned-out teachers in classrooms longer than is prudent, push away strong young candidates who could make many more dollars in other lines of work, and thereby hurt student achievement. This study by Katharine Strunk and Jason Grissom empirically evaluates how front- and back-loaded teacher-salary schedules impact student performance. (Front-loaded schedules provide larger raises early in a teacher’s career and smaller ones later; back-loading concentrates raises among veteran teachers.) The analysts use nationally representative school data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and student-proficiency data in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading from a limited number of states (fifteen to twenty, depending on the grade and subject). Half of all districts frontload salaries; however, the districts that backload do so to a much greater degree: The average back-loading district provides 135 percent more yearly returns (or bump in pay for years experience), whereas in districts that frontload, novice teachers get 37 percent greater returns for their years of experience than do veterans, on average. Further, districts that bargain collectively with teacher unions are more likely to have back-loaded salary structures—unsurprising as unions tend to be dominated by their older members. Regarding student achievement: The analysts find that back-loading is consistently negatively associated with students reaching proficiency benchmarks in both math and reading and across elementary and middle school grades, but the magnitude is small

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How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation Schemes

First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion Rates

Asa Spencer / September 13, 2012

College pennants line the halls of most high-performing charters. Selection Day (when students announce the colleges they’ve chosen to attend) feels much like NFL Draft Day. But, even though these students—prepared as they are—matriculate to college, graduation is far from ensured (as the Houston-based YES Prep charter network and KIPP have discovered). This study from Harvard’s Joshua Goodman and Sarah Cohodes offers perspective as to why these low-income, yet high-performing students may stumble: It comes down to college quality (not necessarily college affordability). The authors examined the impacts of the Adams Scholarship—which offers free tuition at Massachusetts public colleges for those who score in the top quartile of the state test—on college completion. They found that students who were induced by the scholarship to attend Bay State public universities (and forego a higher-quality private or out-of-state option) were 26 percentage points less likely to graduate. These students don’t drop out, then, because they enroll in colleges that are too hard; they drop out because they pick colleges that aren’t hard enough. (Thomas Sowell may not agree, but Paul Tough makes a similar point in his recent book: How Children Succeed—and others have as well.) Educators: This is yet another reason to push your students to set their sights high and push themselves to reach their full potential.

SOURCE: Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman, First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion

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First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion Rates