Michelle Rhee’s Potential DC Cheating Scandal by: Ann Bibby - Care2

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Michelle Rhee rose to prominence in the education reform ranks thanks in large part to methods that helped raise test scores in the perennially low-scoring Washington D.C. school district she oversaw as chancellor.

Her tough stance on low-performing schools and teachers, which included firing those whose students didn't measure up on standardized tests, endeared her to reformers like Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

A Shining Star

Using a merit pay inspired bonus system to spur performance in both teachers and students, Rhee's reforms seemed to work. Schools like Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus made spectacular gains on the standardized test used by the No Child Left Behind Law to measure student academic growth. In 2006, Noyes ranked in the 10% and was labeled a school "in need of improvement" but two years later ranked 58% and was one of Rhee's "shining stars," proof that her reform efforts worked.

Teachers at Noyes were rewarded with $8,000 bonuses and the principal received $10,000 on two different occasions within a three-year period. Parents, however, complained that the test scores made no sense. Their children still couldn't perform basic math, but they were ignored. Test scores, after all, don't lie.

But sometimes, teachers do.

Altering Test Answers

A recent examination of the tests given in Rhee's former district has revealed that perhaps her incentives worked too well and not in a good way. Noyes students' tests, for example, revealed a high number of erasure marks on the test sheets. A frequency higher than would be expected normally and always from an incorrect answer to a correct answer. In one Noyes seventh grade classroom, the average wrong to right erasure marks averaged 12.7 compared to a district wide average of less than 1. The odds of winning the Powerball, in fact, are greater than such an occurrence being merely chance.

At least half of the schools under Rhee's tenure appear to suffer from the same higher than should be expected erasure problem. Taking into account what was at stake for teachers and principals, it evokes questions. Had some schools engaged in widespread answer changing to secure bonuses or jobs?

What Do You Think?

Rhee's methods have been touted by no less than the White House. But what if the miraculous turnaround of schools under her charge was the result of cheating?

The current Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, came into his White House appointment under similar circumstances. His tenure as the superintendent of the Chicago Public schools system supposedly resulted in widespread improvement based on test scores that turned out to be questionable.

If the "reformers" aren't really reforming, why has no one put the brakes on the dismantling of public education? Even NCLB has fallen far short of it's promise without anyone questioning the wisdom of allowing it to be the law of the land.

What do you think? Are we doing our children good, or harm, by jumping on every bandwagon and following every reformer without first testing their theories on a smaller scale to see if they have merit? What should we be doing?

Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel? by Jennifer Medina - New York Times

This is a prime example of the ridiculous things that Bloom/Klein are doing to our children and schools - it's another reason we need real educators running things at Tweed...and not corporate lawyers or this crackpot Professor Roland Fryer...I believe children should taught to learn for the love of learning new things and not for these financial rewards...

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The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

At Junior High School 123 in the Bronx, Jerome Johnson, a seventh-grade math student, also received cash awards.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Part of the tally sheet that students at participating schools receive if they do well on standardized math and reading tests.

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Masudur Rahman receives his “earnings” record from Dalia Johnson, the director of Public School 188 in Manhattan. The amount is determined by his scores on reading and math tests.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.

School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.

Each of these schools has become a test to measure whether, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg posits, tangible cash rewards can turn a school around. Can money make academic success cool for students disdainful of achievement? Will teachers pressure one another to do better to get a schoolwide bonus?

So far, the city has handed out more than $500,000 to 5,237 students in 58 schools as rewards for taking several of the 10 standardized tests on the schedule for this school year. The schools, which had to choose to participate in the program, are all over the city.

“I’m not saying I know this is going to fix everything,” said Roland G. Fryer, the Harvard economist who designed the student incentive program, “but I am saying it’s worth trying. What we need to try to do is start that spark.”

Nationally, school districts have experimented with a range of approaches. Some are giving students gift certificates, McDonald’s meals and class pizza parties. Baltimore is planning to pay struggling students who raise their state test scores.

Critics of these efforts say that children should be inspired to learn for knowledge’s sake, not to earn money, and question whether prizes will ultimately lift achievement. Anticipating this kind of argument, New York City was careful to start the student experiment with private donations, not taxpayer money, avoiding some of the controversy that has followed the Baltimore program, which uses public money.

Some principals had no qualms about entering the student reward program. Virginia Connelly, the principal of Junior High School 123, in the Soundview section of the Bronx, has experimented with incentives for years, like rewarding good behavior, attendance and grades with play money that can be spent in the student store.

“We’re in competition with the streets,” Ms. Connelly said. “They can go out there and make $50 illegally any day of the week. We have to do something to compete with that.”

Barbara Slatin, the principal of P.S. 188, on the other hand, said she was initially skeptical about paying students for doing well. Her students, many of whom live in the nearby housing projects along Avenue D, would surely welcome the money, she said, but she worried about sending the wrong message. “I didn’t want to connect the notion of money with academic success,” she said.

But after a sales pitch by Dr. Fryer, Ms. Slatin said she was persuaded to try. “We say we want to do whatever it takes, so if this is it, I am going to get on board,” she said.

In 1996, P.S. 188 was considered to be failing by the State Education Department, but it has improved dramatically over the last decade. In the fall, it received an A on the city’s report card. Still, fewer than 60 percent of the students passed the state math test last year, and fewer than 40 percent did so in reading.

Teachers at the school said that this year, they had noticed a better attitude among the students, which they attributed to the incentive program. One recent day, fourth graders talked eagerly about the computer games they have been playing to get ready for this week’s state math exam. During the school’s recent winter break, dozens of students showed up for extra tutoring to prepare.

“My teacher told me to study more, so I study,” said Jazmin, who had already taken eight standardized exams this school year. “I did multiplication tables. I learned to divide.” When asked why she took so many tests, Jazmin replied earnestly, “To show them we have education and we learn stuff from education and the tests.”

The students spoke excitedly about their plans for the money. Several boys said they were saving for video games. Abigail said she would use it to pay for “a car, a house and college,” apparently unaware that the roughly $100 she’s earned this school year might not stretch that far. Another little girl said she would use the money simply for food. When asked to elaborate, she answered quietly, “Spaghetti.”

Changing the attitudes of seventh graders seems to be more complicated. At J.H.S. 123 in the Bronx, for example, a seventh-grade English class was asked one morning if there were too many standardized tests. Every hand in the room shot up to answer with a defiant yes. But at the same time, the students all agreed that receiving money for doing well on a test was a good idea, saying it made school more exciting, and made doing well more socially acceptable.

“This is the hardest grade to pass,” said Adonis Flores, a 13-year-old who has struggled in his classes at times. “This motivates us better. Everybody wants some money, and nobody wants to get left behind.”

Would it be better to get the money as college scholarships? Shouts of “No way!” echoed through the room. “We might not all go to college,” one student protested.

So is doing well in school cool? A few hands slowly inched up. But when their principal, Ms. Connelly, asked what could be done to make being the A-plus student seem as important as being the star basketball player, she was met with silence.

For teachers, bonuses come with ambivalence. So toxic was the idea of merit pay for individual teachers that the union insisted that bonus pools be awarded to whole schools to be divided up by joint labor-management committees, either evenly among union members or by singling out exceptional teachers.

Still, nearly 90 percent of the 200 schools offered the chance to join the teacher bonus program are participating, after a vote with each school’s chapter of the teachers’ union. At many schools this year, including P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 123, a decision has already been made to distribute any money they get across the board, and they are trying to include secretaries and other staff members as well.

No teachers were willing to say the rewards were unwelcome, but few said the potential windfall would push them to work harder.

“It’s better than a slap in the face,” said Ms. Lopez, who has taught at P.S. 188 for more than a decade. “But honestly, I don’t think about it. We’re here every day working and pushing; that’s what we’ve been doing for years. We don’t come into this for the money, and most of us don’t leave it because of the money.”

Newer teachers seemed more positive, saying the bonus was a rare chance to be rewarded.

“I tell my students all the time that I can sit in the back and hand them worksheets and get the same amount of money as I do if I stand in front of the class working with high energy the entire time,” said Christina Varghese, the lead math teacher at J.H.S. 123, who is in her 10th year of teaching. “What’s the motivation there? At least this gives us something to work toward.”

It will be months before Ms. Slatin and her teachers know whether they have earned the bonus, but initial test scores are promising. On one test designed to mimic the state math exam, 77 percent of fourth graders met state standards. Roughly half of those who did not were just below the cutoff, making it possible that more than 80 percent of the students would pass the test this year — a virtual dream for the school.

“We want to believe it, but it makes me nervous,” Ms. Slatin said. “Those are not numbers we are used to seeing.”

Mayor Announces Merit Pay Deal - Media Round-up...

Daily News - Erin Einhorn...City hall, teachers union announce landmark retirement deal...

City Hall and the teachers union announced a landmark deal Wednesday to let educators retire earlier with a full pension in exchange for a merit-pay system largely tied to student test scores.

Under the agreement, current public school teachers would be able to retire with full benefits at 55 if they have logged 25 years in the classroom and agree to make larger pension contributions.

In exchange for the pension sweetener - which needs state approval - the union will sign off on a plan to give teachers bonuses if their schools significantly lift student test scores, improve attendance and meet other criteria. The average bonus would be $3,000 per teacher.

"In the private sector, cash incentives are proven motivators for producing results," Mayor Bloomberg said, while announcing what he called a "historic" deal. "The new school-wide bonus program will have the exact same effect."

Funded with $20 million from a private business group, the Partnership for New York City, and two other foundations, the bonuses would flow to teachers in as many as 200 struggling schools as soon as this year.

If there's enough money to go around, the plan is to expand the bonuses to 400 schools next year.

The United Federation of Teachers has agreed to a handful of small, limited programs to pay some teachers more than others, but this is the first time the union consented to a wide-scale plan to tie teacher pay to test scores.

Though union stalwarts tend to resist merit-pay schemes, President Randi Weingarten said this deal is different because teachers will decide whether to participate and because entire schools will benefit.

"When a school works as a team, when teacher voice is respected, when people are collaborative in partnership, schools succeed," she said.

If participating schools fulfill requirements to receive bonuses, a committee of two teachers and two administrators will decide how to distribute the cash.

The committee can decide to give every educator $3,000 or it can give some teachers more than others. They can't dole out cash by seniority. If the committee doesn't agree, the school will forfeit its prize.

The change to the retirement rules has been something the union has sought for years.

While educator pension costs top $1.5billion, city officials say the new deal won't cost taxpayers anything.

The changes will be paid for by increased contributions to the pension plan by teachers who choose to participate - and those who will start their teaching careers next year.

Teachers now pay 3% of their salaries for their first 10 years and then nothing until they retire.

Under the new agreement, Albany must approve the pension changes. If that fails, the agreement is scrapped.

If Albany signs off, teachers who want to participate must opt in within six months. They would pay 4.85% until they have taught for 10 years, and then 1.85% for at least the next 15 years. New teachers would pay the 4.85% for 10 years and 1.85% until they retire. But they can't retire until they've taught 27 years.

The Post of course, quotes a merit-pay advocate...how typical...

NY Post -Yoav Gonen Education Reporter - 'Historic' Merit Pay For Teachers


NY Sun - Elizabeth Green - Deal on Teacher Merit Pay May Sway National Debate

NY Times Blog - Mayor Announces Plan for Teacher Merit Pay by Sewell Chan...

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Mayor Announces Plan for Teacher Merit Pay

By Sewell Chan

Updated, 6:37 p.m. | Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced this afternoon what he called the biggest program of merit pay for teachers in the nation. Under the program, 200 schools — about 15 percent of all schools in the system — will be eligible this academic year for $20 million in privately financed bonuses if student performance improves by a certain amount. In the 2008-9 school year, 400 schools will be available for the bonuses.

The annual bonus would be equivalent to $3,000 per educator, but a committee at each school would have the power to decide how to distribute the money. So under the system, a teacher whose students showed particular improvements on standardized tests would not necessarily receive a greater individual bonus than another teacher at the same school whose students had not shown as much improvement.

The mayor, flanked by Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, and Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, called the agreement a watershed in his six-year-old plan for educational reform based on mayoral control. In providing teachers for the first time with compensation based solely on student performance and not on seniority, the new bonuses will encourage the best teachers and create an incentive for others to improve, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein said.

“In the private sector, cash incentives are proven motivators for improving results,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who built a multibillion-dollar business, Bloomberg L.P., before he was elected in 2001.

The bonuses will be raised from private sources, including philanthropic foundations and the Partnership for New York City, the city’s largest business association.

Participation in the bonus program this year will be voluntary. At each of the 200 eligible schools — schools designated as being “high-need” — the principal will have to agree, as well as at least 55 percent of the teaching staff.

At each participating school, school progress reports will be used to track student performance. Schools will be eligible for cash bonuses of up to $3,000 per educator. A four-member compensation committee at each school — made up of the principal, a principal’s representation and two members of the teachers’ union — will have control over how to allocate the bonus money. The committee may use various criteria in deciding how to distribute the money but may not consider seniority — the traditional basis of prerogatives among teachers.

The mayor has experimented with cash incentives for poor people to engage in certain behaviors, like making sure their children attend school, and he defended the notion of extending economic incentives to public employees.

“I am a capitalist and I am in favor of incentives for individual people, yes,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a City Hall news conference that started around 3:30 p.m. “But it depends on the situation and the organization and what the function is. In some cases it’s very easy to measure whether you do a better job than the person sitting to your left or right. In the schools it is a much more collaborative effort.”

The mayor also announced two other agreements with the powerful teachers’ union.

If union members agree, the number of years of service required for a teacher to earn a full pension would be reduced to 25 from 30. In exchange, current teachers would have to agree to a 1.85 percent increase in their pension contributions. A 1.85 percent increase in contributions will also be required from future teachers, who will have to work at least 27 years — instead of 30 — before being able to retire with a full pension.

The minimum retirement age, 55, would not change. Mr. Bloomberg said the pension change would not consist the city any money in the next five years but would “save in the tens of millions of dollars each of the following years after that.”

Finally, the city and the union announced that they had settled a longstanding legal dispute concerning retirement benefits for about 40,000 current and retired teachers. The dispute concerned whether the city had properly credited interest earned on members’ pension fund contributions. Under the settlement, the city agreed to supplement the retirement benefits for the affected teachers by $160 million over a period of about 10 years. “This settlement saves the city from potentially significant liability that could have been much greater than the settlement amount,” the mayor said.

Ms. Weingarten, who has led the teachers’ union since 1998, supported the 2002 decision by the State Legislature to give the mayor control of the city’s public schools. Since then she has occasionally clashed with Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein. But today, she emphasized the union’s positive relationship with City Hall, saying that the pension improvements, in particular, would reward those who invest their careers teaching. “You’ve all heard me often talk about how we have to attract and recruit and nurture teachers in order to get the best and the brightest not only to come, but to stay,” she said.

The idea of rewarding teachers for student performance is not a new one. At a panel discussion this week and again today, Mr. Klein said that Albert Shanker — who helped found the teachers’ union and led it for decades — endorsed, before his death in 1997, a system of incentives for rewarding teachers.

As a reporter pointed out at the news conference, the new proposal is not the first time that “pay for performance” has been tried in New York City.

In the late 1990s, the city’s Board of Education and the Partnership for New York City began an experimental program, Breakthrough for Learning, in two Brooklyn school districts, one in East New York and the other in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The program included some merit-based payment incentives, as well as signing bonuses for principals and discounted mortgages and apartment loans for teachers, but the experiment was not continued.

“We learned a lot from Breakthrough for Learning,” Ms. Weingarten said today. “It was schoolwide, but it was very management-dominated — and it was top-down. It was not the kind of program that we’re suggesting here.”

She added, “We thought that was the right kind of approach, but the implementation, meaning making sure there’s real collaboration and partnership at the school-based level, is what was missing.”

The city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., who attended the news conference with the mayor, praised the idea of schoolwide bonuses. In a statement released after the news conference, he said:

There is no question that if we are to attract and retain teachers in New York, that we must be able to create an environment where members of this profession have more reason to hope that they can succeed and thrive. Today we are adding one more incentive to help keep experienced, dedicated teachers in New York. I commend Mayor Bloomberg for adopting a wise approach not only to retain teachers but to improve student performance.

Following the news conference, the United Federation of Teachers also issued a statement. Here are Ms. Weingarten’s quotes, excerpted from the statement:

This agreement creates pro-active programs that address two major issues facing our schools, making the profession economically viable and fostering collaborative learning environments where teachers have real voice.

We are delivering on the promise we made to work with the city on a retirement benefit that could serve as an incentive for teachers to work in and stay with the New York City public school system. This pension benefit makes teaching an attractive lifetime career for new teachers. It gives them an incentive to stay for the long haul. Currently, almost half of new teachers leave in their first five years. We need to slow this ‘brain drain’ because experienced career teachers provide much needed quality and stability for our public school system.

The school-wide bonus plan reflects the core belief and principle of the U.F.T.: students achieve when all the educators in a school work together on their behalf. By fostering teamwork and mutual support, the whole school and all its children benefit.

School-wide bonuses properly refocus the misguided debate over individual merit pay. Respecting and understanding the importance of teamwork and collaboration is precisely why the U.F.T. has opposed the idea of individual merit pay for teachers – especially when based solely on student test scores. This school-wide program recognizes and builds upon a core philosophy that says students learn, achieve and benefit most when all educators in a school collaborate to provide the best possible education.

This school-wide plan generates the kind of spirit and partnership within the school community that make a school great.

NY Times: Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers by Sam Dillon...

MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

The New York Times

Here in Minneapolis, for instance, the teachers’ union is cooperating with Minnesota’s Republican governor on a plan in which teachers in some schools work with mentors to improve their instruction and get bonuses for raising student achievement. John Roper-Batker, a science teacher here, said his first reaction was dismay when he heard his school was considering participating in the plan in 2004.

“I wanted to get involved just to make sure it wouldn’t happen,” he said.

But after learning more, Mr. Roper-Batker said, “I became a salesman for it.” He and his colleagues have voted in favor of the plan twice by large margins.

Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.

“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

Scores of similar but mostly smaller teacher-pay experiments are under way nationwide, and union locals are cooperating with some of them, said Allan Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation. A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession.

“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.

Minnesota’s experience shows, however, that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.

How thoroughly unions will embrace merit pay remains unclear, said Chester E. Finn Jr., an education scholar who served in the Reagan administration. In some cities where unions have agreed to participate in merit pay programs, they have consented only after reshaping the programs so thoroughly that student achievement is one of many factors by which teachers are judged, reducing the programs’ effectiveness, Mr. Finn said.

The rewards teachers receive for outstanding performance range from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more in a few districts.

The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] Private groups are also involved; the Milken Family Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., for instance, which helped create the Minnesota program, has channeled money and expertise into similar plans that include incentive pay at 130 schools in 14 states and the District of Columbia.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”

The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, said the union was willing to talk further with the city about “schoolwide bonuses for sustained growth in student achievement.”

Some recent experiments have run into the same opposition that doomed merit pay in the 1980s. In Houston, an incentive plan drafted at school district headquarters over union opposition stirred up a firestorm when the first checks were written earlier this year and The Houston Chronicle put teachers’ bonuses on its Web site, making public which teachers the district had rewarded and embarrassing those it had not.

In Florida, the Legislature last year rushed to approve a merit pay plan before Gov. Jeb Bush left office in January. But many teachers rejected it this spring because it limited bonuses to the top 25 percent of teachers in any school, identified primarily by students’ test scores; they said that was an artificial cap. This year Gov. Charlie Crist and the Legislature scrapped the plan in favor of one that allows teams of teachers, not just individuals, to get bonuses.

In Minnesota, some experiments with new teacher pay systems got under way during the last decade at the initiative of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, whose leaders feared that their Democratic state legislators, on whom the union had long relied to obtain financing for teacher raises, were losing power to suburban Republicans.

“We realized we were going to have to embrace some things that would get money into teachers’ pockets in nontraditional ways,” said Louise Sundin, the federation’s president from 1984 until last year.

In 2004, the union worked with Mr. Pawlenty to bring a Milken Foundation initiative to three Minneapolis schools, including Seward Montessori, where Mr. Roper-Batker is one of about 50 teachers. He received a bonus of $2,131 after the first year, partly because he taught English in an intensive team effort that raised student scores. Student achievement has risen even more sharply at other schools participating in the program, officials said.

Mr. Roper-Batker said the bonus was welcome but not remotely as powerful a motivation as his own ambitions for his students. Several of his colleagues expressed similar views.

In 2005, Mr. Pawlenty modeled his own statewide teacher incentive plan, Q Comp, on the Minneapolis program. Of Minnesota’s 340 districts, about 40 have adopted Q Comp, and about 140 have submitted letters declaring their intent to join, he said. Allowing teachers to vote to participate is crucial, he said.

“This is a complex process of changing a culture, and it will fail if teachers don’t support it,” Mr. Pawlenty said.