Sen Gillibrand Says Education Agenda Must Stress More Math and Science by Roger Muehlig - The Daily News Online: News

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Saying that more than 25 percent of students across the state tested poorly in math and science last year, U.S. Senator, Kristen Gillibrand announced an education agenda intended to strengthen instruction in those areas to better prepare students for jobs in an increasingly technological era.

"America is home to the world's strongest economy, the greatest colleges and universities, and the world's brightest minds, Gillibrand said in releasing her agenda during a conference call with upstate news media last week.

"But if we're going to keep our place atop the global economy, we must prepare our students with the education they need for the jobs of the future."

That starts, she said, with sparking more interest in math, science and technology, drawing more STEM (science, technology and math) teachers to educate students in "high-need" areas and streamlining proficiency standards.

"We are relying on our children today to be the innovators of tomorrow," she said in a news release tied to the conference call. "It's our job to make sure they are prepared."

Gillibrand said high-tech is going to be the best growing industry and that her agenda includes:

-- The Engineering Education for Innovation Act, a targeted effort that would, among other things, integrate engineering education into K-12 classrooms, increase engineering and technology teacher preparation programs, and promote partnerships among K-12 school administrators and teachers and engineering professionals.

The legislation, she said, would create a three-year program to award grants for planning and implementation of engineering education into K-12 instruction and curriculum.

-- Co-sponsoring legislation to establish a grant program within the U.S. Department of Education to create more hands-on STEM learning experiences, such as robotics.

-- Introducing legislation to provide STEM teachers who work in low-income, high-need schools a tax credit to cover 10 percent of their undergraduate tuition, up to $1,000 each year.

-- Legislation encouraging states and the National Assessment Governing Board to adopt common core standards in mathematics and encourage state participation by establishing an incentive fund for awarding four-year grants to states that agree to adopt voluntary math and science standards as the core of their own standards and align their teacher certification and professional development to those standards.

Focusing on primary education is a first step, Gillibrand said. "We have a long way to go."

--

Students lack proficiency

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the fastest-growing occupations in the last 10 years required expertise in the fields of science and math, according to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

But, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, less than a third of American students are proficient in those two academic fields, she said.

For Western New York, figures from four math and four science regents from 2010 indicate 23 percent of high school students scored unsatisfactory in math and 16 percent scored unsatisfactory in science.

In the Rochester/Finger Lakes region, the figures were 25 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

Weingarten: Reformer and Firebrand by Stephen Sawchuk - Teacher Beat - Education Week

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In her keynote address today, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sought to present two sides of herself and her work for the union, as both reformer and firebrand.

The union, she said, has been willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations about reforms to teacher evaluation and due process. But it won't hesitate to speak out against politicians and pundits who are using the mantle of reform to attack teachers.

Weingarten had a lot of tough ground to cover in this speech, and it's a delicate balancing act to advance some reform ideas and fight against others. No doubt some folks will accuse her of playing both sides of the fence. But she's also getting credit for her work, as in this recent op-ed.

As always, I recommend that you read the whole speech yourself, but here are the key quotes whose themes were woven throughout her keynote address:

"I stand before you today sure in the knowledge that we have examined our policies, looked at our practices, and made changes when we've needed to change. That has sometimes been hard, but it gives us needed credibility to hold a mirror up to others.

But frankly, I am shaken to the core —in fact I am horrified—by the immense threats to public services, particularly public education, that exist in the corridors of power in this country."

In the speech, Weingarten set her brand of reform—which is largely being carried out in the form of new contracts, such as those in Pittsburgh and New Haven, Conn.—against those pushed by what she termed the "blame the teacher" crowd. That crowd, she said, focuses on top-down reforms, expects teachers to overcome children's learning barriers by themselves, fails to engage in supports teachers need, like well-designed curricula, and is focused on teacher firing and the weakening of job security.

Weingarten and other officials took pains to point out that they've been willing to take on Democratic lawmakers, not just Republican ones, over certain policy prescriptions.

"I never thought I'd see a Democratic president, whom we helped elect, and his education secretary applaud the mass firing of 89 teachers and other staff in Central Falls, R.I., when not a single one of the teachers ever received an unsatisfactory evaluation," she said to much applause.

While introducing Weingarten, AFT Secretary Treasurer Antonia Cortese noted that the union called out the Education Department for seeking to isolate "pet programs" from cuts. And apparently, Weingarten also confronted Vice President Joe Biden at a recent AFL-CIO meeting for voicing his support of the Central Falls firing. "I don't think he'll make that mistake again," Cortese quipped.

A few other items of note.

• Weingarten again underscored the importance of out-of-school factors in student learning. "It is simply wrong to suggest that there is an epidemic of bad teachers, and at the same time to ignore poverty, budget cuts, the absence of curriculum, the huge attrition of good teachers—all the things we know truly hamper student success," she said.
• While calling some charter networks "lovely schools," she said many are essentially "boutiques" that selectively enroll (KIPP would beg to differ), tap resources not necessarily available to public schools, and aren't scalable solutions to the problems of public education.
• Curriculum continues to be an important focus for the union. It is one of the key supports teachers need, Weingarten said. That helps to explain why the AFT has been so engaged in the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
• In keeping in touch with her idea of "360 degree" accountability, an old theme from her United Federation of Teachers days, Weingarten said that school leaders and administrators must be held accountable for providing educators with the supports they need to succeed.
• She also said that the AFT is beginning a "full-on campaign" in support of public education "as it ought to be." Few details were immediately available; I'll bring them to you as I get them.

More later with some policy details on teacher evaluation from a press session Weingarten just hosted with reporters. Stay tuned.

Teachers’ Union Shuns Obama Aides at Convention by Sam Dillon - NYTimes.com

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For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The National Education Association's convention began Saturday. No one from the Obama administration is set to speak.

But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling.

The largest union’s meeting opened here on Saturday to a drumbeat of heated rhetoric, with several speakers calling for Mr. Duncan’s resignation, hooting delegates voting for a resolution criticizing federal programs for “undermining public education,” and the union’s president summing up 18 months of Obama education policies by saying, “This is not the change I hoped for.”

“Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the union, the National Education Association, told thousands of members gathered at the convention center here.

President Obama and Mr. Duncan have supported historic increases in school financing to stave off teacher layoffs while seeking to shake up public education with support for charter schools, the dismissal of ineffective teachers as a way of turning around failing schools, and other policies. That agenda has spurred fast-paced changes, including adoption of new teacher evaluation systems in many states and school districts, often with the collaboration of teachers’ unions.

But it has also angered many teachers, who say they are being blamed for all the problems in public schools.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Duncan played down the tensions. “I have great respect for the leadership of both unions,” he said. “We’re trying to push a lot of change, and we’ve seen extraordinary breakthroughs in the last 18 months.

But we won’t agree on every issue.”

He noted the considerable range of views among union leaders nationwide. “Some state and local unions are very thoughtful and progressive and are embracing innovation,” he said. “Others are more entrenched in the status quo.”

Still, administration officials are concerned about the souring relations, and have been working to ease tempers, partly by emphasizing what they consider to be positive leadership by teachers’ unions in some regions.

“The administration is aware of the anger and wants to do whatever they can to cool it off, including getting third parties to issue words of praise for the unions when warranted,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a Republican who last month used his influential education blog, Flypaper, to highlight the forward-looking positions taken by union leaders in Delaware, Tennessee and six other states. Mr. Finn said he decided to write the post after an administration official pointed out how many local unions had helped lead overhaul efforts.

Better relations are important to the administration. Mr. Van Roekel’s association, with more than three million members, says it spent $50 million in 2008 to help elect the president and more than 50 candidates for Congress and governors’ offices, most of them Democrats.

The American Federation of Teachers, with 1.4 million members, also spent millions of dollars to help elect Mr. Obama and other candidates in 2008.

“If the teachers sit on their hands this fall, it would be a disaster for Obama and the Democrats,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied the teachers’ unions.

In a skirmish last week over federal education financing, the administration and the teachers’ unions were bitterly at odds. Last year, Congress approved $100 billion in education stimulus funds, about half of it to help states avoid school layoffs.

With that money now running out, House Democrats proposed spending $10 billion more to shore up school district budgets, paying for it, in part, with $800 million in cuts to Race to the Top and two other competitive grant programs Mr. Duncan created to spur his initiatives. Mr. Duncan and the White House supported the $10 billion in new spending, but objected to trimming the grant programs, infuriating union leaders.

“For the Department of Education to say, ‘Everybody else has to sacrifice, but our pet programs must be spared’— that makes me so angry I don’t even know how to say it,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has often been more supportive of administration initiatives than the National Education Association .

E-mail messages pleading for the jobs measure rained down on Congress from thousands of union teachers, and despite a veto threat by the White House, Democrats in the House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to create the $10 billion school jobs fund and to trim Mr. Duncan’s grant programs. The bill must be reworked by the Senate. On Friday, Mr. Duncan shrugged off what appeared to be an administration setback, expressing confidence that lawmakers would eventually find a way to spare Race to the Top.

One group that helped the administration defend Race to the Top was the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that has pressed for changes in the way teachers are evaluated. Timothy Daly, its president, said the angry rhetoric from union leaders now was less important than the long-term changes the administration has begun to coax from them.

“Sometimes union leaders need to show their members that they are vociferously pushing back,” Mr. Daly said. “But in several areas of the country the unions have come quite a distance.”

As examples of what he called innovations that unions have recently supported, Mr. Daly pointed to a “revolutionary” new contract for teachers in Washington, D.C., a far-reaching state law overhauling teacher tenure passed in Colorado with Ms. Weingarten’s support, and a new contract in New Haven, under which tenured teachers who are ruled ineffective and do not improve may be fired.
“Teachers are like anybody else, we don’t want to make changes,” said David Cicarella, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, who helped negotiate that contract. “But those days are over. The public is sick of hearing that an ineffective teacher has tenure, that you can’t touch them.”

Here in New Orleans, many state and local teachers’ union leaders have expressed ambivalent views on the Obama administration.

“We have to recognize that with Obama we have a voice in the decision-making, they listen to us,” said Earl Wiman, president of the Tennessee Education Association. But he added, “Mostly what we’ve seen out of this administration is a top-down, put-your-thumb-on-somebody kind of philosophy, and it’s aroused more frustration around federal education policy than I’ve ever seen.”

Charters: Will the Free Market Improve Education? By Claus von Zastrow - Public School Insights

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Another study of charter schools has dealt a big blow to the most die-hard supporters of the free market in schooling. It seems a charter school's popularity is no guarantee of its success. The invisible hand will not deliver better results.

The Department of Education just released the new study (PDF), which focuses on charters at the middle school level. The study examines schools that had more applicants than they could accommodate and compares students who were randomly selected to attend those schools with those who were not. It concludes that, on average, the schools "are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior and school progress."

Charters, it seems, helped some students but hurt others. Like other studies before it, this report supports a far more cautious charter strategy than we're hearing from politicians and pundits these days. Here are some of the big lessons I drew from the study:

Even the Most Popular Charters Did Not Outshine Traditional Public Schools
First, let's not forget that this study did not review a representative sample of charter schools. It examined the small share of charters that had many more applicants than they could take. These are the charter schools parents are most likely to choose, so we would expect them to be the high fliers.

And that's a pretty select group. Of the almost 500 charters that had been been around long enough to meet the study's criteria, only 36 made the final cut. Some declined to participate, but the vast majority were not sufficiently oversubscribed to take part in the study. Would the less popular charter schools--or those that would rather not be studied--perform worse than the 36 chosen ones? It's hard to say, but my instinct tells me they're not likely to perform better.

If popular schools that have to resort to lotteries are in some cases doing worse than traditional public schools, what does that tell us about the power of school choice to improve students' performance? We all know how hard it is to close even the least successful schools.

The Free Market Did Not Guarantee Success
The one area where charters really outshone traditional public schools was parent and student satisfaction. But this finding reveals that people can be very happy with lackluster results--an inconvenient truth for those who would say the free market will make schools better and better.

The finding that parents and students are happier with the most popular charters isn't all that shocking. The schools are oversubscribed, after all. Charters full of disgruntled parents are not likely to inspire new parents to enter their children in the lottery. What's more, if you tried but failed to get your child into a popular school, chances are you're none too enthusiastic about the school you tried to leave.

But the charter schools in the study do seem to earn the praise they get from parents. Parents whose children won the lottery were more likely to report that they receive calls from their schools. They were also more likely to say they attended school events. The fact that charters were smaller on average than the comparison schools may account for some of this finding. Still, it seems that traditional public schools could learn something from the most popular charters.

Yet the fact remains: Too often, satisfaction does not translate into strong academic results. That's a real problem for the free marketeers.

We Have to Learn from the Best Charter and Non-Charter Schools
There is some good news in the report for charter supporters, but nothing to warrant the no-holds-barred charter expansion plans cherished by the True Believers. Charter schools serving more low income or low achieving students had positive effects on those students' math scores. (Reading scores were a wash. Reading remains the toughest nut to crack.) So it would behoove us to study those schools more closely to see what they are doing right.

Overall, though, charters seemed to drag down the math and reading results of students who did not receive free or reduced-price lunch. That finding, too, deserves serious attention. Policy makers have to think hard about what kinds of charter school regulation are most likely to feed the flowers and kill the weeds.

Of course, we should also pay attention to what does and doesn't work in traditional public schools. Some do very well by their low income students, and others flop. In the end, I'm more interested in how well a school is doing than in how it is governed.

The Hype Surrounding Charters Endangers Good Policy
The huge and well-funded campaign for charter schools seems way out of proportion with the results charters have delivered so far. The nuance of the IES study is nowhere to be found in the grand pronouncements of politicians and pundits. Films like The Lottery and Waiting for Superman are fueling the notion that charters are always better than traditional public schools. The best charter schools have been poster boys for all charter schools, while the worst traditional public schools have come to represent all traditional public schools.

Could this massive sales job be making parents less discriminating? Could it widen the gulf between parent satisfaction and anemic results? Could it blind policy makers to the pitfalls of rapid charter expansion?

In the end, all the PR around charter schools may undercut the very free market forces some charter friends embrace. Markets depend on information we can trust. Hype just clouds our judgment.

Send a Message to Congress to Prevent Damaging Increases in Class Size, NOW..! by Leonie Haimson - The Huffington Post

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All over the country, school budgets are being slashed to the bone and teachers are being laid off, leading to sharp increases in class size next year.

But we still have a chance to minimize these damaging effects on our schools.

Representative Obey, head of the House Appropriations committee, has introduced an amendment in Congress that would save thousands of teacher jobs , using funds drawn from the federal "Race to the Top" grant program, subsidies for charter school expansion, and teacher merit pay.

None of the programs that the Obey amendment would cut back on are research-based, according to the National Academy of Sciences, which has pointed out how these experiments may have negative effects on our schools.

Unlike reducing class size, these policies also have little support from most public school parents or educators. Meanwhile, the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Department of Education, has reported that providing smaller classes is one of only three reforms that has been proven to work through rigorous evidence.

So please tell your member of Congress today that you strongly SUPPORT the Obey amendment to save teacher jobs, and that cutting back on the risky federal expansion of high stakes testing and charter schools would be a great way to do this, by calling the Congressional switchboard at (202) 225-3121.

For more on the Obey amendment, see Education Week here.

You can also check out our earlier letter to Obama and Congress from parents across America about the importance of listening to parents and reducing class size and our piece in EdWeek about the way in which the US Department of Education has shut out parent voices from the debate over education reform.

Follow Leonie Haimson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/leoniehaimson