PA: Tenure Attack Renewed

HB 805 -- a bill to #protectexcellentteachers -- just passed the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 6-3. #HB805 #PAbudget

— StudentsFirst in PA (@PAStudentsFirst) December 4, 2015

And while the latest round budget attempts was stirring up dust, that's about as much attention as anyone was paying this week when the Pennsylvania Senate Education committee sent this direct assault on seniority in Pennsylvania back out into the world.

I last wrote about this bill back at the end of June after the PA House passed. You can skip back and see what I said back then, but here are the highlights.

The bill takes aim at two main portions of the laws regarding teacher employment-- temporary (pre-tenure) teachers, and the business of getting rid of a teacher. As I said in June, there is a large-ish amount of strike-out and new language in this, and you are encouraged to go sift through the whole thing yourself. I've read it, but you probably ought to, too.

The Small Potatoes

Pre-tenure employment used to be two years. More recently it was upped to three years. The new bill says that temporary teachers become professional employees after completing their third year. Yes, I know what I said and read before (four years), but I'm looking at the proposed language and it says that for anybody hired after June 30, 2015, "Whose work has been certified by the district superintendent to the secretary of the school district during the last four (4) months of the third year of such service ... as being satisfactory shall thereafter be a 'professional employe' within the meaning of this article."

However, the superintendent may extend that for a fourth year of temp-ness if it somehow seems that there's something to be learned about the temp teacher in a fourth year.

The Big Enchilada

The more serious issues with the bill are in the section dealing with getting rid of teachers, specifically the Why and the Who.

The bill adds another reason to jettison a teacher. The old standards were declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. Now add to that "economic reasons."

Let that sink in. It would be okay in Pennsylvania to cut teaching positions, even if everyone knows and acknowledges that such cuts are not educationally defensible. Let's also note that, given the ongoing huge problems that come with Pennsylvania's school funding system (called the most inequitable in the country) and that fact that today marks the 158th day late for our budget (supposed a deal has just been struck, but I'll believe it when I see it), the list of school district suffering economic distress in Pennsylvania includes pretty much all of them.

Now for the who.

Pennsylvania currently operates with the traditional First In Last Out system. This bill will end that. When teachers are let go, under this bill, such decisions must first consider teacher ratings from evaluations.

The bill proposes using the most blunt-instrument form of the evaluation. IOW, rather than tossing teachers based on, say, a five point difference in evaluation scores, only the category is considered. PA only has four -- crappy, needs work, pretty okay, and super-awesome. So if teachers must go, the crappy ones go first, then the needs work group, and so on. Within the groups, we revert to FILO. Also, callbacks work the same way, in reverse.

There are some fine details to go with this. The district can't suspend anybody with a super-awesome rating for economic reasons. And you are generally well-protected if two of your last three annual ratings are super-awesome (though nobody is supposed to get super-awesome ratings regularly-- we "live" in pretty good and only "visit" super-awesome). If you dump teachers because of enrollment shrinkage, you must dump an equal percentage of administrators (unless you only have five, or you get a special note from Harrisburg, etc etc).

Oh, and the bill expressly forbids districts from dumping teachers because they make too much money, which practically speaking means that districts are expressly forbidden to say out loud that's what they're doing.

Baldfaced Baloney

Practically speaking, this is a bill that reflects the baldfaced foolishness of groups like StudentsFirst. It starts with the presumption that districts are harboring large groups of terrible crappy teachers, either because principals weren't doing their jobs during the teacher pre-tenure temp period, or because awesome teachers are being thrown into the street while crappy ones keep their jobs. And as always, it rests on the fiction that administrators lack the power to get rid of teachers who can't do their jobs, and so those teachers are still there in the classroom.

It's worth noting that the folks pushing this bill have failed to come up with compelling tales of excellent teachers thrown into the street. The bill's sponsor, when he first started pushing this, resorted to a letter filled with made-up faux statistics. I'm just going to cut and paste from my earlier piece:

Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:

Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times. 

What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.

Who will be affected? 

In fact, the last round of teacher evaluations found that 98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.

The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.

Why do we care, anyway? 

This is a foot-in-the-door bill, a bill that throws out the idea of tenure and seniority and resets the whole teacher employment model around a teacher's ability to get good test scores out of her students. Because remember-- teacher evaluations are based on one chunk test scores, one chunk school rating (which are 90% test scores), and small chunk of things over which a teacher has no control.

At the moment, this may seem like a not-big-deal; after all, it draws a target mainly on 289 public school teachers. But just imagine what would happen if legislators later say, "This isn't accurate enough. Instead of basic rating, let's set job security based on each teacher's precise rating score."

At that point we get Teacher Thunderdome, and that's not just a problem for teachers. It's a problem for schools. When teachers must compete for every small numerical advantage for job security, teachers will face a real dilemma-- share a teaching strategy that will help students, or hold onto it so that you have better odds of being able to feed your own family?

And for tough schools, underfunded schools, troubled schools, the very schools that we all want to see improved filled with the students have been most underserved and neglected-- how do you recruit a teacher to a school where it's so hard to get the numbers she needs to keep her career alive?

So if you're in Pennsylvania, it's time to email your Senator to suggest that HB 805 is a bad bill that should die a quiet death. Granted, he's probably busy not getting a budget passed and doing terrible things to our pension at the same time (but that's another story). Still, it would be huge bad news if this bill somehow slipped through during the larger drama. This does not "protect excellent teachers." It just attacks the profession, forcing teachers to treat their colleagues as enemies and their students as obstacles. This bill should never, ever become law.

Let's (Not) Pay Teachers More

In education reformster land, words often mean the opposite of what they say. So, for instance, "Let's protect excellent teachers" actually means "Let's fix it so that any teachers can be fired at any time."

But a popular new opposites-land reformster refrain is "We need to pay teachers more."

It has been featured in a many StudentsFirst campaigns (including a crowdsourcing plea on a breast cancer site?!) and is a prominent feature of new initiatives like the one being discussed in Indianapolis. Arne Duncan has said, "Let's pay great teachers $150K"

You would think "Let's pay teachers more" would be a fairly straightforward proposal. We could raise state taxes or even use some of that free federal money that DC makes appear out of nowhere. Whatever the source, we could fulfill this goal with a simple two-step process:

          1) Gather up more money
          2) Give it to teachers

The problem with that plan is Step 1. If there is anything reformsters are in absolute agreement on, it is that public school systems should cost less. So how are we going to pay more and make schools cost less?

The Indianapolis proposal shows part of how this works. "It... challenges the traditional step salary scale by proposing a cut in the pay for experience to instead create a funding pool for bonuses." By cutting the traditional experience-based scale, districts can free up a bunch of money which can then be divided up based on extra responsibilities and rewards for excellence. In other words, the new process would be:

         1) Gather up money that used to be for raises
         2) Let teachers fight over it

There are, to put it mildly, many challenges in a system like this. One is the damage to any sort of collegial atmosphere as everyone has to fight over a slice of the pie. This is not just a matter of greed; depending on how this system is structured, I may need to beat you out in order to pay my gas bills this winter so, no, I will not help you figure out a better way to teach that unit, and under no circumstances will I stand by and let you transfer Johnny Rocksforbrains from your class into mine.

Another huge problem with this system is the same problem with almost everything proposed by reformsters. When StudentsFirst says "Those who show they can move kids along academically should be compensated accordingly" what it means is "Pay teachers whose students get good test scores."

So, get a good class, get a bonus. Get a lousy class, get no bonus. And you teachers who teach subjects that aren't one The Test? Sucks to be you. And if school has many excellent teachers? Too bad. I've always maintained that one of the reasons schools can't do true merit pay is that no school board is ever going to say to the public, "Hey, we have so many excellent teachers that deserve merit bonuses that we must raise taxes to do it up right." That pie is never going to get bigger.

Some systems may fold test scores in with observations, but most of us have already heard the refrain-- "Super-duper awesome excellence (or whatever your state calls it) is a place you visit, not a place where you live." Translation: you will only get bonus-worthy evaluations occasionally. Reformsters are willing to offer big money to "great" teachers because they are so certain that most teachers aren't great at all.

So would people want to pursue a career where their pay might not even keep pace with inflation over the course of their professional lives? Actually, North Carolina has been experimenting with this very approach, and the busloads of teachers quitting North Carolina schools is our answer. Even people who love teaching find it hard-to-impossible to devote their lives (and their family's support) to a job where the pay starts out mediocre and then shrinks ever year afterwards.

But it turns out that's a feature, not a bug. Mike Petrilli from the Fordham Institute (motto: the best thinky tank money can buy) states it plain in the New York Times: "Our public education system is among the only institutions in the land still pretending that professionals will spend their whole careers in a single job." Petrilli is pretty sure that millennials don't even want lifelong careers, which is great, because "lifers" are a drag on the education system.

Part of the reformster model of a perfect school is one where the staff churns and turns regularly. This not only keeps direct staff costs down, but also solves the problem of those nasty pensions, which can get so expensive if someone spends a whole career in education.

So "Let's pay teachers more" really means "Let's pay some teachers a little more for one or two years and hope they go away before they start to really care." It definitely does not mean "Let's turn teaching into a career that features really impressive career earnings."

Are Reformsters Under Attack?

I have generally avoided picking on quotes from That Woman that appear in her joint blogventure with Jack Schneider, mostly because I think it's a worthy experiment that deserves some place to breathe. But recently she dropped an extraordinary quote that I can't let pass. It happened in a discussion of unions, specifically discussing the need for bridge-building if any collaboration is going to occur.

You say that would require a cease-fire against the unions; but I'd say that the cease-fire needs to be mutual. Reformers are under attack every day from unions as well.

This is a false equivalency of the rankest kind. Let us look, for instance, at my state of Pennsylvania.

Currently I, as a teacher, am under attack by StudentsFirst. Their national Let's Trash Tenure & FILO tour has been here for a few months, complete with slick advertising, video clips, and well-heeled lobbying.

As a teacher with thirty-some years of experience, I am directly in the cross-hairs of this campaign. StudentsFirst asserts that I need to live with the constant threat of being fired or else I will just default to Lazy Slacker status. They would like career status to be based on PA's version of VAM which includes the results of a bad test and, among other things, points for the number of AP courses my school pays the College Board to teach.

I, on the other hand, have a blog. 

So let's look at the fire that needs to be mutually ceased.

Attacks against me from StudentsFirst:
 
          1) Undermine my professional reputation by suggesting I must be lazy, cause I'm old.
          2) Threaten me with ending my career at will.
          3) Using both 1 and 2 to undermine my co-workers and destabilize my workplace
          4) Thereby threatening the educational well-being of the students that I am pledged to serve

Attacks against StudentFirst (and That Woman) from me:

         1) Sophomoric mockery

Shall we count my union's actions? Let's stick to the state, because to say that the NEA has attacked reformsters is ludicrous; they have been cheerful collaborators. But PSEA? Perhaps a bit more feisty, but have they done anything that would threaten, say, the continued existence of StudentsFirst, or That Woman's ability to make a living in her chosen profession?

There is a name for this technique in contract negotiations-- it's called stripping, and it consists of answering a proposal with a full-out attack (that simply takes things away that were already there), and then pretending that moderating that attack is "meeting you half way."

Union: We'd like to see a $1/hour raise and the addition of some flex time.

Management: We are going to cut off all workers' arms and legs.

Union: What the hell?!

Management: All right. We'll just cut off the legs. Now we've given something; you have to give, too.

The teachers whose careers have been damaged, whose job protections have been stripped, whose employment and wages are being made contingent on damaging junk science, and the manner in which all teachers are working in an environment that is being made increasingly hostile to us-- that's all the work of reformsters and their huge bankrolls and their connections to power.

How have reformsters been hurt? Which thinky tank consultants have had their jobs put in jeopardy? Which astro-turf group operators have had to worry about feeding their children? Which reformers have been forced to listen to teachers telling them how to do their jobs?

Reformsters and teachers are not locked in some struggle between equally powerful opponents who chose to attack each other. This is a battle between rich and powerful people who are being surprised that the less powerful, less rich, less important people they attacked are trying to fight back. No teacher-- certainly no teachers' union-- started any part of this fight, any more than the defense team at the Vergara trial initiated that bogus case.

Yes, reformsters' characters are being impugned. They should stop making it so easy to do that. And they should stop being surprised that when you attack peoples' lives, professions, the very work by which they support and define themselves, those people will not just roll over and play dead. It's flattering that, for just a moment, a reformster would pretend that what we teachers are doing in our own defense is hurting her somehow. But for more than just that moment, I don't believe it. And if I struggle while your foot is on my neck, I'm not sure less struggling from me is the solution to our problem.

StudentsFirst Cynicism Truly Boundless

An alert reader shared with me an email she received with the subject line "Demand Better Compensation for Teachers." Turns out, it's just further proof of how cynical the reformsters at StudentsFirst are these days.

The email was generated by the site Greatergood.com, a website of the kickstarter crowdsourcing variety, aimed specifically at projects for, well, the greater good. Anybody can hop on there and set up a project and try to raise money, so somebody at StudentsFirst apparently said, "Hey, why not."

The "project," which is for some reason in the breast cancer section of the site, uses this copy:


During a speech, President Obama said, "Education is an investment that we need to win the future."
He's right. In order to invest in our kids' futures, we need to invest in teachers now.

The most important school-based factor in a child's education is teacher quality, and America's teachers are grossly underpaid. StudentsFirst is working to elevate the teaching profession by advocating teachers be rewarded for excellence. Those who show they can move kids along academically should be compensated accordingly.

Our great teachers are the ones who help shape our kids' lives, the ones who give them tools to succeed. Teachers help pave the way for children to become scientists, engineers, world leaders. Their impact on a child's life can't be underestimated.

Yes, as witnessed from California courts to the statehouse of Pennsylvania, this is how we're playing it these days. StudentsFirst is dedicated to getting recognition for teachers, and to do that, they are campaigning tireless to get rid of tenure, seniority, unions, and any kind of job protections.

Only by turning teaching into a job that no grown-up would want to take on as a career, only by destroying teaching as a profession, can StudentsFirst get teachers the rewards they deserve. StudentsFirst will keep advocating for excellence, by which they mean "high scores on standardized tests." And if teachers in certain school settings, teaching poor students in crumbling schools with no resources-- well, if those teachers have students with low test scores, it must be the teachers' fault, and they're not excellent.

What's impressively cynical about it is that it's the kind of rhetoric you can only use effectively if you know that you're full of baloney. You can't sell this stuff if you really believe in it, because it only holds up to reality for about five seconds. And as of right now, over 20,000 people have signed on, with heartwarming messages like "It is of grave importance that we value and compensate our teachers" with no idea that they are just props in a cynical ploy by people who place no value on teaching at all.

On Studentfirst Grades

I'm pretty sure that Michelle Rhee, celebrity spokesmodel for ed reformy stuff, is a Kim Kardashian kind of problem. The best response to today's ridiculous grade release, as with most of what Rhee does, is to not talk about it as if it is the most important things that happened in the education world today, stop linking to it, and generally stop turning her into the most successful clickbait on the interwebs since Justin Bieber danced with a panda cub.

Seriously. Kids were shot up today in NM, and the internet is burning up with the latest Rhee-volting development. The woman has never successfully done anything, at all, and yet every time we react to her like someone just slapped us with an armadillo, it makes her look like a Really Important Voice. What might happen if we all just refused to mention her for a week?

That is all.

StudentsFirst Flashback

A year ago, like many teachers, I was quietly plugging away in my classroom, only slightly aware of the rumblings of CCSS off in the distance. I've found it instructive lately to go back and look at some of what was being said, and how it has panned out since.

One gem I ran across was this piece from the StudentsFirst blog in which Eric Lerum explains why CCSS is super swell and everyone should want to give it a big educational kiss on the lips and addresses the first pushback. How could we have responded if we knew then what we know now? The original text is in italics. My comments will be in red.


Recent efforts to roll back Common Core (our latest Policy Brief on Common Core can be read here) adoption and implementation are troubling. Legislative proposals in Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina threaten the progress already made in these states to ensure schoolchildren are ready to compete with their peers in other states and around the world.
As it turned out, that was just the beginning. At last count, Mercedes Schneider found pushback in 23 states.
 
We've come to expect resistance to change and reform from a variety of special interests over the past few years. That’s because education reform puts students' interests ahead of adults' priorities, often for the first time, and that threatens the adults. What is different -- and concerning -- about the recent pushback against Common Core, however, is that it appears to be motivated not by a desire to protect the status quo, but rather by a desire to deliver on a political agenda at the cost of students.
 The two threads offered here are familiar. First, it's for the children. Even the strongest proponents forget to sing that song, instead offering that we need to stop coddling the children or cutting them off from the excessive confidence of their white suburban mothers. Second, the pushback is just politics. The repeated notion that opponents are confined to Tea Party Tinhat Wing republicans or motivated by Obama Derangement Syndrome still has legs, though more and more media are recognizing that opposition comes from all across the political spectrum.



Let's be clear: retreating from the implementation of Common Core standards puts equity among schoolchildren across the country at risk. Current state standards highlight disparities among expectations for students; what might constitute proficiency in one state is considered failing in another. It makes no sense to continue under a structure that lets U.S. students reach college and compete for jobs in a global workforce unprepared and unable to compete, even when they have done all of their homework and passed all of their graduation requirements.
The StudentsFirst hallmark-- prove your point by asserting really hard. "Let's be clear" means "I am not going to explain how we know this." No links, no data, not even anecdotal evidence. Just assertion. You would think by now, we would be awash in tales of people who finished school but found themselves unemployable on the global scale, or US employers searching fruitlessly for American hires. A year later-- nothing.
 
Moreover, when students in different states are held to different standards, comparative growth is difficult to analyze, which makes improvement in our schools hard to achieve. Common Core makes it possible to measure the progress of students from state to state against the same metrics, enabling policymakers to make better decisions regarding everything from adoption of instructional methods to resource allocations to professional development.
Turns out we already knew this was baloney last year because the Brown Center Report on American Education had already laid out that scoring disparities were worse within states than between states. The rest of this paragraph because it once again tips the reformers' hand. We need national standards so that we can make national comparisons. Why? Asa classroom teacher I have never thought, "Gee, if only I could give my students a test that would allow me to compare them with students in Utah, because then I could make better lesson plans for next week." No, we need the national standards so that we can make national comparisons to inform national decisions about national materials, methods, curriculum, and materials. The real need for national standards and national tests is to better data-drive a national school district.

A 2010 study by the Fordham Institute found the Common Core Standards stronger than 33 states' standards in both English Language Arts and math. Even states like Massachusetts and California, with some of the more rigorous state standards in the nation, chose to adopt the Common Core because the benefits outweighed any risks of switching over (also, notably, up to 15 percent of the state’s standards can be shaped to a state’s own interests and needs; and Massachusetts, as a lead member of an assessment consortium, helps develop the assessments administered to their students).
Most of the arguments propelling the current wave of concern regarding Common Core are unfounded and blatantly misconstrue the facts. First, there is no question that Common Core would improve academic standards for students. All of the states listed above that are considering withdrawal from Common Core or the testing consortia had standards equal to or less rigorous than the Common Core, except for Indiana's ELA standards. In some cases, particularly Idaho and Missouri, their standards were among the worst in the nation.
 Mercedes Schneider has done the definitive take-downs of Fordham and their study. I have nothing to add-- this is all bunk.

Furthermore, Common Core is neither federally imposed nor a national curriculum, where 45 states plus the District of Columbia voluntarily adopted Common Core as a means of raising the quality and rigor of their state academic standards. Common Core establishes high learning expectations for students that are consistent regardless of district or state. This initiative does not prescribe pedagogy and there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers how to teach the material or prescribing any particular curriculum framework. Instead, Common Core outlines internationally benchmarked skills that students should know and allows districts and schools adopt their own curricula and instructional materials aligned to the standards.
Nobody believes this any more, either. Even supporters have started referring to CCSS as a federal program. Note the careful wording-- "there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers..." No, there are just state bureaucrats and corporate curriculum writers doing so, as highly incentivized to do so by the feds. And a year later, we still have seen no sign of the international benchmarks that are supposedly a foundation of CCSS.

By focusing on unfounded fears of federal interference, state policymakers are overlooking the huge benefit of Common Core to educators. Teachers have overwhelmingly signed on to the rigorous standards movement. We're already seeing a huge influx of new ideas and innovations for learning materials and professional development tools. Most of these leverage new technology and online platforms that make tools, tips, and lesson plans more accessible to teachers looking to improve their craft and reach students in ways they never have been able to before. Best of all – many of these are teacher-driven. One such site, Achieve the Core, represents a joint effort by the two national teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to supply teachers with Common Core implementation tools.
Yes, those federal interference fears are totally unfounded. Well, unless you count Duncan's attempt to influence local decisions in both California and New York. And NEA and AFT continue to experience anger and agitation from their members. (Check out the comments section of this NEA puff piece on CCSS). And a year later, achievethecore.org is not exactly awash in thousands of lesson ideas.

 Among educators I've talked to about this, there is a tangible excitement about the potential impact these could have in the classroom and on the teaching profession as a whole. Many teachers began implementing Common Core in their lessons as soon as sample standards were released to the public. Legislators and parent groups should support this groundswell of teacher enthusiasm towards bringing rigorous standards and creative lessons to students.
 Yeah, keep saying it and it may be true.

There should be no doubt that with Common Core, states have embarked on the right path. It is true that implementation has been difficult, but states are making progress. The hard work of adopting new standards and assessments is something every state has done in the past, and these transitions are complex. Yet the move to Common Core is notable for something different, even extraordinary. For perhaps the first time, states – and the school leaders, educators, and communities responsible for our children – are able to do this work together. Let's make sure that states' efforts to do the best for our students are not thwarted by those who seek to use unfounded fears to make political points.
There should be no doubt? Why? For fans of data-driven instruction, these folks sure don't want to provide much actual support for what they have to say. Is it extraordinary that states are able to work together, or is that just further proof that this is a federally-driven, corporate-manufactured program?

In some ways this piece can make us all nostalgic for February, 2013, when many of us were still clueless about just how bad CCSSec was, and CCSS supporters were still sure they were being opposed only by a splinter of easily-marginalized political activists. The good news for us is that we have learned a lot since this piece first ran. The bad news for them is that they have not. I have saved one little detail for last.

I did not locate this article through some deep or wandering search. StudentsFirst posted it on their twitter feed just this week. Apparently they think it's still on point. Good for their opponents to know.