Marcos Breton: Sacramento’s teachers have won this battle
Published: Sunday, Apr. 13, 2014 - 12:00 am
You might have missed it, but there was a sea change within the Sacramento City Unified School District last week.
Some call it a complete surrender by the district to the unrelenting tactics of the local teachers union. When district policy is announced at the teachers union hall, as it was last week, that point is hard to argue.
Time will tell whether the union won a single battle or a broader war over district control, but we know this: Efforts to link teacher performance to student test scores in Sacramento city schools have been abandoned for the near term.
One of President Barack Obama’s key goals for improving accountability and classroom performance simply was not happening within Sacramento city schools, which have emerged as a home base for teacher union power. Last year, the district joined with seven others in California in a consortium that pledged to find ways to improve education in failing schools – and, as part of that, to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. In exchange, the U.S. Department of Education granted the consortium the nation’s first district-level waivers from the punishing mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Officials with the Sacramento City Teachers Association say they opposed the consortium agreement because they were left out of the conversation on teacher accountability – but the truth is they didn’t want to have the conversation at all. They simply refused to engage in discussion on a range of issues central to moving the district forward until the accountability piece – “the antichrist,” as the current interim superintendent called it – was dropped from consideration.
Sara Noguchi, the interim superintendent, did just that on Wednesday – at SCTA headquarters. A photo of the event on the website of EdSource Today shows SCTA President Nikki Milevsky looking commanding while Patrick Kennedy, the school board president now running for county supervisor, stands awkwardly to one side with his hands in his pockets.
It stands to reason: Because of its waiver this school year, Sacramento City Unified gained autonomy in spending about $4 million in federal dollars to aid low-income students. Appeasing the union likely means losing control of the $4 million.
It also means Sacramento schools once again will be held to task by the standards of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law. Under the law’s provisions, all but a handful of the district’s schools have been deemed failures for falling short of ever-rising math and English standards many call unrealistic.
But the union hated the idea of test scores factoring into teacher evaluations even more than it hated the law – and got its way. To some, last week’s announcement spoke volumes about the balance of power in the district.
“They own you and everybody knows they own you,” said Jonathan Raymond, the former Sac City superintendent who resigned last year after exhausting years of tussling with the union. “The Marcos Breton: Sacramento’s teachers have won this battle - Marcos Breton - The Sacramento Bee: