LA Unified teachers could finally ‘exceed standards’ next year under tentative contract:

LA Unified teachers could finally ‘exceed standards’ next year under tentative contract

 After years of union resistance, a tentative agreement would allow Los Angeles Unified to identify which teachers “exceed standards.”

The temporary, internal rating would be added to evaluations next year, while district officials try to negotiate a permanent solution with union leaders.

“It’s a bit of a punt, which I think is understandable, because they weren’t able to get what they wanted in negotiations,” said Nancy Waymack, who monitors evaluation policies in 118 school district across the country for the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Union members will vote on the deal during the first week of May, while school board members are scheduled to vote May 12.

The tentative agreement includes raises that will send teachers home for the summer with one-time payouts close to 5 percent of their annual salaries and installs a 10.36 percent increase next year.

District officials expect UTLA’s concession on evaluations will preserve $57 million in federal funding tied to a three-level evaluation system. Those dollars will come in handy, as the contract creates a $140 million hole in the budget next year. District officials are hoping the state will plug the remaining hole with an influx of revenues.

UTLA’s opposition to more than two ratings for teachers won a tentative ruling from the state’s top labor authority in December, which stopped administrators from using four levels to rate how teachers perform while teaching. But even the contested system only offered two final scores of either “meets” or “below” standards.

UTLA leaders fear more than two possible ratings will lead to performance-based pay or undermine layoff protocols which protect veteran educators. Last year, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge sided with a group arguing teachers should be laid off based on performance rather than strictly tenure in thelandmark Vergara v. California decision.

The tentative agreement prohibits LAUSD from acting against teachers who simply “meet standards.” So while the “exceeds” ratings can’t be used for layoffs, it could help the district pick top teachers to coach struggling peers. At least that was the idea behind the contested evaluation system.

In 2010, a report from a task force of union leaders, district officials and outside experts recommended an evaluation system that identifies the best teachers and pays them extra to help struggling peers.

At the time, 99.3 percent of teachers scored a “meets standards,” effectively making evaluations useless. Even for educators who were “below” standards, there was little consequence attached to their rating, according to the 2010 report.

Waymack, however, predicted the new rating won’t do much in the way of identifying LAUSD’s best teachers, as principals tend to check the middle box on forms with three levels.

“Often it’s kind of a human nature to go to the middle, and we would want to differentiate teacher performance in a way that would be informative to the teacher and others who are looking that rating,” Waymack said. “A three-prong system probably wouldn’t give enough differentiation to do that.”

It’s also unclear how many educators will be evaluated while the rating remains in place next year. Unlike most districts across the country, LAUSD evaluates teachers just once every two years. After teachers log 10 years on the job, they’re only evaluated once every five years.

Over half of the nation’s largest districts evaluate tenured teachers annually, according to the NCTQ.

The tentative agreement also limits a fundamental aspect of evaluations — in-class monitoring by administrators — to just once. The contested evaluation system had planned on ensuring each teacher was observed twice, once during the first half of the school year and again during the second half.

Ed Voice President Bill Lucia said his organization will be watching very closely. In 2012, Ed Voice won a Los Angeles Superior Court ruling, which required the district to consider student performance in evaluating educators.

“The recent dispute and proposed return to more endless committee work does not absolve the district of being under a writ to include the consideration of student learning in the final written job performance evaluation of every teacher and principal in LAUSD,” Lucia said in an email.

By Oct. 2, five representatives of UTLA and five district officials will begin meeting in hopes an agreement can be reached by Feb. 26, 2016. An additional $114 million in federal funding for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 fiscal years hangs in the balance.

“The 15/16 agreement would have to be revisited if we are unable to create/modify the evaluation process within the identified timelines,” the district said in a statement via spokesman Thomas Waldman.LA Unified teachers could finally ‘exceed standards’ next year under tentative contract:

The e-mails fly over One Newark, the controversial N.J. city school plan - The Washington Post

The e-mails fly over One Newark, the controversial N.J. city school plan - The Washington Post:

The e-mails fly over One Newark, the controversial N.J. city school plan

 Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.) exchanged letters Friday with Cami Anderson, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools and architect of a controversial school system overhaul in New Jersey’s largest city.

Payne wrote first, demanding answers to his questions about One Newark, the program that Anderson implemented despite widespread opposition from community leaders. He said he was writing after waiting for more than a year for a response from Anderson to a similar letter he sent in February 2014.

“In the time since I sent the (first) letter, we have seen increased community backlash over One Newark,” Payne’s April 24 e-mail said. “This includes widespread criticism that requests to meet and engage with your administration in productive dialogue have been repeatedly ignored, and there is a lack of accountability and transparency with regard to the plan.”

Anderson, who has been widely criticized by New Jersey state lawmakers and Newark community leaders for being unresponsive, sent a letter to Payne, apologizing for never answering his first letter.

“Thank you for bringing to my attention that you experienced some difficulty in reaching my office,” Anderson wrote. “Your experience is by no means intentional and must be the result of miscommunication between systems.”

Payne organized a meeting last month between community leaders in Newark and the U.S. Department of Education, which is investigating seven separate complaints of civil rights violations stemming from One Newark.

The plan is the signature initiative crafted by Anderson, who was appointed by Gov. Chris Christie (R) in 2011 to run Newark Public Schools. The state seized control of Newark Public Schools in 1995 amid academic and financial failure, but two decades of state control has resulted in little progress.

One Newark, which fully took effect in the current academic year, essentially blew up the old school system. It eliminated neighborhood schools in favor of a citywide lottery designed to give parents more choices. It prompted mass firings of principals and teachers, and it led to numerous school closures and a sharp rise in the city’s reliance on charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.

With Christie’s blessing — and freed from the need for approval from a local school board — Anderson pushed through a raft of changes, many of which were untested. While other cities have experimented with one or two reforms, no other urban system launched them all simultaneously.

As a result, many families saw their children spread among multiple schools or sent across town. The scattering has been problematic for a city divided along gang lines, and where many residents don’t own cars.

The end of neighborhood schools meant that newcomers no longer had a right to attend the school down the street. The new citywide lottery, relying on a computer algorithm, forced many students to change schools while dividing siblings in some cases between different schools in different parts of the city.

Meanwhile, state test scores have stayed flat or even declined, and Anderson has faced continuous calls for her removal — even from some of her onetime allies.

City leaders, including Mayor Ras Baraka, who won office on the promise he would fight One Newark, say Anderson imposed change from above, instead of working alongside residents.

Christie, who is eyeing a run for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, has declined requests to discuss One Newark, and he avoids mentioning the project in public.The e-mails fly over One Newark, the controversial N.J. city school plan - The Washington Post:

A Report on the Network for Public Education Conference | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Report on the Network for Public Education Conference | Diane Ravitch's blog:

A Report on the Network for Public Education Conference 

 I am writing at the conclusion of the second annual conference of the Network for Public Education. Last year, we met in Austin, this year in Chicago.

It was a smashing success! Attendance was 50% higher than in Austin. There were attendees from every corner of the country. All the sessions were held in the Drake Hotel.

Saturday opened with keynotes by Tanaisa Brown of the Newark Students Union, which launched the sit-in in Superintendent Cami Anderson’s office, and Jitu Brown of the Journey for Justice, which is generating civil rights complaints against several major cities.

There were many outstanding workshops during the morning session. At lunch, blogger Jennifer Berkshire interviewed bloggers Peter Greene and Jose Luis Vilson, which everyone enjoyed.

After lunch, Yong Zhao gave a scintillating multi-media presentation, which was both educational and hilarious. At one point, the entire audience stood to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which Yong used to make a point about the value of being different. At times, he was almost drowned out by laughter. If you have a chance to hear him, don’t miss it. Or wait for the videos of the conference to go online.

Saturday afternoon, there were more workshops. We split for dinner but after dinner, Anthony Cody moderated a session of new documentaries about the schools. The film makers were there to describe their work.

Sunday morning, more workshops. I especially enjoyed Jesse Hagopian’s discussion of the racist roots of standardized testing. Jesse was accompanied by Seattle’s education director for the NAACP, which issued a protest against standardized testing.

Mid-morning, I moderated a discussion between Randi Wengarten of the AFT and Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the NEA. I asked them about the future of teachers’ unions, teacher tenure, Common Core, annual testing, whether they would pledge to reject any funding from Walton, Gates, and Broad (they did), and what advice they had for those fighting for public education and the teaching profession. Their answers were lively. See the tapes.

In the last event, I led a discussion with the great and much-loved Karen Lewis. Karen looks fabulous, but she is not fully recovered from her surgery. She shared her wisdom with us, and she was showered with love. Her message was to build alliances. Again, you must watch the tape.

Before the meeting, the wonderful Newark students presented me with a selfie stick (lots of selfies all weekend!). After showing me how to operate it, Tanaisha Brown asked me to show her that I could do it myself. I knew I was in the presence of a real teacher!

Everyone I spoke to told me how my h they enjoyed the conference, how energized they felt, and that would return home to pick up the struggle with renewed vigor.

It was a wonderful and inspiring event!!A Report on the Network for Public Education Conference | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Texas English Teacher Named National Teacher Of The Year:

Texas English Teacher Named National Teacher Of The Year

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) -- A high school English teacher in Texas who works with students facing poverty and traumas related to their immigration to the United States on Monday was named the 2015 National Teacher of the Year.

Shanna Peeples from Amarillo was selected for the honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She is the first Texas teacher to win the award since 1957.

Peeples works at Palo Duro High, where about 85 percent of students live below the poverty line and where more refugee children are enrolled than in any other high school in the 31,000-student district.

She will be recognized by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday.

Peeples said a childhood that exposed her to alcoholism and domestic violence has provided her with empathy for students from Burma, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq and Cuba, many of whom are survivors of emotional or physical trauma in their war-torn homelands. That can make trust difficult, she said.

"That's what helped me as a teacher probably more than anything, that I have that connection with them, unfortunately," Peeples said. "You can't really learn when you're scared."

Texas has led the U.S. in refugee resettlements for the last four years. Most are settled in large cities, but immigrant populations also are thriving in more remote areas, including Amarillo.

The 50-year-old mother of three grown children, whose teachers when she was young urged her to write to find a way out of her pain and isolation, began teaching after working as a disc jockey, medical assistant, pet sitter and journalist at the Amarillo Globe-News, where she covered education. She's taught for 12 years, the past seven at Palo Duro.

Peeples, who was nominated by a Palo Duro colleague and won campus, district, region and state teacher of the year honors, teaches AP English and serves as the English department chair as well as an instructional coach for other teachers.

One former student knows there are plenty of selfless teachers in Texas and across the country. But Peeples has something intangible, said Viet Tran, a college junior who believes he wouldn't be at Harvard studying neurobiology on a scholarship without Peeples' help.

"The reason for her being a special teacher is she is able to bridge a very wide gap of both student achievement and student experience," said the 21-year-old junior who came to the U.S. in 1998 from Vietnam. "She teaches kids who have never been in a classroom before and students who want to go to Ivy League schools."

On occasion, she has spoken with refugee parents who wanted their children to get jobs so they could contribute financially to the family, rather than attend school.

"She tries to help the parents in families understand that their (child's) future is really in education," Tran said.

Peeples is a "brilliant" teacher who is animated and captivating, Palo Duro principal Sandy Whitlow said.

"She continually tries to improve herself as a teacher," Whitlow said. "She is like an onion - there are so many layers to her."

Peeples was selected from among four finalists named in January. The other three Texas English Teacher Named National Teacher Of The Year:

When Should a State Consider a School Officially "Turned Around"? - Politics K-12 - Education Week

When Should a State Consider a School Officially "Turned Around"? - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

When Should a State Consider a School Officially "Turned Around"?

 There might have been a lot of bipartisan love when the Senate education committee considered—and unanimously passed—a bill to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act.But there were a number of key issues lurking below the surface of all that good feeling, including the question of whether or not states should have to identify a particular percentage of low-performing schools for interventions.

That's something the Obama administration would really like to see, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted in his initial statement congratulating committee members for crafting a bipartisan bill. And it's something that some folks on the committee, including Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., would also favor. In fact, Bennet introduced an amendment during consideration that would add the 5 percent requirement to the bill. But then he withdrew it, saying lawmakers could work on the issue as the legislation moves through the process.

Here's the thing: The five percent requirement is already being tested at the state level, right now, through the Obama administration's waivers. States have to identify 5 percent of their lowest performing schools for major interventions. But that hasn't always gone super smoothly.

In fact, one of the key issues that's come up, again and again in state waiver renewal applications, is just when a school should get out of "priority" status. In some states, including New Mexico, which already got its waiver application approved, low-performing schools are making progress—but they aren't moving the needle on student achievement fast enough to meet the strict "exit criteria" that the state initially proposed. The problem? States may have other schools that are have greater academic need—and only so many resources to devote to turnarounds. More in this story. 

On the other hand, of course, the current Senate bill directs some resources to turnarounds but doesn't specify a particular number or percentage of schools for dramatic interventions. So states, or districts, could, conceivably, decide not to intervene in some pretty needy schools, or provide them with more targeted help.

So does having a bottom five percent make sense? Or not? Comments section is openWhen Should a State Consider a School Officially "Turned Around"? - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Peace between Cleveland schools and teachers over?

Peace between Cleveland schools and teachers over? Union shoots for 1,500-member protest at school board Tuesday | cleveland.com:

Peace between Cleveland schools and teachers over? 

Union shoots for 1,500-member protest at school board Tuesday

Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon, left, and Cleveland Teachers Union President David Quolke were happy with the 2012 agreement on the Cleveland Plan for Transforming Schools. Quolke is now accusing Gordon of not following parts of the plan. (Plain Dealer file)

 CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland Teachers Union hopes to draw 1,500 teachers to Tuesday's school board meeting to protest changes the district is imposing at 23 struggling schools targeted for improvement.

It's the latest in a series of protests the union has had since last year over portions of the Cleveland plan for Transforming Schools, the district's overall improvement plan that the state legislature and Gov. John Kasich backed in 2012. It would be the largest if the union meets its goals and members respond to a drumbeat of calls for solidarity and action made on Facebook, Twitter, email and through an online petition.

CTU leader Jillian Ahrens said she hopes teachers will overflow the 6:30 p.m. meeting atJames Ford Rhodes High School, 5100 Biddulph Avenue.

CTU President David Quolke accused the district of "reneging on the promises of the Cleveland Plan," one piece at a time since 2012.

"You're going to see some very unified and very frustrated members," he promised.

District CEO Eric Gordon denied Quolke's charge and said that a feud won't help teachers or the district. Other district officials say the union is responding to outside pressure to try to roll back parts of the Cleveland Plan, which gives the district broader powers -- and the union fewer -- than in any other district in Ohio.

"I think it is a national movement to get this local union to stand up and push back on this initiative," said Michele Pierre-Farid, the district's chief academic officer.

At issue: Corrective Action Plans at struggling schools

CTU's latest concern is over new "Corrective Action Plans," or CAPs for short, for the district's 23 "Investment Schools." 

The district is tossing aside old CAPs at those schools and imposing new ones that set academic and culture goals, while also naming outside organizations that will come in to coach staff on improvements.

Just like the old ones, the new CAPs call for things like setting high expectations, creating a "college-going and career-oriented culture" and expanding mentoring opportunities for students.

They also set more specific requirements for teachers. These are drawing objections from the union. Among them:

• Requiring teachers to file advance lesson plans with principals;

• Requiring teachers to wear "professional" clothes;

• Requiring teachers to communicate more with parents, sometimes visiting them at home; and

Does CTU have a legitimate complaint? Tell us below.

• Requiring teachers to give students additional tests and incorporating those results into lessons.

District officials say the new action plans are needed to either accelerate improvements in schools or to jump-start schools that have not seen gains. Pierre-Farid said most of the expectations are standard in suburban districts and needed to help the schools succeed.

"My job is to make sure that our kids get the best education," she said, and to make that happen as soon as possible.

"This is about kids," she said. "We don't have 10 years to make it happen. We have to make it happen today."

Union says rules are vague and punitive

CTU, in its online petition, said that many of the changes "de-professionalize the staff and do little to address student success."

Quolke said in a letter to teachers that the CAPs "put in vague, punitive, 'gotcha'  clauses.

"They demand repetitive rote tasks that are more compliance-driven than student-driven," he wrote. "The CAPs read more like a hodgepodge of top-down, central office, anti-teacher sentiment than a plan to improve our schools."

Ahrens agreed. "It devalues the role of the teacher," she said.

We'll have more details about some of the specific changes in the CAPs about noon today. Click here to see an example of a new Corrective Action Plan.

Fixing schools is a key part of the Cleveland Plan

The "Investment Schools" are just one portion of the Cleveland Plan, but an important one. While the district seeks to offer families choices by creating specialized schools or by partnering with high-performing charter schools, the district also promised in the plan to fix schools where students aren't learning.

The district named 13 schools for improvement efforts starting in the 2013-14 school year, all with failing or near-failing grades on their state report cards, and 10 more starting this school year. The 23 buildings amount to about a quarter of the district's schools.

As reported Thursday, the district will not start turnaround efforts at any new schools in the fall so it can focus on the 23.

Gordon said the objections from teachers were just one reason for not adding more schools.

Quolke and CTU said they are just as upset about how the district set the new CAPs as by what is in them. Union leaders said the district did not keep promises to collaborate with teachers to reach the best plans -- assurances Quolke has long said were key to the union agreeing in 2012 to the Cleveland Plan.

Gordon conceded that he could have involved teachers more early on, but said he has offered the union several opportunities that it is not taking.

District has the legal right to impose new plans

And the district said it followed House Bill 525, the state law creating the Cleveland Plan, when it changed the CAPs. That law allows a team of union members to give input on proposed changes, but gives Gordon power to impose the plan that he wants.

Teachers offered some objections to the CAPs that Gordon presented. He made some small changes and them imposed most of what he had proposed.

The state law reads: "If the chief executive officer disagrees with all or part of the recommendations of a corrective action team, or if a corrective action team fails to make timely recommendations on the implementation of all or part of the corrective plan, the chief executive officer may implement the corrective plan in the manner in which the chief executive officer determines to be in the best interest of the students."

Teachers also are objecting to a section of the new CAPs that reminds teachers that the CAPs overrule conflicting sections in the union's contract with the district. Some teachers complain that Gordon is attempting to take away their union's rights.

But that issue was settled in 2012 with HB 525, which reads: "The content and implementation of the corrective plan prevail over any conflicting provision of a collective bargaining agreement entered into on or after the effective date of this amendment."

Quolke agreed that Gordon has those powers, but said real partnership with teachers is the best way to find solutions that work. Imposing changes doesn't make teachers feel valued, he said.

"Do you get teacher buy-in that way?" Quolke asked. "No."

Did teachers already sign contracts for these schools?

CTU also objects to Gordon tossing aside the "commitment letters" that teachers at the Peace between Cleveland schools and teachers over? Union shoots for 1,500-member protest at school board Tuesday | cleveland.com:

L.A. Inequity Map Packs Political Punch - On California - Education Week

L.A. Inequity Map Packs Political Punch - On California - Education Week:

L.A. Inequity Map Packs Political Punch

Map showing areas of highest student need in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  The map, developed by the Advancement Project, proved powerful in persuading the school board to reallocate funds.

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Okay, this is a semi-morality play.  There are good guys, or at least pretty good guys, and they win, at least a little.

The story begins with California's Local Control Funding Formula, which eliminated scores of targeted categorical funds and replaced them with supplemental funding based on numbers of students in poverty, English learners, and foster youth.  The Los Angeles Unified School District quickly realized that it would gain $837-million, and there was no shortage of ideas about how to spend it.

There was a lot of pent-up demand among teachers, who hadn't seen a raise in eight years.  Even before the legislation was signed, the school board pushed the superintendent toward district-wide, teacher friendly expenses: extending the school year, reducing class sizes, restoring staff positions lost during the recession, and increasing teacher pay. 

Pent up demand to address recession shortfalls would have sucked up all of the new funds.

But a large coalition of community based organizations wanted the new supplemental and concentration grants to be spent at the schools with the most need.  They constructed a student need index, picking 12 variables that indicated the challenges these schools faced.  [See listing below.]  The index identified 36 high schools, 32 middle schools, and 174 elementary schools with the highest need.

Creating the index, itself, was political.  Coalition members needed to decide what to count and how much to weight each variable.  The index began as review of research into the achievement dampening challenges that children face.  Academic research connected with first-person narratives from students.  There was a process of give and take among advocacy groups, all leading to pages of spreadsheet calculations.

However, "numbers on an Excel spreadsheet are not very persuasive," said Kim Pattillo Brownson, director of educational equity at the Advancement Project.  Her organization drew on its geodata expertise to map student need by school.  Then the schools were located within school board member districts, resulting in the map at the top of this post. (The Advancement Project had been working with mapped data since the early 2000s.  Its Healthy City project maintains a powerful online mapping utility.)

Look carefully at the map.  It is almost a textbook example of good data visualization.  It took a lot of complex information and reduced it to easy-to-understand symbols: those colored dots with red indicating schools with the highest need scaling to less vibrant colors in schools of less need.  The clustering of red and orange dots is immediately obvious.

So, too, are the school board district boundaries.  It's immediately apparent that there is a concentration of high needs schools in districts 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7.  An easy political majority, you would think; just move some money from the more affluent areas of the city to the less affluent.

But the political calculus was a little more complicated.  Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, the veteran school board member in District 1, had died; her replacement, George McKenna, had not yet been elected.  And the remaining board members were divided into warring camps that made their cooperation difficult. 

Armed with the map, which visualized the student need index, a coalition of more than 50 community organizations held rallies and met one-on-one with school board members.  Under the banner of Communities for Los Angeles Student Success, the coalition initially demanded that 80 percent of the local control budget supplemental and concentration funds be spent through the need index formula.  (A case study from Education Trust West documents the process.)

United Teachers Los Angeles came aboard even though some of its members' schools would not be advantaged by the deal.  President Alex Caputo-Pearl rallied support at the board meeting where the index was presented and approved.

The map and advocacy, created a convergence of self-interest and civic good, and gave a majority of school board members a reason to support financial redistribution toward the most needy students and schools.  "It didn't take a great deal of arm twisting," Brownson said.  The motion to allocate $154-million according to the index passed with five votes. 

The fifth supporting vote came from Steven Zimmer, whose District 4 contained none of the highest need schools.  He just saw it as the right thing to do and became a co-sponsor of the resolution.

The moral of this story is that good data maps and graphics can help gather the political will.  Getting data to speak to people who are not number crunchers will become increasingly important as California moves more deeply into local control funding and accountability.  It will be how politics is done right.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Exploring GeoMapping

Esri, headquartered in Redlands, is the world leader in geographic information systems software.  Its normally expensive tools are freely available to schools, and it will be offering a free online course starting in May along with an educator conference in San Diego in July.

Elements of Need Index Used In LAUSD

1. Percent of 8th grade students scored basic, below basic, or far below basic in CST ELA exam.
2. Percent of 3rd grade students scored basic, below basic, or far below basic in CST ELA exam.
3. Number of high school dropouts.
4. Number of children without licensed childcare seats per 10,000 children.
5. Number of English Learner students.
6. Unduplicated number of students qualified for foster care.
7. Number of enrolled students.
8. Number of nonfatal gun injuries per 10,000 persons.
9. Number of nonprofit organizations related to youth crime prevention per 10,000 persons.
10. Number of suspensions and expulsions.
11. Asthma hospitalization rate per 10,000 children under 18.
12. Percentage of students who are in Health Fitness Zone in two or less categories.L.A. Inequity Map Packs Political Punch - On California - Education Week:

How education reform drives gentrification | Al Jazeera America

How education reform drives gentrification | Al Jazeera America:

How education reform drives gentrification

A Portland teachers’ contract negotiation debunks the myth of school choice, which leaves a swath of the city behind

Emma Christ, center, a Cleveland High School senior, at a rally organized by the Portland Student Union and the Portland Teachers Solidarity Campaign. The rally attracted students, parents and other unions in support of teachers during contract negotiations.Stephanie Yao Long/The Oregonian/Landov

 Public school teachers in Portland, Ore., and their students are doing a victory lap. Nearly a year after unveiling acontract proposal that would have put the squeeze on the 2,900-member Portland Association of Teachers (PAT), the Portland School Board on March 3 approved a contract that acceded to virtually every demand from the teachers’ union.

The board was acting as a stalking horse for corporate attacks on unions and public education nationwide. It initially wanted to saddle teachers with higher health care costs, fewer retirement benefits, more students and a greater workload in a city where 40 percent of teachers already work more than 50 hours a week (PDF). The board also demanded expansive management rights (PDF) and allegedly wished to link teacher evaluation more closely to standardized testing. The PAT opposed the board, arguing that low-income and minority students would pay the heaviest price as their classes grew larger, more time was devoted to testing and resources for curriculum preparation and teacher development got slashed.

Only after 98 percent of the PAT voted to strike starting Feb. 20 — and students vowed to join the picket line — did the board blink. Alexia Garcia, an organizer with the Portland Student Union who graduated last year, says students held walkouts and rallies at many of the city’s high schools in support of teachers’ demands because “teachers’ working conditions are our learning conditions.”

The deal is a big victory for the teachers’ union in a state where business interests, led by the Portland Business Alliance, call the shots on education policy. The school board had brought out the big guns, authorizing payments of up to $360,000 to a consultant for contract negotiations and $800,000 to a law firm, despite already having a full-time lawyer on its payroll. But, emulating Chicago teachers who prevailed in an eight-day strike in 2012, the PAT went beyond contract numbers, winning community support by focusing on student needs and rallying to stop school closures in underserved communities. 

Most significant, the teachers helped expose the role of education reform in gentrifying the city, making it nearly impossible for every neighborhood to have a strong school. This is a process playing out nationwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. But it is particularly striking in Portland, so noted for quirkiness and tolerance it has spawned a hit television show, “Portlandia,” During a public forum on the contract negotiations, one teacher observed that the show was a reflection of how “we march to our own beat in Portland.” This has held true for the teachers’ approach to education.

Test scores by ZIP code

The current fight over public schools began in January 2013 when teachers, parents and students successfully blocked the board from closing or merging half a dozen schools, mainly in the historically African-American neighborhood of Northeast Portland, which had already seen two schools shut down the previous year. This helped to mobilize community support behind a vision of public education that contrasted starkly with the Portland School Board’s ideas.

The tussle over teacher contracts has underscored how cozy the board is with corporate interests that promote school ratings, standardized testing and school choice, which allows students to freely transfer to other public schools. Touted as a way to use market forces to improve schools, school choice instead creates a two-tier system.

The racial effect of school choice is stark in Northeast Portland, where more than 40 percent of the black population has been pushed out since 2000, and which is 70 percent white today. City documents reveal that more white children in the area opt for charter, magnet and public schools in other parts of the city than attend their assigned neighborhood school. For African-American children, barely one-fourth access those choices.

Sekai Edwards is a sophomore at Jefferson High School in Northeast Portland, the only African-American-majority school in the city. It’s ranked in the bottom 15 percent of the state’s schools. Edwards says Jefferson is “portrayed as failing, as having a lot of violence and gang activity, so fewer kids want to come here.” Jefferson has about 500 students, a third of the size of some other high schools in the city. Since funding is tied to enrollment, Edwards says the only foreign language offered is Spanish, and her anatomy and physiology class has 43 students in it. She says, “I just want to focus on schooling,” but with constant fears of her school being shut down, she adds, “I don’t think I’ll get that at Jefferson.”

History of displacement

What’s happening in Portland is white flight in reverse. Middle-class families eye Northeast Portland for its undervalued homes but choose different schools because neighborhood ones are pegged as bad. Declining enrollment bleeds money from already underfunded schools, making them less attractive and creating a downward spiral in which the schools are rated as failing, subsequently closed and eventually replaced by charter schools that can cherry-pick students.

School choice is layered atop a racialized terrain, allowing middle-class families to profit from lower home prices while avoiding the cost of bad schools. 

As public schools in Northeast Portland shutter, black households are displaced as redevelopment pushes rents upward. Karen Gibson, a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, analyzes how government policies, banks and developers ghettoized Portland’s blacks. The history of black Portland is one of high unemployment and incarceration rates, toxic land and shoddy housing, institutionalized segregation and redlining practices, poor schools, minimal social services and overpolicing. Gibson wrote that for 40 years blacks were subjected to “predatory and exploitative lending practices by speculators, slumlords, bankers and real estate agents,” being denied routine mortgage and rehab loans or the ability to move to other neighborhoods. When Northeast Portland was slated for rehabilitation in the ’90s, government assistance, bank mortgages and business opportunities flowed to whites, while black homeowners, often not realizing how much their homes had appreciated, took below-market cash offers from speculators. For the two-thirds of black households who don’t own homes (as opposed to the 57 percent of white households who do), rising rents hit harder, as their per capita income is barely $16,000, half that of whites.

Despite decades of promises to address such displacement, the city has pushed ahead with policies that intensify racial disparities. Most recently it offered a $2.6 million parcel of land for a mere $500,000 to the billionaire-owned Majestic Realty to develop a Trader Joe’s outlet. The deal would have increased displacement without any guarantees for community hiring or affordable housing. After an outcry from the African-American community, Trader Joe’s withdrew from the deal.

Ironically, the same cultural wave that has brought “Portlandia” to young audiences has also encouraged more gentrification. The show trades on residents’ obsessive tendencies about food, facial hair, bicycling, dumpster diving — any activity untainted by mass consumer culture. But the quirky authenticity attracts new residents to the city, driving up rents and spreading the hipster culture that has colonized much of New York City, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and other places. In its wake it leaves its own form of homogenization: new residents who are largely white and wealthy.

Beyond cold numbers

School choice is layered atop this racialized terrain, allowing middle-class families to profit from lower home prices while avoiding the cost of bad schools. It’s the existing residents who foot the bill. Elizabeth Thiel, an educator who has taught in five Portland public schools over the past 11 years, lives in Northeast Portland. She says the white middle-class families moving into black neighborhoods are genuinely concerned about “trying to find the best education for their kid.” But according to Thiel, the education-reform movement, with its focus on standardized testing, has legitimized the naming of schools as failures. Families thus feel justified in saying, “Well, I live in that neighborhood, but I would never send my kid to that school.” Thiel says, “People stop thinking about what a school really is. It’s a community, and community is defined by the people who participate in it.”

In fact, standardized test scores mainly measure income and race. Students from wealthier and whiter neighborhoods score higher on the tests than students in low-income black areas. Portland schools use parent-led foundations to fundraise. In wealthier neighborhoods those efforts can translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to pay for support staff, technology, arts classes and electives lacking at schools like Jefferson.

Looking ahead

By the time the two sides struck a deal on Feb. 18, the school board had conceded (PDF) nearly every demand of the How education reform drives gentrification | Al Jazeera America:

I Asked Weingarten About the Hochul Robocall | deutsch29

I Asked Weingarten About the Hochul Robocall | deutsch29:

I Asked Weingarten About the Hochul Robocall

I am at the Network for Public Education (NPE) second annual conference in Chicago, Illinois. I just attended the Sunday morning keynote, Diane Ravitch in Conversation with AFT’s Randi Weingarten and NEA’s Lily Eskelsen Garcia.

At the end of the session, I was briefly able to interview American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten regarding her September 8, 2014, robocall in support of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s running mate, now-lieutenant governor Kathy Hochul.

I caught Weingarten at the end of the session as she was greeting members of the audience, so when I use the term, “interview,” I mean that it was my intention to interview her regarding the robocal, and I did so in the moment, without any warning to Weingarten.

I walked up to the stage and asked, “September 8th, the robocall you did in support of Kathy Hochul: Do you admit that your actions directly contributed to the re-election of Andrew Cuomo?

Weingarten responded, “No…yes… no. They were separate items on the ballot in the primary.”

Me: “So a vote for Hochul was not a vote Cuomo given that Hochul was Cuomo’s running mate?

Weingarten: “No. They were separate on the ballot.”

Me: “One more question: Was it the intention of the Democratic National Party to use the robocall for Hochul as back-door support for Cuomo?”

Weingarten: “No.”

However.

On May 21, 2014, Cuomo chose Hochul as his running mate, and on that day, the Democratic ticket was considered “complete:

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday (May 21) named a former congresswoman from Buffalo to be his running mate, a move that completes the Democratic ticket and underscores his courtship of western New York.

The selection of the former congresswoman, Kathy Hochul, to run for lieutenant governor, which was revealed as Democrats met here for the party’s convention, resolved the one lingering unknown about the governor’s carefully planned re-election bid. …

Ms. Hochul adds a measure of diversity to the Democratic Party’s statewide ticket….

So. Even though Hochul was listed separately on the ballot in the primary, I Asked Weingarten About the Hochul Robocall | deutsch29:

Russ on Reading: Network for Public Education Conference: Highlights of Day 2

Russ on Reading: Network for Public Education Conference: Highlights of Day 2:

Network for Public Education Conference: Highlights of Day 2

Public School Champions

Lily Eskelsen Garcia/Diane Ravitch/Randi Weingarten

At NPE Conference/Chicago

Day 2 of the 2^nd annual Network for Public Education opened with a selection of sessions for all interests. I chose to go to the one chaired by my friend and public education hero, Carol Burris. Carol is well known for her advocacy in New York, where she has not only been named Principal of the Year, but has also been a consistent thorn in the side of Governor Cuomo and all education reformers. Carol frequently blogs on The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post. You can check out some of her work on that blog here.

Schools of Opportunity

Carol Burris and her colleagues at Schools for Opportunity are trying to change the conversation about what constitutes a good school. Rather than focusing on test scores as a definition of excellence, Schools of Opportunity seeks to look at a broad based  picture of educational excellence and to reward schools for achievement in overall excellence. Schools of Opportunity looks at multiple criteria for achieving excellence and recognizes schools that achieve this excellence. Their criteria include creating and maintaining a healthy school culture, broadening and enriching curriculum, providing more and better learning time, ending disparities in learning opportunities created by tracking and ability grouping, using a variety of assessments designed to respond to student needs, supporting teachers as professionals and 5 more.

This is a group that truly deserves our support as they try to change our definition of excellence in schooling to a broader more nuanced view. Please visit their website here to learn more.

     

Morning Keynote: A Conversation with Diane Ravitch, Randi Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen Garcia

The anticipated highlight of the day did not disappoint. Randi is feisty and political, Lily is quieter, more teacherly, but every bit as skilled a speaker and Diane Ravitch is, well, Diane Ravitch, the hero of the anti-reform movement. It is no secret that many in the room have had their disagreements with the two labor leaders, but on this day, the discussion was mostly a pro-teacher, anti-reform love fest as Lily and Randi pledged to fight for tenure and against yearly testing and even grudgingly agreed to concerns about the Common Core, even if that was couched in the old canard that the problem is really the test. The denouement of the session was reached when Diane asked the two leaders of multi-million dollar unions if they would pledge to refuse to accept money from the Gates/Walton/Broad billionaire reformers club foundations. As the audience held their breath, both Randi and Lily said a resounding, “Yes!” We all hope they mean it and we will all be watching to make sure they follow through.

Getting Your Book Published

I attended this session with new friends like Steven Singer and Duane Swacker, NPE members who surely have a good book or two in them. Steven has a wonderful blog you should follow called gadlfyonthewall. Steven is a reader of my blog and now I am a reader of his. This is how it works in the wonderful whacky world of blogging to defend public education. Three men who started out blogging and ended up writing books, Anthony Cody, Jose Vilson and John Kuhn discussed the process of going from blog to book. Denny Taylor, long-time champion of great literacy instruction and now a visionary publisher discussed the Russ on Reading: Network for Public Education Conference: Highlights of Day 2: