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david blake
Obama Wins a Battle as a Teachers' Union Shows Flexibility
By NEIL KING JR.
A showdown between the White House and the powerful teachers' unions looks, for the moment, a little less likely.
This week in New Haven, Conn., the local teachers union agreed, in a 21-1 vote, to changes widely resisted by unions elsewhere, including tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as the unions, said the New Haven contract could be repeated in other school districts.
Melanie Stengel/RegisterKim Torello, left, and Karen Lavorgna, teachers in New Haven, Conn., discuss the contract that was ratified by their union this week. Terms included tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections.
"I rarely say that something is a model or a template for something else, but this is both," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who helped broker the New Haven deal.
"This shows a willingness to go into areas that used to be seen as untouchable," Mr. Duncan said.
His cause for optimism is this: If teachers' unions start showing flexibility in other cities, the administration's high-stakes push to boost graduation rates and improve test scores at public schools could get a lot easier. That might even spare the administration an unwanted fight with a labor force that gave Mr. Obama a big lift in his election.
Under pressure from the Education Department, the country's two powerful teachers unions, Ms. Weingarten's AFT and the larger National Education Association, are already budging in ways that were previously unthinkable. The two unions have a combined membership of 3.6 million employees.
The AFT recently issued a batch of innovation grants to districts that are tying teacher pay to performance -- a practice usually frowned upon by unions. The NEA is taking similar steps to encourage tougher evaluations and to loosen seniority systems, moves that Mr. Duncan called "monumental breakthroughs."
It is also noteworthy that the AFT seems almost as pleased with New Haven as Mr. Duncan.
Public schools in many bigger cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are seeing the usual tension between unions and school administrators.
In Washington, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has collided with both the national and local unions. The city moved ahead recently with the firing of 388 school employees, nearly 6% of the work force.
In New Haven, by contrast, all sides agreed on the new contract after months of closed-door negotiations. The deal allows the city to close its worst schools and bring in new management, though any new teachers would have to join the union. In exchange, the union got an average 3% raise each year for four years.
"We now have unusual flexibility for a unionized system," said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.
A big question now is whether Mr. Duncan can proceed with federal efforts to remake U.S. public schools without stirring up storms like the one in Washington.
His one big advantage is financial. The administration plans early next year to distribute $4.3 billion under its "Race to the Top" program to help states set new testing standards, boost teacher quality and help rescue -- or close -- thousands of the worst-performing schools in the U.S. Beyond that, the department has another $5 billion for various school-improvement and innovation grants.
The administration is using its pot of money to get states to revamp rules that bar performance pay and charter schools, which rely on public money but are run outside the public system. Nearly 10 states have taken such steps to qualify for the funds. Select states will have to use the money to reward and encourage the changes.
So far, the administration has avoided a fight with unions. Mr. Duncan meets every few weeks with Ms. Weingarten and the NEA's president, Dennis Von Roekel.
But there is still plenty of room for friction.
Mr. Duncan, the former superintendent of Chicago public schools, got booed by teachers in July when he praised performance-based merit pay at NEA's annual convention. "You can boo," he told the crowd, "just don't throw shoes, please."
A few weeks later, the Education Department released tentative guidelines for changes states have to undertake to qualify for the federal grant money. Unions, school boards, city governments and outside groups responded with more than 1,200 recommended changes.
With the final rules scheduled to be out in mid-November, the unions are warning about limits on their flexibility. The groups are most troubled by Mr. Duncan's quest to link teacher pay to student performance, especially if it is measured only through standardized tests.
"To evaluate a teacher or a school on a single test makes no sense," said Mr. Von Roekel, who used to teach high school math in Arizona.
The unions also are wary of some of Mr. Duncan's other prescriptions, including his proposals to shut down and reorganize many of the country's most troubled schools.
For now, potential antagonists are holding fire. "I may disagree with their tactics," Mr. Von Roekel said, referring to Mr. Duncan and his team. "But I wouldn't question their intent or motivation."
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A3
The enemy concedes some ground. A battle is won, what now of the war?
Google to distribute eBooks
Google Editions aims to bring e-books to all devices
Google has announced that it plans to sell e-books online through a service called Google Editions. It plans to simultaneously work with and against other e-book retailers, but wants to ensure that people can read books on nearly any device.
The reason that this news is so incredible it that, as the article closes with, that this means publishers who have been reluctant to enter the eBook space due to committing to one of the ereaders proprietary formats can now have a way to jump in via a ubiquitous platform. In my post on digital media rights management, I mention how the consumers use of hi def movies was delayed by years due to everyone hesitating to commit to see who would win the war between blu ray and hi def DVD.
Hopefully, this means that digital literature will be spared the same battle.
[Teacher] unions are out of touch & are courting irrelevance.
A great WSJ article on the rising success of charters and the downfall of the unions:
All the reforms unions oppose—charter schools, testing, accountability, No Child Left Behind, performance pay—have been around for a while now and the disasters the unions predicted have not come to pass," said Richard Colvin, who runs the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media in New York. "The unions are out of touch and are courting irrelevance.
Teachers and administrators who once relied on a steady stream of critical stories about charter schools (which they see as competitors) now witness a flow of laudatory articles. Fly-by-night charter operators still get their comeuppance in the press, but these days reporters are just as likely to profile the high-performing charters saving thousands of inner-city children from near-certain academic death . . . and then to ask why regular public schools can't do the same.
Through the growing list of high-profile success stories, like KIPP [charter schools], the public is starting to understand that reform is actually possible," says Joe Williams, a former journalist who is now executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. "That's a big deal," argues Mr. Williams, "because the hopelessness that marred previous reform eras took a lot of people's eyes off the prize.
Online education expanding, awaits innovation
A fantastic summarization of the pressures that will move more to online education from Reuters:
Obama wants to make us first again by 2020, in order to do that, we need to create 63 million college graduates over that period. The higher education system as constructed will come up 16 million degrees short. There's not capacity in the system.
Florida college students get free online books
From eCampus News:
More than 120 textbooks are available to Florida state university students for downloading free of charge through the program, called Orange Grove Texts Plus. The initiative is a partnership with University Press of Florida. And if a student wants a printed book, he or she can buy the text for up to half off the prices found at most retail and online book stores, University Press officials said. The books will be sold for $29 to $54 apiece.
Duncan finds model charter
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
After touring one of Mastery's four schools on Tuesday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Gordon's vision of providing rigorous, college-prep education for all could become a national model for public schools.
"It was a thrill for us," Gordon said yesterday. "We said clearly we wanted to make a change in Philly, but we also wanted to demonstrate that all kids, regardless of their backgrounds, can achieve at the highest levels."
The Mastery approach aims to prepare students for college with a strict behavior code and rigorous curriculum with personal responsibility and interpersonal skills.
The model includes a longer school day (8 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and a longer school year. Struggling students must attend tutoring and Saturday sessions. All students must show "mastery" by earning a grade of at least 76 percent before advancing.
Chronicle of Hi. Ed. throws down on Harvard
I don’t agree with much this article said but here are some highlights:
In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today's dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.
Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen. That is remarkable stinginess…
Harvard announced that it was spending a small fraction of its endowment on making the university more affordable for the upper-middle class. For that, it was praised to the skies for its commitment to opportunity and the egalitarian ideal. Competitors scrambled to follow suit, while also doing little or nothing to serve more undergraduate students.
This I agree with in premise, but the chronicle intended this as a critique of Harvard. I totally disagree. Harvard is Harvard because it continues to “hoard” (protect) what makes it so valuable—exclusivity. For those whose objectives in education are scale how irrational it is to turn to Harvard as the source.
The true currency of elite higher education is admissions, not financial aid. Harvard could have used its great fortune to create more spots for deserving low-income students and hire people to fan out across the world and find them. Instead, it spent a little bit of what it had a lot of—money—while jealously hoarding its real store of value.
Again intended as a scathing criticism, again so asinine to expect otherwise (and not just asinine, but unwise—firing professors at an University is like firing the lawyers at a law firm or the consultants at a consultancy—they are the product you are selling).
The real priority of elite higher education, as the receding tide of money has exposed, is the greater glory of elite higher education and the administrators and faculty members who work there. That's where all the money went, and that's where, now that some of the money turns out to have never existed in the first place, it needs to come from.
My thoughts in closing, I am disappointed when money making is critiqued in the same piece shaming a college for lack of access and scale, for truly, without financial incentives we will never see the innovation, reform, and scale that I believe so many desire brought to the marketplace that is higher education.
Elite universities have benefited mightily from a number of converging long-term trends, none of their making. The markets made them rich, America made them famous, globalization and the information revolution made their services particularly valuable. The winner-take-all society made them objects of aspiration, nexuses of money, power, and prestige, places where those forces pulse and converge.
They are, without a doubt, extremely valuable institutions that contribute much in the way of science, scholarship. and culture. They make the world a better place. But they've mistaken their good fortune and great fortunes for virtue, and have lost their way.
An institution truly dedicated to teaching students has natural limits on how much money it needs. At some point, the land and space and professors suffice.
An institution dedicated to accumulating more money and prestige? There are no limits to those needs. They can never be satisfied.
