NEWSTEACHER UNIONS

To run a great school, you need excellent teachers with students who are ready to learn, right? It's true. But you also need librarians, janitors, and aides. Who do you call when somebody spills their chemistry experiment, or when a special needs student requires extra help? Or, even worse, if an emergency happens? Without the thousands of people who support teachers and students, things start to get out of hand.

And that's exactly what employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District are worried about: their schools unraveling because they've just been laid off. The school district terminated more than 1,000 employees Wednesday because of district budget cuts, despite available federal money that could keep people working and schools running smoothly.

"I know every kid's name. I know their parents, their siblings," said Carole Koneff, a library aide at Third Street Elementary. "You're part of the DNA of the school, you're part of the makeup."

Thank you to the Change.org members who signed the petition to Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Ramon C. Cortines, demanding that teacher evaluations be far more multi-faceted than the Los Angeles Times' rating 6,000 of the district's teachers based on students' test scores would have us believe.

The Times used student test scores to create their own ranking system of Los Angeles teachers, painting teachers as ineffective if their students' test scores weren't up to par.

The good news: Los Angeles Unified School District responded!

Change.org editors received an email in response to the slew of messages to superintendent Ramon C. Cortines, letting us know that they're keeping teacher evaluations fair:

"We received your letters regarding the LA Times series, Rating the Teachers.  We appreciate your interest in LAUSD, our staff, and, most importantly, our students.  We share your concerns regarding the use of any single measure as the determinant of teacher effectiveness.  Our Teacher Effectiveness Task Force recommended and our Board of Education adopted a set of principles grounded in notion of developing a multiple measure teacher performance review system.  To read more, please visit http://sae.lausd.net.  You can also follow our weekly progress by reading the We Are LAUSD weekly update on the LAUSD home page – www.lausd.net."

This week, Baltimore's teachers will vote to ratify (or not) the newly negotiated contract with the city. The contract has been hailed as a landmark, a vanguard, you name it. Everyone seems to love it . Why? The new contract allows the city to do what many have been hoping to do for a long time: fire teachers. This is the end of tenure and seniority, the raison d'etre for teachers unions.

The contract's central component is an evaluation system (still in the process of being developed) in which teachers would be judged annually on a combination of their students' performance on state tests, any courses teachers take to improve instruction, and a menu of other less-easily measured areas like classroom instruction itself. Based on that evaluation, teachers will be able to move up a "career ladder" and earn pay increases. Some teachers could make up to $100,000 a year, more than what some principals make. The money is good, but what are the teachers giving up in exchange?

Teachers worry about the lack of job security in this new contract. In the last few days, some Baltimore teachers have been circulating petitions urging their colleagues not to vote for the contract. They say that they would be voting for something that they have not even seen yet, and that there is no research base for the proposed teacher evaluation system.

Waiting for Superman, the new movie by the team behind the climate-change doc An Inconvenient Truth, is making waves among teachers, parents, and the media for turning a critical eye to the our nation’s education system. The doc has already gotten flack for vilifying teachers unions and touting charter schools as a panacea for education. But anyone who’s seen the movie can tell you that the message is loud, clear, and compelling: whether schools are really in crisis or simply leaving too many kids behind to tolerate any longer, there are some pretty big problems with the way things are going. And something needs to change, now.

Just what’s broken, and how can we fix it? Here are the top three issues the documentary hits on:

1. Tenure and Teachers Unions: Ugly Stepsisters?

Teacher tenure is a policy which gives teachers a permanent contract, effectively ensuring them a guarantee of employment … for life. Teachers that have tenure cannot be fired unless for “just cause”, such as severe misconduct or incompetence. Critics say that teacher tenure makes it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers. Once teachers earn tenure, which, according to a charter school leader quoted in the movie, is as easy as breathing for a few years, getting rid of them can involve years of review and bureaucratic hurdles, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars per teacher.

News site VoiceofSanDiego.org's recent article explores the pros and cons of value-added analysis in educational testing data. "Value-added analysis" means that when using test scores to monitor school and teacher performance, it makes more sense to monitor an individual student's test score growth over time than to hope each crop of third graders outperforms the previous crop of third graders (read: No Child Left Behind).

But in San Diego, teachers are not rated based on those scores. Not only was this data not publicized as it was in the Los Angeles Times, but apparently "the San Diego Unified school board, which is strongly backed by the teachers union, has panned the idea of rating teachers with test scores, saying it reduces teaching to test prep."

The L.A. Times' controversial decision to publish 6,000 teachers' students' test scores and rate teachers based on that information is provocative and misleading at best. Sure, to blame one teacher's suicide on a newspaper is sensationalist and unfounded. But many education professionals argue that the very concept of value-added analysis is bogus, given its huge margin of error and its growing preponderance in the circles of education administration and assessment.

NBC's Education Nation has focused national attention on education. As part of that national focus, one of the more insightful pieces of commentary came from Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC who declared, “I think Snooki highlights the problem in public education."

Referring to all of the characters on the television show Jersey Shore, he added, "What teacher could possibly have reached anyone of them, to get any one of their scores up, in any subject?"

O'Donnell suggests that some things are beyond a teacher's control and that it might take more than teachers to improve the achievement of the stars of Jersey Shore. You might say that Snooki, who was recently hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after partying too hard in a Miami club, is not that much different from any child who suffers from problems that teacher could not address alone.

The Gates Foundation, along with others, argues that we must improve teaching because teachers are the single most important factor in improving student achievement.

But  if we let student achievement rest only the shoulders of teachers, we let everyone else off the hook for the problems that students bring with them to school.

A few miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, Miramonte Elementary School sits in a poor neighborhood where gangs are an everyday reality and college sounds like a pipe dream. Less than half of its students are native English speakers. This is where Rigoberto Ruelas, a popular fifth grade teacher, visited his students' homes and tutored them on the weekends.

On Sunday, law enforcement officials found Ruelas' body in the Angeles National Forest. Ruelas, 39, appears to have taken his own life. Now, the local teachers union is blaming the Los Angeles Times for Ruelas' death, saying that the Times' recent evaluation of local teachers drove Ruelas to suicide.

Did it?

In August 2010, the Times published a database of 6,000 elementary school teachers in the district as part of a larger investigation. The Times rated teachers based on how well they've been able to bring up their students' standardized test scores.

Ruelas was ranked as "average" and "less effective" in the database. He wasn't alone. School-wide, only five of Miramonte's 35 teachers got as high as "average" scores and the school itself was ranked as "least effective."

Heroes? Check. Villains? Check. Insurmountable challenges? Double check. Education is getting the movie star treatment this Friday with the premiere of Waiting For "Superman," a new documentary that spotlights the tragedies and triumphs kids around the country face as they try to get an education.

All of the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster are here: stars, a spot on Oprah and - thanks to the action-packed mayoral race in Washington D.C. - a wave of new controversy surrounding the best path to education reform. It follows kids like Bianca, a kindergartner from Harlem, and Anthony, a D.C. fifth-grader, as they aim to "make it against the odds." Parents, teachers, mentors, reformers are all featured in the movie, looking for solutions in a system that fails so many children every minute.

Think education isn't the sexiest topic for a documentary? It's directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth - the movie that made talking about global warming hot and Al Gore cool. The filmmakers are hoping to similarly electrify the national dialogue about schools, and motivate people to work for change. Buying a ticket gets you a $15 credit on DonorsChoose.org to donate to the classroom of your choice.

Advance screenings have already made waves. Many critics love it; but the president of the American Federation of Teachers lashed out at the documentary earlier this month, calling it "inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete" and saying it lionizes charter schools while slamming "bad" teachers and teachers unions.

Chancellor Rhee of Washington D.C. fired 241 teachers, according to the New York Times. She concluded that these teachers should be fired for poor performance. Perhaps these teachers were not performing well, but I have two questions for Kate Rhee. How do you decide what  a poorly performing teacher is? And what do you plan to do to replace them?

DC uses a system called IMPACT to evaluate teachers. Under this system, half of teacher's evaluations are determined by their students test scores, the other half is a mix of observations, and other "value-added measures." It is unclear what really goes into the stew of teacher evaluations in DC. It is equally confusing to DC teachers, as one said, "We don't mind being held accountable," said a third. "but this is not the way. It is subjective, unclear and punitive."

In the debate over whether the evaluation system is effective or not, a major point is being overlooked. In a school system that serves many low income students, how does the city school district plan to replace the fired teachers and build an effective teaching force? There is a fierce battle on both sides, mainly between teachers unions and school district administrators, on how to evaluate teachers. But the particularities of the evaluation system distracts from this larger question of how to build a high quality teaching force.

They say you can't fight City Hall. Tell that to Karen Lewis, newly elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union. In a landslide election, Lewis won on a platform (among other things) to fight mayoral control of the schools, to provide equal funding for the city schools, to stop the over-emphasis on testing, and to keep class size low.

Chicago teachers are not taking it anymore. Tired of the union sitting back while the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed schools, fired teachers, and let class size rise to 35, Lewis is rallying union members to demonstrate at the CPS headquarters to ask them to open their books. CPS is claiming a $600 million dollar budget deficit, and laid off 2700 teachers this week. They promised 4% raises to remaining teachers, using monies they plan to borrow with approval of the school board. CPS hopes that the raise averts a teacher strike, which could be the first since 1995.