Passing Notes

Last month in Philadelphia, the National Education Association, the largest teachers union (and notably, the largest union in America) held their annual conference. Several Democratic Presidential candidates spoke to the convention.

An important purpose of the annual meeting is for NEA delegates to adopt various resolutions that drive the organization’s policy agenda. Here are some highlights of resolutions the NEA adopted, as first reported by the EIA blog:

“School boards must be authorized to deny applications [for charter schools] that do financial harm to the authorizing school districts.” In other words, money should be allocated to school districts and the adults that work in them, rather than allowing funds to follow the child receiving an education to the public school of her choice. This sort of illegal and unconstitutional fiscal inequity punishes children who seek quality educational options and it was recently struck down by the Maryland Supreme Court. When money follows children, it forces the system to respond, as recently noted in Oakland. This issue will be important in Rhode Island as the state works to implement a funding formula — an important concept of which should be that money follows kids to the public school of their choice.

Performance pay as a concept is front of mind for many, including Democrats George Miller and Barrack Obama. But the NEA strongly opposes any attempt to judge the performance of a teacher by the results of her students, as newly adopted Resolution D-20 says: “The Association also believes that the use of student achievement measures such as standardized test scores or grades to determine the competency, quality, or effectiveness of any professional educator is inappropriate and is not a valid measure.”

Yet the liberal Brookings Institution suggests exactly the contrary in their 2006 study on identifying effective teachers, where they recommend (among other things): “Measures of outputs and performance rather than credentials would need to be used. Moreover, some measure of ‘value added,’ or the average gain in performance for students assigned to each teacher, would need to be a significant component of [teacher evaluation].” The same study found that measuring inputs (rather than student outcomes) such as teacher certification or national board certification is “largely irrelevant to predicting his or her effectiveness.”

You don’t need to be a policy wonk to understand that a highly effective teacher is the strongest factor in increasing student success. Research such as the Brookings study shows that having a top-quartile (in terms of effectiveness) teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher, over a period of four years, would effectively close the black-white achievement gap in this country. Yet there are few states that measure teacher effectiveness, link it to student achievement, or have policies in place that allow management to increase the effectiveness of the average teacher in the workforce.

And in fact, beyond simply opposing measures of student achievement in compensating and hiring teachers, the NEA opposes using student achievement as the basis for any state or federal mandates. Newly adopted Resolution E-9 now begins: “The National Education Association believes that federal and state mandates regarding school programs should be broad, general guidelines, must be fully funded, and must not be based on student achievement.” (emphasis added)

To the contrary, shouldn’t student achievement form the basis for most federal and state education mandates? Isn’t raising the achievement levels of our kids the entire purpose of our public education system?

In Rhode Island, responsibility for implementing this national NEA agenda falls on NEARI. As is the case nationally, the NEA tends to organize teachers in suburban and rural schools, while the AFT (represented locally by RIFTHP) organizes teachers in our urban schools, with a few exceptions in both cases.

Currently, Rhode Island has no policy or system to track teacher effectiveness based on growing student achievement. Rhode Island is also one of only 15 states lacking alternative certification programs that encourage more people to enter the profession by removing barriers to entry.

The Brookings report, in contrast to the recent NEA resolutions, summarized five key recommendations to improve teacher effectiveness in our schools:

1. Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification
2. Make it harder to promote the least effective teachers to tenured positions
3. Provide bonuses to highly effective teachers willing to teach in schools with a high proportion of low-income students
4. Evaluate individual teachers using various measures of teacher performance on the job
5. Provide Federal grants to help states that link student performance with the effectiveness of individual teachers over time

You won’t hear these proposals coming from the NEA. But they are right on the money, and for the most part are embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike. When will we see them implemented in Rhode Island?