Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

The Detroit News editorial board knows how to get more teachers… by putting those release-time union officers back in the classroom.

Release time should be examined closely in every district, but it’s hard to believe the News editors are serious. Especially when they also state:

“Teacher union presidents also tend to be more experienced and better instructors. Keeping them out of the classroom may hurt student achievement.”

Noticing my questions about the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future report on teacher retention, Alexander Russo asked his Chicago readers to comment on the effect of the city’s residency requirement – an effect that went unexamined by NCTAF. If the first anecdotes are any indication, it’s a big factor.

One commenter mentions an annual high school job fair:

“Nobody out of the thousands of prospective teachers at the thing thinks about teaching in Chicago. The reasons are several, but one of the biggest is the residency requirement. I’ve attended three of these things over the past four years.”

Another mentions the real estate market:

“The fact is, Chicago real estate has gone up over 100% in the past 4 years. It is just bad timing for a new teacher and first time homebuyer. I read an article in the Tribune about a shortage of nurses in Chicago. The number 1 reason was housing.”

The point is that the NCTAF report chose two districts out of five (and by far the two largest ones) with an unusual characteristic affecting teacher retention and failed to account for it. But they did have time to dream up a Teacher Turnover Cost Calculator.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Education Intelligence Agency. I want to thank all of my readers, clients, lurkers, sources, critics and fans. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that none of this is possible without you, but in my case it’s literally true.

There is no such thing as great unread writing. The reader completes the equation. And until the written word is read, the writer can never be sure if his work will be affirmed, rejected, amplified, diminished, cheered, denounced, misunderstood or ignored. I have had ample doses of all of these reactions, and they have reshaped my work over the last 10 years.

Your participation is important because while the truly great authors can pen great thoughts for posterity, I like to refer to this as “disposable media.” Future generations will not dig through my blog posts. (Come to think of it, they might not dig through anything.) This is storytelling, and while I’m sure Homer would be happy to know we are still studying the Iliad and the Odyssey, it probably wouldn’t match the thrill he got from his own audiences’ reactions as he recited his epic poems.

So, again, thank you. Without you, I am some guy muttering to himself.

The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future released The Cost of Teacher Turnover in Five School Districts: A Pilot Study. I encourage you to read the full report for yourself, especially as the newspaper accounts tend to focus on the researchers’ recommendations rather than their research (the Washington Post story even repeats the fifty percent in five years figure, erroneously crediting it to NEA).

The authors examined five school districts: Chicago, Milwaukee, Granville County (NC), and two small districts in New Mexico – Jemez Valley and Santa Rosa. These districts have a number of unusual characteristics, but let’s stick to one BIG one.

The NCTAF researchers analyzed 59 variables that may affect teacher turnover, including age, race/ethnicity, experience, grade level, salary, enrollment, student poverty, and student academic performance.

How strange, then, that the report doesn’t mention one critical factor in teacher turnover that is very rare, but exists in both Chicago and Milwaukee – a residency requirement for teachers. In order to teach in Chicago’s and Milwaukee’s public schools, you must live within city limits.

I have no idea whether a teacher residency requirement affects turnover positively or negatively, but it must affect it somehow. Decisions about staying or leaving a job in Chicago’s public schools may in fact be decisions about whether to live in the city of Chicago. Just hypothetically, teacher turnover in Chicago and Milwaukee could be reduced significantly by allowing teachers to commute from the suburbs.

I suppose it’s hopeless to fight the tide on this one. I’ve got one organization accusing me of conspiracy-mongering on teacher turnover. But if it’s such a problem, it must be measurable. And if it’s measurable, it should be measured accurately and in context.

The Educational Testing Service released a new poll about the No Child Left Behind Act. Both Education Week and Eduwonk examine it thoroughly, but they both bury the lede, in my book.

I know I’ve beaten this dead horse before, but the key finding of the poll is that most people know very little about NCLB, so the poll results are based on opinions given after the law has been described to them in a short paragraph – after more than five years of news coverage, research and debate!

We can blame ignorance and apathy on the schools, but at some point you have to ask where individual intellectual curiosity has gone. Maybe the best argument for NCLB is that we don’t want kids to grow up to become just like the people polled by ETS.

Here’s the depressing summary from ETS:

The Public Is Largely Uninformed About NCLB

A majority of the public (54%) remains unaware that Congress passed and
the President signed into law a major education bill. Of the 46% who do know it,
only 14% believe that major changes are under way as a result. This is critical
to understanding how the public approaches education reform.

• Only 12% of the public claim to know a great deal about NCLB. An
additional 33% say they know a fair amount. That means about half of the
American public admits to knowing little (38%) or nothing at all (16%) about
this major legislative initiative.

• Even when presented with four possible NCLB descriptions, less than
half (47%) of the public correctly associated NCLB with standards and testing.
It was almost exactly the same for parents of children in K-12 schools (49%).
Significant segments of the public associate NCLB with national testing for high
school graduation (12%) or school vouchers (8%).

• A large segment (26%) associates NCLB with not leaving students
behind as they move from grade to grade at the end of the school year. They
think of “social promotion” when they hear the phrase “no child left
behind.”

The Associated Press reports unions are important to Democratic candidates!

The Seattle Times calls the Washington Education Association’s use of agency fees “money laundering“!

The Long Beach Press-Telegram learns the pitfalls of covering the inner workings of the teachers’ union!

The members of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future don’t read Education Week!

From AFT’s NCLBlog:

Summer Break

June 15, 2007 01:46 PM

The blog is on summer break, though it reserves the right to do a little work if it gets bored with the tanning, swimming, barbecues, baseball games, etc.

See you in the fall.