The May 11 Communique’ Is Up!
Special “Quote of the Week” Issue
1) Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association
2) Megan McArdle, economics blogger for Atlantic Monthly
3) Katherine K. Merseth, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
4) David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association
5) Candi Peterson, member of the Washington Teachers Union board of trustees
6) Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers
7) Elaine Chao, former U.S. Secretary of Labor
8) Pat Donohoe, state councilor of the New South Wales Teachers Federation in Australia
9) Contract Hits
10) Last Week’s Intercepts
May 11th, 2009 at 13:08
Mike,
RE: Your Dennis van Roekel quote.
While I agree that the NEA has been squeezed into publicly modifying their language on performance pay (and will be forced to continue doing so, in their attempt to get ahead of a fast-moving train that they should have seen coming years ago), you have mischaracterized both National Board Certification, and the NEA’s relationship with National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs).
National Board Certification isn’t a “union thing” although both the AFT and NEA have members on NBPTS’ Board of Directors. When you look at where the highest concentrations of NBCTs are, they’re in right-to-work states where salaries are low and becoming an NBCT will net the teacher a pay boost. (Confirmation that performance pay works, actually. Teachers are capitalists, too.) In many strong-union states, NB Certification is virtually unknown, as old-guard union leaders opposed salary incentives for NB Certification as elitist. Union states where NBC is growing have state-granted incentives (on top of locally negotiated salaries).
And shame on you for using an old post and some old (and, frankly, shabby) research to suggest that NB Certification has no relationship to teaching performance. The United States Department of Education (no fan of either unions or NBPTS) commissioned a meta-analysis of the existing research on NBCTs, in 2006–done by the National Research Council, under the auspices of National Academies of Science. Their report, released last year, confirmed that NBCTs do leverage learning gains higher than their colleagues’–and those gains were more significant when the NBCT was teaching in high-needs and high-minority schools. Here’s a link to a press synopsis:
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12224
There’s a section in the report that debunks, statistically and politically, a lot of the flag-waving around Bill Sanders. Other quantitative researchers (Goldhaber, for example) drew very different conclusions than Sanders, using the same data set. Of course, by then Sanders was doing research for ABCTE, who got a $43 million dollar grant from the USDOE (speaking of political compromises). That’s a lot of taxpayer dough that didn’t yield many new teachers.
May 11th, 2009 at 15:07
Hi Nancy,
I encourage my readers to examine the full NAS analysis. I don’t find it as compelling as you do.
We can debate whether or not national certification is a “union thing,” but a bonus for achieving it is not the same as performance pay, as much as NEA would like to equate the two.