Failing to Make Adequate Yearly Progress on the Laugh Test
1) California Teachers Association President David Sanchez is urging CTA local affiliates not to sign Race to the Top memoranda of understanding. “It’s crazy for them to think that we were going to go out on a limb and sign something off without knowing what the final product is going to look like,” Sanchez said.
But the teachers’ union in New York, along with school administrators, make exactly the opposite argument when it comes to collective bargaining agreements. “If negotiations were public, what incentive would there be for either side to move even one inch for fear of being publicly criticized?” asked a New York State United Teachers spokesman, while the superintendent added, “It’s not easy to reach an agreement with both parties now, and if we got the public involved it would be that much more cumbersome.”
2) There is an effort in New Jersey to move school board elections from April and May to November. The New Jersey Education Association is opposed because it “would politicize what is currently a non-partisan election process.”
Who’s the largest campaign contributor to school board candidates? You only get one guess.
3) In a Los Angeles Times opinion column, United Teachers Los Angeles officers A.J. Duffy, Julie Washington and Gregg Solkovits tell us how to create “better teachers, the union way.” They trumpet the district’s peer review program:
The Los Angeles Unified School District program, a collaborative effort with the union, provides both new teachers and struggling veterans with ongoing peer coaching from trained consulting teachers. Teachers who receive a below-standard evaluation are automatically referred to the program. So far, nearly 850 teachers have been referred to the program, and more than two-thirds of them have successfully improved their practice or decided to leave the profession.
The program is 10 years old. LAUSD has more than 34,000 teachers. That’s an average of one-quarter of one percent of LA teachers in the program annually. Also, how do we interpret that last sentence? Did two-thirds improve their practice and one-third leave the profession, or does the two-thirds include both improvers and leavers, and there is another third unaccounted for?
