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An Unfair Editorial

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The Plain Dealer had a terribly slanted and unfair editorial titled "Cleveland school-reform bill needs teachers' input". From the title it sounded as though some were finally calling for collaboration, before a rush to legislation. Alas, that was not the case, as the editorial demonstrated, first with a straw man argument

When the usually reserved Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says he would trade his office for "quality education for our children," all of the other adults involved in the high-stakes discussion on school reform ought to determine what they would give up as well.

So far, judging from the Cleveland Teachers Union's tepid response to the mayor's Cleveland-only school reform package, the answer appears to be little or nothing.

One should hardly be confused by the empty rhetoric of a politician and then compare it to actual sacrifices working people ought to make on the basis on that rhetoric. So straight away we knew this editorial was headed south.

The mayor says that despite hours of meetings with union representatives, he has received no written reply to his wide-ranging draft legislation on school reform.

The draft legislation was only made available less than 24 hours ago as of the writing of this editorial! People have barely had chance to even read and digest it, let alone craft some policy response document in considered terms.

If the Mayor and the Plain Dealer truly wanted teacher input, why didn't they seek it during the crafting of the actual legislation, then they could have rolled it out with a lot more support and a lot less controversy. To now blame teachers, yet again, for his own failing to collaborate with critical stakeholders is very unfair.

Ohio's Draft Waiver for NCLB

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The Ohio Department of Education has a draft waiver for NCLB. The headline making change is to move away from the current school ranking system to a letter grade (A-f). Other proposals in the draft include:

  • Changing the current differentiated accountability system to identify and support the lowest performing Title 1 schools.
  • Greater flexibility in the use of federal professional development funds as a trade off with the higher standards and transparency in the accountability system.
  • Schools and districts will need to complete fewer forms and reports to use federal dollars.
  • Focusing on low-achieving schools to ensure compliance with reform models and mandates, including those in the state budget (HB 153).
  • Ensuring a system of rewards and recognitions exist for districts and schools that meet designated achievement levels or levels of expected growth.
  • Improving federally approved Differentiated Accountability Model and ensuring that it aligns with state accountability system and consequence.
  • Phasing out the Highly Qualified Teachers measure on report card and as data used to determine equitable distribution of teachers and replacing it with four evaluation effectiveness ratings.
  • Continuing to expand and provide technical support for school-wide pooling of funds in eligible buildings and expanding transferability to allow schools in improvement status to transfer Title funding.
  • Optional flexibility to permit community learning centers to use 21st century funds in supporting expanded learning time during the school day in addition to non-school hours, according to the draft.

Further information can be found here at the ODE website.

Teachers comments hit with bullets

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The Governor's teacher liaison has published a draft memo condensing over 1,200 educator comments into an awful lot of cut & paste bullet points. As noted by StateImpact, these bullets have been arbitrarily lumped into 5 categories

  • Big Concern #1: Who would / could / should evaluate a teacher under this new system?
  • Big Concern #2: What would / could / should be used to evaluate a teacher (or administrator) under this new system?
  • Big Concern #3: How would / could / should student growth be measured?
  • Big Concern #4: How would / could / should this new system lead to a teacher’s growth?
  • Big Concern #5: How would / could / should my pay change if we move to performance compensation?

Not included in this document is any mention of collective bargaining, even though a significant number of teachers expressed that local collective bargaining was the best mechanism to formulate evaluations and pay. It's also not possible to determine the weight to apply to any of these bullet points based on either frequency or validity, but as noted, this is a working draft document.

In the mean time we will continue to publish a wide selection of raw comments. The memo can be found below.

Concerns Ideas Memo