- Unanimous D.C. Council panel advances special-education overhaul
- School boundary plan assailed at hearing
- Teachers union convention opens, Common Core on table
- Time to end teacher tenure
Unanimous D.C. Council panel advances special-education overhaul
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 10, 2014
The D.C. Council’s Education Committee on Thursday unanimously supported special-education legislation intended to speed services to children and give parents more leverage in disputes.
The legislation, which is scheduled to go to the full council for a vote in the fall, is contained in a package of three bills that D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) proposed in March.
The legislation would cut in half the time schools have to evaluate a child referred for services. D.C. schools now have up to 120 days to offer students an evaluation, the most time in the country. Schools would also have to provide parents with information before special-education meetings and develop transition plans earlier to better prepare students for adult life.
Educators would also try to identify and serve children with disabilities earlier and more efficiently to improve their chances of being successful in school. The legislation would expand the number of infants and toddlers who are eligible for special services, building on a program expansion initiated last year by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D).
Catania, the committee chairman and a candidate for mayor, said the three bills address critical problems in special education. He said families often feel powerless when they try to advocate for their children and seek help for “all-too-often undiagnosed” disabilities.
Special-education services in D.C. long have been in turmoil, and the city historically paid tuition for thousands of special-needs children each year to attend private schools. The school system has been working to build up its special-education programs and reduce the number of private placements.
Federal officials recently noted improvements on many fronts, but they still found the District to be out of compliance with national requirements and in need of intervention. Of particular concern is low academic performance.
Judith Sandalow — executive director of the Children’s Law Center, which represents children with special needs and helped draft Catania’s legislation — also credited public schools with making significant improvements.
“Five years ago, or 10 years go, we would have laughed at this legislation because it would have been so unrealistic,” she said. With a new foundation in place, she said, the legislative package is realistic and could serve to push the schools “to move faster and farther.”
The committee gathered comment from parents, agencies and experts and made revisions to the proposals, including giving the city more time to introduce some major changes.
The earlier deadlines for evaluations would not go into effect until July 2017, because schools officials said they needed more time to prepare. Some schools have struggled to conduct evaluations within the current time frame, although compliance has improved in recent years.
In most cases, the legislation shifts the burden of proof in disputes about special-education services to the schools and away from parents, who typically have less access to expertise and information. But under a revision, reflecting school leaders’ concerns, parents will continue to have the burden of proof in cases in which they seek tuition reimbursement after unilaterally moving a child out of public school.
The revised legislation also seeks to discourage frivolous lawsuits by allowing the school system to recover expert witness fees if it prevails in a lawsuit deemed unreasonable or without foundation. If parents win, they, too, would be able to recover expert witness fees, a provision included in the original proposals.
The committee abandoned a proposal to move the hearing officers who decide such cases out of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Many parents contend that the education office could be biased, but the agency is making changes to the hearing process and sought to retain that function. The revised bill seeks instead to make the process for selecting hearing officers more transparent.
School boundary plan assailed at hearing
The Northwest Current
By Graham Vyse
July 9, 2014
Northwest residents dominated a D.C. Council hearing on school boundaries late last month, leading the pushback against proposed changes to the way students are assigned to the city’s public schools.
Over the course of six hours on June 26, the council’s education committee heard from parents, PTA presidents and other stakeholders, the vast majority of whom objected to plans crafted by Deputy Mayor for Education Abigail Smith and her advisory committee.
Intended to address overcrowding at high-performing schools and underutilization of space at others, the proposals have been refined since April to incorporate public feedback. Nevertheless, Smith’s effort continues to meet widespread resistance, including from families losing rights to desirable schools and critics who say education officials should focus on expanding quality, not changing assignment policies.
“The deputy mayor says that we can do both at the same time, but we can’t,” Washington Teachers Union president Elizabeth Davis said at the hearing. “The city is focused on a divisive, unproductive plan that is going nowhere.”
Tenleytown resident Nabeeha Hutchins noted that none of this year’s mayoral candidates have embraced the proposed reforms. “Why are we spending time and taxpayer dollars when whatever comes to pass will not be implemented?” she asked. “We should stop.”
Hutchins’ family was one of 12 in the neighborhood that would have lost rights to Janney Elementary under an earlier version of the plans. The mother of two toddlers, Hutchins said she was shocked by that notion, because she lives close enough to Janney to see the school from her bedroom window. She told the committee that walkability and proximity must be prioritized as part of any boundary changes.
At-large Council member David Grosso agreed with that sentiment. “If you’re right within a half a mile, you have a right to go to that school,” he said. Ward 3 member Mary Cheh also emphasized the importance of proximity, especially at the elementary level.
Tracy Gabriel was another witness whose community would be directly impacted by the proposals. Gabriel lives in Foxhall Village, which would lose rights to Key Elementary under the current plan in favor of Georgetown’s Hyde-Addison. When it comes to that school, she said the deputy mayor and her committee may be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
“The feeling that Key is overcrowded is not one shared by the Key administration or Key parents,” Gabriel said, despite the school’s use of “demountable” classroom trailers.
At-large Council member David Catania, who chaired the hearing, was seriously concerned about the plan’s implications for school diversity, suggesting that some proposals might run afoul of civil rights law. In addition, he said affluent families would flee the city if their school access were threatened.
“Is there any reason why this has to be finalized this year?” Catania asked Smith, alluding to Mayor Vincent Gray’s stated goal to announce a final plan late this summer.
The deputy mayor said her concern was that putting off reform could mean holding it back indefinitely.
“I do worry that delaying making decisions means not a few months’ delay, but a few years or a few administrations,” she said.
Council member Grosso was one of several speakers to point out that Smith and her committee made no detailed recommendations regarding charter schools — a large and growing component of the city’s educational offerings.
“I was looking for a little more on that myself,” said D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who testified alongside the deputy mayor. “It was certainly something the advisory committee placed high value on and spent time talking about,” Smith said, explaining that the committee felt it needed deeper engagement with the charter sector to make recommendations.
Grosso responded that the need for more meaningful engagement was the strongest argument for delaying reform.
A few witnesses at the hearing offered support for elements of the most recent proposal. Mount Pleasant resident Mark Elton said he was grateful that Bancroft Elementary would continue to feed into Deal Middle. In addition, several Ward 2 parents said they were pleased with plans for a new center-city middle school at the former Shaw Junior High site. Ann McLeod, president of Garrison Elementary’s PTA, suggested early family engagement would be needed to make such a school a success.
“What parents want is proven quality and proven programming that is already in place,” she said. Public feedback will be accepted on the proposals until July 21. Details are available at dme.dc.gov.
Teachers union convention opens, Common Core on table
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 11, 2014
In response to teachers who are uneasy with the Common Core State Standards, a major teachers union is offering to underwrite projects crafted by teachers to improve the math and reading standards.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is expected to announce Friday that the union will give up to five grants worth as much as $30,000 to teachers for projects aimed at reforming the standards.
Weingarten plans to make the offer as part of her keynote address to the AFT’s annual convention, which begins Friday in Los Angeles and runs through Monday.
The Common Core standards, a set of expectations of what every student should know in math and reading from kindergarten through 12th grade, is expected to be a central focus of the AFT convention.
Forty five states and the District of Columbia originally adopted the standards, but in recent months, Indiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma reversed course and decided to drop the standards. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), tried to pull his state out of the standards but is fighting with the state’s board of education about whether he has the legal authority to do so.
The AFT and the other main teachers union, the National Education Association, have both supported the standards but have been critical of the way they have been implemented.
The unions also are opposed to the use of new standardized tests based on the Common Core to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Most states are using these teacher evaluation systems at the Obama administration’s direction.
Weingarten has called for a two-year moratorium on using testing for job evaluations or academic progress, saying that teachers and students need more time to learn the standards and adjust to new tests before student scores are used for decisions about whether teachers keep their jobs or students get promoted or graduate.
Reached in Los Angeles on Thursday, Weingarten said she is offering the grants to give her members an outlet to improve the standards.
“This is about a union listening to its members, listening to educators who say ‘We have a better way’,” said Weingarten, who is expected to be easily re-elected to another two-year term at the convention.
Both AFT and NEA members were involved in the writing of the Common Core standards, but “teacher voices have not been strongly enough represented in their development or their rollout,” Weingarten said.
She said the grants could be used in any number of ways, including critiques of the standards, review of the research behind them, and analysis of the implementation, especially how they apply to students with disabilities and English language learners. Some union members might want to write their own standards for a particular grade level and subject, she said.
The AFT has about 1.6 million members, including teachers, paraprofessionals, higher education staff, health care workers and nurses. The NEA, the nation’s largest labor union, has about 3 million members, including teachers, paraprofessionals and higher education workers.
AFT activists from Chicago have said they intend to try to get the national convention to call for an end to Common Core.
The AFT’s leadership is proposing a milder statement that applauds the ideals behind the Common Core but says the number and frequency of standardized tests should be reduced, and stakes should be lowered so that assessments aren’t used to “test and punish” but instead “support and improve.”
It is unclear whether AFT delegates will echo NEA members, who last week at their convention in Denver called for the resignation of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. NEA activists, led by a delegation from California, were enraged by Duncan’s support of a recent court ruling in that state, which found that tenure and other job protections for teachers violated the state constitution.
Three days after the NEA’s action, Duncan appeared at an event with Weingarten and went out of his way to say that he supports teachers unions and collective bargaining.
Weingarten said Thursday she understood the call by the NEA for Duncan’s resignation. “The comments he made about the (tenure) case showed a real disrespect for the every day teacher,” she said. If her union members wants to follow suit, it’s up to them, she said. “That’s what conventions are for,” Weingarten said. “It is in their hands.”
Time to end teacher tenure
The Hill
By Casey Given
July 11, 2014
After over a century as a standard practice in American public education, is teacher tenure coming to an end? This question seems to be on the tip of many education reformers’ tongues in the wake of recent policy pushes across the country.
In Philadelphia, the city’s public school system seeks to pull itself out of a financial rut by laying off 100 teachers, some of whom are tenured. In California, the Golden State’s tenure system was recently ruled unconstitutional after a group of students argued in court that it interfered with the government’s obligation to provide a quality education. The case has given rise to a similar challenge in New York, laying the pathway for further legal battles across the country.
While teachers’ unions may be up in arms about tenure’s downfall, these developments are a rare victory for students in an era of stagnating educational outcomes. Teacher tenure is an anachronism of a bygone era that is detrimental to student learning in our modern, high-tech world.
A quick look through the history books is enough to see how outdated tenure is as a model of employment in education. Massachusetts was the first state to adopt tenure in 1886 as a method to combat rampant discrimination against teachers. At the time, primary and secondary educators were almost exclusively women who were subject to strict contractual terms and social norms for their profession. Teachers were expected to be exemplars of citizenship in their community. Consequently, teachers were routinely fired for getting pregnant, staying out too late, or even wearing pants, as labor expert Carl Van Horn recalls.
Two centuries later, these employment concerns hardly cross teachers minds. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, teachers can no longer be discriminated against for their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Furthermore, decades worth of contract negotiations with public sector unions make it virtually impossible for schools to arbitrarily fire teachers in the reckless fashion that ran rampant in the 19th century.
So, what is teacher tenure good for anymore?
Tenure defenders often argue that it is needed as a means of protecting the free speech and political views of teachers from discrimination by politically driven administrators. “School boards shouldn’t impose political tests in hiring teachers,” Cal Poly Ponona Professor Ralph E. Shaffer recently argued in the Los Angeles Daily-News. “With tenure gone, they will.”
The professor is certainly right in the context of higher education. University scholars, after all, contribute new and often controversial ideas to academic literature and therefore should not fear losing their job for rocking the boat. K-12 public school teachers, on the other hand, make no such academic contributions and are obligated to impartially teach their pupils the facts without an obscuring political bias.
Instead of protecting good teachers from bad administrators, teacher tenure has made it nearly impossible for good administrators to deal with bad teachers. Some school districts have resorted to desperate measures, going so far as to pay poor teachers to stay away from the classroom. In New York City, for example, teachers accused of misconduct are assigned to “rubber rooms” while they await disciplinary hearings for months or even years. These facilities cost the city $22 million in 2012 alone, highlighting the need for more flexible policies related to hiring and firing.
Instead of fearing the downfall of teacher tenure for employment instability, teachers should embrace it as an opportunity to be rewarded for their hard work. While a loss of tenure will undoubtedly mean more rigorous evaluations, many schools and districts will tie these assessments to rewards. Former DC Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, for example, once proposed a plan that would pay top-performing teachers up to $130,000 in exchange for eliminating tenure. Sadly, DC’s teacher’s union rejected the offer to instead cling to its seniority-based tenure model.
Public sector unions should stop tailoring their demands to the least common denominator among their ranks and instead agree for what’s best for teachers and students alike — namely, ending tenure. While tenure played an important role protecting quality teachers from unjustified layoffs throughout American history, it has been warped throughout the decades to protect poor teachers from very justified firings. America’s schoolchildren deserve better.