Performance pay works in the Prince George's schools

By William R. Hite Jr. and Donald J. Briscoe

Performance pay is supposed to be the third rail of education reform. But in Prince George's County, we have shown that it doesn't have to be.

Two years ago, we agreed to reward teachers and principals who elevate student achievement in high-need schools. Our program shows that the government can be a catalyst for school reform and that the Obama administration's plans to dramatically expand incentive programs are essential to changing school systems that currently fail, or cannot afford, to reward effective teaching.

It also shows what administrators and teachers can accomplish when we work together. During the 2006-07 school year, Prince George's schools and the unions joined hands to create and implement the district's first pay-for-performance program, supported by a five-year, $17 million grant from the federal government's Teacher Incentive Fund. TIF helps states and school districts develop innovative systems to reward teachers and principals who boost student achievement in high-need schools.

Yes, we had our disagreements as we worked out how to supplement the existing compensation system, which is based largely on seniority and qualifications, not performance. But thanks to the involvement of teachers and administrators selected by the unions, we were able to create a voluntary program that provides up to $10,000 in bonuses for effective teachers in high-need schools and as much as $12,000 for administrators who work to turn around struggling schools. Two committees that included teachers and administrators designed both the cash-incentive structure and the program's professional development system, which helps teachers improve classroom instruction and assists teachers and administrators in earning their bonuses...

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Is Arne Duncan giving up on education reform?

By David Ellison- Oakland Tribune

TO CHARTER OR not to charter? That is the question.

Hamlet pondered whether to battle "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or to just give up. My fear is that, in pushing for more charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has given up.

Charters never really became laboratories for innovation.

They simply adopted the "new ideas" all public schools would if they had the freedom and the funds: longer school days and years, smaller schools and class sizes, careful selection of motivated, gifted teachers, strict accountability for both students and their parents, site-based management. "...

Charters have such freedom. But their claims to operate with less state funds than most public schools are spurious.

For one, charters usually receive substantial outside support. Even more significant, since salaries account for more than 90 percent of most schools' budgets, charters typically employ younger, far-less expensive faculty, and turn them over after only four years, thus keeping expenses artificially low.

In other words, charters attract our best new teachers but quickly burn them out.

This is reform?

True reform would address the real and enduring problems plaguing public education, such as the fact that the teaching profession generally attracts our least qualified college graduates; that the worst of them too often staff inner-city schools; that schools stand more segregated by race and class than ever; that they follow the same factory model as a century ago.

Many (certainly not all) charters — such as Summit Preparatory High School, which I featured in my last column — offer at least a few of our inner-city children a way out of an obviously broken and shamelessly unjust system of public schools...

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Why Michelle Rhee Has to Play Tough

By Richard Whitmire

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The forces lined up against D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee -- angry teachers, grumpy D.C. Council members, the nation's top teachers' union leader quarterbacking the opposition -- are essentially asking one question: Why can't you behave more like that nice Arne Duncan?

Indeed, with his aw-shucks humility and his anecdotes about playing b-ball with the president, Duncan has undeniable charm. That charm was honed in Chicago, where he never played in-your-face politics and never publicly suggested there was widespread incompetence among the teaching force, qualities that contributed to President Obama's tapping him to be U.S. secretary of education.

By contrast, Rhee appeared on the cover of Time wielding a broom to symbolically sweep incompetence out of her public schools. Yikes.

But there's a reason Rhee plays hardball: She has no choice...

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New York Mayor Wants More Charter Schools

More charter schools may be coming to the city under a plan proposed Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Speaking at a 10th anniversary celebration of charter schools at the Sisulu-Walker Charter school in Harlem, the mayor said if reelected, he would fight to abolish the cap put on charter schools by Albany.

Bloomberg's plan would double the amount of charter schools in the city to 200. He is proposing that by 2013, almost 10 percent, or 100,000 public school seats will be charter.

"Charter schools like Sisulu have succeeded because they empower teachers and principals to set high expectations," said Bloomberg. "They encourage innovation in the classroom. They create competition among schools for students. But most importantly, they give parents more options in deciding what's best for their children."

In addition, he pledged to raise $100 million in private funds for charter school facilities...

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Will Longer Schoold Days Work?

By Jason Campbell

President Obama thinks that keeping kids in their seats might just be the education reform this country needs.

But at least one Manteca teacher isn’t quite sure that his kids could stand to stay in their seats any longer than they already do.

With that the Commander-in-Chief believes that students today spend too little time in the classroom. Coming this week, those involved in education at the local level who have had to deal with the crippling economic blow that is still digging into coffers, aren’t quite sure that the concept of longer school days and shorter vacations – while maybe a good theoretical idea – is currently feasible.

“We need to prepare our students to be able to compete in a global economy, and that’s just the reality of education in America today,” said Manteca Educators Association President Ken Johnson. “I think that the idea sounds good theoretically, but practically something like that is going to take some serious money and that’s something we just don’t have right now.”

“On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but in reality I’m not so sure that it could immediately work. It might be good rhetoric...

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Newt and Al Making the Rounds

By KATHY MATHESON (AP)

PHILADELPHIA — The Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich don't agree on much, but a meeting with a group of inner-city charter school students on Tuesday left them with the same impression: There is hope for improving the U.S. education system.

"We may disagree about other issues, but this is a place where we have a common" goal, Gingrich said outside Mastery Charter School in West Philadelphia. "I take education very, very seriously."

Sharpton, a liberal Democratic, and Gingrich, a conservative Republican, joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the first stop of a "listening and learning" tour to find out what school strategies are working and why.

At Mastery, the trio met with about a dozen 11th graders who attended the school four years earlier when it was under district management. At that time, students said, kids ran wild, expectations were low and teachers didn't care about the students — or even about teaching.

"It was horrible," 17-year-old Donnell Clark said.

But since 2006, the school has been run by Mastery Charter Schools, a nonprofit that now has four campuses in Philadelphia serving 2,100 students. The Shoemaker campus visited Tuesday has outperformed some of its more affluent suburban counterparts on state standardized tests.

Clark and others told the education advocates that new teachers and staff made the difference by raising the academic bar, accepting no excuses and simply caring about their students.

"Teachers actually invest their time," Clark said.

Public education in Philadelphia is a mixture of district-run schools, schools operated by private management companies and charter schools, which are public but operate independently from the district.

It is a high-poverty system where only about half the students can read and write at grade level...

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One Person's Opinion: Charter Schools Are not the Answer

By Noel Anderson

"We need more charter schools as a choice for parents". "Charter schools foster innovation!" All we hear is that charter schools are the answer to failing public education. If you recall, charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate outside the governance and policies of a local district in a state.

This charter school hype was literally translated into policy in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, fewer than 20 of approximately 120 schools in center New Orleans remained usable. Since the hurricane destroyed the state and local tax base, the result was a state takeover of public schools, with more than half of them reopening as charter schools. According to an Urban Institute, New Orleans has become the largest charter school experiment in the country.

But do charter schools live up to the hype? The truth is they don't. Charter schools are given a window of three to five years to produce results or shut down. Yet the results of studies done by the Economic Policy Institute illustrate there is no real distinguishable academic effect on children in charter schools versus ones in traditional public schools.

There are other myths around charters that need dispelling. One myth is that charters foster innovation for public schools. Although there are many charter schools that do innovative things with curricula and have creative names (some are simply strange), they do not help reshape traditional public schools.

In fact, charter schools tend to be in competition with traditional public schools for students rather than becoming conduits for changing the public education system. Ostensibly, public schools should not be competing for students like businesses would compete for customers. Public schools are not businesses, but a fundamental right provided for all....

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