| Senate Bill 10-191, The Principal and Teacher Evaluation Bill, will be heard in the Senate Ed Committee today Wednesday, April 21st. This bill will codify Governor Ritter’s executive order requiring that 50% of teacher pay will be linked to test scores. If you think the needs of children should be heard, then you as parents, teachers, and concerned citizens will have to raise your voices on their behalf. Read the full bill here Why you should oppose this bill: Section 3 of this bill transfers authority for our schools, teachers, and students away from citizen elected school boards and centralizes control in the hands of a Governor appointed "Governor's Council for Educator Effectiveness." The state board will have to adopt the guidelines the council develops. Section 6 ensures that our local school boards will then have to adopt those same guidelines. It creates yet another level of expensive government attempting to exert "their" agenda and further removing parents and citizen's from public school decision making. Section 3 requires the state board of education (state board) to work with the governor's council for educator effectiveness (council), as created by executive order, to promulgate rules concerning a system to evaluate the effectiveness of educators (system). Section 6 requires a school district board of education or board of cooperative services to meet or exceed the guidelines established by the state board when creating its performance evaluation system. Standards are provided for a school district board of education to use when evaluating principals. Keep in mind that the measurement tool used to "earn" and maintain "non-probationary" status will be state standardized tests. This bill will REQUIRE districts to penalize teachers whose students do not demonstrate growth according to the Colorado Department of Education's formula for "longitudinal growth." (II) BEGINNING WITH THE 2011-2012 SCHOOL YEAR, TEACHERS 20 SHALL EARN NONPROBATIONARY STATUS BASED ON THREE CONSECUTIVE 21 YEARS OF DEMONSTRATED EFFECTIVENESS AND SHALL LOSE 22 NONPROBATIONARY STATUS BASED ON TWO CONSECUTIVE YEARS OF 23 DEMONSTRATED INEFFECTIVENESS. THE RECOMMENDATIONS DEVELOPED PURSUANT TO THIS SUBPARAGRAPH (I) SHALL REQUIRE THAT AT LEAST FIFTY PERCENT OF THE EVALUATION IS DETERMINED BY THE ACADEMIC GROWTH OF THE TEACHER'S STUDENTS Quick Facts about CSAP and Standardized Tests: - CSAP has never been independently audited or evaluated for validity or reliability - CSAP tests are graded by Kelly Girls. These "temp workers" are not required to have any education experience or a degree in education. - While the publishers of CSAP will be charged with judging teacher performance the public has no oversight of these corporations and no regulatory means of evaluating their performance. - A 2008 survey of DPS students indicated less than 50% of high-school students "tried their best on CSAP." - The number one indicator of test performance is income. See this link: http://www.angelaengel.com/blog/?p=73 According to the proponents of the bill: SB10-191 "Helps us retain our best teachers and principals by offering them challenging new career ladders that offer them more pay and more responsibility to support their fellow educators in improving their practice." Apparently the bill supporters haven't noticed the school closures and teacher lay-offs. $300 million dollars in education cuts to Colorado schools this year means there is no money for "teacher incentives." Districts have had to cut essential programs and basic student services. A well respected superintendant once said to me, "I'd love to reward teacher for great performance, but I wouldn't be able to afford it." The real truth is that this bill isn't about rewarding teachers, it's about punishing them. Good policy provides a solution to a problem. Sponsors of Senate Bill SB10-191, listed below, have identified teachers and principals as the "problem" in education. They arrogantly assume that they "know better" than the on-site principals and community elected school boards. SB10-191 represents another failed attempt to quantify what is uniquely individual - human performance. Evidence behind standardized test driven reforms: Let's be very clear in looking at the evidence behind standardized test driven reforms. A decade of grading schools based on the same standardized tools SB10-191 proposes to grade teachers has yielded the following outcomes for Colorado: - higher drop-out rates - wider achievement gaps - narrower curriculums - larger class sizes - fewer innovative education models and reduced alternatives in academic programming - more dollars spent on bureaucracy and less dollars spent in the classrooms - NO INCREASE IN STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT and NO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENTS Please be advised of the bill sponsors: SENATE SPONSORSHIP Johnston and Spence, Foster, Gibbs, Hodge, King K., Kopp, Newell, Penry, Romer, Scheffel HOUSE SPONSORSHIP Scanlan and Murray, Carroll T., Gerou, Massey, Rice, Summers The answer to improving our public schools is creating greater opportunity for students. This means small classes, access to technology, safe and protected learning environments, inclusive school cultures, nutritious meals, exercise for the body as well as the mind, positive modeling and relationship building, and real-world learning experiences. Educators aren't robots. They are human being teaching human beings. It's not cheap and it's not quantifiable but it's terribly important. Take Action Today Please contact your Senators and Senate President Shaffer and ask them to vote "NO" on SB10-191. Help spread the word by forwarding this information to school leaders and school board members. Don't forget to inform your media contacts as well. If you are uncertain of your representatives, you can click on this link to find your district: http://www.comaps.org/allsearch.html Click here for the Senate directory President Brandon Shaffer (303)866-3342 or Brandon@BrandonShaffer.com Connect the dots: There are special interests behind Performance Pay Initiatives. Many of these organizations rely on your donations and your membership. Pay close attention to their agendas. Education holds market opportunities and children are the targeted niche. Many of these organizational leaders have aspirations to drive educational decisions from the appointed positions of the "Governor's Councils," which this bill will create. Identified Proponents of SB10-191 Stand for Children - Colorado Succeeds/BizCares - Metro Organization for People - Padres Unidos - A+ Denver - Colorado Children’s Campaign - Colorado Common Good What Follows Performance Pay As I asked the question, when teachers "fail" in our most impoverished and underfunded districts, who will be there to meet the need of our most vulnerable children? The answer: The New Teacher Project. The unattainable mandates such as NCLB's "every child proficient by 2014" create negative labels. Performance Pay's demands for "highly-effective teachers", is simply a call for higher test scores. Given that state standardized tests carry no credibility in higher education and serve no purpose in democratic citizenship or career life, over-emphasis on standardized tests creates a lowering of expectations for students and teachers. The deterioration of professional education standards hurts schools and it especially hurts children. Even worse, Performance Pay creates an access point for non-educated, non-licensed trainees to teach our most underserved and highest needs public school children. As districts are forced with budget cuts and lower revenues, we are finding the schools with the highest minority populations and lowest family incomes are the schools to be identified for closure. Please remember that these are the children who need your voice the most. Read below for more details. Barbara Miner provides the answers to important questions about these Non-teacher training programs, including Teach for America. I've provided excerpts (in blue) from her article, Looking Past the Spin: Teach for America, published in Rethinking Schools Online, Spring 2010. Read the full article here: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/24_03/24_03_TFA.shtml My comments are in italics. How Teach for America and the New Teacher project are linked: The New Teacher Project is headed by CFO Wendy Kopp, Founder of Teach for America. http://www.tntp.org/aboutus/board_of_directors.html From the "About Us" page on the New Teacher Project Website. The New Teacher Project is a revenue-generating nonprofit organization that utilizes a blended revenue model to sustain and advance its work nationwide. The majority of our revenue comes from our work with clients on a fee-for-service basis, often under performance-based contracts. This approach incentivizes TNTP to meet the needs of its clients while continually assessing the value and cost-effectiveness of our services. We find that the fee-for-service model also encourages our clients to be motivated, active collaborators by literally "investing" them in the success of our work. http://www.tntp.org/aboutus/our_business_model.html Read the New Teacher Project Director Job description here: http://www.idealist.org/en/job/372522-270 "TFA is perceived as a major player in the education wars over the future of public schools, and a key ally of those who disparage teacher unions and schools of education, and who are enamored of entrepreneurial reforms that bolster the privatization of a once-sacred public responsibility." "Over the years, it has grown in size and influence, and has developed a market niche with districts that, for a variety of reasons, have significant teacher turnover and hire large numbers of uncertified teachers." What are their indicators of program success and what are the outcomes? "After visiting the TFA teachers in St. Louis, I wondered why I heard more about what TFA-ers learned about data and time management than I did about the children and their dreams and accomplishments. It bolstered another of the complaints about TFA: that the organization’s value accrues mostly to corps membersâ€"what they gain from the experienceâ€"and not to urban students, who once again see a teacher come and go. - B.J.M. What are the retention rates for TFA candidates? A math teacher ran some numbers for me. His conclusion? The only thing one can say with certainty is that in 2007, at least 16.6 percent of those recruited by Teach for America were teaching in a K-12 setting beyond their two-year commitment. Ââ€"B.J.M. Are test scores the only indicators? What may the other indicators of effectiveness be for candidates in these programs? The Mathematica study, using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, found that there were statistically insignificant differences in reading achievement for students in the TFA and control classrooms. In math, students in the TFA classrooms faired slightly betterâ€"equal to one month’s extra teaching. This, as Center for Teaching Quality head Barnett Berry notes, “is essentially virtually no gain at all. These students were still reading more poorly than 85 percent of their peers nationwide, and well below grade level.†Teach for America boasts about its impact, noting on its webpage: “ur corps members and alumni work relentlessly to increase academic achievement.†Yet in a study touted by TFA, the students of corps teachers remained far below their national peers and made only marginal gains. Darling-Hammond’s Houston Study
"Does Teacher Preparation Matter?†is a peer-reviewed, scholarly evaluation of the effectiveness of the TFA approach, published by Linda Darling-Hammond and three other Stanford University colleagues in 2005. Reading through the study, one can see why TFA doesn’t like the results." "The study is a longitudinal, six-year look at data from Houston representing more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers, on six different math and reading achievement tests. (TFA has sent recruits to Houston since 1991, and this year has more than 450 corps members teaching there.)" “Although some have suggested that perhaps bright college graduates like those who join TFA may not require professional preparation for teaching, we found no instance where uncertified Teach for America teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings,†the study states. "At the same time, few of the TFA teachers stayed in the Houston schools for long. Based on district data, the study notes that “generally, rates of attrition for TFA teachers were about twice as high as for non-TFA teachers.†For instance, of those who entered in the 1998 school year, 85 percent had left the Houston public schools after three years, compared to about 55 percent of non-TFA teachers." â€"B.J.M. Who benefits from these programs and what are the cost savings? "Peter Downs, president of the elected school board, summarizes TFA’s role in one word: “privatization.†He says that the mayor, not the district, first invited TFA to St. Louis, in line with reforms such as for-profit charters and the privatization of services in curriculum development, teacher recruitment, maintenance, and food service. As part of its contract with TFA, the district pays $2,000 a year to TFA for each of its recruits. (The elected board has no power because the state took over the St. Louis schools; the mayoral appointee to the new three-person board is a former regional staff person for Teach for America.)" "In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, for instance, the superintendent laid off hundreds of veteran teachers but spared 100 TFA-ers. TFA, meanwhile, expanded into Dallas this fall, bringing in nearly 100 new teachers, even though the district had laid off 350 teachers in the 2008-09 school year."- B.J.M. Who is funding TFA and the New Teacher project? "TFA spends significant organizational time, energy, and money on its alumni, who are arguably the source of the organization’s true political power. (The most famous alumni are Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, and Mike Feinberg and David Levin, founders of the KIPP Schools.) LEE is an outgrowth of TFA’s Political Leadership Initiative, which the TFA website says is designed to provide “tools, resources, and opportunities to help alumni influence the policies and priorities of local, state, and national government. It also helps prepare them to pursue elected positions.†"Some 27 TFA alumni are currently in office, nine more are running for office, and more than 700 are interested in “pursuing political leadership.†TFA has a goal of 100 elected officials in 2010." "TFA’s 2008 annual report lists Wachovia as one of five corporations donating more than $1 million at the national level. The others are Goldman Sachs, Visa, the biotechnology firm Amgen, and the golfing tournament Quail Hollow Championship. The organization is, without a doubt, a fundraising mega-star. In one day in June 2008, for instance, TFA raised $5.5 million. The event, TFA’s annual dinner, “brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks,†the New York Times reported. To my knowledge, there has been no in-depth analysis of who funds TFA and why. Clearly, one of the unanswered questions is how TFA has been able to garner such amazing corporate supportâ€"especially since some of these same companies, in their business practices, have preyed on low-income people or have exacerbated this country’s growing inequality of wealth." *Likening market-oriented reforms in public education to the deregulation of the financial industry that culminated in a recession, she says that the very same people who promoted economic deregulation are influential supporters of organizations such as Teach for America. They want to sidestep professional teachers, unions, and schools of education “and let loose the forces of the market,†Puriefoy says. “The marketplace of education is a big market. There is a lot of money to be made.†*Wendy Puriefoy is president of the Public Education Network, a national association focused on public school reform in low-income communities, and was on the board of Teach for America in the early 1990s. Marcello Stroud sent me TFA’s 990 for fiscal 2008. It shows that TFA had revenues of $159 million in fiscal year 2008 and expenses of $124.5 million. CEO and founder Wendy Kopp made $265,585, with an additional $17,027 in benefits and deferred compensation. She also made an additional $71,021 in compensation and benefits through the TFA-related organization Teach for All. Seven other TFA staffers are listed as making more than $200,000 in pay and benefits, with another four approaching that amount. It’s also interesting to look at the 990 for the KIPP Foundation, the charter school chain led by Richard Barth, a former Edison vice president and TFA staffer who also happens to be Kopp’s husband. Barth made more than $300,000 in pay and benefits, bringing the Kopp/Barth household income to almost $600,000 for their work with TFA and KIPP. (In a 2008 article, the New York Times dubbed Kopp and Barth as “a power couple in the world of education, emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to reshape the United States’ educational landscape.â€) TFA’s 990 lists its major contributorsâ€"some of the biggest names and players in the privatization of public education. Take, for example, the Walton Family Foundation, based on the philanthropic beliefs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Its $9 million in contributions made it the single largest contributor to Teach for America. Within the world of education foundations, Walton is synonymous with privatization and the promotion of vouchers for private schools. The Doris and Donald Fisher Fund is listed as contributing $2.5 million to TFA. The late Donald Fisher founded the Gap clothing store chain and made headlines in the San Francisco Bay area for decades for his conservative Republican politics and his various deregulation and privatization plansâ€"including a pledge of $25 million in the late 1990s to expand the for-profit Edison Schools into California. The 990 also broke down the $523,475 that TFA spent on political lobbying in 2008, within the allowable limit for a 501(c)3. On a state level, TFA worked to pass alternative certification requirements. On a federal level, its lobbying included support for appropriations for Teach for America and for unspecified education programs in the stimulus package. | 
