K-12 Education

The Political Calculus Behind Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association

When the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) delivered its March 29 ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the announcement of a 4 to 4 deadlock was something of an anticlimax.  Ever since the sudden February 12 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, SCOTUS watchers had anticipated just such an impasse. Based on Scalia’s questions when the case was argued before the Court a month before his passing, the late justice appeared to be the fifth vote for a decision that would have overturned 40 years of precedent – in effect, imposing “right to work” status on all those working in the public sector and eviscerating their unions. Without this vote, the four remaining conservative justices failed to constitute a majority.

In the days following this decision, observers across the political spectrum described the judicial deadlock in Friedrichs as a victory for public sector workers and their unions (at least for the moment). A more definitive resolution of the issue awaits Senate confirmation of Scalia’s successor, whether President Obama’s pick, Judge Merrick Garland, or someone yet to be named by the next president.

But, so far, what has been missing from most media commentaries is a recognition of the immediate political import of the Court’s impasse, and most especially, its impact on the 2016 election campaign. To understand the full political dimensions of Friedrichs – how the Court’s conservative majority seem to have been prepared to use the case to sway the election – a brief review of the case is necessary.

Changing The Narrative: Leveraging Education Policy To Address Segregation

Our guest authors today are Jennifer Jellison Holme, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Kara S. Finnigan, Associate Professor at the University of Rochester. Holme and Finnigan have published several articles and briefs on the issue of school integration, focusing on regional policy solutions to address segregation and inequality, and the link between segregation and low-performing schools. Recent publications include articles in Teachers College Record and Educational Law and Policy Review as well as a research brief for the National Coalition on School Diversity. This is the second in a series on this topic.

In our first post on this topic, we likened the education policy approach to low-performing schools to what happens when you ignore a decaying tooth: when you treat the symptoms (e.g., low achievement, high dropout rates) without addressing the root causes (e.g., racial and economic segregation), the underlying problem not only will persist, but is likely to worsen. In that post, we used demographic maps to show what this looked like in Milwaukee, illustrating how the approaches pursued by policymakers over several decades do not seem to have significantly improved achievement for students across the system, while patterns economic and racial segregation have worsened.

In this blog post, we outline a set of strategies based on our research that seek to address these issues through specific education policy leverage points: the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and two federal grants programs (Stronger Together and the Magnet School Assistance Program).

The Election, Our Schools, And The Power Of Words

Our guest author today is David Sherrin, a social studies teacher at Harvest Collegiate in New York City and the author of The Classes They Remember: Using Role-Plays to Bring Social Studies and English to Life as well as Judging for Themselves: Using Mock Trials to Bring Social Studies and English to Life. In 2014, he was the recipient of the Robert H. Jackson Center National Award for Teaching Justice.

This election has led to confusion, and soul-searching, amongst many. As a social studies teacher, I find that even the most experienced of educators are scrambling to reassess our election pedagogy for this campaign. Every four years, we dust off a playbook in which we investigate candidates’ positions, political party platforms, and the workings of the Electoral College. This time, though, the Donald Trump campaign, especially its use of troubling language and the violence at his rallies, call for new teaching strategies to help students grapple with an emotionally-charged election.

One powerful framework for learners to engage with this campaign is to consider the power of words. History is replete with examples of dirty campaigns, including charges of murder, rape, and adultery; indeed, elections in the 18th and 19th centuries were often surprisingly nasty. Still, it is noteworthy that GOP candidates Donald Trump and Marco Rubio chose to insult each other’s physical characteristics, with reference to their genitalia. It is also remarkable that a U.S. presidential candidate, such as Donald Trump, would actually encourage followers physically to attack opposition protestors. As when analyzing historical campaigns, we ought to help students see that (most) candidates select their words carefully just as authors do. When we ask students to close-read the use of political rhetoric, through Trump’s choice of words like “punch” and “knock ‘em out,” we add a nuance and depth to our political discussions.

Getting Serious About Measuring Collaborative Teacher Practice

Our guest author today is Nathan D. Jones, an assistant professor of special education at Boston University. His research focuses on teacher quality, teacher development, and school improvement. Dr. Jones previously worked as a middle school special education teacher in the Mississippi Delta. In this column, he introduces a new Albert Shanker Institute publication, which was written with colleagues Elizabeth Bettini and Mary Brownell.

The current policy landscape presents a dilemma. Teacher evaluation has dominated recent state and local reform efforts, resulting in broad changes in teacher evaluation systems nationwide. The reforms have spawned countless research studies on whether emerging evaluation systems use measures that are reliable and valid, whether they result in changes in how teachers are rated, what happens to teachers who receive particularly high or low ratings, and whether the net results of these changes have had an effect on student learning.

At the same time,  there has been increasing enthusiasm about the promise of teacher collaboration (see here and here), spurred in part by new empirical evidence linking teacher collaboration to student outcomes (see Goddard et al., 2007; Ronfeldt, 2015; Sun, Grissom, & Loeb, 2016). When teachers work together, such as when they jointly analyze student achievement data (Gallimore et al., 2009; Saunders, Gollenberg, & Gallimore, 2009) or when high-performing teachers are matched with low-performing peers (Papay, Taylor, Tyler, & Laski, 2016), students have shown substantially better growth on standardized tests.

This new work adds to a long line of descriptive research on the importance of colleagues and other social aspects of the school organization.  Research has documented that informal relationships with colleagues play an important role in promoting positive teacher outcomes, such as planned and actual retention decisions (e.g., Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Pogodzisnki, Youngs, & Frank, 2013; Youngs, Pogodzinski, Grogan, & Perrone, 2015). Further, a number of initiatives aimed at improving teacher learning – e.g., professional learning communities (Giles & Hargreaves, 2006) and lesson study (Lewis, Perry, & Murrata, 2006) – rely on teachers planning instruction collaboratively.

The Hidden Power Of Our Social Worlds

In July 2014 the Albert Shanker Institute began a blog series on the “social side” of education reform. The collection, which includes contributions from established and emerging scholars, attempts to shine a light on new research arguing for the centrality of the social dimension in educational improvement. This blog post serves as the preface of a new ASI publication featuring six of the most important blog posts from this series. The publication is now available for download here. ASI is holding a research and policy conference on this theme Friday April 8th.

Whatever level of teacher human capital schools acquire through hiring can subsequently be developed through formal and informal professional interactions. As teachers join together to solve problems and learn from one another, the school’s instructional capacity becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

This quote from Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson (p. 20 of this volume) may make perfect sense to you. Our systems and organizations, however, are largely structured around individualistic values. As such, a primary goal is to optimize and reward performance at the individual level. So, while some of us (perhaps many of us) might agree that a team’s capacity can exceed the sum of individual members’ capacity, we generally have a difficult time translating that knowledge into action – e.g., rewarding individual behaviors that enhance team dynamics. Part of the problem is that there’s still a lot to learn about how teamwork and collaboration are properly measured.

No matter how challenging, understanding the social dynamics that underpin our work organizations seems particularly timely given the interdependent nature of the modern workplace. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more” over the past two decades. At many companies, the article notes, “more than three quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.”

Caring School Leadership

Our guest authors today are Mark A. Smylie, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Joseph Murphy, professor at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, and Karen Seashore Louis, professor at the University of Minnesota.  Their research concerns school organization, leadership, and improvement.  This blog post is based on an article titled “Caring School Leadership: A Multi-Disciplinary, Cross-Occupational Model” which will be published later this year in the American Journal of Education.

From our years of studying school leadership and reform, working with practicing educators, and participating in education policy development, we have come to the conclusion that caring lies at the heart of effective schooling and good school leadership.  In this time of intense academic pressures, accountability policies, and top-down approaches to reform, however, the concept of caring has been neglected, overshadowed by attention to more “objective”, task-oriented aspects of school organization and leadership (Cassidy & Bates, 2005; Richert, 1994 (pp.109-118); Rooney, 2015).  This, we contend, is a serious problem for both students and teachers.

In this blog, we share some of our recent thinking about what caring school leadership is and why it is important. We draw on empirical and theoretical literatures from education and from disciplines outside education, particularly research on human service occupations such as health care, social services, and the ministry. And we present a model of caring school leadership. Our ideas were developed with principals in mind, but they apply to any educator engaged in school leadership work. We focus on students as the primary beneficiaries of caring. It should be noted that, as we argue for the importance of caring in schools, we do not mean to diminish the importance of academic achievement nor the need to care for staff and the community. We consider managing mutually-reinforcing combinations of caring support and academic press a central function of school leadership.

Collaboration Is The Way We Work, Not An "Activity"

Our guest author today is Joseph Vincente, 10th Grade Chemistry Science Team Leader at the East Side Community High School in New York City. East Side is one of a growing network of 38 NY public high schools (mostly in NYC) with waivers that replace standardized state tests with performance based assessment. Vincente is interested in educational technology, sustainability education, and empowering young women and students of color to pursue STEM careers.

So, 300 homework assignments checked, 200 email replied to, 100 quizzes graded, 50 more lab reports left from Monday still to read, 30 lessons executed, 10 revised notebook entries re-graded, 5 phone calls home and texts made to check-in with parents, 4 curriculum maps revised, 3 extra help sessions held before school, during lunch, and after school, 2 college bound pep-talks made, and 1 mediation between quarreling best friends conducted.

Phew. 

I take a deep breath and do a bit of mindless silent cleaning and organizing in my classroom to decompress. Another exhausting week in the life of a high school teacher comes to a close. Must be time for the weekend, right?  Well, almost... Friday afternoon at my school is when we do some of our most demanding but essential work as teachers.  You may be thinking it’s time for the dreaded weekly PD meetings or for some “collaboration”. Yes, that’s right; but, at East Side collaboration isn’t just an activity or behaving in a friendly, respectful, or cooperative way toward colleagues. Rather, collaboration underpins how we structure and conduct most of our work, how we serve students, and how we learn and grow as professionals. In the next few paragraphs, I describe some of East Side’s collaborative structures as well as the norms and conditions that support them.

Evaluating The Results Of New Teacher Evaluation Systems

A new working paper by researchers Matthew Kraft and Allison Gilmour presents a useful summary of teacher evaluation results in 19 states, all of which designed and implemented new evaluation systems at some point over the past five years. As with previous evaluation results, the headline result of this paper is that only a small proportion of teachers (2-5 percent) were given the low, “below proficiency” ratings under the new systems, and the vast majority of teachers continue to be rated as satisfactory or better.

Kraft and Gilmour present their results in the context of the “Widget Effect,” a well-known 2009 report by the New Teacher Project showing that the overwhelming majority of teachers in the 12 districts for which they had data received “satisfactory” ratings. The more recent results from Kraft and Gilmour indicate that this hasn’t changed much due to the adoption of new evaluation systems, or, at least, not enough to satisfy some policymakers and commentators who read the paper.

The paper also presents a set of findings from surveys of and interviews with observers (e.g., principals). These are in many respects more interesting and important results from a research and policy perspective, but let’s nevertheless focus a bit on the findings on the distribution of teachers across rating categories, as they caused a bit of a stir. I have several comments to make about them, but will concentrate on three in particular (all of which, by the way, pertain not to the paper’s discussion, which is cautious and thorough, but rather to some of the reaction to it in our education policy discourse).

Where Al Shanker Stood: The Problem of Student Mobility

In this New York Times piece, published on January 13, 1991, Al Shanker discusses the persistent problem of student mobility, how it disrupts children's lives and educational prospects, and what schools and school systems might do to help.

Once upon a time, people talked about student achievement in terms of the kids' responsibility for what they leaned. Some youngsters were smart, and others were dummies. Some worked hard; some were lazy. Nowadays, we've discarded these crude yardsticks because we understand that many things can influence a child's success in school. But we've substituted something just as crude. I mean the notion of accountability that makes schools totally responsible for student learning.

Of course, people have the right—the responsibility—to find out whether schools are doing a good job. And they have the right to call for the changes that are needed. But people should also understand that schools face some big problems over which they have no control.

Take the problem of student mobility, especially among poor children in urban school systems. Every year between September and June, an enormous number of students transfer in and out of these schools, often because their families are in a state of collapse or because they've lost their current housing and have to find somewhere else to live. A recent Wall Street Journal article (November 14, 1990) about the Rochester, NY, schools says that in 1987 annual student mobility—that is, the number of student transfers in relation to the entire student population—reached 64 percent. In one elementary school, it was 100 percent. And if this is true in Rochester, there's no question that something like it goes on in other urban school systems. What does it mean for teaching and learning in these schools?

Improving Teaching Through Collaboration

Our guest author today is Matthew Ronfeldt, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. Ronfeldt seeks to understand how to improve teaching quality, particularly in schools and districts that serve historically marginalized student populations. His research sits at the intersection of educational practice and policy and focuses on teacher preparation, teacher retention, teacher induction, and the assessment of teachers and preparation programs.

Learning to teach is an ongoing process. To be successful, then, schools must promote not only student learning but also teacher learning across their careers.* Embracing this notion, policymakers have called for the creation of school-based professional learning communities, including organizational structures that promote regular opportunities for teachers to collaborate with teams of colleagues** – also here and here. As the use of instructional teams becomes increasingly common, it is important to examine whether and how collaboration actually improves teaching and learning. The growing evidence, summarized below, suggests that it does. 

For many decades, educational scholars have conducted qualitative case studies documenting the nature of collaboration among particular groups of teachers working together in departmental teams, reading groups, and other types of instructional teams. This body of work has demonstrated that the kinds and content of collaboration vary substantially across contexts, has shed light on the norms and structures that promote more promising collaboration, and has set the stage for today’s policy focus on “professional learning communities.” However, these studies rarely connected collaboration to teachers’ classroom performance. Thus, they provided little information on whether teachers actually got better at teaching as a result of their participation in collaboration.