CMS seeks to bypass teacher vote on performance pay

A local bill introduced by Rep. Ruth Samuelson this week would allow the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board to launch teacher performance pay without the approval of teachers.

Reaction from teachers has been swift. Judy Kidd, head of the Classroom Teachers Association, sent an "action alert" last night, urging members to tell local legislators that the bill "is NOT in the best interest of students of CMS, teachers of CMS and therefore the economic stability of Mecklenburg County." That group and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators plan a news conference later today.

"If you want buy-in to any kind of performance pay, this is not the way to go about it," said CMAE President Mary McCray.

Trent Merchant, the school board's point person on performance pay, said this morning he hopes CMS can still create a plan that would win teacher approval, but said the bill would give the board a "nuclear option" for a key part of its education reform. He said CMS leaders have botched communication on the issue and lost the support of teachers and many parents, and called for a "time out" to rethink how officials are interacting with faculty.

"When we started talking about this three years ago, we said it would be done with teachers, not to teachers," he said. "Right now it seems like teachers feel like something is being done to them. Right now it feels adversarial."

Some background: Superintendent Peter Gorman and the board have long viewed performance pay as a key to improving educational results. The plan is to identify and reward the most effective teachers while helping weaker ones improve -- or, if all else fails, getting rid of them.

State legislators already approved a plan that would allow a handful of districts -- so far, CMS is the only one to apply -- to revise the teacher pay scale under certain conditions, including approval by a majority of teachers.

As CMS has moved toward its performance pay plan, which is scheduled to take effect for teachers in 2014, resistance has grown. Teachers have voiced concern about "value-added" ratings based on test scores -- and more recently, parents have mobilized as CMS rolls out 52 new local exams designed to size up student and teacher performance.

On Tuesday, Gorman sent employees a link to a five-minute video clip Tuesday, urging teachers to get more informed and engaged in the process of identifying effective teachers. He mentioned the new local bill but did not say it would eliminate the teacher-approval requirement. Instead, he said it would give CMS "freedom and flexibility  as a school district to make decisions about how we evaluate staff and how we compensate staff."

"We want to make sure we treat you as professionals and give you the information you need," he said.

Several teacher say that's not the impression they've gotten. One forwarded this list of concerns presented to Gorman and his staff by his Teacher Advisory Committee, with district responses in red. The responses "are degrading, demoralizing, and in a tone of voice that I have never read before. This is so scary to classroom teachers," the veteran teacher said.

Saving sports, paying executives, catching up

A few items as I catch up after a week off:

*The folks trying to raise private donations to save middle school sports in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will hold their first public meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, at Christ Lutheran Church, 4519 Providence Road. Another meeting in the northern part of the county is expected soon.

*Kay McSpadden, a teacher who writes opinion pieces for the Observer's editorial page, will be guest speaker at an Action for Education meeting at the East Meck media center, 6800 Monroe Road, from 6-9 p.m. Tuesday, April 5. This is the group of teachers and parents who are concerned about performance pay and the use of standardized testing to rate teachers. Read McSpadden's take on the issue here.

*I was interested to note that CMS hired a new human resources director, Daniel Habrat from Wells Fargo/Wachovia, at $160,000 a year. That's up 12.5 percent from the $140,000 Maurice Ambler was making before he left last summer. Kit Rea, promoted last week to Southwest area superintendent, is making virtually the same as her predecessor at $134,659. We'll be doing our annual payroll roundup soon; that will provide a better look at how executive salaries and positions stack up (it won't reflect job cuts that may happen in 2011-12).

*As noted recently, CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman's name has been floating as people speculate about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's possible picks for CEO of Chicago Public Schools (Gorman says he's not interested in leaving). Another site, Catalyst Chicago, has posted him as a top contender. The report notes that CMS is much smaller than Chicago Public Schools, but adds that "Gorman is no stranger to controversial decisions, such as closing schools and laying off teachers -- two things he would most likely have to do here."


*Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating cover article on the challenges of covering teacher-effectiveness ratings and the national trends behind the push to use a more businesslike model for teacher pay. It's great context for big issues swirling in Charlotte (but not a quick read).

*Eric Smith, who was CMS superintendent from 1996 to 2002, has announced his resignation as Florida's education commissioner, saying he wants to let newly elected Gov. Rick Scott pick his own education leader.

*And finally, reporter Steve Lyttle shares the word that CMS is taking a different approach to Friday's teacher work day. Administrative offices will work 10-hour days today through Thursday and close Friday. Hmm ... if nothing else, that eliminates any confusion that might come from memos and edicts issued on April Fools Day.

Fewer students taking Advanced Placement tests

This probably doesn't rank as a big shocker, but it appears fewer Charlotte-Mecklenburg high school students will be taking the Advanced Placement tests for college credit this spring. Many would say that stands to reason, since cash-strapped CMS has opted not to pay the $87 testing fee on behalf of students this year. (The state pays for low-income students).

CMS estimates that about 9,800 students will be taking the tests at the end of this school year, including 2,500 being paid for through a grant to the state to cover economically disadvantaged kids. That 9,800 figure is down from the 13,362 AP tests administered by CMS in 2009-10.

Could it be that there are just fewer kids enrolled this year in AP classes? Nope. Last year there were about 12,700. This year there's about 13,000. (I know it looks like there are more tests administered last year than there were students in the classes, but some International Baccalaureate students could have taken the tests, or AP students might have taken tests multiple times seeking higher scores).

Students and parents have told the Observer the fees pose a big financial burden, especially to students taking heavy AP courseloads. Chris Cobitz, head of testing for CMS, said it was more likely due to students who might have "stretched" to try AP classes, and now don't feel confident about taking the test since they have to pay for it.

I tend to suspect more the former, myself. What do you think?

Gorman on Rahm Emanuel short list?

The Chicago Tribune reports today that Rahm Emanuel, who recently left the White House to become mayor of the Windy City, may be looking outside for someone to lead the city's troubled schools.

The article says he's looking at inside candidates, but "many believe he wants to nab a proven leader or education innovator from outside Illinois." Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Peter Gorman is among four outside candidates said to be on Emanuel's "short list," along with Jerry Weast, who was superintendent in Guilford County in the 1990s and retired as superintendent in Montgomery County, Md.

Gorman's response to the speculation: "Not interested in being superintendent anywhere else!"

This is becoming a familiar drill, as superintendent jobs come open and people speculate about names that are prominent on the national education scene. Next comes the part where I remind you that superintendents always say they're not interested in leaving right up until they make a public finalist list, and you weigh in on whether Gorman's departure would be a tragedy or a cause for celebration.

The thing that's got me grinning this time is imagining Gorman, after five years' immersion in ever-so-polite Charlotte, dealing with Emanuel's infamously earthy tirades. Talk about culture shock!

Rethinking schools

Revamping public education is often compared to fixing a plane while it's in the air. Perhaps that's why so many reform efforts feel more like screw-tightening than redesign.

So I thought I'd share a couple of items on ways to shake things up. (An aside: Does it drive anyone else crazy when people use the hackneyed "thinking outside the box" to describe originality?)

Tamela Rich passed on a link to a New York Times op-ed piece about a Massachusetts school that let eight teens design their own school-within-a-school. They launched scientific inquiries, set themselves a rigorous course of reading and tackled individual and collective projects.

"Perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them," concludes author Susan Engel. "Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education."

Colleague Gary Nielson urged me to watch this video in which Salman Khan describes "flipping the classroom," with students watching professionally-made video lectures on their own time and using class time with teachers to do "homework." Khan has created a nonprofit academy of video tutorials that spun off from YouTube videos he made to help his nephews study.

He argues that many students are more comfortable watching videos at their own pace, and the technology allows the best instructors to lecture an unlimited number of students. "If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to," Khan says.

Real-life teachers, meanwhile, are freed to "humanize the classroom" by spending their time helping kids apply the lessons.


As a certifiable old fogey, I've always viewed video teaching as a second-rate substitute for the real thing. But this got me thinking: What if my high-school science lectures had been delivered by, say, Carl Sagan or Oliver Sacks? Would that have been better than what I got? Absolutely.
 
That's my food for thought. If you're reading, watching or hearing about other creative ideas, please share. 
 
 

Revamped schools drawing interest

Families apparently aren't rebelling against the money-saving school closure/consolidation plan the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board approved late last year. If they were of a mind to opt out of the new K-8 campuses or the revamped Harding high school, it might easily show up as a surge in magnet school lottery requests.

But at their weekly press briefing, Superintendent Peter Gorman and his aides said they don't see any sign of higher-than-normal magnet school applications from children bound for the revamped schools. They said, for instance, that they saw no evidence fifth-graders zoned for K-8 campuses are applying in higher-than-normal numbers for middle-school magnet programs. Harding, a previously all-magnet school that will accept Waddell's students next fall, also showed strong enrollment numbers. Harding's International Baccalaureate magnet drew 714 students, nearly as many as it had last year.

Of course, pessimists could argue that many parents might not have seen magnets as a practical option, now that CMS requires them in many instances to ferry their kids to less-than-convenient shuttle stops to catch magnet buses. CMS officials prefer the non-pessimist view. "The response of the community has been positive to the changes we've made," said Mike Raible, facility planning guru for CMS.

For more details on the issue, see Ann's story from last week, which also includes a link to a CMS page with all lottery results for all the magnet schools.

Trying to simplify value-added ratings

As debate continues over the Charlotte-Mecklenburg quest to crunch teacher-quality numbers, one of the district's officials has forwarded a link to an explanatory slide show on value-added ratings.

As you may recall, those ratings are a way of analyzing student test scores to tease out how much progress can be attributed to teachers. CMS started running a preliminary formula to calculate those ratings based on 2010 results. By 2014, the district hopes to have a more sophisticated value-added formula in place and use it, along with other measures of teacher quality, to base part of teachers' pay on student results.

Susan Norwood runs a performance-pay pilot in 20 high-poverty CMS schools. She shared the link to a presentation from the Value-Added Research Center (part of the University of Wisconson-Madison education school) that she uses to help explain her program. She thought readers might find the oak-tree analogy helpful.

"Based on some of the online comments, there's still a lot of confusion about the measures and what their corresponding numbers represent," she e-mailed.


I'd be skeptical that anyone would watch a 13-minute slide show on value-added ratings. But a memo from CMS performance pay director Andy Baxter trying to explain the CMS calculation has gotten more than 2,000 views since Sunday, so evidently interest is high.
 
Eventually I hope CMS will be able to explain its calcualtion as clearly as the hypothetical oak-tree example. I know students are more complicated than trees, and variables such as absences and learning disabilities may be harder to quantify than sunlight and soil. But as long as the calcualtions are so convoluted that they boil down to "trust us," I suspect a lot of teachers won't.