Obama: budget freeze won't apply to schools

President Barack Obama's plan to freeze domestic spending won't apply to public education, according to this article by CNN reporter Ed Henry.

The president recently announced that he plans to freeze most non-security related spending in order to rein in the federal deficit, which is about $1.4 trillion this year. That left educators wondering about the future of Obama's education plans.

In tonight's State of the Union address, according to Henry, the president will announce that education spending by the federal government will increase by $4 billion in the coming year.

Included in that amount is an additional $1.34 billion for Obama's Race to the Top program, and another $1 billion to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act.

Obama announces "Race to the Top" fund

Not everyone is happy with the strings tied to President Barack Obama's nearly $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund , but union leaders like AFT President Randi Weingarten say it's too early to make strong pronouncements.

Many of those opposed to teacher unionism are gloating at the fund's requirement that states allow the use of student achievement data to evaluate teacher performance. Unions like the American Federation of Teachers have traditionally opposed such linkage.

But union opponents could be reading too much into the apparent philosophical divide. After all, the president left no doubt that he sees a vital role for unions in school improvement. He singled out Weingarten's great leadership of a professional union and, when it comes to problems such as turning around low-performing schools, he encouraged local union leaders to work with other stakeholders in "making collective bargaining a catalyst and not an impediment to reform."

Said Weingarten, "President Obama emphasized the importance of working with teachers and their unions to implement successful education reform, saying that collective bargaining can be a catalyst—not an impediment—to reform. He recognizes that this work must be done with teachers, not to teachers."

The Race to the Top fund will provide grants to encourage and reward states for plans in four core education reform areas aimed at improving teacher and principal quality, academic standards, data collection and turning around low-performing schools.

"Will we agree with everything? I doubt it," said Weingarten. "But hopefully we will agree that teacher evaluations must be improved the right way. We need meaningful, fair and multiple measures for supporting and evaluating teachers so that evaluations aren't based on one observation by a principal or one standardized test score."

The AFT president concluded, "Both the president and Secretary Duncan understand that teachers are essential to education reform and that their voices need to be heard as we launch this major offensive to improve public education."

The Associated Press filed this story about the president's announcement of the Race to the Top fund.

Merit pay a well-intentioned bad idea

Here is one great rejoinder when the subject of merit pay for teachers comes up: just call it a "hardy perennial in the overgrown garden of well-intentioned bad ideas. "

That jewel comes from the keyboard of Philadelphia Daily News columnist Elmer Smith, whose essay questions the logic behind President Barack Obama's belief that merit pay should be a key element of education reform.

Smith is not opposed to any type of performance-based supplements. He notes that teachers in some places -specifically mentioning Denver and Cincinnati - are experimenting with contractual incentives. There are two very important distinctions between these examples and the common understanding of merit pay.

First, those examples are proceeding under the mutual understanding of collective bargaining agreements. Teachers are defining the incentives in partnership with their school boards.

Second, those incentives are not based purely on student achievement. As Smith puts it, "Fact is, nobody has ever devised a fair and equitable way to base teacher pay on student performance. Nobody. Ever."

Smith recounts several reasons why basing teacher pay on student performance is a bad idea. But the most compelling may be the unintended consequence to challenged schools.

"Even more troubling," Smith writes, "is the likelihood that teachers will opt out of the schools with the hardest-to-teach student populations."

Smith concludes his column with the observations of a teacher union president:

How do you attract good teachers to hard-to-staff schools if their pay is
based on getting the best results from the most-challenging students?

"It won't happen,'' said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President
Jerry Jordan. "The equitable distribution of qualified teachers would get a lot
harder."

I'd raise teacher pay across the board. But I'd do it in a way that would
not discourage the best teachers from taking on the toughest challenges.

Obama's education plan: It's not anti-teacher or anti-union

Those who dislike teacher unions are tickled pink over what they believe is an anti-union slant to President Barack Obama's education reform speech, delivered this week to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. This example in the Politico blog says that Obama "for the first time confronted a powerful constituency in his own party: teachers’ unions. "

True, the president voiced support for performance-based pay. But that's not exactly the same as test-score based merit pay, as much as some would like to conflate the two. As American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten says here, there is much that is good to say about "innovative ways to reward teaching excellence."

Note that in this Washington Post report on the president's speech, reporter Scott Wilson writes that he is proposing increases in education spending (the federal No Child Left Behind Act was never fully funded, even though its mandates were fully implemented). He also wants to explore national academic standards, an issue that Weingarten herself strongly supports.

It is true that the AFT and LFT will have policy differences with President Obama. We are not in his pocket, nor are we in his. The important difference between now and the past eight years is that this president has promised to make changes WITH teachers, not TO them.

There is one thing that we in the South need to understand about President Obama's background. He was raised in Hawaii and his public service career was nurtured in Illinois. Both of those states have collective bargaining laws for teachers and school employees. He comes from a culture of collaboration with teacher organizations.

So when the president talks about education reform, he automatically assumes that educators will be in on the discussion and policy decisions.