I know everyone is in it for the kids, it’s all about the kids, and all that, but seriously can these statements be squared?  They’re indicative of some pretty intense conversations within the teachers’ unions about how to respond (publicly and privately) to the current environment as well as some evolution in the NEA:  

AFT President Randi Weingarten at the recent AFT meeting:

 ”I hope you’re as outraged as I am when our critics say that unions are part of the problem, not the solution; that we are only in it for ourselves; that we represent adults against kids; and that we are a selfish special interest set against the public interest,”

Outgoing NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin at the recent NEA meeting:

“NEA and affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions, and unions first and foremost represent their members,”

From a must-read interview with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO):

…we don’t yet have a politics that’s informed by the kind of urgency that informs all kinds of other things, like whether or not the mayor of a city picked up the trash and whether or not he picked up the snow and whether or not we’re filling our potholes. 

Turns out that new House Education and Labor Committee ranking Republican John Kline may have some strong views on education after all…If this is for real, it will make things harder not easier on the education side of the committee…In other words, the Republicans may be choosing option #2 in the House.  That could leave a weak center to support reform…

A big thank you to the good folks from EE for all their blogging last week.   If you haven’t seen it, it’s all below.  I’m around for a while and then later in August Celine Coggins from TeachPlus and Michael Goldstein from MATCH will step in for a few weeks.

Random links and opportunities: 

Before he was famous as an author, Frank McCourt was a teacher.

This looks like the kind of PD this field has far too little of.  

Austin Considine points out the de facto school segregation problem in relation to last week’s achievement gap report.  But, he concludes that unless we address school segregation then education reform is largely hopeless.  He’s right that the segregated nature of our schools is a problem, yet we’re not going address the root cause, residential segregation, anytime soon.   And in the meantime there are concrete things we can do to make the schools better now that too frequently are obscured by conversations about larger issues that policymakers have much less leverage over.  Disentangling the two is a key part of the conversation Considine wants to spark.  Also, he beats-up on Wisconsin over the achievement gap.  Everyone is!  But given Rep. Dave Obey’s (WI) powerful position in the House of Representatives doesn’t the fact that Wisconsin is a bad actor on the achievement gap, and ed reform in general, complicate “Race to the Top” politics just a wee bit?

The DC Public Schools are looking for master teachers across a bunch of subjects and grades.  The National Council on Teacher Quality is hiring for several roles and has intern opportunities.

The Walton Family Foundation (not an ES funder) has been pretty reticent about public relations leading to a lot of misconceptions about the range of work the foundation undertakes.  Check out their annual report to see their giving across a range of issues.

New school data tool for parents, Schooldigger.com.

Copulate?

We’ve appreciated Andy’s letting us share our puzzlements about some of the ‘givens’ in the policy discussion. There’s some risk in trying to expand what’s ‘at issue’. But sometimes this is the way to progress. We hope you’ve found it useful. We value your comments.

Perhaps our biggest puzzlement is about the definition of achievement; of what’s wanted, of what students are to “know and be able to do”. This truly is central. The outcomes sought determine what schools and teachers do. They shape financing, priorities and the use of time. They determine what’s considered success; for student and school. And they encourage or constrain change. Major innovations usually solve some different problem: If tested by the traditional concept of ‘success’ they’re likely to be rejected.

Few take time today to discuss “the aims of education”. It seems assumed we know what ‘achievement’ is, and how to measure it.

Do we? Here’re a few of our puzzlements; questions that might seem naïve but that the discussion might usefully pursue.

• When people talk about “what (students) know and are able to do” they seem to mean: what they learn in school. Does anyone study the knowledge and skills young people actually have; look at what’s been learned outside school? Have a look at this to get a sense for how much more there is.
• Should the definition be so narrow? Within school it’s limited to academics, and within academics it’s pretty much limited to language arts and math. Can this really be all the American public wants? Shouldn’t the outcomes-desired be much broader?
• Is it enough to have knowledge and skills or is it important also for students to know how to apply them? Obviously this is at the center of the debate about using PISA.
• Are there to be consequences, ‘high stakes’, for a student not meeting standards? If so, then the standards will be fairly low, won’t they? The politics of this public institution mean that K-12 realistically can’t deny success to more than a small proportion of students. (Probably this explains the interest now in ‘benchmarking’, which lets everyone see performance compared to others while imposing no sanction.)
• Is there a concept of achievement, then, above the standards? Surely high achievement (as in the STEM areas) must be important, especially for the country’s economic success. Where and how is that assessed? Who works to encourage high achievement?
• Beyond a ‘basic’ level is it essential that all students achieve the same thing? Why are standards set in terms of exit from high school rather than in terms of entrance into what a young person wants to do next? Would it be OK to differentiate ‘achievement’ for different groups of students; for individual students? Might that diversification better serve to produce the breadth of accomplishment the country needs?
• Is it really important for all students to master algebra? What fraction of the occupations actually require knowledge of Algebra II? Might it be better to try to get students to understand something of statistics: probability, risk, rates, proportions and such?
• Do schools achieve — or is it only students who achieve? Is the students’ achievement the school’s achievement? Or is Professor Raudenbush correct that one cannot properly use measures of student proficiency to draw conclusions about school performance?
• Should achievement be treated as something adults do? That seems implied when we talk of education being ‘delivered’. But in the end who does determine what a student knows and is able to do?

One more. How much bias is there in the conventional definition of ‘achievement’? Think, for example: If success were defined as having a reasonable facility in speaking two or more languages, which young people today would be high-achieving and which would be low-achieving?

—Guestblogger Education|Evolving

My effort to explain why no student learns from a charter was reasonably successful, I judge from the comments this week.

This is good. The discussion will be a lot clearer if we all see chartering as a platform on which people create schools.

Some of the schools chartered will be different and hopefully better schools than we have today; some will not.

Whether the school-chartered is different or better depends on what kind of school it is; on what approach to learning its organizers design into it.

The case for chartering is that it is better as a platform: better than the ‘district platform’ for creating innovative and successful schools.

But, again: In evaluating success advocates and researchers alike need to identify what the school (chartered or district) is as a school—need to describe what its students read, see, hear and do—and relate student performance to that.

—Guestblogger Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving

If motivation is important for students mustn’t it be equally important for teachers? If it is, how does that happen?

‘Improving teachers and teaching’ is replacing ‘accountability’ as the theme for improvement. But, like so much on the improvement agenda, the effort at ‘teacher quality’ takes existing arrangements as given; in this case, the boss/worker traditional in K-12. And this is tough going. Might people be more motivated to come into teaching, and to stay, were teaching to become a better job and a better career?

One of the important insights of public life is that problems are the product of circumstances; that success often comes from ‘modifying the circumstances’. [See Jean Monnet, Memoirs, 1978, page 291.] What if we were to try that approach to the issues with teachers and teaching?

About 1982 a former teacher pointed out that teachers are almost the only professionals who have to work for administrators. Why, she asked, can’t teachers have the option to work as professionals in a group they control? Get out of the labor/management framework and perhaps many of its problems would disappear. One of our associates likes to say to (complaining) superintendents: “You wouldn’t have a problem with bargaining if you didn’t insist on being an employer!

We’ve worked at that, and it turns out that teachers can work in public education as most professionals have the opportunity to do. A partnership model was one of the first innovations to appear in the charter sector after the Minnesota Legislature opened that opportunity in 1991. Later the idea was transplanted successfully into the big-city unionized environment in Milwaukee.

We’re now at the stage where the partnership concept is ‘proved’. Research has not yet picked up on this. But as best we can see, behaviors do change remarkably when the school is the teachers’ school. And this does seem important to the ‘teacher quality’ discussion.

Albert Shanker used to say: If you want to hold the teachers accountable the teachers have to be able to run the school. It’s not impossible he was counting on the system never giving teachers that authority. But it turns out that where they can design the program and make the decisions teachers do accept responsibility for school and student success. Recruitment, assignment, effort, compensation, performance and accountability seem to be handled if anything better in the partnership than in the confrontational boss/worker model.

Certainly Richard Ingersoll at Penn’s GSE has found that schools work better where teachers’ control is greater. In the partnership model ‘control’ is emphatically collective, collegial.

We’d love to know how teachers in partnerships innovate; to see how they change the approach to learning. Our impression is that they customize student work, introduce technology and enlarge students’ responsibility for the way the school runs. As students take more responsibility for their learning, student behavior changes. And the teacher’s job upgrades.

You do begin to wonder how things might change if policymakers, weary of the conflict generated by the boss/worker arrangement, were to encourage a shift to the model that internalizes the ‘quality’ issues within the partnership framework. E|E has in fact been discussing a strategy along these lines with teacher-union leadership, at both the local and national levels.

We’d appreciate your thoughts about this. It certainly seems to us that along with efforts to get good people into teaching there should be a comparable effort to make teaching a better job for its people.

—Guestbloggers Joe Graba and Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving

Check out E|E’s video series with teachers and students working in these arrangements. And another describing the partnership concept.

Education|Evolving’s impulse being always to look for unstated premises, we’re struck by the way the ‘improvement’ discussion assumes the framework of ‘service delivery’. Unless we’re much mistaken the prevailing notion is that material is organized into courses, courses are organized as classes, the teacher is the worker, instruction is the technology. This is true, isn’t it?—that the discussion is filled with talk about ‘delivering education’? It’s almost as if ‘to learn’ were a transitive verb.

What if, instead, the effort at improvement stepped outside that framework, saw the student along with the teacher as the worker on the job of learning, and in organizing and running school set out to maximize motivation?

Deborah Wadsworth when heading Public Agenda once cited Daniel Yankelovich’s notion of ‘discretionary effort’. There’s a basic level of effort people will always give you. There’s an additional level they can give you if they want. The job is running organizations and in designing organizations is to maximize that discretionary effort.

At a dinner last year I suggested to a person prominent in the policy discussion the importance of motivation. (I wish I could show you the text, but it was a private occasion, unrecorded.) I do recall him saying: This is a slippery slope, to start with what interests students. It can lead down to Constructivism.

Yet motivation matters. Excellence is hard, so effort matters. And if effort matters then surely school should make motivation central, no? This was Jack Frymier’s conclusion from his life with teachers and students. If kids want to learn, they will. If they don’t, you probably can’t make ‘em. Her conclusion irritates more than a few in education policy, but Mary Haywood Metz at the University of Wisconsin might be right that students do hold veto power over all education reforms. (See her work, “Real School: a universal drama amid disparate experience,” on pp. 75-91 of Politics of Education Association Yearbook 1989).

How would school be different if motivation were central?

Well, students could individualize, customize, their learning. Mel Riddile argues in Diplomas Count (Education Week June 11, 2009) that customization is inescapably implied if the goal is for every student to learn.

Customization means pace would change. Students needing more time would get more time; students able to go faster could go faster. Learning should then improve for both. And more students would move into college or into work by age 16, with not-insignificant implications for the economics of K-12.

Finally: Keying on motivation would change teaching. We’ll write tomorrow about how school might be arranged to maximize motivation for teachers. Or look at The Other Half of the Strategy: Following Up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Learning.

—Guestblogger Education|Evolving
Visit the Student Voices section of Education|Evolving’s Web site

There’s a critical if little-noticed fork in the road for “national education policy” and it looks now as if the Obama administration, to its credit, is going to take both paths.

When the discussion gets serious about implementation people realize they’re looking down one road where the signpost points toward treating improvement as a ‘performance’ problem, and down another where the signpost points toward ‘redesign’.

The first road accepts the existing arrangement of system and school and looks simply to get districts, schools, teachers and students to do-better. The second insists that improvement requires changing the arrangements for ‘school’ and creating different—even radically different—approaches to learning.

The risk is that a national government with a strong sense of its own role will see improvement as a problem of improving performance. Why? Because the federal government cannot re-design either system or school. K-12 exists in state law, and neither executive action nor Congressional legislation can directly change state law. The temptation, as a result, is to do what the federal government has traditionally done with the major domestic systems it does not directly own and control: to try to effect change by hanging requirements and mandates on its grants-in-aid to the states and local units.

There is some of this in the strategy prepared by Secretary Duncan. But there is also an initiative down the other road; activating the process of state law-making. The President has spoken repeatedly and forcefully about wanting the states to enact chartering laws. It’s not that chartered schools are inherently better schools. It’s that he and Secretary Duncan, like so many foundations and others, understand that chartering is the principal platform on which new, different and better schools can be built.

I—we in Education|Evolving—wish Mr. Obama would some day actually appear before the legislature of some state, saying directly: “This is your system. Washington can’t change it. Only the states can change it. We will help. But it’s basically your responsibility.” Saying ‘school’ has to be different and that this requires new schools and that only the states can open the way for this.

Perhaps some day he will. Clearly with the push for chartering laws he’s starting to move down that road, toward the activation of state law-making.

—Guestblogger Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving

Visit Education|Evolving’s Web site
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Now again comes yet another study agitating the old debate about whether students learn more in ‘charter schools’ or in ‘district schools’. The Stanford researchers suggest not; others say yes: CREDO didn’t look far enough down the students’ experience in the charter schools. Some studies say: No sure. Others conclude: It depends: Sometimes yes; sometimes no.

This kind of thing is not really helping us move ahead very much, is it? I ask this in all seriousness, partly because I am genuinely puzzled that so many researchers I like and respect engage in this comparison-among-jurisdictions, and partly because by feeding the ideological and political debate it obstructs clear thinking about strategy.

I have no qualifications to quarrel with the statistical analysis. I’m sure it is possible to relate student scores to particular schools; charter and district, public and private, and to draw conclusions about the category in which, overall, students ‘do better’. What puzzles me is that it must be equally possible to get data and to do similar analysis about student scores in, say, one-story buildings and two-story buildings, or east-facing schools and west-facing schools.

A report concluding that students learn more in one-story schools than in two-story schools probably would not be considered useful. But ‘charter’ and ‘district’ are just structures, aren’t they? Surely students learn not from the structure but from what the organizers put into it; from what they read, see, hear and do. So shouldn’t researchers and analysts be looking to see what the schools have students reading, seeing, hearing and doing; looking to see what the school is as a school, and relating student scores to that?

‘To charter’ is a verb; chartering is a platform on which teachers and others create schools. A chartered school is not a kind of school; at least not in terms of its approach to learning. The whole idea was to leave it open for their organizers to try new approaches; for the new sector to operate as a kind of R&D program for K-12. And it does. While many chartered schools are conventional in their approach, the sector contains more innovation than research has yet identified. Probably more innovative schools in the district sector, too. A few researchers, like Jeff Henig at Teachers College at Columbia University, are now looking inside the black box of ‘charter’ and ‘district’ to distinguish the differences. More should.

All this surfaces an uncomfortable truth: that education research does not know how to describe schools as schools. Amazingly, this is a field without a taxonomy. Imagine zoology or geology without a taxonomy! One could be created, using a framework developed by Mark Van Ryzin on a Spencer Foundation grant. Perhaps this is what it will take to get us beyond “This structure performs better than that structure”.

—Guestblogger Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving (and on Facebook here)

Perhaps the biggest single obstacle to progress all across the K-12 field is the notion that ‘We’ always have to agree politically on any change.

For a current example, consider the debate about ‘teacher autonomy’. For years the argument has see-sawed back and forth: “Teachers need more scope for discretion”; then, “No, teachers have too much scope for discretion!”. You’ll be familiar with others. Traditional school vs. the dreaded ‘progressivism’. Phonics vs. whole-language.

So it goes. Across one area after another. Think about the ‘either/or’ with respect to achievement. Some people insist on the ‘equity’ agenda: We have to close the gap. Others focus on the ‘excellence’ agenda: We have to excel at the top. The two fight each other. Why can’t we be working both?

In the conflict between the ideologies—religions, almost—time goes by and nothing meaningful changes. The convictions run deep: This is right. No, this is right. Neither side prevails.

Well, many say, that’s just the way the world works. No. That is not the way most systems work.

Think about most any field: Something new appears, the ‘early adopters’ pick up the new model, those uncomfortable with the change stay with the traditional model. Nobody is coerced into change; nobody is prevented from changing. Both models run along side by side. Over time people move as they are ready. Tractors replace horses; computers replace typewriters. (The country has just finished its transition from analog to digital television, right?)

Gradually one system after another evolves; some new model replacing the old. Often the transition is not without political controversy. But the policy of gradualism, tolerance, holds the conflict to a minimum. We could do this with K-12, too, couldn’t we?

Back to teachers and teaching. We could have some schools in which teachers had a very large opportunity to innovate; to try things they believe might help the students they actually have enrolled. Some teachers would thrive in that environment. Some would not; would prefer to have decisions about instruction made by the principal or by the district. Some families would prefer one model; some the other.

Education|Evolving thinks about this as a ‘split screen’ approach to change. Before about 1990, when there was only a single organization offering public education in a community, an effort to run two different approaches created big conflict in the district, in the board of education. But today students—through chartering or through open enrollment—students have access to different choices. So isn’t the ‘split screen’ approach conceivable?

Take a few minutes to think about it, yourself, in the issue areas you know in K-12. Are we wrong about this?

—Guestblogger Ted Kolderie, Education|Evolving

We listened last week in Nashville as noted Harvard Business School author and professor Clayton Christensen explained the premise of Disrupting Class to the annual meeting of the Education Commission of the States. In the Q&A period, he said he has to limit his use of the term “innovation” to those occasions when there’s time to define it.

We’re wondering, like Christensen, if the term “innovation” hasn’t been stretched, twisted, and hijacked into definitional disarray.

For Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, innovation seems to mean grabbing the lessons from schools with records of high performance and grafting them on to problem schools. Finding “what works,” adopting it, spreading it around. Why not call that what it is: replication?

Replication is a worthy effort. But ‘new, here’ is not the same as ‘new, anywhere’. There needs to be room for real innovation. Which means: Letting schools and teachers try things. Which means, in turn, that we will all have to get comfortable with not-knowing, ahead, what the innovators will come up with.

And that, of course, runs head-on into the argument from the research community that no change should be made unless it’s ‘evidence-based’. How can real innovation be ‘evidence-based’?

There’s an argument that replication at least should be evidence-based. But this has to contend with the reality that students differ. People sometimes point to medicine. But even there researchers does not always come to a definitive conclusion; and where they do the conclusions often change with new research a short time later.

Christensen’s career rests on his distinction between “sustaining” innovation—the constant improvements that successful enterprises make in their products or services—and “disruptive” innovation in which a new and different product or business model bursts through from a competitor the established firm cannot emulate.

This highlights a critical problem with ‘innovation’. These disruptive innovations, the truly new models, are never high-quality at first. They appeal just to people not being served well by the mainstream offerings.

Rigorously evaluated against the existing and traditional model, real innovation would be rejected. At any given time most people are not ready for radical change. Progress would stop. As our colleague Joe Graba puts it, “Almost everyone wants schools to be better, but almost no one wants them to be different.”

Education|Evolving has been trying to think this whole puzzlement through. It does seem to us that innovation has to involve trying things not tried before, pushing on the edges, breaking out of the institutional boxes of practices that hold people back and that fasten them to doing the same things in the same way day after day.

Are we wrong about that?

—Guestblogger Curt Johnson, Education|Evolving

I’m one of the guest bloggers this week: Curt Johnson, managing partner of the policy group Education|Evolving. Based in Minnesota but operating nationally, we work mainly on the design of state policies for K–12.

We are a bit unusual. We’re mainly defined by what we’re not: not partisan, not academic, not governmental and not commercial (meaning that we don’t work for clients on contract). We’re analysts and advocates . . . with a particular bent for stepping outside the current/conventional framework. As an example: the chartering idea, the suggestion that there can be more than one entity offering public education in a community, which pretty much started in Minnesota. That was outside the ‘givens’ at the time.

Through the week we’ll invite comment on our various puzzlements about the accepted framework of the current K-12 policy discussion. The ‘we’ will include Joe Graba, Ted Kolderie, Jon Schroeder, Kim Farris-Berg, Bob Wedl, Lars Johnson, Mary K. Boyd, Dan Loritz, Ed Dirkswager, Tim McDonald; perhaps others.

We’re more fully identified—and explained—on Education|Evolving’s Web site. Also find us on Facebook.

—Guestblogger Curt Johnson, Education|Evolving

I’m going to be out of pocket much of next week so Joe Graba and Ted Kolderie from Education Evolving will be here to entertain you.   Ted’s one of the early intellectual leaders of the charter school movement and Joe’s a former teacher, teachers’ union leader, and state legislator.   Like other guestbloggers their posts will be clearly identified at the end of each post.  Enjoy!

In the wake of this proposed WaPo salon series there is a lively debate going on in Washington right now about off-the-record dinners and meetings where there is an intersection of policymakers, journalists, and corporate interests.  In the course of taking Atlantic Media’s David Bradley to task over Atlantic’s off-the-record dinners Slate’s Jack Shafer writes:

It’s Bradley’s corporate salons and his defense of them that deserve scrutiny. He claims that the sessions are placed off the record to avoid canned remarks. “My own view is that there is a great deal of constructive conversation that can take place only with the promise that no headline is being written,” he writes.

Has Bradley never attended a function at the Cato Institute, where the repeal of the drug laws, the phasing out of Social Security, the privatization of education, the dismantling of the Cold War war machine, and other contentious topics are discussed openly and cordially on a regular basis? The same can be said for discussions at the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, and other think tank venues. Elsewhere in his memo, Bradley applauds his company’s ability to attract “authors and activists” representing “all sides of an issue” at its talks: “conservatives and liberals, conservative think tanks and liberal think tanks, corporations and consumer groups, all manner of associations and all manner of environmental, health advocacy and public interest groups. The art here is bringing disparate parties to table for a constructive conversation.”

It’s fantasy to imagine that there’s any “art” to staging constructive conversation in Washington, and Bradley knows it…

In general there’s obviously a legitimate debate about dinners and events of this type and where to draw the line on media activity and corporate sponsorship.  However, having attended some I suspect the suspicion and paranoia is disproportionate to what actually goes on.   But, I think on this off/on-the-record issue Shafer is mistaken and Bradley is onto something.  It seems Shafer is conflating conflict with candid and while we’ve got plenty of the former we don’t have much of the latter.  The town doesn’t reward it.  So, at these public events you do often get a back and forth.  But it’s generally predictable and often staged.  Sadly, it’s only in private that you often hear a lot of nuance, textured positions, caveats, and all the rest.  These are not immutable laws, of course, and skillful moderation at public events can help, but it’s frequent enough to be a real issue. 

For instance, a few weeks ago the journal Democracy  (which if you’re not reading you should) hosted a meeting at the Brookings Institution with the education and political media and some players from the education reform world.  Originally off-the-record, at the insistence of many of the journos who attended the session was put on the record.   Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, and Joel Klein!  In the same room!  Talking teachers’ contracts!  Gates Foundation personnel, too! E.J. Dionne moderating!   The result of that all-star line up?  Snooze…Absolutely predictable, filibusters, little candor, etc…you could have written a script for it.

So sure, to Shafer’s point there was engagement, even some back and forth, but none of the really complicated issues were broached nor was there in-depth discussion of serious points of disagreement among those in the room.   There likely would have been more of that in an off-the-record setting.  How do I know that?  Call it the wisdom of that crowd.   I have real time emails and texts from media and participants alike making the same point…In addition, at one point Randi Weingarten offered to go off-the-record to share some information I know is interesting because I’m involved, but the reporters wouldn’t let her change the rules for that instance.  So she said nothing.  How was that helpful?

Overall this is unfortunate because while the public might have missed out on that actual discussion at Brookings, had it been off-the-record, I’d like to think subsequent reporting would have been enriched by more context, nuance, and understanding as the result of a candid conversation.   Perhaps no one was fooled but I still think the format left something on the table and because reporters go off the record with sources all the time I don’t see the line that is being crossed by sometimes doing it in group sessions. 

Two events this month you might want to check out:

As if you need an excuse to visit Charlottesville, Virginia, the Albemarle County Public Schools are hosting EduStat University there this summer.  The theme is 21st Century Skills and it’s a lively line-up.  July 19-22.

On July 29th, REL Southwest is hosting a one-day conference on “Educator Staffing, Quality,and Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems” in Dallas, TX.

UVA’s Dan Willingham looks at knowledge and reading and USA Today looks at Willingham.

The NEA convention can be hard to understand.   One NEA insider described it to me as “like watching birds f***.   It looks crazy and hopeless, but makes perfect sense to those doing it and is a lot of fun for them to boot.”  What more can you say?

There was a lot more going on in CA during the meeting than Arne Duncan’s speech.   To wrap-up this year’s meeting, Sawchuk has a lot of good stuff from the convention, Antonucci does as well.   They both comment on the new emphasis on “union” from the NEA leadership, which is a departure from the past posture of the organization (in short, AFT people lobby you to make the point that they’re not the NEA and NEA people lobby you to make the point that they’re a professional association not a union, but perhaps no more?).   It’s a smart strategy for the NEA.  There is little love for their policies and stances these days* but making themselves invaluable to organized labor ensures some political relevance and toleration.

For instance this just released love-letter from the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights (pdf) is really something and not to be missed if you follow all this closely.

Also, ES’ discussion on teachers and unions just wrapped up – it gets lively toward the end! – and is worth checking out.

Arne Duncan’s speech to the NEA today is an important one and an important moment.    It’s fair but challenging and a pretty clear signal of where the lines are.     Free PR advice for the NEA:  Pretend you love it and are on board and in agreement with the Secretary about the urgency to improve schools, it’s a holiday weekend so maybe nobody will notice the actual content….

Update from Eduwonk sources inside the hall:  They’re ignoring my advice!  They even heartily booed the mention of Green Dot!   These days that’s like hating Santa Claus…some booing at other parts as well, tenure, seniority, and all the talk of data but charters are definitely the big target that almost everyone in the NEA ranks can agree to shoot at.

Update II:  Some reax from LA Times, Politico, Sawchuk, Antonucci.

Update III:  Implicit big winner here:  AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten.

This is depressing…

…in Rhode Island.  Mayor McKee is sort of a low-key guy but he’s really moving the ball here…Background here.

You frequently hear people remark about how different Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee are.  Perhaps in some ways, but I’m not so sure their circumstances are not more similar than dissimilar and may well ultimately require similar resolve.   Michelle Rhee has pursued an aggressive reform strategy that basically means she has to win on every contested issue or transaction.  It can work, but the risk-reward ratio for that strategy heightens the risk around every clash.   But, as we come into a period of a few months (big calls on Race to the Top, low-performing schools, remaining stimulus funds, FY11 budget request and No Child Left Behind reauthorization groundwork) that will arguably define the Obama first term on education it’s worth asking whether Duncan isn’t now in roughly the same place given his ambitious plans.    There is intense push-back going on around many of his priorities, especially on the Hill where some of the interest groups seem to be preparing to make their stand.  You can sense that at the first sign of weakness the overall politics here, which have been largely favorable for him, could start to change.  In other words, it’s unclear if he can afford to lose a big one either.

WaPo ed board foreshadows Arne Duncan’s big speech tomorrow…

Meanwhile, at ES today and tomorrow we have a group of teachers, former teachers, and a policy expert discussing how the professional work of teaching does or does not mesh with unionism.  It’s off to a good start and as with all of ES’ online discussions you can submit questions for the panelists as well.

Jay Mathews weighed-in on some of this on Monday in the WaPo.