Lots to talk about what with Indiana, North Carolina, and all. But there’s still stuff going on here that’s noteworthy!
- There will be a public meeting on Boston University’s scary-virus biolab next Friday:
A panel investigating the safety of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University will hold a public meeting next week at the State House. The panel, commissioned by the director of the National Institutes of Health, will meet from 9 a.m. till noon May 16 in Gardner Auditorium. Members of the public will be able to address the scientists. The panel was convened after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November sharply critical of NIH’s earlier safety reviews of the project.
That meeting is probably your last, best chance to give your views to the people making important decisions about the biolab.
- The SJC heard arguments in two interesting cases today: Flomenbaum v. Commonwealth, in which the SJC considers whether the Governor had the authority to fire the state’s chief medical examiner after learning that his office lost track of a body that ended up in the wrong grave (surely the answer should be “yes,” but in the past the SJC has shown an IMHO distressing willingness to intrude into decisions that should be committed to the executive branch); and Carney v. Attorney General, in which the owner of one of the state’s two dog-racing tracks will try to invalidate the proposed 2008 ballot question that would ban dog racing.
- Paul Reville, Governor Patrick’s Chair of the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, came out in favor of a form of merit pay for teachers. The Globe reports:
Governor Deval Patrick’s top education adviser came out in favor yesterday of changing the way public school teachers are paid – backing higher salaries for those who take posts in the most challenging schools; who teach hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, and special education; and who work in schools with dramatically improved performance….
Patrick opposes merit pay for individual teachers but supports rewarding all teachers in a school that raised test scores.
Reville’s more detailed comments are in line with this general philosophy, which Patrick outlined during his campaign, according to Patrick spokesman Kyle Sullivan.
That’s what I remember from the campaign too — awarding merit pay not teacher by teacher, but school by school. I like Reville’s idea. The teachers’ union, however, does not:
The concept of rewarding individual teachers for improved test scores has long been supported by reformers, but drawn the ire of unions, which was the case again yesterday.
Anne Wass, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the largest teachers union in the state and a strong Patrick supporter, rejected any merit pay based on students’ test scores – even if given to all teachers at a school….
The only changes the union would support, she said, are increasing the salaries of all those in high-poverty, low-performing schools as an incentive for teachers to work there.
But that seems far too limited. Nothing wrong with encouraging teachers to work in difficult schools — and Reville’s idea includes that. But if students at a school are improving, obviously the teachers are doing a good job, and they should be rewarded. Hard to see what’s objectionable about that.
You’d think the likes of Jon Keller and the Pioneer Institute, who have gleefully trashed Patrick’s education policies in general — and Reville in particular — would be pleased by this development. So far, no reaction, beyond a snippy post from the Pioneer gang who were apparently annoyed that the Gov himself didn’t greet US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings (update: which Pioneer has had to recant — turns out it was Spellings who was the no-show). Whatever. We’ll keep you posted. UPDATE: Pioneer responds here — they like it! Hey Mikey!
- The Mayor of Newton, David Cohen, who has been under fire lately for the $200 million high school among other things, has suggested a 28% pay raise for himself. His current pay is about $98,000. Good luck with that, Mr. Mayor.
- What is all this nonsense about the ban on tipping American Airlines’ skycaps at Logan Airport? What is the big deal? If people want to tip the skycaps a buck or two for checking their bags at the curbside, why shouldn’t they? And it’s hard to see American’s new policy banning tips as anything other than obvious retaliation against the skycaps for winning their lawsuit against American. The AG is looking into the retaliation issue; let’s hope they resolve it quickly.
- Thumbs-up on a Prop. 2-1/2 override in Brookline; thumbs-down in Shrewsbury.
The split mirrors statewide trends so far in asking voters to override the state’s property tax cap of 2.5 percent a year. Overrides for operating budgets, prior to yesterday’s votes, had passed in five communities (pending a recount in one), and failed in five others, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association.
The association expects about 30 cities and towns to ask voters to raise property taxes this year to support municipal and school budgets, prompted by lower-than-expected increases in state aid, falling property values, and diminishing excise tax receipts.
And the beat goes on.
They’ve done some reasonable work … but seriously, I’ll have to take everything that comes out of Chieppo and Stergios’s mouths with a serious grain of salt. 90% of that article is a political hatchet job and name-calling, and then there’s a little policy talk, sorta.
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p>Anyway, the whole Patrick=Obama thing is pretty stupid, beyond the obvious but superficial connections. (Does the Patrick administration give a preview of how Obama would deal with Pakistan or Iran? eh?) I predict that Patrick’s poll numbers will rebound strongly this year, and Obama will take the presidency; and the people who wouldn’t have liked either of them anyway will continue not to like them. Which leaves me happy enough.
has really good timing. May 20th is the scheduled override.
Yeah, I don’t get it. That’s his retirement announcement, right?
he’s just trying to save for retirement, yeah.
http://www.boston.com/bostongl…
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p>but the damage is done (and when the pro-override vote is calling for your retirement, think you’re toast).
Leaving aside Obama-Patrick comparisons, I can tell you that I, for one, am pleased with Paul Reville’s comments yesterday. I don’t believe he goes far enough, but it is a start.
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p>As I outline in my post on Pioneer’s blog (disclosure: I am Director of Communications at Pioneer and a former public school teacher) and in comments on previous posts at BMG, nothing frustrated me more as a teacher than the step system of compensation.
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p>If we want to attract the best and the brightest to teaching, then we need to reward them based on performance.
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p>Here is the link to my original post: http://www.pioneerinstitute.or…
I’ve just lambasted your bosses on the front page. Bad, bad, terrible, no good Weekly Standard piece.
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p>re: Pay for peformance, I’m on board. The problem is who decides, and how, and what, is good teaching. Not so easy.
Teachers would certainly need to be part of the conversation and I would balk at a system that rewards individual teachers strictly on their students test scores. I think something like a 360 degree evaluation can work, one that includes student test scores, principal evaluation, colleague evaluations, even student and parent evaluations if it didn’t become too unmanageable a process.
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p>Denver was able to institute a system of merit pay because the superintendent, Michael Bennett, brought teachers into the design process. It would be a useful model to follow.
Strange how the conservative solution to problems in education is always more bureaucracy.
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p>I can understand school merit pay, or team merit pay…but I’ve yet to see a workable model for individual merit pay. Saying that one favors individual merit pay if a good model rather avoids the difficult part of the equation.
of advocating the manifestly bad because the proposed alternative is not perfect.
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p>Everyone had that teacher in high school who was marking time: “Read the chapter and answer the questions at the end while I do this crossword.” It is bad enough that these teachers have a near property interest in their position if they’re in a public school, but it is an outright travesty that the these guys are compensated at the same rate as the dynamic teachers making a real impact.
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p>The present compensation structure rewards longevity, only, and does little to provide incentive for quality. That is a problem that cries out for repair.
I want merit pay, but I want a meaningful measure of merit, and I’ve yet to see one seriously proposed.
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p>There are plenty of cops who sit on their duffs doing crosswords while on duty, but for some reason I don’t hear of pay-per-arrest.
I’m not sure why we can’t dramatically empower the principals and department heads in this area. They must know who teaches, and whose exams are still mimeographed and refer to the Nixon administration in the present tense. Or who doesn’t give tests, but only Lake Wobegone group projects in which the lowest grade ever given is a B+. Give them the power to invite these teachers to find a different line of work, and to reward –financially– those who they know are performing teachers.
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p>The problem is that you want to create a purely objective measure of something that is simply not objective. The solution is not to pretend that no solution is possible (which is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwing students for the sake of the union) but to embrace that it is a subjective measure, and live with it.
Since I started teaching in my hard-to-staff school I’ve been averaging more than one principal per year. Whereas the richer schools in the area have the same high-salaried guy or gal for several decades. This is pretty typical…
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p>Agreed that there will always be some fuzziness about any evaluatory method…there’s always subjectivity. But the party line of “screwing students for the sake of the union” is an interesting way to rephrase it. I submit that it’s no more objective than “screwing public education for the sake of private ‘education’ companies who donate heavily to the Republican politicians who push these ideas”.
I’m not trying to advocate for for-profit education companies, but I understand their attraction, because, especially in cities, public education simply isn’t always a very good option.
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p>When a union turns a blind eye toward bad teachers for the sake of union solidarity, I don’t see how my “party line” description is unfair. And, “sorry, but there is no way to evaluate” is doing exactly that.
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p>When I was in high school (NYC), our European History teacher set us to reading a chapter and answering the questions, every single day. He put someone “in charge” to take names, and then would go have a cigarette. His materials on post-war Europe ended with the Treaty of Rome, and discussed the challenge of Heath to Wilson in the present tense– 20 years after the fact. That sort of thing is just simply a disgrace. And there are teachers like that at every school.
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p>School choice, charters, vouchers, and for-profit education aren’t so much solutions as they are lifeboats.
I’m sure there’s a metric out there to shear off the teachers who can’t/won’t do their job. It’s that metric I’m interested in.
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p>But almost every discussion on- or off-line I have about evaluation turns to a teacher the discussant had who mailed it in on the job. Sure, I’d imagine of the 100 or so teachers you had in your early career, a couple mailed it in. An occasional cop mails it in. Librarians, too. The DMV! Not to mention private companies. They employ humans, too. It’s human nature…but somehow it comes back to the teachers every time.
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p>But one aspect I’d mention is that a strict regime that makes it easy to fire someone is all good, but how deep is the talent pool to replace them?
I am sympathetic to the cries of uncle from teachers who are being buried in paper work. And I would agree, that any system of merit pay would need to be both fair and manageable, for teachers and administrators.
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p>Denver has implemented a system of merit pay that has been embraced by teachers and seems to be working. I would urge you to take a look at it.
The premise of merit pay relies on the market assumption that educating will work better if teachers are paid based on performance: people work for money, people work harder for more money;
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p>Money certainly is important to people, and teachers are no difference. But the merit pay argument oversimplifies the relationship of work and money. The fact is for many people, and I would argue (and research suggests) a significant portion of teachers, job satisfaction and working conditions are at least, if not more important than making more money. The incentive for good work comes from helping kids and being effective.
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See http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunc…
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p>We could see the day where we have to pay math and science teachers more money. It’s a matter of supply and demand. It’s highly unlikely, however, at least in Massachusetts where teachers are relatively well-paid, that we can pay enough teachers enough money to make the profession more attractive or inspire a difference in achievement.
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p>Merit pay proponents, I think, have things ass-backwards. Merit pay is not a market solution to educational problems; it’s a educational solution to market fundamentalism. It’s just another attempt to justify an obsolete economic model that has become folk wisdom.
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p>Mark
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A former Supreme Court Clerk should know more about what he is talking about than attacking like a demagogue. The medical examiner has a good case in my eyes. But I haven’t read the briefs.
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p>Deval was to Romneyesque in his firing perhaps.
Just out of curiosity—-what is?
He had a contract. It was agreed the place needed substantiel changes and it was goinmg to take time to figure everything out. This body snafu happened during the window of time when the place was being cleaned up but stll problems not his fault.
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p>that’s the argument and it maybe a good one.
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p>He had to get the fire under control first.
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p>he has a good argeument. Did he did not serve at the pleasure of the governor. he had a contract with the state.
David – I am curious to learn your examples where “in the past the SJC has shown an IMHO distressing willingness to intrude into decisions that should be committed to the executive branch).” In my own humble experience, they’re often not willing enough. Thanks.
the three dissenters (Marshall, Cordy, and Sosman) were right in Levy v. Acting Governor (the case in which the SJC ruled, 4-3, that Jane Swift couldn’t fire Jordan Levy and Christy Mihos). I think courts should tread very, very cautiously in executive-branch personnel decisions. They did not do so in that case.
the medical examiner case is a contract case I believe. I don’t think Deval allowed him to collect on the contract after the firing.
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p>This job was suppose to be everything but political and one of the arguments I imagine is that Deval breaced the contract by making it political and firing him.