Budget decisions can sometimes return to haunt

It may be time to pay that piper.

Read this article by Ty Tagami at the AJC:

Suit could cost DeKalb millions

The school system in DeKalb County experienced a setback in a lawsuit brought by employees that could someday cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, yet a top official says he’s unaware of plans to set money aside in case the county is forced to pay.

Superior Court Judge Clarence Seeliger ruled in October against DeKalb’s claim that it was immune to a lawsuit over suspended payments to a supplemental retirement fund for teachers, bus drivers and other employees.

The case is on appeal, with hearings scheduled for April. If the school system loses the appeal, the lawsuit will continue in the DeKalb court system. So far, the case involves only two plaintiffs, but they are seeking class action status. If it is granted and if the county loses the case, taxpayers could be compelled to make back payments to the thousands of employees in the retirement plan.

The school system had been paying into the plan since 1979, but suspended payments in 2009 because of a budget shortfall. A teacher and a school counselor sued last March, charging the suspension was a breach of contract. They are demanding the restoration of all payments for three years and counting. It’s unclear how much the total could be.

The only calculation available in the court record is for the 2009-10 school year, when DeKalb was scheduled to pay $26.5 million into the tax-sheltered annuity plan.

Assuming the annual contribution — about 6 percent of each employee’s pay — didn’t change much, the total could exceed $50 million, said John Salter, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Yet school board Chairman Eugene Walker said he knows of no plan to save money for the possibility of a payout.

That's the word from the former finance chair who is now our board chair.

Click this link to read the rest...

Gwinnett's Wilbanks promotes teacher quality

An Opinion Piece to the AJC
By J. Alvin Wilbanks and Stephanie Hirsh

The debate on how to best improve student achievement continues in communities and school systems, among state and national lawmakers and in the media. Is class size the answer? How does technology figure in? What about charter schools?

However, in these discussions, a critical piece often is missing or glossed over during the conversation — teacher quality and how we should go about improving the quality of teaching in every single classroom.

Research supports that a key factor in a student’s academic success is the classroom teacher. That is why a growing number of school districts, including Gwinnett County Public Schools and others in the metro area, are implementing effective solutions to improve teacher quality.

The focus must be on helping struggling teachers become better teachers and helping good teachers become great educators.

I am proud of the investment our school district has made in professional development. Our commitment to improving the quality of teachers is making a difference and was noted by The Broad Foundation when it selected our district as the 2010 winner of The Broad Prize for Urban Education, the nation’s largest and most prestigious education award.

The value of professional development is far-reaching and is not confined to just one teacher or one classroom.

It occurs throughout the school, every day, and even touches other schools. It takes place during meetings where successful teachers share best practices.

You find it as teachers work in collaborative teams across grade levels. We see it in classrooms when teachers are supported by coaches and participate in other forms of just-in-time learning. And it occurs in conversations with supervisors in which teachers receive valuable feedback on how they can improve their instruction.

Professional development also occurs when educators have access to the latest research and best practices of other school systems.

This week, close to 3,000 educators from around the world were in Atlanta as part of the Learning Forward (formerly the National Staff Development Council) Annual Conference.

However, it is not enough to set aside a day or two each year — or even each month — for professional learning. That only gets things started. The true difference and the most powerful improvements occur when professional development is embedded into the daily work of every educator. That must be our goal.

While motivated and committed school and district leaders are taking key steps every day to advance this vision, others play a key role as well. State policymakers share the responsibility of ensuring a quality and effective education for every child.

Rather than reducing support for professional development, we should work together to encourage policies that reward school systems and educators who use professional learning to advance the quality of instruction and who demonstrate the impact of professional learning in terms of improved student achievement.

As discussions continue on how to improve Georgia’s schools and how to help students reach their potential, we cannot underestimate the power of caring, dedicated and highly effective teachers.

An investment in their professional development is a strategy that will help ensure all students experience great teaching every day.

J. Alvin Wilbanks is CEO and superintendent of Gwinnett County Public Schools.
Stephanie Hirsh is executive director of Learning Forward.

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To link to the discussion on this opinion piece at the GetSchooled blog at the AJC, click here.

To link to Maureen Downey's interesting discussing about Teach for America, click here.

Perhaps It Isn't Rocket Science ...

Another international student test has the U.S. lagging well behind the leaders and a moon-shot away from the students of Shanghai, for example. I found this interesting article on the NYT's web site and thought readers here might enjoy.

Here is one of the summary statements from the article discussing Shanghai's extraordinary results on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests:

"The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports."

Wow. That is so ... radical. Teacher training and more time studying ... hmmm, that is a newfangled idea! Perhaps DCSS instructional wizardry and legion of curriculum gurus should be "Shanghai-ed" and replaced with good old fashion expectations and work ...

Here is the full article and a link to the test results:

>Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

>Test Results 

Reading deeper into the test results and analysis, you can find a report titled, "What Makes a School Successful?" Great question, right? We agonize over this question on this blog and I thought it worth a look ... here's a summary from the report's Forward:

"First, while most nations declare their commitment to education, the test comes when these commitments are weighed against others. How do they pay teachers compared to the way they pay other highly-skilled workers? How are education credentials weighed against other qualifications when people are being considered for jobs? Would you want your child to be a teacher? How much attention do the media pay to schools and schooling? Which matters more, a community’s standing in the sports leagues or its standing in the student academic achievement league tables? Are parents more likely to encourage their children to study longer and harder or to spend more time with their friends or in sports activities?

In the most successful education systems, the political and social leaders have persuaded their citizens to make the choices needed to show that they value education more than other things. But placing a high value on education will get a country only so far if the teachers, parents and citizens of that country believe that only some subset of the nation’s children can or need to achieve world class standards. This report shows clearly that education systems
built around the belief that students have different pre-ordained professional destinies to be met with different expectations in different school types tend to be fraught with large social disparities. In contrast, the best-performing education systems embrace the diversity in students’ capacities, interests and social background with individualised approaches to learning.

Second, high-performing education systems stand out with clear and ambitious standards that are shared across the system, focus on the acquisition of complex, higher-order thinking skills, and are aligned with high stakes gateways and instructional systems. In these education systems, everyone knows what is required to get a given qualification, in terms both of the content studied and the level of performance that has to be demonstrated to earn it. Students cannot go on to the next stage of their life – be it work or further education – unless they show that they are qualified to do so. They know what they have to do to realise their dream and they put in the work that is needed to achieve it.

Third, the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers and principals, since student learning is ultimately the product of what goes on in classrooms. Corporations, professional partnerships and national governments all know that they have to pay attention to how the pool from which they recruit is established; how they recruit; the kind of initial training their recruits receive before they present themselves for employment; how they mentor new recruits and induct them into their service; what kind of continuing training they get; how their compensation is structured; how they reward their best performers and how they improve the performance of those who are struggling; and how they provide opportunities for the best performers to acquire more status and responsibility. Many of the world’s best-performing education systems have moved from bureaucratic “command and control” environments towards school systems in which the people at the frontline have much more control of the way resources are used, people are deployed, the work is organised and the way in which the work gets done. They provide considerable discretion to school heads and school faculties in determining how resources are allocated, a factor which the report shows to be closely related to school performance when combined with effective accountability systems. And they provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame what they believe to be good practice, conduct field-based research to confirm or disprove the approaches they develop,and then assess their colleagues by the degree to which they use practices proven effective in their classrooms.

Last but not least, the most impressive outcome of world-class education systems is perhaps that they deliver highquality learning consistently across the entire education system, such that every student benefits from excellent learning opportunities. To achieve this, they invest educational resources where they can make the greatest difference, they attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms, and they establish effective spending choices that prioritise the quality of teachers. These are, of course, not independently conceived and executed policies. They need to be aligned across all aspects of the system, they need to be coherent over sustained periods of time, and they need to be consistently implemented.

The path of reform can be fraught with political and practical obstacles. Moving away from administrative and bureaucratic control toward professional norms of control can be counterproductive if a nation does not yet have teachers and schools with the capacity to implement these policies and practices. Pushing authority down to lower levels can be as problematic if there is not agreement on what the students need to know and should be able to do. Recruiting high-quality teachers is not of much use if those who are recruited are so frustrated by what they perceive to be a mindless system of initial teacher education that they will not participate in it and turn to another profession. Thus a country’s success in making these transitions depends greatly on the degree to which it is successful in creating and executing plans that, at any given time, produce the maximum coherence in the system.

These are daunting challenges and thus devising effective education policies will become ever more difficult as schools need to prepare students to deal with more rapid change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented and to solve economic and social challenges that we do not yet know will arise. But those school systems that do well today, as well as those that have shown rapid improvement, demonstrate that it can be done. The world is indifferent to tradition and past reputations, unforgiving of frailty and complacency and ignorant of custom or practice. Success will go to those individuals and countries that are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change."

And here's a link to the full "What Makes a School Successful?" report:

http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9810101E.PDF