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UNIONS STAGE WALKOUTS. In case you hadn’t heard, the national teachers’ unions are staging/pushing for teacher walk outs across the country. In case theyhadn’t heard, the nation’s report card says less than 50 percent of our kids are proficient in the basics – with the percentages being dramatically less if you’re a minority or at-risk student. The exception to this persistent years-long rule can be found in the states that have seen dramatically more opportunities offered to kids…

LIKE ARIZONA — where charter students boast larger NAEP gains than any state. Ironically, despite this success, teachers are being pressured to walk out, even among the leading charter schools. This was anything but organic – In fact, West Virginia labor leaders claim to have inspired Arizona’s walk out this week.

BUT IN COLORADO…  Scores have remained stagnant and the achievement gap unacceptably wide. In fact, Colorado is near the bottom of states in making progress in closing that gap. Despite that, teachers across Colorado are also planning walkouts. Their gripe is funding. It should be achievement.

A friend in Colorado shared a letter from the Douglas County School District, excerpted below.

“…teachers across Colorado are attending rallies at the State Capitol later this week to call for increased education funding. Many districts decided late last week to close school on either Thursday, April 26 or Friday, April 27. We have been monitoring time-off requests carefully over the last few days. Yesterday, requests increased significantly, such that there are not enough substitutes in the system to cover all classrooms across our district.

“As a result, our neighborhood, magnet and alternative schools will be closed on Thursday, April 26. District charter schools, that manage their own staffing, will remain open and operating on a normal schedule. [Editors note:  we would like to repeat that last sentence. “District charter schools, that manage their own staffing, will remain open and operating on a normal schedule.”] …we recognize that this presents challenges for many of our families. However, with over 500 of our educators out, we will simply not be able to provide a safe and effective learning environment for all of our students.

“WANT TO KNOW WHEY THEY ARE STRIKING?” According to the Denver Post It’s about pay and benefits and spending of course.  (The Post doesn’t mention the four-day school week that more than half of schools now have in CO, by the way.) Nor is there coverage anywhere about the “School-Staffing Surge,” the phenomenon that has dominated US public schools for more than 50 years. It goes like this: “Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.” And the number of teachers since prior to NCLB have grown more than twice that of students!

BUT THERE’S MORE TO IT THAN EVEN THAT.  We agree that “There’s an important conversation to be had about teacher pay, benefit costs, and how to attract and honor terrific teachers — and pay fairly professionals who put in a solid day’s work,” as one of the nation’s leading education policy experts Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute posits. “And, like many, we think the gains that Oklahoma’s teachers have now won are reasonable and appropriate.

LIVE FROM SAN DIEGO… IT’S THE ASU+GSV SUMMIT!

TRANSFORMATION. It’s the thread that ties together all engaged in this, the 9th annual summit. University innovators, coding zealots, edtech investors, developers, advocates and educators have spent the past two days pitching, conversing and launching what may become the latest innovation for students. What makes this confab great is the openness of everyone here in rethinking everything, including how to do what we do know even better.

“We know what works in education,” said Timothy Renick, a Senior Vice President at Georgia State University and the winner of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Higher Education. “They need individualized education,” but universities are not set up to deliver more personalized learning, he said. “Why not?”

WHY NOT? That’s the attitude that Phyllis Lockett had one summit that made her stay an extra day and develop the business plan that became LEAP Innovations, a Chicago-based, edtech nonprofit that works with schools to develop personalized learning approaches supported by new innovations and edtech tools. Phyllis won the summit’s “Innovator of Color” award this year.

ASU INNOVATIONS. Each year attendees are regaled by ASU leadership who offer compelling visions of how to deliver higher ed here and abroad in more effective and efficient ways. The thought-provoking ASU president Michael Crow, who helped launch the summit, offered his view that the students of today no longer are wired to sit and listen but to engage. As Summit attendee and founder of VIDASHARKS, Eric Chagala, put it, Crow’s message is critical “as a new generation of leaders in education and policy stand to rise against the rigidity of a system that still sorts winners and losers.”

“History is determined by the people who stand up at a particular place and time.” —Michael Crow

NEW COLLEGE? Chegg Founder Dan Rosenswig is among the many here who believe we have to turn college on its head if we want to ensure completion with a purpose. “If you can binge watch [Netflix], you can binge watch college,” he told his audience. As Wyatt Cash reported, It’s time to abandon the two and four-year college model.

HELPING RURAL EDUCATION was also a theme, sparked in part by CER’s leadership on this issue before and during the summit. (Check out our session video here.) If bandwidth is the issue, companies like Nucleos.com can actually bring the internet to schools via a portable cloud! Looking for content? Try the hundreds gathered who are using data to demonstrate student learning, likeCarnegie Learning, Waterford and Nearpod, to name just three.

ARE HIGHER ED ACCESS AND WORKFORCE your jam? You should look up Burning Glass, Ellucian, Noodle and Strada, each of which are leading and providing tools and resources to help us all rethink the path from the early years to productive engagement in life.

TAKING ED INNOVATION INTO EDREFORM. We met new friends, strengthened old alliances and connected with education dignitaries and leaders like President George W. Bush and Angela Duckworth, who our CEO had the pleasure of introducing before her keynote address on Tuesday morning.

As CER approaches its 25th anniversary, we’re moving our focus from reform to innovation, and working to ignite the efforts of all the innovators here to ensure that the next 25 years of education efforts produce dramatically more results than the first. We will convene and coordinate actors across the thousands of efforts present to ensure that the best of all make their way into the nation’s schools, homes and learning environments of every level, shape, size and scope.

JOIN US THIS YEAR in doing just that! Stay informed with updates here.

THIS WEEK, you can’t scan your favorite news site, Twitter feed or newspaper (yes, they’re still out there) without reading about the Nation’s Report Card. Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 4th and 8th grade reading and mathematics are out. So are the opinions.

But look again: no one’s talking about the timing of the release of these startlingly bleak, stagnant scores just days before the 35th anniversary of the landmark 1983 report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. The connection between these two reports is obvious and our observations are clear: where innovation and opportunity are encouraged, the results are better — in some states, significantly better. Florida’s unprecedented gains in both reading and mathematics were the highest.

A NEW FEATURE ON OUR WEBSITE is devoted to the NAEP scores, the analysis behind the data and trends, current commentary and decades of CER resources and research representing our unparalleled efforts on the frontlines challenging the status quo and working against the rising tide of mediocrity that was decried as eroding the educational foundations of our society in A Nation at Risk 35 years ago. The feature is called, “A Nation Still at Risk? Results From the Latest NAEP Recall the Report From 35 Years Ago.” There you’ll find the scores from this year and previous years, the entire A Nation at Riskreport, the story behind Florida’s success and much more. Check it out.

THE CASE FOR EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION, Part I: The Disappointing Reality of American Education was published in February. It’s now been updated and reissued with the newest data from the 2018 NAEP report. New findings and further analysis shed even greater light on widening achievement gaps and proficiency stagnation:

“Data from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress show that the lowest performing students in the nation are faring worse than they did on the same assessment in 2015. The gap in reading achievement between the nation’s poorest and wealthiest students equates to more than six years of learning in middle and high school.”

A SPECIAL REALITY CHECK WITH JEANNE ALLEN PODCAST offers a deeply personal commentary by CER’s founder and CEO, who looks at this week’s NAEP scores through the lens of more than 30 years of driving the most innovative efforts to transform how we educate our citizens. Don’t miss this special editionof Reality Check as Jeanne shares her insights and analysis of the trends and challenges we face if the nation does not transform how — and what — we do to educate learners at all levels.

IN ONE OF THOSE TELLING IRONIES that pop up every now and then, this week’s release of NAEP scores just happens to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the release of the landmark report on education: A Nation at Risk.For many Americans, the report was unsettling. It was a principle of citizenship to believe that America was the best in everything, especially in education. So it all came as a shock when the report said there was “a rising tide of mediocrity” in our schools; that educational content “was a mile wide and an inch deep”; and that our teachers were lacking the necessary qualifications to ensure expert teaching, particularly in math and science. And it didn’t calm any concerns when President Reagan stepped up to lead the call to action, telling his fellow Americans that our education system was plagued by “low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and a failure to challenge students to push performance to the boundaries of individual ability.” So the fact that the latest NAEP scores show that 35 years later, we are still a nation at risk is a sad, frustrating irony. The first Reagan Institute Summit on Education convenes tomorrow to commemorate the work of the report’s creators — the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Dozens of current and former elected officials from all levels of government will discuss a new path forward. Will they be bold and unyielding in their demand for change? Here’s hoping so, along with a reminder that the subtitle of the Nation at Risk report was, “The Imperative for Educational Reform.” Read more in National Review Online.

CAUTION: This newswire contains serious and thought-provoking commentary on teacher pay and teacher strikes.

IN LIGHT OF THE TEACHER STRIKES, we are compelled to bring you some facts, research and data about teacher pay that we hope will enlighten and inform readers and help you avoid simply falling into the trap of saying to yourself, “Oh wow, this is awful that we pay teachers so poorly…” Indeed, we do pay teachers poorly, and the pay scales and structures of how teachers are hired, rewarded, retained and paid later in retirement are completely broken. This is not an exhaustive analysis, just a smattering of thoughts that should propel you to do your research before jumping to conclusions.

MOST ARE OUTRAGED BY TEACHER PAY LEVELS. How bad are they, really? The answer is, It depends. Confirms the California education blog ED100: “It is difficult to accurately compare teacher pay with private sector pay, because they work differently. In a simple comparison, teacher salaries can seem worse than they are. Private-sector workers’ retirement dollars flow through paycheck deductions and build up in a way that is easy to count. They show up on a monthly statement. They accumulate in an account… Teacher pensions, by contrast, don’t accumulate. Like a life insurance contract, teacher pensions are a promise of future payments. The ‘payout’ on this contract varies mostly on how long the beneficiary lives.” Incidentally, that payout results in teachers being able to retire and earn nearly their full salary for every year of their lives afterward.

Then there are union dues, which can be another $600-$1,000 a year, with no obvious benefit other than to be told why your profession is underpaid and encouraged to strike… This why tens of thousands of teachers oppose these compulsory paycheck fees, teachers like California’s Rebecca Friedrichs who took her case to the Supreme Court and Illinois’ Mark Janus who is awaiting the High Court’s decision on his challenge (which will likely be handed down this June). (For background reading, see this op-ed by CER’s CEO, Jeanne Allen, and listen to this podcast with Mark Mix, president of the organization that represents Mark Janus.)

STRIKING FOR THE WRONG THING? The teacher unions won’t tell them, but the teachers who are striking across the country aren’t going to solve anything even if the legislatures give them an annual raise. Why such a strident statement? Consider the following number: $1,000 PER PUPIL. That’s the annual cost of employee pensions. Imagine a school of 600 students — that’s $600,000! Let’s just say half those funds could go to teachers instead of the state pension coffers upfront. There are approximately 26 classroom teachers in a school that size, if we are talking a traditionally organized school. If you took just half of those funds and put them in teachers’ salaries in that school, they’d be earning another $11,000 a year each! Please note that these funds are above and beyond employee contributions, Social Security and taxes.

LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT PENSIONS. As teachers retire they will need to access the pensions they were promised and which the state has paid into. Those funds are paid by the current crop of teachers, to the tune of ten percent of their earnings. Let’s take the average pay for an Oklahoma teacher — $50,000 (which is equivalent to about $76,000 in Stamford, Connecticut. For all you New York Times readers, the cost of living in the Northeast is between 40-60% higher). According to a study from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, “On average across state plans, over ten percent of current teachers’ earnings are being set aside to pay for previously accrued pension liabilities. This amounts to a large reduction in real operating spending per student. . . . A significant fraction of the resources allocated toward teacher compensation in current public education budgets is not being invested in resources to educate today’s students at all.”

WHAT TO DO? Researchers who have been studying this issue for years argue that there are several policy changes that could favor teachers while they work and reduce the pension burden that accumulates on states that are constantly threatened by shifting economic conditions: “(1) transition teachers to defined-contribution retirement plans, (2) transition teachers to cash-balance retirement plans, and (3) tighten the link between funding and benefit formulas within the current defined benefit structure.”

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET SMART on teacher pensions, you need to spend some time here. The solutions guiding what teachers make and what the state spends, on top of pension costs. There have been dramatic increases in the past ten years in public pension and benefit spending.

TIME TO RETHINK TEACHER PAY. We’re rethinking everything else — higher ed, K-12, workforce, school safety — so how about teaching? First, compensation is wildly uneven, being delivered to teachers through schools based on state rules governing experience and pay schedules that often see teachers meeting the peak of their salary years after most other professions, in their 50s! As respected researcher Marguerite Roza writes for the left-leaning Brookings Institution, “…a disproportionate amount of available salary funds is concentrated on teachers at the end of their career.”

“District leaders are steering a disproportionate share of the highly constrained public education funds toward a small segment of the teaching force — the group of teachers least likely to leave teaching. The National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Follow up Survey reports that while fewer than four percent of teachers with more than 20 years’ experience leave before retirement, 13.5 percent of teachers with under five years’ experience do. The lower turnover among senior teachers might be a result of the higher salaries, or of proximity to pension earnings — we don’t know for sure… But current distribution patterns leave few dollars for pay raises in a teacher’s earlier years where turnover is most acute.

“These practices not only result in lower salaries for most teachers, they also channel funds in ways that jeopardize equity across schools and create havoc for district financial stability.”

DID YOU KNOW?
“Most public-school teachers’ salaries are determined by years in the classroom and degrees held. But a new study from the Manhattan Institute shows that the premium we pay for teacher experience is far greater than is typically acknowledged.”

In Memory. Oh, Pat, you would have a field day with this newswire! A relentless data gatherer, truth seeker, amazing communicator and reporter, our dear friend and colleague Pat Korten (who we were able to lure out of retirement to help us with writing, editing and policy guidance, after having spent more than 30 years in the communications field), left us unexpectedly and far too soon last week. He would have edited this piece with depth and perfection, attributes he offered to us and to so many others in all his deeds. We will miss him, but know his abundant qualities are now being deployed by God.