Update: CMS officials later said the $10 million for one-time technology projects includes four other projects, with amounts not yet set. The iPad project is expected to get less than half, according to a memo to the school board.
There's a pot of about $10 million for buying teacher iPads, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools said today. This week the district notified teachers they can compete for iPads for themselves and their classrooms, part of the push to get all schools more active in digital learning.
Here's what CMS sent out:
Innovation for Transformation Grant Application 2012
Professional Learning Communities in each of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are invited to apply for the 2012 Innovation for Transformation Grant. Today’s students must be able to use technology to analyze, learn, and explore. Today’s teachers must use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. In order for the learning environments of today to effectively meet the needs of the 21st century digital learner, a transformation must occur. The 2012 Innovation for Transformation Grant provides an opportunity for PLCs in CMS to embark on a transformational journey filled with innovative professional development, digital resources, and effective student engagement. Please join us in the transformation!
Applications must be submitted by March 30, 2012 at 5:00PM
PLC award recipients will be announced in May.
Please review the following information and requirements for the 2012 Innovation for Transformation Grant program:
Informational sessions will be offered the week of March 12-17 to expose teachers and PLCs to the various ways technology can be integrated in the learning environment to help generate ideas for the grant application (these sessions are optional).
Technology integration strategies must be embedded in the School Improvement Plan linking the way in which awarded equipment will be integrated into the learning environment
Teacher devices will be distributed prior to the end of school during a 3-hour professional development session.
PLC attendance at a summer institute session will be required for grant winners
Summer learning virtual courses will be completed by grant winners
Professional development opportunities will occur through-out the 2012-2013 school year and will be required to ensure the effective use of digital tools and resources
Each teacher in the PLC will receive an Innovation Kit which includes: Teacher iPad, student iPads (up to 10 per teacher), iPad cases, 1 wireless keyboard, 1 VGA cable, 1 charging/storage tray, and an iTunes App Voucher
Completing the application
School based PLCs will complete the grant application as a team. If selected as a winning recipient, each PLC will continue to work together at the school level to plan, implement, and facilitate an innovative digital learning environment.
Tentative Schedule:
Optional Integration Sessions
Location: Lincoln Heights
Dates: myPD Class Name: Innovation Integration Session
3/12 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
3/14 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
3/15 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
3/16 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
3/17 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Content: Demonstrations and interactive sessions on both how to present/use as a teaching tool and how a student would use the device
iPad Distribution and Set Up
Location: (TBD)
Dates: (TBD)
Sessions: (TBD)
Content: Set up teacher’s iPad and provide brief overview of use
Required Summer Institute Sessions
Location: (TBD)
Dates: Week of June 25-28, and a make-up day in August
Format: Will select one full day session from 8:00AM-4:00PM during the week of June 25-28
Content: Open in auditorium with key note speaker and group messages on best practices and protocols, followed by differentiated break-out sessions on consumption and production, including information on BYOT
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Hattabaugh: Change teacher pay scale
Changing North Carolina's teacher pay scale is "the most important reform needed in public education today," interim CMS Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh told the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Tuesday. His remarks were emailed to employees; here's what he told the lawmakers.
Good afternoon. I’m Hugh Hattabaugh, interim superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Thank you for inviting me to speak today about our district’s work on effective evaluation and compensation of teachers.
My remarks today are the analysis and observations from the staff at CMS. The perspective of the Board of Education will be provided by Ericka Ellis-Stewart, our Board chair, who will speak after me.
We believe this is the most important reform needed in public education today. In order to succeed, all of our students need to be well educated. They are going to compete with others around the world for college placement and jobs. We need to do a better job of making them competitive. The classroom teacher is the key to success because the classroom teacher is the single biggest school-based factor in student achievement. We need to encourage and reward more effective teaching, so our students learn more and learn more quickly.
The state salary schedule for teachers does not encourage teacher growth and improvement. It doesn’t differentiate between top performers and mediocre ones. It doesn’t differentiate between teachers in hard-to-fill content areas and others. As one example: We need the very best teachers in STEM areas, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But the state’s salary structure doesn’t recognize how competitive these jobs are, making it unlikely that we’ll be able to lure potentially great teachers from other fields where STEM knowledge is valued, such as finance and medicine.
The new Common Core standards are another reason for urgency. As we begin to increase rigor in our classrooms, we need to be sure teachers are able to help students master a more rigorous curriculum.
Some of our teachers are doing a great job of making sure students learn. Some are doing an adequate job in the classroom. And some are not. We need a way to identify who’s who – a reliable, accurate, affordable and easily understandable way to measure teacher effectiveness. Who’s doing great work? Who needs professional development and coaching to do better work? Who might be better suited to other work?
Right now, we can’t really answer those questions. That’s because the way we evaluate and compensate our teachers doesn’t effectively link teachers’ performance to their students’ achievement. So we don’t know who’s great, who’s adequate and who is not. We don’t know enough about the coaching and training that could turn our average teachers into great teachers.
Our compensation and evaluation system is broken. It doesn’t distinguish between great work, good work or poor work in the classroom. What we’re using is almost a century old – it’s essentially the same salary schedule used in American public education since the 1920s. The three qualifications that make the biggest difference in teacher compensation are years of experience, National Board certification and advanced degrees. Teachers who have these things get paid more than those who do not. But these three things often make virtually no difference in student achievement. Some teachers improve when they earn them; others do not. So they’re not a good proxy for measuring a teacher’s value.
Our teacher evaluation and compensation structure doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing who’s great, who’s good and who’s not. Nationally, more than 95 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory on their evaluations – yet our high school graduation rate continues to languish at less than 75 percent nationally. How can nearly all of our teachers be considered successful if less than three-fourths of our students are completing high school?
At CMS, we are trying to close that disconnect. We want to develop a way to distinguish between our great teachers, our good teachers and our inadequate ones. We want to reward great teachers so they stay with us and continue to grow. We want to retain our good teachers, too, and help them improve in the classroom by providing the right coaching and training.
So we are working on better standards and compensation structures for our teachers and other employees. We’re not finished yet. There is much we have left to do. But we have learned some important lessons in this work.
We have learned that any successful evaluation/compensation plan must have four elements.
First, it must have reliable and accurate measurements. That’s measurements with an ‘s’ – good teaching is too complex and too nuanced to be effectively measured with just a single test score or one evaluation measure. We’re looking at nine areas that could be measured, and we’ll talk more about that in a few minutes. We also need to measure the right things – the skills and attributes that increase student achievement.
Second, a successful plan needs to be sustainable. That means we must be able to afford to keep doing it year after year. We’ve all seen what happens to teachers’ morale when they’re told they’ll get bonuses for good work and then they don’t. We have seen that very recently in fact, when North Carolina didn’t pay out ABC bonuses. It breaks teachers’ faith in the system and hurts morale.
It needs to be sustainable and the right kind of payout, too. The existing research also suggests that short-term financial incentives such as bonuses are unlikely to improve teacher performance by themselves. Your information packets have some details about some research studies done in Nashville, Chicago and New York that show the shortcomings of short-term bonuses.
But other studies have found that some short-term programs can help attract and retain highly effective teachers. There are programs in Denver and Houston that rewarded effective teachers and helped reduce turnover. That’s important – we want our best teachers to stay. Attrition levels in teaching are nearly 50 percent in the first three years, and that’s too high.
We don’t have much research about long-term plans because none have been tried for long enough to gather data. As I said at the beginning, we’ve been using the salary structure we have now since the 1920s. So there’s not a lot of hard evidence out there yet that we have seen. That doesn’t mean it won’t work – just that nobody has come up with the right plan yet.
Our own experience suggests that short-term bonuses can work in the right setting. Money is not the prime motivator for teachers but it can be an effective incentive in conjunction with other things. A few years ago we launched a High School Challenge, offering extra money to teachers willing to come to some of our most difficult high schools. Some teachers signed on but not enough for us to use all the money we received. We used only $14.5 million of $18 million planned for a three-year period – and we ended up changing the way we allocated the money, as well. We learned that money by itself was not enough to draw teachers to a situation that looked difficult.
So we took another look and came up with a plan that we thought might work better, and it did. It’s called Strategic Staffing Initiative and we’ve put it to work in 26 schools thus far. We’ve seen remarkable improvements in nearly every school – double-digit improvements in test scores, visible changes in school culture.
Strategic Staffing combines a mix of incentives. We chose highly effective principals – those with a proven track record of success – and told them they could take as many as five teachers with them to their new schools. We told them they could also ask for reassignment for up to five teachers at the new school who weren’t on board with the improvement plans. We gave the principal increased flexibility in managing the school and gave them three years to turn things around. The principals and the teachers who accepted Strategic Staffing assignments did get more money as part of the package.
It’s been an overwhelming success in the first three years. We think all of the elements played a part: Teachers were willing to go to a difficult school if they trusted the new leadership. Principals were willing to take on the challenge if they had the beginnings of a strong team as a foundation for school turnarounds. The money sweetened the mix. We’ve included some slides showing improvement at our Strategic Staffing schools over the past three years in your information packets. But we haven’t come up with the right plan to keep principals and teachers in those schools after three years, and we’ve seen some attrition in years four and five.
The other limitation we’ve discovered with Strategic Staffing is making sure you have a deep enough bench. We need more great principals to keep moving them into challenging schools. And that brings me to the third element of a successful plan:
A successful plan needs to be scalable. We’ve done some work with the Teachers Incentive Fund and Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance, or TIF/LEAP. One thing we have learned is that it would be very hard to expand this program district- or state-wide. TIF/LEAP used Student Learning Objectives created by individual teachers. Teachers who met their objectives got extra money. But it’s difficult to take to scale because it means extra staff to approve the objectives in the beginning, then check that they were achieved in the end. Each teacher’s work must be checked individually, and that takes a lot of time and effort. So we’ve concluded that we have to strike a balance between a plan that is so broad that it misses the nuances of great teaching, and a plan so individual that we can’t afford to do it for all teachers.
Finally, a successful plan has to be easy to understand. People will not support something that they can’t understand. Teachers who are being evaluated need to understand how the evaluation process works and how their assessments are calculated. Again, looking at the TIF/LEAP work, that was a problem for us. The calculation of bonuses was very complex and most of our teachers did not understand how it was done. It’s also a problem with the value-added calculations we are developing. We think value-added is the best measure of a teacher’s contribution to students’ academic achievement. But it is a very complex calculation. Teachers don’t understand it and it’s hard to build trust in that environment. We’re working on ways to address this issue.
While we’ve encountered some staff resistance to a value-added measure, we also see broad-based support for this work. Our community wants us to strengthen schools. Our surveys have shown that parents and the community think performance-based pay is a good idea. On our most recent CMS Parent/Community Survey, in November of last year, nearly 80 percent of participants agreed with the statement that “A performance-based compensation system is needed to recruit and keep highly effective teachers.” Another survey done in July found 74 percent supported differentiating pay for teachers based on how well they help students improve.
So there’s support on one side of the equation: the community and our families. But we need support on the other side: teachers themselves. It’s an uphill battle for a lot of reasons.
First, change that can directly affect your paycheck is threatening. The current system isn’t very good in many ways. It doesn’t put students first. It doesn’t help teachers identify ways to improve. But it’s been there a long time. Teachers understand it, they know it and for many of them who have stepped and laddered their way into top scales, it’s a case of “better the devil you know.” So it’s a hard sell in any environment.
At CMS, the recent economic environment has made it even harder. Three years ago, we had the first reduction in force in our public schools since the 1930s. We had to lay off teachers, teacher assistants, principals and other school and district staff. Teaching, which had long been a very secure profession, didn’t look so secure any more. And introducing a performance-based pay scale made it look even less secure to many of our teachers. Layoffs don’t build trust and morale. The pain and the memory of those layoffs has lingered.
We also have learned that it’s important to get information out quickly and accurately. We’ve struggled with this because our performance-based plan is in development. We want to share information but we don’t have the full picture yet. That has made it easier for opponents of performance-based pay to find fault with it, to build opposition to it. We don’t have a complete solution to this problem, either. We’re working to share information with teachers, and we’re working to include them in the process of developing the standards. Teacher working groups are developing additional measures to provide a fuller understanding of a teacher’s effectiveness than what we learn from test scores by themselves.
One issue that we’ve seen is that calling it performance-based pay created a lot of anxiety. It’s also not the most accurate term for it. What we are trying to build is a system that will not only identify which teachers need help but provide that help. That means strengthening professional development for teachers, and that’s a big part of this work as well. What we are trying to build is not intended to be a punitive plan. It’s intended to strengthen our schools and help our students by helping teachers improve and getting the best teachers we can into our classrooms. But there has been widespread mistrust and anxiety that we are only trying to punish our teachers, and that’s not true.
What we are working on building is a teacher evaluation tool that will take into account the many aspects of great teaching. We need a measure that breaks teaching into its component parts and analyzes each one, so that our coaching and our training actually helps teachers do a better job of teaching.
The nine elements are:
Classroom management
Content pedagogy – how well teachers know the material being taught and how skillfully they impart this knowledge
Contributions to the professional learning community – how well teachers collaborate with others at their schools
Willingness and ability to take on hard-to-staff schools and subjects
Student learning objectives in a form that can be used district-wide
Student surveys – what students tell us about the teaching they receive
Professional consultations, in which effective teachers share their expertise with their peers and solicit feedback in order to improve
The teacher’s work product – how rigorous assignments, tests and homework are
Value-added – how much a teacher is able to move a student beyond the growth that student was expected to make
We think that to fairly and accurately measure the quality of teaching, we will need to look at all of those things and use what we learn to supplement the state’s evaluation tool for teachers. We will need measurements that meet the four standards I’ve discussed today. They will need to be reliable and accurate. They will need to be sustainable so that we can use them over many years. They will need to be scalable so that we can use them for all 9,200 teachers in CMS. They will need to be understandable so that teachers, parents and the community will see their value and support them.
We see this work as a three-stage process. We need to develop the best measures of effectiveness, which is what we’re working on now. We need to incorporate those measures into a comprehensive performance-management system, so that they are applied across our district. And we need to align recognition and rewards with high performance.
Good afternoon. I’m Hugh Hattabaugh, interim superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Thank you for inviting me to speak today about our district’s work on effective evaluation and compensation of teachers.
My remarks today are the analysis and observations from the staff at CMS. The perspective of the Board of Education will be provided by Ericka Ellis-Stewart, our Board chair, who will speak after me.
We believe this is the most important reform needed in public education today. In order to succeed, all of our students need to be well educated. They are going to compete with others around the world for college placement and jobs. We need to do a better job of making them competitive. The classroom teacher is the key to success because the classroom teacher is the single biggest school-based factor in student achievement. We need to encourage and reward more effective teaching, so our students learn more and learn more quickly.
The state salary schedule for teachers does not encourage teacher growth and improvement. It doesn’t differentiate between top performers and mediocre ones. It doesn’t differentiate between teachers in hard-to-fill content areas and others. As one example: We need the very best teachers in STEM areas, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But the state’s salary structure doesn’t recognize how competitive these jobs are, making it unlikely that we’ll be able to lure potentially great teachers from other fields where STEM knowledge is valued, such as finance and medicine.
The new Common Core standards are another reason for urgency. As we begin to increase rigor in our classrooms, we need to be sure teachers are able to help students master a more rigorous curriculum.
Some of our teachers are doing a great job of making sure students learn. Some are doing an adequate job in the classroom. And some are not. We need a way to identify who’s who – a reliable, accurate, affordable and easily understandable way to measure teacher effectiveness. Who’s doing great work? Who needs professional development and coaching to do better work? Who might be better suited to other work?
Right now, we can’t really answer those questions. That’s because the way we evaluate and compensate our teachers doesn’t effectively link teachers’ performance to their students’ achievement. So we don’t know who’s great, who’s adequate and who is not. We don’t know enough about the coaching and training that could turn our average teachers into great teachers.
Our compensation and evaluation system is broken. It doesn’t distinguish between great work, good work or poor work in the classroom. What we’re using is almost a century old – it’s essentially the same salary schedule used in American public education since the 1920s. The three qualifications that make the biggest difference in teacher compensation are years of experience, National Board certification and advanced degrees. Teachers who have these things get paid more than those who do not. But these three things often make virtually no difference in student achievement. Some teachers improve when they earn them; others do not. So they’re not a good proxy for measuring a teacher’s value.
Our teacher evaluation and compensation structure doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing who’s great, who’s good and who’s not. Nationally, more than 95 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory on their evaluations – yet our high school graduation rate continues to languish at less than 75 percent nationally. How can nearly all of our teachers be considered successful if less than three-fourths of our students are completing high school?
At CMS, we are trying to close that disconnect. We want to develop a way to distinguish between our great teachers, our good teachers and our inadequate ones. We want to reward great teachers so they stay with us and continue to grow. We want to retain our good teachers, too, and help them improve in the classroom by providing the right coaching and training.
So we are working on better standards and compensation structures for our teachers and other employees. We’re not finished yet. There is much we have left to do. But we have learned some important lessons in this work.
We have learned that any successful evaluation/compensation plan must have four elements.
First, it must have reliable and accurate measurements. That’s measurements with an ‘s’ – good teaching is too complex and too nuanced to be effectively measured with just a single test score or one evaluation measure. We’re looking at nine areas that could be measured, and we’ll talk more about that in a few minutes. We also need to measure the right things – the skills and attributes that increase student achievement.
Second, a successful plan needs to be sustainable. That means we must be able to afford to keep doing it year after year. We’ve all seen what happens to teachers’ morale when they’re told they’ll get bonuses for good work and then they don’t. We have seen that very recently in fact, when North Carolina didn’t pay out ABC bonuses. It breaks teachers’ faith in the system and hurts morale.
It needs to be sustainable and the right kind of payout, too. The existing research also suggests that short-term financial incentives such as bonuses are unlikely to improve teacher performance by themselves. Your information packets have some details about some research studies done in Nashville, Chicago and New York that show the shortcomings of short-term bonuses.
But other studies have found that some short-term programs can help attract and retain highly effective teachers. There are programs in Denver and Houston that rewarded effective teachers and helped reduce turnover. That’s important – we want our best teachers to stay. Attrition levels in teaching are nearly 50 percent in the first three years, and that’s too high.
We don’t have much research about long-term plans because none have been tried for long enough to gather data. As I said at the beginning, we’ve been using the salary structure we have now since the 1920s. So there’s not a lot of hard evidence out there yet that we have seen. That doesn’t mean it won’t work – just that nobody has come up with the right plan yet.
Our own experience suggests that short-term bonuses can work in the right setting. Money is not the prime motivator for teachers but it can be an effective incentive in conjunction with other things. A few years ago we launched a High School Challenge, offering extra money to teachers willing to come to some of our most difficult high schools. Some teachers signed on but not enough for us to use all the money we received. We used only $14.5 million of $18 million planned for a three-year period – and we ended up changing the way we allocated the money, as well. We learned that money by itself was not enough to draw teachers to a situation that looked difficult.
So we took another look and came up with a plan that we thought might work better, and it did. It’s called Strategic Staffing Initiative and we’ve put it to work in 26 schools thus far. We’ve seen remarkable improvements in nearly every school – double-digit improvements in test scores, visible changes in school culture.
Strategic Staffing combines a mix of incentives. We chose highly effective principals – those with a proven track record of success – and told them they could take as many as five teachers with them to their new schools. We told them they could also ask for reassignment for up to five teachers at the new school who weren’t on board with the improvement plans. We gave the principal increased flexibility in managing the school and gave them three years to turn things around. The principals and the teachers who accepted Strategic Staffing assignments did get more money as part of the package.
It’s been an overwhelming success in the first three years. We think all of the elements played a part: Teachers were willing to go to a difficult school if they trusted the new leadership. Principals were willing to take on the challenge if they had the beginnings of a strong team as a foundation for school turnarounds. The money sweetened the mix. We’ve included some slides showing improvement at our Strategic Staffing schools over the past three years in your information packets. But we haven’t come up with the right plan to keep principals and teachers in those schools after three years, and we’ve seen some attrition in years four and five.
The other limitation we’ve discovered with Strategic Staffing is making sure you have a deep enough bench. We need more great principals to keep moving them into challenging schools. And that brings me to the third element of a successful plan:
A successful plan needs to be scalable. We’ve done some work with the Teachers Incentive Fund and Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance, or TIF/LEAP. One thing we have learned is that it would be very hard to expand this program district- or state-wide. TIF/LEAP used Student Learning Objectives created by individual teachers. Teachers who met their objectives got extra money. But it’s difficult to take to scale because it means extra staff to approve the objectives in the beginning, then check that they were achieved in the end. Each teacher’s work must be checked individually, and that takes a lot of time and effort. So we’ve concluded that we have to strike a balance between a plan that is so broad that it misses the nuances of great teaching, and a plan so individual that we can’t afford to do it for all teachers.
Finally, a successful plan has to be easy to understand. People will not support something that they can’t understand. Teachers who are being evaluated need to understand how the evaluation process works and how their assessments are calculated. Again, looking at the TIF/LEAP work, that was a problem for us. The calculation of bonuses was very complex and most of our teachers did not understand how it was done. It’s also a problem with the value-added calculations we are developing. We think value-added is the best measure of a teacher’s contribution to students’ academic achievement. But it is a very complex calculation. Teachers don’t understand it and it’s hard to build trust in that environment. We’re working on ways to address this issue.
While we’ve encountered some staff resistance to a value-added measure, we also see broad-based support for this work. Our community wants us to strengthen schools. Our surveys have shown that parents and the community think performance-based pay is a good idea. On our most recent CMS Parent/Community Survey, in November of last year, nearly 80 percent of participants agreed with the statement that “A performance-based compensation system is needed to recruit and keep highly effective teachers.” Another survey done in July found 74 percent supported differentiating pay for teachers based on how well they help students improve.
So there’s support on one side of the equation: the community and our families. But we need support on the other side: teachers themselves. It’s an uphill battle for a lot of reasons.
First, change that can directly affect your paycheck is threatening. The current system isn’t very good in many ways. It doesn’t put students first. It doesn’t help teachers identify ways to improve. But it’s been there a long time. Teachers understand it, they know it and for many of them who have stepped and laddered their way into top scales, it’s a case of “better the devil you know.” So it’s a hard sell in any environment.
At CMS, the recent economic environment has made it even harder. Three years ago, we had the first reduction in force in our public schools since the 1930s. We had to lay off teachers, teacher assistants, principals and other school and district staff. Teaching, which had long been a very secure profession, didn’t look so secure any more. And introducing a performance-based pay scale made it look even less secure to many of our teachers. Layoffs don’t build trust and morale. The pain and the memory of those layoffs has lingered.
We also have learned that it’s important to get information out quickly and accurately. We’ve struggled with this because our performance-based plan is in development. We want to share information but we don’t have the full picture yet. That has made it easier for opponents of performance-based pay to find fault with it, to build opposition to it. We don’t have a complete solution to this problem, either. We’re working to share information with teachers, and we’re working to include them in the process of developing the standards. Teacher working groups are developing additional measures to provide a fuller understanding of a teacher’s effectiveness than what we learn from test scores by themselves.
One issue that we’ve seen is that calling it performance-based pay created a lot of anxiety. It’s also not the most accurate term for it. What we are trying to build is a system that will not only identify which teachers need help but provide that help. That means strengthening professional development for teachers, and that’s a big part of this work as well. What we are trying to build is not intended to be a punitive plan. It’s intended to strengthen our schools and help our students by helping teachers improve and getting the best teachers we can into our classrooms. But there has been widespread mistrust and anxiety that we are only trying to punish our teachers, and that’s not true.
What we are working on building is a teacher evaluation tool that will take into account the many aspects of great teaching. We need a measure that breaks teaching into its component parts and analyzes each one, so that our coaching and our training actually helps teachers do a better job of teaching.
The nine elements are:
Classroom management
Content pedagogy – how well teachers know the material being taught and how skillfully they impart this knowledge
Contributions to the professional learning community – how well teachers collaborate with others at their schools
Willingness and ability to take on hard-to-staff schools and subjects
Student learning objectives in a form that can be used district-wide
Student surveys – what students tell us about the teaching they receive
Professional consultations, in which effective teachers share their expertise with their peers and solicit feedback in order to improve
The teacher’s work product – how rigorous assignments, tests and homework are
Value-added – how much a teacher is able to move a student beyond the growth that student was expected to make
We think that to fairly and accurately measure the quality of teaching, we will need to look at all of those things and use what we learn to supplement the state’s evaluation tool for teachers. We will need measurements that meet the four standards I’ve discussed today. They will need to be reliable and accurate. They will need to be sustainable so that we can use them over many years. They will need to be scalable so that we can use them for all 9,200 teachers in CMS. They will need to be understandable so that teachers, parents and the community will see their value and support them.
We see this work as a three-stage process. We need to develop the best measures of effectiveness, which is what we’re working on now. We need to incorporate those measures into a comprehensive performance-management system, so that they are applied across our district. And we need to align recognition and rewards with high performance.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
CMS rethinks testing, ratings
Here's the letter interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh sent to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools employees before Tuesday night's school board meeting. The new "summative," or end-of-year tests and the value-added ratings based partly on those scores created controversy among teachers and parents last spring.
From: "Hugh E. Hattabaugh" <hugh.hattabaugh@cms.k12.nc.us>
Date: February 14, 2012 6:00:52 PM EST
To: cmsmailall <cmsmailall@cms.k12.nc.us>
Subject: Update on Assessments in CMS/Evaluations
Dear CMS employees:
We are changing the way we approach two areas of accountability and I wanted to share the specifics with you in advance of tonight’s Board of Education meeting where I will discuss the changes.
The first change involves summative testing. Starting next year, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) will pilot summative tests in nearly all subject areas. DPI has also recruited CMS to help develop these tests because we had already begun designing our own.
To avoid duplication, CMS will no longer work on developing our own summative tests except in three areas where the state has no plans to test. Those areas are fine and performing arts, and world languages. We will use the state summative tests to track student progress and instructional effectiveness in all other areas. We also do not plan to allocate any money for developing summative tests in the 2012-2013 budget.
We remain committed to measuring student achievement and using that data to strengthen our schools. Assessment is a key component of that. We will also continue to work on developing more effective ways to measure the quality of teaching.
The second change involves teacher and principal effectiveness measures on the state evaluation forms. As you know, CMS has been developing a value-added measure to assess teacher effectiveness in raising student achievement. Earlier this month, however, the State Board of Education approved an additional standard on teacher and principal evaluations. The additional standard – Standard Six on the teacher evaluation, Standard Eight on the principal evaluation -- is based on growth in student achievement. We have decided to use the state’s value-added measure, rather than continuing to develop our own.
Our value-added work was intended to measure what teachers bring to the classroom – how well they teach students. Based on our discussions with the state, and the information we have now, we think the state’s measurement for Standards Six and Eight will allow us to effectively evaluate teachers and principals’ contribution to student achievement.
The measure the state proposes to use is based on an EVAAS value-added measure. EVAAS stands for Education Value-Added Assessment System. It’s a customized software system that is widely recognized and widely used -- including in CMS where teachers and principals have had the option of using EVAAS scores for at least five years. We are confident that it will be fair to teachers, principals and to students. It will not be completely transparent because it belongs to a private company, SAS. We will not be able to reproduce or recalculate it because we won’t have access to the calculation method.
We don’t know yet how many rankings on the evaluations there will be, or what they are. We do know that our teachers will be measured against a state average, rather than against just their peers in CMS. And we know that three years of a teacher’s EVAAS score will be used to calculate effectiveness, not just a single year.
Standards Six and Eight will go into effect this year, for the evaluations that will be done later this spring. But they won’t have data until September or October, after the state has processed state-test results and calculated EVAAS for our teachers and principals. So there’s a disconnect in time on those standards. The data for Standards Six and Eight will be put into the individual evaluations in the fall when it becomes available, and we will share the EVAAS data with teachers and principals.
We continue to believe that measuring teachers and principals using an academic growth standard as part of the evaluation is essential. We think the new state standards will do that – and using them will keep us from spending money to duplicate something the state has decided to do.
Hugh
Hugh E. Hattabaugh
Interim Superintendent
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
Government Center
600 East 4th Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
From: "Hugh E. Hattabaugh" <hugh.hattabaugh@cms.k12.nc.us>
Date: February 14, 2012 6:00:52 PM EST
To: cmsmailall <cmsmailall@cms.k12.nc.us>
Subject: Update on Assessments in CMS/Evaluations
Dear CMS employees:
We are changing the way we approach two areas of accountability and I wanted to share the specifics with you in advance of tonight’s Board of Education meeting where I will discuss the changes.
The first change involves summative testing. Starting next year, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) will pilot summative tests in nearly all subject areas. DPI has also recruited CMS to help develop these tests because we had already begun designing our own.
To avoid duplication, CMS will no longer work on developing our own summative tests except in three areas where the state has no plans to test. Those areas are fine and performing arts, and world languages. We will use the state summative tests to track student progress and instructional effectiveness in all other areas. We also do not plan to allocate any money for developing summative tests in the 2012-2013 budget.
We remain committed to measuring student achievement and using that data to strengthen our schools. Assessment is a key component of that. We will also continue to work on developing more effective ways to measure the quality of teaching.
The second change involves teacher and principal effectiveness measures on the state evaluation forms. As you know, CMS has been developing a value-added measure to assess teacher effectiveness in raising student achievement. Earlier this month, however, the State Board of Education approved an additional standard on teacher and principal evaluations. The additional standard – Standard Six on the teacher evaluation, Standard Eight on the principal evaluation -- is based on growth in student achievement. We have decided to use the state’s value-added measure, rather than continuing to develop our own.
Our value-added work was intended to measure what teachers bring to the classroom – how well they teach students. Based on our discussions with the state, and the information we have now, we think the state’s measurement for Standards Six and Eight will allow us to effectively evaluate teachers and principals’ contribution to student achievement.
The measure the state proposes to use is based on an EVAAS value-added measure. EVAAS stands for Education Value-Added Assessment System. It’s a customized software system that is widely recognized and widely used -- including in CMS where teachers and principals have had the option of using EVAAS scores for at least five years. We are confident that it will be fair to teachers, principals and to students. It will not be completely transparent because it belongs to a private company, SAS. We will not be able to reproduce or recalculate it because we won’t have access to the calculation method.
We don’t know yet how many rankings on the evaluations there will be, or what they are. We do know that our teachers will be measured against a state average, rather than against just their peers in CMS. And we know that three years of a teacher’s EVAAS score will be used to calculate effectiveness, not just a single year.
Standards Six and Eight will go into effect this year, for the evaluations that will be done later this spring. But they won’t have data until September or October, after the state has processed state-test results and calculated EVAAS for our teachers and principals. So there’s a disconnect in time on those standards. The data for Standards Six and Eight will be put into the individual evaluations in the fall when it becomes available, and we will share the EVAAS data with teachers and principals.
We continue to believe that measuring teachers and principals using an academic growth standard as part of the evaluation is essential. We think the new state standards will do that – and using them will keep us from spending money to duplicate something the state has decided to do.
Hugh
Hugh E. Hattabaugh
Interim Superintendent
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
Government Center
600 East 4th Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
Friday, February 10, 2012
Cogdell: County lacks money for CMS raises
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools shouldn't expect Mecklenburg County commissioners to raise taxes or slash services to provide across-the-board raises for CMS employees, commissioners' Chair Harold Cogdell warned in a letter to CMS officials.
Read his letter here.
Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh unveiled his proposal to ask commissioners for an additional $25 million to $30 million for raises at a school board session in mid-January. See the proposal and videos that CMS created to make its case here.
Cogdell sent the letter to CMS board Chair Ericka Ellis-Stewart after meeting with her on Thursday. Cogdell and Ellis-Stewart were both elected to lead their boards in December. Cogdell said Thursday was the first chance they had to get together and talk about the 2012-13 budget.
Read his letter here.
Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh unveiled his proposal to ask commissioners for an additional $25 million to $30 million for raises at a school board session in mid-January. See the proposal and videos that CMS created to make its case here.
Cogdell sent the letter to CMS board Chair Ericka Ellis-Stewart after meeting with her on Thursday. Cogdell and Ellis-Stewart were both elected to lead their boards in December. Cogdell said Thursday was the first chance they had to get together and talk about the 2012-13 budget.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
CMS/Project LIFT partnership plans
Project LIFT, the year-old philanthropic quest to pump $55 million into eight west Charlotte schools, got an enthusiastic reception from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board Saturday when it unveiled its plans for a groundbreaking partnership to transform the schools.
Read the plan here.
On Tuesday, the school board is scheduled to vote on a contract with Project LIFT. Read a draft of that contract here.
Read the plan here.
On Tuesday, the school board is scheduled to vote on a contract with Project LIFT. Read a draft of that contract here.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
CMS: Help us find teachers
Here's the memo Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools sent employees this week, seeking their help recruiting candidates for a program that prepares people without formal teacher training to become licensed teachers.
From: cmscommunications
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2011 12:10
To: cmsmailall
Subject: Do you know someone who would make a great teacher? Refer them to TEACH Charlotte.
Do you know someone who would make a great teacher? Refer them to TEACH Charlotte today: www.teachcharlotte.org.
You made the choice to dedicate each day to supporting education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. You probably know other outstanding individuals who are also looking for an opportunity to make a difference by becoming teachers. While CMS currently has an accomplished group of professional educators, the need for additional high-quality teachers is always great. The TEACH Charlotte program is an aggressive campaign to recruit local and committed professionals, community members, and recent college graduates who have the potential to become effective teachers, joining us in our efforts to increase student achievement in CMS classrooms.
TEACH Charlotte is a highly selective, innovative path for talented mid-career professionals and recent college graduates to become teachers and make a measurable difference in the most critical subject areas of math, science, EC, and Spanish as well as elementary, English, and language arts. The goal of TEACH Charlotte is to recruit, select, and train only the most outstanding candidates who have the potential to effectively increase student achievement in their classrooms. Candidates do not need to have taken courses in education or have prior teaching experience, but they should be committed to ensuring the academic success of our students and our schools.
TEACH Charlotte participants will:
Complete a rigorous summer training to develop their ability to affect student achievement as a new teacher in a high-need school;
Achieve significant academic growth with all of their students and hold themselves accountable by measuring student outcomes in their classrooms;
Complete lateral entry requirements through the TEACH Charlotte TNTP Academy during their first year teaching to earn North Carolina licensure.
Committed educators attract other committed educators; therefore, principals and current teachers are the key to helping us attract the community’s brightest leaders to become teachers.
As soon as possible, refer any high quality professionals who you think would make great teachers to our website, www.teachcharlotte.org to apply to teach or help share information about this opportunity to others who might be interested in applying. The early application deadline is Dec.19.
We know that teacher quality is the most critical factor in raising student achievement for all students, regardless of background or socioeconomic status. TEACH Charlotte is committed to recruiting and preparing high-quality, effective teachers who will raise student achievement in the classrooms that need them most.
Feel free to contact Mallory O’Connell, TEACH Charlotte site manager, with any questions or suggestions.
TEACH Charlotte contact information:
980-343-5886 | info@teachcharlotte.org | www.teachcharlotte.org
Become a fan of TEACH Charlotte on Facebook.
From: cmscommunications
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2011 12:10
To: cmsmailall
Subject: Do you know someone who would make a great teacher? Refer them to TEACH Charlotte.
Do you know someone who would make a great teacher? Refer them to TEACH Charlotte today: www.teachcharlotte.org.
You made the choice to dedicate each day to supporting education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. You probably know other outstanding individuals who are also looking for an opportunity to make a difference by becoming teachers. While CMS currently has an accomplished group of professional educators, the need for additional high-quality teachers is always great. The TEACH Charlotte program is an aggressive campaign to recruit local and committed professionals, community members, and recent college graduates who have the potential to become effective teachers, joining us in our efforts to increase student achievement in CMS classrooms.
TEACH Charlotte is a highly selective, innovative path for talented mid-career professionals and recent college graduates to become teachers and make a measurable difference in the most critical subject areas of math, science, EC, and Spanish as well as elementary, English, and language arts. The goal of TEACH Charlotte is to recruit, select, and train only the most outstanding candidates who have the potential to effectively increase student achievement in their classrooms. Candidates do not need to have taken courses in education or have prior teaching experience, but they should be committed to ensuring the academic success of our students and our schools.
TEACH Charlotte participants will:
Complete a rigorous summer training to develop their ability to affect student achievement as a new teacher in a high-need school;
Achieve significant academic growth with all of their students and hold themselves accountable by measuring student outcomes in their classrooms;
Complete lateral entry requirements through the TEACH Charlotte TNTP Academy during their first year teaching to earn North Carolina licensure.
Committed educators attract other committed educators; therefore, principals and current teachers are the key to helping us attract the community’s brightest leaders to become teachers.
As soon as possible, refer any high quality professionals who you think would make great teachers to our website, www.teachcharlotte.org to apply to teach or help share information about this opportunity to others who might be interested in applying. The early application deadline is Dec.19.
We know that teacher quality is the most critical factor in raising student achievement for all students, regardless of background or socioeconomic status. TEACH Charlotte is committed to recruiting and preparing high-quality, effective teachers who will raise student achievement in the classrooms that need them most.
Feel free to contact Mallory O’Connell, TEACH Charlotte site manager, with any questions or suggestions.
TEACH Charlotte contact information:
980-343-5886 | info@teachcharlotte.org | www.teachcharlotte.org
Become a fan of TEACH Charlotte on Facebook.
Monday, November 14, 2011
CMS report: No safety data
Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member Kaye McGarry provided the Observer a copy of the school-closing report interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh decided not to distribute last week.
It contains no information about safety or discipline at Harding High or any of the other 35 schools that saw change because of school closings and mergers. Instead, it lists enrollment, mobile classrooms and teacher vacancies at the affected schools. View it here.
McGarry and two other board members had asked Hattabaugh to report on issues connected with the closings; they all cited concerns about safety and order at Harding, which almost doubled in enrollment after taking students from the closed Waddell High. When the board voted 8-1 to wait until December to hold that discussion, Hattabaugh had his staff keep the written report. The Observer requested it, noting that is is a public document, and spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry said CMS will provide it. McGarry forwarded the copy sent to board members Friday night.
McGarry replied to Hattabaugh that "it does not address tension and safety issues at any of those schools ... please advise."
It contains no information about safety or discipline at Harding High or any of the other 35 schools that saw change because of school closings and mergers. Instead, it lists enrollment, mobile classrooms and teacher vacancies at the affected schools. View it here.
McGarry and two other board members had asked Hattabaugh to report on issues connected with the closings; they all cited concerns about safety and order at Harding, which almost doubled in enrollment after taking students from the closed Waddell High. When the board voted 8-1 to wait until December to hold that discussion, Hattabaugh had his staff keep the written report. The Observer requested it, noting that is is a public document, and spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry said CMS will provide it. McGarry forwarded the copy sent to board members Friday night.
McGarry replied to Hattabaugh that "it does not address tension and safety issues at any of those schools ... please advise."
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