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From Randi Weingarten’s speech to a national union conference in D.C., where she is now being joined by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a town hall-style meeting:

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

We won’t let them take away our jobs. We won’t let them cut our pay. We won’t let them plunder our pensions. And I will be damned if I let them define who we are.

Because nobody-nobody-goes into teaching to feather his or her own nest. And this union, which proudly works on its members’ behalf, has always been about something bigger. That is why we fight-24/7/365-for the social and economic conditions that will help our students do better in school.

Apparently pins being handed out to members say “with us, not to us.” The conference, called QuEST, focuses on best practices for teaching and learning. Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and her term as president of the New York City union expires at the end of the month.

Her full prepared remarks are below: (more…)

When senators return to work on Wednesday, they will likely vote to bring back mayoral control — but they may also pass checks that would further curb the mayor’s power.

Details about what those checks would look like began to surface last night, when four senators introduced three amendments with specific changes.

Sens. Malcolm Smith, Martin Dilan, Bill Perkins, and Shirley Huntley have all proposed bills that would amend the bill passed by the Assembly, which Mayor Bloomberg supports. Two of the bills call for state funding for a parent training center and only one would prevent the mayor from firing his appointees to the citywide school board at will.

Smith’s amendment comes as a surprise. As Senate Majority Leader, a post he held a little over a month ago, he was a vocal supporter of Bloomberg’s policies.

Smith’s bill and the Dilan/Perkins bill would give $1.6 million per year for two years to the New York University Center for Urban Education, which would run a parent training center. Another $600,000 would be divided among the city’s student success centers, which work to increase the number of students in public high schools that go to college.

Huntley’s bill would leave parent training to the borough presidents, and sets aside no extra funding for the project. (more…)

Remember how, in 2001, when he was first running for mayor, Michael Bloomberg vowed to require all public school students to wear uniforms, to bring in private companies to take over long-failing schools, and to re-evaluate tenured teachers every two years?

These are among the fun facts included in a self-evaluation Bloomberg released today, running through all the promises he made in his 2001 and 2005 campaigns, and reporting that he’s followed through with most of them (97% in 2005, the report says).

The list of education promises Bloomberg terms stick-a-fork-in-it “Done” (as opposed to those he “reconsidered”) includes many that did obviously happen, but it also includes claims that could inspire challenge. Four promises that caught my eye:

• Improve access to selective schools for students in under-served communities. (2005 campaign promise) The mayor’s report notes that the city now offers summer workshops for parents to encourage them to consider having their children take the entrance exam for selective high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. The city has also offered summer test-prep institutes for low-income students. Still, The New York Times reported last year that proportionately fewer racial minorities were taking the admissions exam, and a lower percentage were passing. There was little change when the paper reexamined the figures this year. Gifted and talented programs for primary school students, meanwhile, have also gotten less racially diverse under Bloomberg’s watch, The Times reported.
• Give teachers more control over how they teach. (2001 promise) The report explains that this “done” stems from the new availability of “a series of tools for teachers that highlight students needs and provides teachers the information to focus on helping students master their subjects.” I assume that refers to projects like ARIS, the data warehouse, and the periodic assessments known as Acuity, meant to give teachers an ongoing portrait of what students do and don’t know throughout the school year. While some teachers embrace these tools, others say the tools limit the way they teach, forcing them to focus too much time on test preparation. (more…)

President Obama’s Department of Education has vowed to invest federal money in building better tests, but the dollars may be held up until the country can hash out some “common standards.” The new Board of Regents chancellor, Merryl Tisch, is also zeroing in on state tests, but it’s not yet clear exactly how that will happen.

Meanwhile, in England, they’re off and running. Computerized assessments staggered throughout the year will replace written end-of-course exams within the next 15 years, a senior testing official, Simon Lebus, told The Guardian over the weekend:

Exam boards are investing millions of pounds in developing the technology – and, Lebus claimed, it’s not “science fiction”.

He said: “The likelihood is that in the next 10 to 15 years it will change almost out of recognition in that by the end of that period of time you’ll be able to do exams more or less on demand, on screen.

“You can make the learning more valid and the technology can enhance the way people engage in the subject. It’s very expensive, complex stuff to do. But it is achievable. It’s not a vision based on a sort of science-fiction type fantasy.”

This Education Sector report, “Beyond the Bubble,” explains how technology can innovate testing.

So, my job search has come to a short, but fruitful end. This week I’ll be signing the documents and I will officially stop worrying about where to report come September 8th (that is the day they finally decided on, right?). Although my search only consisted of three interviews, it was enough to hear a few good questions and plenty of bad.

Obviously in the interest of time, administrators have to stick to a certain script, but I would have appreciated a curve ball or two thrown in there. In my opinion too many questions sought to quiz me on the proper logistics of a reader’s workshop or Everyday Math.

The favorite questions I heard were mainly in the course of the interview that got me my new job. These were questions that were open-ended and sparked more of a conversation as opposed to questions that simply sought a “correct answer.”  The latter rarely reveal details that say much about a teacher’s actual abilities and value to a school.  Without further ado, ten questions, in no particular order, that I wish I had a chance to answer:

1. What is your educational philosophy? Sure, it’s simple, but more meaningful than, “Why did you decide to be a teacher?” (more…)

ON MAYORAL CONTROL:

• Democratic Sen. John Sampson is still planning to push changes to mayoral control, sources say. (Post)
• Senate Democrats said last week that they would vote on mayoral control this week. (Post)
• Senate mayoral control opponents are still saying they will try to block the Assembly bill. (Daily News)
• The Post asks Randi Weingarten for one last gift before she leaves the city: a renewal of mayoral control.

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• Regents head Merryl Tisch wants to limit makeup credit and bar bad schools from offering it. (Times)
• Tisch is also asking teacher-training programs to track their graduates’ success. (Daily News)
• Some of the state’s worst-ranking schools were opened to replace ones the city closed. (Daily News)
• Eva Moskowitz and Scott Stringer are squabbling about schools. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Post says folks at Moskowitz’s Harlem Success schools should call the police to stop their critics.
• The former principal who is credited with turning around a failing school died. (Times, Daily News)

AND BEYOND:

• In letters, New York Times readers suggest how Arne Duncan can turn around failing schools.
• The Economist takes a look at Texas’s KIPP charter schools.
• Jay Mathews rehashes gripes about how he ranks schools by AP participation. (Washington Post)
• The D.C. Council say they want D.C.’s school voucher program renewed. (Wall Street Journal)
• Some say that Obama misled the public about Ed Sec Arne Duncan’s record in Chicago. (USA Today)

• A law prof concludes scaling great urban schools requires “massive human capital improvement.”
• $36.6 million: The magic number Mayor Bloomberg spent on his campaign so far.
• Tony Avella, in a new mayoral campaign ad, accuses Bloomberg of opposing democracy.
• The second round of pre-kindergarten admissions has begun, Insideschools reports.
• A House committee pushes $446 million for don’t-call-it-merit-pay, just shy of Obama’s request.
• Same budget made charter supporters sweat — until it turned out there was a $100 million typo.
• What do teachers do in the summer? Trivia night! (Via Joanne Jacobs and Flypaper.)
• Dorn gives four ways to evaluate teachers, endorses the “Bayesian bump.” (Not a dance move.)
• U.S. children likely to have unmarried moms, household that spends >30% income on housing.
• A CUNY professor and I discussed mayoral control on a Staten Island television program.
• Jay Greene finds good adolescent books that aren’t mopey, aren’t whining, and aren’t Twilight.
• Jose Vilson is concerned that too few men of color teach at New York City schools.
• The Gadfly highlights problems with a new growth model school report card in Texas.
• And poor education, health care are new forms of racism today, says Hazel Dukes.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer reflects on his tour of P.S. 123 today.

Scott Stringer and Eva Moskowitz are fighting again, not over an elected office this time, but over school space.

Stringer, who defeated Moskowitz in a fierce borough presidency race in 2005, reignited the flames by taking a tour of a Harlem elementary school today. The school, P.S. 123, shares space with Harlem Success Academy 2, one of Moskowitz’s four charter schools. Charter schools are public schools that are privately operated.

Stringer’s visit, guided by P.S. 123 parents, teachers, and members of the activist group ACORN, was the latest attempt by supporters of the school to try to stop Harlem Success from expanding into its classrooms as the charter school adds a first grade. (An earlier scuffle between the two schools ended with police intervention.)

The building tour provided a rare on-the-ground view of the space wars that have accelerated as more and more school buildings house multiple schools.

Piles of furniture and boxes of supplies cluttered a third floor hallway, the detritus of Harlem Success’ move last week, P.S. 123 parents and teachers explained. School supporters also pointed to spaces they fear they will lose to the charter school, including a gym that Harlem Success has proposed splitting in half by partition so that both schools could use it at once. They said they also worry their library will be converted into a classroom. (more…)

A group of 28 teachers, administrators, and policymakers have taken on a lofty summer assignment: They plan to come up with an ideal teacher evaluation system, or at least a report explaining the “essential elements” of one, and to do it by the fall.

The effort is the latest in a string of reports and announcements focusing on the way teachers are evaluated, a process that has been called broken by everyone from teachers union officials to The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit created by Michelle Rhee. A report by The New Teacher Project called evaluation systems “largely meaningless,” and the American Federation of Teachers union has launched an internal working group to build its own recommendations for what comprises a fair evaluation system.

A novel nonprofit called Hope Street Group is behind the effort to involve educators in the debate. Created in 2003 as a volunteer-only experiment, Hope Street Group now has a full-time staff that works to build “coalitions of the reasonable” around domestic policy questions by gathering diverse groups of people to solve them together. (more…)

Regular commenter KitchenSink, a principal, sparked an interesting debate in the comments section by making this claim (emphasis added):

The muckraking days are over, people, no one is losing fingers in factory accidents and kids aren’t working long hours in windowless rooms. At least not in this country. The key labor battles have been won, and teachers have multiple avenues for dealing with injustice.

Ceolaf, equally regular commenter, challenged (again emphasis mine):

Clearly, the key workplace safety battles have been won. Perhaps the key child labor battles have been won. But it is not clear that work dignity, living wage, healthcare and retirement security are anywhere near won. In fact, there seem to be rollbacks in those areas. I would argue that there remain many key labor battle to be won, or even re-won.

New York City teachers have seen their salaries jump 43% under Mayor Bloomberg. But does that mean they have achieved “work dignity”? Discuss. (Bonus points for providing examples from your own experience!)