Parents at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Ca. wait for the board to vote. (Photo by Natasha Lindstrom)

Parent union members at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Calif., have become the first in the nation to convert their struggling neighborhood school into a charter school.

On a 4-0 vote Tuesday night, the Adelanto School District board approved the charter school operator selected by the Desert Trails Kids First parent union, LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy. It took the parent union nearly two years and a bitter legal battle to get there.

“I’m excited. I’m happy. I’m in tears — I’m holding them back,” parent union leader Cynthia Ramirez said shortly after the vote. “I can finally sleep at night.”

California’s Parent Empowerment Act of 2010, known as the parent trigger law, enables parents representing more than 50 percent of students to sign a petition to force major reforms on a low-performing school, from firing the principal and half the staff to a charter conversion. At least seven states have versions of parent trigger laws on the books, and parent trigger bills have been considered in some 20 others.

“The idea behind this movement is not simply to find and save every single failing school in the country through community organizing,” said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles-based advocacy group that trained and bankrolled the Adelanto parents.  “The idea is shifting the paradigm and giving parents the power to do what’s in the best interest of their kids.”

Tuesday’s vote was quick and unanimous, and followed by a brief recess to let the parent trigger supporters celebrate. Members of the parent union and Parent Revolution exchanged hugs with each other, board members and district officials.

Parents hug after the vote. (Photo by Natasha Lindstrom)

“When the cameras are gone and the newspapers are gone, we’re still here and we’re going to work this out,” said Board President Christine Turner.

It was a drastically different scene than so many of the heated school board meetings last spring, when the board twice rejected the parent trigger petition amid a counter-campaign to get parents to withdraw their signatures. The smaller, more loosely organized group of parents opposing the parent trigger argued that some parents had been misled when they signed the initial petition.

Both sides accused the other of harassment and intimidation. The parent union argued the opposition was fueled by teachers’ union members.

The board’s rejection prompted the parent union to sue the district. In July, a Victorville Superior Court judge ruled in the parent union’s favor and said that parents couldn’t withdraw their signatures.

In the fall, the district tried to implement curriculum changes and an alternative governance committee comprised of parents in place of a charter conversion. But in October, another judge ruled the district must let the charter conversion press on.

“We do know what we want for our children,” said Doreen Diaz, who spearheaded the formation of the parent union. She’s since pulled her daughter, who is about to go into middle school, out of Desert Trails and stepped down from the union. “We proved that parents can make a difference.”

The opposing parents didn’t show up to speak at Tuesday’s meeting. One of the opposition leaders, Maggie Flamenco, said she pulled her children out of Desert Trails on Monday. She and fellow skeptics questioned the politics behind the trigger push, and the motives of Parent Revolution, which is backed by major funders like the Gates and Walton Family foundations.

The new Desert Trails Preparatory Academy charter school will be run by LaVerne Preparatory Academy, which runs a K-8 school with similar demographics in the nearby city of Hesperia. In October, the parent union held a vote open only to the parents who signed the petition to select from two charter operators. Fifty of the 53 parents who turned out chose LaVerne.

Parent union leaders said they have high hopes for LaVerne, which scored a 911 on California’s 1,000-point Academic Performance Index last year, compared to Desert Trails’ score of 699. Based on test scores, Desert Trails ranks in the bottom 10 percent in the state and has been stuck on the federal watch list for failing schools for more than six years.

The board trustees, including two newly elected members, told the meeting’s audience that they were impressed with the levels of student engagement they saw while visiting LaVerne’s Hesperia campus. The school emphasizes classical literature, Latin and music classes, and it partners with the University of LaVerne to help train new teachers.

“We’ve gone back to the basics, and we’ve raised the bar,” said LaVerne Elementary Principal Debbie Tarver.

All students and their siblings will be guaranteed spots at the school, but every teacher and staff member will have to file new applications if they want to keep working there.

Tarver said she plans to start distributing fliers to parents about the charter conversion and will be holding informational meetings as soon as next week.

The school board did place a few conditions on the approval. By March 1, the operator must send proof of the new charter academy’s registered nonprofit status, along with revised budget plans in case the academy doesn’t get the state grant funds it’s counting on.

Tuesday’s victory could be a boon for other budding parent trigger attempts throughout California and other states, with several new bills up for discussion in state legislatures in coming months.

The T3 Initiative program, a collaboration between Boston Public Schools and Teach Plus, began training and placing groups of experienced teachers with track records of raising student test scores in a set of three failing schools in 2010, after a dozen city schools were deemed underperforming by the state in 2010 for chronically low test scores. The pilot expanded to three more schools the following year.

The report, an evaluation by Teach Plus of its own program, shows that at the first three schools to use the program, the percentage of students earning advanced or proficient scores on their state tests increased by nearly 13 percentage points in English language arts on average over the course of two years, and 16.5 percentage points in math on average.  The second group of schools saw similar growth at the middle school level over the course of one year.

In addition to training and hiring new teachers, the six schools in the T3 Initiative, provided health and wellness services for students, and intensive teacher professional development over the summer. Teach Plus teachers make up 25 percent of the school faculty at T3 schools, and serve in leadership roles to help other teachers improve.

Six other Boston turnaround schools did not participate in the T3 pilot, but did experiment with longer school days and staffing changes. A report by The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that state-wide, less successful turnaround schools, including those not part of the T3 program, tended to provide more generic professional development, infrequent coaching and teacher support, and struggled to create a safe school environments. Test scores at those turnaround schools have remained relatively stagnant.

Among the T3 schools, the biggest gains were in the middle grades at Orchard Gardens K-8, which doubled the number of seventh graders scoring proficient in English and math over the course of one year.  At the elementary schools participating in the program, growth has been high in math, but more moderate in English language arts. There was only a 0.3 percentage point increase on average in English language arts scores during the first year of the pilot. The elementary school that joined the program during the 2011-12 school year saw only 4 percentage points of growth, although math scores jumped by 18 percentage points.

The Teach Plus program is among several types of reforms that Boston has tried since the 12 city schools began receiving federal funding to undergo a turnaround process. Principals were replaced in five of the 12 failing schools, and staff members at six of the schools were asked to reapply for their positions, including three schools that participated in the T3 project. One school closed in 2011 as part of a massive school closure and consolidation plan intended to save the district more than $36 million.  Nine of the remaining 11 schools extended their school day by an hour, and two added two hours.

Research suggests that school turnarounds are extremely difficult. Most schools in the federal School Improvement Program, which the Boston schools were a part of, made gains on test scores in the first year, but more than a third did worse after receiving federal funding to make improvements.

“If we’re going to make lasting change in our schools, we need to look to teachers to lead that change,” said Boston Public Schools Superintendent Carol R. Johnson. “We’re thrilled with the progress these schools are making.”

Research has shown that teachers are the most important in-school factor that influences student achievement, yet inexperienced teachers are more common in urban and low-income schools. A 2010 study commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education found that during the course of two school years, half of Boston’s public-school teachers were never evaluated, and a quarter of the city’s schools didn’t turn in teacher evaluations to the district.

Districts in Massachusetts have three years to turn around failing schools before they could face a state takeover.

Teacher evaluations have become highly controversial as states introduce increasingly different models.

Can the quality of a teacher be measured by looking at just a few key skills, such as setting academic goals and running an effective class discussion? Or should teachers be evaluated based on a broader range of abilities, including lesson-planning and content knowledge?

In Los Angeles, teachers will soon be evaluated on a list of 61 criteria during classroom observations conducted by school administrators. Louisiana, by contrast, requires principals to look at just five skills in the observation portion of the state’s new teacher evaluations. In most classrooms in Tennessee, principals use a checklist that includes 19 skills during observations that are part of a new, more intensive evaluation system launched last year. In each place, a teacher’s rating will be based on a combination of classroom observations and student achievement data.

Both the longer and shorter observation checklists have met with criticism. The Los Angeles Times reports that while teachers participating in the roll-out of a new evaluation system planned for the Los Angeles Unified School District are generally optimistic about it, many administrators are concerned about the time it takes to observe and rate teachers on 61 skills. In Louisiana’s case, Charlotte Danielson, the architect of a longer checklist on which Louisiana’s observation tool is based, warned that the state’s truncated version is simplistic and may lead to lawsuits.

The Los Angeles checklist is also based on Danielson’s framework, but the district added extra skills to some of the evaluation areas to reflect the local context and California standards for teachers. And although the framework being piloted in Los Angeles is lengthy, the district is only focusing on a handful of areas while piloting the program this year, including “classroom climate” and “teacher interaction with students.”

These two indicators appear in other observation rubrics across the country, but the importance they are given in different rating systems varies. Florida’s Miami-Dade school district has also made teacher-student relationships a priority. There, teachers are rated on eight performance standards including “learning environment,” which holds more weight in the evaluation score than the standards evaluating professionalism and communication. In Louisiana, assessments and procedures, or the extent to which the class “runs itself” through routines, are the priority, and separate indicators measuring a classroom’s climate and learning culture were dropped.

Despite the lack of agreement about the details, the evaluations are becoming increasingly important as more states are using new evaluations to determine who can stay in the classroom. Under Louisiana’s new system, teachers could lose their certification if they receive an “ineffective” rating for two years in a row. In Washington, D.C., 7 percent of the teaching force was fired after a controversial new evaluation system was launched two years ago. (The District of Columbia Public Schools originally included a total of 22 standards in its observation framework, but dropped the number to 18 after teachers complained that the number of requirements was overwhelming.)

When the Measures of Effective Teaching project, a study in six districts funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, observed nearly 3,000 teachers using five different observation systems, researchers found that it didn’t really matter which practices were emphasized on an evaluation. Teachers who more effectively demonstrated the types of practices emphasized in any given system had greater student achievement gains than other teachers. (Disclosure: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

But educators and researchers say the observation process is not meant just to identify which teachers are high-performing. It’s also supposed to help low-performing teachers improve their practice. “The goal of supervision and evaluation should be to develop expert teachers who are self-correcting,” said Michael Toth, CEO of the Learning Sciences Marzano Center for Teacher and Leadership Evaluation, an organization that develops teacher evaluation tools, in a press release. Toth cited results of a study that found teachers assessed with more detailed observation tools are more likely to change their classroom practices. “The more specific the model is … the better the model will be in driving teacher development,” Toth said.

Some teachers in Los Angeles told the Los Angeles Times that their new evaluation system does just that by focusing on specific areas and encouraging collaboration and reflection. Last year, 450 teachers and 320 administrators tested the system. By the end of this school year, every principal and one volunteer teacher at each school in the district will be trained, with a district-wide roll-out date still to be determined.

For the first time in decades, more than 50 percent of the nation’s teaching force is comprised of teachers who have been in the classroom under 10 years, Teach Plus found in “Great Expectations: Teachers’ Views on Elevating the Teaching Profession,” which looks at the changing demographics of U.S. teachers.

From “Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force,” by Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill (May 2012)

The national survey asked 1,015 new and veteran teachers their views on some of the most contentious issues in U.S. public education, like teacher evaluations and class size, to see if attitudes are shifting with an influx of newer teachers.

Despite differences in experience, teachers are generally united when it comes to working conditions. The majority of both newbies and veterans agree that class sizes should not be increased, even if doing so would provide districts with more funding to raising salaries. The two groups are also in agreement about keeping the school day shorter and said that increasing pay is key to elevating public respect for the profession.

On the topic of teacher evaluations, though—one of the most highly debated issues in education reform—the two demographics have mostly differing views. They agree that current teacher evaluations are ineffective at improving instruction, but 71 percent of less experienced teachers say their evaluation should be tied to student test score growth, compared to only 41 percent of veteran teachers.

Those who began teaching in the last decade are also more supportive of changing compensation and tenure systems, and more likely to think the use of student data is important to teach more effectively.

Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, said a new generation of teachers has been exposed to the magnitude of the achievement gap, which may influence their attitudes and their belief in the importance of data.

“Closing gaps among racial groups and across income levels motivates the commitment to teaching for so many,” Coggins said.

In 1987, the majority of teachers had 15 years of experience, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, with about half of new teachers leaving urban classrooms within three years, teachers with just one year of experience are the most common in U.S. classrooms. And each year, 200,000 new teachers enter the profession, 65 percent of whom are recent college graduates.

Mark Teoh, director of research and knowledge at Teach Plus, said that these new teachers were most likely students during or after the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, and said their attitudes show they are more accustomed to testing and accountability than their more experienced colleagues.

At a time when states are introducing the Common Core standards and new evaluation methods, Teoh says these shifting teacher attitudes could influence education reform, as policymakers hear “what kind of profession these teachers want to see, and what kind of workforce they want to be a part of.”

The report also highlights problems that come with a younger, less experienced teaching force. Teach Plus recommends including teacher opinion in policymaking and encouraging newer teachers to take on leadership roles.

“There’s definitely room and a hunger for these teachers to be part in the policy process itself,” Teoh said. “They’re the ones who are there all the time, and they can provide the feedback, guidance and perspective that [are] needed.”

1857: The National Education Association (NEA) is founded in Philadelphia by 43 educators. The new union focused on raising teacher salaries, child labor laws, educating emancipated slaves and how the forced assimilation of Native Americans affected their education.

Chicago Teachers Federation meeting in the 1920s

1897: The Chicago Teachers Federation is formed to raise teacher salaries and pensions. At this point, teacher compensation mainly consisted of room and board in the local community.

1902: Teachers, parents and students unite in Chicago for the first teachers’ strike, which occurs after a teacher is suspended for refusing to allow a disruptive child back into her classroom. According to journalist Dana Goldstein, the strike helps the newly formed CTF.

1906: In New York, the Interborough Association of Women Teachers fights for equal pay for equal work. During this time, teacher salary is based on position. Secondary-school teachers are paid more than elementary-grade teachers, and non-minority men are paid more than women.

1916: The American Federation of Teachers is created in Chicago as several local unions band together. The AFT focuses on salaries and discrimination against female teachers, including contracts requiring that they wear skirts of certain lengths, teach Sunday school, and not receive “gentleman callers more than three times a week,” according to American Teacher magazine.

1920s -1940s: Strikes are rare, since striking workers were often fired quickly and laws in some states make government worker strikes illegal. Unions focus on improving pay, improving conditions in school, and increasing federal aid to schools.

1950s: The NEA affiliates with 18 black teacher’s associations in states where segregation is rampant. By 1951, 98 percent of urban school districts are paying teachers based on professional qualifications rather than on the grade they teach.

1959: Wisconsin becomes the first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public employees. Union membership increases across the country as more states pass similar laws.

1962: The New York City teachers’ strike lasts one day, but shuts down more than 25 of the city’s public schools. Time labels it the “biggest strike by public servants in U.S. history.”

Florida teachers displaying protest signs during their walkout in 1968 (Courtesy the State Archives of Florida)

1968: Florida statewide teachers’ strike—More than 40 percent of Florida’s teachers strike over salaries and funding for classrooms. This is the first statewide strike in the nation.

New York City teachers’ strike—Three separate walkouts close schools for 36 days. The strike occurs after the newly created school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, dismisses mostly white and Jewish teachers from the majority black district. The UFT demands that the teachers be rehired. The strike ends after the state steps in, and the teachers are reinstated.

1970s and 1980s: Striking breaks out across the country. Although it is illegal in Minnesota at the time, a 1970 strike by Minneapolis teachers over low salaries prompts the state to enact the Minnesota Public Employees Labor Relations Act, which protects teachers’ ability to strike. Strikes also take place in Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago, over pay, medical benefits and contract demands. “The same issues were involved, same picketing, same closing of schools, all of that is identical” to the issues in the recent Chicago strike, said John P. Hancock, Jr., a lawyer in Detroit who represented school boards in two Michigan strikes during this time. “It was really awful.”

1990s- 2000s: Laws restricting collective bargaining rights and the differences in contracts and salaries between districts have greatly diversified the role of unions in each state. Unions have taken stronger positions in political campaigns to support like-minded candidates. They have also been vocal about changes to teacher evaluations, an increased number of charter schools, and the introduction of merit pay, and still have the power to impact education reform rollouts in some of America’s largest cities, as was demonstrated in Chicago.

Chicago teachers strike (Photo by br5ad)

Teacher union leaders and district officials reached a tentative compromise on Friday afternoon, after drawn-out negotiations over compensation, the length of the school day and teacher evaluations. But when union delegates met Sunday, many were unwilling to vote in favor of the deal, because they either opposed it outright or wanted more time to go over the details.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is seeking a legal injunction to end the strike in the nation’s third largest school district on the grounds that “it was called over issues that teachers are not legally permitted to strike about and that it endangers the health and safety of children,” according to The New York Times.

“I will not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union,” Emanuel said in a statement. “This was a strike of choice and is now a delay of choice that is wrong for our children.”

As the strike continues, parents, teachers, experts and advocates in Chicago and around the country are weighing in. Some, like former District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, take Emanuel’s side.

“We heard a lot of talk from union leadership about fewer students in each classroom, about improving training, and about the very real challenges teachers face. But by extending the strike tonight, the union proved that this wasn’t about addressing any of those issues,” Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, a group that aims to mobilize parents and to serve as a political counterweight to unions, said in a statement. “It’s clear this was only about job security and compensation for union members.”

Terry Moe, a professor at Stanford University and author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, wrote an op-ed for CNN similarly arguing that the strike—and collective bargaining in general—is harmful to Chicago’s school children.

“The purpose of the Chicago school system—and of the American school system more generally—is to educate children,” Moe wrote. “The way to assess collective bargaining is not to ask whether it works to bring labor peace. It is to ask whether it promotes the interest of children in a quality education. And the answer to that question is no, it does not. Not even remotely.”

Education historian Diane Ravitch argued last week on NPR, though, that the strike was a way to ultimately help children. “I think the union has a vision of a school system that has the kind of resources where children get what they actually need,” she said on The Diane Rehm Show Wednesday. “[The strike] has to do with all the specific issues, but with a larger vision of what’s the best kind of education for children.”

Teachers union members across the country have thrown their support behind their striking peers. Emanuel pointed to the Boston Teachers Union, which recently finished its own tense negotiations over a new evaluation system without striking, as an example the Chicago union should follow.

In response, the Boston union took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Sun-Times to publish a letter to Emanuel. “Thank you for mentioning our contract settlement, which came about as a result of a mutually respectful conversation between the parties,” the union wrote. “Perhaps you can learn from us—and begin to treat your own teaching force with the same respect.”

Saturday, teachers from Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states came to Chicago to lend their support to teachers in a rally.

And the union says it’s receiving a great deal of parental support as well. A poll released last week found that 55.5 percent of parents supported the union’s decision to go on strike, while 40 percent opposed it.

For other parents, frustration grew as the week went on. “Our kids were being used as leverage,” Chicago parent Humberto Ramirez told The Chicago Tribune. “I certainly don’t begrudge any benefits of salaries the [teachers union] has been able to negotiate, but [they] put so many people in a terrible inconvenience simply because they have this grand union agenda.”

The talk soon turned to teacher salaries, and through the day, that topic came up, over and over again.

Research has shown that teachers are the single most important in-school factor for affecting student performance, so attracting and keeping good teachers has become a priority across the country. But educators at the conference stressed that the strongest teachers may be leaving the field because of concerns over salary or the belief that teaching is not a respectable profession. And, they say, the field may not be attracting the strongest potential teachers for those same reasons.

“I want teachers to be treated like brain surgeons, and assume that every single day that they go into work is a challenging day,” said Ninive Calegari, panelist and president of the nonprofit advocacy group The Teacher Salary Project. “What offends me is that they then go home to financial stress, and that’s unfair and as Americans, we should be offended by that.”

As it stands now, the National Education Association reports that beginning public school teachers can be paid anywhere from around $24,000, which is the average in Montana (and the lowest in the country), to nearly $45,000, the average beginning salary in New Jersey.

Salaries also vary within states, depending on district pay-scales, experience and the teacher’s education level. In districts that have introduced merit pay, teacher bonuses are typically based on how students perform on standardized tests.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a panelist and professor at Stanford University who is outspoken on education issues, highlighted the disparity between U.S. teacher salaries and those in high-performing countries like Finland and Singapore. In those countries, teachers and doctors have comparable salaries, and teacher education programs are extremely selective.

In Finland, where only one in 10 applicants is accepted by teacher education programs, the teaching profession is highly respected and attracts the nation’s top college graduates.

“People respond to you depending upon how much money you make as far as the authority you have, the prestige,” said Brian Crosby, a panelist and co-chair of the English Department at Hoover High School in Glendale, Calif.  “Teachers do not have the amount of salary they need to have the level of respect they deserve.”

The comparison to Finland and the issue of teacher salary kept coming up through the day.

“We are not Singapore, we are not Finland, we have a different set of circumstances,” said Kaya Henderson, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools. “At the same time, we have to continue to hold these children to high standards.”

Some districts have seen salary levels directly affect their ability to attract and retain teachers. In Tennessee, Metro Nashville Public Schools this summer raised beginning teacher salaries by more than $5,000 a year, to $40,000. As a result, school officials said they had a flood of applications—over 1,000 for about 540 positions.

Meanwhile, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, in North Carolina, which has experimented in the past with bonuses based on test scores, was recently identified in a study as a district that has failed to keep enough good teachers. This year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg teachers, who start at $34,000, received their first pay raise in four years. New Superintendent Heath Morrison is also investigating how to raise morale and provide more support to teachers as a retention strategy.

But the teacher strike in Chicago, where the average teacher salary is $71,236, demonstrates that for many teachers, salary is only one critical issue.  Chicago teachers are some of the most highly paid in the nation, but even the offer of a 16 percent pay raise over the next four years has not deterred them from striking over other issues, like teacher evaluations and job security.

While raising salaries may not be a main focus of education reform, several members of the panel suggested that it might be the best starting point when it comes to making teaching a more respected position and attracting quality teachers. “In order for our country to be successful in the future, we need to have college students want to teach the same way they want to get into medical school,” said Calegari. “I think that that standard would really protect the future of our country.”

(Photo by Sarah-Ji)

Chicago teachers went on strike Monday, after protracted negotiations over wages, length of the school day, health benefits and new teacher evaluations failed to yield a new contract for members of the city’s teachers union. (A new round of negotiations could end the strike by 2 p.m. Friday, however.)

This year, the Chicago Public Schools planned to roll out a new teacher evaluation system tying at least 25 percent of a teacher’s rating to student test scores. The district is ahead of a state law that requires new evaluations to be adopted by the 2016-17 school year.

Stricter evaluation systems for teachers have been a signature of President Barack Obama’s education reform efforts, but they have been hotly contested by teachers around the country.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney has tried to elevate the strike into a national political issue. He released a statement on Monday condemning the teachers unions and his opponent. “President Obama has chosen his side in this fight, sending his vice president last year to assure the nation’s largest teachers union that ‘you should have no doubt about my affection for you and the president’s commitment to you,’” Romney said. “I choose to side with the parents and students depending on public schools.”

Yet, so far, President Obama has chosen to stay out of the strike in Chicago, citing it as a local dispute. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a brief statement saying he hoped “the parties will come together to settle this quickly and get our kids back in the classroom.”

Political analysts and strategists at the national level have suggested that the longer the strike lasts, the worse it could be politically for Obama. “There’s no doubt that this hurts President Obama,” Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told The New York Times. “He needs teachers to be energized and to go out and knock on doors and man phone banks for him. Right now they’re watching his former chief of staff go toe to toe with the teachers’ union in Chicago. This is not a position that the president wants to find himself in.”

But the Chicago strike is just the latest—if most dramatic—incident in a series of confrontations between teachers unions and the Obama administration. In particular, Obama has pushed for policies like merit pay and increasing the number of charter schools, which unions have vehemently opposed.

Several teachers who spoke with The Hechinger Report at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., last week said they had no problem overlooking disagreements with Obama in order to support him in his re-election bid. Romney’s plans, including his desire to expand school choice, were not an appealing alternative to them. And American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten praised Obama for not getting involved at a Chicago press conference, and assured The Report that she saw no conflict between supporting striking teachers and supporting the president.

Does the strike hinder Obama’s re-election hopes? Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

But some states seem to be feeling the same way about the Obama administration’s own prescriptions for reform.

(photo courtesy of Daniel J. Calderón)

Georgia is in a contentious battle with the feds over the money it won through the Race to the Top competition. The Department of Education has threatened to reduce the state’s award by $33 million after Georgia changed aspects of its teacher evaluation system following a pilot program. Republican Gov. Nathan Deal—who came into office after Georgia submitted its application for the grant—has said he refuses to “defend a system that we have been warned will not work,” and fears lawsuits if he proceeds under the plan the feds originally approved.

Hawaii is among a handful of other states that have also seen their grants jeopardized after missing deadlines and encountering other obstacles. In Illinois, federal officials are unhappy that the state is rolling out new teacher evaluations over the course of the next four years. That’s too slow, the feds have said, and they’re threatening to deny Illinois a waiver from NCLB requirements if they don’t speed up.

Illinois officials have balked at the pressure to move faster, however, saying that rushing risks getting it wrong. (Many low-performing schools in Illinois have to introduce the new evaluations this year.)

“It is really hard work to do well, and it is really high stakes, and we’ve got to be thoughtful,” Chris Koch, the Illinois school superintendent, told the Chicago Tribune last month. “We are not trying to dodge anything. … We’ve done a lot of hard work, and the feds should honor state sovereignty in this regard and let us work within the time frame we approved.”

Tennessee, which got its evaluation system up and running last school year, has faced criticism for moving too quickly, as has Louisiana, which is starting this year without having piloted some of the key components of its new system.

The Tennessee Department of Education released an evaluation of its own evaluation system this summer. Among its findings, which were largely positive, the report also said the following:

“District and school administrators spent considerable time in evaluation training demonstrating an understanding of the different levels of performance for observations, and all evaluators passed a test demonstrating this understanding. However, in implementation, observers systematically failed to identify the lowest performing teachers, leaving these teachers without access to meaningful professional development and leaving their students and parents without a reasonable expectation of improved instruction in the future.”

Pushing states to hurry up or to follow plans that experimentation shows may be faulty might attract criticism, but the Obama administration would probably also be attacked if it gave away federal money with no strings attached. (Although conservatives who think the federal government is overreaching would certainly be pleased.) So far, no state that’s applied for an NCLB waiver or won Race to the Top money has walked away.

Or, at least, that’s what a group of Internet-savvy educators who convened in New York City this week are hoping.

A presenter at the #140edu conference. (photo courtesy of @mbteach, via Twitter)

“Being connected [through social-networking sites] is an opportunity for growth anytime, anywhere,” said Steve Anderson, director of instructional technology for the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, speaking yesterday at the second annual #140edu conference, a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit for tweets. A teacher can go on Twitter, he added, and “learn 10 new things.”

Traditional forms of on-the-job training for teachers have been much-maligned in recent years by experts and by teachers themselves. “Many times professional development is like herding cattle: We’re taking everybody in the same direction. We’re going to learn the same thing,” said Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in northern New Jersey.

For-profit companies, nonprofits and universities make lots of money providing training to schools, but little research exists on what types of professional development for teachers work best. Increasingly, schools and districts are adopting what experts say are more promising ways of training teachers that involve more coaching and teacher collaboration.

But some educators who attended the #140edu conference want to push the envelope further, to make teacher training even more individualized and self-directed. Among the attendees were teachers and principals who keep blogs documenting their daily travails and successes in the classroom, which work as guideposts for others and forums where they can glean tips. Some have thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

Kyle Pace, an instructional technology specialist for the Lee’s Summit School District, near Kansas City, gave an example of how personal networks and crowd-sourcing on the Internet could improve on the old ways of training teachers:

“A teacher could be teaching a lesson on the Civil War. That lesson could bomb. They could go to their network, pose a question, ask for a resource. In the next period they could have new resources, things to try immediately,” he said.

“Traditional professional development can’t offer that immediacy of being a connected educator,” Pace added.

In-person interaction shouldn’t be completely discarded, however, said Sheninger, who says he has revolutionized his school partly through help from people he met via Twitter. “I value my face-to-face connections more than I do my virtual ones,” he said. “Technology flattens our ability to connect with people. It just makes things easier. It’s not the only way I connect with people.”

Indeed, at the conference, a room set aside for in-person mingling and chatting was often more crowded than the auditorium where panelists were giving their talks.