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• Unions agree with Obama except when they don't
• ...And the winner is! NCTQ collective bargaining conference
• Pensions bring discord to Music City
• Union tussles in Rhode Island and West Virginia
• Hawaii: Where so much is wrong, is anyone doing it right?
• Teacher preparation: Defending what can't be defended?
• No surprise here: TFA, TNTP applications surge
• Continuing Series: What does it take to fire a teacher?
• Common sense from Common Good
• Conflicting perspectives from MetLife and NEA

After eight years of opposing education plans out of the Executive Office, teachers' unions are facing a new and harder problem: how to disagree with essential points of the Obama education agenda without drawing attention to the clash.

After President Obama's first major speech on education the AFT issued an ambiguous statement in which it professed that it "fully supports shared responsibility for education." State and local affiliate leaders, like Michigan AFT President David Hecker, assured the public that "our members do not have a problem with change or reform." Hecker went on to assert that his union wants to see American schools as the "envy of the world," especially if education begins early and goes late. It hasn't been lost on Hecker and other AFT officials that better education a la Obama should translate into more spending on schools and more jobs for teachers.

Response from the NEA president was notable for the objections he didn't raise. He resoundingly endorsed Obama's pay reforms, in spite of his union's previous vocal opposition to differentiated and performance pay. Perhaps the NEA is finding itself too overwhelmed by its general identity crisis to really worry about what the President had to say.

Congratulations to the winners of NCTQ's Tr3 research competition: Kristine Lamm West and Elton Mykerezi from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Chris Ferguson from the University of Indiana took second place. The winners took away a $15,000 cash prize, with a second place prize of $5,000. Click here to read the conference versions of the stellar papers.

Teacher pensions may not be the topic of the next Taylor Swift Billboard topper, but those-in-the-know thought the topic was hot, hot, hot at a February conference in Nashville, sponsored by the National Center on Performance Incentives.

What proved so contentious? The DB camp (that's Defined Benefits in pension parlance) who were in the minority in attendance complained more than a few times of the decks being stacked by the DC majority (Defined Contribution). Speaking on behalf of the DC camp, economist Dan Goldhaber, asserted that the status quo was not an option: the necessity of pension reform, not any particular affinity for the kind of pension plans states chose to offer teachers, was the motivation for DCers.

There was also an argument over what is the appropriate "discount rate" for states to calculate their pension fund earnings, with what seemed like one lone actuary in attendance having to defend the current practice of using 8 percent over 4 percent. But a TIAA-CREF exec proved to be a turncoat. Jaws dropped right and left. (The traitor!) (The debate is not inconsequential as, for example, under an 8 percent discount rate, Massachusetts' pension fund is 70 percent funded, but under a 4 percent rate, it is only 44 percent funded.)

AEI's Rick Hess--wearing a tie!--offered some of the most important insights of the meeting on how states have gotten into so much trouble on the pension front. He argued that pension enhancements have been a politically easy way to keep teachers happy by providing more total compensation, but deferring the costs to future years.

Hess' point was well illustrated by a fascinating example on precisely those dynamics, supplied by economist Michael Podgursky. Podgursky pulled together the changes made to Missouri's pension system over a single decade.

As seen below, Missouri's legislature radically increased teachers' total pension wealth over a period of 10 years but probably without any real understanding on the part of said legislators, as the changes were made incrementally from one legislative session to the next. By gradually increasing COLA levels, introducing early retirement options, and changing the calculations for a teacher's average salary (FAS), Missouri teachers retired earlier with significantly greater benefits -- while across the nation other workers were retiring later with decreased Social Security benefits.

East Providence, Rhode Island, school board members are exhibiting more chutzpah than Wall Street executives. Board members in the cash-strapped district want to avoid the district's obligations to negotiate pay and benefits with teachers. The board claims that state mandates barring districts from running up deficits trump other obligations, including negotiating with the local teachers' union.

Their tactics aside, the school board is actually seeking some fairly reasonable cuts, considering the tough times:

It's hard to state this delicately. Apparently, the professional board charged with licensing Hawaii's new and existing teachers ... stinks. A state-appointed auditor found that the board has failed to develop an effective licensing program over the seven years of its operation. It is "in a state of confusion" and ought not to survive, the auditor opined.

The board's chair, Jonathan Gillentine, was quick to deny the auditor's findings and countered that the board had in fact developed "rigorous, quality-driven" standards. Further, he claimed, any blame for Hawaii's inability to meet NCLB's highly qualified teacher requirement lies with the state department of education, not the professional standards board.

Based on our own reading of how teachers get licensed in Hawaii, NCTQ is thinking there's plenty of blame to go around. As one example among many in a long list of teacher quality problems, Hawaii stands out for its blatant disregard of the NCLB requirement that states stop licensing teachers on emergency credentials: teachers are allowed to stay on the rolls for as long as four years without passing the states' licensing exams.

Professional standards boards such as Hawaii's are a favorite of many teacher groups, because they promise to put the profession in charge of itself, much like law or medicine. But unlike comparable boards in law or medicine, too often protecting the clan takes precedence over asserting any actual standards.

Nobody has ever claimed it would be easy to close down ed schools, no matter how much evidence there is that they're consistently churning out bad teachers. The feisty new president at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), Allen Sessoms, is finding out how hard it is just to revamp his education school, no matter that it fails to graduate most of its aspiring teachers.

The UDC undergraduate education department has no particular problem attracting wannabe teachers, posting 380 students last year, but only 8 percent of those students actually manage to graduate within six years. Why? Because the vast majority of them cannot pass a basic 3 Rs skills test.

One would think defenders of such a record would be in short supply. But no, many of the department's faculty members are decrying the planned closure. One professor explained away the incredible failure rate with this choice quote: "We're not math educators." If the ed school accepts students with no math skills, and is then unwilling to remediate, just whose job is it?

Sessom's opinion on the school's graduation statistic -- "it's scary" -- applies on many fronts, including the fact that the UDC program has met all the standards for NCATE accreditation.

Fueled by a diminishing economy, Teach For America and The New Teacher Project are both reporting a record number of applicants. The 35,000 applicants to TFA and 29,600 applicants to TNTP's Teaching Fellows programs represent over a 40 percent increase in applications for both organizations.

For TFA, that marks the second year in a row with significant jumps in application numbers, with the 2008 applicant pool 36 percent larger than in 2007. The last time the economy dipped, between 2001 and 2002, the applicant pool increased two-fold.

If the TFA trajectory continues through the end of hiring season, it will be the organization's most selective year, with an acceptance rate hovering around 10 percent. The applicant pool includes 11 percent of all Ivy League school seniors, many of whom will have had a harder time getting into TFA than they did their alma mater.

A recent Center for American Progress report by Robin Chait and Teach For America's Michele McLaughlin outlines how states can capitalize on this interest by supporting genuine alternative certification programs. The report echoes suggestions in the State Teacher Policy Yearbook 2007 and Alternative Certification Isn't Alternative: "minimize participant burden, ensure program quality and encourage innovation and growth."

Chicago Public Schools being investigated for hundreds of abuse claims

An investigation by a local Chicago TV station has unveiled hundreds of reports of child abuse in Windy City schools over the past six years, mostly leading to little or no action taken by the school system. According to the CBS 2 investigation, there have been 818 students who have filed claims in which they allege being battered by teachers, aides, coaches, administrators or security guards. School system investigators substantiated 568 of those claims but in only 10 percent of the cases has anyone been fired or forced to resign.

What does it take to get fired in Chicago? Apparently, "battering students for several years" and "100 licks with a belt," according to district documents, is not enough. The investigation also revealed reports of teachers committing the following: beating a student with a broomstick, striking a student with staplers, choking a student, pushing a student down the stairs, and paddling a volleyball player for missing a serve. In addition to a whole lot of tolerance for abuse, investigators generally take months to investigate a case.

In response, new Chicago schools CEO Ron Huberman has ordered a high level review of five years' worth of cases.

In our continuing coverage of Portillo vs. St. Lucie County, Florida, (click here) no new developments. As promised, we're tracking this story month to month, even when there aren't any new developments. In our view, that's a large part of the problem.

New York City attorney and Common Good organization founder Philip K. Howard has once again taken on our litigious society, this time devoting a chapter to what happens in schools when regulations replace shared values.

In a chapter from his new book, Life Without Lawyers, Howard asserts that school districts' preference for bureaucratic solutions has crushed educators' ability to create the strong cultures that help people solve problems as they arise.

Take disciplining disruptive students. Howard describes lots of classroom mayhem, including students whalloping teachers, that, he argues, cannot be controlled because of extensive due process rules. In school districts like New York City, where a 210-page booklet outlines procedures for student discipline, offenses just end up going unpunished because no one wants to deal with the paperwork. On the other hand, zero-tolerance policies result in the punishment of innocent students -- like the poor kid who brought a plastic knife to a school with a "no knives" rule -- because teachers are forced to follow the written law instead of their own common sense.

Howard contrasts many regular inner-city public schools with their charter and parochial counterparts, where disorder is not endemic. The difference, he says, is the authority of the schools to govern themselves and enforce their values instead of being bossed by an outside bureaucracy that is trying to juggle the conflicting interests of politicians, parents and unions.

The solution Howard seeks is a system where teachers are able to promptly discipline misbehaving students before disorder breeds disorder and valuable class time is lost. Like Al Shanker before him, he suggests removing perpetually troubled students from classrooms and finding a better situation for them. And if there's unfairness? He advocates the creation of a committee of school citizens with the power to investigate and overturn punishments.

According to MetLife's latest annual survey , teachers' career satisfaction is greater than in earlier years of the survey, which is now a quarter of a century old. Two-thirds of teachers feel respected in society and believe their salary is decent.

As portrayed by the survey, teachers have far rosier views than those of the union that represents more than 2 million of them. The NEA wants everybody to know that teachers continue to be deeply unhappy when it comes to standardized testing and NCLB.