Say this much about the Center for Education Reform: It’s not a fan of the quality of public education in Alabama.

The only proof you need is this passage from a recent CER report: “The only other thing this state has going for it is that its teacher quality index isn’t a complete failure. Parents also have access to a decent school report card to better understand their schools, but school board elections are held in October, a busy time for parents to get engaged.”

Ouch.

A recent CER effort ranked all 50 states in what it calls the “Parent Power Index.” Alabama ranked 46th — poorly, in other words, which is so customary in national reviews of states’ public education systems. At the heart of the poor ranking was the state’s lack of charter schools, which, as most Alabamians know, has been a hot legislative topic in Montgomery for some time.

From here, it’s interesting to view the two sides of the broader issue: In Alabama, proponents of our public education — such as the Alabama Education Association, local and state school boards, the governor’s office and the state Legislature — constantly talk of how proud they are of our schools and how convinced they are of their quality.

Yet, out-of-state agencies who study such things consistently point to real and obvious deficiencies. Rarely do the two sides agree.

Arizona ranked sixth on The Center for Education Reform’s Parent Power Index, which means parents have access to quality education options and are provided with good information to make smart decisions about their children’s education.

The states were ranked on prevalence of charter schools, school choice, teacher quality, transparency and access to data, online learning, pro-reform governors and parent trigger laws, where parents have an opportunity to turn around failing schools.

The rankings pointed to Arizona’s scholarship program for students with disabilities and a tax credit that has helped more than 30,000 students opt into new schools. In addition, Arizona’s charter school law has provided more than 200,000 children with choices about their schooling.

Click here to see the top 10 states in The Center for Education Reform’s Parent Power Index.

Here are more specifics on Arizona from the index:

72%: Arizona’s graduation rate
1539: Average SAT test score
19.7: Average ACT score
33%: 4th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math score
31%: 8th grade NAEP math score
26%: 4th grade NAEP reading score
$8,006: Per pupil funding
1,077,831: Public school enrollment

The Center for Education Reform, a national non-profit tasked with improving public education, has released an encompassing report that grades parental empowerment, solid educational choices, teacher quality and access to digital learning, among other factors. That Pennsylvania ranks in the top ten of all states can be viewed as proof educational reforms in the commonwealth are beginning to take hold.

According to the annual findings released in the Parent Power Index, Pennsylvania trails Indiana, which ranks first; Florida; Ohio; Arizona; Washington, D.C.; Louisiana and Minnesota. Wisconsin and Utah round out the top ten.

The PPI is an interactive, accessible online tool that collects and itemizes data critical to judging the gains and deficiencies in a parent’s control of their child’s education. The index is designed to provide in-depth information to not only parents, but to stakeholders, politicians and education policymakers as well.

“All across America, parents are demanding more power over their children’s education, but the task of sorting through all the information out there is daunting,” said Center for Education Reform President Jeanne Allen. “There are a variety of resources available to evaluate how students are achieving, but there is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sound education reform policy.

As the mother of college students, I liken the PPI to a cumulative GPA, which is a composite of grades from varying professors,” Allen continued. “In this case, these professors are among the nation’s leading authorities and critical evaluators of education policy.”

Each state is graded on five broad categories: school choice, charter schools, online learning, teacher quality and transparency, and the findings related to Pennsylvania are interesting.

For example, the state received points for having a pro-education reform governor in Tom Corbett, but suffered due to limitations in the so-called parent-trigger law, which allows parents to force a change of district leadership if said district doesn’t meet the parents’ standards. The state also received credit for the number and quality of charter schools, for providing school choice and supporting a performance-based pay structure.

Pennsylvania’s overall PPI grade is 74.5 percent.

“A high number of digital learning options prevail alongside charter schools that serve a significant number of students throughout the state. The state affords parents many good information sources and allows them to vote for their elected school boards in traditionally-timed elections,” read PPI’s Pennsylvania summary. “The state’s teacher quality measures are weak, however, and more and better options across all schooling structures are needed and much in demand.”

Pennsylvania was shown to be slightly deficient is several areas, however. On the matter of school choice, the index found that Pennsylvania has two private school choice programs, and that the commonwealth does have a charter school law. Pennsylvania enables public virtual schooling, but needs to address its limited open enrollment policies.

In terms of transparency, the index singled out the School District of Philadelphia and the School Reform Commission for their openness; however, improvements must be made in terms of educating parents about other, less traditional modes of education.

“Pennsylvania’s department of education website is parent-friendly and school report cards are accessible. It is next to impossible, however, to find information on charter or cyber school options. Generally, elections for the 501 local school boards in Pennsylvania are held in November of odd-numbered years,” read the index. “Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission is governed by an appointed panel. Harrisburg and Chester Upland are governed by state appointed boards of control, although their local boards still operate with limited authority.”

The index also shows that Pennsylvania graduates 80.5 percent of its high school students, while the average SAT score is 1473 and the average ACT score is 22.3; of import, Pennsylvania spends an average of $12,418 on per-pupil funding.

“The index’s ‘Top Ten’ prove that when parents have access to options and good information, all children can succeed,” Allen said. “Lawmakers need to look to these exemplars and the policies that have afforded parents greater power elsewhere and act as fast to bring real education reform to their respective states.

“Parents and voters have declared that mediocrity is no longer acceptable,” Allen added, “and our elected officials have a mandate to fix out educational and economic problems for good.”

Two issues being cited as primary stumbling blocks to a Chicago teachers contract are a recall policy for teachers and a teacher evaluation system. Both affect job security for teachers and are part of larger efforts to overhaul schools in the city and nationally.

TEACHER RECALL POLICY

The Chicago Teachers Union is pushing hard for a procedure to recall teachers who have been laid off because of school closings, consolidations and turnarounds. The issue is of critical importance, the union has said, because of rumors that the district plans to close as many as 100 schools in coming years.

Earlier this year, CPS and the union struck a deal over the longer school day that temporarily allowed for such a recall. In exchange for the union agreeing to an extra 30 minutes in high schools and 75 minutes in elementary schools, CPS agreed to rehire nearly 500 teachers in noncore subjects from a pool of teachers who had been laid off.

The district, however, has resisted making such a recall policy the permanent method for filling vacancies in Chicago schools.

“Teachers in this city agreed to a longer day … and what our union got in return for that was a promise there would be a recall procedure for those teachers who are going to be hired,” said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of CTU. “Now we see that offer is being taken away from the table, and there is no sign of respect there. That’s important for our members.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has framed the issue as one of accountability, saying he doesn’t want to place the district’s hiring control in the hands of the union through such a recall process.

“I don’t believe I should pick ‘em. I don’t believe CPS should pick ‘em. I don’t believe the CTU leadership should pick ‘em,” Emanuel said Monday of hiring teachers. “If we’re going to hold our local principals in the school accountable for getting the results we need, they need to pick the best qualified.”

In the district’s latest proposal, CPS teachers whose schools are closed would be eligible for vacancies at the school that takes in the transferred students. If there are no vacancies, the teachers would have three options: a three-month lump-sum severance, five months in a “reassigned teacher pool” or a spot in a “quality teacher force pool,” which would entitle those teachers to an interview and an explanation if they are not hired.

The CPS offer also provides options for teachers displaced for other reasons, including turnarounds or phaseouts.

Jeanne Allen, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform, said recall policies do not encourage improvement or change within school districts but rather a status quo that has never led to improvement in educating children.

But the teachers union has countered that its members deserve as much job security as possible, especially with school closings becoming increasingly common.

“In Chicago, there are many good teachers who work in some of the toughest schools in the city, who saw their schools close through no fault of their own,” Sharkey said.

TEACHER RATINGS

Teacher contract negotiations often come down to money and benefits, so parents might be wondering how employee evaluations became a stumbling block in the Chicago Public Schools teacher strike.

The wrangling has to do with a new teacher rating system pushed by the Obama administration, which has sparked new laws and controversy in Illinois and around the country.

The new evaluations judge teachers in part on how their students perform, with a focus on academic gains. Teachers say that isn’t fair for a lot of reasons and that bad ratings resulting from the new system could threaten teachers’ livelihoods.

CTU President Karen Lewis estimates that almost 6,000 teachers could be discharged in the coming years — nearly 30 percent of union membership. “That is unacceptable and leads to instability for our students,” she said.

But supporters of the new system — created under a 2010 Illinois law — say it’s good for students and a way to ensure that the best teachers are in America’s schools.

“I think there is unbelievably strong momentum not only locally but nationally that the time has come to have more substantive evaluations,” said Robin Steans, executive director of the policy group Advance Illinois, which has been instrumental in pushing education reforms.

Steans said a great deal of effort went into negotiating the 2010 law and that the CTU was at the table — though not Lewis, because she wasn’t union president at the time.

The law required CPS to jump-start the new evaluation system this fall in at least 300 schools, though most suburban school districts were not required to put the program in place until 2016-17.

During the first two years of the new system, at least 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation must stem from how students perform on various assessments and how much they grow in knowledge and skills during the school year. From the third year on, the figure would be at least 30 percent.

CPS had planned to increase the figure to 40 percent in the coming years, but that could change in negotiations with the union, as could other parts of the new evaluation system.

The union wants to alter the scores that determine a teacher’s rating and the timing of tests used to measure student academic gains, among other changes. CPS officials say they’re open to working with the union and making adjustments as needed.

The new system also has been a point of contention between Illinois and the federal government, which wants Illinois to speed up use of the new evaluations. Illinois has refused, creating a standoff that has affected state education reforms.

At a downtown rally Monday, Rick Sawicki, a seventh- grade teacher at Evergreen Middle School, said it’s unfair to tie a teacher’s evaluation to student performance. He compared it to a coach not being able to pick the members of his team but still being evaluated on how they do on the field.

“There are a lot of factors that go into a child’s education that is not reflected in test scores,” he said. “Children are more to me than their test scores.”

Here are three examples of teaching/teachers at work for students:

1) The new paternalism

David Whitman spoke last Thursday at a CER event about his book Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. Whitman dedicated a section of both his talk and the book to a discussion focused on the aspects of a paternalistic teaching/learning environment. Here are but three examples:

• Provide teachers with more on-site training and new opportunities to review student progress and discipline problems, and to observe other teachers’ classrooms.
• Principals, with assistance from teachers, need to create a sense of mission and concern for student character. They should enlist all staff in attaining their goals, including the secretaries and janitors.

Finally, hire principals and teachers who like — and celebrate — their students.

2) Intervention (via ProJo)

“Education Commissioner Peter McWalters has ordered the city schools to begin filling teacher vacancies based on qualifications rather than seniority, an order that could fly in the face of the teachers’ contract.

McWalters, in a no-nonsense letter yesterday to Supt. Tom Brady, said the district hasn’t been moving fast enough to improve student achievement and that it was time to intervene in a much more aggressive fashion.

The order should come as no surprise to the district. Over the last two years the commissioner has issued a series of “corrective action” orders that spelled out what the district needed to do to improve student performance.

“This is intervention,” McWalters said yesterday. “Every state gets to the point when it’s time to stop suggesting. The district can’t come back and tell me they can’t get it done.”

McWalters said that seniority can no longer be the way that teachers are assigned and vacancies are filled. Starting this fall, teachers at six Providence schools, including the new career and technical high school and the new East Side middle school, will be assigned based on whether they have the skills needed to serve students at those particular schools.

McWalters made it clear that contract language will not stand in the way of the changes he expects.” (read MORE)

3) Taking one for the team (via Jay P. Greene’s Blog)

Matthew Ladner shares a story from the New York Times about NBA player Shane Battier. Battier is a true team player, Ladner says, a “white space” employee in business-speak. “The term refers to the space between boxes on an organizational chart. A white space employee is someone who does whatever it takes to achieve organizational goals and makes the organization work much better as a whole.”

Ladner ties the story of selfless Battier to teaching this way: “There’s no reward for being a white space player OR a superstar in the current system of teacher compensation-just an old player. Imagine a system of compensation for the NBA in which Larry Bird was still riding the pine on NBA squads and getting paid more money than LeBron, Kobe or Battier. Hall of Fame = National Board Certified, but you no longer want Bird in the game if you want to win.”

Got Mandate?

Since I am in 11th grade, I have had a lot of good teachers and bad teachers. In my school, students talk about teachers and who is a good teacher and who is not a good teacher. Believe me, teaching for a long time does not mean that a teacher is good. It just means the teacher has been a teacher for a long time. The same names come up for bad teachers and good teachers every year no matter which students are talking about them.

When the school district had to lay off teachers it didn’t matter if a teacher was not a good teacher. It only mattered if the teacher had been a teacher for a long time. That teacher was not going to lose his or her job. Thinking about that made me decide that merit pay is a good idea. In other jobs, more pay and promotions go to the workers that do the best job. If a worker does not do a good job then it’s, “You’re fired.” I have never seen a teacher fired. Students are just stuck with a terrible teacher.

Guadalupe was chosen as a finalist in a high school essay contest being held by The Voice of San Diego.