Maria Goodloe-Johnson to Liv Finne: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

The players? Maria Goodloe-Johnson, superintendent of the Seattle Public Schools, and Liv Finne, Education Analyst for the Washington Policy Center, a conservative-trending think tank.

The timeframe? August, when Goodloe-Johnson tossed a molotov cocktail into the SPS/SEA negotiations with her SERVE proposal for student achievement.

On August 2nd, at the height of the negotiations, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson talks with Liv and gets some publicity:

Last week Seattle Schools Superintendent Dr. Marie Goodloe-Johnson told me the District’s collaborative negotiating process with the teachers union (the Seattle Education Association), in place since April, had broken down. The Seattle School District is in the midst of a lengthy collective bargaining process on a new teacher contract that will determine the personnel costs taxpayers will have to pay in the years ahead.

With the failure of the collaborative approach, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson said the District will now be engaged in classic, and contentious, union/management negotiations, a process that will likely take many months. She declined to specify what contract provisions had led to the break-down.

I asked whether the District was preparing for a possible strike. Her answer was, “Yes, but I’m not at liberty to give out details.”

There's the feed: negotiations are breaking down, collaboration has failed, and we (the district) are getting ready for a strike. Scary!

A few weeks later, on August 27th, Liv carries some more water:

Seattle students return to school in about two weeks. Their teachers should be ready and eager to greet them. A strike would deny students access to education, and teacher strikes are illegal under state law. Our research shows the Superintendent's initiative is reasonable, will help children learn, and deserves widespread community support.

And then on August 30th, in a post titled "Children Who Can't Read or Do Math OK By Seattle Teachers Union":

The most important factor for student learning is the quality of the teacher. The Seattle teachers union, by clinging to past practices, is being unfair to Seattle's students.

So we're be-bopping right along in the attack role, singing the Goodloe-Johnson siren song in the key of F, but then the SEA and the SPS reached an agreement, and you can see the tone start to change. From September 1st, and this is literally the entire post:

Everyone is awaiting release of the new contract agreement between the Seattle School District and the teachers' union, the Seattle Education Association. All indications are that it may be an historic agreement to improve the quality of education for Seattle schoolchildren. Teachers will vote on the agreement tomorrow. More on this later....

"Hey guys! How's that agreement coming along? I hear you got a good one! Happy to have helped! Guys! Guys?"

Move along to September 2nd, when the WPC is still trying hard but dawning recognition is starting to sink in:

Seattle Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and Seattle School Board members deserve credit for this negotiating this ground-breaking contract, reached after four months of difficult and arduous negotiations.

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Unfortunately, School Board members are providing no funding for the agreement. Apparently they plan to ask voters this fall for a special tax increase to pay for rewarding good teachers in public schools. This is disappointing. The signal policy improvement for Seattle school children is left unfunded. School Board members have placed their most important education reform at the bottom of their funding priorities.

A couple of weeks pass. Liv talks about innovation schools and charter schools. She got back around to Seattle on September 17th, and apparently they lost her number:

On September 1st, the District reached a closed-door agreement with its teachers union. The teachers ratified the agreement September 2, but it has not yet been made public.

I wanted to see the exact language of the agreement, to see which portions of the new evaluation and reward system for teachers depend on a tax increase. So I called the district to get a copy of the agreement. I was told the agreement would not be revealed until the week of September 13th, because specific “language was still being hashed out.”

This should worry taxpayers and parents. Platoons of district and union lawyers are working behind the scenes on this agreement. They are fighting over the language, and whatever they are fighting over is not trivial. They are fighting over substance.

I am worried. I don’t like the fact that district and union officials are operating in this clandestine fashion.

A week passed. Today I called the district again. Yet again, I was told that the agreement was not available. And that the public can’t see it for at least another week.

This is uncommonly strange. What is being added and deleted after the fact?

For what it's worth, the Seattle EA has the contract posted on their website under the collective bargaining tab. They also posted a 34 page document detailing the differences. It's kind of silly to say that "union officials" are being "clandestine" when all the information is right there for anyone--even the Washington Policy Center--to see.

It's been said that Goodloe-Johnson would like to be considered in the same echelon of urban superintendents that Michelle Rhee lives in and that Arne Duncan came from. It's a critique that follows Broad graduates all over the country, and to some in the ed reform movement it's taken as a sign of strength--you've got to break a few eggs, and all.

What's pretty apparent, though, is that there's a difference between being on the boat and being pulled along by the bow wave, and in this metaphor it's pretty obvious who the dinghy is.

Read more here, if any.

My Worry About the Labor Situation in the Seattle Schools....

....is that Maria Goodloe-Johnson will ruin the NWEA MAP test for all us districts that use it well and informatively.

She's trying to force a strike. She's the superintendent. If the largest school district in Washington State is pushed over that ledge, the MAP test will be one of the big reasons why, and that's a damned shame.

Read more here, if any.

Washington Education Week #3: Thanksgiving Turkeys Edition

The Race to the Top: With the lull between budget announcements and Legislative Assembly Days, most of the blog chatter this past week has been looking at how Washington State measures up in the federal Dash for the Cash Race to the Top grant program. The League of "Education" Voters has done a 6 part series on their blog that's worth your time to read; also with several blog posts that boil down to "Teachers suck, change everything" are the Partnership for Learning, here. And, just to clear out my RSS reader: Publicola.

I'm working on my own posts on each of the impacted areas, but one thing I do have to chuckle at is just how earnest some of the folks on the pro-RttT side are. "We have to allow the state to just take over failing schools!" they'll protest, without seeming to make the connection that we have laws regarding school boards and local control that are every bit as ingrained in the people of this state as dams and snowy mountain passes.

You can get an inkling of the fight if you go and look at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's School Report Cards. Using their metrics, the worst high schools in the state are in places like Toppenish, Walla Walla, Pasco, Aberdeen, Puyallup, and Coulee City--all represented by Republicans, all places where the community will revolt if you try to send in a bunch of "outsiders" from Olympia to run their schools. "It's for the kids!" needs to be overwhelmingly supported by the evidence to make school takeovers work, and I'm not convinced in the slightest that plan that the State Board of Education has in place gets us where the LEV and SFC want to go.

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Randy Dorn Cares for Children/Randy Dorn Hates All Children: The reaction to the recent proposal by Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn to delay the math and science graduation requirements is still bringing in a ton of reaction. Dorn tried to get out in front of the storm, and a hell of a storm it is: when papers like the Walla-Walla Union-Bulletin are saying that you "continue to undercut the effort to reform — and improve — education", you've got a publicity problem.

Personally, I think that the best, most sensible reaction came from Cliff Mass, a meteorologist of some note at the University of Washington. Keeping science and math as graduation requirements punishes the kids for the failures of adults to get the system right, whether it's the 20 different iterations of testing that we've had in the last decade or trying to define exactly what standards we want to hold them to. The failure of the kids is also the failure of the system, and right now we certainly don't have the system in place to get them all where we want them to be. This thread from the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession is also quite well written and on point. Check out Crosscut as well.

Also not really working in Dorn's favor: President Obama came out this week with a new initiative on expanding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. When the Department of Education is saying higher standards, and the President is saying higher standards, it's pretty clear that Dorn is going against the tide.

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The State Budget: Amber Gunn of the EFF stirred up a hornet's nest over on Crosscut when she echoed Sen. Zarelli's call for a special session to start cutting into the state budget right now. You've got some elected officials in the thread saying pretty incendiary things, and that's always fun!

(Personal aside: You don't hear anyone from any of the professional school organizations talking about a special session, because in a special session there's absolutely nothing good that could happen for schools.)

Publicola has a link to a video that Governor Gregoire put out talking about just how bad things are; consider it the anesthesia before the emergency appendectomy come January. The Capital Record also has the video and some pull-out quotes, here.

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"Merit" Pay in Action, and Inaction: The Superintendent of the Seattle Public Schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, met 4 of her 20 performance goals last year. That's a bad batting average, a really bad spelling test, and not exactly anything to write home about on the job.

That's also $5,280 more in her pocket, according to the Seattle Times.

The way that Goodloe-Johnson's contract is strucutred she can earn up to 10% on top of her base salary for meeting her 20 goals; that means that each goal met is worth $1,320. Under the goose/gander school of thought, if the state designed a plan to allow every teacher to earn up to 10% of their salary in incentives, the legislature would have to allocate about another $250,000,000 just to cover the costs.

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Other bits of note from the week:

• Joanne Jacobs on Why Arts Education Isn't a Luxury. The half-time art teacher in my district already knows that she's at risk of getting cut in the budget crunch to come; hopefully, I can use this to help mount a good defense.
  
  
• I love this and want to marry it.
  
  
• The United Faculty of Washington State has put together a great blog on higher education issues here in Washington; you can check it out here.
  
  
• People are flocking to community colleges, which isn't a surprise given high unemployment and a down economy.
  
  
• This commentary on what happens when school levies fail is important, particularly given the current state budget realities.
  
  
• When the teachers take over the schools.

Read more here, if any.