Tentative Agreement Highlights video clip

PowerPoint Presentation of the WTU-DCPS Tentative Agreement

Members:

Please view the summary of the WTU-DCPS Tentative Agreement on this slide presentation:

Contract Presentation

View more presentations from solangala.

TA Financial Sufficiency Fact Sheet

This fact sheet further explains financial sufficiency for the provisions of the tentative agreement. The recent CFO fiscal certification of the tentative agreement means that public dollars are available to fully fund the new contract.

TENTATIVE AGREEMENT SUPPORTERS

The following WTU members are voting "YES" for the
tentative agreement. See why.

Impact Evaluation System Fact Sheet

The WTU has developed an agreement with DC Public Schools that empowers members by establishing a mechanism that gives teachers ongoing, significant input into the IMPACT instrument and process. This one page fact sheet explains in further detail.

TA Mutual Consent - Fact Sheet

This a one page fact sheet on Mutual Consent that further explains how the proposed Tentative Agreement improves job security and establishes a a clear policy for RIFs and excessing of staff.

Tentative Agreement Q&A - Part II

The following questions have been asked by members after receiving the Tentative Agreement. More detailed information can be found at www.wtulocal6.org or www.unitedfordckids.org.

Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed

New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL
EDUCATION May 02, 2010

In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.

Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.

Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”

That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools. The New York Times

Credo: George Parker

By: Leah Fabel Examiner Staff Writer

May 2, 2010
(Andrew Harnik/The Examiner)

George Parker became president of the Washington Teachers' Union in 2005, as D.C. Public Schools pushed modest reforms that attracted minimal attention outside of the Beltway. Five years later, the city is at the center of the school reform universe, with Parker in the role of defending teachers by demanding more money and more support amid the tumult of major changes to schools and classrooms. Parker, 59, sat down with the Washington Examiner to share thoughts on the faith and experiences that have inspired his fight.

Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?

I'm a Christian, I believe in God. I believe that it's important to know that there's something bigger than yourself to help keep you grounded, and to give you faith when hope is low, and when you need to believe in something.

Did anyone or any event especially influence your faith?

I grew up in North Carolina, in the country, on a farm. My mother was very, very strong in her faith, and she raised us that way. When I went away to college, I got into a different arena, you could say. But later on, one of the most dramatic things that moved me closer to God was my mother's death, in 2000. I was there in the hospital when she passed, and her last conversation with me was about God, and the strength of my faith, and not just talking the faith, but living it. That experience moved me to a different level. My mother's death was the one thing in life I didn't want to see happen, but I couldn't stop it. You realize in those situations that you don't control anything. That realization, and that conversation, was very, very important. I've been a good person in my life, but in that moment there was growth, and the realization that I had to commit more. And I have.

How did a childhood spent in the segregated schools of the South affect your approach to teaching today?

When I grew up, very often we were given the books that the white kids had already used. We got their old books. But the key was that it didn't matter where you start out -- you can still overcome, and move forward and be successful. That helped me to form the philosophy that education makes all the difference. No matter where you start, it's about where you're going.
We had teachers, too, who were not going to let us fail. We had teachers who understood, at that point, that we were going to have to be twice as good in order to succeed, and they used tough love to get us there. I don't support putting hands on a child, but teachers don't have the same kind of authority in classrooms today. Today, the teacher teaches and disciplinary authority rests largely in the hands of the principal. That makes teaching much tougher.

You spent many years as a math teacher. What's harder, managing a class full of kids or managing a city full of teachers?

[Laughter] Probably, I'd say that working with the union, and the duties of this particular job are harder than what I did with kids. One thing about children is that they're very honest. And when you're dealing with adults, sometimes people are not honest. You often have to work through all of the "yuck," the personal agendas, to get to the real core. With children, what you see is what you get. They'll sometimes tell you more than you want to hear, but at least they're honest about it.

At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?

At my core, I believe that what you do for others is more important than what you do for yourself. That's the guiding principle. And I believe that you reap what you sow. Sow good seeds, sooner or later, they will bear fruit. Sow bad seeds, sooner or later, they come up badly.

-Leah Fabel

Rhee, smoke and mirrors in the D.C. schools budget

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s mantra is performance and accountability, and more performance and more accountability.

She is, in fact, getting ready to judge teachers under her new IMPACT evaluation system, and, presumably, will lop off, figuratively, the professional heads of those who don’t score high enough. That’s accountability in action.

But what about Rhee’s own performance?

To look at the unnecessary and damaging mess over the proposed contract that she negotiated over two-plus years with the teachers union is to wonder whether she could pass an evaluation as tough as the one she set for teachers.

Reaching a contract with the teachers after years of painful negotiations was seen by many as excellent sign that Rhee, and the teachers union, were both able to make painful concessions. Rhee, with her take-no-prisoners, I-am-always-right style, saw the value of compromise.
To fund teachers’ raises in the contract, she secured private funding from foundations--apparently without checking whether the city’s finance folks would sign off on such an arrangement. Read more

D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee shifts blame when time to judge own performance

By Robert McCartney

Sunday, May 2, 2010; C03

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee seldom misses a chance to stress that teachers and students must be judged by their performance. It's one of her core principles. Results count most.

Thus, I thought it was reasonable to ask Rhee how she evaluated her own performance in the last two weeks of flips and flops and near-total confusion over whether the city actually has enough money to cover pay increases promised under a tentative new teachers contract.

I posed the question during a five-minute interview Friday at the end of an all-day D.C. Council hearing at which she testified.

Rhee's answer? It was somebody else's fault.

"I don't manage the budget," she said. That pointed the finger directly at the District's chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi.

The most that Rhee would concede was: "We could have done a better job of communicating." She declined to expound.

So much for accountability.

Although Gandhi shares a hefty portion of the blame, it's hardly too much to ask that Rhee make sure she can explain broadly how the city's going to pay for a historic, nationally acclaimed teachers contract before she rolls it out. Instead, nearly a month after the announcement, the District is at least $33 million short.

Rhee wants teachers evaluated rigorously for their supervision of the classroom. Surely it's fair to judge the boss for her overall supervision of something as basic as dollars and cents.

Rhee said she wasn't getting information she needed from Gandhi. He's been the CFO since she arrived. It's been nearly three years. Why hasn't she figured out how to make that work?

The result is that the bizarre uncertainty over the funding has overshadowed what should have been a celebratory moment.

Writing this is a comedown for me. I lauded Rhee in my column three weeks ago for negotiating the contract, which would make landmark changes that should improve D.C. public education. I haven't deserted the chancellor. I still think it's vital to find the money, ratify the deal and let her get on with transforming the schools.

Still, even though Rhee wasn't solely at fault, the follies again illustrate some of her weaknesses.
First, as kindergarten teachers describe some students, she doesn't play well with others. We already knew of Rhee's public spats with teachers, the union and the D.C. Council. Now add the city's independent financial czar to the list.

Rhee excluded Gandhi's representative from her regular senior staff meetings on grounds that he was only an interim appointment. Also, she didn't get the CFO's input from the start on roughly how much money would be available for the contract. (Under questioning, she acknowledged "in hindsight" that would have been desirable.)

Second, Rhee's introduction of the contract showed lack of preparation. In particular, she didn't work out how to handle the use of private foundations' grants, a feature of the contract for which she was directly responsible.

Rhee's haste cuts two ways. On one hand, she personifies the urgency that many reformers feel about the need to fix education. On the other, Rhee sometimes seems to care too much about being first in implementing various changes, to fit the image she's created for herself as a preeminent champion of reform.

These traits are not new. A U.S. Education Department review panel noted them in March when it rejected the District's application for federal Race to the Top school reform funds. It faulted the District in part for being too concerned with obtaining "endorsement for its human management style, to showcase the District's speed in achieving results and to become a national model."
The panel said that shifted the focus from "the detail and attention needed to build the capacity of staff to become great teachers and leaders."

Rhee's and Gandhi's inability to clarify the funding would be comical if it weren't so important.
First the two went back and forth on whether the school system was running an unexpected surplus that could help cover teachers' raises. Then Gandhi said he couldn't certify the contract if it depended on private grants that could be revoked.

The problem still isn't resolved, but I'm confident the money will be found eventually. "This sounds very doable," said the council's Finance Committee chairman, Jack Evans (D-Ward 2).

Gandhi's missteps are not new. He bore responsibility for failing to catch a mid-level tax bureaucrat while she embezzled $48 million over nearly two decades. Now we learn that his office doesn't even provide Rhee with what should be routine monthly reports on how her actual spending compares to the budget.

"The CFO has failed for 10 years to come to terms with basic infrastructure issues. . . . That speaks volumes," said council member David Catania (I-At Large).

Council member Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) concisely summarized the two officials' shortcomings in a comment to Gandhi, who also testified.

"The chancellor doesn't take you seriously or doesn't believe what you say, and you're not aggressive enough to put your foot down and say this is the way it should go, to convince her of the financial status of the D.C. public school system," Alexander said.

While Rhee and Gandhi have been at odds for months, it was especially problematic that they didn't collaborate more closely just before announcing the contract. Rhee said that happened mainly because of fear that the union membership would learn about the deal prematurely from the press.

"Here's the biggest problem: If we had faith that we could have gone through the fiscal certification process without any leaks, then we would have done that," she told me.

So that's the bottom line. When things go wrong, blame the media.