"Charting the Course" agenda moves ahead
Leaders and members gather to explore peer review component 

The nation's public schools need a "proactive agenda fashioned by educators," AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese told leaders of the union's teachers division this fall. The union took strides in that direction in October when AFT leaders and members gathered outside Washington, D.C., to explore concepts tied to "Charting the Course: The AFT's Education Agenda To Reach All Children."
Unveiled last summer, "Charting the Course" focuses on five areas that are fundamental to student success: teaching quality, safe and orderly schools, early reading instruction and intervention, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and intensive assistance to high-poverty schools.

These are areas where there are solid, demonstrated solutions available, and the seminar outside Washington focused on teacher quality and AFT-shaped models of teacher induction, with extensive support for new teachers through peer assistance and review programs.

Participants discussed several models of peer assistance and review (PAR), inluding one of the most successful initiatives that was launched by the AFT's Toledo, Ohio, local in the early 1980s. It is a model worth exploring in other districts, says Steven Grossman, president of the North Suburban Teachers Union in Skokie, Ill., and one of the attendees at the fall seminar.

The Toledo plan for induction is based in part on a quality selection process for identifying and training mentor teachers, adequate compensation and training for those mentors, and time for them to genuinely teach and support beginning teachers. "We think it might be a better way to evaluate new teachers and a better way to train teachers," says Grossman. "There is certainly interest in replacing the system [used by districts around the country] based on three or four classroom observations by an administrator who isn't in the classroom," he says. Everyone wins when you can change the system, "making it more of an intensive internship with lots of support."

Even though North Suburban represents about 400 teachers in Niles Township, a small system just north of Chicago, many of the PAR elements developed in a larger urban system like Toledo still could apply well, Grossman believes. And Niles Township already has a highly regarded mentoring program. Grossman, who teaches at West Niles High School, is now arranging a visit to Toledo so that educators and administrators in his district can see firsthand how that program works.

The fall seminar was designed to foster this type of conversation and exploration of proven models in education. Future meetings will focus on other elements included in "Charting the Course," which is available at www.aft.org/teachers.

The United Federation of Teachers, the AFT's affiliate in New York City, this fall reached agreement with the city on a voluntary schoolwide compensation program to be piloted in approximately 200 of New York City's highest-needs schools. Under the agreement—an unresolved provision of the 2005 collective bar-gaining agreement—schoolwide bonuses will be offered if the schools show significant gains in academic achievement over the course of a year.

A 55 percent majority of staff members must vote to opt in before a school will participate in the pilot. A compensation committee of four—made up of the principal and another administrator along with two UFT-represented educators elected by their colleagues—will decide by consensus how to divide the bonus. If the committee is unable to reach consensus, the bonus will be forfeited. Each school's award will be equal to approximately $3,000 multiplied by the number of UFT members in the school.

The UFT and the city "have worked together to develop a locally negotiated, voluntary, schoolwide initiative that rewards and promotes the collaborative work environment favored by educators," says AFT president Edward J. McElroy. "Such initiatives have long been advocated by the AFT.

"We know that changes in compensation systems work only if, as in this system, they have been developed with—and have the buy-in of-teachers directly affected by the changes," he says.

The union and city also agreed on another outstanding contractual item, one that promotes pension equity.