LIVE FROM SAN DIEGO… IT’S THE ASU+GSV SUMMIT!

TRANSFORMATION. It’s the thread that ties together all engaged in this, the 9th annual summit. University innovators, coding zealots, edtech investors, developers, advocates and educators have spent the past two days pitching, conversing and launching what may become the latest innovation for students. What makes this confab great is the openness of everyone here in rethinking everything, including how to do what we do know even better.

“We know what works in education,” said Timothy Renick, a Senior Vice President at Georgia State University and the winner of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Higher Education. “They need individualized education,” but universities are not set up to deliver more personalized learning, he said. “Why not?”

WHY NOT? That’s the attitude that Phyllis Lockett had one summit that made her stay an extra day and develop the business plan that became LEAP Innovations, a Chicago-based, edtech nonprofit that works with schools to develop personalized learning approaches supported by new innovations and edtech tools. Phyllis won the summit’s “Innovator of Color” award this year.

ASU INNOVATIONS. Each year attendees are regaled by ASU leadership who offer compelling visions of how to deliver higher ed here and abroad in more effective and efficient ways. The thought-provoking ASU president Michael Crow, who helped launch the summit, offered his view that the students of today no longer are wired to sit and listen but to engage. As Summit attendee and founder of VIDASHARKS, Eric Chagala, put it, Crow’s message is critical “as a new generation of leaders in education and policy stand to rise against the rigidity of a system that still sorts winners and losers.”

“History is determined by the people who stand up at a particular place and time.” —Michael Crow

NEW COLLEGE? Chegg Founder Dan Rosenswig is among the many here who believe we have to turn college on its head if we want to ensure completion with a purpose. “If you can binge watch [Netflix], you can binge watch college,” he told his audience. As Wyatt Cash reported, It’s time to abandon the two and four-year college model.

HELPING RURAL EDUCATION was also a theme, sparked in part by CER’s leadership on this issue before and during the summit. (Check out our session video here.) If bandwidth is the issue, companies like Nucleos.com can actually bring the internet to schools via a portable cloud! Looking for content? Try the hundreds gathered who are using data to demonstrate student learning, likeCarnegie Learning, Waterford and Nearpod, to name just three.

ARE HIGHER ED ACCESS AND WORKFORCE your jam? You should look up Burning Glass, Ellucian, Noodle and Strada, each of which are leading and providing tools and resources to help us all rethink the path from the early years to productive engagement in life.

TAKING ED INNOVATION INTO EDREFORM. We met new friends, strengthened old alliances and connected with education dignitaries and leaders like President George W. Bush and Angela Duckworth, who our CEO had the pleasure of introducing before her keynote address on Tuesday morning.

As CER approaches its 25th anniversary, we’re moving our focus from reform to innovation, and working to ignite the efforts of all the innovators here to ensure that the next 25 years of education efforts produce dramatically more results than the first. We will convene and coordinate actors across the thousands of efforts present to ensure that the best of all make their way into the nation’s schools, homes and learning environments of every level, shape, size and scope.

JOIN US THIS YEAR in doing just that! Stay informed with updates here.

CAUTION: This newswire contains serious and thought-provoking commentary on teacher pay and teacher strikes.

IN LIGHT OF THE TEACHER STRIKES, we are compelled to bring you some facts, research and data about teacher pay that we hope will enlighten and inform readers and help you avoid simply falling into the trap of saying to yourself, “Oh wow, this is awful that we pay teachers so poorly…” Indeed, we do pay teachers poorly, and the pay scales and structures of how teachers are hired, rewarded, retained and paid later in retirement are completely broken. This is not an exhaustive analysis, just a smattering of thoughts that should propel you to do your research before jumping to conclusions.

MOST ARE OUTRAGED BY TEACHER PAY LEVELS. How bad are they, really? The answer is, It depends. Confirms the California education blog ED100: “It is difficult to accurately compare teacher pay with private sector pay, because they work differently. In a simple comparison, teacher salaries can seem worse than they are. Private-sector workers’ retirement dollars flow through paycheck deductions and build up in a way that is easy to count. They show up on a monthly statement. They accumulate in an account… Teacher pensions, by contrast, don’t accumulate. Like a life insurance contract, teacher pensions are a promise of future payments. The ‘payout’ on this contract varies mostly on how long the beneficiary lives.” Incidentally, that payout results in teachers being able to retire and earn nearly their full salary for every year of their lives afterward.

Then there are union dues, which can be another $600-$1,000 a year, with no obvious benefit other than to be told why your profession is underpaid and encouraged to strike… This why tens of thousands of teachers oppose these compulsory paycheck fees, teachers like California’s Rebecca Friedrichs who took her case to the Supreme Court and Illinois’ Mark Janus who is awaiting the High Court’s decision on his challenge (which will likely be handed down this June). (For background reading, see this op-ed by CER’s CEO, Jeanne Allen, and listen to this podcast with Mark Mix, president of the organization that represents Mark Janus.)

STRIKING FOR THE WRONG THING? The teacher unions won’t tell them, but the teachers who are striking across the country aren’t going to solve anything even if the legislatures give them an annual raise. Why such a strident statement? Consider the following number: $1,000 PER PUPIL. That’s the annual cost of employee pensions. Imagine a school of 600 students — that’s $600,000! Let’s just say half those funds could go to teachers instead of the state pension coffers upfront. There are approximately 26 classroom teachers in a school that size, if we are talking a traditionally organized school. If you took just half of those funds and put them in teachers’ salaries in that school, they’d be earning another $11,000 a year each! Please note that these funds are above and beyond employee contributions, Social Security and taxes.

LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT PENSIONS. As teachers retire they will need to access the pensions they were promised and which the state has paid into. Those funds are paid by the current crop of teachers, to the tune of ten percent of their earnings. Let’s take the average pay for an Oklahoma teacher — $50,000 (which is equivalent to about $76,000 in Stamford, Connecticut. For all you New York Times readers, the cost of living in the Northeast is between 40-60% higher). According to a study from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, “On average across state plans, over ten percent of current teachers’ earnings are being set aside to pay for previously accrued pension liabilities. This amounts to a large reduction in real operating spending per student. . . . A significant fraction of the resources allocated toward teacher compensation in current public education budgets is not being invested in resources to educate today’s students at all.”

WHAT TO DO? Researchers who have been studying this issue for years argue that there are several policy changes that could favor teachers while they work and reduce the pension burden that accumulates on states that are constantly threatened by shifting economic conditions: “(1) transition teachers to defined-contribution retirement plans, (2) transition teachers to cash-balance retirement plans, and (3) tighten the link between funding and benefit formulas within the current defined benefit structure.”

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET SMART on teacher pensions, you need to spend some time here. The solutions guiding what teachers make and what the state spends, on top of pension costs. There have been dramatic increases in the past ten years in public pension and benefit spending.

TIME TO RETHINK TEACHER PAY. We’re rethinking everything else — higher ed, K-12, workforce, school safety — so how about teaching? First, compensation is wildly uneven, being delivered to teachers through schools based on state rules governing experience and pay schedules that often see teachers meeting the peak of their salary years after most other professions, in their 50s! As respected researcher Marguerite Roza writes for the left-leaning Brookings Institution, “…a disproportionate amount of available salary funds is concentrated on teachers at the end of their career.”

“District leaders are steering a disproportionate share of the highly constrained public education funds toward a small segment of the teaching force — the group of teachers least likely to leave teaching. The National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Follow up Survey reports that while fewer than four percent of teachers with more than 20 years’ experience leave before retirement, 13.5 percent of teachers with under five years’ experience do. The lower turnover among senior teachers might be a result of the higher salaries, or of proximity to pension earnings — we don’t know for sure… But current distribution patterns leave few dollars for pay raises in a teacher’s earlier years where turnover is most acute.

“These practices not only result in lower salaries for most teachers, they also channel funds in ways that jeopardize equity across schools and create havoc for district financial stability.”

DID YOU KNOW?
“Most public-school teachers’ salaries are determined by years in the classroom and degrees held. But a new study from the Manhattan Institute shows that the premium we pay for teacher experience is far greater than is typically acknowledged.”

In Memory. Oh, Pat, you would have a field day with this newswire! A relentless data gatherer, truth seeker, amazing communicator and reporter, our dear friend and colleague Pat Korten (who we were able to lure out of retirement to help us with writing, editing and policy guidance, after having spent more than 30 years in the communications field), left us unexpectedly and far too soon last week. He would have edited this piece with depth and perfection, attributes he offered to us and to so many others in all his deeds. We will miss him, but know his abundant qualities are now being deployed by God.

SPOTLIGHT ON… SXSW, INNOVATIONS AND MORE

SOUTH-BY. It’s the place to be, they say. Thousands gathered for the beginning of several days of “SOUTH-BY…” as in, “Are you going to SOUTH-BY?” South by Southwest EDU, FILM and MUSIC. And from just a day around the “campus,” it’s clear why: Austin is one big town full of everyone and everything who is (or thinks) they’re doing something relevant or innovative or who just wants to learn what it all means.

GREAT PANELS ABOUND. And the room was packed to hear some of the smartest minds in education today talk directly and honestly about the impact of educational failure on black kids. In particular, and how it happens, was Monday’s highlight. Moderator Rehema Ellis from NBC was clearly blown away by the intensity and honesty of the discussion. For example, Margaret Fortune talked about what she sees as the greatest challenge in charter schools. “If you’re a black person with an idea, you’re a novice; if you’re a white person with an idea, you’re an innovator.” Dr. Howard Fuller addressed how difficult it will be to teach kids if you’re not capable of doing so. “Just being fully credentialed doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to teach our kids.” Chris Stewart offered, “I believe parents have been professionalized out of the equation of our children’s education … And, black people are the new cotton. People and companies are trying to harvest our children.” These and hundreds of other insights should be featured at every event, no matter the subject, if we are to make real progress, real change.

Intrigued? Follow along with SXSW EDU.

ALSO IN AUSTIN, A PROMISING NEW SCHOOLS CONFAB. They call themselves the “one-room schoolhouse for the 21st century.” And based on what we’ve seen, this schoolhouse is indeed transformative. The founders of Acton Academy are tapping a growing army of entrepreneurs to start schools that offer a new learning revolution. Teaching students to be self-governing, using adaptive tools and personalized learning, employing an apprenticeship model, following Montessori — these and more are staples of an Acton school. Its founders, Jeff and Laura Sandefer, are evangelists for teaching that puts students at the center of learning and does away with the hundreds of other unnecessary things that exist to accommodate rules and adults. It’s a revolution that isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you like how this sounds and you ever thought of opening your own school, this may be for you.

DID YOU KNOW?… that Puerto Rico gets far more of its education budget from the federal government than any US state? Last year it was 37%! And now, in the wake of Hurricane Maria, despite stiff opposition from teachers’ unions, Puerto Rico is poised to reinvent its school system with the introduction of innovative charter schools.

Which states still have no charter school law? Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.

SPEAKING OF W. VA… The unions still have teachers out on strike after almost two weeks. The issue? Teacher pay of course. But what if it were about more than just raising salaries? What if you could raise the salary of a teacher who was accomplishing more, contributing more and able to get better results? That’s what happened to narrow the achievement gap in DC (yes, some bad actors manipulated results for gain, but the majority of DC teachers are doing more, doing better and earning more as a result!).

IN OTHER NEWS. New faces at the Department of Ed? The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will vote on two nominees: Frank Brogan, for assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, and Mark Schneider, for director of the Institute of Education Sciences (the Department’s research arm).

WHERE WE ARE. Later this month, CER will be represented at the prestigious Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai. Joining education leaders, policymakers, innovators, philanthropists and thought leaders shaping the future of education, our founder and CEO Jeanne Allen will speak about innovative approaches in recruiting the next generation of the best and brightest educators. Follow her on Twitter, @JeanneAllen.

GOING TO ASU+GSV? It’s not too late to join us in San Diego at the hottest event of the year for education innovation, education transformation and the knowledge industry. Industry leaders (like Margaret Spellings and Jeb Bush) will join celebrities (like Bill Gates and Richard Branson). CER will lead several discussions on how Ed Tech Can Save Rural America: Getting Personal and Education Opportunity in America. Beat the rush and sign up now.

TELL US YOUR STORY! Families all over the country have education stories to tell. Send us yours!

“The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

SPOTLIGHT ON… DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

A VIEW FROM SCOTUS. Democracy was alive and LOUD on the steps of the Supreme Court this past Monday. Oral arguments in the long-anticipated case, Janus v. AFSCME, were delivered inside the High Court, and, as expected, the scene outside was, well, colorful and surreal. There were signs and slogans and yelling and an obscene amount of swearing from people claiming to support kids and workers.

Maybe it’s because a decision in favor of Mark Janus and for worker freedom could deal a powerful blow to public worker unions — chief among them, teachers’ unions (whose political spending surpasses all but one company, including the NRA!). But regardless of hard-fought issues, the optics were not befitting a nation as great as the US.

WHO WAS THERE? Our man on the street interviews revealed many who did not know why they were there or what the issues were (including the woman with the union thug sign!). Asked who they were, sign holders refused to answer; some just said they were paid to hold a sign. They told supporters of worker freedom — like us — that we were tools of the Koch brothers. Scabs, in it for the profit. (Huh?) AFT’s Randi Weingarten arrived on the steps presumably from inside after the arguments and seemed to mope around the noise.

During and after the rally, speaker after speaker implored the crowd to appreciate the importance of worker freedom, of great opportunities for teachers. Speakers included the plaintiff himself Mark Janus (pictured above); the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association, Rebecca Friedrichs; EdChoice’s Leslie Hiner; Colin Sharkey and CER’s Jeanne Allen, who fired up the crowd with the following line: “Today in America we have freedom to choose just about everything in our lives — except if we want to join a union.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE? In her column for the Washington Examiner, Jeanne Allen summed up Janus as follows: “The significance of this case cannot be overstated; the decision could potentially restore the freedom of public employees to choose how they want their hard-earned paychecks spent and might put decisions about voluntary union membership back into the hands of the employees themselves.”

Lawyers from both sides gave statements and transcripts revealed that some interesting tête-à-tête was had with both sides, including this exchange between the AFSCME lawyer and Justice Kennedy:

This week’s Reality Check with Jeanne Allen featured Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Mix gets to the heart of the matter: “When you look at Mark and people like him in previous cases like Pam Harris, Diane Knox, Rebecca Friedrichs, these are ordinary people just trying to exercise their basic freedoms and do their job.”

SPEAKING OF CIVICS

We continue to grieve and despair in the wake of Parkland’s tragedy. Students who are speaking up, walking out and taking action are demonstrating their interest, through town halls, marches, social media campaigns and more. But in the spirit of true education, we want them to take their newfound popularity and accomplish their mission. Can they engage in the political process with the diligence and knowhow of how generations past have accomplished democratic social change? Will their efforts take a civil — even if justifiably heated approach — to democracy in action, or will they fall into divisiveness rather than righting the wrongs they seek? We wish them well, and offer them this important resource from the Constitution Center in the nation’s most historic city, Philadelphia, PA.

DID YOU KNOW?

How long the issue of public sector workers being required to pay the fair-share, or agency, fees if they decline to join the union has been going on? Since 1977, in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.

TELL US YOUR STORY!

Families all over the country have school choice stories to tell. Send us yours!

SPOTLIGHT ON… THE CASE THAT MAY LIVE IN INFAMY.

SCOTUS VS. UNIONS

President Roosevelt famously declared December 7, 1941 as a “day which will live in infamy.” We don’t think that word is on the SATs anymore — or even taught — likely because we’ve made education such a dull, uniformly focused system. For decades, teachers have been relegated to work in factory-like conditions with little chance for true control over their professions.

That may finally all change this Monday (February 26), when the Supreme Court hears arguments in Janus v. AFSCME. Janus could lead to a landmark decision on the power of unions in the United States and potentially reverse their ability to extract taxpayer funds, via paychecks, to cover their political activities against a teacher’s First Amendments rights.

That decision, if made, will surely live in infamy for the unions, which are able to spend the hard-earned money of public employees — like plaintiff Mark Janus — and thus wage battle after battle against innovation, opportunity and change in US schools.

JUST ONE YEAR AGO

The case has been winding its way through federal courts since early 2015. Essentially, it’s a re-do of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which the Court deadlocked on 4-4. CER said then that this split decision on whether teachers should have the freedom to make decisions regarding their employment — unfettered by union control — “does not mean that the issue of teachers’ rights is going away.” Well, it hasn’t, and with Janus now on the docket, it’ll finally get addressed.

OPPONENTS BELIEVE

Per the high court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (which Friedrichs sought to overturn), the unions will argue that while union membership cannot be mandated, nonunion members can be required to pay the portion of a union’s dues that support efforts from which they derive benefit (e.g., collective bargaining on wages, benefits, workplace safety, etc.)

SUPPORTERS OF JANUS

Those who disagree — including teachers — argue that regardless of benefit, forcing a nonunion member to pay for union activities amounts to unconstitutionally compelled speech.

As our CEO Jeanne Allen observed last year, “A favorable outcome could pave the way for a loosening on the stranglehold of other public-sector employees compelled to pay mandatory union fees. Public school teachers, in particular, stand to benefit from the freedom that would allow them to make their own decisions as to whether they pay union dues and fees.”

In fact, a ruling in favor of Mark Janus would improve the learning experience for students across the nation. By dramatically empowering teachers, Janus could change the course of American education.

Colin Sharkey, of the Association of American Educators, adds another important point: “For too long America’s workers — teachers especially — have been forced into joining or funding labor unions because they do not know they have the right to opt out. This coerced membership and forced dues run contrary to freedom of association all Americans should enjoy.”

THE CASE IN A NUTSHELL

For Monday’s installment of her podcast, Reality Check, Jeanne Allen talked to Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and of the National Right to Work Committee. According to Mix,

“Janus brings up a core issue of the First Amendment and asks the question, Can a private organization force someone to pay them to ‘speak on their behalf’ without their consent? You know better than most people of these types of battles waged against the monopoly power of the teachers’ unions. This is something we have been intimately involved in, and this will be another case the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation brings to the court and asks them to adjudicate the First Amendment question.”

To hear the podcast in its entirety, click here.

The list of Janus supporters is a starry constellation of public-interest law groups, state executives, lawyers and state-based think tanks from across the country. These notables include the Atlantic Legal Foundation, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Competitive Enterprise Institute, James Madison Institute, Landmark Legal Foundation and Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The list of Janus opponents is equally noteworthy, although their stars shine in a completely different galaxy. These folks include the teachers unions (of course), American Civil Liberties Union, National Organization for Women, Southern Poverty Law Center, National Urban League, Sierra Club (go figure), YWCA USA, National Center for Lesbian Rights, National LGBTQ Task Force and United Students Against Sweatshops. Interestingly, among the mayors who organized an amicus brief is Chicago’s Rahm Emmanuel, who the unions have given no shortage of grief in his tenure.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

We can’t say for certain, but given the 4-4 tie in Friedrichs and the expectation that Justice Gorsuch (Scalia’s replacement) will side with his colleagues who voted to overturn Abood (Justices Roberts, Kennedy and Thomas), the wind seems to be blowing strongly in favor of Mr. Janus.

And that ain’t just us talkin’. Here’s the assessment of Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of Law at UC Berkeley: “No one — liberal or conservative — has any doubt about the outcome or that the ideologically motivated decision will hurt public workers in this state and elsewhere.”

TOP TAKEAWAYS IF SCOTUS RULES IN FAVOR OF JANUS

1. Millions of workers, including public school teachers, will be unshackled from compelled association, which in and of itself is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

2. No one will be forced anymore to pay union fees when opting out of union representation.

3. More take-home pay for teachers and more freedom to operate as they see fit when opting out of mandated associations with teachers’ unions.

4. More innovation in public schools, as the money that unions spend to lobby against education change will be dramatically reduced, as will their power.

5. A pro-Janus ruling will have no impact on a union’s right to organize and function, just on an employee’s right to not pay up.

TELL US YOUR STORY!

Families all over the country have school choice stories to tell. Send us yours!