CTA leaders are considering a real agenda for educational change

Now that the election is won, where do we go from here?

That's the question CTA is asking. The answer, as CTA President Barbara E. Kerr puts it, is just as clear: "It's time to focus on real education changes that will improve student learning, provide our schools with the resources they need and ensure quality teachers in all classrooms."

"We have earned political capital from all our work in our coalitions," says Kerr. "And now I'm hopeful that we really have the chance to be proactive about school change."

CTA's Educational Change Workgroup has been studying the issue of how to improve public schools for more than a year, but was forced to put its agenda on hold during the campaign. At the end of November, the group's recommendations were once again moved to the front burner and given a serious look by CTA Board members, State Council committee chairs and staff, who traveled from throughout the state to discuss the group's recommendations at CTA's Burlingame headquarters.

Leaders and staff at the Nov. 28 meeting familiarized themselves with the recommendations of the workgroup and then broke into discussion groups to determine whether the recommendations were within CTA policy or required new policy, and which merited immediate attention.

In a follow-up conference call, the CTA Board voted to approve the workgroup's recommendations and send them on to CTA's State Council of Education for consideration at its January meeting. The workgroup explored several areas of school change, as follows.

Adequacy and Equity in Funding: Adequacy is a concept requiring that funding provided to schools be sufficient to allow students to meet the state standards. California's standards are among the highest in the country, yet its schools are funded at $1,000 per student below the national average. The concept of equity requires that funds be disbursed to schools based on the needs of the students and not solely on the wealth of the school district.

Among the recommendations are:

• Working with Education Coalition leaders to develop a foundation for a campaign to fund California schools under an adequacy model.
• Identifying means to ensure equitable school funding based on the individual needs of all students, exploring the underlying reasons for spending gaps at school sites and finding additional resources.

Teacher compensation: The quality of teaching depends on many factors, not the least of which is adequate compensation that supports professional practice. According to research the workgroup considered, there is substantial interest among teachers in alternative compensation systems as long as they are rational, objective and fair, and developed and implemented in an inclusive, sensitive and reasonable manner.

Among the recommendations are:

• Studying the impact of current alternative compensation/salary schedule revisions in districts and charter schools to see if the change encourages teachers to develop their professional knowledge and skills, and engage in innovation and exploration.
• Defining a broad range of financial and working condition incentives to attract and keep teachers in the most challenging districts and schools.
• Developing various alternative compensation models that include working condition incentives to attract and retain qualified educators in hard-to-staff schools, and identifying low-performing districts with supportive climates to pilot such systems.

Teacher development: Within the next few years nearly half of the teaching workforce will retire, presenting a challenge and an opportunity to the public school system.

Among the recommendations are:

• Improving preparation programs so that teachers are better able to work in a standards-based environment, supporting teachers in their efforts to focus on student learning, and ensuring the quality of alternative routes to certification.
• Developing a "professional practice model" with strategies for teachers working in schools with the greatest challenges.
• Improving coordination and cooperation with higher education in such areas as teacher preparation, professional development, school improvement strategies, curriculum alignment, technical assistance, and the use of teachers as researchers and as resources to higher education.

Assistance to schools: The top-down style of management found in most schools today does little to promote the atmosphere of collegiality that is associated with effective and motivated teaching staff. Effective schools give teachers authority over decisions affecting how students learn. Parental and community involvement is critical to student success, yet is seldom encouraged in an organized way.

Among the recommendations are:

• Helping educators exercise their right to a strong voice in school site management, work as professionals within required intervention/assistance programs, and become more effective advocates for and better participants in efforts to make schools more rewarding places to work.
• Finding ways to help chapters navigate the requirements of accountability and intervention protocols.
• Collecting data and identifying the factors that have positive impact on learning, and engaging all stakeholders in the effort to improve student learning.
• Making sure schools are safe, clean and climatically controlled in a systematic way.