Melissa Bailey Photo
With a new gift from President Obama, first-year teacher Lisa Kieslich may get relief from a new “super-sub” so she can spend a day learning classroom management tips from a newly dubbed “master teacher” in her school.
That was one vision of New Haven’s plans for a whopping new $53.4 million, five-year federal grant announced Thursday by Obama’s U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan.
The grant comes from the $285 million Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), a competitive federal grant. The first batch of money, $12 million, will be available this school year. New Haven is one of 35 winners of the latest round of TIF grants. (Details here.)
“This is a big deal,” U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of New Haven (at left in photo with Mayor John DeStefano) declared at a 3:30 p.m. press event Thursday at the John Martinez School. Local officials credited DeLauro with helping secure the grant. They noted that New York City, which has 50 times the number of students as New Haven, scored only $53 million.
The grant will enable New Haven to reward, recognize and develop talent in its teaching and administrative ranks.
New Haven is well-suited for the grant because it already has already overhauled its teacher evaluations to reflect student performance — a key reform Obama has been pushing nationwide — Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries said. New Haven gained national plaudits for including teachers in those changes, and struck a peaceful deal with the union in 2009 that paved the way for reforms. The principals union followed suit with its own job evaluation, also based on job performance.
The new changes funded by the grant will build on the “foundation” set by those job evaluations, Harries said.
News of the new grant sent ripples of excitement through the teaching ranks Thursday.
“Oh happy day,” said Iris Duran (at right in photo), a 19-year veteran math teacher at Fair Haven School. She ran over to John Martinez when she heard about the prospect of new money to support teachers.
Fair Haven School music teacher Dan Kinsman (at left in photo), who spent his own money on a three-week graduate-level class in dance and music in Ghana last summer, said he hopes the district will provide a stipend for teachers to pick their own training outside the classroom, something “inspiring.”
Leaders Stay In Class
In a conversation after the press event, Harries said the district won’t quite be sending teachers to Africa — but that they could still find a way to benefit from the grant.
Harries outlined various efforts the school system pitched to the feds in its grant application.
One goal: to create new leadership roles for teachers and principals. Right now, Harries said, teachers who want to move up in the district have only one option: Become an administrator. Harries said schools need to create another option, so teachers can stay in the classroom while also taking on leadership roles.
The district aims to build a new cadre of exemplary teachers with expert talents to share, Harries said. A teacher could be an expert on classroom management, or on Singapore math, for example.
Call them “master teachers.” They would keep teaching, while also mentoring other teachers and sharing their skills with their peers.
Likewise, the district would create a “mentor principal” role for principals who would share wisdom with their peers.
The grant will allow for these new “master teachers” and “mentor principals” to get extra compensation for their new duties, Harries (pictured) said. It would also allow the district to pay teachers and administrators more for working in difficult environments, such as schools with lots of transient or special needs kids.
The differentiated pay scales and leadership roles are a way of leaving behind a “factory” model of education.
Along those lines, teachers would get access to individualized training according to their needs.
For example, Kieslich, a brand new teacher at John Martinez (pictured at the top of this story), said she’d like some extra help with classroom management for her 6th-grade classroom. The teacher joined the classroom after earning her bachelor’s from Southern Connecticut State University.
As a new teacher, Kieslich is paired with a mentor for her first two years. She said she could always use more training.
She said she studied classroom management in school, but “you just read it from a book. Once you’re in your own classroom, it’s completely different.”
Harries said that’s just the kind of problem the new grant could solve.
Super-Sub Me
Enter the “super-sub.” In its grant, New Haven asked for money to pay for 15 to 20 full-time substitute teachers. Their job would be to cover classes so the teachers can get extra training they need to develop their skills.
For example, a super-sub might take over Kieslich’s classroom for an entire day so she can learn from an expert in classroom management. Or the super-sub might relieve the master teacher from her duties so that teacher can spend the day with Kieslich.
Veteran teachers could benefit, too. Shelley Weinhaus (at left in photo with Kieslich), who’s in her eighth year teaching, said she already mentors new classroom teachers. She said she sees the benefit in expanding mentoring beyond first-year teachers. And, she said, teachers could always use more training around how to use data to plan lessons.
Superintendent of Schools Reggie Mayo at Thursday’s event.
The district also aims to train the staff who perform teacher and principal evaluations.
Teachers union President Dave Cicarella said the goal is to create an even playing field.
“There’s a lack of fairness and training” to the way the evaluations are implemented, he said.
None of the details above are final, Harries cautioned.
A new committee of three teachers and three principals or assistant principals, called a Talent Council, will convene to oversee how the money is spent. That committee will have the final say.
Recognition
School officials called the TIF gift the “largest national recognition” of its reform drive so far.
While New Haven’s reform efforts have gained much praise from Obama’s administration, money had not followed the kudos until Thursday.
While some aspects of reform have generated controversy, the city’s tack with teachers — working with them rather than fighting with them to produce changes in a landmark contract — has become a model cited nationwide for how other cities can improve the schools. Sources of praise have included education policy centrists at The New York Times and pro-union reform skeptics like Diane Ravitch. Click here for the latest example. New Haven’s teachers agreed to make it easier for the district to get rid of the lowest performers — and to judge them based on a mix of test scores and other factors — while the city agreed to include teachers in the evaluation process and to offer support for struggling teachers to improve rather than fail and leave the system.