This seminar is part of a new effort to commit union leaders, district superintendents, researchers and school level teacher leaders to work collaboratively on improving public education through a focus on teaching. It emerges from the Albert Shanker Institute’s role as sponsor of provocative policy discussions and dovetails with the reform agenda of the American Federation of Teachers.

First some background. In June 2007, the Albert Shanker Institute held the first seminar in what its leaders hoped would become a productive series of meetings on the necessity for a greater union role in shaping good schools. A key motivation came from discussions among members of the Institute’s board of directors, initiated by board member Diane Ravitch. The board concluded that the American Federation of Teachers was likely to continue to face unfounded attacks for school failure, led by a group of politically motivated researchers and their allies. Thus, the first Good Schools seminar examined the state of the research on teaching quality and teacher policies—including the charges by union critics that collective bargaining contracts and practices they enshrine result in teaching assignments, teacher protections, transfer policies, and salary determinations that have a negative effect on student achievement, particularly for poor and minority students. The mix of participants included union leaders, superintendents, and researchers with expertise on the impact of collective bargaining contract provisions. The group found that the picture being painted by partisan researchers was not an accurate one, and indeed may act to distract attention away from what serious research had to say about how teaching practice and teacher policies could be made more effective.

In his concluding remarks at the June 2007 meeting, AFT and Shanker Institute President Ed McElroy noted the sense of participants that this work was really about a much larger agenda. Many had noted that these discussions take place against a backdrop of a public education system under serious and immediate threat, prompting McElroy to recommend that we continue discussing these issues around a "big table" of actively involved people—making sure that the agenda is very concrete and consistently anchored in lessons from the best research. Fighting back against those who are only too happy to balkanize and dismantle public education, he said, will require taking on these issues with a variety of players who are willing to work together to strengthen and preserve public education.

This second seminar is an attempt to build upon the first. We hope to move toward a "bigger table," but plan to start with a core group of superintendents, local leaders, researchers and education policy experts, and selected school representatives. We now envision a series of practical and political meetings that will attempt to broaden and deepen discussion between union leaders and superintendents—but also school level players—on the design and execution of sound teacher policies that include: supports for new teachers, peer assistance and review, professional development, transfer and assignment policies (especially as they impact upon hard-to-staff schools), and pay incentives and performance pay.

At the forefront of our thinking is that these policies are embedded in school, district, and state practices that may be more powerful in determining their effectiveness than the policies themselves. Some union leaders have noted, for example, that the best new teacher supports and peer assistance programs may not be enough to keep new and talented teachers in the district if student conduct and discipline policies are weak or inoperable. Or, making peer judgments about whether or not a teacher intern has and uses requisite content knowledge may be difficult if the content he or she is expected to teach varies from school to school.

At this meeting, we are targeting two context factors that are crucially important to teaching and learning. The first is curriculum—what is it that the district expects children to know and understand at each grade level in each subject area, based on state standards. If teachers don’t have a clear idea of exactly what they are expected to teach, it’s hard to support them in teaching it, or hold them accountable if students don’t learn it. The second context factor is student discipline and the learning environment. Whatever they know about subject matter content and how to teach it, good teaching cannot happen if classrooms and schools are chaotic and teachers are not respected as adult authorities. So, at this meeting we will spend some time on these before moving to specific discussions of teacher policies.

And, to set the stage with one more observation, researchers at our first meeting helped us move toward a definition of teacher and teaching quality that serves as a foundation for everything we will take up. Variability in the U.S. education system hampers all research because of all the differences in relevant factors like class size, student conduct, curriculum requirements, testing patterns, hiring policies, family background, and on and on. But, to the degree we know that anything has a measurable effect on teacher effectiveness, these three things matter: teaching experience; a teacher’s content knowledge in the subject to be taught; and verbal ability. We should keep this in mind as we wrestle to determine which teacher policies have the greatest chance to affect student learning.

Like the first seminar, the discussions at this meeting will also be off the record. At this seminar, however, we also intend to have conversations that will set the stage for movement on concrete steps. What is different about the dynamic here is the players—union leaders, school leaders, superintendents, researchers, and policy experts. Having us all at what is still a relatively small table will, hopefully, help us work toward actions that are possible, real and sound. We expect there will be further deliberation within each group separately as each refines its respective role. If this works, our next meeting (and what happens until then) will amount to even richer contributions to the change needed.