The day before President Obama spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, about the pressing need to improve America's teachers, a report was released on the same topic at a conference in Washington's swanky Capitol Hilton. The task force that wrote the report was chaired by Minnesota Governor (and rumored 2012 presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty and included such education policy heavyweights as New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The report's 20 recommendations for improving teacher effectiveness include providing more funding for alternative teacher training and certification routes (like Teach for America), requiring school districts to create teacher evaluations contingent on student achievement, and using those evaluations to help determine teacher salaries and make tenure decisions.
Strikingly, though, the report wasn't endorsed by the full task force. Reasons, according to conference speakers, ranged from a) "there just wasn't time" for all of the members to get their organizations to sign on to the document, to b) it was enough for the full body to have endorsed the "gist" of the report. But it turns out that the schisms on the task force run deeper than the leadership let on. EdWeek reported on Wednesday that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, and a task force member, has called the report "disrespectful." In a letter to the task force's leadership, she said its work "has focused almost exclusively on how teachers need to change rather than how the system and all its actors need to change."
