I've said it before, I'll say it again.

The following is my reaction to an Education Week article, States' Costs Skyrocket on Master's Degree Pay for Teachers by Stephen Sawchuk on July 17, 2012.  The narrative is familiar: master’s degrees add no value in terms of student test scores, therefore, they represent the misappropriation of resources.  Read the original, then cool your jets: 

Let's flip this and consider the single salary schedule for what it is: a deferred compensation system.  It is not that senior teachers with advanced degrees are overpaid, but rather that beginning teachers are underpaid, unless you count the IOU represented by that top level salary twenty years in the future plus the pension.  The highest paid teachers are being paid for their work, plus an amount representing work they performed many years before.  Retired teachers are paid entirely for services rendered in the past.

Since single salary schedules contain both steps and columns, master’s degrees, and arrangements which subsidize them, represent a mechanism for states and localities to control the pace that individuals move across the schedule towards those top level salaries.  In other words, requirements for advanced education string people along and allow the polity to delay the day which it has to pay professional salaries.

Rather than pull deferred compensation from the future into the present, while honoring current commitments, political expediency leads to attacks on the single salary schedule itself, including masters degrees, pensions, and tenure, the glue which gives deferred compensation legitimacy. A social contract is being broken, without recompense, with the people charged with caring for our children.  Our nation is morally debased as a result.

The real problem with master’s degrees is that they are driven by an economic arrangement, rather than an educational one.  Many teachers do use them as an opportunity to improve their practice.  Perhaps the imperfections of advanced degrees stem from not really being intended for this purpose.  The real focus is on delaying payment for services rendered, with the added bonus of being able to walk away from the deal when the debts become inconvenient.

Teacher Negotiation Reform: Beating Swords Into Ploughshares

This is a cross posting from my friend Patrick Ledesma's Leading from the Classroom on Ed Week Teacher Magazine.  He was kind enough to let me guest blog.  I'm putting it here for readers who normally read my stuff on Education Worker.

The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) convened in Cincinnati last month, with a theme of harnessing the power of collaboration to advance student achievement.  I attended the last conference in Denver as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows, and had the opportunity to network with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which promotes sound and stable labor-management relations.

Back in Vermont, in 2011 I was entering my fourth cycle as a negotiator and second as local president.  Our negotiations had always been protracted and contentious, requiring thousands of hours of teacher and school board member time.  The traditional process goes through a predictable sequence: bargaining, impasse, mediation, fact finding, crisis buildup, and, in rare instances, imposition and strike.  Mediation and fact finding employ private consultants costing thousands of dollars.  Boards often call on private attorneys to negotiate, the costs of which often exceed the amount needed to settle the economic issues.

This scenario is repeated dozens of times all over Vermont.  Each negotiation is for a small number of teachers by national standards, resulting in minor changes to “mature contracts.”  It is a time consuming and costly way to preserve the status quo.

Our previous negotiation had required at least 200 hours of each of the ten teachers on our team.  The board commitment was similar.  Rancor adds no value.  Unions, boards and administration should be partners in the cause of student learning, but are instead trapped in a ritualistic process.

I returned from Denver determined that our pending negotiation would be collaborative, and facilitated by FMCS.  It took months of persuasion – one board member could not believe that FMCS services were free.  Finally, a pair of skilled FMCS mediators trained both teams together in the techniques of Interest Based Bargaining. 

We invested in success. The results?

·         Zero dollars spent on a board attorney, mediators or fact finders

·         Settlement was achieved in 6 months rather than 18

·         Team members expending 60 hours rather than 200+

·         No rancorous crisis buildup

·         A labor-management committee to deal with issues as they emerge.

·         Respect between board and teachers, a result of “tough minded collaboration.”

Is this process reform sustainable? Can it become a template for our state?  An innovation of this year’s LMC is critically important in answering these questions: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants.  Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, presented.  Their teams highlighted work they have done to support local collaboration. 

Vermont sent a team of statewide leaders.  We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the collaborative work already happening at the local level.  I am confident that our state leaders found inspiration and practical ideas at the conference.

Process reform is not enough.  Sustainability depends on connecting to a greater goal: excellent student learning.  In Vermont, dealing proactively with contemporary policy challenges requires this focus.  Collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation, and become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools. 

The tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont is a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to the cause of great student learning.  Our children deserve no less.

State Teams Featured at LMC2

The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) is convening in Cincinnati this week.  The theme is harnessing the power of labor management collaboration in the interest of student achievement.  I attended the last conference in Denver fifteen months ago as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows.  In addition to becoming steeped in the theory and practice of labor management collaboration, I had the opportunity to network with several leaders from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which is an extraordinary organization that provides free technical assistance to improve negotiations outcomes at the local level.   That learning has proven very influential in changing the tenor of our local negotiations during the last year.

There is an innovation of this year’s LMC that is critically important: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants.  Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, are presenting.  These states will highlight work they have done to support districts in collaborative work.  Vermont is sending a team of statewide leaders, which I find tremendously encouraging.  We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the good work in our state which is already happening at the local level.  I am confident that our state leaders will find inspiration and practical ideas at the conference to help us move forward.

Mere process reform, however is not enough.  Sustainability of our work ultimately depends on connecting to a greater goal: great student learning.  Leaders at ED already get this; it is a theme of both labor management conferences.  In Vermont, for us to take it to the next level, and to be able to deal creatively and proactively with 21^st century education policy challenges, stakeholders need to refocus on this goal.  Thinking about collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation.  Our CBA’s must become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools.  When I think of the tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont, I see a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to our common enterprise of great student learning.  Our children deserve no less.

Innovation, Ideology and Compliance

As we say in the union: a supposal....

Let’s set aside for a moment the heated arguments about the course of federal education policy. Let’s give the United States Department of Education (ED) the benefit of the doubt, impute good intentions, and take at face value their claim that they are trying to use federal policy to change the conversation about teacher quality from sorting and firing, to elevating the profession and improving teaching practice.  We can always revert to the noisy argument, but stepping back to a quieter place for a moment may illuminate  avenues for better policy.

Race to the Top and NCLB waivers are among an alphabet soup of ED initiatives intended to spur change and innovation at a state level.  Certainly there is guidance from ED as to what that change might look like, and that is legitimately a subject for political debate.  Let’s consider the possibility that to some significant extent these programs are intended less to be prescriptive, and more to be platforms for innovation.

There is a dangerous assumption embedded in policy of this sort: that states have the same capacity for creativity and innovation as the people who created the policy in the first place.  There may be states where capacity exists, but in many places this policy ship is dashed on the twin rocks of ideology and compliance.

Ideology is expressed in astroturf teacher bashing, and in policy and legislation that assume that bad teachers and the unions that protect them are the problem.  This is the “fire your way to the top” approach, which has the added advantage allowing politicians to evade the tough task of raising the revenue necessary to create a great education system.  From the left it consists of a cynical view that everything ED does is astroturf in disguise.  Ideology offers its proponents relief from the necessity of thinking.

When it comes to trying to elevate the teaching profession to advance the cause of great student learning in our schools, ideology is a noisy, destructive distraction from that task.  Federal programs designed to encourage creativity and innovation cannot succeed in states where this type of toxic thinking predominates. 

There is a second, more insidious impediment to the success of current federal policy: a compliance mentality.  State and district level bureaucrats often live in a culture of compliance.  Rather than using a program as an opportunity to create something progressive, they ask “What is the minimum we have to do to get the money/waiver/whatever?”  This mentality collides with the intent of the people who created the Federal policy.  That policy is designed to disrupt and change the status quo.  Compliance is about maintaining a comfortable status quo for adults, regardless of the impact that has on the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.

There are places that have managed to keep the ideologues tamped down while responding with some creativity to federal initiatives.  Massachusetts is one such place.  The Massachusetts Teachers Association took a proactive approach to the RTT requirement to incorporate student achievement data in the new teacher evaluation system.  The MTA plan, which the Association characterizes as a “Triangulated Standards-based Evaluation Framework,” uses student achievement as one data point among several. 

The universities and think tanks in Massachusetts have the ability to help by providing a theoretical framework to support the work in strategic partnerships with other stakeholders.  Few states boast such capacity - certainly not my state, Vermont.

There is a pathway for more effective Federal policy.  Presuming good intentions here, if it is the intent to promote innovation rather than ideology or compliance, ED has to consider ways of building capacity in places where it does not currently exist, ways of getting colleges and universities to step up to the plate, of helping unions get past a circle the wagons mentality, of reaching people of good will and helping them to understand the issues at hand, not just in states that are the recipients of federal largess, but everywhere.

People who are numbed by the noise of worthless ideology, or deadened by the dull drone of bureaucratic compliance, cannot be the engines of innovation, cannot be equals and partners in a program of educational improvement. 

How can we move past the ideological noise of both the right and the left, and emerge from the suffocation of compliance in order to create great public policy?  How can we learn to govern ourselves again?

Collaboration: Just a Fancy Word for Working Together

I remember seeing Jesse Jackson on TV many years ago.   He said something about language which has always stuck with me, “Don’t say ‘prevaricate’ when what you mean is ‘lie’.”  What he was getting at is the virtue of simplicity and directness in the choice of words.

The word collaborate has been all the rage in education, whether we are designing “collaboration time” among teachers at a school, or achieving “labor-management collaboration” between boards, unions and administrators.  It’s easy to lose track, when using a fancy term like collaboration, of the human dimension of collaboration, in all its simplicity and directness: people working together towards a common goal.

In education, there is only one goal that matters: great student learning.  All other subsidiary goals must be paths to that single thing.  Without that, you can collaborate all you want, but the result will be vestigial.  Probably not a good use of anybody’s time.

In my experience there are two paths to labor-management collaboration, meaning leaders working together to advance student learning, 

The first is charismatic individuals.  There are extraordinary people out there who “get it” and can draw others into a home cooked approach to working together that works tolerably well.  But there are three disadvantages to relying on charismatic leadership:

1.       There aren’t enough charismatic leaders

2.       Charismatic leaders retire

3.       Charismatic leaders can block the development of other leaders

The second approach is to create collaborative structures and techniques within which normal people can operate.  The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is in the business of promoting this body of knowledge.  Techniques include Interest Based Bargaining (IBB), labor-management committees, contract language which permits flexibility at the site level, and salary benchmarking.

I’ll use IBB for a moment, because it is probably the best known (if most misunderstood) technique.  IBB is not a panacea.  Rather, it provides a civil platform upon which other types of work can occur.  It is virtually impossible to advance the cause of student learning when, as one of our veteran WCEA negotiators put it, “The two sides are shouting at each other through their spokespersons.”

Luckily IBB has a well articulated body of theory and practice, which makes it accessible to those of us who are mere mortals.  People can learn to do this – it’s not a matter of talent.

The danger of this sort of structure is that it will ossify into something ritualistic, that people will value the process itself more than overall end goal of the enterprise.  But, providing this detour can be avoided with a little “big picture” thinking (something that seems to annoy a lot of folks when pulling weeds) having a structure for ongoing conversations about local policy and progressive education reform creates sustainability.

Of course the ideal would be to have both the charismatic leadership and sustainability of structures to support meaningful reform.  But if I had to choose, I’d choose sustainability.  This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon.  And there is an essential human dimension to the work which is not captured by a term like collaboration.  Let’s remember, as flawed human beings, the advantage of structures that support us in working together.

My Garden Sprouts

How often does a book on education achieve both literary and visual artistry?  How often would you expect any book on education to be both practical and inspiring?  Had you asked me these questions a couple of weeks ago, I would answered seldom to the second question and never to the first.  Both questions together?  Impossible.  Then I encountered My Garden Sprouts by Sharla Steever, illustrated by Diana Magnuson.

My Garden Sprouts is an annotated journal for elementary classroom teachers.  Its 127 illustrated pages are filled with space for a teacher to make notes about his/her unfolding practice over a three year period.   Each journal page begins with wise and insightful prompts.  The quality of these prompts grows from Sheever’s deep experience as a mentor and teacher leader at her school.  Magnuson’s illustrations are gorgeous; her self-professed Allegorical Realism is the perfect foil to Steever’s use of metaphor.  They are  understated, supporting, but never overshadowing the professional intent of the book.

A 2011 Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the US Department of Education and a National Board Certified Teacher, Steever is a master teacher form South Dakota who teaches fourth grade.  Her video Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education, illustrating her profound knowledge of Native American education issues, was previously reviewed here on Education Worker.   Magnuson is a gifted illustrator from Michigan with a large portfiolio of illustrated children’s books. 

Steever is also an accomplished gardener.  She uses gardening as a literary metaphor for teaching.  The culture of individual vegetables and flowers illustrates the character of students and situations one encounters in school.   Pumpkins “take up a lot of space.”   With regard to pumpkin students, Sheever invites us to consider how we can build their boundary awareness.  Onions “are socially repellant” – how can we peel back the layers, getting past the hunger, poverty or abuse to hold these students to “compassionate high standards”?  At every step Steever challenges even jaded veterans to consider students in novel ways, and with humor and wit asks us to reconceive our classrooms and the way we see our students.

This journal should become a modern classic for the induction and mentoring of new elementary teachers.  I could see it being a graduation gift for new teachers, or a gift to new hires, especially in rural places.  I could see it being a standard text for Peer Assistance and Review programs, directed both to the new teachers and struggling veterans typically served by these programs.

As I read, however, it became clear to me that this journal is for anyone at any level of experience who simply wants to ramp it up to the next level in their practice.  Compassionate, wise and eminently practical – how often does that happen in an education book? 

Focus On the Learning!

I really appreciate the phrase “student learning.”  Unlike “student achievement” or “student outcomes” it has not yet become a euphemism for bubble test scores.  I appreciate student learning because it enables me to imagine a range of indicators for success in the classroom: true multiple measures.

What can student learning look like?  When you leave my classroom after music class, I hope there is something you can do, think or remember, something that you couldn’t before you walked in.  Perhaps you can perform a song, or you can play a simple rhythmically independent accompaniment; perhaps you made a connection to prior knowledge, or have deepened your understanding of some concept, such as tempo or dynamics, and demonstrated that deepening by using that concept to create a short musical piece.   Perhaps you can finger a new note, or have just acquired some fluency between fingerings that leaves you feeling successful.   In any event, my aspiration as a teacher is that you leave my classroom having grown in some small way as a creative person, as a human being.

I acquired this focus on student learning by going through the National Board Certification process.  This demanding process requires around 300 hours of work at minimum.  You produce a video portfolio and take a tough six part exam on your knowledge of content and pedagogy.  It was in the portfolio process that my brain got reprogrammed to focus on student learning.  I had a candidate support provider who helped me go over my portfolio with a fine tooth comb.  At each stage Dan would ask, “What does that have to do with student learning?”  Eventually it became my mantra.  It has an annoying tendency to slip from my mouth during faculty meetings.  Even if it doesn’t slip out, it certainly echoes around the inside of my brain.

As a union activist, I experience a similar echo effect inside my head as we operate the levers of union influence: negotiations, grievances and so forth.  Our recent foray into Interest Based Bargaining is hobbled by the fact that we are not yet focused on student learning.  Unlike districts that truly achieve Labor Management Collaboration, our contract talks still focus on adult issues, and not student learning.  In the most progressive districts, the adults strive to make the collective bargaining agreement into an education improvement plan.  In my district we have yet to cross that threshold.

In this sort of context, things like behavior and climate become ends in themselves.  We do not want good behavior in our classrooms or great school climate because it’s nice to be nice to each other; we want it because behavior and climate are necessary preconditions to great student learning.  We do not want great working conditions and competitive pay because teachers “deserve it;” again, we need these things to the extent that they promote conditions of maximum growth for students by creating supports for the best teaching and by removing distractions.  Without that focus on the learning as the most vital institutional goal, the school drifts, and climate and behavior, working conditions and pay, deteriorate anyway.

Why is a laser-like focus on student learning beneficial to children?  It is the best way that educators can express that they care for the students.  If we expect that our classrooms will be incubators of intellectual, artistic and ethical growth, this indicates that we want the students reach their potential.  We all arrive at school with baggage.  To focus on behavior or pay as an end is to get mired in the baggage – all the reasons that we can’t treat each other well.  To put the learning at the center of the institution is to put the student at the center in a truly profound way.

How does this express itself in actual classroom practice?  In the planning process the teacher keeps standards and curriculum in mind.  Not that binder on the shelf, but living curriculum which has been internalized.  I strive to make the constant connection between the activities I select, and the things that are appropriate for a particular cohort of students to master.  For example, I might look at a group of sixth graders and see that they need some conscious experience of 6/8 time, so I plan a series of lessons culminating in an opportunity for them to improvise and/or compose a piece of music in 6/8 time.  I love using a creative act for assessment – to me, it demonstrates true understanding.

Without a focus on standards and curriculum, the focus becomes the activities themselves, and the question becomes not what the students will learn, but what the teacher will do to entertain in order to get through the day.  An activity centered classroom is a teacher centered classroom.

It may seem ironic that the direction of institutional attention to student learning, seemingly external to the self, can have such a salutary effect.  To lose that focus, however, is to lose the soul of the school, and cripple us in the muck of the psychic baggage we carry.  To lift one’s eyes, to see that we can be better than we are, is to express faith in ourselves and in our students.  From time to time we may fail, but it is in the relentless movement towards growth that the members of a school community best express their humanity.  This is why we need to focus on the learning.

How Do You Spell Respect?

Yes, I know this book was published in 2009.  And yes, I know that it's 2012.  Perhaps this book was ahead of it's time and it's moment is now.

Against a policy backdrop of reductionist accountability run amok, The Mindful Teacher by Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley quietly restores a measure of sanity and balance.  This book could not have arrived at a better time for educators feeling under siege.

The Mindful Teacher displays profound respect for the teaching profession by throwing into high relief the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of teaching.  It is a demanding volume that honors the reader by showing confidence in the intellectual capabilities of educators, drawing on the best of the philosophical traditions of both east and west.  The book is more than a philosophical tome, however.  It constantly grounds this elevated discourse in concrete examples of improved teaching practice and better student learning, through six moving case studies of urban teachers, displaying teaching as a profession in the finest sense. 

MacDonald is a teacher in the Boston Public Schools; Shirley is a respected researcher and academic.  Together they pioneered the Mindful Teaching seminars, really a professional learning community (PLC) which is a product of an exemplary school/university partnership.  Dennis Shirley is a rare academic who is humble enough to see the correct role for academics in the education enterprise.  He sought ways to respectfully support educators.  Rather than pushing an agenda on a group of hard pressed urban teachers, he supported a process enabling them organically discover the questions they themselves needed to explore.

The seminars took place over a four year period and yielded ten clusters of questions specific to participants, but universal in character, and an “eightfold structure” which could be adapted to other PLCs with different circumstances.  An example of a question I found particularly telling: “What does it mean to be a teacher leader? How can I help build support networks for teachers in a way that leads to my renewal rather than burnout?”

An essential part of the eightfold structure of the seminars is the role of meditation in creating a space in which mindfulness can grow.  The concept of mindfulness emerges from the Buddhist tradition, and the concept of mindful teaching is advocated in the book as a means of mitigating alienated teaching, a concept borrowed from Marx.  The authors handled the practice of meditation in their seminars in a way that made it accessible and helpful to people from a variety of spiritual traditions.

The Mindful Teacher concludes with an exploration of dialectical tensions in the profession of teaching.  The Seven Synergies are individually necessary and jointly conditions for mindful practice, including concepts such as a caring disposition, professional expertise and collective responsibility.  The Triple Tensions acknowledge the existence of polarities in teaching practice: contemplation and action, ethics and power, the individual and collective.  The faith the authors show in us, that we can hold these tensions in our minds in what Estelle Jorgensen calls a “both/and” synthesis, demonstrates a profound respect for educators as intellectual and spiritual actors.

I was a bit troubled near the end of the book when the authors referred to teaching as a vocation.  As a labor activist, I fight for professional compensation and working conditions, and worry that teaching as a vocation leads us down the path to martyrdom.  But then I realized what The Mindful Teacher had taught me: profession and vocation are just one more tension that can be creatively embraced.  I felt both moved and honored.

Vermont and NCLB Waivers: Student Learning or Power Politics?

In order to understand the Vermont NCLB waiver application you have to understand the waiver process itself.  An op ed in the Times Argus recently critiqued certain features of the state’s application, including emphasis on high stakes testing, and failure to address poverty as a factor in low student achievement, but the waiver process is a Federal policy of the United States Department of Education.

To understand waivers you also have to take into account the power dynamics in Washington.  There is an ongoing effort by Congressional Republicans to block virtually every Obama administration initiative.  The Republicans strive to deny the administration a signature domestic policy achievement during an election year, even though an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization has been the first term hallmark of virtually every administration since LBJ.  The last re-authorization happened in 2001 during the Bush administration.  We know this iteration as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

I believe the Obama administration put ESEA on the back burner for a variety of valid reasons.  There was the possibility of bipartisanship.  They expended political capital on fixing the economy, on wars, on health insurance reform, and embedded a major education policy initiative in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Race to the Top (RTT).  RTT was a highly successful competitive grant program which leveraged states to make wholesale education policy changes at a very modest cost – just four billion dollars. 

Against the background of severe revenue problems in almost every state, RTT moved policy in significant ways even in states that did not receive grants.  For example, Vermont’s State Board of Education adopted Common Core Standards along with 45 other states and joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop a new generation of tests for Common Core.  But we did not even apply for RTT.  The results of RTT were well nigh astonishing.  Seldom has so much change been achieved for so little federal money.

NCLB waivers are a continuation of RTT.  There is enough similarity between the requirements of the two programs to make this assertion.  For example, the adoption of College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core meets this requirement) and the adoption of new teacher accountability systems that take into account test scores in some way are salient features of both programs.  So Vermont’s waiver application makes perfect sense – these are requirements for a waiver.  If you don’t meet the requirements, you don’t get a waiver.

The difference between the programs is rather than dangling cash in front of revenue starved states like RTT, the waiver program dangles regulatory relief from the NCLB ticking time bomb of 100% student proficiency on tests by 2014, a statistical impossibility that will label virtually every school as failing and subject them to a draconian set of restructuring requirements, including firing their teachers and their administrators.

In essence, the Obama/Duncan administration is doing a political end run around a recalcitrant and uncooperative Congress.  In my view, the whole thing has a lot more to do with Washington power politics and whole lot less to do with student learning.  If states adopt the basic tenets of the “Blueprint”, the Obama/Duncan plan for ESEA reauthorization, wholesale via RTT and waivers, then the ESEA becomes moot, and the administration has won the political battle for education reform without firing a shot. An ESEA reauthorization, if it occurs, will merely be codification of changes led at the state level.   It is an audacious political strategy.

Why is student learning jeopardized in this scenario?  Waivers assume that all states have a similar capacity to assimilate these policies.  I found it interesting that states like Massachusetts and Colorado already have waivers in hand.  The former was a round 2 RTT state that has a huge jumpstart on the work.  The latter is a state noted for pioneering many of the innovations that are becoming embedded in Federal education policy.  In Vermont we are starting from scratch.  Ten years of slash and burn budgeting during the Douglas administration have reduced our DOE to a shell of its former self, a compliance agency for Federal formula grants.  Whatever little capacity to respond to national policy is left is embedded in outside organizations like VT-NEA.

We are left asking permission.  Instead of treating the waiver process as an opportunity to rethink systems, we treat the waiver application like a bunch of hoops to jump through - hardly a way to make effective policy.  And student learning is left out of the equation.

The great danger here is that our legislature will panic and do something nonsensical, like New York or Tennessee did around teacher evaluation.  Our legislature has a history of doing that sort of thing at the eleventh hour – things like the “two vote mandate.”  I hope instead that our leaders think about how to bring together people with interest and expertise in great education policy to rebuild Vermont’s capacity so that we can not only respond effectively to the national policy context, but learn to lead it.