A group in the California section of the audience booed loudly when Duncan praised Green Dot Public Schools, which independently operates more than a dozen schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District with union contracts. David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Assn., called the anti-Green Dot contingent a "vocal minority."
Duncan pointedly advocated using student test score data to assess teacher effectiveness. "It's time we all admit that just as our testing system is deeply flawed, so is our teacher evaluation system."
Test scores should not be the sole measurement of teacher quality, Duncan said, and any merit pay needs to be shared on a campus-wide basis. When he headed the Chicago public schools, Duncan oversaw the creation of a program that rewarded some schools for increasing student achievement, which was measured partially by test scores, by giving extra pay to all employees.
Unions agreed to the program, said Duncan, who added that rewarding only individual teachers was wrong.
"You cannot pit teachers against each other. Such programs will always fail," he said.
He also said that administrators need to be given more support and training, but if they are ineffective they "need to find something else to do."
Van Roekel said he was willing to work with Duncan and the Obama administration because they appear to understand the complexities of reform and of using testing data to evaluate teachers. But Sanchez said he did not favor using that data.
"It shouldn't be on the table," he said.
Sanchez said that local unions need to negotiate their own contracts, but that he doesn't believe merit pay should be a bargaining point. Still, he said he was pleased that Duncan was reaching out to unions.
When reform "comes from the top down, it never works," Sanchez said. "We need to be inclusive."
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jason.song@latimes.com
