Obama plans teacher initiative

Effort to place experienced educators in high-need schools

President Barack Obama, center, speaks about education during a lunch meeting with teachers, Monday, July 7, 2014, in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington. From left are, Justin Minkel of Arkansas; Leslie Ross of Greensboro, N.C.; Obama, and Dwight Davis of Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
President Barack Obama, center, speaks about education during a lunch meeting with teachers, Monday, July 7, 2014, in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington. From left are, Justin Minkel of Arkansas; Leslie Ross of Greensboro, N.C.; Obama, and Dwight Davis of Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama introduced a new administration effort Monday to place quality teachers in schools that need them the most.

Obama said the U.S. education system has "a problem" in that students who would benefit the most from having skilled or experienced teachers in their classrooms are least likely to get them, including black and Hispanic students.

Obama credits education and good teachers with helping him get to the White House. He said he wants to make sure that every child has the same access to good teachers that he had.

"The one ingredient that we know makes an enormous difference is a great teacher," Obama said before discussing the issue over lunch in the Blue Room of the White House with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and four teachers -- from Springdale; Washington, D.C.; Greensboro, N.C.; and Philadelphia.

The Springdale teacher was Justin Minkel. Minkel is a second-grade teacher at Jones Elementary School and was the 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year.

Under the initiative, the Education Department will ask every state and the District of Columbia to develop plans by April to make sure every student has an effective teacher. It's also spending $4.2 million to help states and districts create the plans and put them into place. States will be required to publicly report their progress.

Forcing states to be transparent about the quality of teachers in high-poverty schools will create pressure to make changes, Duncan said, so low-income children will have equal access to good teaching compared with their more affluent peers.

"This is a really important exercise for the nation to undertake," he said.

When asked what penalties states will face if they do not comply, Duncan said he hadn't figured that out.

Black and American Indian students are four times as likely as their white peers to go to a school where more than 20 percent of teachers are in their first year, according to Education Department statistics. The same data show that Hispanic students are three times as likely to attend such schools.

At a roundtable discussion after lunch, Duncan heard from 10 teachers and principals who work in high-poverty schools around the country. The teachers voiced frustration at the lack of resources at their schools and the regularly changing demands of their jobs.

But they said they stayed because of good working environments, with supportive principals and time and opportunity to collaborate with colleagues. Three of the seven teachers on the panel work at public charter schools.

Duncan shrugged off questions at a White House news briefing about a call for his resignation that came from the nation's largest teachers union last week.

Delegates of the National Education Association adopted a business item Friday at their annual convention in Denver that called for Duncan's resignation.

A tipping point for some members was Duncan's statement last month in support of a California judge's ruling that struck down tenure and other job protections for the state's public school teachers. The judge said such laws harm particularly low-income students by saddling them with bad teachers who are almost impossible to fire.

Before that ruling, teachers unions clashed with the administration over other issues, including its support of charter schools and its push to use student test scores as part of evaluating teachers.

On Monday, Duncan said he supports teachers unions and collective bargaining.

Asked whether union contracts exacerbate the problems in high-needs schools because they often give the most senior teachers the right to transfer to the most desirable schools -- leaving high-need schools populated by inexperienced educators -- Duncan said he believes unions and labor agreements could be part of the solution.

He said he "absolutely agreed" with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who mentioned labor contracts in several districts that contained financial incentives such as hardship pay to lure good teachers to high-need schools.

Information for this article was contributed by Kimberly Hefling, Darlene Superville and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press and by Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post.

A Section on 07/08/2014

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