On Education: Helping Teachers Help Themselves

 

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve.

The program, Peer Assistance and Review — known as PAR — uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel — made up of eight teachers and eight principals — can vote to fire the teacher.

Sitting in on two cases last week, I could not tell from the comments which of the panel members were teachers and which were principals. In one of the cases, 11 of the 12 panel members present voted to follow a principal’s recommendation and discipline the teacher; in the other, they decided in a 10-to-2 vote to reject a principal’s recommendation and support the teacher.

In the 11 years since PAR began, the panels have voted to fire 200 teachers, and 300 more have left rather than go through the PAR process, said Jerry D. Weast, the superintendent of the Montgomery County system, which enrolls 145,000 students, one-third of them from low-income families. In the 10 years before PAR, he said, five teachers were fired. “It took three to five years to build the trust to get PAR in place,” he explained. “Teachers had to see we weren’t playing gotcha.”

Doug Prouty, the teachers’ union president, said, “It wouldn’t work without the level of trust we have here.”

Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s state superintendent of schools, called PAR “an excellent system for professional development.” Senior staff members from the United States Department of Education have visited here to study the program, and Montgomery County officials have gone to Washington to explain how it works. In February, the district was one of 12 featured in Denver at a Department of Education conference on labor-management collaboration.

Dr. Weast, who calls the United States secretary of education, Arne Duncan, “a good friend,” said, “He’s told me, ‘Jerry, you’re going where the country needs to go.’?”

Unfortunately, federal dollars from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program are not going where Dr. Weast and the PAR program need to go. Montgomery County schools were entitled to $12 million from Race to the Top, but Dr. Weast said he would not take the money because the grant required districts to include students’ state test results as a measure of teacher quality. “We don’t believe the tests are reliable,” he said. “You don’t want to turn your system into a test factory.”

Race to the Top aims to spur student growth by improving teacher quality, which is exactly what Montgomery County is doing. Sad to say, it is getting the right results the wrong way.

It does not seem to matter that 84 percent of Montgomery County students go on to college and that 63 percent earn degrees there — the very variables that President Obama has said should be the true measure of academic success. It does not seem to matter that 2.5 percent of all black children in America who pass an Advanced Placement test live in Montgomery County, more than five times its share of the nation’s black population.

The 12 states that were awarded the billions of dollars in Race to the Top grants are using student scores as a measure of teachers’ worth. New York has decided that state tests will count for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s grade; Maryland does not have a magic number yet.

Mr. Duncan’s supporters have marveled at how he has used Race to the Top money to pressure states into adopting his education agenda. Dr. Grasmick, the Maryland superintendent, said the administration made it clear that if a state wanted to win a grant, the proposal had to include a formula for calculating student growth. Maryland toed the line and was awarded $250 million.

Asked if the state could make an exception for Montgomery because of the PAR program’s history of success, Dr. Grasmick said Gov. Martin O’Malley had been told that no modifications were allowed. Nor are districts permitted to appeal to federal officials, said Ann Whalen, director of the Implementation and Support Unit at the Education Department.

So here is where things stand: Montgomery’s PAR program, which has worked beautifully for 11 years, is not acceptable. But the Maryland plan — which does not exist yet — meets federal standards.

Dr. Weast said a major failing of Race to the Top’s teacher-evaluation system is that it is being imposed from above rather than being developed by the teachers and administrators who will use it. “People don’t tear down what they help build,” he said.

Maybe that is why Race to the Top has been divisive in so many places. In Maryland, teachers’ unions in 22 of the 24 districts refused to sign the state’s grant proposal. In New York and New Jersey, the competition has made the war between the unions and state officials even nastier.

Every politician who micromanages education today should visit a PAR meeting.

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.com

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For Some, Helping With Disaster Relief Is Not Just Aid, It’s a Calling

 

The minute they got the call from Southern Baptist Convention disaster relief leaders that tornadoes had ripped through the South, the Blankenships grabbed their sleeping bags and sturdy shoes and headed out from their home in Decatur, Ala.

Together, they have cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina, mucked out flooded homes in Atlanta and built houses in Sri Lanka. And for the past week they were camped out here in a rural part of northeastern Alabama where 48 lives were lost and thousands more disrupted in the storms.

Mr. Blankenship, 70, and Mrs. Blankenship, 69, heated up chili and Salisbury steak, handing it out to people who drove through a church parking lot and packing it into Red Cross vans that carry meals into the remote countryside.

And they did it all for God.

“I thought when we were done working that I wanted to travel,” said Mrs. Blankenship, a former flight attendant. “I just never thought it’d look like this. But it’s our calling.”

With the ability to feed 20,000 people from one mobile kitchen, and a chain of command so tightly run it would make a military officer proud, the Southern Baptist teams are the backbone of disaster relief here.

Nearly 95,000 Baptists across the country are trained to handle disasters like hurricanes and floods. After the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, the Baptist group is the biggest disaster relief organization in the country.

“We’re the best-kept secret out there,” said Ron Warren, cleanup and recovery coordinator for the Alabama Southern Baptist disaster relief group.

Of course, thousands of church members are doing their part to help the South recover from the tornadoes. They raise money, sort clothing donations and hand out water.

They are what the veterans of large faith-based relief efforts call S.U.V.’s — spontaneous untrained volunteers. The efforts are welcomed, but they have nothing on what the Southern Baptists bring to a disaster.

From an elaborate “war room” in a church building in Montgomery, Ala., to direct lines of communication with federal and local emergency agencies, the Southern Baptist disaster ministry is a model of efficiency.

Its renowned chain-saw crews were cutting fallen trees so medical crews could get to the injured in the hours after the tornadoes hit. They had an enormous mobile kitchen, complete with a hot-water heater for dishwashing and five convection ovens, set up here a day before the Red Cross arrived.

“Churches are literally, honestly, the first ones there,” said Jon Mason, director of the Alabama Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The Baptist relief efforts began in earnest during Texas’ hurricanes in the 1960s and became more organized in the 1980s. They and other large church disaster programs got a formal, though controversial, lift in 2001, when President George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

But when it comes to disaster relief, the link between church and state has never been stronger than during the most recent storms in the South, say federal officials and the leaders of faith-based disaster relief work.

Joshua DuBois, executive director of what is now known as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, credits David L. Myers, a Mennonite minister and the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Mr. Meyers meets regularly with government emergency officials and church leaders to discuss how best to respond to disasters.

As a result, Mr. DuBois said, “there’s a dramatic difference” in the relationship between the government and faith-based groups since Hurricane Katrina.

“There were a lot of groups that felt like they weren’t plugged in before,” he said.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “I have never made a distinction that the faith-based communities were something separate from the team.”

The Baptists are not the only church group with highly organized disaster relief teams. More than a dozen denominations, from the United Jewish Federation to the Islamic Circle of North America, jumped into relief operations here.

Each is known among government emergency crews for its own specialty. The Mennonites help to warehouse emergency supplies. The Presbyterians do counseling. Lutherans have a broad network of churches that can provide shelter, and specialize in long-term relief work.

All of them rely on donations and special fund-raising events. Some work directly with the Red Cross and state and federal emergency management agencies, which provide supplies and technical assistance.