“Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven’t had that leadership from the top,” he said.

“Where you’ve seen real progress in the sense of innovation, guess what the common denominator is? Mayoral control,” Duncan said.

It’s an AP article, but one version is here.

So the Education First Compact/Philadelphia Education Fund/Cross City Campaign launched their “Effective Teaching for All Children Campaign” yesterday. There’s reference to a policy paper in the news coverage but I couldn’t find it on their website. Whether it’s their intent or not, it seems a clear salvo at the PFT, a way to undermine seniority.

We’ll see how much traction they get with this — it’s a contract year and the PFT will strike over this issue — but last night I wondered what would happen if they allowed teachers to form groups or teams that could transfer to troubled school together. What if these teams could gather, write a proposal, and then see if there was a principal willing to take them on (and a principal they’d be willing to deal with) ?

Then, they could all be rewarded equally, as a team, if the school’s performance turned around… It would avoid some of the nastier elements of merit pay — principals with minimal understanding of instruction or teachers essentially competing against each other — and support a community “grown” by teachers themselves.

(Just to reiterate a point I’ve made over and over again: with such a shallow pool of administrators, you can’t expect veteran teachers to take a chance on the sanity/intelligence of a principal they don’t know. And you can’t create new school culture by dropping an assortment of new folks — experienced or not — into a building.)