This is a stunning article about the teacher evaluation system that Michelle Rhee put in place in the District of Columbia. The article was written by Ben Nuckols of the Associated Press. He is not usually an education writer, but he dug deeper than many education writers.
Rhee fired about 1,000 teachers during her time as chancellor.
Since her evaluation system was put into place, 400 teachers have been fired.
Since the evaluation system was put into place, the federal test scores for the District went flat.
Some teachers get big bonuses. One teacher, at the end of the article, says she is rated “highly effective” and she turned down the bonus.
As Mary Levy, a long-time analyst of the DC school system, says in the article: We have gone from a system where almost no one was terminated, no matter how bad, to the other extreme, where good teachers as well as bad are terminated,” said Mary Levy, an attorney and a longtime analyst of city education policy. “The latter is probably more damaging due to the stress and demoralization it causes.”
Advocates of merit pay and test-based evaluation claim that it will strengthen the teaching profession because teachers will be drawn to the chance to earn a big bonus or higher salary.
This isn’t happening. As the article says, “But many teachers aren’t sticking around long enough to enjoy the higher salaries. The district has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the nation. Half of new teachers leave the system after 2 years, according to Levy’s analysis, compared with about one-third nationwide. Levy recently began examining individual schools and found two-year turnover rates as high as 94 percent at one elementary school and 66 percent at a high school.
Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project, founded by Rhee, says it is too soon to judge the evaluation system. Give it 5 to 10 years, he says.
Question: Why are we foisting on the entire nation a method that has not been proven successful anywhere? Why not give it 5-10 years and see what happens before making it a national mandate, imposed by state legislatures at the behest of the Race to the Top?
But I thought teachers were no longer successful after 7 years?
In addition to and aside from all the other BS in that article, this leapt out at me:
“In addition to firing teachers who perform poorly, the district has moved aggressively to reward the best teachers. Those who get top evaluations can get pay raises more quickly and receive up to $25,000 a year in bonuses. That means a teacher can earn a $131,000 annual salary, one of the highest in the nation for a public school instructor, after nine years on the job.”
Weren’t we just told that, at allegedly $76,000 average, Chicago teachers have the highest teacher salaries in the nation? Now we’re being told that DC teachers allegedly make upwards of $100,000 even without the bonus.
I guess truth is whatever it’s convenient at the moment.
Let’s all tweet this article to @Michelle Rhee and @Students First.
DCPS Salary Schedule:
http://dc.gov/DCPS/About+DCPS/Career+Opportunities/Teach+in+Our+Schools/Compensation#1
So, after nine years the highest is about $80,000, and that’s with a Ph.D. Sixteen years is the minimum to break $100,000, again with a Ph.D. Hm, I guess the article was wrong – how very shocking.
You know how facts and the ‘truth’ get in the way of a story. I’m old school. I was told to check, double check and have two sources for each fact I presented as fact. And I would now like to thank all my teachers who stressed that.
Today, it seems all stories are written from memory or based on someone else’s ‘facts.’
I think the article said a teacher CAN make up to $131,000, not that a teacher will make that much. That seems to be correct given the pay scale.
TE – the article specifically said “after nine years”. Look at the payscale Mark Collins posted. At nine years, it tops out around $80,000 with a *Ph.D.*. $75,000 with a Masters and $65,000 with a Bachelors, which two categories probably account for the majority of teachers. So, no, even with a $25,000 bonus, a nine-year teacher cannot make $130,000. The article is Just. Plain. Wrong.
Your right, the nine years is wrong. I am impressed with the salary scale in both cities. If my experience teaching 13th grade counted, I would get a significantly higher salary in either school district than I get at my university.
TE, only if your VAM scores were consistently high.
I would have to keep the job, but it would be a 50% increase in my salary if I worked in DC, somewhat less in Chicago.
Just blogged about this; Are teachers trapped in an abusive relationship? http://qmsteched.edublogs.org/2012/09/25/has-teaching-become-an-abusive-relationship/
Evidently many teachers in DC can and do leave the abusive relationship.
I am in the process of helping a friend who is in a psychologically abusive relationship. As a result, I have read many articles about the “cycle of abuse”.
Your blog is spot one. It is the source of teacher stress and this type of teacher abuse is often covert in nature … sometimes hard to specifically identify.
Thank you for explaining this phenomenon so clearly. I would think that every public school district would have policies against abuse in any form.
I would add to the list the feeling of never knowing for sure what is going to ‘get you in trouble’…Which hoops are most important to jump through today? We have a long list of things that our administrators expect to see when they randomly pop into the classroom, and a different list for when they come for formal observations. Not to mention the long ‘list’ of unwritten rules that take time to learn, and are often learned the hard way. BTW, I am not in DC. This problem seems to be any many, many places.
Though I’ve been retired for five years, I can’t help imagining what my strategy would be, if I were faced with this test score insanity. I believe I would be far more critical of student effort and behavior, much more willing to send chronically lazy, unmotivated, misbehaving students to the office, and seek to have them removed from my class list by challenging both the student, parents, and administration. Your classic “squeaky wheel”.
If confronted with this pattern of behavior, I would simply point out that I’m doing exactly what the administration is doing. If it’s okay for them, it’s okay for me. Wouldn’t be popular, but it might get some attention. I was always known as a hard case.
A good plan, except we’re not allowed to send children to the office. If an ED kid has an eruption in your room, you must have caused it by poor teaching practice. If the kid has no disability, but is just being a little creep because he’s having a bad day, then your class isn’t interesting enough. Can’t punish the kid because you’re crap at your job.
They have enough years now to find out if 3 highly effective teachers in a row closed the achievement gap……
Guess that didn’t happen
Not likely with teachers churning and burning in good ole D.C. As a matter of fact the gap has widened.
D.C. schools have largest black-white achievement gap in federal study
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-have-largest-black-white-achievement-gap-in-federal-study/2011/12/06/gIQArNnMcO_story.html
Tim Daly pokes his head in again.
As I have posted before, Tim Daly believes Michelle Rhee’s Baltimore Miracle hoax.
Despite the data that shows it didn’t happen.
Tim is a fool, like the boy Ronald Reagan liked to talk about, the boy who shovels through a pile of horse shit because he is convinced there’s a horse in there somewhere.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Why is this being foisted on the nation . . . ? Because it’s not really about the kids . . . it’s about money.
Avoiding responsibility is also a primary goal of the reformer class. Astonishingly, teachers and public education have become the scapegoats for the economic crisis. Frankly, I’m depressed and angry that most people don’t see this…
Amazing how one can tweet a link to Diane Ravitch and see her tweet a blog post of her own about it half an hour later! We should all be so quick.
What struck me most about the AP piece was this paragraph:
“The system is also placing more emphasis on professional development. The union is training teachers on how to improve their evaluation scores, and Saunders said teachers, by and large, have learned how to adapt to the new criteria.”
Is the Washington Teachers’ Union helping teachers effectively “teach to the test” and calling it professional development? Am I reading that right?
Thanks for that link!
I also heard from the writer, who sent a link where he got a byline, which was well deserved.
Question: Why are we foisting on the entire nation a method that has not been proven successful anywhere? Why not give it 5-10 years and see what happens before making it a national mandate, imposed by state legislatures at the behest of the Race to the Top?
Answer: because the hidden agenda is to be able to fire good teachers who are rated ineffective due to new evaluation systems. I believe teaching in the future will no longer be a career, just a 5 year job.
I disagree. TFA is two and done. That is one of their “best practices.”
The article says Memphis teachers “chose” an evaluation system similar to DCPS. That is untrue.
Perhaps they asked 5 or 10 teachers. They certainly didn’t ask the majority. I know there was an article in the local paper where a teacher was complaining about the checklist nature of the new evaluation system. She said she was one of the teachers who chose this system, and she hadn’t expected it to be used as a checklist (which is the way it is almost universally used).
She said she would be leaving the school system because of her dislike of the new evaluation system.
I’m a first grade teacher in Indianapolis. We cannot even get anyone to explain to us what the new pay structure is for our school district. We know we will no longer be given pay increases…..we’ve been told nothing about bonus pay, or starting salaries. Our union has no power since our legislature stripped it in this last session. I understand that we want to hold teachers accountable, but I think it is not unreasonable to expect that I be at least told what my pay structure will be so I know what to work towards. I’ve earned a masters degree, two separate certifications and have 16 years of experience in inner city schools. I do what I do because I love it and I make a difference. I’m tired of being demonized and demoralized in the press because I want to know whether or not I am going to be able to continue to support my family. These new evaluation systems are so complicated and at the same time vague and ambiguous. I’m in the process right now of writing my state approved forms for my administrator for part of my evaluation and I’m overwhelmed by what I must now do. People believe all of this paperwork and bureaucracy is going to make better teachers, but in reality it is driving people from the profession. College enrollment in education programs has dropped dramatically over the last 5 years. Who would want to be a teacher in this climate? I don’t know about Chicago and DC, but in Indianapolis, we are all frustrated and worried about the future of our schools.