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New York Will Move Away from Teacher Evaluation Tied to Test Scores

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2024 //
48

Back in 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rolled out his Race to the Top program to reform American education. The U.S. Department of Education offered a total of $5 billion to states. To be eligible to compete for a part of the huge prize money, states had to agree to authorize charter schools, to adopt the Common Core (not yet finished), and to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students.

The requirement to change teacher evaluation was heated. Duncan scoffed at critics, saying they were trying to protect bad teachers and didn’t want to know the truth.

Debate over this methodology was heated.

I was part of a group of education scholars who denounced this method of evaluating teachers in 2010.

In 2012, three noted scholars claimed that teachers who raised test scores raised students’ lifetime incomes; President Obama cited this study, led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, in his State of the Union address. It seemed to be settled wisdom that teachers who raised test scores were great, and teachers who did not should be ousted.

In 2014, the American Statistical Association warned about the danger of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. The ASA statement said that most studies of this method find that teachers account for 1-14% of the variation in test scores. The greatest opportunity for improvement, they said, was to be found in system-level changes.

The Gates Foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into districts willing to test value-added methodology, and eventually gave up. Teachers were demoralized, teachers avoided teaching in low-income districts. Overall improvements were hard to find.

Arne Duncan was a true believer, as was his successor, John King, and they never were willing to admit failure.

Teachers never liked VAM. They knew that it encouraged teaching to the test. They knew that teachers in affluent districts would get higher scores than those in less fortunate districts. Sometimes they sued and won. But in most states, teachers continued to be evaluated in part by their students’ scores.

But in New York state, the era of VAM is finished. Dr. Betty Rosa, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, reached an agreement with Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers, to draft a new way of evaluating teachers that moves away from students’ standardized test scores.

New York state education leaders and the teachers’ union have announced an agreement to change how New York school teachers and principals are evaluated, and move away from the mandated reliance on standardized test scores.

State Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa and New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person hand-delivered their drafted legislation Wednesday to lawmakers to create a new system that doesn’t use students’ test performance to penalize educators. The state teacher evaluation system, known as the Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, was modified in the 2015 budget to place a greater importance on scores.

“It’s connecting research to practice and developing strategies to ensure that teachers have the best tools and principals to make sure our young people are getting the best quality education,” Rosa told reporters Wednesday in the Legislative Office Building.

When NYSUT elected president Person last year, she said her first task was to change the teacher evaluation system, and state lawmakers said with confidence Wednesday it will happen this session.

The proposed law, which has not officially been introduced in the Legislature, would remove the requirement to base evaluations on high-stakes tests. School districts would have eight years to transition, but could make the changes faster than the required deadline.

Person argued it will support new teachers who are often burdened by the required paperwork under the current model.

“This would be a fair and a just system that would support them in becoming better educators, which is ultimately what they want to do anyway,” Person said.

The proposal was negotiated in agreement with state superintendents, principals, school boards, the PTA, Conference of Big 5 School Districts and other stakeholders. The issue has been contentious for union and education leaders for years, and both state Education Committee chairs in the Legislature said they’re thrilled with the agreement. 

“That’s such a nice thing in Albany,” said Senate Education chair Shelley Mayer, a Democrat from Yonkers. “Who can do that? Who gets agreement? It’s very hard around here.

“It takes a woman to do it,” Assembly Education chair Michael Benedetto replied with a smile.

Benedetto, a Bronx Democrat, was a classroom teacher for decades and recalled how feedback helps educators develop when done in the proper way.

“It’s like anything else — we want stability in our lives, we want to know where we’re going, how we’re going to be rated and what we’re going to be rated on, as a teacher, as a professional,” the assemblyman said.

Lawmakers will review the proposal and draft legislation in the coming weeks.

Remembering how strident were the supporters of VAM, it’s kind of wonderful to hear the collective sigh of relief in Albany as it fades away.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Chief Clings to Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.

He writes:

As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.

My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”

Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:

Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.

Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”

Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.

Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.

Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”

On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?

So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.

The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.

By the way, Walters just announced his plan to create a “one-stop shop” for teacher training, development and financial services. He unexpectedly ended the state’s relationship with:

The three organizations, which have wide membership throughout the state are the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (CCOSA) and the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center (OPSRC). In a news release, Walters said without providing examples that the three organizations “work in tandem with national extremist groups that seek to undermine parents, force failed policies into the schools, and work against a quality education in Oklahoma.”

The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

North Carolina: A Teacher Explains Why the State is Pushing a Disastrous Plan

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2022 //
11

A few days ago, I posted a column by Peter Greene about a dreadful plan in North Carolina to align teacher pay and evaluation with test scores, an approach that has always failed and that always demoralizes teachers.

Peter was relying on the thorough research of Justin Parmenter, a North Carolina teacher who is a National Board Certified Teacher.

Another North Carolina teacher wrote the following comment:

As a North Carolina teacher, I can personally attest to everything that Justin Parmenter has written about this god-awful plan. It has absolutely no support either from teachers or from school districts, where the administrators know full well that it will only increase their already desperate staffing problems. Yet there seems to be almost nothing that we can do to stop it short of the NC State Board of Education. At least there, a majority of the members were appointed by our Democratic Governor Cooper and may balk at a plan so universally opposed by those it will directly affect. We have no real union (NCAE is an “advocacy organization”) since we’re prevented by law from forming unions or collective bargaining. We’re also barred from striking. We have no recourse except to appeal to those few sympathetic political figures (like the Governor) who might be able to stand in the way of this. The DPI and the Legislature, who created PEPSC, are just looking for another way to undercut public education (without just coming out and doing it openly) so that they can move on to the privatizing that they really want to do but that the public at large still opposes. Driving away experienced teachers by undercutting their pay and heaping new burdens on us is just their latest scheme.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, VAM (value-added modeling)

North Carolina Plans to Scrap Experience-Based Teacher Pay and Replace It With Test-Based “Merit Pay”: A Zombie Policy

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2022 //
16

What can you say when a state decides to adopt a policy that has failed again and again and has been conclusively discredited? I call such proposals “zombie policies,” because they fail and fail but never die.

Justin Parmenter, a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina, writes here about a plan in his state to eliminate experienced-based pay and replace it with the obsolete practice of tying teacher pay to student test scores. The leaders in North Carolina call it ”merit pay.” It is also called value-added evaluation and test-based compensation.

Whatever it is called, it is ineffective and demoralizing to tie teacher pay to test scores. Those who teach in affluent districts will be paid more than those who teach in low-income schools or who teach students with disabilities. Presumably, the folks in North Carolina never heard of the POINT study in Nashville, Tennessee, a three-year study of whether teachers would produce higher test scores if offered a big bonus. The conclusion was that the bonus (merit pay) did not make a difference.

The final evaluation concluded:

While the general trend in middle school mathematics performance was upward over the period of the project, students of teachers ran- domly assigned to the treatment group (eligible for bonuses) did not outperform students whose teachers were assigned to the control group (not eligible for bonuses). The brightest spot was a positive effect of incentives detected in fifth grade during the second and third years of the experi- ment. This finding, which is robust to a variety of alternative estimation methods, is nonetheless of limited policy significance, for this effect does not appear to persist after students leave fifth grade. Students whose fifth grade teacher was in the treatment group performed no better by the end of sixth grade than did sixth graders whose teacher the year before was in the control group.

Have the North Carolina policymakers heard about the Gates-funded program to evaluate and pay teachers based on test scores and peer evaluations, which was tried in seven sites, including Hillsborough County, Florida, Memphis, Pittsburgh, and four charter chains? The program cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was evaluated by the RAND Corporation and AIR. The cost of the program was shared between Gates and the local districts.

The evaluation report of the Gates program was released in 2018. It concluded that the program did not improve student achievement, did not raise graduation rates or dropout rates, and did not change the quality of teachers. In some sites, teacher turnover increased. The neediest students did not get the best teachers because teachers angled to get students who would produce higher test scores. The program planners expected that as many as 20% of the site’s teachers would be fired but only 1% were.

Furthermore, in 2017, a federal judge in Houston threw out precisely the same evaluation system that North Carolina plans to use because teachers were judged by a “secret algorithm” and had “no meaningful way” to ensure that their scores were correctly calculated. The judge wrote: “The [teacher’s] score might be erroneously calculated for any number of reasons, ranging from data-entry mistakes to glitches in the computer code itself. Algorithms are human creations, and subject to error like any other human endeavor.”

Parmenter writes:

A draft proposal coming before the State Board of Education next week (April 6) would transition all North Carolina teachers to a system of “merit pay” as soon as 2023.

The proposal represents the culmination of the work of the Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission, which was directed by state legislators to make recommendations on licensure reform.

The proposed change would make North Carolina the first state in the country to stop paying teachers on an experience-based scale that, at least in theory, rewards long-term commitment to a career in education and recognizes the importance of veteran educators (if adequately funded by the state–but that’s a topic for another post).

Instead, compensation would be based largely on teacher effectiveness as determined by EVAAS, a computer algorithm developed by the SAS corporation which analyzes standardized test scores. Teachers who do not have EVAAS scores would receive salaries based on principal observations, observations by colleagues, and student surveys.

This plan is problematic in a number of ways. It would increase “teaching to the test” by offering a handful of larger salaries to those educators whose students do well on tests. Competition over a limited number of larger salaries would lead to teachers working in silos rather than collaborating and sharing best practices as cohesive teams. Teachers of subjects with no standardized tests are raising concerns that observations and student surveys are highly subjective, and basing salaries on them would be unfair.

Dr. Tom Tomberlin, who serves as the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Director of Educator Recruitment and Support, has justified moving away from an experience-based pay scale by claiming that teacher effectiveness plateaus after the first few years in the classroom.

It’s an argument which shows a major disconnect between DPI and those of us who actually work in schools and experience first hand how important veteran teachers are to overall school operations.

Veteran teachers often work as mentors, run athletic departments, coach sports and deliver professional development for peers.

They have long-standing relationships with school families and community members that position them to be excellent advocates for the needs of their schools.

None of that value is reflected in a veteran teacher’s EVAAS score.

Brenda Berg, CEO of pro-business education reform organization Best NC, has been a vocal proponent of scrapping the experience-based pay scale. Berg, who serves on the compensation subcommittee that helped develop the plan, said this week that it’s clear our current system isn’t working and it’s time to be “bold” about change even if it’s “scary.”

I’d like to note that anyone who claims educator pushback to this plan is centered in fear of change is completely out of touch with what it’s like to be a professional educator. We are the most flexible and resilient people on the planet, and the last two years have illustrated that fact like never before. We also know what it means to be treated fairly.

It’s true that North Carolina is facing a major pipeline crisis, with enrollment in UNC education programs down drastically over the past several years. It’s true that if we aren’t bold about change we will soon have nobody left who’s willing to work in our schools.

But we also need to be bold about acknowledging the reason for this crisis. It isn’t because the licensure process is too cumbersome. It isn’t because veteran teachers are ineffective and making too much money. It isn’t because our teachers lack accountability.

The reason North Carolina’s schools are suffering from a lack of qualified educators is because for the last 12 years our legislature’s policies have made it deeply unappealing to be a teacher in this state. Those policies include cutting master’s pay and longevity pay, taking away teacher assistants, eliminating retiree health benefits and many, many others.

The solution to North Carolina’s teacher pipeline crisis isn’t a system of merit pay which devalues long term commitment to public schools and ties salaries to standardized tests and subjective measures.

The solution to the problem is comprehensive policy change that makes a teaching career in North Carolina an attractive proposition. That’s the kind of change that will allow us to put an excellent teacher in every classroom.

This proposal ain’t it.

You can share feedback on the proposal with Dr. Thomas Tomberlin here: Thomas.Tomberlin@dpi.nc.gov

State Board of Education members will hear Dr. Tomberlin’s presentation at the April 6 board meeting. Their email addresses are:

eric.davis@dpi.nc.gov
alan.duncan@dpi.nc.gov
olivia.oxendine@dpi.nc.gov
reginald.kenan@dpi.nc.gov
amy.white@dpi.nc.gov
James.Ford@dpi.nc.gov
Jill.Camnitz@dpi.nc.gov
Donna.Tipton-Rogers@dpi.nc.gov
JWendell.Hall@dpi.nc.gov
john.blackburn@dpi.nc.gov
mark.robinson@dpi.nc.gov
dale.folwell@dpi.nc.gov

Categories Education Industry, Failure, Merit pay, Nashville, North Carolina, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jennifer Berkshire: Who Is Driving Teachers Out of Their Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire, expert education journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, writes in The Nation about the forces driving teachers out of the schools.

She interviewed many teachers who explained why they were leaving. Some cited ”the bad teacher” narrative promulgated by Arne Duncan and his insistence that teachers be evaluated, based on their students’ test scores, which is both ineffective and inaccurate. His and Obama’s “Race to the Top” was deeply demoralizing to teachers, and it accomplished nothing positive.

She begins:

Neal Patel survived teaching in the pandemic. It was the culture wars that did him in.

In the fall of 2020, Patel added two flags to the wall of his science classroom in Johnston, Iowa. Now, alongside images of energy waves and the electromagnetic spectrum were the Gay Pride rainbow flag and a proclamation that Black Lives Matter. The flags, says Patel, represented the kind of inclusive space he was committed to creating, sending a signal to all students that even in this conservative suburb of Des Moines, there was a place for them.

School administrators supported him—on one condition. “They’re just there as decoration,” Patel says. “The only time I discuss the flags is when a student asks me about them.”

Patel assumes it was a student who snapped a picture of the display. Somehow it ended up on the Facebook page of a conservative state legislator. Representative Steve Holt, who lives 100 miles from Johnston, pointed to the flags as evidence of creeping left-wing indoctrination in Iowa’s schools and encouraged his constituents to take a stand. Patel says he was shocked by the attention, then upset: “Holt thinks it’s a political issue to try to create an inclusive environment, and he’s using that to try to further divide our community.”Johnston has grown only more divided since Patel became Facebook fodder. At a school board meeting last fall, members debated whether to ban two books on race, including one by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, after parents complained. The president of the Iowa State Senate, who represents a neighboring county, took the mic during the public comment period, calling for teachers who assigned “obscene” material to be prosecuted. Patel was in the crowd that night, to lend support to minority and LGBTQ students who’d come to speak out against banning the books. And he had an announcement of his own to make: This year would be his last as a teacher in Johnston.

The Obama administration made matters much worse for teachers when it imposed test-based evaluation as the heart of its “reforms.”

The thinking went something like this: Make teacher evaluations tougher, and teaching would get better, which would mean higher student achievement, more students graduating from college, and ultimately a country better able to outsmart China et al. “Tougher” meant holding teachers accountable for how their students fared on standardized tests…

In 2010, Colorado became one of the first states to enact a high-stakes teacher evaluation law; by 2017, nearly every state had one on the books. While the pandemic may have disrupted everything about schooling, policies like Colorado’s Senate Bill 10, with its 18-page evaluation rubric and 345-page user guide aimed at weeding out bad teachers, remain in place.

For Shannon Peterson, an English language acquisition teacher in Aurora, that meant leading her students through a writing exercise last fall as her principal observed. Peterson’s students, many of them immigrants who live in poverty, bore the pandemic heavily, she says: “The kids are stressed, all of their writing is about anxiety, and attendance is way down.”

To her delight, the students responded enthusiastically to the writing prompt she’d come up with: comparing and contrasting the Harlem Renaissance and Black Lives Matter, and how the entertainment industries in their respective eras related to both. In a year of stress and struggle for teachers and students alike, here was something to celebrate. “Excellent writing came out of this,” Peterson says.

Her principal wasn’t convinced. Peterson, he felt, hadn’t done enough actual teaching during the observation. “I just don’t feel comfortable checking off these boxes,” he told her.

The previous year, when the cash-strapped school district had offered teachers buyouts to leave, Peterson turned it down: “I felt an enormous obligation to go back for the kids and my colleagues.” After her evaluation, though, Peterson had reached a breaking point. She quit a week later, walking away from a career that spanned 23 years, 18½ of them in Aurora. “I’m not a box,” Peterson says.

Two weeks after Peterson resigned, a major study came out: The decade-long push to weed out bad teachers had come to naught. The billions of dollars spent, the wars with teachers’ unions, and the collapse in teacher morale had produced “null effects” on student test scores and educational attainment.

Please open the link and read the study. Billions of dollars wasted on ineffective and demoralizing teacher evaluations that produced tons of data but nothing else.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers? Readers Respond

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2022 //
75

Last week, I posted my thoughts on “Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers?” I sought to identify the people and organizations that spread the lie that America’s public schools were “broken” and that public school teachers were the cause. The critics slandered teachers repeatedly, claiming that teachers were dragging down student test scores. They said that today’s teachers were not bright enough; they said teachers had low SAT scores; and they were no longer “the best and the brightest.”

The “corporate reform” movement (the disruption movement) was driven in large part by the “reformers'” belief that public schools were obsolete and their teachers were the bottom of the barrel. So the “reformers” promoted school choice, especially charter schools, and Teach for America, to provide the labor supply for charter schools. TFA promised to bring smart college graduates for at least two years to staff public schools and charter schools, replacing the public school teachers whom TFA believed had low expectations. TFA would have high expectations, and these newcomers with their high SAT scores would turn around the nation’s schools. The “reformers” also promoted the spurious, ineffective and harmful idea that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, although this method repeatedly, consistently showed that those who taught affluent children were excellent, while those who taught children with special needs or limited-English proficiency or high poverty were unsatisfactory. “Value-added” methodology ranked teachers by the income and background of their students’ families, not by the teachers’ effectiveness.

All of these claims were propaganda that was skillfully utilized by people who wanted to privatize the funding of public education, eliminate unions, and crush the teaching profession.

The response to the post was immediate and sizable. Some thought the list of names and groups I posted was dated, others thought it needed additions. The comments of readers were so interesting that I present them here as a supplement to my original post. My list identified No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core as causes of demoralization that tied teachers to a standards-and-testing regime that reduced their autonomy as professionals. One reader said that the real beginning of the war on teachers was the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk,” which asserted that American public schools were mired in mediocrity and needed dramatic changes. I agree that the “Nation at Risk” report launched the era of public-school bashing. But it was NCLB and the other “solutions” that launched teacher-bashing, blaming teachers for low test scores and judging teachers by their test scores. It should be noted that the crest of “reform” was 2010, when “Waiting for Superman” was released, Common Core was put into place, value-added test scores for teachers were published, and “reformers” like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and other became media stars, with their constant teacher-bashing. For what it’s worth, the National Assessment of Educational Progress flatlined from 2010 onwards. Test score gains, which were supposedly the point of all this “reform” activity, were non-existent on the nation’s most consequential test (no stakes attached).

Readers also blamed demoralization on teachers’ loss of autonomy, caused by federal laws and the testing imposed by them, and by the weakness of principals and administrators who did not protect teachers from the anti-education climate caused by NCLB, RTTT, ESSA, and the test-and-punish mindset that gripped the minds of the nation’s legislators and school leaders.

Readers said that my list left off important names of those responsible for demoralizing the nation’s teachers.

Here are readers’ additions, paraphrased by me:

Michelle Rhee, who was pictured on the cover of TIME magazine as the person who knew “How to Fix American Education” and lionized in a story by Amanda Ripley. Rhee was shown holding a broom, preparing to sweep “bad teachers” and “bad principals” out of the schools. During her brief tenure as Chancellor of D.C., she fired scores of teachers and added to her ruthless reputation by firing a principal on national television. For doing so, she was the Queen of “education reform” in the eyes of the national media until USA Today broke a major cheating scandal in the D.C. schools.

Joel Klein, antitrust lawyer who was chosen by Mayor Bloomberg to become the Chancellor of the New York City public schools, where he closed scores of schools because of their low test scores, embraced test-based evaluation of schools and teachers, and opened hundreds of small specialized schools and charter schools. He frequently derided teachers and blamed them for lagging test scores. He frequently reorganized the entire, vast school system, surrounding himself with aides with Business School graduates and Wall Street credentials. Under his leadership, NYC was the epitome of corporate reform, which inherently disrespected career educators.

Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City, billionaire funder of charter schools and of candidates running for state or local offices who supported privatization of public schools. He claimed that under his leadership, the test-score gap between different racial gaps had been cut in half or even closed, but it wasn’t true. He stated his desire to fire teachers who couldn’t “produce” high test scores, while doubling the size of the classes of teachers who could. His huge public relations staff circulated the story of a “New York City Miracle,” but it didn’t exist and evaporated as soon as he left office.

Reed Hastings, billionaire funder of charter schools and founder of Netflix. He expressed the wish that all school boards would be eliminated. The charter school was his ideal, managed privately without public oversight.

John King, charter school leader who was appointed New York Commissioner of Education. He was a cheerleader for the Common Core and high-stakes testing. He made parents so angry by his policies that he stopped appearing at public events. He was named U.S. Secretary of Education, following Arne Duncan, in the last year of the Obama administration and continued to advocate for the same ill-fated policies as Duncan.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education despised public schools, unions, and teachers. She never had a good word to say about public schools. She wanted every student to attend religious schools at public expense.

Eli Broad and the “academy” he created to train superintendents with his ideas about top-down management and the alleged value of closing schools with low test scores

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which writes model legislation for privatizing public schools by opening charters and vouchers and lowering standards for teachers and crushing unions. More than 2,000 rightwing state legislators belong to ALEC and get their ideas directly from ALEC about privatization and other ways to crush public schools and their teachers.

Rupert Murdoch, the media, Time, Newsweek, NY Times, Washington Post for their hostility towards public schools and their warm, breathless reporting about charter schools and Teach for America. The Washington Post editorialist is a devotee of charter schools and loved Michelle Rhee’s cut-throat style. TIME ran two cover stories endorsing the “reform” movement; the one featuring Michelle Rhee, and the other referring to one of every four public school teachers as a “rotten apple.” The second cover lauded the idea that teachers were the cause of low test scores, and one of every four should be weeded out. Newsweek also had a Rhee cover, and another that declared in a sentence repeated on a chalkboard, “We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” as though the public schools were overrun with miscreant teachers.

David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, which undermined the autonomy of teachers and ironically removed teachers’ focus on content and replaced it with empty skills. The Common Core valued “informational text” over literature and urged teachers to reduce time spent teaching literature.

Margaret Raymond, of the Walton-funded CREDO, which evaluates charter schools.

Hanna Skandera, who was Secretary of Education in New Mexico and tried to import the Florida model of testing, accountability, and choice to New Mexico. That state has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the nation, and the Florida model didn’t make any difference.

Governors who bashed teachers and public schools, like Chris Christie of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Gregg Abbott of Texas

“Researchers” like those from the Fordham Institute, who saw nothing good in public schools or their teaching

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who turned Denver into a model of “reform,” with everything DFER wanted: charter schools and high-stakes testing.

Poorly behaving students and parents who won’t hold kids accountable for bad behavior

Campbell Brown and the 74

The U.S. Department of Education, for foisting terrible ideas on the nation’s schools and teachers, and state education departments and state superintendents for going along with these bad ideas. Not one state chief stood up and said, “We won’t do what is clearly wrong for our students and their teachers.”

The two big national unions, for going along with these bad ideas instead of fighting them tooth and nail.

And now I will quote readers’ comments exactly as they wrote them, without identifying their authors (they know who they are):

*Rightwing organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, (AEI), the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Heritage Foundation, even the allegedly Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) for publishing white papers masquerading as education research that promotes privatization.

*Wall St moguls who invented Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) to gamble on & profit from preK student test scores.

*Rogues Gallery. One body blow after another. A systematic 💦 water boarding with no respite. And then we add the Broad Foundation who sent Broad-trained “leadership” so drunk on arrogance and ignorance that the term “School Yard Bully” just doesn’t capture it.
Operating with the Imprimatur and thin veneer of venture capital, plutocratic philanthropy, these haughty thugs devastated every good program they laid eyes on. Sinking their claws instinctively into the intelligent, effective and cultured faculty FIRST.A well orchestrated, heavily scripted Saturday Night Massacre.

*Congress and the Presidents set the stage, but the US Department of Education was instrumental in making it all happen. They effectively implemented a coherent program to attack, smear and otherwise demoralize teachers. And make no mistake, it was quite purposeful

*This list is incomplete without members of Democrats for Education Reform. Add in Senator Ted Kennedy, whose role in the passage of No Child Left Behind was critical. Same for then Congressman and future Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who noted (bragged!) in his recent autobiography that he was essential in keeping President George W. Bush on track with NCLB.

*Let’s not forget Senate Chair Patty Murray. She has been an important player in keeping the worse of Ed Reform legislation alive.

*You have presented a rogue’s gallery of failed “reformers” that have worked against the common good. In addition to those mentioned, there has also been an ancillary group of promoters and enablers that have undermined public education including billionaire think tanks, foundations and members of both political parties. These people continue to spread lies and misinformation, and no amount of facts or research is able to diminish the drive to privatize. While so called reformers often hide behind an ideological shield, they are mostly about the greedy pursuit of appropriating the education that belongs to the people and transferring its billions in value into the pockets of the already wealthy. So called education reform is class warfare.

*The Clintons, whose 1994 reauthorization of ESEA set the stage for NCLB

*Don’t forget the so called ‘liberal’ media, publications such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe who have published pro charter piece after pro charter piece, while simultaneously dumping all over public schools

*I’d like to include a cast of editorialists like George Will, Bill Rhoden, and many others, who have parroted the plutocratic-backed Ed Reform line. Armstrong Williams would certainly be part of this.

*Going back even further into the origins of this madness, I would add to Diane’s excellent rogues gallery those unknown bureaucrats in state departments of education who replaced broad, general frameworks/overall strategic objectives with bullet lists of almost entirely content-free “standards” that served as the archetype of the Common [sic] Core [sic] based on the absurd theory that we should “teach skills” independent of content, all of which led, ironically, to trivialization of and aimlessnessness in ELA pedagogy and curricula and to a whole generation of young English teachers who themselves NOW KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING OF THE CONTENT OF THEIR SUBJECT, typified by the English teacher who told one of the parents who regularly contributes comments to this blog, “I’m an English teacher, so I don’t teach content.” So, today, instead of teaching, say, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as part of a coherent and cumulative unit on common structures and techniques and genres of poetry, one gets idiotic test-practice exercises on “inferencing” and “finding the main idea,” with any random piece of writing as the “text.”

*It’s driven by how teachers have been treated the past 4-5 years, especially during the pandemic. Teachers are first responders. We should have been on the list of first-to-be-vaccinated. Schools should have strict mask and vaccine mandates. Teachers are professional educators. We should not be told what and how to teach by ignorant, conspiracy-driven MAGA parents. Public education is a cornerstone of democracy, and we teachers are motivated by a sense of civic duty. We are demoralized by attempts to destroy public education, led by anti-education bible-thumping “leaders” like Betsy DeVos and (in my home state) Frank Edelblut. Public education is being dismantled by gleeful right-wingers, while naive, well-intentioned moderates wring their hands and do little to defend it. It’s tiring to be under constant attack on the front lines, with no support. That’s why teachers are leaving today.

*One tiny example of a routine phenomenon. Teachers got the message pretty clearly: They were at the bottom of the pecking order. The absolute bottom. Micromanaged and undercut at every turn.Excellent points. The heavy handed top-down, bureaucratic demands for “data,” basically serve one goal, to justify the existence of administration.Don’t forget the voracious appetite of publishing companies…We had a district administrator prance around in our “professional; development days” tell use could not read novels or other picture books to the students…ONLY USE PEARSON.”And then 7 or so years later, the district made us THROW OUT every book from Pearson, and they bought new crap curriculum…that program was written by testing industry, not educators, I think it was “Benchmark,” real junk.

*I’d like to mention how I often lose my student teachers when they see the edTPA requirement. They switch majors, and the teaching pool gets even smaller.

*After Skamdera in NM came the TFA VAM sweetheart Christopher Ruszkowski. At least he had 3 years in a classroom, Skammy had none, but the Florida model, you know?

*Children’s behavior is in large part in response to the drill and kill curriculum and endless testing and teaching to the test that has been driving public education since NCLB and the back-to-basics movement that ushered it in. No room for creativity, no room for self expression, no room for innovation. Highly scripted Curriculum like Open Court turned children into little automatons, barking their answers like well trained dogs and turned teachers into task masters. It was a drive to dummy down the curriculum for fear of teaching too much free thinking. And a drive to turn teachers into testing machines and teacher technicians, easily replaced by anyone who can walk in a classroom and pick up the manual. Only it doesn’t work. It was and is developmentally inappropriate and the resulting rebellion in the classrooms if proof of that. No wonder teachers are leaving in droves!

*Under threat of closure of the MA school board in the mid 1800s, Horace Mann turned to the cheapest labor he could find, literate northern females, and deployed the Protestant ethic “teacher as a calling” trope to institute state free-riding on teachers (as opposed to the free-riding of which teachers are accused). Everything in this piece is correct except for the “almost” in the final paragraph. There’s no “almost” about it … free-riding on teachers is an operational feature of a system imported from Prussia, designed to produce cheap, obedient labor by underpaying women. As of 2012, teachers would need to make around 1/3 higher salaries to be paid on the same level as their professional peers. Everyone mentioned in the article is simply this generation’s enactment of the long-standing, systemic class war that preys on gender and race to continue and exacerbate inequity. While naming the current situation is very important, we also need to discuss, address, and shift these deep issues.

*It’s the boiled frog effect over the last 50 years that began as a response to mini-courses, sixties curriculum, obsession over college attendance, professors and teachers walking out to protest with their students, Viet Nam… and the Civil Rights Act. Since 1964, Intentional segregation influenced Local, state, and federal decision making on transportation, health care, insurance, zoning, housing, education funding, hiring, and more. When whites fled the cities and insured two sides of the tracks in towns and two systems evolved, quick fixes became that accumulation of bad decisions and leadership – and slowly, slowly, deterioration became acceptable.

*The list is not dated. It’s illustrative of the accumulation of negativity, quick-fix seeking, acronym-filled, snake-oil salesmen, desperate mayors and governors, obsession with rankings, publisher fixation on common core, NCLB votes hidden under the shadow of 9/11, and keep-everyone-happy state and national professional organizations.

*At the end of 2021 it is far right and left of politics and their rhetoric like CRT and homophobic slurs. So much for especially the “Christian Right.” In their god’s (yes lower case since not The Lord Jesus Christ’s New Testament words of love) name they exclude instead of include to share the good news/word.

*Data, data, data. Yesterday, I commented that I feel sympathetic toward the anti-CRT petitioners. I do. They’re not bad people. They’re just afraid of changing social rules. Their actions are demoralizing, but not dehumanizing. Wealthy corporations and individuals on the other hand , through their untaxed foundations, gave carrots to governments the world over to give the stick to education so that greater profits could be made through privatization and data monetizing. I was once called a 2. I was once labeled the color grey. I was numbered, dehumanized by test score data in an attempt to make education like Uber or Yelp. Not just demoralized, dehumanized. It’s not just who but what dehumanized teachers. It was the wrongheaded idea that education can be measured and sold by the unit. That idea was insidious. The marketing ploy to make my students into consumers who consider their efforts junk unless they are labeled with the right number or dashboard color was insidious. I have no sympathy for the investor class. They are not people with whom I disagree about social issues; they are hostile, corporate takeover wolves out to tear the flesh of the formerly middle and deeply impoverished classes for profit. Not one of the investors in education “reform” or any of their revolving door bureaucrats is any friend of mine. The list of who is long. The list of what is short.

*Jonah Edelman (Founder, Stand on Children); brother Josh Edelman (Gates Foundation: Empowering-?!–Effective Teaching; SEED Charter Schools); Charles & David Koch. Pear$on Publishing monopoly&, of course, ALEC (interfering in our business for FIFTY long years!)

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Class size, Coleman, David, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, John King, Klein, Joel, Michelle Rhee, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Philanthropy, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Republicans, Rhee, Michelle, Segregation, Stand for Children, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, U.S. education, VAM (value-added modeling), Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Gary Rubinstein: One of the “Most Dangerous” Reformers Will Be #2 in NYC Ed Department

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2021 //
67

Gary Rubinstein writes here about the new leadership of the New York City Department of Education.

He begins:

Eric Adams will become the next Mayor of New York City on January 1st. He will hire David Banks as the new schools Chancellor. And Banks will bring in Dan Weisberg as his top deputy.

Dan Weisberg

Unfortunately Dan Weisberg is one of the most dangerous people in the country who could rise to be the second highest ranking administrator in New York City…

In the article from Chalkbeat, NY, Alex Zimmerman tries hard to sugarcoat the background of this controversial pick. He writes:

He has tapped Dan Weisberg — who runs an organization focused on teacher quality and handled labor issues under Mayor Michael Bloomberg — to be his top deputy. That move is likely to raise eyebrows with the city’s teachers union, which has previously clashed with Weisberg.

So what is this “organization focused on teacher quality”? Well it is TNTP which once stood for The New Teacher Project. TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee in 1997. What started out as a Teach For America type program for training career changers to become teachers quickly became an education reform propaganda organization. In 2009 they got into funding ‘research’ and their first publication was called ‘The Widget Effect’ which argued the benefits of merit pay for teachers based on standardized test scores. This publication is still often quoted despite very shoddy statistical practices. Dan Weisberg was the lead author of ‘The Widget Effect.’ More recently they put out something called “The Opportunity Myth” about how most teachers have low expectations because they do activities that don’t completely adhere to the researcher’s interpretation of the Common Core Standards.

Fifteen years ago there were plenty of Michelle Rhee type reformers in leadership positions in school districts around the country. As that brand of reform failed to deliver results, those reformers took positions in think tanks where they could make a lot more money but where they would not have such direct power over school systems.

Back in the Bloomberg/Klein days, people like Weisberg would celebrate judicial rulings where parents would fight to not have their children’s schools shut down. Charter schools, in the wake of ‘Waiting For Superman’, were supposedly proving that all you needed to turn around a school was to staff them with non-unionized teachers. Teacher bashing was all the rage, they even had their own Walton funded movie flop ‘Won’t Back Down.’

But things are different now. Reformers are not as brazen as they once were. The charter bubble has burst a bit, though Bloomberg has $750 million that says he can revive it. But it will be hard. With the failures of projects like The Achievement District in Tennessee, it will a a tougher sell to say that we need to replicate their accomplishments. Back in the day, there would be so much talk of charters that were beating the odds with 100% graduation rates or 100% college acceptance rates. Those stores were debunked so often that even The74 hardly runs stories like that anymore. Does anyone know whatever happened to KIPP? The only charter chain that can even claim to get good test scores is Success Academy, and even reformers hardly like to talk about them since they boot (or discourage from enrolling) so many kids who might bring down their precious test scores.

So where does a teacher basher fit into the current system? As a New York City teacher with two kids in the system, I’m a bit scared to find out.

Gary follows up with anti-teacher, anti-union tweets by Weisberg, as well as congratulatory tweets from the hardcore reformers.

Hold on, tight, NYC teachers. You are in for a rough ride.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York City, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

New Study Finds that Tougher Teacher Evaluations Showed No Gains in Student Achievement

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2021 //
147

Education Week reported that a decade of “reforms” focused on tougher teacher evaluations produced no improvement in student test scores.

More than a decade ago, policymakers made a multi-billion-dollar bet that strengthening teacher evaluation would lead to better teaching, which in turn would boost student achievement. But new research shows that, overall, those efforts failed: Nationally, teacher evaluation reforms over the past decade had no impact on student test scores or educational attainment.

The research is the latest indictment of a massive push between 2009 and 2017, spurred by federal incentives, philanthropic investments, and a nationwide drive for accountability in K-12 education, to implement high-stakes teacher evaluation systems in nearly every state.

Prior to the reforms, nearly all teachers received satisfactory ratings in their evaluations. So policymakers from both political parties introduced more-robust classroom observations and student-growth measures—including standardized test scores—into teachers’ ratings, and then linked the performance ratings to personnel decisions and compensation.

“There was a tremendous amount of time and billions of dollars invested in putting these systems into place, and they didn’t have the positive effects reformers were hoping for,” said Joshua Bleiberg, an author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. “There’s not a null effect in every place where teacher evaluation [reform] happened. … [But] on average, [the effect on student achievement] is pretty close to zero.”

The evaluation reforms were largely unpopular among teachers and their unions, who argued that incorporating certain metrics, like student test scores, was unfair and would drive good educators out of the profession. Yet proponents—including the Obama administration—argued that tougher evaluations could identify, and potentially weed out, the weakest teachers while elevating the strongest ones…

A team of researchers from several universities analyzed the data, starting when states adopted the new teacher evaluations incorporating student test scores. They looked not only at changes in scores but high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates.

Tougher teacher-evaluation systems can work, Petrilli said—but there was no political will to act on the results at the time of the reforms. Teachers’ unions resisted firing teachers who received poor results, and districts were unwilling or unable to pay great teachers more, he said.

At a time of acute teacher shortages, what school district is eager to fire teachers based on their students’ test scores?

The failed reforms were in large part a response to the demands of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which required states to adopt test-based evaluation to be eligible for a share of $4.35 billion in federal money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised such teacher evaluations loudly and frequently.

As I wrote in my 2020 book SLAYING GOLIATH, test-based teacher evaluation was never tried before it was imposed on almost every state in the nation. It had no evidence to support its use. Many scholars and professional groups warned against it, but Duncan plunged forward, belittling anyone who dared to disparage his Big Reform.

Obama and Duncan found support in a 2011 study led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, but his glowing predictions about the benefits of test-based evaluation didn’t pan out. His paper on value-added teacher assessment won him a front page story in the New York Times, a story on the PBS Newshour, and a laudatory mention in President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address. Chetty et al concluded that better teachers caused students to get higher test scores, to graduate more frequently, to earn more income over their lifetimes, and—for girls, to be less likely to have out-of-wedlock births. As one of the authors told the New York Times, the message of our study is that bad teachers should be fired sooner rather than later.

But despite the cheerleading of Arne Duncan and the seemingly definitive conclusions of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, value-added teacher evaluations failed.

How many good and great teachers left their profession because of this ill-fated “reform”?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Economics, Education Industry, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Study: How Foundations Engage in Advocacy by Funding Ideas They Like

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2021 //
36

Sarah Reckhow of Michigan State University University and Megan Tompkins-Stange of the University of Michigan studied the ways in which foundations fund research that advances policies they believe in. They use the issue of teacher quality, specifically, to demonstrate how the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation underwrote research that provided evidence for evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students (VAM, or value-added modeling). The research supported a policy that the Obama administration wanted to implement.

VAM turned out to be highly ineffective and demoralized teachers, but the big foundations gave the Obama administration the back-up the administration needed for their demand that teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores. The American Statistical Association warned that VAM was an invalid measure of individual teachers, as did other scholarly and professional organizations, but Obama and Duncan ignored the naysayers.

Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange write:

After the Obama Administration took office in 2009, a number of former Gates Foundation officials assumed senior roles in the Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan, and were influential in drafting Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion competitive grant program designed to induce states to comply with specific policy reforms, including the use of value-added methods in evaluation programs. The Department of Education’s call for proposals stated that Race to the Top grant winners would focus on advancing four specific reforms:

“Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy; building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction; Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and turning around our lowest-achieving schools.”

These implicit and explicit references to value-added measures and the need to evaluate and compensate teachers based on their effectiveness are evidence of the emergent debates around using student test scores to determine teacher pay—another plank of the education reformers’ theory of change. An interviewee from a foundation commented on the fact that after Race to the Top, states were required to “put together evaluation systems for teachers and states would begin to link this to hiring and firing.” The fact that this particular reform had acquired such political capital in a relatively short time was, in the words of this interviewee, “remarkable.”

Creating an evidence base

In addition to maintaining close networks with policy elites, foundations actively engaged in commissioning original research designed to provide an evidence base relevant to their policy priorities. Foundations make grants to intermediary organizations to conduct “advocacy research,” which has the explicit objective of being injected into policy discourse to be cited as empirical justification for desired reforms (Lubienski et al. 2009). Unlike traditional peer-reviewed research, which may pose uncertain conclusions regarding policy implications, advocacy research is shaped by specific policy objectives and political strategy and is typically produced by think tanks and nonprofit organizations, rather than universities (Shaker and Heilman 2004). The level of empirical rigor in advocacy research exists on a spectrum, from employing highly rigorous methods and considerations of external and internal validity, to omitting discussion of methods entirely.

While foundation-funded advocacy research is by no means the only source of policy-influential research in the teacher quality debate, it is central in Congressional hearings during our study period. Between 2000 and 2016, only nine research reports were cited three or more times by witnesses (and only one of which was peer-reviewed). The fourth-most cited report, which was consistently referenced in our interviews, was a 2009 advocacy research report by The New Teacher Project entitled The Widget Effect—a call to arms about the need for systematic teacher evaluation systems in order to distinguish between low-quality and high-quality teachers using test score-based evaluation methods. The report stated that “institutional indifference to variations in teacher performance” resulted in systems that perpetuated low-quality teaching across the country, taking aim at evaluation systems that relied predominantly on observational meth-ods as opposed to econometric approaches (Weisberg et al. 2009). Several education reform-oriented foundations including the Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Robertson Foundation, and Joyce Foundation funded the report. Within a month of its release in 2009, Secretary Duncan made the following statement about the report in a speech:

“These policies…have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets. A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that? We need to work together to change this.

The Widget Effect was praised by many interviewees as a triumph of advocacy research—a clear proposal and message, presented in a comprehensible and digestible format, that made a complicated issue more palatable. More importantly, however, the report was also a triumph for the policy networks surround-ing teacher quality discourse—within a month, the report had had such impact that Secretary Duncan was referencing it in major speeches, which was accomplished by disseminating it through policy networks among actors with shared preferences.

The widespread recognition of The Widget Effect was emblematic of the rising prominence of advocacy research in policy debates. In the last ten years, education policy scholars have observed a shift toward targeted advocacy research funded by foundations, particularly surrounding issues of market-based policy interventions (Henig 2009; Lubienski et al. 2009). Contemporary examples of advocacy research contest the traditional conceptualization of expert researchers being separate and distinct from politics. According to Kingdon (2011, p. 228):

“The policy community concentrates on matters like technical detail, cost-benefit analyses, gathering data, conducting studies, and honing proposals. The political people, by contrast, paint with a broad brush, are involved in many more issue areas than the policy people are, and concentrate on winning elections, promoting parties, and mobilizing support in the larger pol-ity.”

In current education policy networks, however, the converse is true, as researchers and advocates may overlap. One interviewee, a staff member of an education advocacy organization, described her role on a Gates Foundation-funded advocacy research project: “We saw a need to be more involved, not just from putting ideas out there but to help guide the conversation more hands-on.” Foundations, particularly those that endorse common education reform priorities, are now more likely to reject the traditional model of funding basic research in universities intended for diffusion into policy networks, but without the added leverage of a dedicated marketing structure to ensure, rather than impute, that the research reaches its intended audience.This is particularly true for foundations that identify as strategic philanthropies who are more likely to assertively use research as a tool to advance their policy goals. Strategic philanthropy is structured around the managerial concept of strategic planning, emphasizing clearly articulated goals from the outset of an initiative, the use of research to substantiate decisions, accountability from grantees in the form of benchmarks and deliverables as measured in incremental outcomes, and evaluation to assess progress toward milestones (Brest and Harvey 2008).

Strategic funders also prioritize measurable returns on investments. Applying this formulation, basic research can appear very costly, with high levels of uncertainty or ambiguous returns, while targeted advocacy research promises better yield.Interviewees described strategic foundations—most notably, the Gates and Broad Foundations—as highly influential leaders within the teacher qual-ity policy network and depicted foundations’ theory of change as based on the assumption that teacher evaluation was necessary to advance other education reform goals, such as pay for performance and alternative teacher certifications. They also focused on these foundations’ use of research evidence as political in nature, departing from the “expert-led model of change” that Clemens and Lee (2010) describe and moving toward a model wherein researchers and advo-cates pursued similar goals: to inject policy ideas into political discourse more directly than their traditional philanthropic approaches.

The authors go on to describe the Gates Foundation’s big investment in the MET program (Measures of Effective Teaching). As several interviewees comment, the research started out with a desired outcome, then sought the evidence to back it.

The research paper was published in 2018 and remains timely.

What we don’t know yet is whether the Gates Foundation learned anything from its multiple failures in the field of education.

Categories Broad Foundation, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philanthropy, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Gary Rubinstein: Why I Left the “Reform” Movement

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2021 //
27

Gary Rubinstein is well known to readers of this blog, as I have posted almost all of his blogs. He is a career high school math teacher in the New York City public schools. I met Gary about ten years ago, when I had made a complete turnaround in my views about testing and choice. I was working on an article about “miracle schools” that fudged their data and discovered that Gary was an expert on reviewing school-level data and exposing frauds. He helped me write an article (“Waiting for a Miracle School”) that appeared in the New York Times in 2011, and he has continued to be a friend ever since. Gary’s analytical skills have been invaluable in fighting off idiotic “reforms,” like evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores (known as VAM). In his multiple posts on that subject, he showed its many flaws. For example, an elementary teacher might get a high score in reading and a low score in math, posing the dilemma of whether the district could fire her in one subject while giving her a bonus in the other. I confess that I am a person of The Word, and I have never taken the time to learn how to put graphics into my posts. I can’t even reproduce charts. I only do words. So when I need to post a pdf or a graphic or anything else that is not words, I turn to Gary for help and he is always there for me. In addition to being a math and computer whiz, Gary is an author. As most of you know, Gary began his career working for Teach for America. As he explains below, he became disillusioned with the “reform” spin just as I became disillusioned with the propaganda about testing and choice. Gary writes about how strange it is to be frequently attacked on Twitter and other social media by “reformers.” My admiration for him is boundless.

Gary writes:

I got into blogging almost exactly ten years ago, just after the Teach For America 20 anniversary alumni summit.  Until that time, I was unaware of the politics of education and the emerging education reform movement.  I had seen ‘Waiting For Superman’ and knew it was propaganda, but I didn’t quite understand who was benefiting from it or what the possible negative side effects of it could be.

But at that conference it became very clear to me what was going on during a ‘Waiting For Superman’ reunion panel discussion.  I watched as Michelle Rhee, whom I had known from years earlier when we worked together at the Teach For America training institute, and Dave Levin, who I had known for a lot of years from when we were teaching in Houston around the same time.  At the end of the conference, Arne Duncan made an odd speech about how great it was that he shut down a school and fired all the teachers and now it is a charter school in which every student supposedly graduated and got into college.

It sounded fishy to me.  Having worked, by that time, at three different schools that had low standardized test scores, I knew that a school can have good teachers but still have low test scores.  I suspected that there was more to the story than Arne Duncan was saying so I did my first investigation.  Little did I know that it would lead to a ten year adventure that would give me the opportunity to be an investigative journalist and help save the world.  As an added bonus, I made a lot of friends, got a following to read my writing, appeared on NPR and also on a TV show called ‘Adam Ruins Everything.’  But there was a downside to this attention because I also became a target of various known and unknown internet personalities who have attacked, ridiculed, and slandered me.  I think that on balance the good outweighed the bad, but it is sad to me that I have had blog posts about what an awful person I am and there have been podcasts about how I don’t believe in the potential of all children.  Students of mine have googled me and located some of these smears and asked me about them.  It’s hard to explain to them that I’m embroiled in a strange war where the FOX news of education wants to vilify me for telling the truth.

Here is a recent example where Chris ‘Citizen’ Stewart, the CEO of the Education Post website, compares my views with those of Charles Murray of ‘The Bell Curve’ fame.

I suppose my story is that I was the right person at the right time and in the right place.  The small group of resistors to the misguided bipartisan teacher-bashing agenda needed someone like me.  I was a Teach For America alum so I had that whole ‘war veteran against the war’ kind of credibility.  I was very patient and able to comb through state data.  I was a math major in college so I was able to do some basic statistics and make the scatter plots that helped the cause so much.  You may or may not know that I have slowed down a lot on my blogging.  After about 7 years of intense blogging, I started to burn out.  Fortunately other bloggers came on the scene and took up the cause and have been great.  I do try to blog from time to time still, but I have also been doing other projects, like my recent effort to explain all the essentials of elementary school, middle school, and high school math in one ten hour YouTube playlist.  These efforts come from the same source — the desire to help students learn.  Whether it is by fighting off a destructive element or in providing a free resource that anyone in the world can access, I am very proud of what I’ve accomplished in the last ten years.

I want to thank the great Diane Ravitch for taking me under her wing and for being a great mentor and friend.  I wish for her a speedy recovery from her surgery.

Here is a presentation I did at Tufts University describing my journey from teacher to crusader:

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Categories Accountability, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)
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