A reader sent in a comment about holding teachers accountable for test scores.
He attended a “question and answer” luncheon hosted by the Lafayette, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce, where Governor Bobby Jindal was the speaker. Jindal came late, spoke fast, and left without answering any questions.
The reader, possibly the only educator in the audience, turned to the CEO of a hospital sitting next to him and asked “if he ever pondered posting his hospital’s mortality rate outside its door.” The reader was “a little surprised at how firmly his ‘no’ response was—-it was as if I asked him to jump off of a bridge. I was merely trying to make a comparison to cohort grad rates and letter grading systems in our state to the business community.” The reader concluded that “accountability as educators know it will never be applied to any other type of profession much less within the business community despite their unwavering support of accountability for public schools. That CEO’s firm ‘no’ response was all the proof I needed that accountability the way we know it will not make anything better….and the business world knows this.”
Another reader liked that comment and added: “had the CEO offered more than his terse response, I suspect his explanation would include that although doctors play a role in a patient’s health, there are a number of other factors that doctors have no control over–patient’s genetics, prior medical history, willingness to follow the doctor’s prescriptions, environment, how far an illness has progressed before the doctor sees the patient, etc. And, of course, his explanation is perfectly valid. For some reason, though, when teachers make the same point regarding students’ test scores, corporate ed reformers are quick to accuse them of making excuses.”
Why do doctors refuse to post their results on their front door? When you visit a cardiac surgeon, ask him or her how many of their patients survived their surgery?
When you go to the dentist, ask how many of their patients continued to get cavities?
Why do they make excuses and tell us that if patients don’t follow orders, don’t blame them? Or if patients arrive with pre-existing conditions, don’t blame them?
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t want to believe this, but let’s face it here in the USA teachers are not respected or thought of as professionals and this deform movement has only made it worse. We are the convenient scapegoats for all of society’s ills…..ALL of them.
Education is a complicated issue with so many facets. They want a quick fix and we are not only thrown under the bus, they are driving over us daily.
I don’t know who would ever pursue teaching as a lifelong career. At this rate, TFA or TFWW, Teach for Wendy’s Wallet, will take over all city schools in our country.
LikeLike
I propose all Doctors who work in public hospitals and other public institutions post their evaluations. They should be told to create data of their successes and failures. Their budgets should be held to a 2% cap, and 50% of them should be forced out if all of their patients don’t show improvements. Also, when their budgets run out, they should dig into their own pockets and buy the resources they need.
Sounds fair to me
LikeLike
Why do business leaders make excuses? When are corporations going to measure and publish data on the successes and failures of their workers, including efficacy ratings on each of their products?
I want to know exactly who at Microsoft is responsible for Internet Exploring freezing and Windows crashing in my (different model) computers multiple times every day, costing me a fortune in lost work and hours upon hours of wasted time!
LikeLike
In a related manner, I wrote about the comparison between doctors and teachers a while back.
Nonsense, Like Blaming Teachers
http://oneteachersperspective.blogspot.com/#!/2012/01/misplaced-blame.html
LikeLike
The reasons hospitals wouldnt want to post their mortality rate is because the mortality rate is a very poor indicator of whether the hospital is good or not. The mortality rate for different procedures varies tremendously. An eye hospital may have a mortality rate of 0.000000001% but a hospital that does heart surgery could have a rate of 10%. Depending on the surgeries that are done and the variation, the hospital could have a big difference in mortality rate. Patients wouldn’t know what the distribution is and what each individual mortality rate is for each procedure. What would happen is that hospitals would stop doing procedures where the mortality rate is naturally higher (emergency cases, cardiac cases) and try to only do simple procedures and low mortality procedures. The difference is in school all children face the same curriculum. It is different.
LikeLike
In response to the comment:
“The reader, possibly the only educator in the audience, turned to the CEO of a hospital sitting next to him and asked “if he ever pondered posting his hospital’s mortality rate outside its door.”
This already exists and can be found at: http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/
Diane, I see on on your web site that you work in the 10003 zip code so I’ll use examples from that location.
When I type in your zip code it tells me there are 81 hospitals within 25 miles of you and it lists each one. I decide I want to compare 3 hospital close to you: Beth Israel, Bellevue, and NYU so I check those boxes and click on “Compare.”
It returns data on “Survey of Patients’ Hospital Experience.”
I look to the left and click on “Outcome of Care Measures.” It shows me Death Rates for various ailments and how each hospitals’ outcomes compare to the national average. On these measures Beth Israel and Bellevue are no different from the national average but NYU is rated better than the national average.
Finally, and this is VERY VERY important, I click on “View Tables” and at the bottom of that page I click on “Risk-Adjusted”. It tells me the following about the data:
“The rates are ” risk-adjusted, ” meaning that the calculations take into account how sick patients were when they went in for their initial hospital stay. When rates are risk-adjusted, it means that hospitals that usually take care of sicker patients won’t have a worse rate just because their patients were sicker when they arrived at the hospital. When rates are risk-adjusted, it helps make comparisons fair and meaningful.”
So they have figured out a way to not penalize hospitals who deal with higher-risk patients (those who will likely have poorer outcomes).
That’s accountability. And people can look at these results and have the freedom to choose where they will seek care.
Related to this last point, to Prof W who notes:
“I want to know exactly who at Microsoft is responsible for Internet Exploring freezing and Windows crashing in my (different model) computers multiple times every day, costing me a fortune in lost work and hours upon hours of wasted time!”
You have the freedom to dump poorly-performing Microsoft and switch to Apple. You can dump Internet Explorer and use Firefox. Will you give me the same freedom to dump my local, poorly-performing school and choose the school I want my child to attend?
LikeLike
Should you also have the power to seize control of your city’s sanitation department if you don’t like the trash pickup? How about occupying the local police station and privatizing it? I am sure you have other good ideas about how citizens can take control of other basic public services and privatize them. You seem very solicitous about the big corporations. I am concerned for the public welfare, not defending the indefensible. That’s what happens as you grow older.
Diane
LikeLike
Before changing subjects, isn’t it great that we have this freely-accessible data on hospitals and the freedom to choose which we want to use and which to avoid based on the risk-adjusted outcomes they drive?
What do you think about that?
LikeLike
Ed,
Do you know of DHH prescribing target mortality rates for hospitals to achieve? How about rates (risk adjusted or not) that would include 100% living in 2014?
Thank you for the link to the DHH site containing the data—I truly didn’t know it existed. .I must not have received my nearest hospital’s Report Card.
LikeLike
Ed,
Also, do you expect a highly motivated pre-med student—let’s assume from an ivy league school—to be the next Surgeon General?
LikeLike
You dodged the main issue..if a patient doesn’t follow a doctor or dentists advice (exercise, diet, flossing, etc) do you blame the doctor or the patient?
Do you long for a corporate controlled babysitter supervising test prep drones educating your children? Ones who will leave every two- three years only to start the indoctrination all over again.
Is it a teacher’s fault when a school is starved into destruction? When do we hold administrators, mayors, appointed BOE’s and reformers responsible?
LikeLike
I don’t think I dodged the main issue which is accountability. In the case I gave regarding hospitals, I can choose whether I want to hold hospitals accountable for their outcomes based on widely-available data about their outcomes.
Great doctors and great teachers share share some things in common: They know that their job is more than just diagnosing problems and telling patients/students what to do. They motivate their patients/students to do what needs doing. Great doctors and great teachers have fewer cases of patients/students not following advice and it shows in the outcomes they achieve.
Linda and Diane, I believe you both extended what I said into the realm of privatizing schools and having corporations run schools. I support neither of these ideas. I do support ways to use choice to drive more accountablity and better outcomes for children.
LikeLike
Great teachers are being strangled by the Duncan policies and the privatization movement. Great teachers do not want to become Stepford test prep drones. Great teachers do not want to be reduced to at-will employees who are demeaned by politicians and philanthrocapitalists who do not know anything about teaching and learning. Great teachers are being bullied and silenced and great teachers are leaving in droves. Choose the school that fits you best and talk to the teachers who are left (if they let you), not the faux reformers.
LikeLike
I don’t know what state you live in, but in California, I do have the freedom to move to different public school if it has room for my child. My child’s ADA money follows her to the new school. I could do so for academic or practical reasons (say to send her home to grandparents) even though my local school is in good standing.
But, having room for additional students implies a certain inefficiency. Are we willing to fund schools enough so that they have room for more children if they wish to attend?
I realize that this is not the case in every area, most specifically because of (a) lack of supply and (b) purely property-tax based funding where parents are convicted of theft for enrolling a child in the “wrong” school.
The other issue is that frequently there may be multiple, identical schools to choose from, all in the same district, all using the same curriculum, so perhaps not creating any meaningful distinction. The only advantage there would be an option when a parent or student has an interpersonal issue at the local school.
But creating these choices, if they are important to you, can be done within the system of local public schools. It is not necessary to create separate charters, and certainly not for-profit charters.
LikeLike
I don’t recall getting much choice on my healthcare. I can choose no insurance or insurance dictating my doctor and hospital. If I don’t like it, I can drop them for another choice provided by the insurance company. Sure, I’m free to choose a quality physician and hospital but if it doesn’t happen to be a choice of my insurance company, I have the pleasure of paying full expenses in addition to my insurance premiums…
The truth is – the doctor or hospital isn’t my issue. My issue is my insurance company claiming to know what is needed for my health regardless of my doctor’s recommendations.
The problem continues to be when others presume to know the best for which they are far removed rather than trusting the educated to do their job as they were trained to do. The original post still helps others to see the issue from another angle – an unexpected angle – it was a good post.
“Risk-Adjusted” isn’t in the calculations for education and I would be seriously offended as a parent and a teacher to have such a label placed on my children and students. It sounds like one step away from Naziville. We throw our children away enough in this world – let’s not provide additional data to support that moronic process. Our history is full of great Americans deemed failures as students and yet succeeded at the benefit of all mankind.
Nothing at the top will ever look the same from the bottom. I’d like to see our top dogs go under cover similar to the show on TV but spend a year doing it not just a week and then tell me again what a failure and worthless teacher I am.
Diane, thanks for your blog but maybe I should stay off anything “education”. I’m suppose to be working on getting my blood pressure to return to normal. I’m not sure this is how to do it. Then again, I can’t afford to bury my head in the sand or walk away from our future!
LikeLike
My point was that the very corporations that are paying politicians, so they can determine the course of education in America, are not doing at their own companies what they are demanding of schools.
If VAM is so important for consumers of knowledge, why is it not implemented for consumers of their products? So I should have been told by corporations in advance which of their workers made great products and bought only what they produced? Or, since I’ve already paid thousands for these products, I should be given a voucher to get other products elsewhere? Not going to happen in the corporate world.
And BTW, I HAVE to use Windows and IE9 because Apple and Mozilla are incompatible where I work.
LikeLike
Corporations are pretty Darwinian about employee accountability especially in difficult economic times. There are also (almost daily) stories about CEOs getting fired by their boards, presumably because they are not adding enough value.
The private sector has its own version of VAM. Profit. Excepting monopolies, they only earn a profit if they are adding value. And the arbiter of whether they are adding value is customers. Customers choose. No added-value = no customers = no profit = no corporation.
As a customer, if you buy a product that stinks, return it for a refund, tell your friends and family, post a bad review online, share that review via Facebook and Twitter, contact a local news station. Most importantly, exercise choice and don’t buy from that company ever again.
For individual workers at corporations, most corporations have metrics against which employees are evaluated. Could be growing sales, could be growing profit, could be increasing the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, could be increasing the quality of service delivered, etc. Their VAM is that “growing.” It’s the difference between where things started and where they finished.
It’s different for entities that are not held accountable by the marketplace. How do you measure the value they add?
For a hospital receiving Medicare funds, Medicare may want to hold them accountable via better patient outcomes or improved patient satisfaction.
For an elderly care center that receives public money, their VAM might be tied to safety, cleanliness, a reduction in preventable deaths…
For public education, there continues to be a struggle over how to measure the value educators add. (I’m not questioning whether educators add value). There are legitimate differences of opinion in how best to figure this out but it’s not surprising that many people believe a part of the answer can be found in improved student outcomes.
Contrary to the example of the customer who stops buying from a company with which they are not satisfied, most customers of public education cannot stop buying it. The bill comes whether they are satisfied or not. So, unsatisfied customers look for ways to: 1) Improve quality; 2) Increase choice or; 3) Both.
There are good ideas and crazy ideas to improve quality, increase choice, or both. Declaring that 100% of American students will be proficient by a certain date or else we will burn down our public schools and the people who work in them is an example of crazy.
Trying to figure out which teachers are driving the best student outcomes, I’m interested in that.
P.S.: I’m sorry you are stuck with Windows and IE9 but encourage you to write to your head of IT or organize a group of dissatisfied users and take action. Someone told me Google is making a browser, don’t know if it solves your problem.
LikeLike
Ed, it is not true that business leaders are penalized when their corporations don’t make a profit. Over the past 20 years, we have seen many examples of corporations that collapsed yet the CEO departed with a golden parachute of $20 million, $40 million, $100 million.
It is certainly true that for businesses, the bottom line is making money. But that is not the same as “value-added,” as businesses can make a lot of money selling inferior junk and toxic garbage to unwitting consumers. Turn on TV most any night and you can see their junk advertised or displayed on screen as “entertainment.”
What you don’t understand is that children are not products, they are children.
Each one is different. Each one is precious.
Their test scores are not profits.
You exemplify the bottom line mentality that treats our children as interchangeable widgets.
That is your right but unfortunately federal policy now imposes that vision on families and educators who don’t share it.
Diane
LikeLike
Diane, in general business leaders are punished (and severely) when they don’t add value. Every year, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses that go out of business because they providing insufficient value.
In contrast, a few hundred corporations offer gigantic pay packages with golden parachutes to attract CEOs they want to hire. Sometimes these CEOs fail miserably, bankrupt their company, and still get the golden parachute money
For companies not funded by tax dollars, this is a matter between businesses and their owners (private owners and/or shareholders). For companies that are publically-funded, golden parachutes should be banned.
We’re getting away from the main point here and that is accountability. I’ve posted a reply to Prof W this morning that details what that I believe that means for public education so I won’t repeat myself.
Our children are precious and deserve the best education in the world. The public is sending a message loud and clear that they are holding people – politicans, school administrators, etc. – accountable for delivering that education.
I believe you are confusing cause and effect. Public education accountability does not diminish the preciousness of our children. It is because our children are precious that so many of us want greater accountability.
LikeLike
Ed, I think the takeaway from the CEO’s response in a previous post isn’t that data on hospitals is, in fact, available. It’s that the CEO felt no compulsion to make that information known himself, yet he apparently felt schools should be obligated to.
I just tried out the hospitalcare.gov site. I think it’s useful but only to an extent. First, there are only six conditions from which to choose. Second, the sample sizes varied considerably. I chose three hospitals in the Memphis area (where I live), chose pneumonia as the condition, and then looked at the “Outcome of Care Measures.” One hospital’s score was based on 971, another 562, and the third had fewer than 25 cases, which meant the sample was too small to use.
The biggest limitation, though, was the “risk-adjusted” feature you mentioned. The adjustment factors in the condition a patient was in when he/she entered the hospital. This is the equivalent of what value-added systems in education, which measure growth from where the students begin, not their raw scores. Whether someone survives a medical condition, though, is based on more than just the condition they were in when they entered the hospital and the doctor’s ability, right? Genetics, adherence to doctor’s prescribed medication and/or actions, environment, age, to name just a few. Likewise, even if value-added systems were perfect instruments, they’d only make comparisons between schools “fair and meaningful” if varying student ability were the only variable to adjust for. It’s not. It doesn’t take socioeconomic status, parental involvement, peer influence, student health, health of family members, student motivation, mood of the student on the day of the test or any other of a number of variables into account.
LikeLike
Jason, let’s agree to call the hospital CEO a hypocrite.
Regarding: http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ I think the most important point is that it is an example of outcome data being collected and being made widely- and freely available to all.
I think “it’s useful but only to an extent” is a fair comment and one hopes it will become more useful over time, larger samples will result, more medical conditions will be added, etc.
The biggest challenge I see – and this applies broadly to this kind of data whether it is about hospitals, schools, child care facilities, nursing homes… – is that virtually no one knows the data exists.
The data itself sitting in a database that no one looks at is not going to drive any meaningful change in hospital attitudes and behavior or patient attitudes and choice. Should a time come when hospitals realize patients make hospital choice decisions based on this data, then the data will drive change.
I mentioned the “risk-adjusted” feature because it parallels the value-added systems debate and it prompts questions that will never be answered to the satisfaction of everyone – whether it be people choosing hospitals, evaluating schools and teachers, rating the quality of elderly care facilities…
If you don’t adjust for pre-existing conditions that you know about you are an ostrich with your head in the sand. How could you not adjust for the fact that the patients we care for are 4x more likely to have advanced heart disease when we first see them compared to the average hospital? How could you not adjust for the fact that our students start 3rd grade on average one full year behind their middle- and upper-class peers?
If you do make best efforts to adjust for pre-existing conditions and factors, people can always find one or more they believe you didn’t account for or didn’t adjust for by the proper amount.
Which brings me to my last point. These kind of measures will never be perfect. They will never be near-perfect. They may never be excellent. But they can be very good and useful if used as part of an overall system of feedback that looks at a variety of measures, over multiple time periods. Initially, I think this kind of data is best used to give recipients performance feedback and coaching they can use to improve performance.
Using one piece of data or one observation for public executions damages the credibility of this kind of data.
LikeLike
I’m not seeing info on individual doctors there, so unless I’m missing something, I think the data on hospitals only parallels data on each school’s outcomes, not the efficacy of every teacher within a school.
LikeLike
Are you saying that VAM makes risk-adjustments for every child, based on what are known to be the specific pre-existing conditions for each student?
LikeLike
Ed Turley, I think the (albeit implied) part of the analogy you missed is that no matter what a hospital’s ratings are, no doctor’s office or hospital operates under the fear that its will be made to fire and replace its entire staff, or closed down entirely, just because its ratings didn’t improve by significant amounts EVERY year without fail, or because it didn’t achieve a 100% success rate by a certain date.
Not every doctor has to “great,” either. Most of us have rather routine medical needs (fortunately!) and those of us who are able to afford to see a doctor regularly (either because we have health insurance or can pay out of pocket on our own) are served perfectly well by a good-enough doctor with whom we have some rapport and feel comfortable with.
As the joke goes, half of all doctors graduated at the bottom 50% of their class. Yet somehow there is no widespread panic about physcian quality. Why is that?
Finally, depending on their speciality, great doctors do not necessarily have great outcomes, no matter how fabulous their advice or how effective they are in motivating their patients to follow it. Haven’t you ever known anybody with terminal cancer?
LikeLike
Barbara, I was only responding to what was originally posted – the CEO refusing to post his hospital’s mortality rate and the hypocrisy of the CEO on that point.
With respect to 100% success by a certain date – whether it be in hospitals or schools – I believe we both agree that is ludicrous.
Rightly or wrongly, the general public believes that doctor quality is good enough. I think much of that stems from the fact that people feel they have choice when it comes to choosing a doctor. It doesn’t matter whether they always exercise that choice – the option of having choice is highly valued.
Great doctors do not necessarily have great outcomes. That is why any fair evaluation of doctor outcomes must take into account the state of the patient at the start of a doctor’s care. Same with teachers and where their students are when they enter a teacher’s classroom.
LikeLike
Ed,
The goal is ludicrous, we agree. More ludicrous is what our state superintendent did with his recent NCLB ‘waiver’ application—-he kept the ludicrous goals of NCLB, 100% proficiency in 2014. More outrageous is what I call the 2014 contradiction whereby, Louisiana, under the ‘leadership’ of John White, plans to fire 10% of the teachers in 2014 based on VAM scores (risk adjusted and all that)….connecting the dots…..his plan is to fire 10% of the workforce that helped achieve his lofty goal of 100% proficiency! Outrageous.
LikeLike
Ed,
You may think the business model is superior, but it is far from perfect. There are many occasions when products are dangerous and harmful to people, even causing death, which companies don’t pull off the shelves or notify consumers about until after the Consumer Product Safety Commision gets involved. It’s no panacea.
The business model in education reduces children to widgets, teachers to assembly line workers and compares apples with oranges. People are too valuable, complex and idiocyncratic to be treated like products and product makers. Measuring progress using VAM does not take into account and adjust for the unique risk-factors of each student, such as having a parent in jail, living in the family car, going to bed hungry, domestic violence, child abuse, gang membership, exposure to drugs and alcohol, and other risk-factors associated with poverty.
According to Gallop polls, most parents are satisfied with their own children’s schools. Parents have choices. They can choose their school district and neighborhood; they can send their kids to magnet schools and they can opt for private schools. It’s all the corporate sponsored political media hype that influences parents to have a different opinion of education in general, since that’s one of the intents of the ongoing “failing schools” narrative, as well as the reports on aggregate scores of students from all income groups, rather than noting the disparities between kids from higher and lower income families. The problem is, and has long been, a matter of poverty.
The corporate/political education reform hype diverts attention away from the inequitable distribution of wealth in America and from the fact that our country has done nothing to ensure that poor parents are paid a living wage. Instead, they prescribe testing and “choice”, which effectively result in filling the coffers of politicians and corporations and siphoning funds from traditional schools, and they get away with scapegoating teachers for not eradicating poverty.
Non-educators, who have already been ruling education for a long time (17 years in my mayoral controlled city) promote the notion that everyone should go to college, when we have a glut of college degrees and many unemployed and under-employed college grads in this country. In requiring the college prep curriculum in all high schools, they have eliminated opportunities for high school students who don’t want to go to college to opt to learn trades in Career and Technical Education programs. Politicians need to get out of bed with big business and mandate livable wages, and education needs to be given back to educators.
Universities that have their own proprietary Learning Mangagement Systems (LMS) payed top dollar for them and require faculty and students to have the required compatible software or go somewhere else, because it’s too costly for schools to change their LMS. Most choose Micorsoft compatible products because MS has a monopoly; the computors that the majority of people buy come with MS software. When you have a corporate monopoly, then you don’t have to do much to improve because folks are stuck with using your product. Yes, people can write reviews after the fact, but you cannot return computers that are years old due to software incompatibility.
(The Google browser is Mozilla.)
LikeLike
I think you are reading some things into my post that I did not say. I don’t think profit is a useful metric for public education, and I don’t support privatizing (making profitable) public education.
I do think accountability matters though and, over time, businesses who do not deliver customer value lose customers – who go elsewhere – and go out of business. Businesspeople who do not deliver value lose their jobs. There are exceptions but this is the dominant paradigm in business.
Institutions that are funded via tax dollars need to be accountable too and each must figure out how they deliver satisfactory value and outcomes to their customers. Public education doesn’t (and shouldn’t) be judged on making a profit.
Public education adds value by educating children. Parents and taxpayers are also customers of public education and they judge whether public education is delivering sufficient value (educated children) for the public’s money.
Currently, we have a situation where the public is increasingly saying they are frustrated with public education. They feel they are not getting the outcomes they want to see for the dollars being spent on public education.
Personally, I find this situation very frustrating. For example, there is so much some parents don’t seem to understand – that they are as much their child’s teacher as are teachers in schools, that problems at home spill into the classroom, that teachers are vastly underpaid and underappreciated. The list goes on and on.
I think the mega-challenge for the next decade is 1) Showing customers of public education the value that public education delivers. This applies broadly as well as down to the level of the classroom; 2) Convincing public education customers that the value is sufficient for the investment being made (and possibly that that investment should increase); 3) Educating parents on their role in making public education work.
I support ideas that advance this agenda.
LikeLike
P.S. 17 years after my city’s first business CEO took over our schools (and then passed his business model off on other cities across the country), he backed down on the value of high-stakes testing:
http://pureparents.org/?p=19376
LikeLike
I encourage readers to go to the link you posted and click on the Reuters report referenced.
Regarding the person you mention it says:
[“Many state assessments are given in March or April, so they capture only what a student has learned in the first two-thirds of the school year. The results often don’t come back until the summer, too late for teachers to use the scores to guide their approach in the classroom.
“They’re not useful,” said Paul Vallas, a veteran superintendent who has helped turn around districts in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans and is now running the schools in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Vallas is hardly anti-test: He favors giving abbreviated versions of standardized tests every six weeks, all year, so teachers can monitor student progress and adjust accordingly. But a single high-stakes test? “A big mistake,” Vallas said.
“The assessment systems are not reliable,” he said. “They need to be more sophisticated, more accountable, more fair.””]
In summary the person you reference:
1) Is “a veteran superintendent who has helped turn around districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.”
2) He believes standardized tests are useful but that end-of-the-year, high-stakes testing “is a big mistake.”
3) He believes one of the criteria for assessments is that results must arrive in time so that teachers can “use the scores to guide their approach in the classroom.”
4) To achieve 2/- and 3/- he “favors giving abbreviated versions of standardized tests every six weeks, all year, so teachers can monitor student progress and adjust accordingly.”
5) He believes current system of high-stakes testing is “not reliable” and that these assessments “need to be more sophisticated, more accountable, more fair.”
Bravo !!! He’s pro-accountability and he believes there is a better way to achieve this accountability. We need more people like him !
How does this support the point you were making?
LikeLike
The biggest issue with accountability is the students don’t have a great reason to take the test seriously. What is the benefit for them to try their hardest on the test. ACT, sure they need a good score to get into college but some other test used solely to judge the school or their teachers, not that important. I have given math competition tests to hs students in second year calc and even some of them won’t take it seriously. How do we expect a struggling junior still in algebra I to take some test that has no value to him/her seriously? If we can remedy that some how and both teachers and students were in this battle together, now we can talk about accountability. Oh and make sure we find a way to hold the parents accountable who don’t provide a safe place to live, food to eat the morning of the test… I think this is the issue.
LikeLike
Ed,
“We need more people like him!” It’s taken Paul Vallas since 1996 to realize that the high-stakes tests he required to be administered in the spring and to determine whether children will be promoted are not “reliable”. That’s a very steep learning curve for a someone who’s been CEO of schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, post-Katrina New Orleans and Bridgeport. I pitty the people in other school districts subjected to the policies this businessman first instituted here, as well as the next round of people in post-earthquake Haiti and Chile.
You seem to have overlooked the part where parents complained about the 125,000 students who were flunked, due to Vallas’ high-stakes testing and failed student promotion policies, which are basically still in place, as well as the $1B cost –and those are just the numbers for Chicago. Charter schools began on his watch here, too –which you really might like if you care more about “choice” and “accountability” than children and parents –most of whom are satisfied with their children’s schools, according to Gallup polls. Nobody listens to parents when they don’t want their schools closed.
LikeLike
You quoted the Gallup Poll and I have included a link to it:
Click to access PDK-Poll-Report-2011.pdf
It supports what you say about parents being satisfied with their children’s schools.
But also look at Table 38 on Page 23. When asked:
“Do you favor or oppose allowing students and their parents to choose which public schools in the community the students attend, regardless of where they live?”
74% say YES. That’s up 12 pts since 1991, up 5 pts from 1995.
Similarly, Table 37 on Page 22:
“[Long definition omitted]…Do you favor or oppose the idea of charter schools?
A record high 70% said yes in 2011.
It may surprise you that I highly prefer school choice in a model where all schools are operated within the public education system.
LikeLike
I don’t think most people know what charter schools are. Most are concentrated in urban centers, but most people don’t live there. As charters become more aggressive, there is growing resistance to them.
LikeLike
The full question on charter schools is:
“Charter schools operate under a charter or contract that frees them from many of the state regulations imposed on public schools and permits them to operate independently. Do you favor or oppose the idea of charter schools?”
I grant you that most people don’t know what charter schools are and this question is probably tapping more into the broader idea of how people feel about schools operating independently of the public school system.
However, the question on school choice…
“Do you favor or oppose allowing students and their parents to choose which public schools in the community the students attend, regardless of where they live?”
…is very clear and 74% of adults support this. In their analysis Gallup says:
“Americans increasingly support choice – allowing students and parents to choose which public schools to attend in their community regardless of where they live – and this support is consistent across age differences and political affiliation.”
I support this kind of school choice as well.
Where I draw the line – and it appears from Gallup that many American do too – is on the question:
“Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”
Only one in three Americans favor this.
LikeLike
If you think Paul Vallas should be cloned, take a look at what’s in store:
http://jonathanpelto.com/category/paul-vallas/
LikeLike