The principals of New York State have been up in arms in opposition to the “educator evaluation” system that the New York State Education Department has designed. More than one-third of the principals across the state have bravely signed a petition in protest.
The reason for the evaluation system is that New York had the misfortune to “win” Race to the Top. The $700 million did not go to schools for urgent needs, but to meet the mandates imposed by the U.S. Department of Education. One costly mandate requires the state to evaluate principals and teachers, based in part on test scores. Despite the fact that no state or district has figured out how this will work or how it will improve instruction, New York is plowing ahead.
A reader describes his views of this new system:
| Earlier this week, I spent two days along with 60 other school administrators (Superintendents and Principals) from the area districts to learn how to become a “Lead Evaluator” for the implementation of the new APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review). This new law requires district administrators to conduct multiple evaluations on every teacher (60% of the score), then add the teachers’ students’ results (20%) on flawed state assessments (remember the Pineapple story?), and another 20% on the results from local assessments. This score will give each teacher a score based on a 100-point scale and determine whether or not they are “highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective”. The state will be providing the scores to the districts because they are “secured tests”. Teachers will not be able to glean significant data from the tests to see how they can improve their instructional practice, because the state will not provide schools with the test questions to allow for detailed and accurate item analysis. It is not difficult to see where this train is going. Teachers will be vying for students that would be considered to have a positive impact on their APPR score and praying that students deemed to have a negative impact will be placed in one of their colleague’s classes. When the scores of individual teachers are made public (parents will be allowed access to their child’s teacher’s score and will assuredly end up on Facebook before they hit the parking lot), they will be demanding that their child be placed with the teacher with the highest score. Teachers will be pitted against other teachers, students, and parents. This system was put in place allegedly to make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. However, if one looks at the law, it is now much more onerous to terminate an ineffective teacher than it was previously. The law was also put in place in order to be a contender for the infamous Race To the Top (RTtT) money. NYSUT supported the initiative assuming it would infuse more money into a system that desperately needs it. However, the money did not go to school districts to offset the massive decreases in state aid, but rather to the BOCES across the state in order to implement the new APPR. Mr. Cuomo and Dr. King have cited many “facts” leading up to these massive changes. One example they have used is: New York schools are “Number 1 in spending but 34 in terms of results”. However, this statistic has been discredited. Education Week, which publishes the annual “Quality Counts” guide, ranked New York State No. 2 in the nation in a comprehensive analysis of policy and performance. Other statistics used for US schools in comparison to other industrialized nations have us ranked quite low. For example, scores from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that US students ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math out of 34 countries. However, when one digs deeper, the “facts” change. Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, Executive Director from the National Association of Secondary School Principals dug deeper and found that in order to get a more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students would be to compare the scores of American schools with comparable poverty rates to those of other countries. He found that Schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate had a PISA score of 551. When compared to the ten countries with similar poverty numbers, that score ranked first. That’s right folks, the United States ranked FIRST! Finland was second. As Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics.”As an educator for 20 years, I am proud of our schools and our teachers. They work hard and deserve our respect. Teachers and students should never be reduced to a number. It is bad for education and it is bad for our nation. APPR as it now stands should be repealed. For the sake of our children, please contact your state Assemblyman or Assemblywoman to get rid of this law. Our children deserve better. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
an important point to note on the analysis from Tirozzi. If schools had less than 10% poverty rate they outperformed Finland, which has a poverty rate of around 4%. Consider the implications of that analysis. And also consider that we overall have a poverty rate of over 20% and that is not all in inner cities: some is in rural areas and on Native American Reservations.
LikeLike
Heaven forbid that our politicians would actually do something to ameliorate the poverty that we have in this country instead of pandering to the rich bastards like Gates, Broad , etc. . . .
LikeLike
According to latest UNICEF report, our poverty rate nationally is 23%. Scandalous.
LikeLike
How do we get the results of that study into the mainstream media or is that pointless?
I can tell you for sure that the evalution system described above will not promote collaboration, teamwork and trust. We will be pitted against each other and we will be more paranoid than we already are. How will these “reformers” continue to destroy our profession?
I read where Duncan called John White (NYCDOE to LA, TFA dropout) a visionary, really?
A visionary who cannot see is nothing more than a bloviating bureaucrat (and most likely backed-up by billionaires).
Someday the money guys (BCG and others) will be bored with us. When the economy improves someday and there are plenty of jobs, the TFA recruits will dwindle and very few will care about greedy, lazy teachers. But will they destroy the system first?
LikeLike
You might just get a kick out the visionary leader, John White.
LikeLike
Pre-decisional? Do visionairies get to create their own vocabulary or is that a TFA thing? They certainly make rules for us that don’t apply to them, like transparency and high standards.
I read that the TFA term for people who question their motives is “critical friends”. If you didn’t read it, go to the TFA 11 days of training post by Diane for an essay comparing TFA to a cult.
Pre-decisional….that’s funny.
LikeLike
I did read that. Just be careful not to get used to pre-decisional decisions. 🙂
LikeLike
YES!!
LikeLike
APPR and similar tests are tools for disciplining labor and reducing the wage package. Goal is to get labor(teachers/unions)under tight control, settling for less and less, weakened, divided, demoralized, despised, reviled, and ready to be displaced by 22-yr-old wunderkinds from TFA. Such harsh labor discipline will enable dispossession of public school assets into pvt hands(charters) and open up the once-public-good of public educ to market forces(profit-driven enterprise). Its class war of the 1% lowering the cost of labor and the standard of living while fabricating blame on the teachers’ own alleged incompetence. A big lie(testing)helps disguise the corporate theft of such enormous public assets.
LikeLike
This “apples to apples” comparison is necessary if we are ever to turn around the intentional political misrepresentation of American schools as failures. When this public relations campaign began back in the 1980’s if was refuted point by point in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on American Schools, by Berliner and Biddle. They demonstrated clearly that the statistics were being spun for political and economic purposes.
The USA educates universally, while other countries, particularly industrialized countries, begin tracking and sorting students as early as grade six, at which time only the academic-tracked students are tested and compared. On that basis it is no surprise that on grade four scores the USA always excelled, but by grades eight and ten they appeared to be “failing”, sliding in comparison to other countries. They were, in fact, comparing our entire school populations to their selected/accelerated groups.
There is no doubt that particular schools were in need of improvements, that real educational reform based on rigorous studies (not commercially funded studies of packaged programs) would benefit all schools.
But this campaign was never about reform, it was about the redistribution of public dollars into private hands.
LikeLike
That’s an excellent point you make about American students being compared with students in other countries who are on the academic track while others have already been moved into the vocational track. It is not a fair comparison. Of course, in this country we have all but done away with vocational education and pretend as if everybody can and should go to college.
This point is NEVER made because deformers use the statistics they like.
LikeLike
Thanks for bringing up Berliner and Biddle. A lot of their work can be found at the Arizona State University website that all educators should be checking out: Education Policy Anaylsis Archives.
LikeLike
Oklahoma teacher will have 35% of their evaluations tied to test score, yet to be determined just how that will happen, another 15% based upon goals the teacher and principal devlop, and the final 50% on multiple evaluations. I heard Florida is using a value-added model that will predict a range for each students’ score upon testing time. The formula does not take poverty into consideration and myt district is almost 70% free and reduced lunch. Sounds like we are being set-up to fail, yet again.
LikeLike
In addition to the concerns that are frequently made that good teachers will receive poor evaluations under this system, I think we need to be equally concerned that poor or problematic teachers will receive good evaluations under this system. Imagine a teacher who has a class that is 20% Belgian (let’s say) and who is constantly making snide comments about Belgians. And so either (a) 80% of the class does fine and he gets good test scores or (b) all the Belgians drop his class and the remaining kids do fine and he gets good test scores.
What this new paradigm creates is a rigid system that cannot cope with unexpected failure OR success. The people who imagined teacher evaluations have little experience and sadly, less imagination. The teacher who got a group of kids to collaborate on a brilliant and exciting and horizon-expanding project is shot down by low test scores. The teacher who pisses off every adult – parent or teacher – she meets is artificially bolstered by median scores, even though she’s destroying morale and causing other good instructors to leave.
This is simple.
Hire good administrators.
Trust them to evaluate their staff.
Evaluate the administrators, by meeting them, their staff, their students, parents, and touring the school. Mentor administrators.
LikeLike
el, you’re right it’s simple. But your suggestion would entail treating educators as professionals, which seems anathema to a number of trendy reforms.
LikeLike
To paraphrase one of my mentors, “It’s simple. But it’s not easy.” 🙂
LikeLike
The mind goes numb for many of us who remember that we used to educate a great many children very well, but, instead of expanding the knowledge-based, creative , and imaginative methods of former years, which, of course requires a WELL-EDUCATED faculty, those in control believed that they could simply mandate good teaching by fiat.
We can’t take prospective teachers from third and fourth tiers of graduating classes,
having given them minimal numbers of content courses and ridiculous numbers of hours of methods courses and expect the outcome to be brilliant teaching.
Reinventing the wheel, as we try to do in almost predictable cycles won’t do it either. The answers are self-evident, not easy, not cheap, but quite obvious. We need bright, enthusiastic (young) people or bright. highly-motivated (older) people with small enough groups of students (no more than 25) so that they can actually engage each student in the course of the class. The teacher needs the freedom to go “off-book” if a vivid class discussion is really going somewhere that will leave a memorable and worthwhile lesson in the students’ minds- even if it wasn’t dictated by the syllabus. Electricity in a discussion is a great teaching tool, but I’ve never seen it in a methods text. Of course, the skillful teacher guides the class back to the task at hand, but I’d hate to see a missed opportunity if I were evaluating a teacher’s performance.
I didn’t mean to start a dissertation here; I’m just venting a bit. I taught for thirty-six years and loved what I did. Although most of the time in most of those years was spent with gifted and Advanced Placement students, I have taught every level from sixth grade through graduate school. I really liked them all. I want the students of the future to have exciting, inspiring (once in a while) teaching,
LikeLike
“The teacher needs the freedom to go “off-book” if a vivid class discussion is really going somewhere that will leave a memorable and worthwhile lesson in the students’ minds- even if it wasn’t dictated by the syllabus. Electricity in a discussion is a great teaching tool, but I’ve never seen it in a methods text.”
Hit the nail on the head with that one. As a Spanish teacher, I think some of the best classroom experiences I’ve had had nothing to do with teaching Spanish but had to do with what concerned the students at the time. I believe by listening to my students concerns for a short while (the “electricity in discussion”) allowed me to “connect” with my students so that when we “got back to the Spanish” they were more willing to “learn”. How do you measure that?????
LikeLike
Our new evaluation systems have at their base the idea that incompetent teachers drag our system down. Bill Gates and Eli Broad have incorporated into schools what is known in the Microsoft world as “stack ranking” where opposing work groups are ranked individually based on their performance. This is a way to identify those Microsoft workers who do not produce. This was a big part of the Great Leaders and Great Teachers portion of the RttT state applications.
Stack ranking pits workers against each other and stifles innovation (according to some Microsoft employees).
What is interesting is that Value-Added Methods of growth, which FL and NC use (along with most states), pit a teacher of a subject against the students’ previous teachers because the higher the students growth scores are over time, the higher projected growth score is expected in the future (whereas, the lower the scores are – the more room for growth there is). For example, a physical science teacher who teaches juniors is automatically pitted against a biology teacher who teaches sophomores, and that physical science teacher is hoping and praying for low biology scores in order for there to be more room for growth in their class. It’s stack ranking in its truest form.
What is even worse, is if a teacher (or a Michelle Rhee wanna be) cheats, or even teaches to the test, VAM scores are inflated, leaving the next teacher in line to be screwed. With the cheating scandals coming out of Atlanta, and other places, things are going to get real spicy, real quick.
And I don’t even necessarily have a problem with stack ranking, when the product is easy to identify (which in the business world it usually involves profit for a company). However, I take great offense at the notion that our students’ test scores are some all-important outcome that we ought to be judged upon. That negates everything teaching is about – especially in an environment where U.S. students are so poverty-stricken. And for those that argue that VAM only encompasses 50% or less of a teacher’s evaluation, I ask, do you really think administrators are going to not pay attention to a teacher’s growth score when they go to assign classroom evaluation judgements? What administrator is going to assign a teacher as “distinguished” in an observable classroom evaluation when they know the teacher made “low growth” the previous year? For all intents and purposes, VAM now rules teacher evaluations!
LikeLike
Actually, I forgot to mention something even worse – the pitting of teachers of the same subject within the same school and county wide. The lower the mean score for a subject across a sample (county), then the easier it would be for a particular teacher to show growth. This means that if I teach biology, then I am hoping all other biology teachers have students who score low. In this fashion, my kids have a better chance of scoring over the mean, and, therefore showing growth.
This is even more detrimental when you have teachers of the same subject pitted against each other. Do we share ideas, innovations, aspirations? Crap NO! I hope your kids fail!
LikeLike
In my Florida district VAM is already the law of the land. I don’t even know what my final evaluation was for the past school year, nor do any of my colleagues. We will be told on the first day back in mid-August. The principal did her 60% of the evaluation with me (and all the other teachers, after multiple informal and formal observations) and rated me “highly effective” but the other 40% of our ratings comes from the test scores of our 4th & 5th graders — I teach 1st & 2nd and am new to this particular school so I never actually taught any of these students but we are all being evaluated by those tested grades. They left 3rd grade out of the equation for now probably because the results of 3rd grade FCAT have been an embarrassing disaster for years. There are no Pre-K, K, 1st, 2nd, Art, Music, PE, Computer Lab, etc. tests. Yet. They are working on that.
Since the FCAT scores were predicted to drop quite a bit across the state due to a “more rigorous” test this year there was no way that we could win at this evaluation game. The scores were held too long for principals to try to figure out the complicated VAM formulas during the last week of school so they just put it off, fully expecting that most teachers will be rated “in need of improvement”. What a way to start off a new school year. Talk about motivation!
We were told outright to be prepared for the worst this first year and that out of our faculty of 45 only 4 or 5 at most could be rated “highly effective” under any circumstance (that good old stack ranking) and that some would be rated “in needs of improvement” and most should be rated “effective” dependent on our test scores of course. The scores went down slightly from last year, better than expected but there is no mechanism to adjust for poverty. We were told that was illegal under RTTT. There is some adjustment for ELL, Special Education, and Attendance. We had a meeting towards the end of the year where we had to “verify” the students we taught this year for the state DOE so their future scores can be attached to our future evaluations throughout their school careers in the state. No explanation of how that will work yet.
Whatever transpires this year, if your get 3 years of “needs improvement” or lower ratings the state of Florida now yanks your teaching certificate and forbids the offering of a teaching contract for the next year by law. I suppose charter schools will be exempt from this hiring prohibition as they are exempt from most other state education laws. So they will be forcing most of the teaching force into charters or other kinds of employment and BINGO, they win.
LikeLike
The stack ranking is so unfair! All teachers are going to be suffering. Students will be hurt. Others won’t understand or want to understand the consequences of VAMs.
LikeLike
our dumb union signed onto it in our state and our evaluation system is a total MESS. First time ever I received a bad evaluation as a teacher in 17 years. My evaluator even mentioned he lowered one of my scores dealing with students (I have a great rapport with them) because of an issue where a kid did threaten me. I called admin 3 times before anyone showed and the kid got more and more aggressive with comments as I was ignored. Finally by the 3rd call I promised to grieve it if no one showed. I was reprimanded in front of the class and kid. I was told I should be able to handle someone calling me a bitch and dumb ass, and I could never even get a word in about the threat. At my evaluation, he lowered my score because of it. He also asked me questions about what certain things were that I had no idea… he only asked people who scored developing. The people who scored effective and highly effective weren’t asked the same questions… but I personally asked them. They had no clue about the answer either. Go figure… One teacher scored highly effective for rapport with students… lots of her kids wanted to transfer to my class. Kids have been transfered out of her room to mine quite often. Once I had one transfered to hers…and in the end she wanted to come back to mine. The teacher is excellent, I am just saying the evaluation process is biased. How could her score about rapport be higher than mine? She’d tell you the same thing. So she also went through my scores and we found MANY discrepancies. I scheduled another meeting with my evaluator. All he did was talk over me and say he could go through my scores with the rubric again and lower them. I used to love to come to school to teach. I hate it now. There is no support and if you’re forceful about your safety, it works against you on your evaluation.
LikeLike