Archives for the month of: July, 2012
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How to Run a Meaningless Meeting

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
27

A reader writes:

The tactic of breaking meeting attendees into small groups with one staff member per group who runs the group discussion and writes the comments on chart paper is commonly used at the system level in the county where my children attend. They did it for controversial redistricting plans, and when they were acting as if they cared about teacher and parent input regarding conversion to a charter system. The tactic drives me crazy because it is a way to control the crowd, a way to keep the masses at bay. It avoids the opportunity for the “whole” of who cares enough to show up to HEAR from each other and build a discussion that has the potential to become loud enough to  BE HEARD. It was so patronizing to be led in these small group discussions, which were largely controlled by the facilitator anyway because they had parameters and categories and ultimately decided what to write on the chart paper.  In our system, they then lean heavily on these “town hall meetings” to bolster their decisions because they can SAY they got input. In reality it is just window dressing.
So, it comes as no surprise that they would break such a large group of teachers down to take away the power of your collective voice. They neatly avoided what would have been said, perhaps to thunderous applause and cheers, had they allowed you to stay gathered and build on each others’ comments. I am a psychologist by training, but it doesn’t take a psychologist to see the manipulative ploy for what it is.  Democracy at its best, right?

Categories Education Reform

Memphis: Is Anyone Listening?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
12

When the Transition Planning Committee rolled out its plan, based on the recommendations of the management consultants, the Boston Consulting Group, and led by Stand for Children, teachers were not sure if the public hearings would be genuine and if their voices would be heard.

In a comment posted here, this teacher describes her experience at a town hall meeting. Corporate reformers seem to have an aversion to the give and take of genuine democracy. It is hard to listen when you think you have all the answers. What do educators know about education anyway?

I went to the town hall meeting today. They went over the TPC powerpoint for the first hour. That powerpoint can be found on the website and if a person chose to go to this two-hour long meeting, that person had probably already read it or the the commission report.

After going over the powerpoint for an hour, they did not have time to answer everyone’s questions (and there were only 30-50 people in attendance). They did not allow people to stand up or to raise their hand to ask a question. They required that all questions be written on a note card and submitted to the panel to be read aloud by a panel member.

They did not allow follow-up questions, several times interrupting audience members mid-question.

I did not feel that my concerns were heard or that any changes will be made to the plan in response to the community concerns, one of which was discomfort with cutting librarians in elementary schools.

Mayor Mark Luttrell inadvertently made it clear at the beginning of the meeting that changes will not be made to the plan based on community response. He said that what the TPC is doing now is “selling the plan to the community.”
Categories Education Reform

A Field Report on New York’s Educator Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
23

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.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, New York, Principals, Race to the Top

My View of the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
92

I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s classrooms?

In 2009, I went to an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute where Dane Linn, one of the project directors for developing the standards, described the process. I asked if they intended to pilot test them, and I did not get a “yes” answer. The standards were released early in 2010. By happenstance, I was invited to the White House to meet with the head of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, the President’s education advisor, and Rahm Emanuel. When asked what I thought of the standards, I suggested that they should be tried out in three or four or five states first, to work out the bugs. They were not interested.

I have worked on state standards in various states. When the standards are written, no one knows how they will work until teachers take them and teach them. When you get feedback from teachers, you find out what works and what doesn’t work. You find out that some content or expectations are in the wrong grade level; some are too hard for that grade, and some are too easy. And some stuff just doesn’t work at all, and you take it out.

The Common Core will be implemented in 45 states without that kind of trial. No one knows if they will raise expectations and achievement, whether they will have no effect, whether they will depress achievement, or whether they will be so rigorous that they increase the achievement gaps.

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution thinks they won’t matter.

The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which received large grants from the Gates Foundation to evaluate the standards and has supported them vigorously, estimates that the cost of implementing them will be between $1 billion and $8.3 billion. The conservative Pioneer Institute estimates that the cost of implementation would be about $16 billion, and suggests this figure is a “mid-range” estimate.

The Gates Foundation, lest we forget, paid to develop the standards, paid to evaluate the standards, and is underwriting Pearson’s program to create online courses and resources for the standards, which will be sold by Pearson, for a profit, to schools across the nation.

Of course, every textbook publisher now says that its products are aligned with the Common Core standards, and a bevy of consultants have come out of the woodwork to teach everyone how to teach them.

In these times of austerity, I wonder how much money districts and states have available to implement the standards faithfully. I wonder how much money they will put into professional development. I wonder about the quality of the two new assessments that the U.S. Department of Education laid out $350 million for.

These are things I wonder. But how can I possibly pass judgment until I find out how the standards work in real classrooms with real children and real teachers?

Diane

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

A Charter Battles for Right to Remain Open

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
15

In Florida, where charters spring up like wildflowers in shopping malls, the Miami-Dade School Board voted to close down Rise Academy charter school.

Rise appealed to the state board, and the state board reversed the local board’s decision.

The Miami-Dade board went to court, and the court overturned the state board’s decision. That is, the court ruled that the local board was right to cancel Rise Academy’s charter. The charter school plans to sue the Miami-Dade board for damages.

I recall reading in an article in the Economist that I wrote about earlier that one of the great virtues of charter schools is that it is easy to shut them down for poor performance, malfeasance or other reasonable grounds.

This one won’t go without a fight, and the fight isn’t over.

According to the story in the Miami Herald, Rise Academy was closed because of:

unsanitary bathrooms and food storage, a shortage of textbooks, and questionable spending by administrators. The school had no science, social studies, art or writing programs, no student computers, no library — and recess was held on an asphalt parking lot, Miami-Dade officials found.

“The school was a dump,” school district lawyer Mindy McNichols told state officials at a 2010 hearing. “They refused to follow any of the requirements.”

But none of these conditions was a problem for the majority on the state board. Now that the Appeals Court has upheld the decision of the local board,  the fight goes on.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida

Teachers in Memphis Speak Out

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
11

I have published several posts (see here, here, and here) about Memphis, where a “Transition Planning Committee” devised a plan to merge the Memphis public schools and the Shelby County Schools. The planning was based on work by the Boston Consulting Group; the director of the TPC is the executive director of Stand for Children in Memphis. The plan proposes to shift many children out of the Memphis public schools and into new charter schools, so that charter enrollment will increase from 4% of Memphis students to 19% by 2016. The plan also involves a transfer of $212 million from the public schools to charter schools.

I have received letters from Stand for Children and from both supporters and opponents of the plan. Today I heard from Memphis teachers:

I teach in one of the grades K-3 in Memphis. In addition to the injustice of using test scores at all in making personnel decisions, K-3 teachers are evaluated based on the test scores of students they have never taught.Every teacher in Tennessee who teaches K-3 and every art, music, P.E. teacher, and librarian, instead of using their students’ value-added scores for half of their evaluation (because there aren’t any), is assigned their school’s value-added score for half of their evaluation.This is clearly designed to make the bad schools worse. Already, nearly all of the K-3 teachers at my failing school have transferred to other schools with better school-wide value-added scores. I don’t yet know who the principal has hired to replace them, but I’m guessing many will be TFA types (we also have a TFA-style program here called Memphis Teaching Fellows, run by The New Teacher Project), most of whom will be ineffective their first year.This legislation is designed to make the bad schools worse, so that they can be closed and turned into charters.The same teacher wrote this comment:In the meeting the Transition Planning Commission (TPC) had with teachers, the district strongly encouraged all teachers to go in place of faculty meeting. I didn’t go because I knew it would be a waste of time, but my colleagues went. According to them, it was a waste of time. They had a thousand teachers in the auditorium of a high school and no organization for the meeting. Teachers were not given an opportunity to speak the the group as a whole. Instead, they broke off into discussion groups comprised of a large number of teachers and one staff member. Teachers’ suggestions in these groups were written down and supposedly submitted to the TPC. The teachers I spoke to doubted anyone would read their suggestions. Why couldn’t they just ask teachers to email these suggestions, instead of wasting enormous amounts of time at the end of a long school day to organize a thousand teachers into discussion groups?

This comes from another Memphis teacher:

Let’s clear up the confusion around teacher input and the transition plan. There are NO current teachers on the Transition Planning Commission. The TPC appointed NO current teachers to the work groups who prepared the plan. The only input the TPC got from actual teachers was what they allowed them to say at community “listening tours”. These tours were usually about two hours long and held in various parts of the community. I believe there were six of these events. They were open to the public and teachers could attend and speak. The TPC members present answered virtually no questions as these were listening events. I do not call this teacher input. Additionally the teacher unions were intentionally left out of the discussions and were told their input was not needed even though the two unions involved represent over 7000 teachers. Teachers have no idea what is really in this plan.

 
Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Arne Duncan: “We Don’t Know”

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
24

At a recent meeting in New York City, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that “we as a country don’t know” how much student test scores should count as part of teachers’ evaluation. He said it shouldn’t be zero, and it shouldn’t be 100%. But it should be somewhere in between. As to what the number should be, the secretary said, “we don’t know.”

Here’s a thought: What if the current methods of calculating value-added are inaccurate? What if they are fundamentally flawed? What if they say nothing about teacher quality? What if they reflect who is in the class rather than teacher quality?

What if, say, a few years from now, we look back and realize they are junk science?

How much should they count then?

And if we don’t know whether they are accurate, and we don’t know if they are a reasonable measure of teacher quality, and if we have no evidence that their use in evaluation helps teachers improve or students achieve, why are we counting them at all? Shouldn’t we wait until we have clear evidence that the methods we use to evaluate teachers and principals are accurate, fair, reliable and valid, before putting them into practice?

I know that “we can’t wait,” but shouldn’t we wait long enough to know that what we are doing will help and not harm?

Or, are we still building a plane in mid-air?

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Billionaires Want Charters in Washington State, Again

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
13

Three times the question of charter schools has been put to a referendum in Washington State, and three times the voters have said no.

Undeterred, the charter-lovers of the technology sector are putting another couple million into a campaign to take it back to the voters again.

Bill Gates put in $1 million, chump change, you might say. More from the Bezos family of amazon.com fame. How embarrassing for Gates that his own home state has no charter schools.

Not surprisingly, Stand on Children is working on behalf of the billionaires’ drive to save poor children from their “dreadful” public schools.

So the drive is on to take the issue back to the voters for a fourth shot.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Why Does Governor Christie Have a Grudge Against Teachers?

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
16

One of the best bloggers in New Jersey, if not the whole northeast, is Jersey Jazzman.

He has gathered statements that Governor Christie has made about teachers that are quite negative. His teachers remember him fondly.

By all accounts, he had an idyllic childhood and experienced great public schooling.

Now he is pushing privatization as hard as he can, promoting privately managed charter schools and cyber charters (despite their dismal results).

What went wrong?

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization

Carol Burris on the Art of Teaching

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
19

This morning I posted Carol Burris’s essay about the Relay Graduate School of Education. Carol Burris is the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island.

Many people wrote comments and discussed what they thought of Relay’s method of teaching as represented by a video embedded in Burris’s essay, taken from the Relay website.

I invited Carol to respond to the many comments, and this is what she wrote today:

My Answersheet blog on Relay opened up an interesting discussion on teaching and learning, both on that blog and on Diane’s blog. That is a good thing, and I am happy to enter the dialogue on this topic, although I certainly am not an expert.  First, let me say that I am not critiquing the young woman in the video. She is merely showcasing the techniques Relay asked her to show. It is the techniques that are ineffective, not the young woman. 

I learned to teach from a wonderful cooperating teacher, professional development by Madeline Hunter of UCLA and under the guidance of a great department chair who had a deep understanding of effective instruction based on Hunter’s work. Madeline based her wisdom on educational research, the observation of teachers and her own instruction. She believed deeply in the professionalism of teaching and was horrified when misguided administrators tried to turn good instruction into a check list. She would be appalled by what is happening today.

Her one “absolute” was that there are NO absolutes other than never humiliate a learner because learning shuts down. She said the only thing that every teacher had to do in every lesson was to think.

Now to the techniques in the lesson and why I consider them to not be effective techniques…

We know from cognitive science that it takes young students  5-7 seconds (teenagers 3-5 seconds) to retrieve information from long term memory and bring it to working memory. Without that wait/think time, many students cannot find the answer. Those seconds also increases the quality of responses of higher achieving students. The teacher does not give Omari sufficient think time, nor does she pose an open ended question for the rest of the class to think about. Hunter used to call that “naming the pigeon”…one student on the spot so no one else needs to think.

There is no learning happening for those students who are sending energy through their fingers. Although they are active, they are not engaging in active participation which requires that students be engaged in the learning. Learning happens in the mind of the learner, it is not poured into a passive pail. We know that not only from Hunter, but also from constructivist learning theory.

To connect covert to overt active participation and engage the minds of the learners the teacher could:

  • ask students to think about one time they were ambitious
  • jot down their response
  • share with a partner (teacher walks and listens)
  • share out so that the teacher can correct error.

That would take no more than 2 minutes to do. Remember, though, Hunter said each teacher must think. She may not want to spend the time because her learning objective is broader than that. She can (1) tell the class what the word means, and then ask them to give one example from their life of when they were ambitious (a few seconds). However, if she wants to engage the students in higher level thinking at the level of evaluation, (2) ask the students to decide if the character WAS ambitious, and back up their opinion with an example.

Or, she could differentiate and have some students work on 1 and others on 2.

Finally, although the narrator said that the problem was that the student did not understand the difference between a trait and a feeling, the teacher never clarified the difference.  She might present examples of traits and feelings and have the class explain how the two differ. That would engage the students in analysis, which is on the higher level of Bloom’s as well. With good support, kids can do it. Complexity and difficulty are not the same. This would promote transfer, and she could come back to this theme throughout the book. 

My overarching problem with the Relay videos is that they are most focused on keeping kids in line and low level learning than they are in teaching students to think deeply about content and develop academic discipline.  The video does not show ‘rigorous discussion’.  In my opinion it shows a behavioral management technique….Omari answer my questions because I will not stop until I get what I want from you.

 

 

Categories Education Reform
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