Michelle Rhee founded The New Teacher Project.* Subsequently, Rhee was chancellor of the DC school system for four tumultuous years. One of the people who worked for Rhee at The New Teacher Project was Kaya Henderson, who is now chancellor of the DC schools.
So if you want to get a truly rigorous, definitely independent study of Rhee’s reforms, what group should be hired to do the review? Obvious: The New Teacher Project!
Here is the not surmising conclusion of the study: Rhee’s reforms are working! Great teachers are retained, bad teachers are fired.
Surely, in a year or two, we will see dramatic improvement in the DC test scores now that there is a great teacher in every classroom. The black-white test scores gaps and the Hispanic-white test scores gaps–now the largest of any city tested by the federal government–will close. With a great teacher in every classroom, all children in the DC schools will be proficient. Maybe as early as 2014.
*After this post first appeared, a reader informed me that Rhee did not “found” The New Teacher Project, although she often claims that she did. My informant says it was founded by insiders at Teach for America, who then asked Rhee to run it. If you check her Wikipedia entry, you will see that she is credited as the founder. I will leave this to Wendy and Michelle to sort out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TNTP is another shame. I actually made it to the semifinalist round of their Fishman Prize competition last year (Sorry folks the $25,000 prize lured me in after not having so much as a cost of living increase for 5 years). I submitted a video of me teaching for evaluation and in over 30% of the categories there was no interrater reliability between scoring judges. In those categories, one gave me an above average score and the other gave me a score that said there was not enough evidence to grade it. I’m not sure how TNTP gets to decide what great teaching is when two judges can’t even agree what great teaching is. Also, note that most of the winners of the competition were from charter schools.
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It is amazing how the so call education reformers are embraced by everyone as saviors for poor and minority children while openly running such a scam. When will America wake up?
When the smoke clears on this madness theses market model education reforms will be a sad and regrettable era in our nation’s history.
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Damn! Then it was their server!
I am out for breakfast but will resend even I get home. I know my system works! Geez! So sorry.
Hope deer hunting was fun and successful! Did I hear something about snow??
Sent from my iPhone
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I just completed my teaching evaluation on myself and guess what: It turns out that I am an exemplary teacher!
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Yes, me too!
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The Washington Post’s education reporter wrote an article yesterday about the study that noted in passing Rhee’s and Henderson’s ties to TNTP. The article also noted that, although DCPS did not pay for this particular TNTP “study”, DCPS has a current contract to pay TNTP for other services — more reason to doubt TNTP’s objectivity.
The Washington Post also published an editorial today trumpeting the TNTP study as proof that DCPS was retaining good teachers and discharging bad teachers — without explaining that the TNTP study used the IMPACT (value-added-model) ratings to measure teacher quality and without noting the national controversy regarding the reliability of value-added models as measures of teacher quality. (In other words, it’s just as — or more — likely that DCPS has been retaining teachers, good and bad, in higher-SES-area schools while discharging teachers, good and bad, in low-SES-area schools).
The editorial is yet another in a long line of Washington Post editorials praising corporate school reform (high-stakes testing/teacher discharge, charters) and criticizing teachers/teachers unions. Given that the Washington Post has a national reputation as an excellent — and liberal-leaning — newspaper, it’s particularly depressing to see this bias on its editorial page.
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The Washington Post editorial page has consistently been a cheerleader for all of Rhee’s most misguided ideas. Fortunately the Post has had excellent education writers who are unaffected by the biased views of the editorial writers.
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Mirror, Mirror, on the wall….
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Despite the conflict of interest noted here, the TNTP report has several very interesting findings: 1- the retention rates of “high-performing” teachers was no better in DC than in other districts, despite the fact that the district had adopted five out of the six recommendations of TNTP to improve their retention rates, including merit pay; 2- the “high performers” as measured by IMPACT were clustered in schools w/ fewer poor kids, which TNTP admitted might be the result of a biased evaluation system. This last finding, if true, would make moot all the other conclusions in the report. Both findings tend to undermine the credibility of TNTP’s work in general. In general, the findings are similar to their last report, when the main conclusion seemed to be that in order to improve retention of effective teachers, principals ought to support them more and express their appreciation — rather than all the other #corpreform nonsense about the need for merit pay etc.
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Brava, Leonie. It’s also worth pointing out that the five districts used for study in “The Irreplaceables” use five different methods to identify who the “irreplaceables” actually are. One of the districts is a charter management organization.
I also have serious concerns about how the teacher surveys were conducted. Too bad a comprehensive description of the report’s methodology was not included.
This is the problem with think tanky research: often, it’s so incomplete, you can’t make an honest assessment of it.
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JJ “Problem” you say ? Being so incomplete that nobody can make an honest assessment of it is exactly what NYSED is aiming for in their teacher evaluation process. A murky sliding measure that can be tweaked to make anyone on their radar appear “ineffective.” Do it two years in a row and presto. Bye bye teacher no matter how great you are.
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Sean, what they aiming for is to fire as many veteran teachers as they can.
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Essentially, Rhee vindicates Rhee? I’m shocked!
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First issue at play. There is evidence that administrators are going to be affected by VAM outcomes – seeing teachers with low VAM scores as ‘bad’ and others as ‘better’ proportionally based on VAM outcomes. For evidence see Beardsely’s study out of HISD. It doesn’t really take evidence to know this would be the case – just common sense. Administrators do not want to look like unreliable raters, nor do they want to receive flack from their supervisors. You could cut the tension in Tennessee’s First the Top report in that the state was worried about how administrator ratings did not agree with VAM outcomes. I’m sure they’ll put so much pressure on the administrators that the administrators will be forced to simply follow VAM outcomes as gospel.
So, just because this study depended upon IMPACT outcomes, rather than solely VAM outcomes, is no comfort to me.
Second, note this statement on pg 12:
“Irreplaceables are less likely to teach the students who need them most.
Irreplaceables in DCPS appear to teach significantly fewer high-poverty students than low performers do. Top teachers in DCPS reported that only 60 percent of their students come from high-poverty backgrounds, compared to 90 percent of the students taught by low-performing teachers.15 This is a troubling finding and one that stands in stark contrast to the other districts we studied, where Irreplaceables were about as likely as low performers to report teaching high-poverty students.”
All this does is reinforce that IMPACT and VAM (for the other districts) are skewed and effected by SES status, something VAM (or IMPACT) should not be influenced by.
But because of their bias in thinking it is the teacher’s fault, they completely overlook this important finding.
The report continues in it’s teacher bashing style (still on pg. 12):
“The effect on students is striking. In a high-need DCPS elementary school, the typical student will have two low-performing teachers before she moves on to middle school, and nearly 40 percent of the students will never be assigned to an Irreplaceable’s classroom. In a low-need elementary school, however, the typical student will have two or three Irreplaceable teachers, and most students
(4 out of 5) will never have a low-performing teacher.”
Rather than observe that the effects of SES are “striking” on the outcomes of the teaching and learning equation, they completely get lost in their own disgusting rhetoric.
And still the report continues (still on pg. 12):
“There are two possible explanations for this trend. The first possibility is that top-performing teachers are inequitably distributed across DCPS schools, with more Irreplaceables working in lower-need schools. The second possibility is that a flaw in the design or implementation of IMPACT makes it easier for teachers working in low-need schools to earn top ratings.”
There is but one possible explanation. Better students, ones that are ready to come to school and learn (had a healthy dinner, have parents that care, etc…) will learn more. This is nothing more than proficiency measures of test-based accountability, brought about by the NCLB Act, told us, yet we believe that new ‘growth’ measures, brought about by RttT, will reveal something different.
Maybe there is no “flaw in (the) design or implementation of IMPACT” – maybe VAM is distressed by the same, single variable that proficiency always was for the last decade and some years – THE POVERTY LEVEL OF STUDENTS.
Again, these people are off on their tangent (still on pg. 12):
“We found evidence suggesting that inequitable distribution is a real problem regardless of the existence of design or implementation flaws in the evaluation system.”
How about realizing that the “inequitable distribution” of the parents’ income for students in lower-achieving schools (and lower-rated teachers) is the REAL FRICKIN’ PROBLEM.
I mean get real people.
And some more (still on p. 12):
“When
we performed our analysis using value-added results instead of IMPACT ratings—a method that controls
for student poverty levels—high-need schools still had many more low-performing teachers and many fewer Irreplaceables (Figure 9). However, more analysis is necessary to confirm this pattern and determine whether other factors are involved.”
How do we know that IMPACT really “controls for student poverty level”? The reality in this report thus far do not support such a statement.
Yeah TNTP, I’ve got some more “analysis” for ya. I’ve analyzed outcomes stemming from scores, for every year I can get my hands on, for PISA, TIMSS, NAEP, SAT, and ACT, that show no poorer group of students EVER outscoring their richer peers, at any income bracket, for ANY test – based on average scores disaggregated based on poverty levels.
I fear the same phenomenon for VAM outcomes no matter how much VAM trumpeters toot their horn, and no matter how much money they steal from our schools in the name of “reform”.
Please inform me of where my analysis is wrong. I want to be wrong. I want a true measure of teacher effectiveness that actually works.
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Thank you for the fine analysis. Do you (or any other reader) have a bibliography listing scholarly articles demonstrating the problems with VAM? I am also interested in articles showing how standardized test scores correlate with SES and other out-of-school factors. I am trying to write a critique of Connecticut’s new teacher evaluation process. I would like to cite real research (unlike the state documents that outline the rationale for the new process). Ten cities are piloting the new process, including Norwalk, which just lost more than a week of school due to Hurricane Sandy. Thank you.
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Please post your critique here if you would. I am horrified by the evaluation system being explained to us by the CEA…some of us are being thrown under the bus…well 23% of us anyway. The rest are free from test scores. Why? I though we all taught literacy, reading and writing, via our content area. We have been told that over and over again.
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Will do, though it will take a few weeks to produce.
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Look up “Value-Added Assessment Annotated Bibliography”. Also, you can find one for teacher evaluation in general too.
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