This is an unintentionally hilarious story in the New York Times.
Reformers are upset to discover that an astonishing proportion of teachers are getting high marks on the new evaluation systems that have just been set up. The evaluations were supposed to identify the best teachers (to get bonuses, even if no one has any money for bonuses) and most importantly to weed out the “bad” teachers who were causing so many students to get low test scores.
But look at these shocking statistics:
In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”
In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.
Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.
Needless to say, the National Council on Teacher Quality–whose board (as this blog knows well from the posts of Mercedes Schneider) includes such experienced teacher experts as Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Wendy Kopp–is upset.
So is the Brookings Institution expert Grover Whitehurst, who was in charge of the Bush administration’s education research. He says that any system that can’t find 5% ineffective teachers must be flawed.
Think of all the hoopla, not to mention the billions of dollars spent by Race to the Top, the Gates Foundation, the states, and the districts, and now what? Where did all those ineffective teachers go? Where are they hiding? Why can’t we find them?
Sort of feels like the T-shirt that says, “My grandma went to Miami and all I get was this lousy T-shirt.”
My government spent billions to find teachers to fire, and all we got was confusion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your last sentence says it all, Diane. Reform is not about identifying weak teachers to help them improve. Instead of rejoicing that, according to their metrics, we have so many effective teachers, the rheeformers are apoplectic. Their goal has always been to get rid of as many of us as possible. Kind of reminds me of the closing to every Scooby-Doo episode: they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those pesky teachers. Have no fear, though: they will tweak evaluations until they get the results they desire.
Lehrer: what you said.
Everyone should read the entire article to which Diane has provided a link. Then ponder this…
Remember the match-fixing scandals that recently rocked the world of soccer? Or the way a slew of Tour de France yellow jerseys went to the savviest users of performance-enhancing drugs? Or that guy (the one who incongruously was wearing a heavy overcoat on a hot day) you saw walking up to people, rolling up one of his sleeves to show his forearm bedecked with watches, offering brand new Rolexes for $25—and people were buying?
😦
Folks, you were hearing about and watching “professionals” at work. Gotta hate what they were doing, but ya gotta admire [or not] their devotion to their craft.
The sheer incompetence of the charterite/privatizer crowd boggles the imagination. Even when they spend mammoth amounts of money [remember: No Adult Consultant Left Behind!] to set up rigged systems to sucker punch public school teachers, they sucker punch themselves instead!
🙂
Although you have to admit, giving yourself a black eye intended for someone else requires an unusual skill set…
🙂
Imagine being so disgusted that we don’t have MORE lousy doctors, lazy firemen, incompetent accountants, ineffective policeman, stupid adminstrators or God forbid, dishonest, lying, sellout politicians. The horror!
There was the assumption that all school districts would find that the costly and distracting new evaluation systems would result in the identification of a significant percentage of ineffective teachers. What this assumption fails to take into account is that many school districts have hired carefully and provided ongoing high quality professional development thereby nurturing a cadre of effective and highly effective ( to use the current jargon) teachers.
I think this is like “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” where the computer Deep Thought is created to find the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”………..after 7-1/2 million years they get the answer……42.
And the Rheeformers are the Vogon construction fleet.
Your analogy is pretty apt. The answer “42” makes no sense, because they don’t know what the right question is.
Imagine the meeting at which “they” were given this information.
“But…but…but,” the Rhee-former sputtered.
The philanthropist pondered, “How will we spin THIS to match our rhetoric?”
“They can’t possibly pass these evaluations,” said the company representative, “because we designed them for failure.”
The TFA executive wondered aloud, “I hope the failures were not TFA members.”
“They cheated. No question.” said the politician.
“Takes one to kn…” muttered the disgruntled union boss.
“No one will believe this,” said the reporter. “It’s been months since Newtown and we’ve made sure that the vilification of teachers has been our priority.”
They certainly don’t want anymore sappy stories about teachers dying to save their children, giving their kidney to a student, spending their own money, inspiring their students, bonding with families and making a difference.
They need Campbell Brown out there barking about those accused of sexual misconduct (accused not proven).
All the while she hobnobs with the Rhees not realizing the hypocrisy of hanging out with those who cut a deal once the details were exposed.
Now if we could have parent evaluations, maybe then we could find a cause to this learning gap.
And….administrator evaluations, reformer evaluations, test company evaluations, politician evaluations…imagine if the ones for accountability and transparency were held to the same high standards.
WE should develop evaluations and metrics for those groups ourselves and publish them.
When will all this nonsense end.
Not for at least a decade, and not without a firm, focused fight.
I’ve done work for the New York Times, and I can tell you first hand that they are an organization with a lot of factions and schisms politically.
But the overriding direction of the paper is corporate, corporate, corporate.
The paper has been tirelessly biased against teachers, teacher unions, and public education with the one exception of Micahel Winerip’s articles. VIrtually every other writer there that has produced an article on public education may as well have been from the Bill Gates and Arne Duncan camp. The frequency of pro-reform articles dwarfs the frequency of any articles form a teacher or administrator in the trenches point of view. Mr. Bloomberg’s connections with corporate media and advertisers swayed the New York Times and its editorial board to see things his way, especially at a time when major periodicals were going under or not surviving conversion to digital format.
The Times was determined to survive.
It did.
When I had an editorial illustration of mine published back in 2006 in the New York Times, the editor then, Brian Rhea, told me that he was doing me a favor and trying me out before he would consider me for bigger jobs, bigger pages. His usual person assigned for that day was out sick, so I became the fill-in. I had been “wooing and courting” the Times for months to see if they would be interested in my work as an editorial illustrator.
My drawing went to print in the 1.3 million reader paper the next day as I had made my 5:30 pm deadline, rushing into Manhattan to drop it off. It was a Thursday, I believe.
It was my FIRST piece published there, and I was afraid – had allowed myself to feel intimidated – that they would never give me work again if I pursued payment.
Well, after that and despite a lot of declarations that they would hire me again, I was never given another assignment. That’s fine, because it’s their right to choose whoever they think works best for them for whatever reason.
No one ever called me again, and when I called them, it was always, “When it’s the right assignment, we promise we’ll call you.”
This stayed with me for 5 years. For 5 years, it I was stewing in it, brewing in it, you name it. It really bothered me that I was good enough to be put on their major page in a major section, but that I was inadequate to be compensated.
Was the art director simply pocketing the money or was he trying to save money in his operating budget and impress his boss?
The caper continues.
I called the new art director up and Nicholas Blechman at the Times two years ago and explained my situation. I called Ochs-Schulzberger’s office as well and explained to the secretary what had happened. I called their legal division and stated the situation as well.
The op/ed page people went back to research their records and sure enough confirmed that a piece was published, but no money ever went out for it in accounts payable.
I received a check in 7 business days for the rate they currently paid free lance illustrators.
My point?
The NY TImes is a corporate entity and is NO angel.
The Times is pro-reform in education for the most part and it blows with the readership wind whenever it can to stay in business. It are PRECISELY the kind of paper that sympathetically reports on struggling fledgling unions that are having a hard time forming in foreign countries, but the very same paper that slants its bias against labor unions here, and slams down against American teachers’ unions unless they show pro-reform platforms and moves in their leadership.
EIther the Times is truly unaware and ideologue-plagued, or it’s just in on the reforms with the reformers.
Either way, I dropped my subscription the the Times a few years ago and read independent media.
I cancelled my about a year ago as well. Good riddance to rubbish.
What ever happened to Michael Winerip? I always thought he was a stand up guy and got it? He seems to have disappeared. As a esult of the infighting?
He was reassigned. Go figure!
That figures.
States will tweak there evaluation plans to make them more RIGOROUS. One thing is certain, Gates, Broad and his spawn, will NEVER admit they were wrong. NEVER.
The war on public education is well funded and our fourth estate has been purchased. The road ahead is rockier than the road behind.
What I found surprising in the article was that the view that the high scores were caused by the inclusion of standardized test scores in the evaluations.
That’s actually predictable. There’s so much noise in VAM, it can help the weak as well as hurt the strong.
Noise should go both ways though. The way the test scores were included seemed to only increase the evaluations, not decrease them. If noise is the issue, shouldn’t we see large number of teachers incorrectly categorized as not meeting expectations?
The NYT is Fox News but with a larger vocabulary.
My 7th graders could beat Steve Doocy, their morning buffoon.
Not a bad analogy.
Reblogged this on Sow. Cultivate. Bloom. and commented:
I wonder how much will be spent to fix the “flawed” evals?
Not to be a spoiler, but isn’t relying on these systems to give any kind of accurate evaluation is wrong, even if they give us good scores? How would it look if we came out now and said, hey look, the scores say an astonishing number of us are actually excellent teachers, when we’ve been denigrating the whole concept of VAM evals all along?
We’ve been saying for some time that we know we are excellent teachers. We don’t need an evaluation system to tell us that.
As a school administrator for 35 years these findings are unsurprising. Principals do a good job identifying weak teachers and counseling them out of education or working with them to improve their performance… but wasting money on tests is nothing new. In the mid-1970s when I began my career as an administrator in PA they gave a state wide assessment that was analyzed by a group of statisticians who determined that the test scores correlated with the mother’s level of education and the father’s occupation. We’ve spent billions on tests since then that repeatedly demonstrate that children raised in households where both parents are well educated and affluent do better than students raised in households where neither parent has a solid education and have limited resources. We keep establishing this fact and continue to do nothing about it… WHY? Because it would require us to provide resources to those educationally and economically disadvantaged families and those resources would require more spending. on schools.
Why spend money on poverty when you can divert that money into corporate coffers. The next thing will be to require schools to hire corporate evaluators who are “objective”. 2% of teachers are in need of improvement yet there is a VERY high direct correlation between poverty/parental education and test scores. Answer? It must be the teachers. Thanks for your post. Nice to hear from administrators.
During training for Connecticut’s new teacher evaluation system, we were told that we should not expect to consistently be ranked at the highest of the four rankings, “exemplary”. This was described as a place we might “visit” every now and then. The implication, of course, is that we’re just not that good. This was during TRAINING, before a single student took a test or an administrator observed me teaching a lesson. How would people respond to me if I told students in September that they would only “visit” the “A” grade every now and then; usually they would do less well.
Another case of “Do as we say, not as we do”?
We got the same talk in our state, must be the canned scripted language they want teachers to start using. “you will only visit the highest ranking”….WTH???
We got the same speech in our district. Maybe “they” focus all their attention on teachers because we are the only ones who have something to lose: our jobs. No penalties for parents or students.
Well said, WGersen.
This is about money, power, individualism vs. collectivism, private interest vs. the common good, personal pursuit vs. social responsibility.
I know.
I teach low income immigrant students. 90% of them each year on average always flourish in local, standardized, and formative assessments, but under RTTT, the new APPR, new tests aligned with the CCSS, and shrinking resources in my district and school, I am not holding my breath as to what becomes of them or me.
I am Nationally Board Certified. And so what .
Once again, to evaluate teachers on these criteria is like evaluating doctors without regard for the health of the patients as they walk in the door. The Times has a long history of not being exactly truthful about schools. I worked in one school vilified in the early 1970’s because of a group of white parents who wanted their kids out and put into a new school where they would be the large majority…This was in the Bronx NY. Since then I have always been skeptical of what they write about education…with the possible exception of Michael Winerip….What happened to him?
There was one piece of information that did frighten me however. I do this to fact check the paper that claims to be the most accurate in the nation. It said, “Until recently Florida teaches were typically observed once a year for about 20 minutes and deemed satisfactory or unsatisfactory.” And that, “teachers are no longer rated simply on ‘classroom management” and ‘planning’, but rather on 60 specific elements including ‘engaging students in cognitively complex tasks involving hypothesis generation’…”
Can someone either verify this repute it? I can’t believe that is the case. In most of the schools I know of here in NY, untenured teachers are observed a minimum of three times a year for full periods, and once tenured at least once a year for a full period. In addition, usually each observation comes with pre and post observation conferences. Although I can’t come up with a specific number of elements on which evaluations were based, they most certainly included more cognitively complex tasks based on the age of the students and the particular subject matter. Finally, principals’ and supervisors’ major task for years (before burdened with inane amounts of paper work) was to supervise and improve their teaching staffs. Even with that burden to most I know it still is.
Of course some are better than others. It is no wonder that the anti teacher Times recently acknowledged the results of a Gallup Poll saying “Teachers were second only to physicians in reporting having felt stress, and when asked, “Does your supervisor always create an environment that is trusting and open, or not?” teachers answered “yes” less frequently than respondents in any other profession, including workers in sales, construction and mining, and service occupations.”
Which is it? Certainly 20 minutes a year isn’t stressful.
If the report of the 20 minutes per year is false then the Times must be taken to task. However if it is true, then it is indeed an indictment of poor mentoring and development of teachers by supervisors in Florida.
It was true that a few years ago, teachers in FL with tenure only had to be evaluated once a year. However, in my district you would have follow-up evaluations if that first evaluation was poor. Also, principals routinely did walk-throughs, which just meant they were showing their face, and were learning about your classroom and how you teach.
I was stressed out beyond belief in Florida. Just because the principal only evaluated me once doesn’t mean we aren’t under a great deal of stress. Are you a teacher? Because having the boss breathing down your neck is only one source of stress. There’s also unreasonable parents, overwhelming paperwork, being expected to teach with materials you have to create yourself (which takes a lot of time), performing miracles for low-achieving students all by your lonesome since there’s no money to hire extra help, and of course… meetings, meetings, MEETINGS!
I don’t know about the “60 specific elements” since I quit June of 2012. Our evluation did get much longer, but I never got mine since the test scores weren’t in, and I don’t care what it says now. 🙂 i’m in nursing school now because I want to be an hourly worker that can go home and be DONE with my shift at the end of the day. A teacher’s work is never done…
Unfortunately David in my experience here in Louisiana 20 minutes every third year was the norm. I say in my experience – I worked in the higher performing school district in the state. That was the State requirement and the system was called “self-evaluation.” It led me to seek National Board Certification in order to find out for myself if I was “effective.” Of course individual school principals were ultimately responsible for the school and I’m sure there were some more capable and responsible ones but not much. I often wondered how effective our higher performing junior high in the district could really be with great leadership. The current method of evaluating teachers based on student performance is not only useless and invalid but when one considers how much better our schools could be bysimply hiring and training school leadership that had the time and the ability to mentor their teachers .
Just goes to show how I was spoiled here in NYC and Westchester being in schools and districts where the professional growth of teachers was as great a concern as the growth of students.
I spent four hours writing up my pre-ob, 20 minutes in pre-ob, principal observer one hour of my 90 minute class, we had a 20 minute post ob, and he spent two hours writing the whole thing up.
Wonderful, teacher rock!
You said – “Even if no one has money for bonuses. . “. Well the hogs at the trough are managing to find money with one of the sources being none other than our federal tax dollars via Arne Duncan. Because many if these charter operators have no concept of fairness -honestly they don’t appear to have a brain in their heads – this kind of anomoly is occurring. http://thelensnola.org/2013/03/15/teacher-paid-43000-bonus-as-part-of-new-beginnings-charter-school-incentive-system/
Can you imagine the school climate after such an ill conceived teacher pay plan?
Another possibility is, of course, that the assessments weren’t sufficiently sensitive to identify poor performing teachers. After all, isn’t a consistent theme on this blog that teacher evaluations aren’t very accurate and don’t reflect the full picture? How is it that now that results are favorable we’re using that as evidence that teachers are effective? If they’re flawed in your opinion, they have to be flawed whether they show the results you like or not.
The article suggests that many teachers who were evaluated as needing improvement based on direct observation were bumped up to highly effective based on standardized test scores. Given that standardized test scores are viewed as meaningless by the vast majority of the posters here, I would think the majority of posters here would also view these evaluations as meaningless.
…and we do!
The issue is that teachers performed well on evaluations designed by those who continually tell us how awful we are in our jobs. I don’t think anyone here really gives a rat’s whisker about how teachers perform on the tests per se.
Oops: Substitute “evaluations” for “tests”.
Lehrer, there isn’t a singular “evaluation.” In one county in FL, for example, criteria for “successful teaching” were changed so that the percentage of teachers passing moved from 78% to almost 100%. This isn’t an example of a flawed evaluation system or a good or bad teaching force, but district motivation to portray themselves in a positive light (be that good or bad).
In other words, there isn’t much irony here, and not much to laugh at. People just changed criteria so that folks appeared successful.
I should also add that my point isn’t to say teachers are bad, simply that we don’t have enough information to make conclusions about teacher performance either way.
This post has me laughing. I like the idea of baffled “reformers.”
Teaching is a profession that purges itself, mostly within the first five years of entering the classroom. Teaching is difficult. It requires lots of energy during the school day and a commitment beyond that, if one wants to not be swallowed by the planning and grading. It also requires adjusting to constant interruptions, whether those be due to school scheduling or individual student personal situations. And teachers know they will not be financially compensated for all of their work. I didn’t go into teaching to “make a buck.” I have never heard a colleague talk about “the money to be made” in teaching.
The ladder-climbing reformers, well, that’s another breed. They’re in it for quick and big money. And in their pompous ignorance, they think that good teaching can be quantified.
Great post, Diane. Thank you.
Since the first observation data started coming in for Louisiana teachers, the tfa’ers who are in charge of the teacher evaluation system (yes, you read that right) have ridiculed the “skewed” numbers. Too many rated too high!! But guess what? They have the system rigged so that even though 50% of the evaluation is based on observations and 50% on test scores, an ineffective on either yields an ineffective rating. Because, after all, we can’t trust administrators to truthfully rate their fellow educators!
The tfa’ers keep changing the rules of the game (any game, you name it) and when they do, they always say “Based on feedback from teachers around the state, we have decided to…”
1. They are not talking to teachers from around the state. 2. Since teachers don’t know anything, why would they take advice from them??
FYI- the tfa’er who was in charge of the teacher evaluation system now has a new position. Drumroll………… Teacher preparation
We have a similar attempt at “rigging” built into Connecticut’s new system. (I work in a town piloting this program…lucky me.) Half of your score is “practice” (mostly your observations) and the other half is “outcomes” (mostly students’ test scores). They do not really count the same (although they are put in pretty little pie charts in state-prepared power points, with each half adding up to 50%). Your “outcomes” score can trump your “performance” score. I guess I should conclude that 50% is really more or less than “half” depending on what that 50% is supposed to represent. Ouch. My brain hurts. I think I’ll go read “1984”.
Maybe, just maybe those ‘incompetent’ principals never awarded tenure to teachers who truly were ineffective. Maybe in the probationary period the ones who could not cut it actually resigned….Maybe, just maybe, schools have found ways within due process, to make dismissal work and educators who fell apart actually left. Maybe just maybe the only ‘lemons who have been dancing’ are the so-called reformers.
No doubt that is par of the explanation, but the principals quoted in the article had a much lower evaluation of the teachers than the official evaluation.
One thing I am curious about: what percentage of teachers in a typical district are in their probationary period? These figures suggest that even inexperienced teachers are typically effective or highly effective.
Over the past 5 years, the average seniority is 5 years and decreasing. The math dictates that far more are probationary and subject to greater scrutiny and pressure.
Interesting. If that figure is about correct for the states reported on here, that would mean at least 94% of inexperienced teachers meet or exceed expectations. I would have thought that experience would play a larger role in teacher quality, but the explanation could be that this measure of teacher quality tops out too soon or does not mean very much.
There is too much in flux now to take any of this seriously. The article doesn’t even say if these evaluations were of tenured teachers or non tenured teachers for whom this may not count in FLA. Do you know? Are they still checking for hanging “chads”?
Because the article used the word “teachers” without any modification, it would seem to refer to all teachers.
Carol,
There are many of us in NYS who understand that supervision, evaluation, and professional growth without loss of due process should be the norm everywhere.
My favorite part of this story is in the comments: they are overwhelmingly positive with regard to teachers.
“…any system that can’t find 5% ineffective teachers must be flawed.” What other class of highly trained professionals is held to this standard? How about Assistant district attorneys? No they’re supported in their profession tike teachers in Finland are:
Legal Training | The New York County District Attorney’s Office
Besides formal training, ADAs receive informal mentoring from their supervisors and more experienced peers. The office has a cadre of highly experienced trial, appellate, and investigative attorneys who are strongly committed to mentoring the attorneys in the office
http://manhattanda.org/legal-training
Dana Goldstein:
“For those teachers already in the classroom, the single most powerful professional development experience is not merit pay, but good, old-fashioned collaboration, working side-by-side — over the course of a full year — with an experienced mentor.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/is-the-us-doing-teacher-reform-all-wrong/2011/05/31/AGAErRFH_blog.html
I don’t understand this Jack Welsh mentality of tossing out the bottom 10% (or 5% in this case). Simple solutions from simple people, I suppose.