With the Obama administration’s latest policy pronouncement, the federal grip on American education grows tighter and stupider every day.
The latest: the administration plans to reward the best teacher-training institutions and drive the “worst” ones out of business. This is like Race to the Top for teacher preparation programs.
What are their measures? Of course, student test scores loom large.
“The goal: To ensure that every state evaluates its teacher education programs by several key metrics, such as how many graduates land teaching jobs, how long they stay in the profession and whether they boost their students’ scores on standardized tests. The administration will then steer financial aid, including nearly $100 million a year in federal grants to aspiring teachers, to those programs that score the highest. The rest, Duncan said, will need to improve or “go out of business.”
Thus, programs that send their graduates to work in urban districts with high-needs students will get low ratings. Duncan will drive them out of business. Smart institutions will steer their graduates to affluent suburbs, where scores will go up regardless of what they do.
The message from the U.S. Department of Education to the nation’s colleges of teacher education:
1. Do not send your graduates to teach struggling students who are likely to get small or no gains on standardized tests, such as students with extreme disabilities and English language learners, as well as gifted students, who are unlikely to post gains because of the ceiling effect.
2. Teach to the test. Drill the students hour after hour. Extend the school day whenever possible so there is more time for test prep.
3. Don’t waste time on non-tested subjects like the arts, history, civics, and science. They don’t count.
4. Invest in Pearson and McGraw-Hill stock.
The evidence is overwhelming that value-added measures for teachers are inaccurate, but neither secretary Duncan nor the White House care about evidence.
As reporter Stephanie Simon points out:
“The formulas for measuring how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s test scores are complex and often carry a sizable margin of error.
“Earlier this month, the American Statistical Association warned that such formulas must be used with caution because teachers generally account for less than 15 percent — and in some studies, as little as 1 percent — of the variability in student test scores. Value-added models spit out precise-sounding numbers that purport to quantify a teacher’s impact on her students, but in fact the formulas “typically measure correlation, not causation,” the group concluded.
“A recent study funded by the Education Department found that value-added measures may fluctuate significantly due to factors beyond the teachers’ control, including random events such as a dog barking loudly outside a classroom window, distracting students during their standardized test. A 2010 study, also funded by the Education Department, found the models misidentify as many as 50 percent of teachers — pegging them as average when they’re actually better or worse than their peers, or singling them out for praise or condemnation when they’re actually average.
“Yet another challenge: Calculating scores for educators who do not teach subjects or grades assessed with standardized exams. Nationally, some 70 percent of teachers — including most high school and early elementary teachers, plus art, music and physical education teachers — fall into that category.
“Despite such complications, [White House policy director Cecilia] Muñoz made clear in a call with reporters on Thursday that Obama wants student test scores, or other measures of student growth, to figure heavily into states’ evaluations of teacher prep programs.
“This is something the president has a real sense of urgency about,” she said. “What happens in the classroom matters. It doesn’t just matter — it’s the whole ballgame.” So using student outcomes to evaluate teacher preparation programs “is really fundamental to making sure we’re successful,” Muñoz said. “We believe that’s a concept … whose time has come.”
Yes, using student test scores to evaluate teachers, principals, schools, and teacher colleges is “a concept… whose time has come,” despite the fact that there is no evidence for it, despite the fact that the nation’s leading scholarly organizations have warned about its limitations and misuse, despite the fact that it fails to account for factors beyond the teachers” control, and despite the fact that it misidentifies teacher effectiveness at an alarmingly high rate.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No doubt big money is behind this. How many bankers have been indicted for the economic meltdown of 2008? Hint: Obama’s biggest campaign contributors were from the banking industry.
Dear Diane:
Aaaaarghhh!
Do they never stop?
How will anyone have a teaching job to land or stay in?
Why would anyone decide to teach?
And when did it become government business to track everyone’s life trajectory and interpret a value based on its twists and turns, i.e., who knows what it means if a teaching graduate decides not to teach?
Duncan and his educational policy are out of control.
The tail is wagging the dog.
Fire Duncan.
Refuse the tests.
How will anyone have a teaching job to land or stay in?
Why would anyone decide to teach?
Because TOGETHER (Teachers and parents) we’re are going to STOP the MADNESS.
The cracks in their wall are growing by the day. Just read the headlines posted here.
It’s easy to predict the colleges that will be hit the worst and labeled failures: state colleges that probably offer the most teacher certification programs.
That of course leads to this question: are public state colleges the next target to privatize after public education has been bulldozed out of existence?
Imagine the profits to be made if every college was a private college charging about $50,000 annually in tuition with no financial support from the states accept a voucher from the pool of money that once supported the public colleges. And imagine how this would rob minorities and children who grew up in poverty out of any opportunity to go to college.
After all, two-year, state community colleges—for instance—are about the only option most of these children have to not only earn an academic degree in college but also reasonably priced vocational training.
In 1968 when I got out of the Marines and went to college on the GI Bill, that’s where I started, a two year state community college. Two years later, I transferred to a four year state college. The GI Bill didn’t pay enough to cover all my expenses, so I worked part time and took out about $7 thousand in loans to finish my last two years.
Without the lower tuition offered through state colleges, I would nave never had the money to go to college. There was no way I could have even dreamed of going to a university like Stanford where the cost is close to $60,000 annually—that is if Stanford would even accept a young man who as a child grew up in poverty with parents who never graduated from high school and who barely graduated from high school himself.
My wife also grew up in poverty and she never went to high school because she was born in China and lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution. You can read her story and how she climbed out of poverty by coming to the US with a student VISA and working as many as five part-time jobs at once to pay her way through college. You may read all about her story in her memoir, “The Cooked Seed”, that was named one of the top ten books of 2013 by “Entertainment Weekly”.
It’s no secret that both my wife and I climbed out of poverty the hard way—both on different paths—because we managed to scrape by and earn a college education and due to that, our daughter who will graduate this year, went to Stanford—a dream her mother and I could never have imagined for ourselves.
Can anyone even imagine the anger I have at these fake Ed reformers—if they succeed—for the dreams they are going to steal from so many young people who will dare to leave poverty behind.
You see, leaving poverty is a choice and no fake education reform that labels teachers as failures and closes public schools is going to change that.
Good coverage by Politico.
One other great problem with this is that it may hinder bona fide innovation and change in teacher prep programs and certainly detract from needed discussions.
great point
If Obama-Duncan succeed in this plan, inner-city schools will have even greater trouble recruiting teachers, forcing them to turn to TFA for staffing, so this scheme is also a way to further enrich and embed TFA as the model teacher pipeline for cheap labor ,non-union, no pension non-professionals who willingly “teach to the tests.”
The irony is that part of the proposed rating of teacher Ed. programs include how long teachers stay in the field. By that standard TFA should get an F.
When the calm collected teachers in my very small school start getting riled up about all of this, you know we are near a tipping point. We’ve suffered through ridiculous in -services about CCSS vocabulary (mainly looking up words in the standards CCSS thinks students should know…even though these standards were written for adults to use as guides not as vocab list for kindergartners) to day long Charlotte Danielson methodology meetings (where we are told we need to document, document, document and a variety of other techniques we are already using…I can only imagine the meetings our principals go to ‘now write down every question the teachers asks…mind you can totally ignore how she actually teaches’). We have had it, no other profession is so under the microscope, so put upon for all of societies ills. We are teachers, It is just a job. Is the person who builds the cars responsible for the recalls, no! We don’t dictate curriculum, for the most part. We don’t dictate what tests will be used to measure progress state wide. We don’t even elect our own school boards (for the most part). Stop blaming us for every little thing, stop blaming the colleges that educated us…did the government penalize all the colleges that turned out the corrupt wall street bankers or the venture capitalists who created the housing bubble?
What happened to common sense? Where did it go? Maybe that is the fault of education..we didn’t focus enough on common sense during the 70s and 80s when the people making decisions about education, now, seem to have gone through school. Why aren’t we holding their colleges responsible for their lack of civic mindedness (despite their positions).
“… Stop blaming us for every little thing, stop blaming the colleges that educated us…did the government penalize all the colleges that turned out the corrupt wall street bankers or the venture capitalists who created the housing bubble?…”
This. In a very, very, very big way.
I’m sorry, but enough is enough. Big data is evolving into Big Brother and this is not Chicken Little talking. I can’t believe what I’m reading in this post. How does the federal government have the right to do this?
Obama, for all his “aw shucks” “I’m just like you” image, is destroying public education. A two tiered system will be created if we don’t stop this.
How much can you have rest on standardized test scores?
First, the schools. Then, the careers of the teachers in those schools. Then, the departments of education that trained those teachers. That’s going to drive the NEXT step – evaluating the teachers in the departments of education that are being threatened by the scores of the THEIR students who go out to teach and the scores of the students of their students…
What the heck are they going to do next – evaluate the PhD programs based on the outcomes of the departments of education that their professors go to serve when they learn that you can’t punish professors to success?
How is it that the Obama administration can actually hold the claim of selectively granting colleges Federal Reimbursement? If the debt goes to the student, and the student is forced to choose a costlier college because the Federal Gov’t discriminated on which colleges they could go to, is it not the student that assumes even more debt? Will the Obama administration help those who fall into greater debt than they wanted if the people the colleges graduate can’t find jobs?
I’d love to see Obama make ONE guarantee that he can credibly carry out, where the outcome is not in his hands alone. He’s not guaranteeing certain prices on the Obamacare exchanges. He’s not guaranteeing any prison time for the 2008 hucksters.
He’s not guaranteeing a thing that he does not have control over – and now he’s placing teachers’ livelihoods at risk with conditions beyond their control, and he’s willing to gamble with college professors and the choices that their assigned students make, and the students of those students.
How perfect are these scores and how much causative value can you possibly infer reliably from them?
It sounds a little like “The House that Jack Built.”
He’s the stereotyped corrupt Chicago pol. Period.
Who will want to teach? Who will want to teach SPED? Obama’s legacy will be his planned decomposition of our public research institutions. Disgusting.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t trust the president or the secretary of education to make good policy, and this exercise may well be more of same. Still, I am concerned with the quality of some of the diploma mills out there, especially those conferring masters degrees. I attended one of these in my passage through the New York City Teaching Fellows Program; as I wrote the director of the abysmal program to which I was assigned: “Everything I know about teaching I learned in spite of your institution, not because of it.” I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible idea to take a hard look at some of the secondary schools offering teacher training to make sure they are appropriately rigorous and that their curricula are current with the research on good teaching practice.
David Labaree at Stanford has some interesting things to say about this issue in his excellent study, “The Trouble with Ed Schools” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Though you have valid points, from a the perspective of someone familiar with different professions, I can tell you many job fields have poor education, and that goes for medical schools too. (Yeah, they have high standards, but they are the most inane, insensitive, non-facilitated nonsense around.)
The real problem of the teacher training programs is the plethora of programs. Even if all these programs were stellar, the vast majority of kids would not find work. This ripples through the corporate reform movement’s operations. If there was a proper match between supply and demand, would there ever be any teacher graduate working at a charter–Hell no! Ditto with nasty public administrators.
To draw an analogy, the dental field has rigorous controls to limit seats. This will prevent the increase in dental service chains; only new grads with mass debt will work there. If the numbers were regulated only by the income stream deans actuate, private dental offices would only be concierges for the rich. Ditto with medicine. I hear that charters are burning through unemployed grads so quickly, H1b visas are being issued enmass for teachers? Is this a joke? A first year teacher costs what at a charter–30K? The visa fee alone is 2k. Foreign teachers are not going to have the cultural or patience to deal with inner city kids. They’ll get eaten alive. Enough is enough. Canada has recently halved their teacher education programs. (The government has that power and exercises it prevent mass unemployment.)
If you measured a doctor by their outcomes, who would work in trauma wards or high risk cancer/brain surgery. If we measured lawyers by the number of cases they won.
Isn’t there some measure of trusting people pursuing advanced degrees to choose credible institutions (that are accredited by professional organizations) and that those people in turn will behave as professionals? Isn’t this why professions are usually defined by their code of ethics? Isn’t the only prohibition typically to refrain from unethical conduct and to do no harm as being the guiding principles?
How is failing a student who didn’t show up to your class, had parents that were unresponsive, and who did not pick up the material, and blaming the teacher for that, fair? I’ve heard a principal seriously say that a staff’s lessons should be “less boring” if they wanted students to come.
This kind of thinking though, is on keel with blaming a local doctor for a death because the person didn’t seek their help because they didn’t think the doctor would help them. The doctor’s job is not to entice you to see them – it’s to help you when you’re present to be helped.
There are no excuses though – because anything rational that might indicate a teacher would not or should not be responsible for some outcomes would become the biggest liability to this entire effort to label teachers.
One problem at least for graduate degrees is that most contracts automatically award salary increases independent of degree quality. That is why there are so many online education programs. Even the education school at my institution is gearing up for a massive online push. It is expected to be a cash cow.
It’s a two pronged approach for control over higher education. Note how, under the other prong, “hundreds of degree programs in fields from accounting to culinary arts could be forced to shut down for failing to place enough graduates in well-paying jobs.”
The criteria for teacher education says only “how many graduates land teaching jobs” –nothing about whether those jobs are “well-paying.” Apparently, it will be just fine and probably preferred if teachers land low paying jobs.
With the neoliberal track record of undermining public education, it should be very evident that aiming for private for-profits is a ruse and the schools they really hope to drive out of business are public colleges.
Once again, high-stakes testing is the linchpin. Nothing like Obama/Duncan tactics for trying to circumvent public opinion, including the pushback against testing and storing student data to hand off to God knows where… All the more reason to opt out and cut off the snake’s head.
Given how utterly glutted the market is with out-of-work teachers, we know this is an excuse to shutter all teacher colleges, both public and private.
Next on the agenda is the abolition of state colleges and universities.
Again, it’s the selling off of public assets for private gain that’s the issue.
We’ve got millions of college graduates today who are unemployed and underemployed, stuck in low paying jobs, and this administration wants to blame colleges because graduates can’t find “well-paying jobs”???
It’s pretty unbelievable what politicians will do to protect the malfeasance of the super-rich. That they have no qualms about destroying virtually all aspects of education in this country in the process is truly criminal.
If Arne is so concerned about teacher preparation why does he endorse MATCH fast track teacher mill? His hypocrisy is stunning.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/me…
@arneduncan ask[ed] Match Teacher Residency team thoughts about bringing program to scale to produce thousands of teachers
— Match Education (@MatchEducation) March 12, 2014
Match and Relay train people in ONE pedagogical approach, that of the drill sergeant test prep teacher, because those programs arose from no-excuses military style charter schools. There’s no need for teachers to learn how to promote thinking –critical, creative or higher order– because if subservient peons in the highly stratified society that neo-liberals love and want so much have such skills, they might rebel against the ruling class that condemns them to a caste system and jobs with unlivable wages.
Great!. More good news.
Wow, Don’t you get it? Teach For America will rise to the top with its 5 weeks preparation for creating the best teachers in the world. Then, it will be “elite” to become a teacher, and the rest of them can go work at Walmart. Isn’t this the goal? Isn’t this the point? They are already spinning how 5 weeks TFA “training” creates a better teacher than 4 years in college learning how to actually teach, and getting real experience. This is it folks. The best schools are charter, the best teachers are TFA, and that is how the 1% want it to be. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Does anyone have a link to the story about how TFA was certified as being well prepared after the original attempt at doing that was taken out of it’s original bill and put into an unrelated bill at the 11th hour?
Here you go, “The debt deal’s gift to Teach For America (yes, TFA)”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/16/the-debt-deals-gift-to-teach-for-america-yes-tfa/
I say…”CRACK DOWN” on Schools of Law who turn out lawyers who do NOT uphold Our Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Let’s give CONGRESS ALL the TESTS our students take. How about we then sort, rank, and label them, then offer them $500 to give up DUE PROCESS under law.
And think beyond the DEMs and REPs. They are the SAME – Party of the OLIGARCHY.
If a teacher can succeed or fail in 2 years, surely a politician can do better in the same amount of time….heck they have 4! What empirical evidence is there to substantiate that a 4 year term is an adequate amount of time to determine if they’re any good or not?
Surely we’ll know immediately a bad politician when we see one.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
Why is Duncan the only Cabinet-level officer or “secretary” who continually bashes his own department and every degreed/certified teacher across the United States?
Not including Duncan, we have Cabinet-level officers or secretaries leading the following departments: State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Heath and Human Services, Veterans’ Administration, Homeland Security, Transportation, Energy, Housing and Urban Development.
Are there any other examples of Obama’s Cabinet criticizing their own on a regular cycle?
This is all about destroying all colleges of education because why have a professional teaching force if the jobs of the future are lousy-paid jobs that require only an eighth-grade education? Hey, they hire basically uneducated people to “teach” kids in the third world, why not here?
It’ll be nothing but poorly-paid teacher aides and assistants for kids in public schools if any are left, most of whom are already part-time and have no benefits.
Let’s just call it what it is: The Obama administration is a complete failure, a train wreck.
I am disgusted and ashamed this man ever got the presidential nomination and damaged the Democratic Party brand so bad.
Could someone give a synopsis of this program? It sounds like a similar program being touted in Chicago, AUSL, that not only trains teachers but now has ‘turned around” over thirty schools in Chicago.
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/arne-ology-the-bad-incentives-of-evaluating-teacher-prep-with-student-outcome-data/#comments
Good analysis of the idiocy.
Your neurosurgeon is here. He’s the guy with the ice pick and the sledge hammer.
That’s what this insane program sounds like.
This is the kind of stupid, dangerous policy that is put into place when decisions of import are made by distant, totalitarian authorities.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. Resist these top-down mandates. If the legislation contains any dependence of policy on standardized testing, kill it.
So when can we stop referring to this as a “Republican” problem?
It is an American “class” problem with enemies of public education on both sides of the aisle.
You’re kidding, right? Most people here know better than to refer to this as a “Republican” problem. Some may have judged the Obama book by it’s cover in 2008, but that’s old news. Many have since realized that, like the GOP, Democrats serve the plutocracy and are tools of those who seek to privatize public education, so voted third party in 2012. We are well aware that both parties have blood on their hands.
Jeff Bryant wrote an insightful piece about this in March: “New Extremists in the Education Debate: Republicans AND Democrats”
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-5
This isn’t the usual corruption drive. This is an attempt to immprove teacher training programs. It’s things like this that make me believe that many in the reform movement do believe they are doing good, from a twisted Reagan youth perspective, which Obummer was the perfect age to be warped by.
The teaching profession is the most porous and easily accesable profession. In some states, a provisional license is given to people off the streets; most states only require a Praxis test for certification. There’s also facilitation programs like Troops to Teachers. An overwhemling problem is the vast oversupply of teacher programs. The charter people would hate for schools to shut down: less fodder for them.
There are flaws to Obummer’s program. For instance the reliance on flawed test scores, the fact that the few graduates that get jobs are in charters or inner city schools, where they are set up for failure, etc. In NY we now have a ridiculas video lesson project which is picked apart by boobs from some consultant company. It’s yet to see if this will be used to fail everybody or is simply a corrupt and/or misguided political move.
This is no more altruistic than anything else that has been promoted in education by this neo-liberal administration and their corporate sponsors. This is just one more attempt by non-educator politicians and big business to control schools in this country with over-reaching federal regulations, monetary incentives and threats of closure.
If students’ standardized test scores and VAM are not valid and reliable measures for judging the impacts of teachers on students, then students’ scores should not be used for judging the teachers of those teachers either.
This should be in bold for everyone who opposes high-stakes testing, VAM and other junk science growth measures to see and repeat:
“If students’ standardized test scores and VAM are not valid and reliable measures for judging the impacts of teachers on students, then students’ scores should not be used for judging the teachers of those teachers either.”
Amen.
The GOOD news is the Obama administration has real difficulties with implementation —and we all know Mr. Duncan’s history of implementation — so, teacher preparation institutions need not worry–you just know some part of this policy will go off the rails big time. Honestly, if I were the President I would get on the phone to my SOE and just say cool it, please, just sit at your desk and draw up plays for our game tomorrow–that’s it.
Not surprisingly, DFER has come out with a statement on why they’re all for it: http://www.dfer.org/advocacy/2014/04/joint_statement_1.php
Sadly, this lunacy is also in the new CAEP standards for teacher education, and creates crazy disincentives for placing candidates in high needs schools: http://alexandramiletta.blogspot.com/2013/09/teacher-preparation-standards-add-new.html
NCATE accreditation was optional, although many states partnered with them and required Teacher Ed programs to meet their standards anyways. Is it the same with CAEP now –or do you know if Ed Schools can opt out anywhere?
Message to Obama. I voted for you. Don’t fall into the test trap. Please continue to work on the problem of financial inequity in our country, so that we teachers can work with students who have a fighting chance of success.
Sorry to say that Obama is a very large and powerful PART of the test trap. Rather than fall into it, he’s been actively digging the hole.
Actions speak louder than words and it’s pretty obvious what his stance is, regarding public education.
IF there’s anyone who’s out there who actually believes that the privatization of public education was just a Republican enterprise, they really need to check the facts. And here’s something with a bit of facts on the “CHICAGO WAY” coming in at 40,000 reads/views: http://www.scribd.com/doc/106337306/THE-CHICAGO-PUBLIC-SCHOOLS-ALLERGIC-TO-ACTIVISM
WHY do they continue to push the same old agenda again and again?
Duncan, they either have no new ideas or look at all new ones as threatening .,,,What do you think?
Because:
Thar’s money in them thar hills!
f you keep repeating the same lie, over and over again; people will eventually believe it. There’s really not enough time in the day to keep up with everything and some people don’t even bother, anyway.
“If you…”
Sorry. Typo not intentional.