Billions of dollars have been spent to create new teacher evaluation systems. Here is one result: in Pittsburgh, 97% of teachers were rated either distinguished or advanced. Meanwhile budget cuts are harming children in Pennsylvania.
For Immediate Release
June 13, 2014
Contact:
Marcus Mrowka
202/531-0689
mmrowka@aft.org
http://www.aft.org
Pittsburgh Teacher Evaluation Results Demonstrate Importance of Due Process and Improvement-Focused Evaluation Systems
WASHINGTON— Statement of AFT President Randi Weingarten following news that nearly 97 percent of teachers were rated distinguished or advanced.
“On one side of the country, a judge in California wrongly ruled that the only way to ensure that kids—particularly kids who attend high-poverty schools—have good teachers is to take away teachers’ due process rights. On the other side of the country, the most recent teacher evaluation results in Pittsburgh proved this is absolutely not true. Due process not only goes hand in hand with this new evaluation system, having those rights helped to strengthen it.
“Nearly 97 percent of Pittsburgh’s teachers were rated distinguished or advanced under this new evaluation system. We’re not surprised at all by the dedication and talent of Pittsburgh’s teaching staff who go into the classroom each and every day to help our children grow and achieve their dreams—but there’s a bigger story here that rejects the assertion made in California that due process rights hurt educational quality.
“These results show what is possible when teachers, unions and the district—in a state with due process—work together on an evaluation system focused on helping teachers improve. While we may have some qualms about the construction of the evaluation system, the fact remains that far from impeding achievement due process and tenure, combined with an improvement-focused evaluation system, empower teachers and keep good teachers in the classroom, offer support to those who are struggling, and streamline the process for removing teachers who can’t improve.”
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
It may be true. However, publicly humiliating teachers by posting their rating is not assisting their “improvement” …
All of this ed reform is smoke and mirrors. Something else, something bigger, is happening under our noses while we busy ourselves exposing the men behind the curtain. This will never be over until they are done toying with us and making us their underlings.
Barons and serfs…what’s old is new again.
All the money. All the energy. All the stress. All the stifling boredom of test prep. All the lost opportunities for students. All this to confirm the identify of the one or two teachers per school building that are simply in the wrong line of work. What a waste. And zero effort directed at identifying the lousy, incompetent, arrogant, inexperienced, bumbling,
lazy, unqualified building administrators who allowed these teacher to flourish.
NY teacher: from personal experience, administrative dead wood doesn’t just allow those teachers to continue in their jobs, they are often the protectors and enablers of those teachers. And why?
After all, if a teacher can’t teach, what better strategy to keep one’s job than become BFFs with the head of the organization?
And the end of LIFO and seniority systems will solve this?
Can you spell NEPOTISM and SPOILS SYSTEM?
😱
Keep commenting. I’ll keep reading.
😎
After all if a teacher can’t teach, what better strategy than to become a principal with no principles, a manager with zero managerial skills, an enabler of teachers just like themselves.
KTA
Do you find it at all curious that not a single building principal has posted anything in their defense?
NY teacher: curious, no, but a bit disheartening, because there are some good admins out there.
But then, the good admins are targets of the self-styled “education reformers” too.
Stand strong. Krazy props.
😎
NYt,
No, I’m not surprised. The very few good administrators know just how much dead wood there is. In my prior district the good principals had a name for the dead wood that always seemed to move up the ladder by kissing ass and being brown-nosers, “the beautiful ones”.
California teachers can’t teach and Pittsburgh teachers are off the charts. This is pure unadulterated BS. Get with the program Randi. The vast majority of us go in every day and give it our all.
Doesn’t this seem to support the 1-3% guesstimate offered up by the defense’s expert witness in the Vergara case?
More importantly, it points out that the vast majority of teachers are competent.
Which is a truism I don’t believe even the most monomaniacal reformer has ever disputed. At issue is the concentration of underperforming teachers in vulnerable districts, and the collateral damage done to children in their classrooms.
Even if that were true (no one has presented any data to support that contention), the solution should not be slash and burn the entire profession.
NO! It doesn’t.
Dr. Berliner’s like, “Aw yeahz, I nailed it!”
“At issue is the concentration of underperforming teachers in vulnerable districts, and the collateral damage done to children in their classrooms.”
Tim
By making this statement you have lost all credibility and revealed your complete and utter ignorance of this issue.
Only if the rating system drops directly from Advanced down to “Grossly Incompetent.” I haven’t seen the rating system, but that seems strange.
Don’t worry — I’m sure the legislature will be right on that. Here in FL when the same thing happened 3 years ago the legislature quickly met with Jeb Bush and ALEC lobbyists to “fix” the law and change the way the scores were figured. It was unpossible, as Ralph Wiggum would say, that most teachers were Highly Effective!
The same thing is happening in Indiana. If teachers are doing a good job, we create an evaluation that makes sure any teachers with experience and proper educations can be fired.
The title should be: “97% of Pittsburgh Teachers Get High Ratings (In a rating system that does not factor in any way whether their students are actually learning anything)”
it is called RISE in Pittsburg.
In California it is called the “California Standards for the Teaching Profession”
Both are similar in that they exclude student achievement in evaluating teachers.
This is not the first time that we have seen these results. Even the highly flawed VAM system has shown, albeit in a highly questionable manner, that the vast majority of teachers are highly effective. The comments are priceless. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/education/curious-grade-for-teachers-nearly-all-pass.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
From State Impact/NPR, Dec. 2013:
“Nearly 98 percent of teachers earned ratings of “highly effective” or “effective.” And the percentage of teachers earning the top rating increased to one in three statewide from one in five teachers the prior year.
Some districts reported they didn’t have a single poor-performing teacher. And only one administrator in the entire state — of more than 6,200 rated total — earned an “unsatisfactory” rating.
“Nobody’s hiring record is that good,” The Tampa Bay Times wrote in an editorial. “The teacher ratings don’t come close to reflecting reality.”
The Bradenton Herald‘s editorial board said teacher ratings look great, until they’re compared to school grades.
“Across the state, 98 percent of teachers rank in the top two categories — a figure that should be reassuring,” they wrote. “Yet the high number of failing schools — despite all those “highly effective” teachers — continues to be troublesome.”
(Some caution on comparing teacher evaluations to school grades — they measure different things.)”
Let’s not forget that the entire system of VAM-based teacher evals is bogus whether it supports our beliefs or goes against them. It is junk, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of suddenly acting as if it’s anything but junk when they seem to support our views. We can’t have it both ways. VAM based evaluations must be resisted at every turn and NEVER be given any credibility.
Excellent point. And getting much less attention are the inaccurate and invalid ratings produced by Marzano and Danielson rubrics.
In our district, the kindergarten art teacher and the AP physics teacher are rated using the exact same rubric. Seriously?
LOL. When I questioned how Marzano’s stuff, which was culled together from other people’s research about high school teachers and students had any bearing on what I do in 1st grade I was scowled at, top that I’m not being openminded, and that they would get around to creating something appropriate for the primary grades. In the meantime we were to continue following the Marzano rubric and teach note taking, summarization of reading before how to actually read, and written responses to reading before how to actually write. Danielson is not better. Two snake oil salesmen treated like education superstars because of Gates money.
sk,
Not only that VAM is based on error and falsehood but also SGPs (student growth percentiles, which is what we’re supposed to be doing next year) as shown by B. Baker in his blog schoolfinance101.
Or going to the epistemological and ontological heart of the errors and falsehood that render the very basis, educational standards and standardized testing, COMPLETELY INVALID, ILLOGICAL AND UNETHICAL. To understand why read Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Danger.
I am a Pittsburgh teacher and an activist in the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (AFT). Let’s not let ourselves get pulled into the trap of applauding the results of a wholly flawed system. OK, so this round the numbers look better than the “reformers” thought they would. BUT the “multiple measures” on which they are based are bogus. And it was a trap, not a step forward, that our union let ourselves get pulled in (via Gates money) to becoming apologists for an “evaluation” system made up of elements which this column has helped to expose as NOT ok for “evaluating” teachers, and deciding which of us is an “effective” teacher, and which of us should have jobs and who should be terminated.
A reminder. VAM. A major one of these “multiple measures.” Now widely rejected as an “evaluating” tool by professionals in the field, and by the AFT. A major part of this “evaluation” system.
Danielson rubrics, another major one of these multiple measures: after many permutations and reincarnations in Pittsburgh, turned into the opposite of what they were in the beginning of this process — presented to us as a tool to help teachers get a window on our practice, but now a set of numbers to which our practice boils down, and which is used to judge and label us. And “objective?” In today’s world, where administrators have to justify their “findings” in a system which relies so heavily on test scores? What do you think . . .
Then there’s (in Pittsburgh) Tripod, the third big measure, where students from the ages of 5 (yes, really) through high school “rate” their teachers — which could be useful to us for insight but, really, a way to decide who is and who is not an “effective” teacher?
To say nothing of the fact that many teachers teach subjects and/or students which can’t be boiled down in these ways, so they are “evaluated” on the basis of other people’s “scores” over which they have even less control.
Really, now.
So, yes, these numbers look better than they did last year, in a “practice run.” But is this whole thing ok? Should we be celebrating that we found the answer to figuring out who is and who is not an “effective” teacher?
This is a trap. Let’s not fall into it.
Then there’s (in Pittsburgh) Tripod, the third big measure, where students from the ages of 5 (yes, really) through high school “rate” their teachers — which could be useful to us for insight but, really, a way to decide who is and who is not an “effective” teacher?
Is it a single quantitative rating? I am a big fan of conducting anonymous student feedback surveys at the end of the school year. Only for personal insights. If misused, this idea opens a very, very worrisome can of worms
Twice a year, students are to rate their teachers answering multiple-choice questions, the number of which varies depending on grade level. I’m most familiar with the middle-school (grades 6-8) form, which is more than three pages of 8- or 9-point (tiny) typed questions, a significant number of which are repetitive or similar. It is an exhausting exercise for struggling readers especially. My students usually work on it for more than a single (44-minute) period. Some give up. Some smile and wink and say, “Don’t worry, Ms. Dawson, we’ve got your back.”
I, too, value my students feedback and take on what I’m doing and how their classroom experience is going. In fact, I survey them directly every report period, and indirectly and via conversation consistently. Like many teachers, my morning shower is a time for me to complete a personal debriefing on signals I’ve gotten from my students the previous day so as to make the new day more productive for them. This is a constant process for all of us, isn’t it?!
But when this turns into yet another fill-in-the-bubble quiet-in-the-hall-because-we’re-testing exercise in filling time and spending money, AND we don’t even see the results until the following year . . . what do you think?
My personal view is that long surveys are tedious for children or adults, and as the interest level drops off, mark any bubble to get it done. You couldn’t pay me enough. Some survey company sent me a crisp ten dollar bill and a long survey. Like, have you considered purchasing a yacht in the last six months? How often do you fly on a privat jet? So, I gave it the scout’s try and gave them a half hour just to be fair, which didn’t come close to finishing, but really.
Here’s my ideal tripod survey, circle from 1 to 5
1 did you like your teacher?
2 did you learn a lot?
done.
I hope nobody is buying it. I just find it amusing that no matter how hard they try, they can’t prove how lousy and lazy teachers are.
They can’t prove it because they are all barking up the wrong tree.
In fact their entire premise is wrong. The weakest link in the learning/achievement chain is rarely the teacher.
I have one hundred students this year. I teach a subject that is new to all of them. This puts all of my 14 year old students on an equal footing as far as course content goes. After a year of instruction, a few of them have been incredibly successful. Some have done quite well. Most have done ok, just not setting the academic world on fire, And a few have been abysmal failures. If student achievement rests solely (or even mostly) on the teacher, how can this be explained?
The premise behind the teacher bashing movement is based on the surrealistic notion that virtually all students are willing participants in the learning process. If all my students are eager to learn, attentive, inquisitive, organized, conscientious, and hard working (and had the necessary parental support), I will gladly take the blame for student failure. In school districts where this is largely the case, it is amazing just how highly effective teachers seem to be.
We are looking for reasons why students don’t learn, and the only rock we have not looked under is the only rock worth exploring.
But is this whole thing ok? … uh….no…