Educators in Néw York are trying to make sense of the state’s evaluation system. The formula is supposed to consist of observations (60%); state scores (20%); and local assessments (20%). Yet the results don’t line up with common sense or common knowledge.
Some principals seem to be giving higher observation scores to teachers they want to protect because they believe they are valuable and don’t want to lose them
“In Scarsdale, regarded as one of the best school systems in the country, no teacher has been rated “highly effective” in classroom observations. It is the only district in the Lower Hudson Valley with that strict an evaluation. In Pleasantville, 99 percent of the teachers are rated as “highly effective” in the same category.”
Charlotte Danielson, whose rubric is the basis forest teacher evaluation systems, called these results “laughable.”
“Pleasantville schools Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter defended her district’s classroom observation scores, which use the Danielson model — saying the state’s “flawed” model had forced districts to scale or bump up the scores so “effective” teachers don’t end up with a rating of “developing.”
What is truly laughable is the effort to turn the art and craft of teaching into a scaled metric, like weighing apples at the supermarket. What is essentially a matter of human judgment, based on experience and wisdom, cannot be measured and graded. Its results will always be flawed, and the very act of measuring the unmeasurable will change teacher behavior to conform to the scale. If all we want is higher scores, this might be a good way to get them. If we want inspired teaching, it is not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I find it encouraging that an entire school district would bump up teacher evaluations to protect its teachers.
Teacher evaluation has become so politicized that it has become meaningless. Teachers who work with the kids who have the most challenges, will be punished by VAM scores.
We have created a culture that, instead of creating a public education system to help all children, works at scapegoating teachers for the failure of our society to be equitable. The system then works to privatize schools as a solution for some of our children rather than all of them.
The purpose of public education policy has become to dismantle public education.
“I find it encouraging that an entire school district would bump up teacher evaluations to protect its teachers.”
I’m not sure that I find encouraging but rather disheartening in the sense that instead of rejecting that educational malpractice as they should, they are attempting to mitigate the inherently bad/illogical practice. It’s like the voting for the lesser of two evils, one still ends up with the evil and harm is done to very real humans.
Of course, I totally agree with you. But when your head is on the chopping block and the executioner has his axe raised, you would find any temporary reprieve encouraging….
This morning, I spent about an hour online, trying to examine the credentials and purported skill of the referenced “expert”, Charlotte Danielson. Sadly, I was not greatly surprised to discover that, aside from some laudatory Google entries, there does not seem to exist any documented support for her claimed educational expertise. Still, a relatively recent blog entry by Brandon Melendez, “A Perfect Storm: The Mystery of Danielson and the Nebula of CCLS,” confirmed my suspicions. There is no “there” there. The same obfuscation ensues when I try to determine the credentials and documentation for the creators of Common Core. How has this been allowed to happen? Millions of dollars have gone to these self-styled “experts.” Teachers have been humbled or shamed by the harsh requirements put in place by the evaluation system engineered by these well-recompensed outsiders. Please, Diane, and other activists, use your influence to expose these frauds.
Margaret Nolan… I went to a workshop given by Danielson and she would have been rated ineffective by her very own scale! She brought a powerpoint with her and read verbatim from the powerpoint. Occasionally she interjected a whimsical comment. She did not leave time for discussion and mentioned that she would only be able to take one or two at most questions from the audience. Really? Yes REALLY!
Funny. I’m not at all surprised. Imagine the arrogance of both Danielson and Marzano to think that they have discovered the magic, broad-brush formula for highly effective teaching, in all subjects, at all grade levels, in all communities, for the rest of time. Just another couple of snake oil salesmen.
Margaret,
njspotlight did a piece on her a while back. Danielson claimed to have heard no criticism of her work. Is she living under a rock?
NJ teacher.. when Danielson took two questions at her LECTURE… fortunately, a NYC teacher stood up and asked her why she did not speak out about the way HER evaluation model was being used and proceeded to explain the hideousness of the FFT roll out in NYC. Danielson put on a sweet grandmotherly voice and said something to the effect of, “no, that should not happen and I was totally unaware of this…” I say “bull… sh” to that. How could she not know? I agree … she must be living under an awfully big rock (that rests on a lot of cash)!
I am not an educator. But I am a parent. Weighing teachers like ‘apples at the market’ distresses me. How would these same ‘experts’ evaluate great writers, for example. How would Tolstoy rate? Is he ‘highly effective’, while someone like Hilary Mantel is ‘developing’?
Yes! Ranking teachers is a an anti-public education strategy designed to destroy teachers and destroy public education.
“What is essentially a matter of human judgment, based on experience and wisdom, cannot be measured and graded. Its results will always be flawed, and the very act of measuring the unmeasurable will change teacher behavior to conform to the scale.”
Bingo, Bango, Boingo!!!
Attempts at measuring the unmeasurable by logical definition will be fraught with error and any conclusions drawn will be COMPLETELY INVALID. This is not anything new. Many folks over time have written about this but the most cogent, albeit perhaps a little difficult to read, is Noel Wilson’s complete logical destruction (and we have to take it to the next “level” and get it destroyed on the political level) of the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing is found in his 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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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.
By Duane E. Swacker
Yes! Ranking teachers is a an anti-public education strategy designed to destroy teachers and destroy public education.
The above post is in response to lutheranliar…..
I am sorrowfully nodding my frustrated head (from a stance of empathy) when I read, ” What is truly laughable is the effort to turn the art and craft of teaching into a scaled metric, like weighing apples at the supermarket. What is essentially a matter of human judgment, based on experience and wisdom, cannot be measured and graded…”
How you would be rated under this “data” obsessed… rubric-crazed… “everything-can-be-measured-for-profit” era in teaching? Using testing data to tip the scales when REALITY warrants human observation leads to “gaming the system”. A good principal does not want to lose those teachers he/she knows excel due to an evaluation system that is as rigid as it is flawed. In Pleasantville it might be a matter of getting an “effective” rating as opposed to a “highly effective” rating so the stakes are not as dire. But principals in this school system are trying to maintain professionalism and equity in this flawed evaluation system. Why should a great teacher be rated developing? Why???? But in low income communities, excellent teachers will be losing their jobs!
Is there a teacher in their right mind who would want to teach in title one schools with such a system in place? Experts in positions who research and know like Ravitch, Burris and a host of statisticians have researched and found that across the board results on these high stakes tests correlate with family income level. Is this not then a severely flawed system which in the end especially FAILS TITLE ONE STUDENTS?? The experienced and great teachers of low income students are apt to lose their professional status and to be fired over this rating system. Who then will be teaching these title one students? And why will these title one teachers be fired? Not because they are ineffective teachers, but because they chose to work with low income students!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Newark currently has 64 tenure charge cases pending.
Master teachers know…they are perennially “developing!” I learn something everyday…and, hopefully, improve in some way. it’s a reason to rise and teach!
Yes, but does your school tell you that you can never be really good? That’s what my district tells us–we can’t possibly get to every indicator on the modified Marzano rubric, and we are told that we can never been seen as truly good, only average. Yes, we can all learn more, but to be told that I can only EVER be average in my teaching is quite discouraging.
Some corporate performance evaluations use similar approach. It’s de-motivating.
A rubric?
Pew spent zillions on the research on THE NATIONAL STANDARDS, IN THE NINETIES, creating a a rubric called The Principles of Learning, four of which were present in any successful teacher’s practice, and four of which were FOR THE PRINCIPAL, who was charged with supporting LEARNING… it was all about LEARNING, not teaching
… and this entire project on effort based learning,
Click to access polv3_3.pdf
has disappeared… so all children can be left behind, and our citizens can be dumbed down.
Ginny, what you said is lovely. Don’t we want every professional, not just teachers, to recognize that there is always more to learn and to know. Shouldn’t we all continue to develop new skills in our chosen profession?
Lovely, but not related to the conversation at hand. We are talking about ranking, stacking and firing excellent teachers based on a flawed system that has zero merit on its face.
I call BS.
You create a false dichotomy here, ginnyatherton. There is not an artificial choice between always learning something new and being stack-ranked based on false statistical VAM garbage.
No one argues that we shouldn’t try to continue growing as learners. The reality is that VAM has caused ALL teachers to be treated as inexperienced, ignorant beginners who must be micromanaged completely in order to bring about the “improvement”.
There are no master teachers under this system because it is impossible to master teaching, according to Marzano and Danielson. There are administrators, coaches, and other personnel who no longer teach and lack practical experience telling real teachers what they should do and deciding if they get to continue in the profession. Danielson herself admits this in a comment below this.
Continuous Improvement failed spectacularly as a business model and there is absolutely nothing that indicates it might succeed as an educational model.
Chris, if you are against VAM, and you are against “continuous improvement”, what do you see as a way forward with teacher evaluation? Maryland seemed to have a good method, in which teachers and districts collaborated together. Your ideas?
TCliff, many of the former ways worked fine — 3 – 4 years supervised probation follows by tenure with an annual professional growth plan overseen by the principal was my district’s formerly successful program before the legislature forced us into Danielson VAM looking glass land.
Kentucky piloted a peer review program a few years ago, ruined by NCLB, RTtT, and VAM.
When I sought and received National Board Certification that was touted as a means of teacher evaluation.
But TCliff, I never said that there was a need for teacher evaluation. I don’t necessarily believe that there is such a need. Like any other profession there is a need for a transitional period from graduation to mastery, overseen by more experienced peers and a means of holding teachers accountable for their professional behaviors.
The whole teacher evaluation ‘need’ is a scam being used to destroy the profession and I object strenuously to that. I paid my dues. I am an experienced, lauded, award-winning, certified, continuously-educated professional who is now micromanaged to the point of insanity and I am treated as if I am totally inexperienced, untrustworthy, and in need of constant oversight.
It is offensive, unnecessary, and the result of all the work of Linda Darling-Hammond, Robert Marzano, and Charlotte Danielson, none of whom are subjected to anything remotely like their hateful programs in their own professional lives. They need to go away.
Chris, You nailed it. It is a scam pushed by the Broad,/Walton,/Koch/ Gates and narrated by their shill Duncan.
I was a celebrated educator,
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
studied by the Pew research team from Harvard and the LRDC, as a cohort for the real National Standards. Chosen with six others, at th send of the research, for the unique curricula that matched all of the Principles of Learning, my work was featured by the LRDC in their seminars.
I was the NYS English Council Educator of Excellence, and within a year, my employment filer emptied, the new principal documented my incompetence and I was charged. Of course, at the time, I was no longer teaching the entire seventh grade at the school I helped to make famous in nYC, but teaching a handful of ‘pull-out’ students, in a closet, after a return from the rubber room where they had sent me so they could trash my classroom and throw out 8 years of careful created materials that put my students into top high schools.
I read, with astonishment, the commentary here, 14 years after they utterly destroyed NYC schools evaluating the veteran teachers into the gutter. See the Grassroots film on how this happened. It is now the process across the country.
https://vimeo.com/4199476
in 50 states, and 15,880 districts, the billionaire’s boys club that owns the media and the institution of public education, are laughing that teachers have figured out the scam to dumb down America while making zillions for the ‘education industry.
Read my essays Bamboozle Them, and Magic Elixir: No Evidence required!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
There is a commentary following Magic Elixir, where the book by John Gatto, “Dumbing us down is explained.
The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto
1. Confusion . Everything is taught out of context. Rather than following a child’s pace and interests, we present children with all sorts of things but never help children connect them or build up a coherent picture of the universe (which is much easier to do if the person trying to make the coherent picture chooses what to look at next)
2. Class position . He conflates two things in here. First, that in a school, you have to be in the assigned class, like it or not. If all your friends are 11 years old or 6 years old, but you are 9, then tough luck, you have to spend most of the day in a room with the other 9 year olds. No freedom of association. Second, that exam results and grading are seen to be very very important, even though actually future employers, or future customers if you are going to set up a business, are probably considerably less interested in your portfolio of exam results than the schools claim they will be. I was feeling quite resistant to this one, thinking “surely nowadays teachers aren’t constantly grading children’s work?” and then I remembered the SATS tests. So I guess it is still operational, though I’m certain that all teacher trainees nowadays read the stuff about how summative assessment is a demotivator (well, duh).
3. Indifference . Schools teach children to be indifferent to everything because of the constant interruptions of lesson change and bells ringing. We teach them that it is never worth while to spend the length of time on a task that the task requires, but instead that external factors like bells ringing are more important than finishing a train of thought.
4. emotional dependency . Teachers mostly operate through carrot and stick, punishment and rewards, however sugar coated. The way a child is treated is conditional on the way (s)he behaves in school. Teachers have huge power over a child’s happiness – they can prevent a child from going to the loo, even. Children have to learn to keep the teacher happy in order to be treated kindly.
5. Intellectual dependency . School children don’t often go into the building and get going on learning. They enter the classroom and a teacher tells them what to do. The teacher then judges whether or not they did it adequately. There is little space for self-motivation and self-criticism when someone else controls the timetable.
6. provisional self esteem . This is the one I am still struggling with. Gatto says that the self-respect of a school child depends on the judgement of the teacher, who tells people (usually implicitly, I imagine) what they are worth. I am thinking that this is just a summary of points 4 and 5.
7. no hiding place . In school, a child is under constant surveillance – and privacy is vital for creativity (have none of them read Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own ?!). The surveillance continues at a distance, through homework – some of a child’s “free” time at home is tied up with tasks for school.
Agree Chris!!
The value-added scores for schools are supposed to be for parents in my state, but I have no idea what these scores mean.
These are the value-added scores for one school, broken down by grades. What am I supposed to do with this information? If I were to look at this without any context or explanation (which is how it’s presented) I would think the 5th grade teachers (last year) were the only group adding any “value”, yet the school has an “A” in value-added, so that can’t be right. Or is it that the 5th grade last year came in with so little value-added prior that there was a lot of room for growth on test scores?
Maybe the 5th grade last year were just killing standardized math tests, and they’ll be in 6th grade this year so the value-added will be higher in 6th grade next test release and that means the 6th grade teachers add a lot of value, not the 5th grade teachers?
http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Pages/District-Report.aspx?DistrictIRN=043679
“What am I supposed to do with this information? ”
Throw it away as it is complete hogwash and one needn’t spend any time with such falsehoods.
My daughter was evaluated last year following a metric, of course. It was her first year teaching. While all of the COMMENTS were positive, and no comments required “improvement needed,” she was not allowed the highest number of 4 in any category, by design and on purpose. She was told “I’d give you 4s if I could.” She works in a high needs urban district in NJ. Teachers, the odds are stacked against you.
In my district, we are told that we may get an occasional “4,” but that we will never actually BE a “4.” Then why have a high score of “4” if we can never earn them?
We are told “you only visit ‘exemplary;’ you don’t live there.”
It’s like telling a student they earned a 100% on the test, but we’ll only give them an 80% because we aren’t allowed to give such high grades. It’s very frustrating.
Yeah, we heard the same thing. I think that phrase is going on my buzzword bingo game for faculty meetings!
Ha ha ha!! We get 6s & 7s Our numbers are bigger than your all’s, neener neener neener!!!!!
Donna, the principals are told NOT to give the highest marks to anyone except the teachers that teach other teachers(workshops etc).So much Bull. No fancy words to describe this scam are needed…Just the Green Word $$$$
We teachers know all of this, but we’re not good at educating parents about it. Common Core only hit speed bumps when the parents became incensed and started complaining.
My school’s scores have plummeted since Mike Miles arrived in Dallas as supt. That’s because the turnover at my school has been 60% every year!!
The parents stay silent, though, because they don’t realize their kids are being treated to a carousel of new, inexperienced teachers every year in almost every class.
At my school, we’re all equally bad. No one gets a good evaluation except for the 3 former TFA teachers who are all quitting after this year.
What I love is how they’ve undervalued experience. Experience doesn’t matter, at all, in public education, unlike every other job on the planet. In fact, it’s a negative!
That’s ridiculous on its face, yet we all now apparently believe it, based on, I don’t know, a CREDO study? Wow. That study better be valid! If it’s not we’re in for a world of hurt, considering that we’ve based the national public education system on it!
The experienced teachers are booted out as the new Testing Hierarchy wants only Puppets on a string. The veteran teachers know what is going on and no muzzle can keep them quiet….
The muzzle has kept this secret for two decades. I wrote this in 2004, after I experienced THE PROCESS and utter lawlessness that was afoot in NYC, ending public education and the profession of pedagogy in the schools.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
Despite the amazing NAPTA site of Karen Horwitz
http://www.endteacherabuse.org
which tells the stories of educators who experienced the war on teachers, and despite Betsy Combier’s chronicle of corruption in NYC
http://parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7534
and despite the Grassroots film that shows how they took out NYC public schools- GRASSROOTS AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH WAITING FOR SUPERMAN-https://vimeo.com/4199476
and despite The chronicle of destruction at
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/06/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
the public does not know what we here in Diane’s ‘teacher’s room’ know. The press tells the Duncan narrative.
15,580 districts in 50 states makes it impossible for the average citizen to know what is going on. The billionaires own the media, and here it is 2 decades later, and they have dismantled public education, and ‘the story’ is NOT getting out!
But the discussion is beginning in the big media
but no one is listening.
In my state we are not allowed to even educate parents. We have been threatened with our licenses (hence my screen name) if we even TELL parents that they are allowed to opt their children out of testing.
That is where the retired veteran teachers come in and Diane’s blog… This news will not be kept secret!!
They try in NC to keep the muzzle on the teachers but too many have retired early and are speaking the truth. They actually tell the curriculum coordinators and the principals what to say to teachers that rebel against this takeover..It is so very laughable.
The southern accent of the Super Leader is enough to make one gag as the leader spews off bunches of hogwash.
Teachers do laugh and this leader will not be elected again….
Meanwhile…..you tell it here…word will get out.. I love this blog.
Do not have time to post but read it when I can.
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/
ABC followed Duncan on his tour last week, if you-all want to watch it. I don’t know when it’s on or anything about it but the Obama Admin are probably aware of their bad polling on public education and it’s an election year, so look for spin.
“Embedded reporters” are probably not a good idea 🙂
It’s sort of appalling how completely the national PTA has been captured. I would think there would be someone in that organization who would worry about credibility and independence. Apparently not. They sound like everyone else inside this ed reform club.
Not everything that can be counted, counts.
Not everything that counts, can be counted.
-Albert Einstein
My List of the Can’t-Be-Counteds:
Compassion
Quality of instruction/program
Appropriateness of teacher-student interactions
Fairness
Accuracy of grading system
Objectivity of grading system
Self improvement
Differentiation
Clarity of instruction
Content knowledge
Creativity
Time invested
Value of experience
professional judgement
reliability
dynamics
relationships
wit/humor
“niceness”
organization
presence/voice
behavior management
I have the Times Herald-Record article right in front of me now….I drove around with it all week on the seat next to me in the car because I just couldn’t believe it really exists and I didn’t know where to put it: “Initiatives, lingering Issues complicate new school year”, Monday, September 8,. 2014.
“Complicate” isn’t the word for it.
Contiguous schools with similar demographics post wildly different teacher rankings, as if somehow the air and soil change once you cross neighboring district boundaries? I know a fair number of these teachers in districts across the region because we live in a relatively rural area. I go to conferences, I’ve sat at union events with these people… for 27 years. We’ve got some great teachers in this corner of New York State.
Are some districts using an oh-so-pretty bell curve to misjudge their teachers? Or, are others being a bit too “generous”? (Cue ominous music, duh, duh, dum…. What is the almighty state ed. department going to say about THAT kind of decent, human behavior?)
What a sick embarrassment that devalues all our schools, all of us, no matter how we are individually rated.
The bottom line, folks. History shows that if a machine can’t be made to do a human job, humans will often be forced to adapt and act like machines, in this case computers. The effort to make teachers and students standardized parts, to make us binary data, is right in front of our eyes, on page 4 in my copy of the newspaper. In a way, the so-called “reformers” are being quite honest with us, really.
And, that fact makes this whole battle all the more ominous. For the destructive sometimes even gruesome results of this sort of dehumanization have already been well detailed in the past.
In Utah, the bell curve is used for school grading, so even if every school is fantastic, some are going to fail. How does that make any sense?
Threatened, it makes no sense at all to judge students, teachers, or schools on a bell curve.
dianeravitch: what you said.
The practice nowadays is to take a bell curve to create a forced ranking/stacked ranking that will mandate burn-and-churn aka rank-and-yank.
But the bell curve makes it look so benign to the general public. Another example of mathematical obfuscation serving the purpose of mathematical intimidation with the result that few are rewarded and many are punished.
And quality teaching and learning? Out the window.
😎
The wildly divergent ratings in neighboring districts prove that educators are encountering a huge challenge making any sense of this ill-conceived, rushed fiasco, something that runs so counter to the ways our children naturally learn and how we help them. “Struggle” is the perfect word to use for the title of this blog entry. Of course, sad to say but the “reformers” are already working to retrench, retool and recalibrate in attempt to launch Fiasco 2.0. Ironically, though, many of these same “reformers” are far from perfect agents of the technological society they profess to serve. And, their hubris, greed, pettiness and stupidity ultimately could be their very undoing. But until then, look for still more data, curves, algorithms and metrics…. coming soon to a classroom near you.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx From the comments thread at the article:
[Denis Ian] “You’d get the same messy results if you tried to compare your lasagna to your neighbor’s. It’s an exercise in silliness.”
Any input on this comment– is it true?:
[Rick Kauffman] “[quoting from the article:]”…teachers often face ‘formidable challenges’ in high-needs districts. The state has said that it has normalized for that when it measures student growth on asessments. The state’s formula is supposed to compare a student to similar students across New York, in terms of poverty, disabilities, English limitations and other factors.”
Kauffman says: “This is a blatant lie. There is no such comparison or norming associated with the type of district. The teacher number is what it is. There is no adjustment.”
With Bill Gates calling the shots, it’s obvious where this is headed.
Eventually, artificial intelligence will be used to evaluate teachers. In addition to the results of standardized tests, there will be cameras in every classroom monitoring everything the teachers do and say, and some program that measures all teachers with the same metrics will rank the teachers, and those at the bottom will get the boot annually.
I’ve read that Microsoft plans to get rid of the 25-percent who rank the lowest annually.
With a plan like this, every four years, 3.3+ million teachers will lose their jobs. Once there are no more humans in the classroom, teaching the children will be turned over to the artificial intelligence and then it will be a HAL 9000, who teaches our children.
When 100-percent of children don’t measure up, then HAL 9000, will eliminate the children who fail to keep up. The execution will be painless. An injection. Then the day will come when there are no more children and most of the surviving adults are homeless and starving.
Maybe instead of HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence will be named the GATES Infinity machine.
This is happening in Washington State also. I have encountered three administrators, requiring three different pieces of evidence for the same criteria. It ranged from a form to fill out to pre and post tests and videoing each lesson.
The New York Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) system is time consuming for both administrators and teachers. It is overly process oriented leaving little time for administrators to assist teachers who need their help. All teachers are essentially treated alike, struggling teacher to the most exemplary.. It wS a solution looking for a problem that did not exist.
I am going to second threatened out west. I think not being allowed to speak is an infringement of our constitutional rights. The other big problem that I see with this scale is interrelator reliability. My principal and vice principal did their evaluations together last year. They openly admitted that their scores did not match. When I asked about this question in a meeting, I was informed that intensive training had eliminated this problem. Really, show me the data. If an evaluation has no reliability it cannot be valid! We are experiencing real discrimination in the work place.
I agree it’s an infringement of our rights; but the union in Utah told me that the state office of education is within its rights to ban us from speaking out, so I’m between a rock and a hard place at this point.
In a sinkhole of meaningless, skewed, and cooked numbers, at least the creative human spirit still rules.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
TAGO!
“In a position paper released last fall, then-outgoing Scarsdale Superintendent Mike McGill explained his district’s philosophy. He wrote that the school district traditionally expects teachers to be highly proficient most of the time, but that ‘no teacher can be truly “excellent” all the time. An underlying assumption has been that all professionals can improve continuously,’ he wrote.”
Got any research that proves this? No? This is a stupid underlying assumption, then. It is just as fallacious as the idea that student test scores (with different cohorts of kids) must rise every year.
I kinda doubt that the scores of the kids from Ferguson are gonna rise this year, for example.
The pernicious ‘continuous improvement’ nonsense that crept into education circles through business school voodoo studies and the imprimatur of the ASCD, which also gave unearned and unquestioned credibility to many of the reformist charlatans from Marzano (whom they have made many $$$$ publishing and selling) to Danielson’s bogus ‘career’ as a ‘researcher’.
Yes, I thought it probably came from Microsoft. Since they have such good control over their inputs, each new product is better than the last iteration. Oh, no, wait – that’s not right, is it?
Here’s a question that I hope some one can answer for me: Because it is well-established that factors such as parental discord, hidden health issues, household financial problems, and myriad behavioral factors can heavily influence a student’s achievement in school and performance on standardized tests, then in accord with the Due Process rights that teachers have, can a teacher whose job is on the line because of students’ poor test scores request detailed information about students’ home life, parental relations, family finances, and other pertinent information? If so, that would raise such a political backlash against using test scores to evaluate teachers that use of test scores to evaluate teachers would be swiftly dumped.
Treating Charlotte Danielson as some kind of expert on teacher evaluation is laughable. And very, very foolish and dangerous.
No disrespect Diane, but few experienced teachers here in NY are struggling to make sense of the APPR data. No one can make sense of a nonsensical system. The broad-brush generalizations in Danielson and Marzano frameworks, the ridiculous SLO templates, the inequity of local v. state measures, the blatant post test cheating by some, serious inter-rater reliability issues, and applying tests scores of students we do not teach or on subjects that we do not teach, the APPR has ZERO CREDIBILITY with teachers in this state Just more junk science and voodoo math. Tired of all these cubicle kings (and queens) and ivory tower bureaucrats trying to measure the immeasurable. Excellence in teaching (like in all arts) is in the eye of the beholder. My best critics are my students, and they can’t even agree. However, incompetence can be spotted a mile away and any administrator that lets truly damaging teachers remain in front of a classroom should be fired as well.
Thanks, Diane. Human judgment is at the heart of the utopian ideal of a never quite reachable democracy ; and the less we exercise it the weaker our democracy. Kids in school are (and long have been) learning HOW TO exercise judgment, too often from teachers who are denied that privilege. Or whose judgment was rarely honored with the time and setting that helps it grow. Painful.
Long post of possible interest. On June 15, 2013, after looking for research on the reliability and validity of the Danielson Framework, I sent the following email to contact@danielsongroup.org For this post, I have edited the email to give you the gist.
Almost every research study posted on your website (last entry 2011) fails to report the reliability and validity of the Framework for Teaching (FFT) for the full spectrum of K-12 education and in subjects for which there are not standardized state-wide tests and/or some variant of value-added scores (offered as if proof of validity). The majority of reliability studies I have examined, including those reported in the MET project, focus on observations of instruction in reading or ELA and mathematics, grades 2 to 8. The job assignments of about 70% of teachers do not fit this profile.
Question 1. As a worker in arts education am I correct there is little or no subject-specific research on the reliability and validity of the FFT beyond ELA, math, and a few studies in science for high school?
Question 2. Can you point me to any studies that systematically compare ratings of art teachers by persons who do, and do not, have credentials and experience in teaching art?
Question 3. What guidance do you provide for evaluators who do not, in fact, have subject-matter knowledge and teaching experience in a subject sufficient to judge the accuracy, precision, and appropriateness of a teacher’s work in a classroom and overall practice?
Question 4. Only a few students experience the within-grade and grade-to-grade continuity in arts instruction that the FFT seems to take-for-granted. Have you any prepared policy documents offering guidance for the evaluation of teachers with job assignments that place serious limits on their ability to perform at the peak levels that the FTT is supposed to honor?
Question 5. Of the approximately 30,000 observers in 46 states that have been trained in some version of the FFT, can you provide information (or a good guesstimate) of the number and state-by-state distribution of observers with verified backgrounds in teaching elementary or secondary visual and/or media arts?
Question 6. I have not had an opportunity to view the 19 hours of classroom teaching in your training videos. If you can direct me to any that focus on teaching in the visual arts, or any of the arts, I would appreciate knowing about these. This would exclude videos with the incidental use of art materials for teaching another subject.
Surprise, surprise. Within 3 days I received a courteous if rambling 900 + word reply from Charlotte Danielson. Edited version here.
She acknowledged my questions were “challenging.” “First, your general premise is correct: all the validation studies have consisted of correlations …with “value-added” gains on standardized tests…. This is a serious limitation, as I’ll freely admit, and until we have reliable assessments for a broader range of subjects, and for more students, we simply can’t rely on those data to be definitive.
1. Yes, you’re correct. As far as I know, there are no validation studies beyond the ones you mentioned. There it now some interest (and I hope to participate in the effort) to validate the FFT for special needs populations, but that’s a different matter altogether, and would still involve reading, math, etc.
2. The FFT is intended to apply to all disciplines, K-12. That is grounded in the simple fact that teaching, in whatever context, requires the same basic tasks, namely, knowing one’s subject, knowing one’s students, having clear outcomes, establishing a culture for learning, etc., etc…. But your larger point is a good one: I don’t know of any systematic studies looking at this issue.
3. This – the expertise of observers – constitutes one of the enduring challenges in crafting reliable systems of teacher evaluation, and I don’t, frankly, have a satisfactory answer to it. And in truth, as you suggest, it’s primarily a state and local policy matter. But it’s one reason why in those districts who are able to afford them, subject supervisors can play an important role. While I recognize that it’s inadequate, it’s the best guidance I can offer.
4. This question is also one that can only be addressed at the local level, and I sense your frustration! …But I must beg off here – I have really NO influence over these decisions, and I fear that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, until, that is, the basic skills testing mania has run its course.
5. A good question, and I simply don’t know the answer to it. … I have no idea of the numbers (although I might be able to come up with it)but (sic)would involve going back through years of records. ..
6. The online modules are, I’m sure, the ones I helped Teachscape develop, and again, I plead guilty – they are overwhelmingly in the “core” subjects, for the simple reason that it’s where most schools have to begin. ……The fft, as you know, tries to be discipline and level agnostic. But I know well that teaching is not; it’s highly specific! I’ve been contemplating for some time assembling some groups of experts in the different disciplines to advise me going forward, to create, not discipline and level specific frameworks, but versions with specific examples from different disciplines. I’d love to engage you in that work, if you have the interest.
Again, thanks so much for writing, and I’d like to continue the “conversation.” Cordially, Charlotte Danielson
I declined the offer, thanked her for the reply and copied it with my original questions to officers of the National Arts Education Association to make them aware of the issues, There was no obvious concern, perhaps because the full force of teacher evaluations is just being felt. The current president is a school principal.
Laura,
Her response is beyond pathetic. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful queries. I love her cavalier attitude while here in the trenches, people’s livelihoods are being affected.
Thanks Laura, I’m adding this to my ever-growing catalog of proofs that Charlotte Danielson is an educational fraud.
That she admits the many flaws in her program is gratifyingly honest.
That she continues to absolve herself of all responsibility for the real-world consequences her quackery has on the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands of teachers is chillingly antisocial and frightening.
She will be remembered in infamy some day. May it be soon.
laura Love it. Bravo.
sue
A press release dated NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ announced that The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust was investing $3 million “to establish a rigorous research project to modify and align the Framework for Teaching with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
This project will happen in four districts. One of these (unnamed) is in NY state.
You can find the application to market the 2013 Danielson Framework in NY state at http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/teachers-leaders/practicerubrics/Docs/danielson-application.pdf
There you will see that the application required empirical evidence in support of “each rubric.” Whatever that “each rubric” meant, the application was approved with very brief references to eight “empirical” studies, three with more elaborate descriptions of the methodology.
In addition to the questions I asked about the full spectrum applicability of the Danielson protocol, I should have asked about studies that paid attention the “demographics” in the classrooms observed—the proportional composition of students who qualify for lunch programs, those in gifted programs, special education, students still learning English, recent transfers, and so on.
Every teacher knows how these distributions shift from class to class and make a huge daily difference in what is taught, how, and so on.
For a recent summary of the many problems with this and related high stakes evaluation schemes see Leading via Teacher Evaluation: The Case of the Missing Clothes?
(July, 2013) Joseph Murphy, Philip Hallinger and Ronald H. Heck
Click to access Teacher%20Eval%20-%20Case%20of%20Missing%20Clothes%20-%20Murphy.pdf
See also a 2014 VIP article by David C. Berliner in Teachers College Record. His online summary of the craze to evaluate teachers by flawed methods closes with this great sentence:
“In fact, the belief that there are thousands of consistently inadequate teachers may be like the search for welfare queens and disability scam artists—more sensationalism than it is reality.” http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17293
Laura, I’ve seen other cases where Danielson claims not to see that her framework is being used in a harmful way, and I don’t believe it.
When we had small schools madness, some of the novice principals decided to evaluate teachers using a cudgel known as RBT. This was a checklist taken from Jon Saphier’s book, “The Skillful Teacher”. ((RBT is an acronym for Research for Better Teaching). I came across the book because I had a student teacher who used it during her practicum.
As the union was preparing for an arbitration on the matter – RBT was not the contractual evaluation tool – the school department desisted. Saphier had threatened a lawsuit for the improper use of his intellectual property without his permission.
I see no reason Charlotte Danielson could not do the same. Of course, she knows her framework is being used – it has her name all over it.
This is a true “story”. An excellent teacher, experienced and well-respected before VAM did great the first year, before it counted. Highly effective, one of the few. Next year, first year it counted, she plummeted, 1 point away from being ineffective. This year she is back up again (don’t know which level yet). The difference was the class make-up in her middle grade room. She had a number of challenging students who required lots of teacher time and attention. In the grand scheme of things even though the VAM score was barely at the effective level, the parents, students and school were all satisfied with the total (academic, social, emotional etc.) growth of the children in this class. Because this experienced teacher is particularly good with challenging students who have all kinds of special needs, her class is often skewed with those kinds of children. Her morale was horrible at the beginning of last year when she heard her “number and rating”. Even though she worked as diligently and creatively and thoroughly as the year she was highly effective, she “felt” as though she was not good enough and wondered what more she could do to improve. She stays at school often beyond 6 pm every night working on her lesson plans, correcting papers, organizing her classroom and tending to her children’s needs. She is kind, enthusiastic and fabulous with kids. She is smart and knows current best practices and wants to continue to use the best ideas and methods. I am curious how this year will go. This is a situation writ large across the country. I cannot believe there are no highly effective teachers in Scarsdale. That is absurd. I would like to hear more about how that metric happened. I know of a school where the principal has said that the Danielson model appears “rigged” in that it is nigh onto impossible to get highly effective, so not to worry. In the end all of this does what for day to day life in the classroom? Makes teachers upset, afraid? Hurts children with too much testing and poor testing that is not transparent? Are the wheels going to come off the bus soon? This is a flawed and harmful idea that simply is not going to meet the goal of better education. What scares me is how quickly the tide can shift…….but then it also gives me hope.
We must continually remind ourselves that the motive behind teacher “evaluations” has nothing to do with evaluating teacher “effectiveness.” It is a red herring. The real motive is to “monitor” teachers to make sure they follow scripted lessons and narrow course materials coming from vendors seeking a profit.
outofthecave,
The motive is to fire credentialed, experienced, vested teachers on the high end of the pay scale.
That’s what’s so funny (not ha-ha) about all of this. Administrators are so busy evaluating everyone that they can’t really help those who are struggling, even though that’s the whole reasoning the “reformers” give for this whole mess. Go figure.
Administrators who have never taught are in no position to help anyone other than themselves.
True, but micromanaging every teacher makes it even less likely that the tiny number of bad teachers will ever be remediated or even noticed. And in my experience, the bad teachers that last more than a year or two are either related to someone in power, or beautiful women.
The fact is if your tests scores are bad 2 years in a row, you can be fired. Meaning 40% (20% + 20%) = 100% after the 2nd year. In the end that 60% is meaningless thanks to a deal hammered out between Mulgrew and Cuomo for NYS teachers.
Many years ago, Michael Winerip published an article about Tennessee principals having to give poor reviews to great lessons because it didn’t follow the new rubric–very much like Danielson. That same day the editorial was about the pitfalls of the new Tennessee system, but the editors thought they should not be abandoned. Soon after that, Winerip was taken off the Education section. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I’m not laughing. 😦
Boy do I have something to say about my 40 years experience with evaluations, and my employment folder at the DOE, which was emptied go the glowing evaluations and awards, and filled, even as I was the NYS Educator of Excellence ( council of English teachers) with the documentation from the last principal hired to rid the school which I helped to put on the map, of ME!
Can’t mandate test-prep to the teacher whose practice and curricula was studied by Harvard and the LRDC for the Pew National Standards research.. Get rid of her 58k salary just as she is reaching longevity and 70k, and charge her with incompetence based on those observations.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
Been there . Done that, and I can offer hundreds of stories just like mine, of excellent teachers who did not have my status at an Eastside magnet school, and were treated like criminals because as I have been saying for over a decade, there is no access to due process with lawless administrations.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
Witness LAUSD!!! http://www.perdaily.com/2014/06/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
And I say to them …..” Get the hell out of my way and Let me teach!”
And you should see how FFT works in a huge system that hires administrators and principals that would have barely been satisfactory in the classroom. They can’t figure it out and there is total chaos. It seems all we are doing is worrying about Danialson’s goofy rubrics and how to apply them. Since Danialson, so very little teaching and learning has gone on in my district.
NYC teachers have Math or ELA scores counted for our 20% of state measures even if we teach different subjects. Some are told to pick a subject. Then, for local measures we are told to pick an assessment from a menu of choices we are totally unfamiliar with. We are also told to pick either whole school, one grade, or the kids we actually teach to see whose scores will be tied to our ratings.
NYC teachers have Math or ELA scores counted for our 20% of state measures even if we teach different subjects. Some are told to pick a subject.
This practice and the weighting of proportion is likely to increase in every state that signed up for the CCSS because every teacher is supposed to enhance performance in reading and math. In a fairly recent case in Florida, a judgede riled that this method of evaluation–not keyed to the primary job description of the teachers is perfectly legal even if it is unfair.
Robinson, S. (2014, May 6) FEA disappointed in federal judge’s ruling on state’s unfair teacher evaluation system. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/59054.htm)
In our district we are told upfront that there are many categories of the Danielson model that we will never get the highly effective rating. We “live” in the effective range because the highly effective is for cream of the crop, walk on water type teachers. Straight out of my administrators opening day staff development speech two years ago.