A regular commentator, Dienne, makes a point that is very important. She asks what is the value of comparing children, comparing teachers, comparing schools, and comparing states by test scores. She is right. The only ones who need to know a student’s test scores are the student, the parent(s), and the teacher, maybe even the principal. A test score is like a medical diagnosis. It is between you and your doctor; if you are a minor, it is between you, your doctor, and your parents. If the states wants to collect data, they do not need to look at your personal records. They use data to determine if there is a pattern that requires a public health response. But how a child scores on a test is no one’s business but those most immediately involved: the student, his/her parent(s), and teacher(s).
Dienne writes:
I think it’s a lose-lose battle so long as we continue to buy into the rephormers oft-repeated lie that we need “accountability” (with the implication that there isn’t any without standardized testing). There are multiple ways for parents to know how their children are doing – report cards, conferences with the teacher, science fairs, open houses, heck, just talking with their kids. How anyone else’s kid is doing is not anyone else’s business.
There are also ways to know how teachers are doing – that’s the principal’s job. Again, it’s not anyone else’s business, just like my performance review at my job is between me and my superiors.
The notion that we need some sort of nationally published stack-ranking system for schools or teachers is ludicrous and we need to say so.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Report cards are meaningless. Just ask all of the economically disadvantaged kids in my city that get “B”s and get promoted every year.
Those parents think there kids are doing great, until they start to get lower grades in MS and HS and then drop out.
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“Their kids” John, not “there kids”. Apparently your teacher never covered that.
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Teacher authority and control over the classroom has been chipped away by “reformers” since A Nation at Risk was published years ago. Teachers today have near zero autonomy to teach, innovate, and experiment in today’s classrooms. There is immense pressure from outside the classroom to inflate grades, teach to the test, and pass along students. Now, more than ever, with student surveys, high stakes tests, imposed standards, loss of due process, rankings and performance indices, and fire-at-will policies, now more than ever teachers see themselves set up to fail by an uninformed public convinced that “accountability” means punishment and retribution. The schools mirror what the public demands. America gets the schools she deserves.
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I agree that this pressure from outside has led to many lousy implementations. But, the pressure isn’t going to go away, nor do I think it should.
I think the teaching profession has to find a way to address accountability by creating systems that support developing teachers (and in a very small minority of cases, getting teachers out of the classroom).
Where is an organization that represents teachers that is presenting this? If teachers would get behind an accountability system instead of trying to avoid them altogether, I don’t think they’d have had lousy systems imposed from the outside.
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“Teacher authority and control over the classroom” has indeed been “chipped away.” And for good reasons. First, because not all teachers deserve such authority and control and second, more importantly, because students need some consistency in the content presented to them.
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Teachers HAVE been proposing alternative systems. Where has the public been and why are teachers being ignored? Instead, we see this insane plunge into “accountability” systems that are more about punishment and demoralization than improving education. The public has bought hook, line, and sinker the false narrative all schools are failing and teachers are the root of the problem. Anybody who seriously believes a flawed, two hour test once a year can accurately measure a years worth of learning and human endeavor is misguided at best. The damage caused by these “accountability” will take decades to fix.
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pbmeyer2014. When you have responsibility without authority, you have a recipe for disaster in any profession. Reformers have set up teachers to fail. Out of one side of their mouth, they pontificate about “accountability”. Out of the other side, they spew policies undermining teachers and taking away all control teachers have in influencing outcomes. Rather than mistrust, demonize, and blame teachers, a better approach is to listen and involve those in the classroom.
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MathVale: Excuse me? ” When you have responsibility without authority, you have a recipe for disaster in any profession.” This is ridiculous. In any private sector job, you have plenty of responsibility and no authority. “Reformers have set up teachers to fail.” Also ridiculous. What evidence of such reformer intention? “Rather than mistrust, demonize, and blame teachers, a better approach is to listen and involve those in the classroom.” The question remains: how do you measure teacher success? What is the measure of accountability?
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“MathVale Teachers HAVE been proposing alternative systems.” And what are those alternative systems?
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pbmeyer – it’s not our job to do your research for you. You could start by reading Diane’s blog all the way back to inception. You’ll find plenty of ideas, strongly backed by research. Happy reading.
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Peer Assistance and Review from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
But then again, the lack of trust in teachers as professional would probably de-rail this idea too.
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/par/
pbmeyer:
Why aren’t you complaining about he managers (principals) that vetted, interviewed, hired, observed, evaluated, and tenured all these bad, ineffective teachers you believe are polluting our classrooms? And if you would seriously like to annually cull out, let’s say 10% of the worst teachers in NYS, where are you going to find 50,000 super star relpacements? Using test scores to determine teaching excellence is an idea steeped in ignorance about what we do.
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pbmeyer
This very deep hole (teacher accountability using test scores) was dug by people who live in a fantasy world in which students enter school in September on grade level, attend school on a daily basis, pay close attention to instruction, are compliant and cooperative, self-motivated, and hard working. Their fantasy world also includes the assumptions that tests are well written, valid, and reliable measures of student achievement. Of course this fantasy world is just that.
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pbmeyer2014 writes ” The question remains: how do you measure teacher success? What is the measure of accountability?”
Well, how do you measure a politician’s success? The reason we trust (some) politicians is because they were elected democratically.
At some point, the democratic process needs to be trusted. In case of teachers, you don’t have to trust just the democratic process (other teachers, parents), but also the teacher training process that tells them how and what to teach.
Gates’ claim that everybody’s performance can be measured and everybody needs to be held accountable in some kind of authority chain didn’t even work in his own field of expertise, software development. For a long time he tried to convince everybody that what they call free or open software cannot be trusted since its and trusted developers are not held accountable and whose work are not evaluated regularly according to some strict standards. Only software developed according to some strict standards in a corporation can be trusted, he claimed.
Well, the very software, WordPress, that enables us to blog here is free software, and it’s the single most used blog software in the World.
The World’s most widespread web server software (called Apache) is free software.
On the other hand, the Department of Homeland security advises everybody against the use of Internet Explorer—a Microsoft product.
The democratic process often turns out to be the most trustworthy process.
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“If teachers would get behind an accountability system instead of trying to avoid them altogether,”
Since when is it the employees job to evaluate other same organizational level employees??? Happens all the time in business, eh??? NOT!!!
The last five words of your statement are pure bovine excrement.
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Señor Swacker: I must be forgetting my native language.
I thought it was the responsibility of management to “manage.”
Of supervisors to “supervise.”
Of those in charge to “take charge.”
Since when do the employees have to do their own job AND that of their employers?
Plus, as commenters below have pointed out, how inane is it for those low on the organizational totem pole to do an increasing amount of pointless data collection tasks that literally take away crucial amounts of time and effort from genuine teaching and learning?
Either I have lost all facility with my mother tongue or we are living on Bizarro World where everything is “weirdly inverted or opposite of expectations.” [google wikipedia]
Whenever I read something in rheephormism I feel the need for an English-to-English translation.
It’s worth a free round at Pink Slip Bar & Grille…
On me.
😎
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Another issue with teacher-created tests and grading is that teachers will only test on what they’ve covered, which means there is no place where anyone measures what part of the required curricula have been covered.
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Again, your point has to do with trying to compare kids against each other and “measure” (sorry, Duane) them against some sort of “objective” criteria – what were they supposed to have learned. There is no accepted standard for what kids are “supposed” to learn at any given grade or in any given subject.
What we should be striving to figure out about kids is not how they compare against each other, but how they’re unique. Personally, I’ll take a kid that only got through 80 pages of the textbook because they got so caught up in Egyptian history that they spent the whole year studying it and never made it any further over the kid who got through all 1026 pages of the textbook but has no real connection with or interest in history.
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Sorry, but this is a public school and taxpayers have a right to know whether their money is being spent wisely. How would one know that without knowing whether kids are learning anything?
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pbmeyer – do you demand to see performance reviews of employees of the Post Office? Not everything funded with taxpayer dollars is public information, sorry. No one else’s children are your business.
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On the other hand, what about the kids who only get through 80 pages of the textbook and also has no real connection with or interest in history? Do we take that over the kids who get through all 1026 pages? There has to be a point at which more breadth is more desirable than more depth. I don’t know what that point is, but I think that’s the point at which debates about standards begin.
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Taxpayers are being given a false sense of security if they think standardized tests show money is being “spent wisely”. School rankings and test scores are horribly flawed and easily gamed. The trend now is to hide public money once is crosses a threshold into “private” entities, anyways, to enrich the well connected at taxpayers’ expense. A novel idea might simply be for taxpayers to support community level schools and democratically elected school boards. In other words, do not just believe what is portrayed in the media or political rhetoric. There is that alternate reality, then there is the true reality of the classroom. Sure, it takes work to be an informed voter. Consider that the price of democracy. .
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Well, I guess I should take a step back and look at what are we taking this kid for? If I were a college admissions person, I’d be jumping for joy over a student who spent a year studying Egyptian history (assuming I saw evidence of that reflected in an essay, interview or some other format). Clearly this is someone with passion and the self-directed ability to get deeply involved in a subject.
The kid who got through the whole book probably wouldn’t impress me much – an eager-beaver academic overachiever type who did what they thought would make them look good – I probably have a whole stack of applications from kids just like that. Unless I’m seeing something interesting somewhere else, that application is going on the “meh, we’ll see” stack.
The kid who only got through 86 pages and doesn’t care about/connect with history is probably not applying to college unless s/he has a pretty strong record elsewhere, like math or science (or athletics).
If it’s not college we’re talking about, I guess I have to ask how much does the average person need history and what history in particular? Personally, I think every citizen of this American experiment in democratic republicanism needs to know enough American history to understand how we became a republic, how that’s changed and been threatened over the years and how we keep it. But I’m not overly concerned whether my plumber knows about the Peloponnesian War or the Ming Dynasty unless he has a personal interest.
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Dienne, I don’t know of any school or school district that releases the names and test scores of students to the public. There is no privacy issue with regard to test scores. And I am not a promoter of releasing teacher names and scores either. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure teacher teaching competence and student learning progress. After all, isn’t that the point of school — to learn something? The point of the Post Office is to deliver letters. You don’t think that someone is tracking the ontime numbers for such letters? Or that Post Office employees aren’t being judged by metrics that have something to do with the delivery of those letters? Sorry, but taxpayers deserve to know whether their schools are working. How do you propose to assure them that the system is working?
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“Covering the curriculum” is part of the problem. Covering the curricumlum grade-by-grade as if the curricum is a training program in skill sets that will a hit a “target” is part of the problem.
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pb – children are not letters, simple as that. Learning cannot be measured like the rate of letters through a machine. Standardized tests are not even an approximation of learning – there’s actually an inverse relationship, the more you work to improve scores, the *less* students are learning. Well, the less they’re learning about anything other than how to take the test, that is.
BTW, are you arguing in favor of a doctor rating system for our public hospitals, so taxpayers can know if our money is being well spent there? Let’s rank doctors against each other based on patient mortality, shall we? Let’s gather every last shred of data we can so that we can prove that all the bad doctors go into geriatrics and the good ones go into pediatric general medicine. After all, those old folks die off a lot faster than the kids, so the only possible explanation must be bad doctors, right?
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pbmeyer2014. You seem stuck on this notion of tests as an effective measure of teacher quality. Rather than the post office, a better analogy is judging doctors by measuring patient waistlines, then blaming doctors when a patient gets cancer. These standardized tests are terrible. They penalize very good, dedicated teachers who work with the most difficult students. They do not identify “bad” teachers due to so many confounding effects – poverty, parent involvement, health, student life choices. The posting of baseless teacher rankings is state sanctioned slander right out of the McCarthy era.
Your premise starts with all teachers are ineffective and cannot be trusted. That is the fundamental flaw in the Reformers’ reasoning. According to Reformers, teachers must be monitored closely and punished. This infantalization of educators is setting America on a very bad path for the future.
I worked on some great teams in private sector professional jobs. The best companies know how to select, grow, and accommodate employees. Employees who feel they have control over their job and are properly rewarded will work long hours, be energetic, find innovations, and feel part of something bigger. To subject these excellent teams to mindless, irrelevant, and punitive tests is to quickly destroy any chance of success. Why are we then applying recycled, failed, and useless management and motivation strategies to teaching?
The anti-teacher mindset has to go. Maybe try actually LISTENING to teachers as a start of any reforms and ignore politicians, FoxNews, and billionaires.
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MathVale says “pbmeyer2014. You seem stuck on this notion of tests as an effective measure of teacher quality.” Excuse me? Evidence please. “Stuck on notion of tests”? Stuck? Evidence please. I keep asking for a reasonable way of evaluating the success (or failure) of the taxpayer-supported public education system and all I get is crazy assertions about my thoughts and assertions — and not a single answer to my question.
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“… they got so caught up in Egyptian history that they spent the whole year studying it …”
Exactly. What qualities do we consider important in a student when they enter college?
In my math class, I want to see students who are willing to think, who like to discover, experiment. I want to see students who are willing to work with me. Does an ACT score give me any indication of these qualities? Nope.
When I arrived to this country 30 years ago, I was annoyed by students’ reaction to my request “Let’s think about how to solve this problem”. They said something like “Nah, we don’t want to think. We are paying you to tell us the recipe how to do this stuff and our job is to do well on the test.”
What’s changed since then? When I ask them “Let’s think about how to solve this problem”, their reply is “What do you mean?”. When I ask them to guess, to experiment and not to be afraid of making errors, they start sweating.
In college, we are not preparing students to learn answers. No. We are preparing them for real life where you have to seek answers. Solving real life problems involves cooperation, thinking, imagination, curiosity about and understanding of the subject. None of these qualities can be adequately evaluated by tests—certainly not by the speed-tests in current use (ACT, SAT included).
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pbmeyer2014 wrote ” I keep asking for a reasonable way of evaluating the success (or failure) of the taxpayer-supported public education system and all I get is crazy assertions about my thoughts and assertions — and not a single answer to my question.”
I actually agree with you on this. It seems that as soon as you ask for evaluation, people think of tests, and then they say “tests are not the way to evaluate teachers and students”. They are correct in that, but they avoided addressing your problem.
I think there are two questions that need to be answered first.
1) What needs to be evaluated exactly?
2) What do you mean by evaluation?
I proposed an answer to 1) in the main thread of this blog topic by showing a video about how to teach math in a way that would be called non-traditional by most, but, in fact, it’s the *original* way of teaching.
In short: the most important task of a teacher is to make and keep the kids excited about the subject. There are other things a teacher needs to do, like teaching some math facts, but *how* to teach is more important than *what* to teach, and *how* kids learn is more important than *what* they learn.
They do need to learn about evolution, but how they learn about it is much more important.
I am not sure how to answer 2) exactly. After all, my answer to 1) makes it clear that the usual way (tests) won’t do. In thinking about an answer to 2), we get close if we think about how to evaluate music, paintings, the performance of an orchestra.
I, for one, am pleased with a teacher if my kid comes home form high school and talks enthusiastically about a class. I don’t need more precise grading (as I don’t grade music on number scales) , and the only ingredient needed to my full satisfaction is to trust the teacher that she is teaching appropriate material, so she doesn’t claim, say, that intelligent design is science.
What do you think?
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wierdlmate wrote: “It seems that as soon as you ask for evaluation, people think of tests, and then they say “tests are not the way to evaluate teachers and students”. They are correct in that, but they avoided addressing your problem.”
Thanks for the clarification. Mine is open-ended question and your questions are good as well:
“1) What needs to be evaluated exactly?
2) What do you mean by evaluation?”
Before you even ask those questions, I believe you have to establish a consensus about purpose. What are public schools supposed to accomplish? Then you ask, Are they accomplishing it? How well?
I simply can’t conceive of any other way forward for an organization, especially an organization supported by taxapayer money and thus responsible to those taxpayers.
thanks
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pbmeyer2014 wrote: “Before you even ask those questions, I believe you have to establish a consensus about purpose. What are public schools supposed to accomplish? Then you ask, Are they accomplishing it? How well?”
I gave my opinion on this in other posts in this blog thread: in math, kids need to understand math (calculating using crazy formulas they forget within a week is unimportant), they need to enjoy thinking, problem solving, experimenting.
What teachers don’t accomplish very well is to get kids excited about learning. I submit, the main reason for this is overwork: US teachers and students have to work way too much. For example, in Hungary, a teacher’s daily load is four 45 min classes with 15 minute breaks between classes—about 60% of what US teachers have to endure.
Since teachers have to keep kids excited, they also need to be excited, enthusiastic, but that’s impossible to do 6 hours a day—plus grading, preparing, communicating with parents. If we want to improve education, the first thing to do is reduce teaching load, and reduce school and home work time for kids.
My understanding is that you are worried that if the public doesn’t look over the teachers’ shoulders, they won’t do a good job. But teachers have a completely different management style from corporations.
Simplistically, there are two kinds of evaluation/management systems. One is what we can call the military style with its hierarchical chain of authority. This is what seems to be preferred by big corporations: the “CEO system”.
The other one is the democratic management system where each worker has full authority over her work. In this system, the quality of work is ensured by a peer review process. This democratic management system has been used in education, but many small businesses have been using it too.
The controversy is that powerful people like Gates, who believe in the almighty CEO system, refused to believe that the democratic system works well in education—or anywhere, and so they decided to implement the military style management in education. This happened despite the fact that the US had the best higher ed system in the world and it’s based on the democratic management system.
When people on this blog are pissed about, say, Gates, and they say, they don’t want to be evaluated by a military system Gates invented for them, they don’t imply that they want to be responsible to the public. No, they just have a democratic management system that has been working very well for decades, and in some instances, for centuries. What teachers see is that outsiders want to force a different management style on them which has been proven ineffective in education numerous times in the past.
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Ain’t no one measuring nothing in the teaching and learning process.
Your confidence in testing is quite misplaced. Read Wilson to understand why you should have no confidence in standards, grading, and testing:
“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 uni-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 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
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Standards are not curricula. Standardized tests are tests designed to determine student performance/achievement, weaknesses/strengths, and/or proficiency on standards. Teacher-created tests that include material not covered are considered bad form (unless they are pretests to determine what students need). Pretty sure final exams are traditionally used to measure (or do you mean determine?) what parts of the required curricula have been covered, which can be linked to standards.
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Joe Willhoft, Executive Director of SBAC, admits that these extreme and exorbitant standardized tests are not absolutely necessary:
“We could probably get students to leave high school college and career ready without any testing at all. It’s a bitter pill for a testing person to swallow, to admit that. But it is probably the truth.”
Smarter Balanced Update for the National Conference of State Legislators on February 26, 2013, on Youtube at 19:50. (You have to open his report to governors to see his report to legislators on the side. Google won’t bring this up directly.)
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I very much like the piece Dr Ravitch pulls from Dienne’s post: there is no place in any accountability scheme currently in practice for students’ personal data. That point could and should be put out there in the public discussion, and loudly.
The accountability movement has made its agenda clear through NCLB, RTTT, VAM, the attempt to corral all public-school teaching and assessment into the CCSS pen, the call for codifying and ranking teacher-education programs. None of it shows any interest or support for the educational progress of individual students. “Accountability” is not about students at all. It is an attempt to account for every dollar spent by the public on public education, cynical in its clear intention to (1)lower the ‘overhead’ of the GDP by removing public goods, and (2)establish opportunity for corporations and investors to raid the public purse as the ship goes down.
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Almost nowhere in standardized testing literature is there a mention of LEARNING.
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“Accountability”
“Accountable to the accountants”
Is what we’re really after
Have dollars piled to mountains?
(Here cue accountant laughter)
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The legislators and governors have gone so overboard with “teacher accountability” that it will someday, not that far off, become a moot point. No one will enter this abused profession to make $33,000 a year, constantly be placed under stress of the threat of being fired, have no time to spend with your family, pretest and test your students over and over and over again…Need I say more?
I am sitting at my desk right now with a list of 22 teacher tasks which all need done within 2 weeks. I have to do all of this outside of my paid hours as a teacher. The teaching job has become undoable, as far as I’m concerned. You cannot stay caught up. It’s awful. I’m so tired. I will have to work most of this entire holiday weekend on teaching requirements to just stay afloat. My family deserves so much more. The sad thing is that I love my students and I love to teach. But, all of that does not matter anymore. I cannot even recognize the profession of teaching. It is so sad and upsetting to me.
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I am in the same boat Sad. I have been given a new assignment outside of my certification that will require hours and hours of catch up work to approach the level of mediocrity. I am so stressed. I can’t sleep. I am heading for the laundromat to avoid tackling my to do list. I used to love teaching.
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One teacher friend of mine has to make spreadsheets for all her students with every assignment and quiz, enumerating their scores for all the CCSS benchmarks – in order to pass her evaluations. Then she bundles the spreadsheets into binders and takes them to the principal who doesn’t even look at them, puts them on a shelf to gather dust. But he’s happy because he checked it off for his list of data about teacher data about student data. Pointless – and juggling all this gives her and her students migraines. Saddest of all, her students’ scores are the same as if she were allowed to teach with her own creative methods, except now, students have no time for activities that make English inspiring and memorable, like projects, debates or plays. She’s quitting.
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The situation you describe is sick….demented. I have to wonder that if more of the public REALLY understood how this is playing out whether this insanity would continue?
Who can fault someone for quitting?
But, of course, when people quit, when the students hate school, when citizens don’t bother to vote anymore, well, don’t the 1% win? Maybe not in the long term but, of course, their main concern so often seems to be the next quarter’s profits, right?
I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories but I have to wonder…….
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Accountable to whom? To politicians or to scholarship, history’s greatest minds, etc? Where is “truth” to be found, in politicians “philosophical” beliefs or in scholarly in depth research validated by other scholars?
Seemingly now the perception of “truth” by politicians trumps scholarship. When lobbyists control our legislative agendas where are we headed? History shows us. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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The problem with any measurement is that it quickly becomes the only thing that matters. Torturing kids with hours and hours of math and language arts while you cut out the arts, music, the school play, the band, the clubs, the field trips, the projects, the stories (remember the stories your teachers used to tell?) so that they can perform on a test serves neither the student or the republic.
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It seems that the following needs to be stated explicitly, though it’s been beat around: TO WHOM teachers are accountable is preceded by the determination of FOR WHAT they are accountable. If we determine and explain this well, the determination of “to whom” should follow naturally.
That teachers’ job is “kindling of a flame” is an ancient idea, and modern people like to discount ancient ideas. But I think quite a few of us understand that there are guiding principles which haven’t and won’t change.
Not surprisingly, there are quite a few reincarnations of the idea to teach to ignite a fire in the student, and the following video shows how the principle works in a cool, contemporary but satisfyingly timeless way. For the case the viewer gets too caught up in the action to think straight, the irritatingly young teacher sums it all up by saying
“It was never really about the answer; it was about the process”
If the “fire” and the “process” are important, then the usual questions on education change. Like
If teaching is about the “process” and tests, on the other hand, are about answers, how relevant are tests to evaluate education?
If a teacher is to kindle a flame, how can we make sure the fire in the teacher doesn’t go out?
Can a teacher do her fire-duty if she teaches 6 hours a day, with barely noticeable breaks between classes, and then she grades, prepares for classes the next day?
Who is responsible to maintain the fire in the teachers?
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Also with medicine the bell curve is considered “normal range.” It seems like in education we are trying to get rid of the bell curve and put everyone on the right of what would be the bell curve. A person can be anywhere on the bell curve in terms of their white blood cell count and still be considered within normal range—and you might be someone with a typically lower count, or someone with a typically higher count, but still be within normal range. The talk and discussion about growth and VAM seem to just ignore the bell curve. It drives me crazy to read discussion, print and copy that is to be taken seriously that ignores this factor of range—–no. . .everyone must be far to the right. And they want people to beat their heads against the wall to make this happen and that is called education.
As long as we continue in the climate of no trust, things will not get better. Recently in our district teachers were told to give each other their M-Class passwords so they can test each other’s students (they are not to be trusted to test their own students because apparently teachers are not trustworthy and might cheat). BUT they can be trusted to take on 5-10 extra students on the “farming out” days (many of whom are kindergarteners, who don’t really understand being tested anyway and will have anxiety about spending the day with a different teacher. . .one even wet his pants, I’m told). Anyway, the teachers (who could not be trusted to test their own children BUT could be trusted to take on up to 30 kindergarteners for the day) called AMPLIFY to ask if it was, afterall, a good idea to just randomly hand out their M-Class passwords (the content of which holds valuable data to be used to judge the teacher—but not valuable enough that the teacher would need to protect her own privacy or integrity of somebody ELSE not cheating by going into their account and mucking around with the data). Anyway, kudos to AMPLIFY for telling the teachers don’t dare give out your passwords and the district had to make a plan B. As for farming out the kids, I’ve heard mixed things.
Whatever the “accountability” talk chip bought us in the 90s has surely been spent past its worth at this point. We need to bring back accountable talk, instead of accountability talk, because I don’t find much of the talk about accountability to be, actually, accountable. It’s like improv theatre and even the best improv theatre gets old after a while.
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One problem is that status conscious, middle class parents–often those with political clout–want bragging rights that come along with comparisons.
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Bingo.
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So then grades could be eliminated too. Just: pass, no-pass instead of ABCs. What do you think?
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We should realize that the tests aren’t a permanent picture of a person’s ability. Whoever thought this was a way to measure and weed out whatever they choose and then use it to praise or condemn a person’s “life’s work” has eggs for brains. It is interesting to note that the powers that be can choose to get rid of teachers who previously had high scores on other tests but sincerely ar “seasoned” those tests g points are somehow no longer valid or important. But they pretend as if there is real significance to these new criteria. A test does not equal a child. Vice versa.
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Will politicians, responsible for their lack of support for public education, ever accept being accountable for their failures?
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What constitutes a falling school and bad teachers? In 2013 the chairman of the Senate Texas Public Education Committee made headlines when he stated that 500 of the 8,000 Texas public schools have been rated unacceptable by the Texas Education Agency (TEA). The actual number was 496 out of 8,526 campuses were rated academically unacceptable by TEA. That is 5.8 % unacceptable by state standards and 94.2% meeting or exceeding state standards. The state system requires that every sub-population (6) have to pass every test (which varies per grade level and campus) at a 70% passing rate to meet state standards (at that time in 2011, the test and standards has since changed). When you look a little deeper into the numbers about 270 campuses failed one test with one sub-population. So about 70 to 80% of the students met state passing standards but the campus was rated unacceptable. Only about 15 campuses in the entire state of Texas failed all sub groups and all test. That is only .002% of 8,525 campuses, I would say that the teachers of Texas have done one outstanding job for the students in our state.
When you look at the surface of the lead statement of “What is the real value of accountability? Accountable to whom?”, I would caution you to look deeply at the measuring stick before classifying a school as failing and then keep in mind who create the measuring stick. A falling school need to be very specifically define because it is our politicians that are moving around the measuring stick that does not really accurately measure a schools overall performance. They have developed a culture of testing and not a culture of learning. With that said, when you have 94% (and in my opinion 97- 99%) doing well that is an A to A+ in anyone’s book.
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