The blogger Plunderbund (aka Greg Mild) here describes the chaotic, pointless, and ceaseless bureaucratic and political meddling in Ohio’s public schools.
Just as the schools began to implement the previous teacher evaluation plan, the legislature decided to “reform” the process yet again:
The full text of Ohio’s latest proposed budget bill (House Bill 64) was posted last week and, as in years past, it includes much more than just financial recommendations. There are numerous education-related “reforms”, some of which have promise, others that will place additional expenses on the backs of local school districts, and some that will continue to just continue the chaotic environment of change that teachers and administrators have been dealing with under the Kasich regime.
statehouseA key piece of reform that falls into the latter category involves the ever-changing Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). In only its third year of implementation in most schools across the state, it appears as though we can look forward to major modifications to the system even as educators are still adjusting to the massive changes that occurred last summer.
The process of implementing the OTES has already been a burden on schools and districts as they have been forced to create entirely new systems of tracking and reporting, all while continually trying to keep both teachers and principals abreast of the latest options and requirements. Last years changes were particularly troublesome as the law did not become official until mid-September, after the school year had already started, requiring most local school boards to delay the official adoption of all of the modifications while trying to get the process started in a timely fashion and educating all personnel about the overhaul that had occurred while they were out on summer break.
The new system will be horrendous, as those who teach non-tested subjects will be evaluated by “attributed” scores. That means that teachers of the arts, physical education, K-2, high school, foreign languages, etc., will be evaluated by the scores of their entire school, the scores of students they didn’t teach, the scores of students they never met.
In practice, shared attribution is essentially taking the value-added ratings of an entire school or district and assigning those ratings to teachers in the non-value-added grades and subjects. The result in Ohio over the past two years is that we have had teachers receive individual evaluation ratings based on students that they have absolutely no direct connection with. For example:
High school teachers of all subjects receiving a student growth measure rating based on the math and reading test results of children in grades 4-8.
Physical education, music, and visual art teachers at all grades receiving ratings based on the test results in subjects they don’t instruct.
Newly-hired teachers in grades PK-3 with an evaluation rating based in the test scores of students in grades 4-5 that they have never even taught.
There are numerous other combinations like these few examples in which teachers have had their evaluations based on students that are not even in the same building (any teacher receiving a district’s value-added rating as shared attribution).
In the comments on the Plunderbund blog, someone asks: “What difference will it make?” Well, let me count the ways: teacher demoralization (a commenter on this blog wrote to ask why he was getting a degree in music education with a specialty in string, when he would be judged by the math and reading scores of 4th and 8th grade students); confusion in the schools about yet another implementation of a policy that has no basis in research or experience; a waste of millions of dollars for compliance that might have otherwise been spent on reducing class sizes, buying musical instruments or upgrading buildings.
As Plunderbund says: Now let the chaos begin….
Diane Ravitch's blog 
sticking to my new theory that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. lawmakers should not be spending their time on education policy. We have boards for that. If the board members are a problem, at least that’s only one group to deal with via a democratic process or something similar, in terms of representation.
I think legislation to limit the meddling of lawmakers into education policy needs to begin, both federal and state. soon.
Diane, Why don’t teachers and their unions sue the state over these bad policies? How can one be evaluated on student test scores when one has never had those students? Sincerely, Dawn Cova (Frustrated CA teacher)
Sent from my iPhone
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Dawn,
There was a suit by teachers in Florida who were evaluated by the scores of students they didn’t teach. Their suit was dismissed by a judge who said that the practice may be unfair but it wasn’t illegal or unconstitutional. I hope they appealed.
There is another suit now ongoing in Tennessee around same issue.
It should be sued everywhere. It is not only unfair but should be illegal to treat people unfairly in their workplace and base their evaluations on students they did not teach.
Definitely. If the same evaluative standard is not being applied to all public sector employees, teachers are being purposefully and wrongfully singled out.
Let’s see states try to evaluate (and rank and fire) police officers based on the number of arrests vs. number of convictions or some other arbitrary statistic. That won’t last very long.
Kasich is still trying to explain his funding formula. The latest nugget of insight from the Governor is that schools facing cuts should just use their reserves up and deal with it. I think this brilliance in governing came during his red state tour for a national balanced budget amendment funded by dark money. Never mind schools are building up savings BECAUSE of the governor’s draconian cuts to education. Of course, the latest budget proposal raises taxes on the middle class and elderly while cutting income taxes for the wealthy. And Ohio’s state reserves are plump and flush with $$$$$.
The Ohio Teacher Evaluation System is a mess ripe with confusion, gaming, and ignorance of the actual classroom. It accomplishes nothing except reducing actual time spent teaching students.
“is that schools facing cuts should just use their reserves up and deal with it. ”
It’s fun to watch him struggle to explain why public schools should take another hit, especially as they’re pumping more money into charters and vouchers. “Use you reserves!”
You really start to think the objective here is to push public schools into bankruptcy. There’s just no concern, at all, for the schools 90% of kids in this state attend. They are unrepresented in Columbus. It’s a complete void.
We might do better if we pooled our funds and hired a private advocate.
I wonder if we’re going to get any actual, unspun analysis of how the Common Core testing goes.
I hope Common Core/Pearson aren’t self-regulating and self-reporting.
It is time for the association of school boards to stand up and refuse to implement these
evaluations. No more negotiations and efforts to please the State that refuses to be satisfied. Instead of parents opting out their children, put the responsibility back on the
school boards who exercise local control. Supposedly “local control” is what libertarians
and conservatives value, so start exercising it. We wouldn’t be in this fix if universities, teacher unions, school boards, and State Departments of Education had refused to
go along with NCLB. Say “enough is enough” and a draw line in the sand. Isn’t that what democracy looks like?
The National School Boards Foundation received more than $750,000 from Gates, for “research and data systems to improve student achievement”.
I am an Ohio teacher….OTES is a nightmare with or without the current changes. Under the current system….50% of a teacher’s evaluation rests on test scores….this allows for a teacher in my district (where we are using locally made tests…that may or may not be equitable across grade levels) who was rated one thing by his/her administrator to be bumped up or down a level on the final evaluation; in a nutshell, some of our best teachers are being rated down because they typically get many of the most difficult students and some of our average teachers are being rated up because they get easier classes. Then there are all those teachers who don’t have classrooms who have no test scores at all entered into their evaluations….it is ALL unfair and it is ALL demoralizing.
“The new system will be horrendous, as those who teach non-tested subjects will be evaluated by “attributed” scores. That means that teachers of the arts, physical education, K-2, high school, foreign languages, etc., will be evaluated by the scores of their entire school, the scores of students they didn’t teach, the scores of students they never met. ”
The policy is elsewhere called a “collective” assessment, meaning that teachers are assigned a value-added score for the entire school, using any test with a fairly broad reach, typically the state tests in reading and math required under NCLB–shortly to become a PARCC or SBAC test in many states.
For a time in Florida, teachers in “untested subjects” could choose whether they would be assigned a VAM in reading or in math. Diane is correct that a federal judge ruled this policy is legal, even if unfair, so future legal challenges will need to be more sophisticated.
With the adoption of the CCSS, states are justifying a “collective” measure on reading, because it is cheap and can be rationalized on the grounds that all teachers are obliged to boost scores in reading and vocabulary, extending to grades 6-12 where the CCSS call for “literacy” standards to be met in various subjects.
In any case, Ohio has gone off the rails on educational funding, accountability, and aims in higher education which must be strictly economic and lead to job-production in OHIO.
Having one’s evaluation based on other people’s work….I was an art teacher. One of those “non-tested subjects”. I cannot imaging how demeaning it would be to be evaluated on the work of anyone else! If this collective idea is good enough for some, why not for all?? We must stop this insanity!!! NO other profession would ever stand for such a humiliating idea!
Ohio’s 5 out of 8 rule, supported by the Ohio Department of Education, defeated art and music teachers and librarians.
By testing only math and English, the tech industry forced teachers of social studies to ask for testing. See the Ohio Council on Social Studies website.
I was actually the one asking on Plunderbund “what difference would it make?” I was asking Greg Mild, the author of the post what he thought would happen to schools if all the standardizing testing just stopped. A teacher responded “One good thing is I could actually teach students and not just to the test. “