The Center for Education Policy released the results of a survey of nationally representative sample of teachers, which probed their feelings about their profession and the demands made on them today.
The survey sought to “learn their views on the teaching profession, state standards and assessments, testing, and teacher evaluations. The report, Listen to Us: Teacher Views and Voices, summarizes these survey findings, including responses indicating that public school teachers are concerned and frustrated with shifting policies, over emphasis on student testing, and their lack of voice in decision-making.”
Readers of this blog will not be surprised that teachers feel burdened by mandates from the district, the state, and federal officials. They feel excluded from decision-making. They feel too much time is spent on testing. They don’t mind testing, but they think there are too many of them. They wish they had smaller classes. They teach because they like to help children learn.
But it must seem that an awful lot of politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants get in their way as they try to do their job. Is this a statement of the obvious?
What do you think?
See more at: http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=1456#sthash.sJESMtqQ.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes
The CEP study was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I found some the questions framed as if to find out the degree of agreement with policies already in place, or perhaps wanted as an agenda for action.
For example, questions about tests focused on too many or too much time, and whether the results were used to inform instruction. It is as if those who constructed the survey wanted to push data as useful for instruction, even if it not necessarily relevant or useful. I did not find a question about whether test provided more useful information or more objective information than teachers could muster by their independent judgment and from multiple observations of individual students.
I also became weary of questions about collaboration, as if school schedules afforded time and that benefits always came from this work. At least the survey results said that time was a big issue and about 69% of teachers in a school had job assignments where same grade and same subject collaborations could not happen. That focus in the survey also happens to match some questions from international surveys on teaching practice from the TALIS program, conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In any case, I have no reason to trust that the results from the survey will be used for anything other that constructing “interventions” based on this evidence of teacher voice, which is not the same as getting the messages from teachers. If you think that I am skeptical of the survey because it was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you are correct.
From http://www.cep-dc.org/pages/About-CEP.cfm
Based in Washington, D.C., and founded in January 1995, the Center has received nearly all of its funding from charitable foundations such as The George Gund Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, The Hewlett Foundation, The Gates Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, The Ellis Foundation, and Phi Delta Kappa International.
It’s worth reading the document in the History of CEP section.
Facebook has a new OnThisDay (OTD) app that reminds you of things you posted on the same day in previous years. Here’s one mine that fits here:
What Public Education Needs Now
May 11, 2012
What public education needs now is this — That the whole motley crew of ALEC-o-holics, banksters, bean-counters, bubble-brainers, business bunko artists, corporate raiders, cyborg schoolers, disaster capitalists, emergency mongers, hedge-fund hawkers, junk-bond hucksters, monopoly gamers, optical scammers, parochial school pushers, and every pelting petty politician should pull their noses out of the duties of professional educators and remove their thumbs from the public funding pie before they wreck the public education system as badly as all the other things they have managed to destroy with their ignorance of fundamentals and their get-rich-quick schemes.
Right on, comment, Jon. AGREE!
Webknowbit’scabout $$$$$, power, and control. It’s totally disgusting.
The results of this survey should be shared with the members of the Regents task force on teacher evaluation. Insidious effete forms of evaluations such as VAM is an area of concern. One of the overarching themes in the survey is the loss of autonomy, respect and right to voice an opinion. One writer here said it best as teachers have been put into an authoritarian, top down climate and have become muzzled, “We’ve become North Korea.”
I found the comments about poor students interesting. Teachers saw the biggest need to be in the area of “emotional needs” of poor students coming in at 42%. It is interesting that most charters seek to ignore the emotional difficulties and trauma of the poor through “no excuses” and suspensions. Ignoring the emotional issues related to poverty is about as effective as ignoring climate change.
Your last line speaks volumes, and for me is perhaps the prophetically most important statement for all Public Education thinkers. If we continue to allow statistical, computer-based school reformers to ignore/denigrate the emotional issues related to poverty, our future in education looks about as safe as our planet.
As a public school teacher, I am total agreement that our jobs are BOGGED down by the excessive amounts of testing. Clearly, this takes the love and joy out of teaching!
When I first started college in ’99 I wanted to teach special education. Now I’m glad I didn’t. I work as a paraeducator for special education instead. I could not go into a profession that does not treat professionals like the professionals they are. Instead I have time to work one on one with students and give support to those loosing traction in their fight to gain back the respect they have lost.
Somehow teachers are the root of all public education problems. How horrible it must be to have a genuine interest in helping children learn and then be told the reason they aren’t “where they are supposed to be” is because it’s all your fault. Frustration, anxiety, and depression runs high and is now in what I think is overdrive mode.
Add to that my conspiracy theory:
1st- keep switching up federal education policies so by the time data shows it has failed…you’ve wasted millions and a few years readjusting to the new flavor of the month federal policy
again citing teachers as the reason students fail
2nd- cut public school funding to invest in alternative schools that claim to be better. Results in larger class sizes with less staff for public schools.
again…teachers must be why students are failing
3rd- over test the crap out of everyone and use info as ammo to fire current teachers to make way for young naive teachers.
again…teachers at fault for not having the time, resources, or attention for their students to help them succeed.
I could go on…you get the picture. We can’t win 😦
“They don’t mind testing, but they think there are too many of them.”
Since you asked Diane: These teachers and adminimals make GAGA Good Germans, is what I think!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
I wrote this 3 years ago.
https://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/new-teacher-bill-of-rights-2013/
“They don’t mind testing, but they think there are too many of them.”
I am just reemphasizing what Laura and Duane already indicated: the most depressing thing about the responses is the above. More precisely, here is what we can read in the survey
For district-mandated tests, only 22% of these teachers recommended eliminating these tests altogether, while 63% would reduce their frequency of administration or length, and 13% would keep district tests as they are. The pattern was similar for state-mandated tests: 31% of these teachers recommended eliminating these tests, while 60% would reduce their frequency or length and only 7% would keep state tests as they are.
In other words, the majority of the teachers believe in the usefulness of the state and district mandated tests.
Of course, the survey made a fundamental error: it never asked why teachers think, these state standardized tests are useful, what do they think these tests accomplish, how do they know that these tests really do what they are advertised to do, and why they think they should be kept.
In other words, the survey seems to be very similar to the standardized tests: it asks questions which are easy to pose in multiple choice format, and which then are easy to quantify, but the survey never asks questions which would make the teachers think about the really basic questions.
Surveys like these are done to claim, teachers are listened to and that educational policies have wide, democratic, expert support.
IHere is another CPE “report” titled “Knowing the Score: The Who, What, and Why of Testing”. The author is one of the researchers who wrote the report of the survey.
http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=1451
On page 2, we can read
Standardized tests have advantages for
assessing larger numbers of students.
“In many situations, standardized tests provide the
most objective way to compare the performance of a
large group of examinees across places and times,” a
National Research Council board concluded based on
a decade of research. Standardized tests produce
results that are comparable across classrooms,
schools, districts, or states, and in some cases across
international borders. They are an efficient and
relatively inexpensive way to collect and report
large amounts of achievement data. Although
standardized tests have limitations (see below), they
yield information that is likely to be more consistent
across large numbers of students than alternatives
such as teacher grades.
and then
Tests have limitations.
— The content on a particular test represents just a
sample of the broader knowledge and skills
students are expected to learn in a particular
subject. If a different sample of test questions
were selected, a student might score differently.
— Test scores are estimates of a student’s
understanding. A student’s score could vary for
reasons unrelated to actual learning if the
student took the test several times with no
additional instruction in between. A test is most
useful when it assesses what students have
actually been taught—in other words, when the
content of the curriculum and test are aligned.
but then we are back, on page 3, to
3. WHAT ARE SOME COMMON
REASONS FOR TESTING IN K-12
SCHOOLS?
The vast majority of tests administered in K-12
schools are intended to assess how well
students have learned academic knowledge
and skills in a particular area.
The results of these achievement tests can help
determine whether students are on track to master
the academic standards for their grade and,
eventually, to graduate from high school with
adequate preparation for higher education or careers.
Achievement tests are often used for other reasons
as well.
— Holding states, districts, and schools
accountable for using tax dollars effectively to
improve achievement for students in general and
for groups that are the target of special
programs (often called “accountability testing”)
— Making high-stakes decisions about students
and teachers
In other words, “we know about some of the problems with testing, but we still use them for high-stakes, and you just have to accept this fact.”
Thanks for that link!
I spent the last few days reading papers and reports on education related research from Stanford, CPE and others. With very few exceptions, the people who write these documents seem to talk to “all the people out there”, they make recommendations how to do stuff in all schools, what all teachers should do, what all students should do, and they feel they are in a unique position to explain the rationale behind DOE policies and demands to parents and other common people.
Who the heck are these researchers? Who taught them that they could immediately draw global conclusions from their research data? Why do they think it’s OK to immediately recommend policies based on their “findings”?
I have the feeling, these people have been watching too many superman and batman movies, and they have listened too closely to Bill Gates and other impatient globalists on youtube and TED, and now they think, it’s their turn to move and save the world.
I actually now start to understand at least in the CEP case what’s going on, why they make global conclusions from their research: Their purpose is to make an impact on educational policy and they keep track of their impact.
Just open http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Lewis%5FPaper%5FEvolution%5F1%2E27%2E12%2Epdf and search for the word “impact”.
It’s interesting to read the section “GETTING SUPPORT FOR THE WORK” on page 4 to see how the various grants influence the work they do.
Well-written piece on Huffington Post now detailing common teacher gripes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html
It indeed is a great article, ponderosa.