Archives for the month of: May, 2016
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Kentucky: First to Adopt Common Core, Achievement Gap Widens

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
26

The Hechinger Report reviews what has happened in Kentucky, the first state to adopt the Common Core standards.

 

In the first year, test scores plummeted. They have started to inch up, but the achievement gap between white and black students has grown larger.

 

“Kentucky stepped into the national spotlight in 2010 when it became the first state to adopt the standards after the Obama administration offered federal money to help pay the costs. (Over 40 other states and the District of Columbia eventually adopted the Common Core.) On Kentucky’s previous state tests, tied to its old standards, over 70 percent of elementary school students scored at a level of “proficiency” or better in both reading and math. Once the state introduced the Common Core-aligned tests in the spring of 2012, that percentage dropped 28 points in reading (to 48 percent) and 33 points in math (to 40 percent), according to the Kentucky Department of Education. Middle and high school students’ scores also dropped.

 

“Of course, we knew that the tougher standards had to be followed up with extra attention to students who were behind,” said Sonja Brookins Santelises, vice president of K-12 policy at the Education Trust.

 

“Scores have been edging up ever since. By spring 2015, 54 percent of Kentucky elementary school students were proficient in the English language arts and 49 percent were proficient in math.

 

“Despite that improvement, within those numbers are hidden divisions that have existed for decades. Breaking the scores down shows that African-American students fare much worse than their white peers.

 

“In spring 2015, in the elementary grades, 33 percent of black students were proficient in reading, versus 58 percent of white students; in math, the breakdown was 31 percent to 52 percent, according to Kentucky Department of Education figures.

 

“And those gaps, in many cases, have widened, according to an analysis of state testing data by The Hechinger Report and the Courier-Journal.”

 

Education Trust, which has received many millions from the Gates Foundation, is one of the strongest supporters of the Common Core standards, which were funded by Gates. Since Education Trust has long been the leading exponent of the view that raising standards and making tests more rigorous would close the achievement gap, the situation in Kentucky is a bit awkward for them.

 

There is still no evidence, despite the billions spent on Common Core, that it raises achievement or closes gaps between races. Common sense would suggest that making tests harder would cause the kids who are already scoring low to score even lower. A student who can’t clear a four-foot bar is going to be in big trouble if you raise the bar to six feet.

 

But Common Core was never related to common sense. It was about a theory, which decreed that all students would one day be college-and-career-ready if school work was more rigorous. And this far, the theory is failing.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Kentucky, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: What Happened to New Orleans?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
5

You may have read that Louisiana’s famous, controversial, ballyhooed Recovery School District has been dissolved. Eleven years after Hurricane Katrina, the district comprised of charter schools is being returned to the districts from which they were drawn. Most are in New Orleans and will be returned to the Orleans Parish School Board.

 

Can it be true? Are the charter champions really giving up their struggle? John White knows. He is the State Commissioner who regularly boasts about the miracle of the RSD. But he is not telling.

 

Michael Klonsky has his doubts. So does Karran Harper Royal.

 

 

Mercedes Schneider has written two versions.

 

Here is a brief overview.

 

Here is her close analysis of the law. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Louisiana, New Orleans

Michael Elliott: The Teachers Who Changed My Life

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
3

Michael Elliot is a film-maker who gives generously of his time to help parents organize against high-stakes testing. He has made numerous superb videos that express the views of parents about public schools, teachers, children, and testing.

 

In this video (and article), Elliott explains why he is so passionate about teachers. His life was changed for the better by two high school teachers of theater arts. He describes himself as a lost teenager, with low test scores and little ambition. He happened into the school theater, and one of the teachers invited him to pitch in. She said, “Pick up a broom and start sweeping.” The arts and his teachers literally saved him.

 

Here are some of the videos that Michael has made for parent groups. See here and here and here.

 

 

Categories Arts Education, Teachers

British Teacher: I Quit!

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
22

 

So you think that only American teachers are disgusted by high-stakes testing, privatization, and loss of autonomy. If you think so, you are wrong.

 

Read this open letter from a British teacher to Nicky Morgan, the Secretary of State for Education from the Conservative party.

 

 

“Please accept this as written notice of my resignation from my role as Assistant Head and class teacher. It is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter. I know you’ve struggled to listen to and understand teachers in the past so I’m going to try and make this as clear as possible. In the six short years I have been teaching your party has destroyed the Education system. Obliterated it. Ruined it. It is broken.

 

“The first thing I learnt when I started teaching in 2010 is that teaching is bloody hard work. It’s a 60 hour week only half of which is spent doing the actual teaching. It eats into the rest of your life both mentally and physically. If it’s not exercise books and resources taking over your lounge and kitchen table it’s worrying about results or about little Ahmed’s home life keeping you awake at 2am. I’ve never minded this. I’ve always been happy to give my life over to teaching as I believed it to be such a noble cause. Besides we’re not the only profession who work long hours. What I didn’t realise back in 2010 is that the job would get harder each year.

 

“First you introduced the phonics check. I was in Year 1 that year and continued teaching phonics to the best of my ability. I didn’t spend much time teaching children to differentiate between real words and “non-words” because I was focused on, you know, teaching them to read. I sat and watched child after child fail that ridiculous “screening” because they read the word “strom” as “storm”. The following year I taught to the test. We spent weeks practising “words” and “non words” and sure enough our results soared.

 

“My second year brought with it the changes to the Ofsted framework and the obsession with data began. Oh the sodding data game! The game that refuses to acknowledge how long a child has spoken English or whether or not they have books or even food at home. The data game changed things. Attainment in Maths and English was no longer just important, it would almost entirely decide the judgement made about your school. Oh and whilst we’re on the judgements “Satisfactory” was no longer satisfactory – it was the far more sinister sounding: “Requires Improvement.”

 

“From then on things began to unravel at an alarming rate. The threat of forced academisation hung over each set of SATs results and the floor targets continued to rise. Gove cut the calculator paper (because calculators are cheating) and introduced SPaG. Grammar was no longer for writing – it was for grammar. Around the same time he also froze teachers’ pay and doubled the contributions we would have to make to our pensions. Teachers were suddenly worse off than they had been the previous year and under more pressure than ever before.

 

“So teaching became harder still and life in schools started to change. There were new hoops to jump through and somehow we just about managed to get through them. It meant sacrificing everything that wasn’t SPaG, English or Maths but we did it – we learnt how to play the game. Outside of the safety of our schools though there was a bigger game being played – one that we had no chance of winning: the status of the teaching profession was being eroded away. There was the incessant name calling and smears in the media from “the blob” to “the enemies of promise” and, of course, “soft bigots” with “low expectations”. You drip fed the message: teachers were not to be trusted and it worked: the public stopped trusting us.

 

“As bleak as it sounds, those years look like a golden age compared to what we have to deal with now….

 

“This year brought with it our greatest challenge to date – the new assessments. For most of the year we were completely in the dark. We had no idea what form the tests would take and how they would be scored (we’re still not entirely sure on the latter.) There was also the introduction of the SPaG test for 7-year-olds (which was sadly scrapped because of your own department’s incompetence.) The criteria for assessing writing has changed dramatically. Gone is the best fit approach and what has replaced it is an arbitrary list of criteria of the things children should be able to do – some of which are grammatical rules that your department have made up . Year 6 were tested on their ability to read long words and remember the names of different tenses. Whatever foundation subjects were still being taught have had to be shelved in favour of lesson after lesson on the past progressive tense.

 

 

“In some ways I don’t feel like a teacher at all any more. I prepare children for tests and, if I’m honest, I do it quite well. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of as it’s not as if I’ve provided my class with any transferable, real life skills during the process. They’ve not enjoyed it, I’ve not enjoyed it but we’ve done it: and one thing my children know how to do is answer test questions. They’ve written raps about how to answer test questions, they’ve practised test questions at home and test questions in school, they’ve had extra tuition to help them understand the test questions. They can do test questions – they just haven’t had time to do anything else….

 

 

“I know I’m not alone in feeling like this. A recent survey found that nearly 50% of teachers are considering leaving in the next 5 years. Just within my own family my fiance, my sister and my sister-in-law have all quit the profession in the last 12 weeks. Rather than address this issue you’ve decided to allow schools to recruit unqualified teachers to fill the gaps. The final nail in the profession’s coffin. I don’t want to stop teaching. I love teaching but I have no interest in being part of this game any more.

 

 

“Worse than being a teacher in this system is being a child at the mercy of it and to them I say this: we tried our best to fight these changes: we rallied, we went on strike, we campaigned and made as much noise as we could. I’m sorry it didn’t work and I’m sorry that I’m not strong enough to keep working in this system but as I’ve told many of you many times: when someone is being mean to you – you ask them to stop. If they continue to be mean you walk away. It is now time for me to walk away. I’ll keep up the fight though.

 

 

“Maybe in time things will change and, when that time comes, I can come back to the job I loved but until then sorry Nicky – I’m out.”

 

 

Categories Education Reform, International, Teachers

UK: National Tests Leaked online–TWICE

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
14

This year’s testing season in England was disrupted by the leak of national examinations, not once, but twice!

 

The first leak was blamed on a “rogue marker” at Pearson, someone who got early access to the tests.

 

The second leak was the national test for students in their sixth year, 11-12 year-olds.

 
“The Department for Education suffered a second major embarrassment over its controversial exams for primary school pupils, after answers for a test due to be sat by all 10- and 11-year-olds in England were leaked online.

 

 

“Nearly 600,000 year 6 state school pupils are to sit the test of spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) on Tuesday, but it emerged that both the test paper and its answers were posted to a website the day before by the department’s contractor, Pearson.

 

 

“The error means that the answers – such as lists of words pupils were to be asked to spell – could have easily been downloaded, copied and distributed a day ahead of the crucial test, potentially allowing parents and teachers to teach pupils the correct answers.

 

 

“Labour accused the education department of compromising the test, which was already a subject of national protests last week by parents concerned that primary-age pupils were being placed under too much pressure, and authors including Philip Pullman claimed the tests were too demanding.

 

 

“It is the second time in just the space of three weeks that the department has been embarrassed in its attempts to impose tougher Spag tests on primary school pupils.

 

 

“Last month the scheduled Spag test for six- and seven-year-olds at key stage 1 had to be scrapped after the education department’s testing agency mistakenly included the actual test paper within a bundle of practice material published three months earlier.”

 

A new international industry emerges: test security. Better locks needed on the barn doors.

Categories Education Reform

UK: Test Worship is Out of Control

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
24

Stephanie Northen, teacher and journalist, enjoyed the spectacle of the Education Minister Nick Gibb failing to answer a question taken from the exam for 11-year-old children as he defends the value of the test on air. And she  rightly ridicules the obsession with rigor that emanates from government officials.

 

 

She wrote this article as the students in England were taking the national exam known as SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar). Northen calls it “Rigor SPAG.”

 

 

 

She writes:

 

 

“Amid the gloom of unsavoury Sats and enforced academisation, comes one delicious moment of joy. Schools minister Nick Gibb doesn’t know his subordinating conjunctions from his prepositions. He can’t answer one of the questions he has set children. Despite this woeful (in his eyes) ignorance – though, tellingly, when his mistake is pointed out he says ‘This isn’t about me’ – he has managed to become and to remain a government minister. Need one say any more about the pointlessness of the Spag test?

 

 

“At least by this time next week it will all be over. The country’s 10 and 11-year-olds will be free to enjoy their final few weeks at primary school, liberated from the government’s oh so very rigorous key stage 2 tests. Like them, I am tired of fractions, tired of conjunctions, tired, in fact, of being told of the need for ‘rigour’. The Education Secretary and the Chief Inspector need to wake up to the fact that rigour is a nasty little word, suggestive of starch and thin lips. Its lack of humour and humanity makes parents and teachers recoil. Check out its origins in one of those dictionaries you recommend children use.

 

 

“Hopefully the weight of protest here, echoing many in America, will force some meaningful concessions from the ‘rigour revolutionaries’ in time for next year’s tests. Either that, or everyone with a genuine interest in helping young children learn will stand up and say No. In the words of CPRT Priority 8, Assessment must ‘enhance learning as well as test it’, ‘support rather than distort the curriculum’ and ‘pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects’. The opposite is happening at the moment in the name of rigour. It’s not rigour – but it is deadly.

 

 

“Of course, the memory of subordinating conjunctions and five-digit subtraction by decomposition will fade for the current Year 6s – and for Nick Gibb – unless they turn out to have failed the tests. Mrs Morgan [the Conservative Party’s Secretary of State for education] will decide just how rigorous she wants to be in the summer. Politics will determine where she draws the line between happy and sad children. Politics will decide the proportion she brands as failures at age 11, forced to do the tests again at secondary school.

 

 

“But still the children have these few carefree weeks where primary school can go back to doing what primary school does best – encouraging enquiry into and enjoyment of the world around us. Well, no. Teachers still have to assess writing. And if my classroom is anything to go by, writing has been sidelined over the past few weeks in the effort to cram a few more scraps of worthless knowledge into young brains yearning to rule the country.

 

 

“So how do we teachers judge good writing? Sadly, that’s an irrelevant question. Don’t bother drawing up a mental list of, for example, exciting plot, imaginative setting, inventive language, mastery of different genres. No, teachers must assess using Mrs Morgan’s leaden criteria, criteria that would never cross the mind of a Man Booker prize judge. Marlon James, last year’s Booker winner and a teacher of creative writing, was praised for a story that ‘traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined – and questions asked’. No one commented on James’s ability to ‘use a range of cohesive devices, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs’.

 

 

“The dead hand of rigour decrees that we judge children’s ability to employ ‘passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’. We have to check that they use ‘adverbs, preposition phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail, qualification and precision’. (Never mind thrilling, moving or frightening, I do love a story to be detailed, precise and qualified.) We forget to read what the children have actually written in the hunt for ‘inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis [used] mostly correctly, and some correct use of semi-colons, dashes, colons and hyphens’. Finally, it goes without saying that young children must ‘spell most words correctly’.”

 

 

 

 

Categories International, Testing

Bill Gates’ Summer Reading List

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2016 //
94

Bill Gates shares with us his summer reading list.

 

What? Nothing about education? He is our national education czar but apparently doesn’t like to read about education.

 

Please readers: suggest your favorite titles. Let’s create a summer reading list for Bill Gates to educate him about education.

 

Here is a start:

 

Anthony Cody, The Educator and the Oligarch: Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

New York: Kids as Guinea Pigs for Testing Company

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2016 //
19

So you thought testing season was over!

 

Nope, now it is field test season, when test vendor Questar tries out its questions on a trial basis, to see how they work in practice. Some parents think their children should be paid to do the work. Others say, “Opt out.”

 

More instructional time lost.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing

Laura Chapman on the Data Monster That Devours Privacy

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2016 //
11

I recently posted about a new partnership between the National PTA and the Data Quality Campaign. In response, our wonderful reader-researcher Laura Chapman dug deep into the money flow and produced this commentary:

 

 

Ah data. You can be sure the PTA is uninformed about the data being collected with their tax dollars. Here are some not widely publicized facts.

 

Between 2005 and early 2011, the Gates’ Foundation invested $75 million in a major advocacy campaign for data gathering, aided by the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and The Education Trust—most of these groups recipients of Gates money. During the same period, the Gates Foundation also awarded grants totaling $390,493,545 for projects to gather data and build systems for reporting on teacher effectiveness. This multi-faceted campaign, called the Teacher Student Data Link (TSDL) envisioned the linked data serving eight purposes:
1. Determine which teachers help students become college-ready and successful,
2. Determine characteristics of effective educators,
3. Identify programs that prepare highly qualified and effective teachers,
4. Assess the value of non-traditional teacher preparation programs,

 

5. Evaluate professional development programs,
6. Determine variables that help or hinder student learning,
7. Plan effective assistance for teachers early in their career, and
8. Inform policy makers of best value practices, including compensation.
Gates and his friends intended to document and rate the work of teachers and a bit more: They wanted data that required major restructuring of the work of teachers so everything about the new system of education would be based on data-gathering and surveillance.

 

The TSDL system ( in use in many states) required that all courses be identified by standards for achievement and alphanumeric codes for data-entry. All responsibilities for learning had to be assigned to one or more “teachers of record” in charge of a student or class. A teacher of record was assigned a unique identifier (think barcode) for an entire career in teaching. A record would be generated whenever a teacher of record has some specified proportion of responsibility for a student’s learning activities.

 

Learning activities had to be defined by the performance measures (e.g., cut scores for proficiency) for each particular standard for every subject and grade level. The TSDL system was designed to enable period-by-period tracking of teachers and students every day; including “tests, quizzes, projects, homework, classroom participation, or other forms of day-to-day assessments and progress measures”—a level of surveillance that proponents claimed was comparable to business practices (TSDL, 2011, “Key Components”).

 

The system was and is intended to keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty. Why? All of this data could be used to determine the “best value” investments to make in education, with monitoring and changes in policies to ensure improvements in outcomes. Data analyses would include as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers.

 

The Gates-funded TSDL campaign added resources to a parallel federal initiative. Between 2006 and 2015, the US Department of Education (USDE) has invested nearly $900 million in the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program. Almost every state has received multi-year grants to standardize data on education. Operated by the Institute of Education Sciences, the SLDS program is: “designed to aid state education agencies in developing and implementing longitudinal data systems.

 

What is the point of the SLDS program? “These systems are intended to enhance the ability of States to efficiently and accurately manage, analyze, and use education data, including individual student records…to help States, districts, schools, and teachers make data-driven decisions to improve student learning, as well as facilitate research to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps” (USDE, 2011, Overview).

 

The most recent data-mongering activity from USDE, rationalized as “helping keep students safe and improving their learning environments” is a suite of on-line School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS). The surveys will allow states, districts, and schools to “collect and act on reliable, nationally-validated school climate data in real-time,” (as soon as it is entered).

 

The School Climate Surveys are for students in grades 5-12, instructional staff, non-instructional staff in the schools they attend and parents/guardians. Data is stored on local data systems, not by USDE. Even so, but the aim is to have national “benchmarks” online by 2017 for local and state comparisons with national scores.

 

Student surveys (73 questions) offer scores for the entire school disaggregated by gender, grade level, ethnicity (Hispanic/Latino or not), and race (five mentioned, combinations allowed).
The Instructional Staff Survey has 82 Questions. Responses can be disaggregated by gender, grade level assignment, ethnicity, race, teaching assignment (special education or not), years working at this school (1-3, 4-9, 10-19, 20 or more).
The Non-instructional Staff Survey has 103 questions, but 21 are only for the principal. Demographic information for disaggregated scores is the same as for s instructional staff)
The Parent Survey has 43 questions, for item-by-item analysis, without any sub-scores or and summary scores. Demographic information is requested for gender, ethnicity, and race.

 

These four surveys address three domains of school climate: Engagement, Safety, and Environment, and thirteen topics (constructs).
Engagement topics are: 1. Cultural and linguistic competence, 2. Relationships, and 3. School participation.
Safety topics are: 4. Emotional safety, 5. Physical safety, 6. Bullying/cyberbullying, 7. Substance abuse, and 8. Emergency readiness/management (item-by-item analysis, no summary score)

 

Environment topics are: 9. Physical environment, 10. Instructional environment, 11. Physical health (information for staff, but no scores for students) 12. Mental health, and 13. Discipline.

 

Almost all questions call for marking answers “yes” or “no,” or with the scale “strongly agree,” agree,” ”disagree” “strongly disagree.” Some questions about drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse ask for one of these responses: “Not a problem,” Small problem,” “ Somewhat a problem,” “Large problem.” None of the questions can be answered “Do not know.”

 

 

I have looked at the survey questions, developed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and concluded they are not ready for prime time. Here are a few of the problems.

 

This whole project looks like a rush job. The time for public comment about this project was extremely short. USDE did not change flaws in the piloted surveys, claiming that there was no budget for revisions.

 

The flaws are numerous. Many of the survey questions assume that respondents have an all encompassing and informed basis for offering judgments about school practices and policies. Some questions are so poorly crafted they incorporate several well-known problems in survey design–including more than one important idea, referring to abstract concepts, and assuming responders have sufficient knowledge. Here is an example from the student survey with all three problems. “Question 8. This school provides instructional materials (e.g., textbooks, handouts) that reflect my cultural background, ethnicity, and identity.”

 

 

Many questions have no frame of reference for a personal judgment:

 

 

From the student survey:

 

“17. Students respect one another.”

“18. Students like one another.“
Other questions call for inferences about the thinking of others.

 

“50. Students at this school think it is okay to get drunk.”

 

Some questions assert values, then ask for agreement or disagreement.

 

In the parents survey,

 

“7. This school communicates how important it is to respect students of all sexual orientations.”
Others assume omniscience:

 

“41. School rules are applied equally to all students.” Some questions seem to hold staff responsible for circumstances beyond their immediate control. 74. [Principal Only] The following are a problem in the neighborhood where this school is located: garbage, litter, or broken glass in the street or road, on the sidewalks, or in yards. ( Strongly agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly disagree).

 

 

Overall, the surveys and the examples of data analysis they provides are unlikely to produce “actionable interventions” as intended. The questions are so poorly crafted that they are likely to generate misleading data with many schools cast in a very bad light. See, for example, page 26 data from this source. https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/sites/default/files/EDSCLS%20Pilot%20Debrief_FINAL.pdf

 

 

The responsibility for privacy rests with the schools, districts and states, but everything in on line. A brief inspection of the background questions should raise major questions about privacy, especially for students who identify themselves with enough detail–gender, ethnicity, race, grade level (20 data points minimum)–to produce survey answers that match only one person or a very few individuals.

 

 

My advice, not just to the PTA: Stay away from these data monsters. They drown everyone in data points. Results from the School Climate Surveys are processed to make colorful charts and graphs, but they are based of fuzzy and flawed “perceptions” and unwarranted assumptions. The surveys offer 63 data points for profiling the participants, but only four possible responses to each of 283 questions of dubious technical merit.

 

 

Perhaps most important for parents: Some questions seem to breech the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for topics in student surveys, especially questions pertaining to “illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior.” More on FERPA at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OM/fpco/ppra/index.html

 

It would be nice to think that FERPA really protects student privacy. But former Secretary Duncan loosened the FERPA protections in 2011, to make it easier for outsiders to obtain student data. That was the premise behind the Gates’ Foundation’s inBloom project, which was set to collect personally identifiable data from several states and districts and store it in a cloud managed by Amazon. That project was brought down by parental objections, which caused the states and districts to back out.

Categories Data, Data and Data Mining, Privacy

Good News! Hawaii Drops Test-Based Teacher Evaluation!

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2016 //
21

The test-based teacher evaluation that was a hallmark of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top is slowly sinking into the ocean (or the desert).

 

Not only did New York teacher Sheri Lederman have her rating overturned by a judge who said the state’s evaluation system was “arbitrary and capricious” (it was designed and defended by State Commissioner John King, now Secretary of Education), but Hawaii just eliminated test-based teacher evaluation. Hawaii won a Race to the Top grant and was required by the rules of the competition to adopt a test-based teacher evaluation system. They did, it never worked, it angered teachers, and it is gone.

 

The state Board of Education unanimously approved recommendations Tuesday effectively removing standardized test scores as a requirement in the measurement of teacher performance, according to a press release from the state Department of Education.

 

 

The recommendations, which were subsequently approved by Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi, will offer more flexibility to incorporate and weigh different components of teacher performance evaluation, although the option to use test scores in performance evaluation remains.

 

 

The recommendations originated from members of a joint committee between the Hawaii State Teachers Association and DOE, established by the most recent collective bargaining agreement in 2013. Vice Chairperson of the BOE Brian De Lima said that since then, the committee has conducted ongoing reviews and improvements to the evaluation system.

 

 

“There was a continuous evolution to make things better so teachers don’t spend all their time involved in the evaluation process, particularly when they’ve already been (rated) highly effective or effective,” De Lima said. “And the teachers being mentored who may need additional work, they’re getting the attention and the support so they stay interested in remaining in the profession — the most important profession.”

 

 

Formerly, teachers in Hawaii were beholden to curriculum and standards developed with little or none of their input by entities HSTA Secretary-Treasurer Amy Perruso described as “corporate philanthropists.” These entities, namely the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, have had sway in setting teacher performance standards, developed testing for those standards and profiting from the system, she said.

 

 

Teaching effectiveness, then, was rated on student understanding of curriculum teachers themselves didn’t develop but were forced by the administration to implement. Performance of teachers was also rated on aggregated test scores of every student participant — the majority of whom individual teachers never had in their own classrooms.

 

 

“The teacher evaluation system served as a control mechanism,” said Perruso, who also teaches social studies at Mililani High School on Oahu. “If you don’t follow the guidelines, you won’t be rated as ‘effective.’ That’s why what happened (Tuesday) was so critical. It gives teachers back a modicum of power. We’re no longer completely held under the thumb of principals because they can’t use test scores against us anymore.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Hawaii, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)
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