Our valued reader Laura Chapman had a long career as a teacher, curriculum developer, and consultant in the arts. It is always a pleasure to post one of her careful essays. A teacher from Hawaii recently wrote to ask if she could read Laura’s research on SLOs, as that is her state’s preferred method of evaluating teachers.
Laura had previously posted this study on Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s blog Vamboozled.
So if you want to know more about SLO and its relation to management by objectives, read Laura’s work.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In response to new rules regarding teachers of “non-tested” subject areas, the majority of school districts in NYS are moving to the use of “distributed” shared scores. Under the Common Core moratorium, about 90% of NY teachers fall into the “non-tested” subject category and are being placed into the same SLO. This shared SLO will use a set of pooled Regents test scores and will account for 50% of teacher evaluations.
The farce is complete.
APPR in NYS has become an abject embarrassment and of course has zero credibility within the profession.
Heck of a job Andy!
The good news is that the 90% of teachers in school districts using “distributed” scores are being protected through the use of teacher friendly SLOs. The last thing that a school district wants is having 90% of their teachers being rated “developing” or “ineffective” and on a TIP plan. Safety in numbers, stupidity for all.
“Good news” for some.
If you teach a Regents course like I do you have to use the exam, so our SLO is based on that and only that.
Hooray! I’m part of the 10%!
So am I RH. At least your test is limited to the content of your ES curriculum. My Intermediate Level Science test covers a four year comprehensive curriculum originally developed as a middle level program evaluation.. So us 8th grade science teachers are on the bottom rung of the 10% ladder.
There should we a sign over the entrance of every school in NYS:
“WELCOM to the RABBIT HOLE”
E
Funny one, Rage!
Every teacher in NYS who signs their junk science evaluation is complicit in the farce. We should all respectfully and professionally decline to sign.
DECLINE to SIGN! Join the movement of professional educators who stand against the misuse of test scores in teacher evaluations.
And while we’re at it we can all send an unsigned evaluation to Governor Cuomo. Just mark it, “Junk Science – Return to Sender”
Here in Ohio at many schools, it is sign or walk.
I found SLOs to be another useless waste of time dreamed up by our clueless, anti-teacher Republican legislators. I would completely ignore any and all rankings from our State regime and throw them in the trash without opening. The scores I calculated ranged wildly from 1 (I stink) to 5 (I walk on pedagogical water). Ohioans think they are getting some scientific system from the esteemed Battelle for Kids, but the gullible, uninterested populace just follows the herd.
“sign or walk”?
If a teacher refuses to sign their teacher evaluation the school district would fire them? Even if they “walk on pedagogical water”?
I doubt they would have a legal leg to stand on. Has anyone in Ohio tested this empty threat?
Not all schools have due process and all unions in Ohio have been reduced to bystander status. So to test by refusing is like any other at-will job where an employee violates the all-encompassing employee handbook. And since Kasich took over with the drastic cuts to schools by the Republicans, the number of openings have dwindled. It isn’t pretty and most teachers I talk to hate the anti-education regime now in power, but things change. Many outside Ohio have no idea how bad this state has deteriorated under Republicans.
It is hard to comprehend, but Ohio really has no interest in improving education. The goals are all ideological and political. I watched plenty of great teachers be forced out or just get tired of the abuse and walk. The state leaders are focused on a witch hunt to root out all the perceived “bad teachers” and implement a harsh, top-down management organization built on business models of the 1920’s as they fumble around with education policy.
The truth is, without support of the public towards teachers and schools, refusing to sign is like leading Pickett’s charge while everyone else decides to sit it out at the foot of the Gettysburg hill. But things would change if people would stop voting against their own interest.
I have no words for the situation in Ohio, just sympathy.
Believe me, I’ve raised heck over SLOs and pushed the limits to the point of being warned. But all of this reform in any state will require parents and voters to stop being gullible sheep and actually support teachers. Right now in Ohio, the anti-teacher sentiments are strong and few truly value education, willing to accept the new normal or just get by “on their own”. Anti-intellectualism is popular and found on bumper stickers next to the stars and bars and don’t tread on me symbol.
As long as Kasich does nothing, his approval rating remains above 50%. But never fear, he is trying to appear reasonable to have a run at the 2020 presidency. Ohio’s decline could become national.
The same is true in my Right to Work state. We have no choice but to follow these draconian rules if we need to keep our jobs. New York is a minority here in that it still has union protection. I know that the New York union is awful, but at least SOME protection is there.
I remember Obama addressing issues about Medicare in the same way. He said, “We will no longer pay for the number of procedures; we will pay for outcomes.” The Feds cut the reimbursements to doctors so low that they started dropping out of Medicare. The big compromise is they expect patients to pay more. This is very unfair to the elderly poor who may opt out of care rather than having to pay a bill they can’t afford. All these metrics do is to reassign responsibility, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the metrics are valid or not.
Management By Objective: the classic takedown is by W. Edwards Deming.
From THE ESSENTIAL DEMING: LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES FROM THE FATHER OF QUALITY (2013, p. 85). The first citation is under the heading “Faulty Practice”; the second facing one, “Better Practice.”
[start#1]
M.B.O., management by the numbers. (Do it, I don’t care how you do it. Just do it.)
A company will of course have aims; likewise an individual will have aims But the aim should be improvement of the system, not a number.
There are of course facts of life. Example: if we don’t decrease faulty product to 5% by the end of the year, we shall not be here. This is not M.B.O.
[end#1]
[start#2]
A better way is to improve the system to get better results in the future. One will only get what the system will deliver. Any attempt to beat the system will cause loss.
[end#2]
For a contemporary example of MBO, see the comments by retired teacher just above. Then consider that moving an abstract number up or down trumps providing the resources to actually do something useful and meaningful.
😎
P.S. Some perspective: W. Edwards Deming died in 1993.
Deming’s ideas were ignored by American business leaders until they were alarmed at the success Deming was having in Japan. American business is myopic and reactionary.
Vale Math: you are too kind. Just look at the wonders wrought by “business/managerial practices” applied to public education.
Although, truth in labeling, the term should be prefaced by the modifier “worst.”
😏
Reminds me of the observation attributed to Talleyrand re the restored Bourbon dynasty:
“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
😎
Love the quote. The sad fact is American business has forgotten how to lead and innovate. No longer do organizations try to grow their workers or think strategically. Members of most organizations are now viewed as cells on a spreadsheet. Professionals used to enjoy, depending on the occupation, sabbaticals, tuition reimbursement, vacations, freedom to innovate. There was some trust that professionals could be relied on and valued. Somewhere along the line, American business began to focus solely on costs and the quick buck and look no further than quarterly reports. And business can’t just keep blaming teachers as an excuse for poor management practices and the decline of America’s economy and global standing. The “gig economy” just means more inequality and exploitation of Americans. Congress goes though the motions of talking tough to the execs at Wells Fargo or Mylan destroying our country, but nothing is ever done.
Vale Math, these changes in business practices did not follow from philosophical change or whim, but in response to historical changes in world markets. There is an article here that expresses your viewpoint. The first 8 or 10 BI comments explore why, & what might eventually force change for the better.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lets-stop-maximizing-profit-and-start-maximizing-value-2012-12
MBO created a maze of paperwork that one expert dubbed a product of “bureaupathology.”
West, G. E. (1977). Bureaupathology and the failure of MBO. Human Resource Management, 16(2), 33-40.
In my district, the SLOs are written FOR us. We have no choice in the matter. I have to give these essay prompts that the district has written. They are poorly written, with errors and terrible maps. One of them is completely plagiarized from the AP test. But I have no choice–I have to give eight of these essays a year, with no changes allowed. It’s incredibly time consuming, and these exercises, and the preparation for them, are truly a waste of the precious time (which has been cut in the last few years) I have in my social studies classes. I have issued written and verbal critiques of the many problems these prompts contain, but no one in power will listen. The least I can do it to NOT tie these essays to student grades, which I don’t.
So are you being evaluated on student “growth” in writing or student “growth” in social studies content? How is your baseline for comparison generated? Do you get to score the essays? Have you considered a move to NY? Our teacher shortage is on the horizon.
We have to score the essays. I have NO IDEA how they are determining “growth.” No one has told us that. We’re supposed to make sure that all of the scores are loaded into our district grading system, and I’m assuming that they can access that. Technically, they can’t use the “growth” or whatever in our evaluations, as that was made illegal by the Utah state legislature earlier this year. So I don’t really understand why we’re having to do this in the first place.
This is the thing that drives me wild about the SLO systems, the incredible gobs of time it eats out of teachers’ lesson planning time — not to mention the add’l student testing time for yr-beginning & yr-end mini-assessments in every subject reqd by our district’s Marzano SLO– tacked on to the onerous [Christie-mandated] PARCC assessments in NJ which are metastasizing as we speak. And I’m not even a pubsch teacher, & my kids graduated before this! Just a frustrated taxpayer paying way too much in property taxes, watching ed-reform debilitate the excellent pubsch sys that has kept my prop value high even during slumps, & that did a fantastic job educating my kids 1992-2010…
I’m an art/tech teacher. I had to write two ‘type 3’ SLO assessments for two of my art classes. I made up the tests, I made up the rubric to grade them, I taught them the material (color theory to both 2nd and 5th grade) they all passed the test by the percentage I GUESSED they would at the beginning of the year….and I was told on the very last day of school, that too many students had passed I needed to make my assessment more rigorous or set my expectations higher (when I guessed what how much they were going to improve).
So, basically I failed because I taught the students color theory (color circle, complementary & analogous colors, warm, cool, primary, secondary and tertiary colors….) and they meet my SLO. It is sooooooooo silly of course they passed, I made up the test and taught them the material, I’M AN ART TEACHER, I DID MY JOB…but not according to my boss.
This year, in NY we can only use teacher written local exams IF they are approved by NYSED. This ridiculous requirement is a logistical nightmare and explains why so many districts have decided to go with distributed scores. They didn’t trust teachers to create fair and accurate exams – and they also realized how “specialized” and “precise” our test prep practices could/had become.
The SLO process is rigged and conceptually flawed to produce this result. Teachers whose students do well on an end of year test are always judged to have set standards for performance too low.
It’s pretty funny, isn’t it? They mandate an MBO-type system which by definition is easily gamed, then scold you for gaming it. ‘Gaming’ apparently = setting a standard all can meet w/appropriate pedagogy in time available, then successfully executing. [But isn’t that what they want? Setting a std & making sure all achieve to that std??]
Soooo– I guess you’re supposed to come up w/some kind of bell curve-biased set of expectations that meets their edumetric concept of ‘how students perform’, then execute it. i.e., set your std a little too high, thus insuring you have a spectrum including winners & losers… ???
I want to add… Taxpayers/ pubsch voters have no clue about SLO’s mandated by state DOEds!
I only know what I know about the Danielson sys as applied on the ground in 2012 from my upstate-NY-sis, a NYS pubsch admin… & about our local NJ district Marzano sys as applied on the ground in 2014 from local teacher [choral colleagues] convos overheard in the ladies’ room during rehearsal.
In my area, voters are active attendees at local school board meetings. They are interested & engaged. Had they the faintest grasp of the burdensome SLO bureaucratic ppwk & assessments reqd by NJ DOEd, they would protest. But our present Supt of Schools is a GAGA (go along to get along), so all we hear about is how our students are [despite the unspecified hurdles of Christie’s ed-reform mandates] maintaining a superior position relative to other NJ districts.
In times past (early 2000’s), our then-Supt of Schools appealed the then-new reqt for the NJ HSPA [NJ’s first highschool exit exam], pointing out that our already-hi proportion of hisch grads had hi admission rate to colleges– & thus the costly reqt to administer this new test was simply adding cost w/o cause… He was overruled by the NJ DOEd.
My point is simply that those of you who have active democratic Biards of Ed need to make your voices heard, regarding SLO, PARCC, etc.
In my teaching life I write and perform in class song parodies related to earth science (of course) and the teaching life.
Here is a link to a little ditty I produced about four years ago when the SLO madness began.
If you like the Blues Brothers version of “Soul Man” here is my parody that I call “SLO Man.
[audio src="http://www.nscsd.org/uploads/GFLICK/slo%20man%20draft%202.mp3" /]
…and I’m not sure why the link didn’t post correctly.
So one more try…
S.L.O. Man
Thank you. We don’t seem to have our Damn Poet anymore. How about being our Song Man?
rockhound2: Thanks for the link.
2old2teach: what you said.
😎
Thank you, and I’ll accept that title, with the understanding that I am nowhere as prolific as our resident poet.
Don’t hide your light under a barrel.
Enjoyed this, Rockhound, keep on truckin’!
I’m a retired art teacher. I am very excited that you and Laura Chapman will be speaking at the NAEA 2017 Conference in NYC this Spring. Years ago I attended a talk Laura gave on what NCLB means for art teachers- she blew the audience away! A call to arms for all to wake up and see what “politics” is doing to education! I continue fighting for truth in education in my retirement. You, Diane, are an inspiration. You and Laura together?! I can’t wait!
Lorraine,
I can’t wait to join Laura Chapman at #NAEA 2017
Geeze. gate and friends make Orwell turn over in his grave.
They turn truth into lies to suit their purpose.
A genuine learning objective is ar the center of every lesson. Why would a teacher do anything if there was no learning to be accomplished.
In 1963, given no materials, no books, nothing but a room, I really needed to know what those kids had to be able to do in June.
I can see that when I talk about authentic objectives for learning, I am referring to a world that has evaporated, and the top-down definitions of everything has created SLOs for their own purposes.
Sigh.
I remember one science Learning objective, was to demonstrate the effect of friction.
I put sand on the sliding pond, and the kids then investigated learned the properties needed to reduce friction. There was no VAM test to prove me effective. No ParCC and no alphabet of mandated policies.