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In Praise of Linda Darling-Hammond

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
7

One of the wisest and sanest voices in the nation on the subject of teacher quality, teaching quality and teacher evaluation is Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. Linda has been involved for many years in studying these issues and working directly with teachers to improve practice. During the presidential campaign of 2008, she was Barack Obama’s spokesman and chief adviser on education, but was elbowed aside by supporters of Arne Duncan when the campaign ended. The Wall Street hedge fund managers who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform (they use the term “Democrats” to disguise the reactionary quality of their goals) recommended Duncan to the newly elected president, and you know who emerged on top.

Linda, being the diligent scholar that she is, continued her work and continued to write thoughtful studies about how to improve teaching.

After the 2008 election, the issue that predominated all public discussion was how to evaluate teachers. This was no accident. Consider that in the fall of 2008, the Gates Foundation revealed its decision to drop its program of breaking up large high schools. Recall that the foundation had invested $2 billion in breaking up big schools into small schools, had persuaded some 2,500 high schools to do so, and then its researchers told the foundation that the students in the small high schools were not getting any better test scores than those in the large high schools.

Gates needed another big idea. He decided that teacher quality was the big idea. So he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a tiny number of districts to learn how to evaluate teachers, including thousands of hours of videotapes. Where Gates went, Arne Duncan followed. The new Obama administration put teacher quality at the center of the $5 billion Race to the Top. If states wanted to be eligible for the money, they had to agree to judge teachers–to some considerable degree–by the test scores of their students. That is, they had to use value-added assessment, a still unformed methodology, in evaluating teachers.

In response to Race to the Top and Arne (“What’s there to hide?”) Duncan’s advocacy, many states have now passed laws–some extreme and punitive–directly tying teachers’ tenure, pay, and longevity to test scores.

No other nation in the world is doing this, at least none that I know of.

The unions have negotiated to reduce the impact of value-added systems but have not directly confronted their legitimacy.

After much study and deliberation, Linda Darling-Hammond decided that value-added did not work and would not work, and would ultimately say more about who was being taught than about the quality of the teacher.

The briefest summary of her work appears in an article in Education Week here.

She recently published a full research report. Here is a capsule summary of her team’s findings about the limitations of value-added assessment:

“Measuring Student Learning

There is agreement that new teacher evaluation systems should look at teaching in light of student learning. One currently popular approach is to incorporate teacher ratings from value-added models (VAM) that use statistical methods to examine changes in student test scores over time. Unfortunately, researchers have found that:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable:

Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Assigned to Them: Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are ad- vantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and students with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students. Students who teach low-income stu- dents are disadvantaged by the summer learning loss their children experi- ence between spring-to-spring tests.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress: –––Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores.”

The application of misleading, inaccurate and unstable measures serves mainly to demoralize teachers. Many excellent teachers will leave the profession in frustration. There will be churn, as teachers come and go, some mislabeled, some just disgusted by the utter lack of professionalism of these methods.

The tabloids will yelp and howl as they seek the raw data to publish and humiliate teachers. Even those rated at the top (knowing that next year they might be at the bottom) will feel humiliated to see their scores in the paper and online.

This is no way to improve education.

Diane

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

 http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/creating-comprehensive-system-evaluating-and-supporting-effective-teaching_1.pdf
Categories Darling-Hammond, Linda, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Honor Roll

What is NCTQ?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2012 //
16

Several  months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate raged, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues.

U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments–ranging from classwork practice to state tests–to improve instruction.”

Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.

Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in such low regard?

The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I value, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1995.00.

Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

And I was there at the creation.

An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Rhee, Michelle

Yuck: US DOE Supports For-profit Entrepreneurs

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2012 //
4

Yesterday I engaged in an unexpected exchange on Twitter with Justin Hamilton, who is press secretary to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

It started after I retweeted a blog by master-teacher Nancy Flanagan. Nancy’s blog took issue with a listing of the up-and-coming stars of American education, which focused heavily on the entrepreneurial sector and forgot teachers. Nancy listed some of the outspoken teachers who are emerging stars in the profession, like Julie Cavanaugh and Brian Jones, two New York City teachers who starred in “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman.'”

When I retweeted Nancy’s blog, I asked “Who will transform education: entrepreneurs or educators?”

I don’t have the exact sequence, but Jersey Jazzman (one of my favorite bloggers) recapitulated the tweets and blogs here: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/05/weasels-in-department-of-education.html?spref=tw.

Before long, Hamilton responded to my tweet by saying that we should not choose between entrepreneurs and educators, but should count on both of them to transform education.

We then had a lively exchange, in which I made clear, in tweet after tweet, that my reference to “entrepreneurs” referred specifically to the for-profit education industry, which seeks to get rich by coming up with new ventures in education. In our twitter exchange, I referred specifically to the for-profit charter industry (most charters in Michigan for-profit) and also to the for-profit cyber charters,which make big profits and get poor results. I asked why Secretary Duncan has never spoken out against the depredations of this industry, which uses lobbyists to buy access to children.

Hamilton responded with an ad hominem tweet, saying that I was an entrepreneur because I get paid to make speeches and to write books.

That seems to be the default position of the U.S. Department of Education, to go personal when they can’t defend what they are doing. A year ago, Secretary Duncan claimed that “Diane is in denial” after I debunked his claims about miraculous turnarounds that happen by firing the staff. (See my earlier post “Psychologizing Female Critics”).

My takeaway from our exchange: the US Department of Education welcomes for-profit entrepreneurs and will never turn its back on them, no matter how paltry their results or how constricted their definition of “education.” The advance of corporate greed into the education sector, in my view, has nothing to recommend it. Corporations will seek to replace teachers with computers, will shave costs wherever possible, and will deliver a product that is as cheaply produced as possible in order to maximize profits. I fail to understand what that has to do with education, as I understand the meaning of the term.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, U.S. Department of Education

Psychologizing Female Critics

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2012 //
10

I received an email the other day from one of my email friends—that is, someone I have never met but have become very friendly with—and he made an interesting observation. He said he was reading Gail Collins’ book When Everything Changed, about the amazing changes in women’s lives since the mid-1960s, and he realized something that he wanted to share with me. He said, your critics have a habit of psychologizing their criticism of you. That is, instead of engaging with the substance of what I write, they look for some deep motive. This is simply a form of condescension, in this case, a male reaction to a female with whom they disagree.

He quoted Arne Duncan, who said, “Diane is in deep denial.” He quoted another critic who said that I was “angry,” though the critic didn’t say why I was angry. It all sounded like a version of the old saw that a feminist was acting as she was because of her hormones or some hidden grievance. We can’t take the little woman too seriously because she….

Now the emails that flowed between the New York City Department of Education and lobbyists for charter schools have been released and they continue in the same vein. I am described in them as “deranged,” a “dangerous crackpot,” “dishonest and platitudinous,” and “slippery.”

At no point does it appear that anyone discusses or debates my serious concerns about privatization. None of these men attempts to challenge or refute what I wrote. No, all these guys can do is to demean, condescend, and insult.

My correspondent put all this into context. These men are reacting by psychologizing my motives. Is that what men do when they think no one is listening and that no one will see their emails?

Diane

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/05/crowd-sourcing-up-till-now-secret.html

http://www.edwize.org/foiled-again-an-inside-look-at-joel-kleins-war-against-public-schools-and-teacher-unions#more-11644

Categories Duncan, Arne, Klein, Joel, NYC, Ravitch, Diane

The Very Rewarding Job of Saving Schools

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2012 //
7

Those pesky public schools! They get reformed, and they don’t stay reformed!

They get saved, and they don’t stay saved! What gives?

Take Chicago: First, Chicago was saved by Paul Vallas in the 1990s; President Clinton congratulated Vallas for raising test scores and all sorts of innovative reforms. Then came Arne Duncan to lead the Chicago school system, and he developed a new plan to save the schools, called Renaissance 2010. Under this plan, 100 or more schools were closed and 100 or more charters and other privately run schools were created. Schools closed, schools opened. By the time 2010 rolled around, Duncan was U.S. Secretary of Education and he took the lessons of Renaissance 2010 and applied them to the nation.

Sadly, even with 2010 having come and gone,  Chicago did not stay saved, so Mayor Rahm Emanuel imported a new Superintendent, J.C. Brizard, from Rochester, to save Chicago public schools yet again. Brizard had a pretty awful record in Rochester (proficiency rates on state tests were only in the 25% range and graduation rates fell). But no matter, Mayor Emanuel decided he was the very one to save Chicago this time. So it goes.

The original saviour of the Chicago public schools meanwhile went off to the Philadelphia public schools, where he saved them as he had saved the Chicago schools. Once again the media hailed a turnaround. The state-controlled School Reform Commission got annoyed when Vallas ran up an unexpected deficit, so he exited and went to save New Orleans. In New Orleans, Vallas won national media acclaim because he encouraged privately-run charters to open and basically put the public school system out of business (Hurricane Katrina had cleared the way). Millions on millions of private and public dollars poured into New Orleans to open charter schools. Now about 80% of the Recovery School District are enrolled in charters. No one thought it worthwhile to revive the moribund public schools. Why bother when so many eager reformers were eager to run their own schools. (Please ignore the fact that most of the New Orleans charters were rated D or F by the state and found to be one of the lowest-performing districts in the state–but that was before Governor Bobby Jindal took change of the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education).

Vallas left New Orleans to try to do for Haiti what he had done for New Orleans, but I don’t know where that stands. He also made an appearance in Chile, but students turned out by the thousands to protest any new measures to privatize that nation’ s schools and universities. Apparently they are fed up with the University of Chicago privatization reforms. http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2439

Now Vallas has been hired to save the public schools in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he has been given a free hand, as is his way. Jonathan Pelto, a political blogger in Connecticut, has been raising questions about Vallas’ deal with Bridgeport. http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/05/16/vallas-says-no-prob-1m-deal-wont-affect-his-work-in-bridgeport/  and http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/04/22/i-wouldve-sworn-you-used-the-word-transparency-the-art-of-moving-public-funds-off-line/

The most interesting part of Vallas’ deal is that he is not only superintendent of schools but runs a consulting company on the side. The Vallas Group just won a contract for $1 million to advise Illinois on saving its schools. It’s one of those “look, Ma, no hands,” moment, when Vallas says that he can handle both jobs. I don’t know of any other superintendents who run a private business on the side, do you?

But see how things go in circles when it comes to saving schools: Vallas is back to save the Chicago schools that he saved more than a decade ago. Maybe he could pick up a contract to save the Philadelphia schools again, since the School Reform Commission wants to hand a large portion of them over to private management.

Whatever else you might say about school reform, two things are clear:

One, the schools don’t stay saved for long;

And, two, it’s a very rewarding business for those who make a profession of saving them.

Diane

Categories Chicago, Duncan, Arne, New Orleans, Vallas, Paul

Bad News for TFA

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
1

Federal Court reaffirms ruling that alternate route teachers are not “highly qualified” and that it is wrong to concentrate them in districts with high-needs students.
Diane

Home › News & Comment › News › Press Releases & Kits
NINTH CIRCUIT REAFFIRMS RULING THAT TRAINEE TEACHERS NOT INTENDED AS “HIGHLY QUALIFIED” UNDER NCLB
Project: Renee v. Duncan
Date: May 11, 2012
But Judges Dismiss Case Because Congress Temporarily Classified Them So

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

The court proceeded to dismiss the Renee v. Duncan case, however, on the grounds that Congress passed a measure in December 2010 temporarily qualifying the country’s approximately 100,000 teachers-in-training in alternate route programs as “highly qualified” through the 2012-13 school year. The court found that there was no relief presently owed to plaintiffs but held the issue was not moot and that, absent further Congressional action, alternate route trainees must once again be deemed not “highly qualified” after June of next year.

The decision is an acknowledgment that the Department wrongly allowed teachers in training to be concentrated in poor and minority schools across the country for the eight years between the Act’s passage and the temporary measure in 2010. It also makes clear that next year, absent additional Congressional action, these less-than-fully-prepared teachers must again be fairly spread across classrooms and that parents must be notified when their children receive instruction from these teachers.

“We think it was premature for the court to dismiss the case since the controlling law will render the Department’s regulation unlawful again in just a little over a year,” said plaintiffs’ lead counsel John Affeldt of civil rights law firm and advocacy organization Public Advocates Inc.. “Nonetheless, it’s very important to have the courts acknowledge that the Department acted unlawfully in treating these underprepared teachers as if they were fully prepared. We look forward to enforcing this precedent next year and to using it to inform the policy discussions in Congress going forward.”

Whether and how NCLB and its teacher quality provisions will be modified anytime soon is an open question. The Act was due to be revised by Congress in 2007 but the reauthorization process has been stalled. In the meantime, outrage over the December 2010 temporary measure — which was slipped into a midnight budget resolution with no public debate —led to formation of the nation’s largest teacher quality coalition, the Coalition for Teaching Quality (CTQ). Made up of 86 national and local civil rights, grassroots, educator and disability organizations, The CTQ is actively pursuing policies in the reauthorization to help ensure every child has a fully-prepared and effective teacher.

Evidence in the case shows that more than half of California’s interns are teaching in schools with 90-100% students of color compared to only 3% of interns in schools with the lowest population of students of color. Research also shows that graduates from alternative programs such as Teach For America and Troops To Teachers can be as effective as traditional route graduates, but that teachers still in training in those and other programs do not improve student achievement as much as fully prepared teachers who have completed their teacher training.

###

Press Kit
1renee_iii_9th_circuit_release_final_05.11.12.pdf
Releated Press Releases
Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Ruling That Trainee Teachers Not Intended as “Highly Qualified” Under NCLB
Diverse Coalition Draws Line On ESEA Teacher Quality
Dozens of Groups Protest Lowering of Teacher Standards
Parents & Students Blast Senate Deal To Call Trainee Teachers Highly Qualified
Intern Teachers Not “Highly Qualified,” Says 9th Circuit

Categories Alternate Route To Certification, California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

Why L.A. Teachers Are Boycotting the L.A. Times

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2012 //
3

A reader wrote to tell me that public school teachers in Los Angeles are continuing a boycott of the Los Angeles Times. This boycott stems from the Times decisions to create value-added evaluations for thousands of LA teachers and to publish them online in 2010. The accuracy of the evaluations were hotly contested by teachers and disputed by scholars who disagreed with the methodology; the reporters at the Times defended their findings and their methodology.

A month after the Times’ series was published, along with the public release of the names and ratings of teachers, Roberto Riguelas committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. He was a fifth grade teacher whose rating had been published. The family said he was depressed by the ratings; the Times did not accept responsibility. And of course it is impossible to know who was responsible and whether there was some other cause.

Two important comments on the LA Times release of its own value-added ratings. When it happened, Secretary Arne Duncan was very pleased, but very few scholars of testing agreed. John Ewing, a mathematician wrote an excellent article called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he excoriated the misuse of value-added as well as the reporters’ actions in browbeating a National Board Certified teacher, whom they said was a bad teacher. http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500667p.pdf

I wrote about all this in the new last chapter of the paperback edition of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

An interesting footnote: When New York City followed LA’s example and released value-added ratings to the media (the media in NYC, unlike LA, did not create the ratings), Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece saying it was a bad idea; Secretary Duncan came out against the release, and so did Wendy Kopp. In fact, almost everyone came out against the public release of teacher ratings except Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

And the public school teachers of Los Angeles are still boycotting the Los Angeles Times. If Eli Broad should buy it, they will have good reason to continue their boycott.

Diane

Categories California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

How stupid items get onto standardized tests

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2012 //
23

Many people have wondered how the New York State Education Department permitted the nonsensical story about the pineapple and the hare to get onto the state test.

This is not the first time a really bad reading passage got onto the test and it won’t be the last.

State Commissioner John King was quick to issue a defensive statement saying that people were reading the story “out of context,” as if the full story made sense (it didn’t). And he was quick to pin the blame on teachers, who supposedly had reviewed all the test items. It was the teachers’ fault, not his. In an era where Accountability is the hallmark of education policy, King was quick to refuse any accountability for what happened on his watch. These days, the ones at the top never accept accountability for what goes wrong, that’s for the “little people” like teachers and students, not for the bigwigs. No one holds them accountable, and they never accept any. None of them ever says, as President Harry S Truman did, “the buck stops here.”

So this is the reason that even a stupid, pointless story like the pineapple story–so thoroughly bowdlerized that it was disowned by Daniel Pinkwater, its original author–got past the review panel. I know about this process because I spent seven years as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board and served on a committee where we read every single question that would appear on a national test. When the review committee gets the items, with questions and answers, you are told that this particular item has been thoroughly field-tested. It has appeared in a children’s magazine; it has been used in a state assessment. Here are the results with all the accompanying statistics for this item. You are also told that the publisher’s own technical reviewers approved the item; so did the publisher’s bias and sensitivity reviewers.

By the time the item reaches the teachers or external panel, it has been vetted, you are told, by many others. There is tremendous implicit pressure to go along with the judgment of others whom you assume are very professional. They all agreed it was fine. Who are you to raise a question or complaint?

Since I am by nature a skeptic, I always read test passage and their questions and answers as if no one  else had. And on more occasions than I can count, I said, “Stop. Wait. This doesn’t make sense. The question isn’t clear. None of the answers fits the question. There are two good answers,” or words to that effect.

But I  understand the social pressure, the social consensus, that discourages questioning and criticism.

And that is how bad questions get onto standardized tests, and why the Pineapple question was not the first and will certainly not be the last to slip past the review panels.

The best remedy for this problem is to publish the questions and answers when the tests are finished. That way, everyone can see them. After all, as Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo and Secretary Duncan often remind us, when speaking of teacher evaluation ratings, “The public has a right to know.”

Since the tests are the linchpin of every national education policy today, the public has a right to know if the tests are fair, valid, reliable and reasonable ways to assess student learning.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, Duncan, Arne, Testing
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