That was the question I was asked by a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times.
It seemed that his last story on that topic had a list of names such as Michelle Rhee, John White, and Joel Klein.
Someone suggested he contact me, and this is what I told him.
Read the story as it presents an interesting contrast to the list of names approach.
Hardly a day goes by without another politician or businessman calling for merit pay, performance pay, incentivize those lazy teachers to produce higher scores!
The Obama administration put $1 billion into merit pay, without a shred of evidence that it would make a difference.
Merit pay schemes have recently failed in New York City, Chicago, and Nashville, but who cares?
The Florida legislature passed legislation mandating merit pay but didn’t appropriate any money to pay for it. That was left to cash-strapped districts.
So here is the secret trick.
There is no money to pay for merit pay!
In a time of fiscal austerity, the money appropriated for merit pay (when it is appropriated) is money that should have been spent on reducing class size, preserving libraries or school nurses, or maintaining arts programs or other school-based services.
Instead, districts will lay off some teachers so that other teachers get bonuses. That leads to larger classes for the remaining teachers.
That is ridiculous, but that is the way of thinking that is now prevalent among our nation’s policymakers.
A reader knows this:
I find the whole premise behind merit pay insulting. If the districts have extra money, let’s use it to improve teaching conditions such as providing class sets of reading books, pencil sharpeners, science materials, or any of the hundreds of items teachers end up paying for out of pocket.
I received a letter from a teacher in Florida. He explains how the evaluation system works and why it is absurd:
Dear Florida Parents,
I want to call your attention to a serious and destructive policy that will have dire consequences for your children. Due to Florida’s ill-conceived merit pay evaluation system, your children may be subjected to inferior teaching.
Although Governor Scott proclaimed, “The teachers that are the most effective are the teachers that are going to do well.” These sound bites are a far stretch from what is actually occurring with this evaluation system.
As you probably know, the merit pay system bases one-half of a teacher’s evaluation on standardized test scores. If you want your children to have highly-effective teachers, understand this is not the way to accomplish this goal. Even if you agree that this is a fair evaluation system, I want you to understand that this is not what is happening. The truth is teachers are being evaluated based on students that they do not teach and sometimes not even on the students theydo teach. Does that sound like a system in which you’ll know which teachers are the best?
Let me explain how this system played out for me this year. I teach a gifted enrichment class for four elementary schools. Each day one grade level of students is bused to my center school. As a teacher outside the “regular” classroom, no district official was even able to tell me which tests my evaluation was tied too. That’s right; I taught a whole year and didn’t know how I would be evaluated. Towards the end of the year, I inferred my evaluation would be based on students’ FCAT scores; however, I quickly learned that only about 10 out 80 of my students would be counted! Why you ask? The DOE, which we are relying on to use a VAM equation only mathematicians can understand, could not figure out how to include my students who were bused to my center school. I tried to correct the measure with my district and union; however, there was no recourse. I was told “the next time around the state would fix it.” This year, my score will be based on the tests of just over 10% of my students. Once again I ask you, “Does that sound like a system in which you’ll know which teachers are the best?
The lunacy of this system does not stop there. My evaluation will be based on the performance of students I did not even teach! As part of my evaluation, groups of teachers were formed and given a list of some of the school’s lowest performing students. These students were tied to our evaluation scores, and our charge was to bring their test scores up. I pride myself on being a team player, but to determine my effectiveness as a teacher based on students I do not teach is not what this system was intended to do. No time was provided to work with these students. Somehow we were supposed to make time to mentor and tutor these kids. In essence, I was to spend my time working with the lowest students instead of dedicating myself to my giftedstudents. Even more preposterous is that my evaluation will be based on the performance of astudent who never set foot on my school’s campus this year. Does that sound like a system in which you’ll know which teachers are the best?
I commend your efforts to hold the Florida Department of Education accountable for policies that are ill suited for our state’s children. You called the DOE out on the FCAT Writes debacle and started a serious conversation with our misguided politicians. I call on you again to defend the best interest of your children. Demand that the merit pay system is repealed and replaced with a system that truly identifies effective teachers.
Sincerely,
A concerned teacher
This is a rhetorical question. After many years studying education, I will tell you my view: Superintendents should be educators.
Superintendents should be experienced educators who understand teaching and learning, curriculum and special education. There is much more, of course, but the starting point is to understand education and students.
We are always looking wistfully to other nations and asking what they do that we don’t do.
They put their schools in the hands of educators, not businessmen or retired military or lawyers.
So what brought on this rant? Tampa is about to pick a new school superintendent and one of my friends in Florida sent this article.
One of the candidates is a faithful cog in the Bush family machine. The other is an educator. Can you guess which is which?
I guess we will have to get used to this sort of thing.
Some charter schools in Florida padded the enrollment–er, made a miscalculation–of the number of students in their program.
An audit of Coronado High School found there was no documentation to show 465 students participated in an on-the-job course. The school could provide documentation of 13 students in the course. The audit at North Nicholas High revealed 102 of 372 students were incorrectly reported.
Nice to see they were audited.
The governor had three charter school executives on his transition team.
He named one of them to the State Board of Education.
Does anyone care?
Remember when we used to worry about conflicts of interest?
A reader in Florida saw that the school grades were phony, as noted in an earlier post. But no matter how many times the grades were shown to be meaningless, everyone accepted them, organized their schools to get them, changed their instruction to raise those grades. worked to get the bonuses, worked to avoid the sanctions, on and on.
And still the grades tell us which schools enroll poor kids and which kids don’t.
There is a lesson here. Something about adjusting to absurd demands and therefore making them seem reasonable.
But if you step back, they are still absurd.
Giving a school–a complex organization with many moving parts–a single letter grade is insulting, demeaning, and stupid. It is the product of people who know how to count but don’t care what they are counting.
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Florida has perfected a useless system of grading schools.Matthew DiCarlo of the Shanker Institute analyzed the school grades from Florida and found that they reflect poverty and income levels, not school quality. If the school enrolls large numbers of poor kids, it stands a high chance of getting a D or an F from the state. If it enrolls middle-class or affluent kids, they get good grades. Nice way to grade schools!
Coach Bob Sikes points out that the charter corporations now colonizing the state of Florida need the school grades so that they can pick up more business. Given the nature of the grading system, there will always be ripe plums that fall their way, along with public dollars. Jeb Bush has promised to revive the failed Parent Trigger law, as that is yet another tool to generate business for the charter chains.
The most important purpose of the grading system, however, is to inculcate the consumer mentality in legislators, parents, civic leaders, and the public. If you don’t like your school’s grade, go shopping for another!
With public disgust running high against the testing regime, Coach Sikes wonders, will the state legislature be ready to fight the parents of Florida again to push for Jeb Bush’s privatization agenda?
On this blog, we have often discussed how easy it is to get drawn into accepting an intolerable practice. When it is first introduced, no one objects because it is worth trying, and over time, as this innovation becomes standard practice, those who don’t like it are ignored because it’s too late, it’s done that way and will go on being done that way.
Take the idea of giving letter grades to schools. My best recollection is that this idea started in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush, who thinks that testing and accountability solve all problems. Then New York City copied Florida. Now other jurisdictions are doing because, well, because Florida and New York City are doing it.
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there is an excellent public school. One year it got an A, and everyone was happy and proud. The next year, it got an F, and no one knew why: Same principal, same teachers, same methods, same materials, same students. What was the point of the A or the F? The principal didn’t know. Neither do I.
Several readers sent me an article about how the state of Florida made a mistake in giving out letter grades and raised the grades of a number of schools in Palm Beach. Good for Palm Beach, but remember that the whole system of letter grades is stupid. Of course, there are mistakes, including many that will never be corrected. Just because you get an A doesn’t mean that the competition is valid. It is not.
One of the great things about fiction, especially science fiction, is that we see how people get trapped in a world that is not of their making, a world that offends their sense of decency. Most people accept that world as it is. A few don’t. The question is always whether the dissidents figure out a way to get others to see the world as they do or whether they die fighting an unjust system.
Giving a letter grade to a school is the height of absurdity. It’s one thing to create a report card, which informs the school about ways it can improve. Such a report card might have thirty different categories, each evaluated to show the school its strengths and weaknesses and to start a conversation about how to improve.
But a letter grade is a Scarlet Letter. It says “This is an A school” or “this is a D school,” whatever.
Imagine if we sent children home with a report card with a single letter on it. “This child is a D.” Parents would be outraged. They would immediately understand that you are branding their son or daughter, not evaluating their performance. The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.
To change the world, which now seems so locked into bad and destructive practices, we must change our vision. We must spread our vision to others and help others to understand that schools, like children, are complex, not unidimensional. We stopped putting dunce caps on children many years ago. We should stop thinking that schools will get better if we put a dunce cap on them.
Rita Solnet is a parent activist in Florida who works hard to support public education in Palm Beach County, in Florida, and across the nation. She is a co-founder of Parents Across America.
She writes in response to the article about whether schools are and are not like businesses:
| I am a product of corporate America and still involved in organizational consulting for corporate America.I listened to the lobbyists and the FL BOE members recklessly scatter business terms throughout their State BOE meeting this week. At one point I wanted to shout “these business terms are for companies with products; they’re not meant for the process of educating children.” Not to mention the fact that some of the terms were preposterously misused.Frequently interspersed with education jargon were terms like: Rebranding; ROI (return on investment);, ROA (return on assets); Six Sigma (a program emphasizing quality and perfection in production); Seedcorn (money set aside to generate more profit in future); Market Leader (referring to the state being a ‘market leader’) and others.
If I closed my eyes I could have been in the board room of any of my clients. Outside of the obvious fact that children are not products and that business methods are not interchangeable nor conducive to educating our children, I discovered something else. Many of them grossly misused these terms. It appears to me they are trying to force fit education into a business operating mold but they are botching that up too. The light bulb turned on for me when I glanced at the FL BOE Strategic Plan. Every goal was listed as “TBD (to be determined). I nearly laughed out loud. No corporation in the world would submit a Strategic Plan to their Board of Directors for SIGNATURES with every Goal listed as “to be determined!” Sigh. |
Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson penned an article in the Miami Herald blasting the state’s testing regime.
She blames it for destroying the lives of countless young people, who didn’t pass, were labeled failures, and did not get the education they needed to make their way in society.
She is a former school principal, and she describes the current obsession with tests and school grading as “madness.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 