Mercedes Schneider, Louisiana teacher and Ph.D. In statistics, is writing a series of posts about the National Council on Teacher Quality. NCTQ rates education programs and presents itself as a neutral, nonpartisan judge of teacher quality. Here Schneider begins an analysis of the members of the NCTQ board. Schneider finds that it is committed to the tenets of corporate reform, that it has a specific point of view about the issues it reviews.
Archives for category: National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)
Mercedes Schneider, who teaches in Louisiana and holds a doctorate in statistics and research methods, continues her analysis of NCTQ, its letter grade reports, and its ties to the reform movement.
Yet another national report from another reformer group, grading the states that meet their definition of what ought to be done.
Here, Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana teacher with a Ph.D. in statistics and research methods, dissects the NCTQ state report on teacher preparation.
Dr. Schneider, a member of our honor roll, previously deconstructed the claim that charters in New Orleans had a higher graduation rate than the state or the nation.
http://ahuntingtonteacher.blogspot.com/2012/10/tony-bennett-selling-big-lie-about.html
Tony Bennett Selling the Big Lie about Need for Hoosier Teacher Accountability
In 2010,
Tony Bennett and the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) introduced relaxed teacher qualifications known as REPA. A slideshow presented by Bennett stated the need for REPA was a grade of “D” for “policies affecting teaching quality”. This grade was given by the National Council for Teaching Quality (NCTQ).
The grade of “D” was endorsed by NCTQ’s technical panel. Tony Bennett sits on the technical panel of NCTQ.
The NCTQ’s report was described by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) as “so fundamentally flawed it is not worthy of your engagement.” The AACTE went as far to call the report “unprofessional” in its obvious attempt to deteriorate traditional education.
Perhaps the NCTQ’s report and Indiana’s grade of “D” for teaching quality policies would have never gained much merit except for a strong endorsement that followed by a group known as Chiefs for Change.
The Chiefs for Change have only eleven members. Tony Bennett is one of them.
In sum, much of the turmoil surrounding the need for greater teacher accountability is because Bennett has said teachers need improvement and endorsed his own statement saying so.
Bennett has a history of disregarding public opinion, or even the law, for that matter, and forcing through his plan to dismantle public education. This also might explain language found here at the IDOE website:
Final RISE rubric ratings did not sufficiently differentiate teacher performance (61% Effective, 30% Highly Effective) or identify specific teacher strengths and weaknesses (67% of teachers received no rating lower than “effective” on all 19 RISE rubric competencies). When all the data is analyzed in the fall, these ratings are unlikely to accurately reflect actual teacher and student performance.
Bennett’s mind is stuck in a bell curve; a percentage of students must always be failing, a percentage of teachers must therefore also be failing. Bennett’s goal in Indiana is to continually fail a portion of students, teachers, and schools for the sake of privatization.
Teachers have not bought into the RISE evaluation system that creates:
· a detrimental “teach to the test” atmosphere.
· greater focus on only select students, especially “bubble” students.
· an environment of competition, not cooperation, among colleagues.
· teacher flight from schools most in need.
· less qualified teachers who do not stay in the profession.
The RISE evaluation has nothing to do with improving instruction. Bennett purposefully took away funding for advance degrees to create funds for merit pay. (Lest we forget, Bennett stood idly by while Daniels cut $300 million from Hoosier school budgets. This shortfall was felt most by teachers, who on average have taken huge pay cuts. In my district, teachers have taken between a 12% and 20% pay cut over the past three years.)
As one commenter said, (Bennett is) driving down teacher’s salaries and forcing them to fight over what spare money is left. Then he is telling the public he rewards the best teachers with merit pay.
Perhaps that is why Bennett also had to include this on the IDOE webpage:
Increased collaboration and conversation promotes overall satisfaction with the new evaluation system and belief that the new system raises student achievement.
This quote is reminiscent of one attributed to Joesph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Indiana, it is time for a change. How can Bennett think he is putting students first by continually putting teachers last? A teacher’s working conditions are the student’s learning conditions. Bennett’s denigration of the Hoosier teacher results in the denigration of all public education students.
It will take years to fix the damage Bennett has wreaked on Hoosier schools. Four more years of Tony Bennett’s policies and the damage may well be irreversible.
We need a new superintendent who will work with teachers, not against them. Glenda Ritz needs your support. She does not have the million plus dollar funding from huge corporations that will profit from Bennett’s privatization efforts. For Ritz to claim victory, it will take a grass roots effort from every citizen who cares about public education in Indiana. Get out the vote for Glenda Ritz.
In a close vote, teachers at the Green Dot charter school chain endorsed a merit pay plan tied to test scores.
Although test score-based evaluation is highly unstable, the teachers decided to go along in hopes of qualifying for a bonus.
A teacher rated effective one year may be rated ineffective the next year, because there are so many factors beyond the teacher’s control that affect student scores.
The National Council on Teacher Quality thought this was a good move. So did Green Dot CEO, Marco Petruzzi, who previously worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Bain Capital.
Some teachers were not happy with the decision. Some were suspended or fired for fighting it. Students joined with teachers to protest, and the administration said the whole thing was blown out of proportion.
Scholars have warned that this method of evaluating teachers encourages teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, and other negative behaviors. Teachers who teach special education or English language learners will see the smallest gains. If these groups are underrepresented at Green Dot, as they are in many charter schools, that won’t be a problem.
Back when I was on the right side of the political fence, I was on the editorial board at Education Next. It is supported by the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, both conservative think tanks with which I was affiliated. The journal, which is based at Harvard and edited mainly by Paul Peterson, was created to counter what was seen as the liberal bias of the mainstream education media.
Education Next is a well-edited journal (I used to write a monthly book review there), but it does have a strong bias in favor of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. It is the journal of the corporate reform movement.
The current issue of Education Next has a fascinating article about the “reformers’ fight club.” I have been writing and speaking about the interconnections among these organizations (and there are many more), and it is good to see confirmation of what I have been saying.
For some reason, these incredibly rich and powerful organizations like to portray themselves as underdogs in contrast to the teachers’ unions.
So, get this picture: On one side are the 3.2 million teachers who belong to the NEA and the AFT. On the other side are the Gates Foundation ($60 billion), the Broad Foundation (billions), the Walton Foundation (billions, and spent $159 million this past year alone on education grants), the Dell Foundation, big corporations, Democrats for Education Reform (Wall Street hedge fund managers who can pump millions into political campaigns at will), and 50CAN (more hedge fund managers). And there are supposedly “liberal” advocacy groups like Education Trust and Ed Sector.
Gosh, that is surely an unequal lineup. No wonder the “fight club” feels like underdogs. Those teachers’ unions are just so doggone powerful and rich. Why, they have the big foundations and Wall Street trembling. Who knew that teachers had so much power?
Diane
An enlightening article by Stephanie Simon of Reuters was just posted. Simon interviewed Gates’ officials and others, and her article fills in the Gates’ rationale that has until now been missing. The article says:
The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.
Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.
Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, “only get us so far,” said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, “we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments” such as the biosensors.
Robinson assures the reporter that the “engagement pedometers” (odd to have a pedometer worn as a bracelet) are not intended to measure teacher effectiveness, at least not now.
The engagement pedometer is not formally part of that program; the biosensors are intended to give teachers feedback rather than evaluate their effectiveness, said Robinson, the Gates spokeswoman.
Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson acknowledged. “It’s hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this,” she said.
Some teachers expressed disdain for the device, but the reporter managed to find someone from a Gates-funded organization to praise it:
To Sandi Jacobs, the promise of such technology outweighs the vague fear that it might be used in the future to punish teachers who fail to engage their students’ Q Sensors.
Any device that helps a teacher identify and meet student needs “is a good thing,” said Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that receives funding from the Gates Foundation. “We have to be really open to what technology can bring.”
NCTQ, readers may recall, was the subject of an earlier blog here.
ADDENDUM: There must be yet another Gates grant for the “galvanic skin response” research. Until now, I had learned of only two: the Clemson research for nearly half a million; the National Commission on Time and Learning for some $600,000. The Reuters article noted above refers to $1.4 million in grants for this research, which means that some other group of researchers is working on developing the technology to measure student responses to instruction via physiological reactions.
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
Diane Ravitch's blog 