Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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Is the Department of Education Over-reaching?

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2012 //
10

I posted about the Department of Education’s plan to rate the teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities by the test scores of the children taught by their graduates–that’s a stretch, if you think about it. One reader saw the absurdity of it and wondered if others saw it too:

Going after universities – Yowzer! I’ve heard rumors and have periodically seen articles and posts regarding this. I’m past ticked. This is asinine. What is the reasoning? Why should a professor who taught me, be responsible for me and my students? Who thinks dreams and rationalizes this horse mess?

Please, someone, share with me the thought process and decision trees that brought about this policy. This is like something out of the old Andy Hardy movies (I like classic films- I never saw them when they came out). When money was needed, Andy and Polly would put on show. This is similar. Let’s dictate policy. Cool. What do you think about…? Hey that sounds great. Problem solved. NOT!

When I ask will the grown-ups enter the room?  What is going on? I thought the Department of Education was to provide support to the states. Not run the schools, colleges and universities of the United States.

I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on- this is definitely overreach. I’m wondering who he’ll/they’ll go after next. The students or the parents? Shouldn’t they be held accountable? Eventually Arne should be held accountable. Who knows when; if ever.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, U.S. Department of Education

VAM Madness in Florida

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2012 //
13

A reader describes the madness of value-added assessment as practiced in Florida:

I teach English in a Florida high school. Although I taught all juniors last year, my VAM score was based on the school average for 9th and 10th grade. Why? Because they cease testing in 10th grade except for those who don’t pass. Of my juniors who didn’t pass FCAT as sophomores, I had a stellar retake pass rate–but that’s not going to count for me. Only what other teachers are doing with other kids I couldn’t identify if you paid me big bucks.

Don’t even get me started about what they’re doing to my colleagues in the arts, JROTC, or other electives. Data selection is arbitrary. Considering that we were in a high-needs, inner-city school, none of us came out looking good.

I’m all for evaluation, but to conflate test score results with teacher quality is wrongheaded, misguided, and downright crazy. Unfortunately, better ways of doing this take money and time and won’t enrich outside providers’ wallets, so it’ll never happen.

For the love of Pete, folks, get noisy. Talk to everyone, and vote for sane candidates in November!
Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Attention, Policymakers! A Teacher Speaks!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2012 //
3

Policymakers are busy writing laws in every state to evaluate teachers. They think they can create a system that will spot the best and fire the worst. So far, none of those systems is working, and none has made any difference, other than to make teachers nervous and make them wonder what these guys will dream up next to complicate their lives. The economists say that credential don’t matter; that masters’ degrees don’t matter; and that experiences doesn’t matter. They say that no one should be paid extra for getting more education or having more experience. They say only test scores matter, and those can be produced by a first-year teacher as well as a veteran.

A reader posted this comment:

My department head carries the title of master teacher. She is working on a second masters degree and has taught for over 20 years. My mentor teacher has been teaching over 10 years. I am starting my 5th year of teaching and not a day goes by when I dont seek their counsel. I am a product of a local alternative prep program. These folks that set it up are current teachers and have degrees in education. The director has her PhD and she assigns you a mentor who works with you throughout your first year along with your campus assigned mentor. The program is short (3 months) but these folks make sure you dont flounder that crucial first year. We take classes at night and are mentored very thouroughly. And after that first year they still hold alumni meets to see how we are doing and work with the local union to solve issues regarding our districts. In all the time I was in prep I never heard them say that teaching had a magic formula. They always said to seek the experienced teachers at our campus and to foster our education and professional development. I feel lucky to be an educator. And one thing for sure is I have learned a lot in 5 years. And by no means do I consider myself a master teacher.Especially not after my first year.  I am sure that will happen a long time from now when I gather something called…what was that word again? Oh yes. I believe it is experience!!

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Pop Quiz about “The Irreplaceables”

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2012 //
6

This just in from California educator Robert Skeels:

POP QUIZ:
What do you call plutocrat funded “research” that isn’t peer reviewed and is conducted by an organization that has already drawn a priori conclusions? Answer: A policy paper.

Pretty much everything one would ever need to know about The new Teacher Project (TNTP) is summed up here:

TNTP is “a leading voice on teacher quality.” – American Enterprise Institute

With extreme right-wing credentials like that, how can TNTP go wrong with Arne Duncan? Nice the ED department is shilling for private corporations like TNTP. Glad my community’s tax resources are being used to promote junk science like VAM/AGT instead of being using in the classroom or school libraries. You know, stuff that actually promotes learning, instead of testing.

TNTP’s board features members from reactionary Ed-Trust and even Bain & Company, Inc.. The former, of course, being Mitt Romney’s “sister” company from which we get Green Dot Charter Corporation’s nasty little Marco Petruzzi from.

Categories Accountability, Alternate Route To Certification, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Who Is Irreplaceable?

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2012 //
20

A new report was released by The New Teacher Project, asserting that our schools were losing the very best teachers. They are the “irreplaceables.”

The report got the red treatment, with Secretary Duncan there to salute its findings. And it was funded by three billionaire foundations: Gates, Walton, John and Laura Arnold (big supporters of Michelle Rhee).

It seems that schools are losing their “best” teachers (the irreplaceables) and holding on to the ones who should have been fired.

Context helps. After Michelle Rhee left her brief teaching stint for TFA, she became an entrepreneur, as most good graduates of TFA do.

She created The New Teacher Project to find and place new teachers in urban districts where they are needed.

An altogether laudable idea, but in true TFA-style, having a good idea and making it happen is never enough.

It has to be the best idea in the universe. And the people who do it are the best ever. And those who don’t agree are awful people.

TNTP began issuing studies and reports to prove that their brand-new teachers were miles better than those jaded old veterans in the classroom. As time went by, there would be no doubt that the very best of all teachers was the one who had never taught before but came armed with enthusiasm and desire and a readiness to stop at nothing in the pursuit of higher test scores.

This is what Shanker Blog said about this latest report.  In three of the four districts in the report, the data are based on only one year of data. As we have seen in many  studies, one year of data is not reliable. The ratings are unstable. A teacher who somehow gets big score gains from her students in one year will not get them the next year; the teacher who look like a do-nothing this year is “irreplaceable” the next year.

Are there wonderful, outstanding, star teachers? Yes. Are there awful people who shouldn’t be there? Yes.

Is it necessary to turn all of American education upside down to root out the small number who are awful?

This is just one more useless salvo in the ongoing attempt to prove that America’s teachers are responsible for low test scores.

The current obsession with using test scores to find the best and fire the worst is wrong. Start with the fact that the tests weren’t designed for this purpose. Recognize that some excellent teachers don’t see huge gains year after year because they teach the gifted or the slowest or ELLs. Some very bad and uninspiring teachers can get score gains by doing endless drill and rote. And you have a formula that produces no improvement, just demoralization.

Someday these bad ideas will go away. Whenever it is, it won’t be a moment too soon.

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, StudentsFirst, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

A Florida Teacher Writes a Letter to Parents

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2012 //
22

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

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Teacher Evaluations

How Times Change

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2012 //
6

A reader writes:

 

I have an editorial comic on my refrigerator with two panels, one labeled 1960 and the other 2010. In both panels a boy is bringing home a failing grade. In the first panel the parents yell at the boy. In the second panel they (as well the boy) yell at the teacher.

I have taught grades k through 9. The best combination for student success is a dedicated teacher, supportive parents, and a willing student. Once when teaching second-grade I had two struggling students whose abilities were at the exact same level. One set of parents was very involved, met with me, helped their child with homework, and expected their child to succeed. The second set of parents was not involved and seemed to have a negative attitude toward school. Guess which child was on grade level a couple of years later?

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

What Michelle Rhee Told the British Education Minister

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2012 //
32

You will not be surprised to learn that when Michelle Rhee went to England recently, she spoke of her great success in improving the D.C. public schools.

Her secret? Finding the best teachers and firing the worst teachers.

The only problem with her narrative is that it is not true.

Her IMPACT system was imposed in 2009. Since then, the D.C. public schools have made little progress on state or national exams.

The D.C. public schools continue to have the largest black-white achievement gap of any district assessed by the federal NAEP.

It is not clear whether her method identified the best teachers or the worst teachers, but it is clear that she created a level of turnover among teachers and principals that is staggering.

A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post said:

DCPS has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the nation. Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania estimates that, “nationally, on average, about 20 percent of new public school teachers leave their district to teach in another district or leave teaching altogether within one year, one-third do so within two years, and 55 percent do so within five years.” In DCPS, by contrast, 55 percent of new teachers leave in their first two years, according to an analysis by DCPS budget watchdog Mary Levy. Eighty percent are gone by the end of their sixth year. That means that most of the teachers brought in during the past five years are no longer there. By comparison, in Montgomery County just 11.5 percent leave by the end of their second year, and 30 percent by the end of year five. DCPS has become a teacher turnover factory. It has a hard time keeping teachers who are committed to their school and the community it serves.

Most of the principals that Rhee personally hired have left their schools.

If the British follow her suggestions, they too can have churn without improvement.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, International, Teacher Evaluations

Los Angeles Court Battle: What Is Pupil Performance?

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2012 //
5

As we have discussed in the past few days, the judge will expect teachers in Los Angeles to agree to incorporate measures of student performance into teacher evaluations. This is in response to a lawsuit initiated by EdVoice on behalf of anonymous parents, citing the Stull Act, passed many years ago before today’s era of high-stakes testing. Look through the comments in earlier posts to learn more about EdVoice.

Here is the judge’s writ, as promised: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101233092/Doe-v-Deasy-Writ-All-Counsel-Edits

The definition of pupil performance, how to measure it, and how it relates to teachers’ evaluations, will be subject to collective bargaining.

A reader comments:

Realistically, there were many acceptable ways under the Stull Act that California teachers could show pupil performance. Yes, standardized test scores could be used if that is what the teacher chose to use to demonstrate student performance but there were many others: teacher observation, principal observation, student work samples and portfolios, criterion referenced tests, and text book publishers tests were all very acceptable ways to demonstrate pupil performance. No teacher or principal in California ever thought that standardized tests were the only way to demonstrate student performance – when did that change? I don’t believe it has.

 
Categories Accountability, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations

UTLA Lawyer: The Scoop

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2012 //
8

I have a copy of the judge’s writ and will try to post it (it is in a pdf file and I don’t know how to copy that).

Background: UTLA has resisted the imposition of value-added-assessments to evaluate teachers, knowing that research shows these measures to be highly unstable and inaccurate. UTLA was burned two years ago when the Los Angeles Times created its own rating system and used test scores to publish its ratings of thousands of teachers.

Subsequently a California group called EdVoice, funded by billionaire foundations (Broad and Walton), discovered a 40-year-old law called the Stull Act, which says that pupil performance should factor into the evaluations of teachers and administrators. EdVoice filed suit on behalf of anonymous parents to demand that the LAUSD school board start using test scores to evaluate teachers.

An interesting thing about the billionaire foundations: They want charters (and in Walton’s case, vouchers). They want teachers to be evaluated by test scores. But typically, when the law is written (as in Louisiana), teachers in charter schools are exempt from evaluation by test scores. What does that mean?

One critic wrote me to say that this is “Deasy v. Deasy,” since LA superintendent Deasey is known to support such measures. I am willing to give John Deasey the benefit of the doubt, as he has a chance to show that he stands against junk science (VAM).

And the law says both teachers and administrators so presumably the leadership of the district will be evaluated by test scores as the decision moves forward.

Meanwhile, here is the UTLA lawyer’s summary of the decision:

PLEASE DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ IN THE TIMES OR DAILY NEWS. THE ONLY ITEM BEFORE THE JUDGE YESTERDAY WAS THE TIME FRAME WITHIN WHICH THE DISTRICT MUST COMPLY WITH THE DECISION REGARDING THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE STULL ACT. THE PLAINTIFFS WERE TRYING TO IMPOSE AN EARLY SEPTEMBER DEADLINE, WHICH WAS REJECTED BY UTLA, AND THE COURT. THE ONLY OUTCOME FROM YESTERDAY IS THAT THE DISTRICT HAS UNTIL DECEMBER 4 TO RETURN TO COURT TO SHOW COMPLIANCE, WHICH ALLOWS TIME FOR MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING. (IF THERE IS NOT MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING BY THE DISTRICT, UTLA CAN SEEK APPROPRIATE RELIEF FROM PERB.)

 

Jesus E. Quiñonez

Holguin, Garfield, Martinez & Quiñonez, APLC

 
Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations, Walton Foundation
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