Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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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

UTLA Did Not Fold: UPDATE

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2012 //
8

Update: an earlier post reported that UTLA would accept evaluations based on test scores.

I relied on a story in the Los Angeles Times. 

The lawyer for UTLA informed me this is not true.

When I have more details, I will post them.

Categories Accountability, California, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Has UTLA Been Pounded into Submission?

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2012 //
13

A story in the Los Angeles Times says that the United Teachers of Los Angeles has agreed to permit test scores to be part of teachers’ evaluations.

This is in response to a lawsuit brought by EdVoice on behalf of anonymous parents. EdVoice is one of those organizations funded by the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation and other members of the billionaire boys’ club who will never leave teachers alone until they teach to the test.

I hope this is not true. As we have seen again and again, judging teachers by the test scores of their students is harmful to the quality of education as it places too much emphasis on testing. It incentives narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, cheating, gaming the system, score inflation.

Value-added modeling, which would be used here, is junk science.

Even Eric Hanushek, the favorite economist of the VAM crowd, says that teachers account for only 7 1/2-15 percent of the variation in students’ test scores.

What about the 60 percent that is usually attributed to the influence of family, especially family income?

If Los Angeles goes down this path, it may well fire the wrong teachers (Houston fired one of its teachers of the year based on VAM data).

Surely there is a better, more constructive way to evaluate teachers than to rely on unstable and inaccurate measures.

Categories Accountability, California, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Unions

Arne Duncan Praises Tennessee and Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2012 //
17

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had a story in the Huffington Post extolling his work in building respect for the teaching profession.

He has accomplished this, he says, by insisting that teachers be evaluated based on the test scores of their students.

Exhibit A of his success, he says, is Tennessee. Mr. Duncan relies on a report by Kevin Huffman, the state commissioner of education (former PR director for TFA, now employed by one of the nation’s most conservative governors).

The report says that since Tennessee won Race to the Top funding in 2010, it has seen remarkable results because it is now using test scores as 50% of teachers’ evaluations.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that leading researchers (like Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University and the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association) say that these value-added measures are inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable.

It is simply bizarre to boast about a one-year change in state test scores. It has long been obvious that state test scores are less reliable than NAEP and that any real change requires more than one year of data as evidence of anything.

According to NAEP, the scores for Tennessee in both reading and math were flat from 2009-2011. Perhaps Secretary Duncan should wait for the release of the 2013 NAEP  before boasting about the dramatic gains in Tennessee.

In the meanwhile, I urge Secretary Duncan and his staff, and Commissioner Huffman, to read the joint statement of the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association on value-added testing and its misuse in evaluating teachers. It is called “Getting Teacher Evaluation Right.” I am sure that the Secretary agrees that policy should be informed by research.

Here is the executive summary:

Consensus that current teacher evaluation systems often do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making has led to a range of new approaches to teacher evaluation. This brief looks at the available research about teacher evaluation strategies and their impacts on teaching and learning.

Prominent among these new approaches are value-added models (VAM) for examining changes in student test scores over time. These models control for prior scores and some student characteristics known to be related to achievement when looking at score gains. When linked to individual teachers, they are sometimes promoted as measuring teacher ―effectiveness.‖

Drawing this conclusion, however, assumes that student learning is measured well by a given test, is influenced by the teacher alone, and is independent of other aspects of the classroom context. Because these assumptions are problematic, researchers have documented problems with value-added models as measures of teachers‘ effectiveness. These include the facts 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 Who Are Assigned to Them: Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and others with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students.

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.

Other tools have been found to be more stable. Some have been found both to predict teacher effectiveness and to help improve teachers’ practice. These include:

  • Performance assessments for licensure and advanced certification that are based on professional teaching standards, such as National Board Certification and beginning teacher performance assessments in states like California and Connecticut.
  • On-the-job evaluation tools that include structured observations, classroom artifacts, analysis of student learning, and frequent feedback based on professional standards.

    In addition to the use of well-grounded instruments, research has found benefits of systems that recognize teacher collaboration, which supports greater student learning.

    Finally, systems are found to be more effective when they ensure that evaluators are well-trained, evaluation and feedback are frequent, mentoring and coaching are available, and processes, such as Peer Assistance and Review systems, are in place to support due process and timely decision making by an appropriate body. 

    And here is a short summary of the report by Linda Darling-Hammond.

Categories Accountability, Darling-Hammond, Linda, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NAEP, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations
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