Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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Teachers at Green Dot Charter Schools OK Merit Pay

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2012 //
6

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.

Categories California, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teacher Evaluations

Teachers in Memphis Speak Out

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
11

I have published several posts (see here, here, and here) about Memphis, where a “Transition Planning Committee” devised a plan to merge the Memphis public schools and the Shelby County Schools. The planning was based on work by the Boston Consulting Group; the director of the TPC is the executive director of Stand for Children in Memphis. The plan proposes to shift many children out of the Memphis public schools and into new charter schools, so that charter enrollment will increase from 4% of Memphis students to 19% by 2016. The plan also involves a transfer of $212 million from the public schools to charter schools.

I have received letters from Stand for Children and from both supporters and opponents of the plan. Today I heard from Memphis teachers:

I teach in one of the grades K-3 in Memphis. In addition to the injustice of using test scores at all in making personnel decisions, K-3 teachers are evaluated based on the test scores of students they have never taught.Every teacher in Tennessee who teaches K-3 and every art, music, P.E. teacher, and librarian, instead of using their students’ value-added scores for half of their evaluation (because there aren’t any), is assigned their school’s value-added score for half of their evaluation.This is clearly designed to make the bad schools worse. Already, nearly all of the K-3 teachers at my failing school have transferred to other schools with better school-wide value-added scores. I don’t yet know who the principal has hired to replace them, but I’m guessing many will be TFA types (we also have a TFA-style program here called Memphis Teaching Fellows, run by The New Teacher Project), most of whom will be ineffective their first year.This legislation is designed to make the bad schools worse, so that they can be closed and turned into charters.The same teacher wrote this comment:In the meeting the Transition Planning Commission (TPC) had with teachers, the district strongly encouraged all teachers to go in place of faculty meeting. I didn’t go because I knew it would be a waste of time, but my colleagues went. According to them, it was a waste of time. They had a thousand teachers in the auditorium of a high school and no organization for the meeting. Teachers were not given an opportunity to speak the the group as a whole. Instead, they broke off into discussion groups comprised of a large number of teachers and one staff member. Teachers’ suggestions in these groups were written down and supposedly submitted to the TPC. The teachers I spoke to doubted anyone would read their suggestions. Why couldn’t they just ask teachers to email these suggestions, instead of wasting enormous amounts of time at the end of a long school day to organize a thousand teachers into discussion groups?

This comes from another Memphis teacher:

Let’s clear up the confusion around teacher input and the transition plan. There are NO current teachers on the Transition Planning Commission. The TPC appointed NO current teachers to the work groups who prepared the plan. The only input the TPC got from actual teachers was what they allowed them to say at community “listening tours”. These tours were usually about two hours long and held in various parts of the community. I believe there were six of these events. They were open to the public and teachers could attend and speak. The TPC members present answered virtually no questions as these were listening events. I do not call this teacher input. Additionally the teacher unions were intentionally left out of the discussions and were told their input was not needed even though the two unions involved represent over 7000 teachers. Teachers have no idea what is really in this plan.

 
Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Arne Duncan: “We Don’t Know”

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
24

At a recent meeting in New York City, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that “we as a country don’t know” how much student test scores should count as part of teachers’ evaluation. He said it shouldn’t be zero, and it shouldn’t be 100%. But it should be somewhere in between. As to what the number should be, the secretary said, “we don’t know.”

Here’s a thought: What if the current methods of calculating value-added are inaccurate? What if they are fundamentally flawed? What if they say nothing about teacher quality? What if they reflect who is in the class rather than teacher quality?

What if, say, a few years from now, we look back and realize they are junk science?

How much should they count then?

And if we don’t know whether they are accurate, and we don’t know if they are a reasonable measure of teacher quality, and if we have no evidence that their use in evaluation helps teachers improve or students achieve, why are we counting them at all? Shouldn’t we wait until we have clear evidence that the methods we use to evaluate teachers and principals are accurate, fair, reliable and valid, before putting them into practice?

I know that “we can’t wait,” but shouldn’t we wait long enough to know that what we are doing will help and not harm?

Or, are we still building a plane in mid-air?

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Stack Ranking in Memphis

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
57

I wrote a blog about the culture at Microsoft, where employees are evaluated by “stack ranking,” meaning that everyone in every unit is assigned a weighting–best, average, worse. I printed comments by people who had been subject to this system, who said that it stifled creativity and collaboration. I discovered that many major corporations have a similar rating system. At Enron it was called “rank and yank.” Jack Welch of GE championed the idea of finding and firing the laggards.

Something similar is happening now in education. Many of the new state evaluation systems, designed in response to Race to the Top (a font of untested ideas), will evaluate teachers and principals on a bell curve. The bell curve decrees that a certain percentage are at the bottom, no matter how effective they are. Economist Eric Hanushek has proposed that 5-10% of teachers (based on the test scores of their students) be fired and replaced by “average” teachers; he says this will produce incredible results: we will rise to the top of the international rankings and the economy will expand by trillions, just by firing those teachers.

A reader in Memphis noticed that the plan of the Transition Planning Committee (led by Stand for Children and advised by the Boston Consulting Group) proposes stack ranking of teachers:

From p. 56 of the Transition Planning Commission’s recommendations regarding the Memphis merger:

“Measures of success
– A meaningful distribution of teacher evaluation scores—approximately 20% evaluated 1s and 2s and less than 20% evaluated 5s
– The teacher evaluation is used as the basis for professional development, decisions about who teaches, and compensation.”

Even if the distribution recommendation is simply hypothetical, it’s pathetic.

There is not a school system in America with 1/5 of its workforce comprised of bad teachers. If there were, that district’s HR department would deserve getting canned first.

But let’s assume 20% is actually a solid estimate. The district fires those teachers. Then what? Fire good teachers you’ve scored “ineffective” in the hopes of hiring even better teachers? Great idea. What teacher would want to work in that sort of system?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Mayor Bloomberg Is Angry

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
9

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state had a disagreement.

The mayor wanted the power to publish the names and evaluations of all teachers in the city, as happened earlier this year when the New York City Department of Education released the single-number ratings of 18,000 teachers, based solely on test scores. The mayor says the public has a right to know the job ratings of every teacher. The teachers’ union (among others) objected because the ratings are highly flawed and inaccurate; and it humiliates teachers to have their ratings made public. Others objected to the public release because the job evaluations of police, firefighters and corrections officers are shielded by state law; why single out teachers and open their ratings to the public? Even Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times opposing public release last winter, a day before the ratings went public, on the ground that they are useful only as part of a discussion between teachers and their supervisors about how to improve. Public release turns them into a tool for humiliating people, not a means of helping them become better at their work.

The governor argued that the parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teachers, but that the ratings should not be made public.

The state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting the governor’s view. The ratings will not be published but parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teacher.

Mayor Bloomberg became very angry that the Legislature sided with the governor and rejected his view. So he said on a weekly talk show that the city would contact every one of the city’s parents or guardians of 1.1 million children and make their ratings known. Many people saw this response as the reaction of a petulant billionaire who can’t stand to lose. Be that as it may, the New York City Department of Education now has the burden of enacting a policy or program to do as the mayor directs because New York City has mayoral control and the department must carry out the mayor’s wishes, no matter how odd they may seem and no matter if they violate the spirit of the law that was just passed.

GothamSchools published an account of how the Department of Education intends to carry out the mayor’s wishes. It appears that every principal will be required to contact every parent to inform them of their right to know, but it is not clear how or if this information will be released. Maybe it won’t be, as that would clearly be illegal.

Based on this article, it appears that the mayor thinks that parents are consumers who should be able to go teacher-shopping. If they don’t like Mr. Smith’s rating, they should be able to transfer their child into Ms. Jones’s class because she has a higher rating. The problem here is obvious and I wonder if this occurred to the mayor. Unlike a business, where consumers may decide to shift their patronage, a teacher can accommodate a limited number of children. If a school has 500 students, and Ms. Jones has the highest rating in the building, her classroom can still enroll only a certain number of students, between 25 and 34, depending on the grade. What happens if the parents of 200 students or all 500 students want to be in her class? It doesn’t work, and it makes no sense.

Furthermore, given what we already know are the huge margins of error built into the ratings, Ms. Jones may not be the best teacher at all. The consumers may be misinformed.

Mayor Bloomberg has a faith in the value of the standardized test scores that shows how little he knows about measurement. The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. A teacher who appears to be effective one year may not be effective the next year. And the more that schools use test scores to rate teachers, the more they incentivize behaviors that actually undermine good education.

As it happens, I just read a blog by a teacher in Los Angeles who announced that he had changed his mind about using test scores to evaluate teachers. He concluded that they are misleading, that they needlessly demoralize almost all teachers, and that they aren’t good for students or for education.

I agree with him.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Five Harmful “Reform” Ideas

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2012 //
11

When you read Bruce Baker’s work, you hear a fresh and thoughtful voice in the education debates.

I wish that President Obama was listening to him instead of the number-crunchers now in control of the U.S. Department of Education.

Bruce Baker is a social scientist at Rutgers University who specializes in statistical analysis of school data. Unlike many others who do the same, he was a teacher in public and private schools before he became an academic. So he has a depth of knowledge and understanding and empathy that many others in his field lack.

In his latest blog, he reviews some of the truly terrible reform ideas of the day.

One is the 65% solution, the idea that legislatures should mandate what must be spent on instruction. It sounds so appealing, this notion that money will be spent in classrooms and not on bureaucrats. As Baker explains, the idea was cooked up by Republicans who needed a good idea, but it doesn’t work. What is really interesting is how carefully messaged the program was. It made budget cutters look like reformers.

Another is weighted student funding, which sounds good on the surface as all these ideas do until they are implemented.

And a third is the parent trigger, now in the news, which allows and encourages a bare majority of parents to seize control of their school. Baker calls this “mob rule.”

If you want to know the other two, read Bruce Baker.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Parent trigger, Teacher Evaluations

What Romney Reform Looks Like

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
8

We don’t have to wonder what Mitt Romney’s education plan would look like if he is elected. It would look like the Jindal legislation passed this spring in Louisiana.

The Louisiana “reforms” represent the purest distillation of the rightwing agenda for education.

First, they create a marketplace of competition, with publicly funded vouchers and many new charter schools under private management.

Second, more than half the children in the state (400,000+) are eligible for vouchers, even though only about 5,000 seats have been offered, some in tiny church schools that don’t actually have the seats or facilities or teachers.

Third, the charter authorities will collect a commission for every student that enrolls in a charter, a windfall for them. And of course, there is a “parent trigger” to encourage the creation of more charters as parents become discouraged by neglected, underfunded public schools.

Fourth, the money for the vouchers and charters will come right out of the minimum funding allocated for the public schools, guaranteeing that the remaining public schools will have less money, more crowded classes, and suffer major budget cuts.

Fifth, the law authorizes public money for online instruction, for online for-profit schools, and for instruction offered by private businesses, universities, tutors, and anyone else who wants to claim a share of the state’s money for public education.

Sixth, teacher evaluation will be tied to student test scores and teachers can be easily fired, assuring that no one will ever dare teach anything controversial or disagree with their principal. Teachers in charter schools, the biggest growth sector, will not need certification.

Rather than go on, I here link to a blog I wrote at Bridging Differences (hosted by Education Week). My blog links to an article written by a Louisiana teacher who happens to have been a professional journalist. You should read what she wrote.

The Jindal plan is sweeping and it seeks to dismantle public education. It is a plan to privatize public education. It is not conservative. Conservatives don’t destroy essential democratic institutions. Conservatives build on tradition, they don’t heedlessly cast them aside. Conservatives are conservative because they take incremental steps, to fix what’s broken, not to sweep away an entire institution. Jindal’s plan is not conservative. It is reactionary.

And it is a template for what Romney promises to do.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Romney, Mitt, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Why Assess the Arts?

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2012 //
10

Nancy Flanagan is one of the nation’s premier teachers and bloggers. Unlike many who opine about education (I include myself in that category), Nancy knows teaching inside and out. She was a music teacher for thirty years and was deeply involved in creating National Board Certification for teachers. Now she blogs for Education Week and she is always informative.

When a Washington, D.C., think-tank person suggested that students of the arts should be assessed by standardized, multiple-choice tests, Nancy was properly incensed. (And so were many of the teachers of the arts who commented on this blog.)

In her commentary, Nancy posed a basic question:

Why would we deliberately advance a worthless (and expensive-to-develop) mode of assessment for something as crucial to kids’ well-being and our own economic vitality as the arts? The humanities are a creative wellspring for individual and social innovation. They cannot–and should never be–reduced to rote, bubbled-in recitation of dry facts. What standardized testing in music and the arts yields is mere quantification of students’ ability to memorize. The tests tell us nothing about how students will apply artistic skill and expression to their real lives and careers. Further–they tell us nothing about the instructional quality of their teachers.

Nancy quite rightly criticizes the view that the only way to “save” the arts is to make sure that they are tested by bubble tests. I have heard the same argument from history teachers, and I think it is self-defeating. If you want to save your subject, don’t sacrifice it on the altar of standardized testing. There is no surer way to discourage students of the arts and students of history than to expect them to be judged by bubble tests. There are certainly far more rigorous and appropriate means to assess skills and knowledge than the cheap and easy computer-based and computer-scored questions.

As I read Nancy’s article, I found myself remembering a segment I saw several weeks ago on 60 Minutes. It was about a ragtag symphony orchestra in Africa. One man who loved orchestral music recruited the musicians (none of whom knew how to play anything), found or begged or made instruments, and taught them to play. The musicians left their daily work to study and practice and play together. The segment concluded with a large number of very joyful men and women–living in a desperately poor nation–playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

What a triumph of the human spirit!

Why would anyone give them a standardized test?

Diane

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Is Vermont the Best State?

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2012 //
20

I have received many comments from readers nominating their state as the worst in the nation for having enacted legislations that removes due process from teachers or reduces their status or connects their evaluation to student test scores or defunds public education or harms professional educators and the public weal in other ways.

Vermont is different. Vermont still has leadership that wants to improve its schools and support teachers. Vermont decided to turn down the NCLB waiver when it realized that it provided no flexibility, just another bunch of mandates that would be bad for the schools and for children. Vermont doesn’t want to test its students every single year. Vermont realized that NCLB and Race to the Top are not good for students or education.

Are there other states that refuse the enticements offered by Washington, D.C., to create more market-style competition for public schools and to reduce the status of professional educators?

If your state has had the wisdom and foresight of Vermont, please let me know.

The question we must ask is, why is Vermont different? Why has it stood outside the destructive mainstream of education “deform” that has swept the nation?

We can all take heart in knowing that one beacon of sanity remains. And yet how discouraging to know that of our fifty states, there is only one that still wants children to have a childhood and for education to be a time to learn rather than a time to be ranked, rated, and numbered by instruments of limited value.

A reader sent this comment:

Vermont is one of the only states in the country that refuses to get on the bandwagon for corporate ed. reform. The state has a law against charter schools and they refused Race to the top funds. Vermont did try to get a NCLB waiver, but was rejected by Sec. Duncan because their proposal did not include tying student test scores to teacher evaluations or charter schools. Their proposal did include focusing more on creativity, a rich curriculum, and less on testing, but I guess that was not good enough. I’m getting certification in both Mass. and NY, but I may consider going to teach in Vermont. Burlington is beginning to focus more on equity and creating a system similar to what they have in Finland. If it is successful, then maybe people will begin to pay more attention to what actually works.
Please sign this petition to get rid of Arne Duncan:http://dumpduncan.org/

Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Why Do Doctors Make Excuses?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
36

A reader sent in a comment about holding teachers accountable for test scores.

He attended a “question and answer” luncheon hosted by the Lafayette, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce, where Governor Bobby Jindal was the speaker. Jindal came late, spoke fast, and left without answering any questions.

The reader, possibly the only educator in the audience, turned to the CEO of a hospital sitting next to him and asked “if he ever pondered posting his hospital’s mortality rate outside its door.” The reader was “a little surprised at how firmly his ‘no’ response was—-it was as if I asked him to jump off of a bridge.   I was merely trying to make a comparison to cohort grad rates and letter grading systems in our state to the business community.” The reader concluded that “accountability as educators know it will  never be applied to any other type of profession much less within the business community despite their unwavering support of accountability for public schools.    That CEO’s firm ‘no’ response was all the proof I needed that accountability the way we know it will not make anything better….and the business world knows this.”

Another reader liked that comment and added: “had the CEO offered more than his terse response, I suspect his explanation would include that although doctors play a role in a patient’s health, there are a number of other factors that doctors have no control over–patient’s genetics, prior medical history, willingness to follow the doctor’s prescriptions, environment, how far an illness has progressed before the doctor sees the patient, etc. And, of course, his explanation is perfectly valid. For some reason, though, when teachers make the same point regarding students’ test scores, corporate ed reformers are quick to accuse them of making excuses.”

Why do doctors refuse to post their results on their front door? When you visit a cardiac surgeon, ask him or her how many of their patients survived their surgery?

When you go to the dentist, ask how many of their patients continued to get cavities?

Why do they make excuses and tell us that if patients don’t follow orders, don’t blame them? Or if patients arrive with pre-existing conditions, don’t blame them?

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Teacher Evaluations
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