Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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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

Debating Cuomo Plan for Teacher Ratings

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
22

Governor Andrew Cuomo has come up with a compromise on the issue of releasing teacher data rankings. He wants only parents to see the rankings and data reports for their children’s teachers, but to make public the data for individual classes and schools. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.

It doesn’t satisfy the tabloids, who want every teacher’s name and ranking to be published online and in print. Like Mayor Bloomberg, they believe that the rankings are an accurate reflection of teacher quality and should be freely displayed, perhaps on “wanted” posters in the post-office.

It doesn’t satisfy me either because I know based on research and experience that the rankings are inaccurate, unstable and will sully the reputation of good teachers. How are parents helped by seeing inaccurate ratings? How are teachers helped to improve, as Bill Gates pointed out in an article in the New York Times earlier this year, if their job evaluations are showed to anyone other than their supervisors?

The rankings, derived from the rise or fall of student test scores, are demonstrably inaccurate. When New York City released its teacher data reports in January and they were published in the media with the names and rankings of teachers, it warned the public to take them with more than a grain of salt because the margin of errors in both reading and math were so large–35 points in reading and 53 points in math. That means that a teacher of math who was labeled a 50 (on a 100 point scale) might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. In reading, the margin of error was so large as to make the numbers utterly meaningless. Statistical analyses showed that there was no correlation between the scores that a teacher “produced” from year to year, and that a teacher who taught both subjects got different grades. All that data, all those rankings were so flawed as to be pointless other than to provide fodder for the tabloids to attack teachers.

Why aren’t the tabloids howling for the release of the evaluations of police officers and firefighters? Why are their evaluations shielded (by law) from public view? Shouldn’t the public have a right to know about their performance?

What about the job evaluations of the top officials at the New York City Department of Education? When will their job evaluations be released? They are public employees and they are paid six figures. What value do they add? How many schools have they improved? What are they doing to strengthen public education? How can the public hold them accountable? Here’s one suggestion: Every time a public school closes, the top officials should lose points on their evaluation because a school closing represents a failure of leadership.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Is Tennessee the Worst State?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
8

A reader in Tennessee nominates his state as the worst in the nation in terms of implementing the usual stale ideas to “reform” the schools.

How could it not be in contention to win the race to the bottom when it was one of the first states (Delaware was the other) to win the Race to the Top? That guaranteed that Tennessee would adopt every untested and harmful policy idea that Arne Duncan’s team could think up.

Conservative Republicans control the state, and they like the Obama agenda. Go figure. Could it be because Obama’s agenda is a more muscular version of NCLB? Republicans love the tough accountability, they like cracking the whip on the teachers, and they love privatization of public services.

Where other people (like parents and teachers) look at schools and see children, the reformers in Tennessee (and elsewhere) look at schools and see entrepreneurial prospects and a steady stream of government revenue.

So naturally the state is committed to evaluating teachers based on student test scores, and those who don’t teach tested subjects get evaluated by some other teachers’ work. Makes sense, no? And surely there will be lots of new charters in Tennessee to “save” the children.

Then, to add to that state’s woes, the new state commissioner of education, Kevin Huffman, is not only Michelle Rhee’s -ex, but was formerly the PR director for TFA. That guarantees a very big foot in the door for the ill-trained novices who only Teach For Awhile. Huffman hired a charter school leader from Houston to take over the state’s lowest performing schools. Tennessee will soon be charter school paradise, or at least paradise for TFA.

And then there is all that Gates money in Tennessee, now deployed to figure out how to have an effective teacher in every single classroom in the state. Watch Tennessee overtake Massachusetts on NAEP rankings. Wait a minute, isn’t Tennessee the birthplace of value-added assessment under William Sanders, the agricultural statistician? Didn’t Tennessee start measuring value-added by teachers in the 1980s? Why aren’t they already number one?

Yes, Tennessee is a contender.

Last year, TN and our TfA commissioner of ed and Michelle Rhee’s ex, Kevin Huffman, rushed into use a similar teacher evaluation system purchased from the Milken Foundation (the same Michael Milken of securities fraud fame) that measures teacher competence on a 1 – 5 Likert scale, aptly named TEAM. 1-5 is the same crude metric I used to rate my hotel stay and my car dealership. Sensitive to the effects of nuanced teaching practices, it’s not. If scored according to the TEAM trainer, on 15% of all teachers will gain or keep tenure protection. 85% will be subject to firing.
Tied into the teacher’s average TEAM score is 40% VAM scores from the TCAP state assessments in reading in math. Teachers who do not teach reading and math were forced to use the VAMs of the school TCAP average or arbitrarily assigned either the school reading or math average score. Recommendations by an “independent” committee to improve the system suggested adding more tests to include all subject areas.
With the republicans well in control of all branches of government in TN, teachers here have lost their collective voices. In 2010, Ramsey with the help of ALEC ended tenure, collective bargaining, auto deductions for TEA dues, and kicked all teacher reps off of the state retirement board. Three of the largest school systems in the state have Broad trained superintendents. The day after Walker in WI survived his recall, TN’s Lt Gov Ron Ramsey announced he’d propose vouchers in the 2013 legislative session.
For profit, online teacher education is proliferating. Requirements for certification to teach are being dumbed down at the same time requirements to raise achievement are increased to levels nearly impossible. Further, state university teacher education programs are being evaluated according to their graduate’s VAM scores. Huffman posted the VAM scores on the TN website and guess which teacher ed program scored the best? Teach for America! The results were so skewed and improbable that several schools requested the raw data, only to be rebuffed, with great umbrage, by the state.
TN politicians in collusion with wealthy privatizers in both the Democratic and Republican parties are using the full force of state power to crush involvement of teachers and parents in decisions about our children’s schools. God help us all in TN.
Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

How Are Police and Teachers Alike These Days?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
16

Read this article, which documents how data-driven policing has caused police to report statistics wrongly, classify crimes as more or less serious depending on the quota needed to fill, and has created constructs of “productivity” that warp the goals of policing.

What is the primary goal of policing? To keep our communities safe and crime-free. What is the primary goal of education? To assure that the younger generation is prepared in mind, character and body to assume the responsibilities of citizenship in our society. But what are the goals of education in a data-driven environment? To raise test scores, by whatever means necessary. This is akin to setting a quota for felony arrests for police or directing them that the crime statistics must go down.

Here we see a restatement of Campbell’s Law. When the stakes are high, people will not only forget the goals of their activity but the measure itself becomes corrupted. Thus, the data that are generated–whether by police or teachers–become meaningless because of the pressure applied to get them. In effect, we are paying people bonuses to generate good news that is not true. The good news is not true, the data are not trustworthy, the measures are no longer useful, and we are not achieving the purposes of policing or teaching. It’s what you might call a lose-lose.

But it does have certain benefits. It creates new industries for those who love counting and measuring and reporting. It creates new work for the consultants who will tell you how to reach your targets. It provides a rationale for endless workshops and professional development and study groups, all of which divert even more time from the original goals. It creates new work for the experts who will opine about better ways to reach the targets. And it gives bragging rights to the politicians who think they accomplished something.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations
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