Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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Oklahoma Is Not OK

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
5

I recently printed a blog about the Oklahoma Department of Education’s outrageous decision to publish personal information about some two dozen students who got waivers and did not take the state tests. This seemed like permission to publish their vital statistics on the department’s website, an outrageous and unprofessional action.

Now we hear from a teacher in Oklahoma:

Oklahoma is NOT OK…we’ve had the misfortune to elect a public-school-hating dentist as Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state…she’s in Jeb Bush’s back pocket, so all we have to do is look to Florida to see what’s coming at us. In less than two years she’s begun dismantling our schools.

She recently published the names, personal information, IEP status of students who appealed for graduation (they hadn’t passed the four required tests of seven) and lost…just the names of the students who lost! Their parents had to sign a FERPA waiver in order to appeal at all. We had been told they removed the information, but they only removed students’ names — initials and all disability info is still on the State Department of Ed’s website.

Vouchers, third-grade flunk law, teacher evaluations based on test scores, A-F school grades, weakened due-process for tenured teachers….we’re there. A dust-up at her first State School Board meeting resulted in her being able to hand-pick a Board of ‘yes’ men. We see the ALEC footprints and Mr. Bush’s.

How very sad that we’re all suffering like this, and the ‘reformers’ will ell you they’re doing this for our students. WE are the ones working for our students!

Categories Education Reform, Oklahoma, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Update on New Jersey’s Bad Idea

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2012 //
7

Earlier today, I posted a blog about a bill in the New Jersey legislature that would remove seniority and tenure from teachers in that state and require that they be fired after two consecutive negative evaluations.. I just received  the  latest report from a reader in New Jersey.

You will notice two bad things about this “victory”:

1. Teachers and school boards have been pitted against each other. This is wrong. They should be working together.

2. Teachers have been pushed so far into a corner defending due process and seniority that they have acceded to demands to be evaluated by test scores. Interesting that the US will be the only nation to accept this untried, unproven teach-to-the-test approach to teacher evaluation.

I have reports from two teachers in New Jersey. There are differences in what they say, but there is concurrence that the political leadership of the state wants to cut teachersdown by making their jobs less secure. Bear in mind that New Jetsey is consistently among the top three states (the others being Massachusetts and Connecticut) on the federal NAEP. Why teachers need to be humbled in a high-performing state is anyone’s guess (I’d say the same in any state, actually).

So, from teacher #1:

Here’s an update regarding how NJ tenure reform bill S-1455 fared in committee today.

The text of tenure reform bill S-1455 as posted on the legislative web site at this hour still includes a provision requiring principals to revoke teacher tenure after two low performance evaluations.

However, today the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee advanced a substitute bill in which unilateral tenure revocation no longer appears to be a factor.  Instead, an inefficiency charge leveled against a teacher after two low performance ratings would result in binding arbitration.  The New Jersey Education Association supports the substitute version of the bill because, in addition to respecting due process rights, the bill no longer aims to weaken seniority.

The New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA) is not happy to know that experienced, more highly paid teachers will retain the benefit of seniority.  NJSBA governmental relations director Michael Vrancik was quoted as saying, “The war is on.  There’s more to fight.”  http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/06/state_senate_committee_approve.html

And now another take from teacher #2:

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/06/tenure-confusion-in-nj.html

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

New Jersey Has a Bad Idea

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2012 //
11

A reader sends this note, relevant today, but relevant beyond today. It is part of the rightwing assault on the teaching profession. The state gets to define “effective,” then can take the right to due process away from those who don’t meet the benchmarks arbitrarily created by the state, which is eager to fire teachers and make room for teaching temps. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Teachers without the right to due process may be fired for any reason or for no reason. Teachers without the right to due process will never teach anything controversial. Teachers without due process rights will never disagree with their principal. Teachers without due process rights have no academic freedom.

IN NEW JERSEY TODAY (6/18), tenure reform bill S-1455 (the TEACHNJ Act) will be voted on in committee. But not by the Senate Education Committee which discussed this bill at length during its March meeting. No, on Thursday 6/14 this tenure reform bill was “transferred” to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee for a quickie vote to be held Monday 6/18. The main purpose of this tenure reform bill is to dismantle the right to due process by making it not only something a teacher can earn but also something a teacher can lose. If an administrator should give a teacher two summative performance ratings on the lower half of a 4-point scale (“ineffective” or “partially effective”), that teacher will then lose his/her previously earned right to due process and can be fired without the opportunity to appeal the decision to a third party. So in other words, in New Jersey a teacher will be able to EARN the right to due process but it will then be TAKEN AWAY precisely when the teacher might actually need to exercise that right.
Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

How Idiotic Is VAM? Very.

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
21

One of my favorite bloggers is Anthony Cody. Anthony is an experienced teacher of science in California. I always learn by reading his blog “Living in Dialogue.” He recently offered his column to a teacher in Florida to explain how his or her evaluation was affected by “value-added modeling” or VAM.

The idea behind VAM is that teachers should be evaluated based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Arne Duncan made VAM a requirement of the Race to the Top program, despite the lack of any studies or research validating this practice and despite ample warnings that it was invalid and would mislabel teachers as effective or ineffective. Nonetheless, many states pushed through legislation requiring that teachers be evaluated in part by their students’ changing scores. If the scores went up, they were a good teacher; if they did not, they were an ineffective teacher.

This idea was embraced most warmly by very conservative Republican governors like Rick Scott in Florida, where VAM accounts for fifty percent of a teacher’s evaluation. In the column cited here, the Florida teacher explains how it works and how absurd it is. This teacher teaches social studies to students in the 9th and 10th grades. When he/she went to get his evaluation, it turned out that the administrator had no idea how VAM would work, especially since the Florida test does not test social studies for 9th and 10th graders. At first, the teacher was told that his/her evaluation would be based on the whole school’s scores–not just the students in his/her classes–but then he/she convinced the administrator that the evaluation should be based only on those in his/her particular classes. That took a while to figure out. The teacher got the FCAT scores in May, but it took the district or state three months to prepare the teachers’ VAM using those scores.

By the end of the blog, it is obvious that the calculation of VAM is confusing, non-scientific, and inherently unrelated to teacher performance. It will be used to take away teachers’ due process rights and any protection for their freedom of speech. It is a weapon created to harass teachers. As this teacher concludes:

As someone who is not comfortable living life on my knees with duct tape over my mouth (you may have figured this out by now if you have been reading this blog for any length of time), I am not comfortable working on an annual contract. Teachers must be able to voice their concerns about administrative decisions that harm students without fear of losing their jobs. Eliminate continuing contracts and a culture of complacency, sycophants and fear will rule the schools. Senate Bills passed in state after Race to the Top state have included VAMs as a major portion of teacher evaluations all in the name of “Student Success” and “Educational Excellence” when in reality they have been immaculately designed to end the teaching profession as we know it and free state and districts from career teachers with pension aspirations. Some may brush me off as your typical history teacher conspiracy nut, but my daddy didn’t raise no sucker. VAM is a scam.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Florida, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

One Courageous Teacher Says No to Test Madness

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
7

Yesterday I heard from a teacher in New Jersey, who read my blog about giving tests in the arts and physical education. I said in no uncertain terms that giving state tests in the arts is wrong. It diminishes teacher professionalism. It has nothing to do with improving education. It’s just the mindless need to test everyone and create data so that teachers can be evaluated by numbers.

This teacher described the nightmare of testing that is descending on her state under the leadership of Chris Cerf. Not only will students be constantly pre-tested, tested, test-prepped, and post-tested, they will be tested in everything to measure their “growth.” They will be tested in dance, physical education, art, etc.

This teacher knows that what is happening is wrong. Other teachers know it is wrong too, but they are afraid to speak up. As the movement accelerates to strip teachers of tenure and any job protections, the climate of fear takes hold. Who will risk their job to do what is right? Who has the courage to stand up to the powerful? Who will defend the defenseless children who are the victims of all this obsessive measurement?

She will. Who will stand with her?

It is funny that you say that because my school is piloting the new teacher evaluation in NJ. NJ has chosen to go with the Student Growth Percentile (SGP) model in the teacher evaluation. So, with SGP, students are given pre-midterms, midterms, pre-final, and final to measure the growth of our students.Here is the breakdown of how it is calculatedQ: How does New Jersey measure student growth?
A: New Jersey measures growth for an individual student by comparing the change in his or her NJ ASK achievement from one year to the
next to that of all other students in the state who had similar historical results (the student’s “academic peers”). This change in achievement
is reported as a student growth percentile (abbreviated SGP) and indicates how high or low that student’s growth was as compared to that
of his/her academic peers. For a school or district, the growth percentiles for all students are aggregated to create a median SGP for the
school or district. The median SGP is a representation of “typical” growth for students in the school or district.However, since we do not have longitudinal tests in the high school, our district/school chose to create their own tests for every content area.
I’m talking dance, physical education, art, musical theatre, graphic arts, sculpture, play-writing etc. This week, our students are taking multiple choice tests mixed with open ended responses in dance and all those other areas I mentioned, and I found myself think, “this is absurd” yet I’m the only one saying anything. Am I the only one who thinks this is DEAD WRONG! No I am not, but I found out yesterday everyone else in our school is afraid to say anything. They are afraid to take a stand because they are not willing to suffer any repercussions from the administration. However we are doing our children a disservice by keeping silent.So, I’ll stand alone and take the stand with one or two other teachers. It may not make a big impact, but I will make a point. We owe this to our children and future generations.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, New Jersey, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Oh, No! Yet Another Arts Assessment

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
12

Oh, no! Dana Goldstein visited Memphis, where she found that arts teachers are using portfolio assessments.

I suppose that is a step up from online standardized tests and the old-fashioned machine-scored computerized tests, but it is still a very bad idea.

The whole premise of testing is that teachers cannot be trusted to reach responsible judgments about student work.

And the purpose of the assessment is not to help students but to devise a numerical rating so teachers of the arts may be evaluated and held “accountable” for student progress. If the student is drawing better pictures, the teacher must be a better teacher. If the student work does not get better, the teacher is a bad teacher. He or she will be rated ineffective and may lose tenure or compensation and may be fired.

If we cared about teacher professionalism, we would let teachers teach without tying their work to test scores or portfolios.

If we cared about creativity, we would let students engage wholeheartedly in the arts without measuring whether they are getting “better” at what they are doing. Almost no one learns to play a musical instrument and gets worse by the day; and if they do, it is because they didn’t practice, didn’t care, and didn’t try. If they try, they will improve. And any teacher of the arts will know that they are trying and improving without need for an assessment to prove it. To “prove it” to whom? To a supervisor? To the state commissioner of investigation?

Let’s face it. None of this assessment mania is about kids or education or teacher quality. It is about control and lack of respect for teachers.

Follow your instincts, Dana. Whether assessed by a machine or by a portfolio, the arts should be performed and experienced, not measured.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Why Test the Arts and PE?

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
24

As I read Dana Goldstein’s article about the advance of standardized testing into subjects like the arts and physical education, I began to get a queasy feeling. “This isn’t right,” I mumbled to myself. I thought of my grandchildren taking standardized tests in music and gym, and I shook my head. This isn’t right.

Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject. Arne Duncan brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.

South Carolina has developed online tests for the arts, multiple-choice, of course. Florida is building tests of music and other pervormance arts that can be scored by machine, that is, by artificial intelligence. The vendors of these tests lobby to make them permanent, regardless of their quality.

Are they doing this at Sidwell Friends or the University of Chicago Lab School or Dalton or Exeter or Deerfield Academy? Of course not.

Is this what they do in Finland? Of course not.

What is the reason for testing the arts and physical education? It’s not to help students take joy in singing or playing a musical instrument or running fast or shooting baskets.

No, the purpose of all these tests is to collect data to evaluate the teachers! Wasting the students’ time with stupid questions and pointless activities and trivial measurements is just a way of gathering information so teachers of the arts and physical education can get a value-added score, just like teachers of reading and math.

Sometimes Americans do really foolish things. Sometimes they do these things because it is so easy to follow the crowd. Sometimes it’s because no one is thinking clearly. Sometimes they get caught up in nutty fads because someone is making a profit and buying legislators. Usually it’s because the people who launched these bad ideas have no moorings. They have lost touch with their own values. They do to other people’s children what they would never do to their own. They don’t listen to teachers. They don’t listen to parents.

History is not kind to people who do foolish, nay harmful, things and fail to exercise independent judgment. That’s why it’s best to say “no” when your conscience tells you to.

Diane

Categories Arts Education, Education Reform, Florida, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Gates Foundation Explains the Galvanic Skin Response Monitor (plus)

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
34

An enlightening article by Stephanie Simon of Reuters was just posted. Simon interviewed Gates’ officials and others, and her article fills in the Gates’ rationale that has until now been missing. The article says:

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, “only get us so far,” said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, “we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments” such as the biosensors.

Robinson assures the reporter that the “engagement pedometers” (odd to have a pedometer worn as a bracelet) are not intended to measure teacher effectiveness, at least not now.

The engagement pedometer is not formally part of that program; the biosensors are intended to give teachers feedback rather than evaluate their effectiveness, said Robinson, the Gates spokeswoman.

Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson acknowledged. “It’s hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this,” she said.

Some teachers expressed disdain for the device, but the reporter managed to find someone from a Gates-funded organization to praise it:

To Sandi Jacobs, the promise of such technology outweighs the vague fear that it might be used in the future to punish teachers who fail to engage their students’ Q Sensors.

Any device that helps a teacher identify and meet student needs “is a good thing,” said Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that receives funding from the Gates Foundation. “We have to be really open to what technology can bring.”

NCTQ, readers may recall, was the subject of an earlier blog here.

ADDENDUM: There must be yet another Gates grant for the “galvanic skin response” research. Until now, I had learned of only two: the Clemson research for nearly half a million; the National Commission on Time and Learning for some $600,000. The Reuters article noted above refers to $1.4 million in grants for this research, which means that some other group of researchers is working on developing the technology to measure student responses to instruction via physiological reactions.

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

New Information on the Galvanic Skin Response Bracelet

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
16

The Gates Foundation now says that its grants for the galvanic skin response monitor had no connection with teacher evaluation, even though the statement on its web site says the purpose of the grant is to “determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers” and says that the researchers at Clemson will be working with the MET (teacher evaluation) project of the Gates Foundation.

The foundation issued the following statement yesterday (sent to me by a reporter, without a link), responding to the questions raised on this blog and elsewhere:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding a portfolio of nearly $1.4 million in grants to support researchers interested in studying students’ classroom engagement – based on biometric measures like skin sensitivity, as indicated through bracelets.  This pilot of approximately 100 students has not yet begun.  Past studies with autistic children have used the bracelets to show those who might seem unresponsive to external stimuli are engaged and learning .

These grants are not all related to the Measures of Effective Teaching research project, and will not in any way be used to evaluate teacher performance.  Rather, these are tools to help students and teachers gain a better understanding how and when students are most engaged in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of learning how to help students learn better.

The foundation is funding, rather than conducting this research, and specific questions about research design and objectives are best directed to researchers  Rosalind Picard picard@affectiva.com and Shaundra Dailysdaily@clemson.edu.

In this statement, the foundation insists that the bracelets “will not in any way be used to evaluate teacher performance.” That is interesting since the grant announcement said the money was connected to the Gates MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) program. But, let’s take them at their word. Developing these biometric measures has nothing to do with measuring teachers’ performance, which is a major focus of the foundation at this time.

But here’s more new information.

A reader sent the following comment:

In 2008 Microsoft filed a patent application for a system that monitors employee metabolism: “one or more physiological or environmental sensors to detect at least one of heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement, facial movements, facial expressions, and blood pressure.”Here is the patent application. And here is an article about it.
Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

The Question of the Day

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
9

Responding to a third-grade teacher who despaired of complying with all the demands pressing on her, this reader asks the best question of all: why is this hard-working, dedicated, conscientious teacher compelled to satisfy Bill and Melinda Gates? Frankly, the same question occurred to me but this reader asked it better than I.

How did the world become so topsy-turvy that these two individuals have become the arbiters of good teaching when neither of them was ever a teacher?

Granted, they are extremely rich. But I’m willing to bet that neither would last a day in any third-grade classroom. Who put them in charge of the teaching profession? How did they get the power to decide who is and is not an effective teacher? What is the source of their presumed expertise? Why should  every teacher in the land feel that they must please Bill and Melinda?

The question of the day, then, is this:
Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching
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