Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

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

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
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »