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Hillsborough County Will Ditch Bill Gates’ Teacher Evaluation Plan

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2015 //
12

What if you build it and it collapses? Well, you can always try to “stay the course.”

Or, in the case of Hillsborough County, Florida, you can start all over again and just write off the millions of dollars already spent on a failed teacher evaluation system as a bad debt. Just pay it off and move on.

Valerie Strauss reports that the new superintendent of schools in Hillsborough County (who followed MaryEllen Elia, who was fired, then hired as New York State Commissioner of Education) has decided to drop the Gates-funded teacher evaluation plan. Gates promised $100 million but delivered only $80 million because the approach wasn’t working.

Strauss writes:

Here we go again. Another Bill Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth.

This time it’s the Empowering Effective Teachers, an educator evaluation program in Hillsborough County, Florida, which was developed in 2009 with major financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A total of more than $180 million has been spent on the project since then — with Gates initially promising some $100 million of it — but now, the district, one of the largest in the country, is ending the program.

Why?

Under the system, 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation would be based on student standardized test scores and the rest by observation from “peer evaluators.” It turned out that costs to maintain the program unexpectedly rose, forcing the district to spend millions of dollars more than it expected to spend. Furthermore, initial support among teachers waned, with teachers saying that they don’t think it accurately evaluated their effectiveness and that they could be too easily fired.

Now the new superintendent of schools in Hillsborough, Jeff Eakins, said in a missive sent to the evaluators and mentors that he is moving to a different evaluation system, according to this story in the Tampa Bay Times. It says:

“Unlike the complex system of evaluations and teacher encouragement that cost more than $100 million to develop and would have cost an estimated $52 million a year to sustain, Hillsborough will likely move to a structure that has the strongest teachers helping others at their schools.”

Eakins said he envisions a new program featuring less judgmental “non-evaluative feedback” from colleagues and more “job-embedded professional development,” which is training undertaken in the classroom during the teacher work day rather than in special sessions requiring time away from school. He said in his letter that these elements were supported by “the latest research.”

This may be the beginning of the end for test-based accountability. It has not worked anywhere, and it has cost the schools of the nation hundreds of millions–or more likely–billions of dollars that would have been better spent on reducing class sizes, promoting desegregation, opening health clinics, and hiring teacher of the arts.

Categories Failure, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Marc Tucker: The U.S. DOE’s “Mea Culpa” Did Not Go Far Enough

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2015 //
21

Marc Tucker is glad to see the U.S. Department of Education acknowledging that American students spend too much time being tested and preparing for tests. But, he writes, it didn’t go far enough to take responsibility for the multiplication of redundant tests.

He writes:

A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools has done what seemingly nothing or no one has yet been able to do: Convince the current administration that the rampant over-testing in U.S. schools is proving harmful for the quality of education that our students receive.

The report found that students take, on average, more than 112 standardized tests between pre-K and grade 12, with the average student taking about eight standardized tests per year. Some are intended to “fulfill federal requirements under No Child Left Behind, NCLB waivers, or Race to the Top (RTT), while many others originate at the state and local levels. Others were optional.”

Now the administration is signaling that they see the error of their and their predecessors’ ways. Calling for a two percent cap on the amount of classroom time that is spent on testing, and a host of other proposals, the administration’s mea culpa is an unexpected demonstration of what can occur when the facts are laid bare for all to see. How much is actually done to reverse the over-testing trend will be decided by the actions of incoming acting Secretary of Education John King.

The tone of flexibility in the Department’s announcement is new and welcome, as is its recognition that the Department may share some culpability in the national revolt against testing. Its call for fewer and higher quality assessments is on target, as is its willingness to help the states come up with more sensible approaches.

What I don’t see in the administration’s proposals is understanding that the vast proliferation of indiscriminate testing with cheap, low quality tests is the direct result of federal education policies beginning with No Child Left Behind and continuing with Race to the Top and the current waiver regime. I offer you one phrase in the Department’s announcement in evidence of this proposition: “The Department will work with states that wish to amend their ESEA flexibility waiver plans to reduce testing…while still maintaining teacher and leader evaluation and support systems that include growth in student learning.”

But it is precisely the federal government’s insistence on requiring testing regimes that facilitate teacher and leader evaluations that include student growth metrics that caused all this over-testing in the first place.

Outstanding principals I’ve talked with tell me that when tough-minded, test-based accountability came into vogue, they created or found good interventions that came with their own assessments, each keyed to the intervention they were using. They had always done that. But their district superintendents, also fearful for their jobs under the new regime, mandated other interventions, with their own tests. Then the state piled on with their own mandated programs and tests, all driven by the fear of leaders, at each level, that if student performance did not improve at the required rate, their own jobs were on the line. Few of these interventions were aligned with the new standards or with each other. But time was of the essence. Better a non-aligned instructional program than none at all. Better a cheap test of basic skills they could afford than a much more expensive one they could not afford.

What sent the numbers right over the cliff was pacing. School administrators, focused on having their students score well on the basic skills tests used by the state accountability systems, pushed schools enrolling large numbers of disadvantaged students to figure out where the students needed to be at set intervals during the year. This determined the pace of instruction. It also made it much easier for administrators to get control over the instruction. All that remained was to administer a test at each of those intervals—say every month or couple of months—to see whether the teachers were keeping pace with the scripted curriculum and the students were making enough progress to do well at the end of the semester or year….

The key for great school leaders isn’t formal evaluation and it isn’t firing people. Only Donald Trump, evidently, fired his way to the top. The key is running a great school that great people want to work in, and then spending a lot of time identifying, recruiting and supporting those great people. Principals who work this way often let their staff know that they expect them to work hard. Those who do not want to work so hard go elsewhere. But these principals do not depend on test-based accountability systems to identify the slackers nor do they depend on test-based accountability systems to identify the teachers they want to hire or to develop them once they are hired.. Why should they? They are in classrooms all the time, talking and observing, coaching and supporting.

The data reported by the Council of the Great City Schools reveal a calamity. The cause is our national accountability system. The flexibility offered by the Department of Education is welcome and refreshing, but it is not the answer. The answer will have to wait for the day when the federal government no longer insists that the states and schools use test-based accountability and value-added strategies to assess individual teachers with consequences for individual teachers. John King did not create this system. Perhaps he can help this country change it. We’ll see.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

John Thompson: The Administration’s Backtracking on VAM Is Good for a Belly Laugh

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2015 //
32

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, sees the bright side in the Obama administration’s apparent step-back from the testing regime it so loved.

He feels certain that the administration will go through some serious contortions to avoid admitting that the past seven years of test-and-punish was an outright mistake.

They might not want to be known as phase 2 of the Bush-Obama education program.

The most important opening that he sees is a ray of sunlight in the retreat from value-added-measurement, which educators despise.

Who knew that the administration praises Minnesota’s educator evaluation plan, which values test scores at 1% or less?

Of course, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s educators would completely strip the test score growth component out of any accountability framework for individuals. The best we could previously do, however, was help kick the value-added can down the road. This wasted money and educators’ energy, but it kept invalid and unreliable test score growth models from inflicting too much damage in the short run. It did so under the assumption that states would eventually tire of flushing those resources down the toilet in order to appease the federal government.

Now, the USDOE is basically inviting that delaying tactic. It endorses the District of Columbia’s backtracking. D.C. had once proclaimed its value-added evaluations as a great success but now it is seen as a model because it “has temporarily removed its value-added measures from its teacher and leader evaluation systems and continues to focus on providing quality feedback on its Teaching and Learning Framework/Leadership Framework.”

The Obama administration has not only demanded that student growth models be used as a part of “multiple measures,” it has insisted that these flawed and destructive metrics must count anywhere from 35 to 50% of teachers’ evaluations. Being realists, some educators have tried to water down test score growth metrics so that they become meaningless and thus harmless.

It could be argued that we need to give reformers a fig leaf, and accept a miniscule portion of an evaluation – say 1% – so that we don’t hurt corporate reformers’ feelings as we “monkey wrench” their scheme. If systems want to waste incredible amounts of money on testing and computer systems for keeping score in order to avoid admitting a mistake, that’s on them.

Guess what? The administration now supports Minnesota’s plan which allows “its districts to include state assessment based growth at any percent (even less than 1 percent).” The administration apparently agreed to this because Minnesota can pretend that it is gauging student learning growth measured by other factors.

And that suggests the obvious first step. Oklahoma and other states should immediately grab the low-hanging fruit and stop the indefensible policy of using test score growth guesti-mates for sanctioning individuals. I’d hate to have to continue to waste scarce resources on test-driven accountability, but I’d be willing to engage in a discussion of whether bubble-in growth should count as .01% of 1%, or .5% or even .99% of 1% of a teacher’s evaluation. It would be a process worthy of The Onion.

I hadn’t known enough about the Minnesota waiver the administration now claims to read in such a manner. So, I’d missed the humor of the situation. If the administration is willing to contort itself into such a pretzel in order to free us from the quantitative portion of teacher evaluations, we should enjoy the ride. If it will go through such contortions to avoid admitting a mistake and to not offend the Billionaires Boys Club who dumped this fiasco on us, it should prompt more than groans.

 

Thompson says we should not be too hard on the administration. Give them credit–or at least that fig leaf–to salute their symbolic retreat from the testing disaster. Please note that Thompson counts Colorado’s testing mania as one of the worst in the nation, based on a law written by ex-TFA State Senator Michael Johnston, who became the state’s leading advocate of high-stakes testing with his obnoxious S. 191. Johnston received some sort of commendation at Harvard a few months ago, for unknown reasons. For sure, no educator in Colorado is grateful for his foisting high-stakes testing on everyone else.

So, Thompson’s advice is to encourage the administration to keep backtracking while the rest of us enjoy an unexpected outburst of good sense and perhaps a good belly laugh.

Categories Colorado, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

John Thompson: The Gates Plan Failed in Tulsa, Now What?

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2015 //
52

John Thompson, historian and teacher, wonders why the Gates Foundation is so slow to recognize the failure of his teacher evaluation initiative and mitigate the damage he has done to so many teachers who were unjustly fired. Here is the case of Tulsa:

I don’t speak billionaire-ese, but Bill Gates’s 15th-anniversary presentation on his foundation’s education investments seemed to be inching towards a non-apology, concession of sorts. The weird concept of using test score growth to hold individual educators accountable was apparently born behind closed doors; the seed was supposedly planted by an economist and a bureaucrat who wowed Gates with their claim that test scores could be used in a statistical model that would drive the making of better teachers. Apparently, Gates was not briefed on the overwhelming body of social science that argued against this hypothesis as a real-world policy.

Gates apparently was unaware that so-called value-added models (VAMs) were “junk science,” at least in terms of evaluating individuals, and they weren’t intended to make a direct educational contribution to school improvement. He might not have fully understood that VAMs were a political club to intimidate teachers and unions into accepting market-driven reforms.

The value-added portion of teacher evaluations was no different than “Waiting for Superman,” the teacher-bashing propaganda film promoted by Gates. Corporate reformers used top-dollar public relations campaigns and testing regimes to treat educators like the metaphoric mule – busting us upside the head in order to get our attention.

Now, Gates says, “The early days almost went too well for us. … There was adoption, everything seemed to be on track. … We didn’t realize the issue would be confounded with what is the appropriate role of the federal and state government, we didn’t think it would be confounded with questions about are there too many tests” and other controversies.

Gates complains that school reform is harder than his global health initiatives because “when we come up with a new malaria vaccine, nobody votes to undo our malaria vaccine. (emphasis mine) Gates, however, would have never tried to invent a malaria vaccine without consulting with doctors and scientists, would he? Even if the goal is creating his vaccine, it would have been subject to objective evaluation using the scientific method. So, unlike his teacher evaluations, his vaccines aren’t rejected because they haven’t been an expensive failure.

I’ve spent a lot of time – probably too much – analyzing the ways that the quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are invalid and unreliable for the purposes sought by the Gates Foundation, and trying to communicate with Gates scholars. To their credit, Gates-funded reformers typically acknowledged that they promoted the test-driven part of evaluations while being unaware of the way that schools actually function. In private conversations, I hear that many Gates people now know they were wrong to ignore warnings by social scientists against his VAMs for individuals. They often voice disappointment and regret for their hurried overreach. But, they refuse to admit that it was a bad idea to start down the VAM brick-up-the-side-of-the-teachers’-heads road.

My sense is that a primary issue, today, is the Billionaires Boys Club’s egos, and reformers won’t pull the plug on the high stakes testing until Gates et. al allow them to do so. The recent Bill Gates speech nods in that direction, but it shows that he still hopes to stay the course because … ???

Gates now says, “Because of its complexity, the relationship to management, how labor is one, you can introduce a system … and people say, ‘No, we’d rather have no system at all, completely leave us alone.’” While acknowledging that the mass rejection of his evaluations is “a real possibility,” he still wants to “nurture these systems and get it so there’s critical mass” of systems that implement the Gates policies the way that he wants them to be implemented.

As explained by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, Gates said that “too many school systems are using teacher evaluations as merely a tool for personnel decisions, not helping teachers get better. … ‘Many systems today are about hiring and firing, not a tool for learning.'” He says “the danger is that teachers will reject evaluations altogether,” and “if we don’t get this right … (there will be) cases where teachers prefer to get no feedback at all, which is what they had a decade ago.”

The big problem with imposing Gates’s ill-informed opinion on schools was foreshadowed by his language. After more than 2/3rds of states were coerced into enshrining his risky and untested policies into law, the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) belatedly concluded that effective teaching can be measured. (emphasis mine) Of, course, that is irrelevant for policy purposes. The question they should have asked was how will those measurements be used? Will they undermine the effectiveness of the majority of teachers? Will VAMs drive good teachers out of urban districts, as they also encourage teach-to-the-test malpractice?

I was in the room for several low-level discussions in 2009 and 2010 when Oklahoma was basically coerced into adopting the federal Gates/Obama agenda. I don’t believe I encountered a single educator – then or subsequently – who has classroom experience and who favored the quantitative portion of the system.

We had no choice but to accept the Teacher and Leader Effectiveness system (TLE) which essentially imposed the Colorado teacher evaluation law on Oklahoma. Teachers and administrators recognized the danger of adopting the test-driven portion of the model that could not control for the essential factor of peer pressure. It was inherently biased against teachers in high-poverty schools, with large numbers of special education students and English Language Learners, and magnet schools where students’ scores have less room to grow. And, the idea that Common Core or any college-readiness curriculum could be adopted while holding individuals accountable for test score growth was obviously nutty!

Gates and Arne Duncan gave educators an offer we couldn’t refuse. The best we could do would be to kick the value-added can down the road. After other states found themselves bogged down in lawsuits and as it proved to be impossible to fund a program that would cost 2% of the entire school budget, we hoped the TLE’s quantitative portion would be quietly abandoned.

Oklahoma’s Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Commission is now asking the questions that Gates and Arne Duncan should have asked years ago. The Tulsa World’s Andrea Eger reports that State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister “questioned whether the state can even afford the scheme (the quantitative portion of the TLE). Secondly, she said she doesn’t want to undermine the success of the statewide system for qualitative measures of public school educators.”

Similarly, Senator John Ford, the local sponsor of the TLE legislation, is asking the question that Gates should now consider. I strongly believe Ford was misinformed when he was originally told that TLE-type evaluations weren’t “designed as a ‘gotcha’ system.” But, I’m impressed by the senator’s statement, “Things have changed. We have learned. … We are truly learning, and I don’t think we’re there yet.”

On the other hand, the one Oklahoma district which tried to remain on schedule in implementing the TLE is Tulsa which, of course, received a Gates Foundation “teacher quality” grant. The World’s Eger notes that it “has been credited for helping the district release hundreds of ineffective teachers and identify many more to receive additional support and training.”

Tulsa’s administrator who oversees evaluations, Jana Burk, echoes Gates’s spin, “We don’t want quantitative measures to be the fear factor of bringing somebody’s (evaluation) score down …Principal feedback and support and decision-making is ultimately the foundation, but those quantitative measures need to inform principals’ next steps with teachers and certainly are supposed to be drivers of improvement and reflection, not a hammer of adverse employment decisions in and of themselves.”

So, the Tulsa TLE is a tool for getting rid of hundreds of teachers, i.e “a tool for personnel decisions.” Those released teachers may or may not have been deemed ineffective under the quantitative portion of the TLE, and they may or may not be ineffective in the real world. Perhaps, in some schools, the value-added portion can be a tool that doesn’t interfere with the qualitative portion of the TLE but, in many or most schools, they will be the death of the beneficial part of the evaluation system.

I hope the commission will ask some follow-up questions. Just a couple of months ago, Tulsa’s struggle to find and keep teachers was in the headlines. Despite $28 million of edu-philanthropy in the last seven years, Tulsa’s student performance seems to lag behind that of Oklahoma City, where we face bigger challenges with less money. Moreover, Tulsa was the epicenter of Oklahoma’s Opt Out movement, where two highly respected teachers sacrificed their jobs to protest the excessive testing. Since Tulsa was ranked 6th in the nation in terms of receiving Gates Foundation grants, why haven’t the Gates’s millions worked?

Tulsa’s dubious record should now be studied in an effort to verify Gates’s claim that his measures can be implemented constructively. We should ask how many “ineffective” teachers have been subject to termination due to their failure to meet test score targets? Conversely, how many were flagged by the qualitative portion? How many “exited” teachers were actually ineffective and how many were good and effective teachers who were fed up with the system? Also, how many educators believe that feedback driven by those quantitative measures is actually better than traditional professional development?

Whether we are talking about Gates’s teacher training or his malaria vaccine, if they work then they won’t be rejected. Why won’t Gates look objectively at the evidence about the failure of the quantitative portions of teacher evaluations, and the damage they cause?

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Oklahoma, Teacher Evaluations

New York Regents’ Chancellor Tisch Denounces Governor Cuomo’s Intervention into Education Policy

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2015 //
28

Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, denounced Governor Andrew Cuomo’s education policymaking via the budget process. Under the New York State Constitution, the Regents are in charge of education policy. That is their role. But last spring, Governor Cuomo imposed a new teacher evaluation plan as part of the state budget.


State Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch Monday spoke out Monday against the new teacher evaluation system backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, saying she doesn’t think education policy should be written into legislation or be part of the budget process.

“Our forefathers and mothers were very clever in how they designed the system in New York State, creating a state policy board that was separate from the executive branch,” Tisch told hundreds of school board members, educators and advocates at a panel discussion at annual New York State School Boards Association conference in Manhattan.

“I think now it’s going to be really hard to convince a lot of people who are up for election to go in and reopen the law that they really would kind of like to put behind them,” she said.

Categories Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Peter Greene Summarizes Bill Gates’ Speech on Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2015 //
31

Bill Gates gave a major national speech yesterday, announcing that he was very pleased with his efforts to improve teaching in America, even though they had produced no results other than a national teacher shortage. He promised to stay the course.

Peter Greene here presents the gist of Bill’s speech to the nation.

“It’s been fifteen years since we started trying to beat public education into submission with giant stacks of money, and it turns out that it’s a hell of a lot harder than curing major diseases. Turns out teachers are not nearly as compliant as bacteria. Who knew?

“Actually, there’s a whole long list of things that came as a surprise to us. Teachers and politicians and parents all had ideas about what ought or ought not to be happening in schools, and damned if they would just not shut up about it. At first stuff was going great and we were getting everyone to do just what we wanted them to, but then it was like they finally noticed that a bunch of clueless amateurs were trying to run the whole system, and the freaked out.

“I have to tell you. Right now as I’m sitting here, it still doesn’t occur to me that all the pushback might be related to the fact that I have no educational expertise at all, and yet I want to rewrite the whole US school system to my own specs. Why should that be a problem? I still don’t understand why I shouldn’t be able to just redo the whole mess without having to deal with unions or professional employees or elected officials. Of course nobody elected me to do this! I don’t mind, really– happy to take over this entire sector of the government anyway, you’re welcome…..

“Look, I’m a simple man. I had some ideas about how the entire US education system should work, and like any other citizen, I used my giant pile of money to impose my will on everyone else. It’s okay, because I just want to help. We’re not done yet– I’m going to keep trying to fix the entire teaching profession, even if nobody in the country actually asked me to do it. And no, I don’t intend to talk to anybody actually in the profession. What do they know about teaching? Besides, when you know you’re right, you don’t have to listen to anybody else.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Teachers and Principals: Has Teacher Evaluation Improved Since Race to the Top?

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2015 //
5

I am sharing a post written by Anthony Cody.

Anthony notes that teacher evaluations have changed in most states and districts because of Race to the Top. He and others are conducting a study to see how teacher evaluation is working or not working.

Please read his post and respond to the survey, if you are so inclined.

Categories Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Beardsley: Day Three of the Trial of the New Mexico Teacher Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
10

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley testified on behalf of the plaintiffs (the teachers) in the court case against New Mexico’s teacher evaluation system. She is an expert on teacher evaluation and has had the benefit of having been a teacher. Her blog “Vamboozled” regularly criticizes the misuse of test-based evaluations programs (like VAM, value-added measurement) that use the rise or fall of student test scores as their measure of teacher effectiveness.

In this post, she gives an overview of day three of the trial. The main “expert witness” for the state, testifying in favor of VAM, was Tom Kane of Harvard. He previously directed the Gates Foundations MET (Measures of Teacher Effectiveness) study, which promoted the use of VAM.

It is noteworthy that neither Beardsley nor Kane was able to analyze New Mexico’s data because the state did not release them or make them available, even to its own “expert witness.”

Kane admitted that he

had not examined any of New Mexico’s actual data. This was surprising in the sense that he was actually retained by the state, and his lawyers could have much more likely, and literally, handed him the state’s dataset as their “expert witness,” likely regardless of the procedures and security measures (but perhaps not the timeline) I mentioned prior. Also surprising was that Kane had clearly not examined any of the exhibits submitted for this case, by both the plaintiffs and the defense, either. He was essentially in attendance, on behalf of the state, to “only speak to [teacher] evaluations in general.” As per an article this morning in The Albuquerque Journal, as an “expert witness” he “stressed that numerous studies show that teachers make a big impact on student success,” expressly contradicting the American Statistical Association (ASA), while referencing studies of primarily his econ-friends (e.g. Raj Chetty, Eric Hanushek, Doug Staiger) and those of his own (e.g, as per his Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) studies), although this latter (unambiguous) assertion was not highlighted in this article. For more information in general, though, see the articles this morning in both The Albuquerque Journal and The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Then the state called the superintendent of the Roswell Independent School District to testify in favor of the state’s evaluation model. He said that the new system was an improvement over the old one. He also testified that he would not use the ratings to fire teachers, because he already had a teacher shortage. He told the local newspaper that:

“I am down teachers. I don’t need teachers, number 1, quitting over this and, number 2, I am not going to be firing teachers over this.” His district of about 600 teachers currently has approximately 30 open teaching positions, “an unusually high number;” hence, “he would rather work with his current staff than bring on substitutes” in compliance. So while he testified on behalf of the state, he also testified he was not necessarily in favor of the consequences being attached to the state’s teacher evaluation output, even if as currently being positioned by the defense as “low-stakes.”

Categories New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations

Peter Greene: Kansas Finds Quick, Cheap Way to Evaluate Teachers

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
8

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/09/kansas-solves-teacher-eval-riddle.html?m=1

Categories Kansas, Teacher Evaluations

New Mexico: Teachers Sue to Invalidate Shoddy Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2015 //
18

Politico reports on the lawsuit that teachers have filed against the state’s teacher evaluation system, which bases 50% of a teacher’s evaluation on test scores:


UNIONS SEEKING HALT TO NEW MEXICO TEACHER EVALS: An effort to halt New Mexico’s teacher evaluation system is back in court today for a third day of testimony. The American Federation of Teachers New Mexico and the Albuquerque Teachers Federation filed a lawsuit in February against the state education department and its education secretary, Hanna Skandera, arguing that the evaluation system relies too heavily on student test scores and violates teachers’ constitutional rights. Data reporting errors produced inaccurate evaluations in spring 2014, prompting Skandera to usher in changes [http://bit.ly/1rn00X2 ]. But the most divisive piece – basing 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations on students’ standardized test scores – remained in place. Some New Mexico teachers even burned their evaluations, protesting [http://bit.ly/1AniLTk] inaccuracies as well as what they see as an inherently unfair system. The national affiliate of both local unions, the American Federation of Teachers, has been heavily involved in the case. President Randi Weingarten attended [http://bit.ly/1FIUxWq ] a hearing on the unions’ request for a preliminary injunction in mid-September. She said she hopes the judge will stop the program now, before a trial next spring decides whether the entire evaluation system is valid.

– AFT also released a report on teacher evaluations, highlighting the experiences of 10 districts in New York and Rhode Island that changed their approaches. A long-time crusader against what it sees as the overuse of student test scores in high-stakes decision-making, AFT says evaluation systems must use multiple measures in order to get the most accurate picture of a teacher’s effectiveness: http://bit.ly/1JDHIHS.

– Speaking of teachers, the Education Department has sent its final teacher preparation rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review. [http://1.usa.gov/1VrsDQE] The proposed rule, released [http://politico.pro/1L4IwuU ] last November, aims to drive bad teacher preparation programs out of business. Teachers unions have panned the rule for using student test scores to measure how new teachers are performing in the classroom, although the department says states would be able to use other measures as well, like classroom observations. Other groups have said it would place a huge financial burden on states, which would be tasked with collecting new data on teacher placement, retention and student learning. The department has said the rule would cost states and teacher prep programs $42 million over 10 years. But groups like the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing said it could cost California alone $485 million for just one year. The final rule is expected sometime this month.

To learn more about the lawsuit in New Mexico, read Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s description of the proceedings here. Beardsley testified for four hours on the deficiencies of the model. Today, Tom Kane (an economist and a champion of VAM) will testify.

Categories New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations
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