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

StudentsFirst Issues Another Ludicrous State Report Card

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2014 //
84

StudentsFirst, the organization created by Michelle Rhee to promote her ideas about fixing schools by high-stakes testing and choice, has issued its second state-by-state report card.

The highest scoring states are not those whose students have the highest achievement on NAEP; that would be Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

No, the highest scoring states are those that do what Rhee did in D.C., the nation’s lowest-scoring district on NAEP.

She awards points for “elevating the teaching profession,” which means tying evaluations of teachers and principals to test scores, eliminating teacher tenure, eliminating collective bargaining, awarding bonuses to teachers whose students get higher test scores, and opening teaching jobs to teachers who have no certification or other credentials. In other words, the way to “elevate the teaching profession” is to make teachers into temporary workers whose job depends on the test scores of their students and to lower standards for entry into teaching. I wish that whoever defined this category would read the research on value-added methodology (VAM), like here and here. Tying teacher and principal evaluations leads to narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and CHEATING.

She awards points for “empowering parents,” which means that a state gets higher scores if it offers charters and vouchers and has a parent trigger so that parents can hand their public school over to a charter corporation. Of course, the report offers no research to support these recommendations since voucher schools do not outperform neighborhood public schools-their advocates, nor do charters, on average. Some charters get higher test scores, because they enroll motivated students who apply. Others get high scores because they exclude students with disabilities and English learners. But on average, there is not much difference in outcomes between public schools and charter schools. The “parent trigger” has thus far–in its four years as state law in California–converted one public school to charter status and fired one principal.

Her third priority–spending wisely and well–promotes governance by the state and mayoral control. In other words, states get a plus if they override or preferably abolish local school boards.

The highest scoring states: Louisiana: #1; Florida (#2); Indiana (#3); Rhode Island (#4); D.C. (#5).

How did the highest performing states in the nation do on the StudentsFirst report card:

Massachusetts: (first in nation on NAEP): D (#21 on Rhee’s report card);

New Jersey: (tied for second place in the nation on NAEP): D (#31 on Rhee’s report card);

Connecticut (tied for second in the nation on NAEP): D+ (#24 on Rhee’s report card).

It is ironic that an organization that wants states to rank teachers, students, and schools in relation to student test scores issues a report card that evaluates states without any reference to student test scores.

Clearly, the rankings have nothing whatever to do with any academic outcomes for students. These are the states that comes closest to complying with Michelle Rhee’s ideological preferences: privatization and dismantling the teaching profession.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Gates Threatens to Yank $40 Million from Pittsburgh

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2014 //
32

According to Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly, the Gates Foundation is threatening to take away $40 million from the Pittsburgh public schools if the district and union don’t agree on a plan to evaluate teachers by test scores, to reward the “best,” and retrain the rest.

Does the Gates Foundation know that eminent researchers warn that VAM is inaccurate? Does it care that VAM has not worked anywhere?

The group in Pittsburgh that is most critical of the union is A+ Schools. Cohen points out that Gates is one of its major funders.

Cohen writes:

“This is probably an extreme example of “high-stakes testing” of teachers. With a significant reliance on student test scores for determining teacher performance, teachers are duly wary of standardized tests, which diminish the socioeconomic factors of student performance, even when the consequences could be teacher dismissals and even school closings. In this case, the high stake facing the teachers’ union is the school district’s loss of a free $40 million.”

(The word “diminish” in the previous paragraph is wrong. It should say “reflect to a large degree.”)

What is so distressing is that the Gates Foundation acts as if it bought public education in Pittsburgh and has the right to call the shots. Guess they never heard of the concept of democratic control of the schools. They are familiar only with plutocratic control.

Who will hold the Gates Foundation accountable for the damage it is wreaking on education?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pennsylvania, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers, Unions

Why I Defend Randi

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2014 //
135

A reader who calls himself or herself “Democracy” left comments criticizing me for defending Randi Weingarten–or perhaps for not attacking her.

Here is my response to Democracy:

Democracy, you ask a good question, and I will answer as best I can..

As you know, I have criticized the Common Core in many posts. I have criticized the lack of transparency and the lack of educator participation in its development. I have criticized the fact that the Gates Foundation paid out nearly $200 million to develop and promote the CCSS, which really means they are the Gates Standards. I have said that rigorous standards will not solve–let alone address–the economic dysfunction at the root of educational inequality–and is likely to exacerbate it.

Randi Weingarten is certainly more positive about Common Core than I am. She is the president of the AFT and has been willing to engage on the issues, while the NEA has remained supportive of Common Core and silent.

I have long believed that Randi would ultimately change course, and she has done so recently. First, she called for a moratorium on testing. only days ago, she came out in opposition to VAM, saying that VAM is a sham. She has followed her reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is that Common Core should be decoupled from testing. If Common Core is in fact decoupled from testing, it loses its power as a means of rating and ranking students and teachers and principals. It becomes a set of standards that may or may not prove useful but has no power to ruin lives and careers

The next, inevitable step is to recognize that Common Core must be amended by teachers and scholars. As it currently exists, it is an infallible edict encased in concrete. No standards are so perfect that they need never be updated.

I will not attack Randi, not only because she is a personal friend, not only because she is showing the capacity to evolve and change her mind, but because we who object to the current demolition derby can’t prevail without the support of at least one of the major unions. In short, we need her leadership. To turn against her is to wound our cause irreparably, our cause being the survival of public education and the teaching profession. To attack one of our few national leaders in the middle of a crucial war will aid those who are attacking public education and teachers. If we who are allies fight one another, we lose. I prefer success to defeat. Too much is riding on the outcome of these questions to indulge in ideological purity and cast out those who are not in complete agreement.

Categories Common Core, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, Unions

New Volume About Teacher Evaluation and High-Stakes Testing Now Available

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2014 //
12

A group of expert researchers have published a new collection of articles about teacher evaluation and high-stakes testing and their consequences.

The collection appears online in the Teachers College Record. It is called “High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation: High Cost, Big Losses.”

You will recognize the names of many of the contributors. (I wrote the foreword, the least significant part of the volume.) This collection provides solid research evidence demonstrating that the teacher evaluation practices promoted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are not only worthless but harmful. Sad to say, his advocacy for these misguided policies have been adopted in many states and may well damage American education for many years to come.

Categories Research, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

John Thompson: Is Market-Based Reform “Working”?

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2014 //
9

In mid-December, Matt di Carlo of the Shanker Institute reviewed the year’s production of research about charters, teacher incentives, and other aspects of the market-based approach to schooling, that is, the use of incentives and sanctions to produce higher test scores.

Schools Matter has published critiques by John Thompson of di Carlo’s review. Di Carlo is known for his scrupulous nonpartisanship; although part of the AFT, he does not take the union’s side. He writes as a researcher with no skin in the game.

In part 1, Thompson asks

“Where is the Matt DiCarlo of corporate reform? Where is a reformer who is will break ranks, for instance, on Washington D.C.’s IMPACT? There are plenty of individual reformers who have open minds. Are there any who are allowed to be like DiCarlo and acknowledge the strengths of evidence on the teachers’ side?”

Thompson is hard on di Carlo for standing back and above the fray:

Matt DiCarlo voices agreement with Gates that teachers and students should continue to be lab rats for Gates’ theories before rejecting them. If DiCarlo doesn’t believe that the jury is in and that twenty years of “reform” has failed, that’s fine. Decent people can agree to disagree.

But, I’m growing more frustrated with DiCarlo’s timidity in the face of corporate reformers singing from the same hymnal. He doesn’t challenge their assumptions and he keeps letting them define the issues. Moreover, I’m getting upset at the way he equates the arguments of test-driven reformers and teachers who resist them. It was the Billionaires Boys Club that came into school reform, denied that they had the burden of proof to show that their hypotheses would do more good than harm, and employed scorched earth politics against teachers and unions. Now, educators are criticized when we raise our voices in protest.

Above all, I am perplexed by DiCarlo’s refusal to push back on policy papers that employ sophisticated quantitative methods, but make no effort to ground their models in reality. 

Thompson adds:

The Billionaires Boys Club has tried to replace the traditional peer review process, social science and education history with Big Data. In doing so, they are trying to drive the clash of ideas from public schools.

The accountability hawks’ utilitarianism, bordering on anti-intellectualism, helps explain why high-stakes testing has failed. They imposed a radical and risky experiment without bothering to study the evidence on teaching and learning. Old Blood and Guts Bill Gates, however, says we need to endure another decade of his bubble-in experiments to see if they work. Yeah. His guts; Our blood.

In part 2 of Thompson’s critique of market-based reforms, he reviews many of the research studies on value-added measurement, showing that many of them contain warnings about the inaccuracy of VAM (one says that 68% of the ratings produce false positives and false negatives, a heck of a way to fire a teacher).

He concludes:

I would add another point which applies to nearly every aspect of market-based reforms. In schooling, the feces rolls downhill. The venom dumped on adults flows down onto children. When principals are subject to not-ready-for-prime-time accountability schemes, the #1 priority often will be to make sure the patient doesn’t die on their operating table. The search for scapegoats takes off. That is why the blame game is the prime legacy of market-driven reforms.

Part 3 of Thompson’s critique analyzes “the pitfalls that were discovered after value-added systems were implemented.” Value-added studies consistently find that teachers in high-poverty schools get less VAM than those in low-poverty schools. Is it the teachers at fault or the model or the assumptions behind the model?

Thompson concludes:

The idea that value-added evaluations could address the teacher quality equity issues in high-challenge schools is based on three assumptions. Firstly, that overworked inner city principals (who in my experience always worked over 80 hours a week, but who went weeks or months at a time without being able to allow classroom instruction to enter their consciousness, much less their “to do” list) are so craven as to allow this situation to persist, and that principals could have confidence that qualified replacements for bad teachers would apply for jobs. The answer, it is assumed, is to dump far more work on those overwhelmed principals.The second assumption is that even though it is not hard to document bad performance and fire bad teachers, that collective bargaining agreements play a significant role in protecting those teachers. In the case of the problem documented by Xu, Ozek, Hansen, and Sass, one must assume that, when a termination approaches, that mild-mannered union officials (even in Right to Work states) step into a phone book, shed their moderate, collaborative demeanor, and emerge as supermen and save the jobs of the “lemons.”

The third assumption is that the federal government should treat teachers differently from any other employees, coerce states into repudiating good faith contracts, turn the evaluation process, which traditionally evaluates what employees do or don’t do, on its head and incorporate the opinions of a few billionaires into law. It assumes that the dismissal of bad teachers would not correlate with the dismissal of “ineffective” teachers. The corollary assumption is that stripping teachers of their rights is the way to make the profession more attractive to new talent.

Even if such bizarre assumptions proved to be true, I question whether such a policy, which is collective punishment of teachers who committed to schools where it is harder to meet test score growth targets, should be considered appropriate in a constitutional democracy. 

Another installment is forthcoming. Stand by for more analysis of the perils of VAM by John Thompson!
Categories Accountability, Research, Teacher Evaluations

Gary Rubinstein: An Open Letter to the New Leaders of TFA

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2014 //
15

Gary Rubinstein was one of the original members of Teach for America. He has been involved in TFA from the outset. However, he became a critical friend of TFA when he attended the corporate-funded 20th anniversary celebration, bringing together the leaders of the “reform movement” who were attacking the nation’s public schools and their teachers, closing public schools, and promoting charters. He saw a very different organization from the one he had joined two decades earlier. It had morphed into an arm of big business.

In this important post, he patiently explains to the new leaders of Teach for America why he strongly disagrees with the organization–beginning with their boasting about their results–and explains why they are on the wrong track.

He begins this way:

On February 12, 2013, founder and long time CEO of TFA, Wendy Kopp, stepped down. Two new co-CEOs were appointed, Elisa Villanueva-Beard and Matt Kramer. Elisa was a 1998 corps member and Matt had never taught. Both were working as very high administrative positions in TFA before this recent promotion.

I was pretty surprised by this announcement. I did not expect Wendy to ever not be the CEO of Teach For America. I was also puzzled that neither of the new co-CEOs were required to relocate to be near the national headquarters in New York City.

Over the past four months they have co-written three blog posts on the ‘Pass The Chalk’ site which had points of view that I definitely object to. The first was about a bogus study ‘proving’ that certain TFA teachers teach significantly more than their non-TFA counterparts (I analyzed that report here). The second was about a bogus interpretation of the recent NAEP gains ‘proving’ that corporate reform strategies are working (I wrote about NAEP ‘gains’ here). The third was about their support for the common core (Me and others have written a bunch about the problems with the common core).

Gary then writes an open letter to Matt and Elisa. It is a very strong letter, written by someone who understands Teach for America and knows its potential and its weaknesses. Gary has remained in teaching for many years and understands the challenges of teaching as Matt and Elisa do not.

Here are a few snippets: read the whole thing:

Based on what I’ve seen in this first year of your appointment, I am not encouraged that the issues I have with TFA are improving in any way. In your language and your writings I see the same kind of unsophisticated logic that I see in the rhetoric of people like Michelle Rhee and Steve Perry. Things about the ‘status quo’ and about the power of ‘raised expectations.’ As someone opposed to the kinds of strategies that Rhee and Perry promote, I know that my resistance has nothing to do with a desire to preserve the status quo, nor do I think that very many teachers have unreasonably low expectations for their students.

I have no particular attachment to the ‘status quo.’ But I’ve done a lot of research about what is now called ‘reform’ and I fight against it because I believe that it will, if permitted to gain momentum, make education in this country much worse. My prediction is that teachers will flee the profession even faster than they already do under the stress of the new brand of ‘accountability.’ And I’ve seen this start already in California where there are fewer teacher candidates to fill the vacancies. This will exacerbate if market-driven reform is not curbed. I think college students would be crazy to pursue teaching in this current anti-teacher climate. I’d wager that you are already seeing the effects of this, even among TFA corps members. A few years ago, the statistic was that 60% of TFA corps members taught for a third year. Recently I saw an article celebrating that South Carolina, I think, had about 40% stay for a third year. I believe that this is not going to be abnormal and you will see fewer TFAers stay beyond their two years. Teaching was already a pretty stressful job before the standardized test mania infected our schools. Now, for many, it is unbearable.

I do not believe in ‘low expectations.’ I also know that ‘high expectations’ is a very weak silver bullet. Expert teachers know how to set their expectations at an appropriate level to maximize student learning…

You recently penned a blog post in support of the controversial common core standards. Of course Randi Weingarten is one of the biggest common core cheerleaders in the country so it is not like you came out in favor of school closings, for instance. But still, it was interesting to me that you would take a side on this. What does it mean to be ‘for’ the common core? Does it mean that you wholeheartedly believe in the 7th grade math standard which states:

CCSS.Math.Content.7.NS.A.2a Understand that multiplication is extended from fractions to rational numbers by requiring that operations continue to satisfy the properties of operations, particularly the distributive property, leading to products such as (–1)(–1) = 1 and the rules for multiplying signed numbers. Interpret products of rational numbers by describing real-world contexts.

(Note: If you don’t know what they’re talking about, don’t worry. Most people don’t know that math majors in abstract algebra, during junior year of college, learn that rather than justifying that a negative times a negative is a positive, informally any number of ways, you learn that since -1 * 0 = 0, which means -1 * (-1+1) = 0 (since -1+1=0, additive inverse property) and then, by the distributive property (which says a * (b+c) = ab + ac) (-1) * (-1) + (-1)*1 = 0, but since 1 is the multiplicative identity, (-1)*(-1) – 1=0, but then if you add 1 to both sides, you get (-1)*(-1)=1, Q.E.D.)

Or do you just mean that you approve of school being more than just memorizing a bunch of shallow facts, but having opportunity for deep thought-provoking learning opportunities? If that’s what you mean, is is really necessary to spend billions of dollars on new textbooks and new ‘common core aligned’ assessments for this? Isn’t this the first thing we learned at the TFA institute (not you, Matt, but I’m sure you get the idea still), that we need to get kids to the higher levels of ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’? Elisa, when you taught in Arizona did you not try to teach to a deep level because the common core had not been invented yet along with new assessments which would make sure you were accountable for getting your students to achieve that type of deep mastery of those standards?

One of my favorite sections of this long letter is where Gary suggests that TFA should adopt a value-added approach to its own organization and be prepared to shut down regions where there is high attrition of TFA recruits:

If you are so enamored with the strategies of Rhee, Daly, Huffman, White, and Anderson, why don’t you use them, yourself, in helping TFA maximize its own ‘value added’? This would be pretty easy to implement. First you would publish an annual A-F report card on the different TFA regions. One of the best metrics would be the ‘quit rate’ — the percent of corps members that quit before completing the two year commitment. Though the national average for all the regions is somewhere around 10%, there are some regions that have much higher quit rates. I believe that Kansas City and Detroit are two regions where around 25% of the corps members don’t complete their commitment. Regions like that would get an ‘F’ and after two ‘F’s or something, they would get shut down using the market-driven reform strategies. Then, for recruiters you could track the test scores of the students of the corps members that each recruiter recruits. Some recruiters will fare worse than others on this metric and those recruiters would be labeled ‘ineffective’ and fired. The various staff at the institutes could also be rated by tracking the test scores of the students of the corps members they trained. Basically, you would want to change the culture of TFA management to one which assumes that all TFA employees are lazy and don’t care about doing a good job and can only be motivated by the fear of being fired. If you admire the TFA leaders mentioned above so much, it would be hypocritical to not use their methods with your own employees.

Be sure to follow Gary Rubinstein. He is one of the wisest and smartest of all teacher-bloggers, and his views are always firmly rooted in evidence, which he supplies.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations

Breaking News: Weingarten Rejects VAM!

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2014 //
173

Randi Weingarten has come out in opposition to value-added modeling (VAM), the statistical measure that judges teacher quality based on the test scores of their students. This is great news! As I have often written here, VAM is Junk Science. It also is the centerpiece of Race to the Top, which makes the absurd assumption that good teachers produce higher test scores. Researchers have shown again and again that test scores–including their rise or fall–says more about who is in the class than teacher quality, and they reflect many other factors, including class size, peers, school leadership, prior teachers, curriculum, etc. Furthermore, VAM places too much emphasis on testing and leads to a narrowed curriculum, teaching to the test, gaming the system, and cheating. Teaching cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

To those tempted to chastise her for changing her mind, I say we should welcome and salute anyone with the courage and insight to give up a previously held position in the face of evidence. A few years ago, I changed my mind about things I once believed, like the value of school choice and high-stakes testing. Now, let us hope that others who support VAM see the light.

This morning’s Politico Education says:

“NEW TACTIC ON TEACHER EVALUATIONS: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is launching a campaign against using value-added metrics to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Her mantra: “VAM is a sham.� That’s a notable shift for the AFT and its affiliates, which have previously ratified contracts and endorsed evaluation systems that rely on VAM. Weingarten tells Morning Education that she has always been leery of value-added “but we rolled up our sleeves, acted in good faith and tried to make it work.� Now, she says, she’s disillusioned.

“– What changed her mind?Weingarten points to a standoff in Pittsburgh over the implementation of a VAM-based evaluation system the union had endorsed. She says the algorithms and cut scores used to rate teachers were arbitrary. And she found the process corrosive: The VAM score was just a number that didn’t show teachers their strengths or weaknesses or suggest ways to improve. Weingarten said the final straw was the news that the contractor calculating VAM scores for D.C. teachers made a typo in the algorithm, resulting in 44 teachers receiving incorrect scores — including one who was unjustly fired for poor performance.

“– What’s next? The AFT’s newly militant stance against VAM will likely affect contract negotiations in local districts, and the union also plans to lobby the Education Department.”

Categories Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Unions

English Teacher: Why I Had to Leave a Profession I Loved

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2014 //
79

In this post, a veteran teacher with 30 years of experience explains why she had to retire. She didn’t want to. But the obsession with data-based decision-making finally broke her spirit.

She recounts incidents where she was able to help students, where students gave her their trust, where classes learned to love literature as she did. She remembers staff meetings devoted to lessons and students, not to data analysis. As all the rewarding parts of her work were eliminated, she realized that the reforms made it I possible to do what she loved est: to teach.

She writes:

“I remember a time when department meetings, faculty meetings, and in-service days revolved around reading, sharing ideas, learning about our subjects—and not around the only topics that seem to matter today: lesson plan format, testing, rubrics, teacher evaluations and technological gimmicks. Watch your back! If you don’t conform it will be held against you!

“I remember AP students who told me their lives were changed after reading Hamlet, or Beloved, or Middlemarch. Is there a metric for that, or is a score on the AP exam the only thing that counts? Yes, we did lots of close reading, but is that what students will remember?

“Mostly I remember a time when I could be creative, do lots of research, veer off in different but related directions, have discussions, allow students to talk about how they feel (yes, David Coleman), and even lecture occasionally, without worrying if I covered every one of the myriad points in the Danielson model in EVERY lesson.

“I am so sad when I read that students, teachers, and schools are labeled “failures.” I am bewildered when I read statements from “reformers” with no background in child development writing standards, arbitrarily setting cut scores, misinterpreting test results, making flawed comparisons with other countries, giving only lip service to parents, and blaming teachers for every ill in society. I am angry when I think of people with no background in education (i.e. politicians from BOTH parties and businesspeople) condescending to, insulting, and even vilifying teachers, whose job is more difficult, challenging, and complex than anyone who has never tried it can imagine.”

Read it all. Get angry. Take action. Find allies. Join your state or local group to resist these terrible trends that destroy the love of teaching and learning. Join the Network for Public Education.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Missouri: Billionaire Donates $750,000 to End Teacher Tenure

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2014 //
84

Conservative billionaire Rex Sinquefield does not believe that teaching should be a career. He doesn’t think that teachers should have any job security. He thinks that teachers should have short-term contracts and that their jobs should depend on the test scores of their students. He has contributed $750,000 to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to achieve his aims.

The campaign, in a style now associated with those who hope to dismantle the teaching profession, has the duplicitous name “teachgreat.org” to signify the opposite of its intent. The assumption is that the removal of any job security and any kind of due process for teachers will somehow mysteriously produce “great” teachers. This absurd idea is then called “reform.” This is the kind of thinking that typically comes from hedge fund managers, not human service professionals.

Sinquefield manages billions of dollars and is also the state’s biggest political contributor.

“The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.

“The initiative also mandates that teachers be allowed to engage in collective bargaining for pay, benefits and working conditions, in an apparent move to appeal to teacher groups. So far, such organizations have been wary of the proposed constitutional amendment.

“Sinquefield gave $100,000 to Teachgreat.org this summer.

“Roughly 147,000-160,000 signatures from Missouri registered voters would be needed to get a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. The exact number depends on which six of the state’s eight congressional districts are used for signature collection.

“A similar ballot initiative – also backed by Sinquefield — was proposed for the 2012 ballot, but signature collection was never completed.

“This latest contribution sharply increases Sinquefield’s total 2013 donations to various Missouri causes and candidates to more than $2.5 million, according to the Ethics Commission’s tally.”

We have seen in state after state that conservative ideologues can buy politicians. But we will see whether they can also buy enough of the public, through advertising and public relations, to start the purge that Sinquefield believes is necessary.

I can’t help but be reminded of the time I spoke to the Missouri Education Association about three years ago. There were about 800 teachers there from across the state. Afterwards, when I signed books, I was struck by the number of people who said things like, “please sign this for my dad, he is a retired superintendent,” or “please sign this for me and my two sisters, we are a family of teachers.” So many of the teachers came from small towns where their family had been teachers for years. If Sinquefield has his way, who will replace them? Is there a long line of graduates from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton just itching to teach in Eureka and all the towns and hamlets of Missouri, to take the place of those who are fired? And who will replace them when they move on to their real careers?

Sinquefield despises public schools. In 2012, he had to apologize for a remark in which he said that the KU Klux Klan invented public schools to hurt African-American children.

Sinquefield founded a fund that now manages over $300 billion. He is also founder and president of the Show-Me Institute, a libertarian policy belief-tank.

Categories Missouri, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

U.S. Department of Education Rejects Charleston Request to Delay VAM

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2014 //
27

VAMboozled reports here that the U.S. Department of Education rejected a request by the school district of Charleston to delay implementation of value-added measurement of teachers.

District officials asked for an extra year to phase in the evaluation of teachers by the test scores of their students, but the DOE said no.

District officials thought it was better to wait until 2016-17, when they might have more confidence in the methodology.

The district needs federal officials’ permission for the delay because the federal government gave the district the $23.7 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant to develop and implement BRIDGE, which is the new evaluation and compensation systems.

The evaluations are being pilot-tested in 14 schools this year, and the district promised in its grant application to expand the evaluation in 2014-15 to all teachers in BRIDGE schools, as well as to core academic subject teachers in grades 4-8 across the district.

Padilla [speaking for the DOE] pointed out in her letter that the application required a timeline, and the district was approved based on its assurance that it would meet the grant’s requirements, including that timeline.

McGinley said earlier this week that she wasn’t inclined to move forward with any district-wide evaluation system until she had more confidence in it than she does right now.

Patrick Hayes, a third grade teacher who leads the education advocacy group EdFirstSC, said he didn’t see how the district could stick to its proposed timeline when officials have indicated they aren’t where they need to be.

“It seems to me that the path forward is clear,” he said. “It’s time to let go of the grant.”

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »