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Breaking News: New York Teachers’ Union Votes No-Confidence in State Commissioner John King

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2014 //
78

On Saturday morning, the Board of Directors of NYSUT–the New York State United Teachers–voted unanimously for a resolution of “no confidence” in State Commissioner John King.

This is tantamount to calling for his removal.

The implementation of Common Core testing in New York state was widely recognized as a fiasco. Many legislators, including the leader of the State Assembly, have called for a delay.

King’s high-handed tactics, his refusal to listen to the public, and his lack of experience as an educator have set off widespread protests among teachers, principals, and parents.

This is the press release from NYSUT:

ALBANY, N.Y. Jan. 25, 2014 – New York State United Teachers’ Board of Directors approved a resolution Saturday that declared “no confidence” in the policies of State Education Commissioner John King Jr., therefore calling for his removal by the Board of Regents.  NYSUT’s board also withdrew its support for the Common Core standards as implemented and interpreted in New York state until SED makes major course corrections to its failed implementation plan and supports a three-year moratorium on high-stakes consequences from standardized testing.

The union’s board acted unanimously Saturday morning at a meeting in Albany.

“Educators understand that introducing new standards, appropriate curriculum and meaningful assessments are ongoing aspects of a robust educational system. These are complex tasks made even more complex when attempted during a time of devastating budget cuts. SED’s implementation plan in New York state has failed. The commissioner has pursued policies that repeatedly ignore the voices of parents and educators who have identified problems and called on him to move more thoughtfully,” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. “Instead of listening to and trusting parents and teachers to know and do what’s right for students, the commissioner has offered meaningless rhetoric and token change. Instead of making the major course corrections that are clearly needed, including backing a three-year moratorium on high-stakes consequences for students and teachers from state testing, he has labeled everyone and every meaningful recommendation as distractions.”

The resolution states that the board declares “no confidence in the policies of the Commissioner of Education and calls for the New York State Commissioner of Education’s removal by the New York State Board of Regents.”

NYSUT Vice President Maria Neira said the union has been sounding warning bells since 2011 about the over-emphasis on standardized testing and the state’s rushed and unrealistic timeline for introducing curriculum and assessments tied to the Common Core state standards.  She said NYSUT is seeking:

  •  completion of all modules, or lessons, aligned with the Common Core and time for educators to review them to ensure they are grade-level appropriate and aligned with classroom practice;
  •  better engagement with parents, including listening to their concerns about their children’s needs;
  •  additional tools, professional development and resources for teachers to address the needs of diverse learners, including students with disabilities and English language learners;
  •  full transparency in state testing, including the release of all test questions, so teachers can use them in improving instruction;
  •  postponement of Common Core Regents exams as a graduation requirement;
  •  the funding necessary to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to achieve the Common Core standards.  The proposed Executive Budget would leave nearly 70 percent of the state’s school districts with less state aid in 2014-15 than they had in 2009-10; and
  •  a moratorium, or delay, in the high-stakes consequences for students and teachers from standardized testing to give the State Education Department – and school districts – more time to correctly implement the Common Core.

“The clock is ticking and time is running out,” Neira said. Students sit for a new battery of state assessments in just a few months. It’s time to hit the ‘pause button’ on high stakes while, at the same time, increasing support for students, parents and educators. A moratorium on high-stakes consequences would give SED and school districts time to make the necessary adjustments.”

The resolution will go to the more than 2,000 delegates to the 600,000-member union’s Representative Assembly, to be held April 4-6 in New York City.  The resolution underscores NYSUT’s longstanding, strong opposition to corporate influence and privatization in public education and calls for an end to New York’s participation in InBloom, a “cloud-based” system that would collect and store sensitive data on New York’s schoolchildren.

New York State United Teachers is a statewide union with more than 600,000 members. Members are pre-K-12 teachers; school-related professionals; higher education faculty; other professionals in education, human services and health care; and retirees.  NYSUT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Common Core, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Why VAM Is a Sham

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
50

The centerpiece–and the most destructive element–of Race to the Top is the insistence that teachers must be evaluated to a significant degree by the test scores of their students, whether they go up or down.

It is destructive because it makes standardized tests the purpose of education.

The tests cease to be a measure and become the aim.

That is wrong.

It leads to a narrowed curriculum, teaching to the test, and cheating.

And the measure itself is fraught with error. The teachers with high ratings one year may get low ratings the next year. Some with low ratings may get high ratings the next year. They did exactly the same things but their ratings shifted. One gets a bonus, the other gets fired. It is wrong to make the tests so consequential.

Here, if you have not read it, is an excellent summary of the VAM research, explaining why VAM is misused, by the distinguished psychometrician Edward Haertel, presented in a lecture to ETS.

You should also follow VAMboozled, which is testing expert Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s blog. She will publish a book this spring, showing the invalidity of VAM. She points out that more than 90% of researchers in the related field agree that VAM is misused by federal policymakers.

Children are not data points; teachers do more than tests measure. Education is more than standardized tests can measure.

Neither children nor teachers nor education itself can be reduced to a metric or an algorithm.

VAM is Junk Science.

In a rational world, NCLB and the Race to the Top would be consigned–quickly–to the ash heap of history.

Hang on, friends. That day is coming.

Categories Education Reform, Research, Teacher Evaluations

Does the ISTEP Measure School Quality and Teacher Effectiveness?

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2014 //
34

This post was written by Charles J. Morris, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Denison University, who lives in Indianapolis.

Does the ISTEP Measure School Quality and Teacher Effectiveness?

Charles J. Morris1

While there appears to be general agreement that teachers can make a big difference in the lives of students, there is little evidence that performance on standardized tests provides a valid assessment of teacher effectiveness. Nonetheless, at the national, state, and local levels, we are seeing increasing use of test scores to evaluate both schools and teachers, to award merit pay, and even sanction low performing schools and corporations.

This growing trend toward using test scores to evaluate schools and teachers fails to recognize the evidence that factors beyond the control of schools account for most of the variation we see in test scores among school districts throughout a given state. Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute sums it up this way: “…roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics…schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects.”2 (The remaining variation is unexplained and considered error variance.) What this basically means is that schools and teachers are being judged to a substantial degree on the basis of factors over which they have little control.

Is the above conclusion also true for the ISTEP, Indiana’s test for measuring student performance and evaluating school quality and teacher effectiveness? The purpose of this short piece is to briefly summarize some evidence which indicates that the same conclusion holds for the ISTEP: Out-of-school factors, namely the socioeconomic profile (SES) of a school district, explain most of the variation we see in test performance from one district to the next.

Consider, for example, the following chart which shows the percent of students who passed both the ELA (English/Language Arts) and Math portions of the 2013 ISTEP as a function of the percentage of students in the corporation (Indiana’s districts) who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches (FRPL, a commonly used measure of SES):

istep1

These data are based on the 56 corporations that have at least 5000 students in the district. As can be seen, there is a very strong correlation between the two variables: The higher the percentage of kids who qualify for FRPL, the lower the passing percentage. Another way of putting it is, if we know the socioeconomic profile of a corporation we can make a very good prediction of where that corporation stands compared to other corporations on the ISTEP. This should not be a surprise to those familiar with the research literature. The same relationship has been found for the various standardized tests used throughout the country.

The above results are based on the performance of all students in each corporation. The following charts show the results separately for 3rd and 8th graders:

istep2istep3

Again, we see the same pattern for both grade levels, basically unchanged after 5 years of schooling in a high-scoring or low-scoring corporation. The SES influence is quite strong independently of the schools and teachers in a particular corporation. In fact, if anything, the SES impact appears to become slightly stronger as students progress from the 3rd to 8th grade.

So what are we to make of this obvious association between ISTEP scores of SES? The seemingly inescapable conclusion is that corporations and teachers deserve neither praise nor criticism for how their student compare to other corporations and teachers. Clearly, the socioeconomic profile (SES) of the corporation plays a decisive role. So I ask a simple question: Does anyone seriously believe that if Carmel and Gary (a high and low-performing corporation, respectively) exchanged teachers, the ISTEP scores would suddenly reverse themselves? I don’t think so.

The challenge thus becomes how to respond to the fact that poorer kids are not performing well in our schools. Is there less parental involvement in these communities? Are expectations lower? Do these parents need additional help in becoming more effective mentors? Are after-school tutoring programs a possible solution? What about summer programs? Or pre-school programs? Perhaps all of the above, along with addressing the well-documented and devastating effects that poverty has on the health and well-being of poor children long before they even enter school3.

But one thing seems clear: Judging school and teacher quality on the basis of test scores offers little in the way of a solution. We need to look beyond our schools and teachers if we are going to better prepare all kids for the world they will face in the days ahead.

1Charles J. Morris is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology from Denison University. He resides in Indianapolis.

2Matthew Di Carlo, Shanker Institute (see http://shankerblog.org/?p=74#more-74)

3Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error (New York: Knopf, 2013, pp. 91-98).

Categories Education Reform, Indiana, Poverty, Teacher Evaluations

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
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