Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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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

VAM Expert: D.C. Score Errors Are NOT a “Minor Glitch”

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2013 //
17

Last Friday, before the winter break, D.C. officials quietly released the news that the D.C. IMPACT evaluation system contained technical errors. It was the perfect time to reveal an embarrassing event, hoping no one would notice. Spokesmen minimized the importance of the errors, saying they affected “only” 44 teachers, one of whom was wrongfully terminated.

But Professor Audrey Amrein-Beardsley explains that what happened was “a major glitch,” not a “minor glitch.” It was not a one-time issue, but an integral part of a deeply flawed method of evaluating teachers. No amount of tinkering can overcome the fundamental flaws built into value-added measurement of teacher quality.

Beardsley writes:

VAM formulas are certainly “subject to error,” and they are subject to error always, across the board, for teachers in general as well as the 470 DC public school teachers with value-added scores based on student test scores. Put more accurately, just over 10% (n=470) of all DC teachers (n=4,000) were evaluated using their students’ test scores, which is even less than the 83% mentioned above. And for about 10% of these teachers (n=44), calculation errors were found.

This is not a “minor glitch” as written into a recent Huffington Post article covering the same story, which positions the teachers’ unions as almost irrational for “slamming the school system for the mistake and raising broader questions about the system.” It is a major glitch caused both by inappropriate “weightings” of teachers’ administrator’ and master educators’ observational scores, as well as “a small technical error” that directly impacted the teachers’ value-added calculations. It is a major glitch with major implications about which others, including not just those from the unions but many (e.g., 90%) from the research community, are concerned. It is a major glitch that does warrant additional cause about this AND all of the other statistical and other errors inherent not mentioned but prevalent in all value-added scores (e.g., the errors always found in large-scale standardized tests particularly given their non-equivalent scales, the errors caused by missing data, the errors caused by small class sizes, the errors caused by summer learning loss/gains, the errors caused by other teachers’ simultaneous and carry over effects, the errors caused by parental and peer effects [see also this recent post about these], etc.).

The “errors” cannot be corrected because the method itself is the problem. The errors and flaws are integral to the method. VAM is Junk Science, the use of numbers to intimidate the innumerate, the use of data to quantify the unmeasurable.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations

Patrick Hayes on the VAM Fiasco in D.C.

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
5

Patrick Hayes is a teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, who is leading the fight to block test-based, value-added evaluations of teachers in that district. As many posts on this blog have iterated and reiterated, most researchers think that VAM is flawed and error-ridden. (Check out Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s blog VAMboozled and Edward Haertel’s ETS lecture.)

Hayes read about the errors in the Mathematica study of VAM in D.C., and left the following comment:

“This is awful news for DC teachers. Down here in Charleston, it’s the greatest Christmas gift imaginable.

“We’re fighting VAM-based merit pay tooth and nail. Guess who our district hired to do the work?

“Here’s the only question I have: was this what Mathematica had in mind in 2010 when they said that VAM has a 36% error rate?

“http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/pdf/20104004.pdf

“Is that before or after they foul up the data?

“Tell you what, don’t ask Mathematica. I can tell you from personal experience: they REALLY don’t like talking about that study.

“I know it was before Arne Duncan handed out nearly a billion dollars in grant funding for value-added systems.

“When Mathematica published this, TIF grants were still comparatively small potatoes.

“Funny thing is, Arne’s the one who picked up the tab for that study. His name appears on page 3. Go figure.”

Categories District of Columbia, Duncan, Arne, Merit pay, Teacher Evaluations

Breaking News: D.C. Teacher Evaluation Scores Flawed

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
29

Last Friday, officials at the central office of the District of Columbia Public Schools quietly released the news that the teacher ratings on its highly touted IMPACT system contained errors. It was not clear how many teachers were affected. If you want to bury a policy disaster, the best time to announce it is on a Friday before a long holiday, on the assumption it will be ignored and forgotten.

Researchers have warned for the past three years that grading teachers by the test scores of their students is error-ridden, inaccurate, and unstable. Earlier this year, the distinguished psychometrician Edward Haertel of Stanford warned in a major lecture that value-added scores should not be used as a fixed percentage when evaluating teachers and should have multiple safeguards to avoid error. Did anyone at the U,S. Department of Education or anywhere else take heed? Of course not.

As Valerie Strauss notes in the linked article, this inherently flawed and demoralizing process has been widely accepted (it is a major element of Race to the Top; in addition, states that want waivers from the impossible mandates of NCLB must agree to adopt this procedure, no matter how ill-conceived it is.)

Strauss writes:

“Testing experts have long warned that using test scores to evaluate teachers is a bad idea, and that these formulas are subject to error, but such evaluation has become a central part of modern school reform. In the District, the evaluation of adults in the school system by test scores included everybody in a school building; until this year, that even included custodians. In some places around the country, teachers received evaluations based on test scores of students they never had. (It sounds incredible but it’s true.)”

Only a few weeks ago, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley wrote on her blog that the ratings on the D.C. IMPACT system made no sense.

Now the company that created the rating system has acknowledged the errors.

Let’s see if some enterprising journalist digs into this fiasco.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

VAMBOOZLED: D.C. IMPACT Evaluation System Makes No Sense

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
33

A reader who teaches in the District of Columbia wrote to ask my advice. He couldn’t understand his evaluation based on the District’s complex IMPACT evaluation system. I sent it to a teacher evaluation expert, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley. She wrote a post trying to make sense of the evaluation report.

Read it here.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations

A Teacher Who Is Evaluated by the Scores of Students She Does Not Teach

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2013 //
40

A reader writes:

“I’m a special education teacher in New Mexico and I took this year off teaching, for medical reasons. The choice was made easier by the new teacher evaluations. Since my students have significant disabilities, they can not take the state tests. 50% of my evaluation would then be based on how the regular education students, who I do not teach, scored at our school. 25% of my evaluation would be based on my principal’s view of how I contributed to that score (God knows how that we be, since I do not provide instruction to any of the students who take the test). So 75% of my yearly evaluation would have been based on test scores of students that receive no instruction from me. How could this possibly be an effective indicator of student/teacher performance in my classroom?

“All this does is provide an incentive for teachers to work with the wealthiest, highest performing schools, while disincentivizing teachers from working with special needs students or in high risk or low income settings.

“I have no problem with being evaluated or critiqued as a professional, but it needs to be done with some semblance of common sense.”

Categories New Mexico, Special Education, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Charleston, S.C., Builds a Bridge to Nowhere–in Its Schools

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2013 //
6

Surprise! The school leadership of Charleston, South Carolina, has come up with some stale ideas and branded them as “reform.”

Nothing like copying what was tried and failed everywhere else!

The district calls it a “new” program of teacher evaluation, pay for performance, and reconfigured salary structure BRIDGE but in fact it is the status quo demanded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Every Broad-trained superintendent has the same ideas but is tasked with calling them “new” (when they are not), “evidence-based” (when they are not), and “reform” (when they are the status quo, paid for and sanctified by the U.S. Department of Education).

Patrick Hayes, a teacher in Charleston, has launched a campaign to expose the destructive plan of the district leaders, whose primary outcome will be to demoralize and drive away good teachers.

This blogger, the Charleston Area Community Voice for Education, recognizes that the new structure is not new, that it relies on “Junk Science,” and that it is “a Bridge to I Don’t Know Where.”

He writes:

BRIDGE brings into full play in Charleston many of the recent reform strategies and policies, including

  • large-scale testing,
  • using test scores to rate principal and teacher performance (VAM), merit pay,
  • Broad Academy trained leadership (starting with the superintendent), for example

It is important to note that these are the reforms of the last decade or so that have produced little improvement in schools as measured by the same testing and by the recently announce PISA results. These “reforms” are the status quo; in fact, they are not reform at all. As Hayes and others have pointed out, there is no credible evidence to support the effectiveness of these efforts, at least in terms of increased learning or even measuring teacher quality.

Further, the school district has built no case for why do BRIDGE in terms of what we want for our children, teachers, and classrooms. BRIDGE appears to be a large, well-funded ($23.7 million) solution to vague, and even non-existent problems. It is a solution the district apparently intends to impact every classroom and hence every student in Charleston public schools.

Here’s the thing. There are students in all schools who are not learning to their potential. There are also schools that have issues, academic and otherwise, that need addressing. There are also schools and students doing amazingly well.

The success of those students and schools cannot be attributed to evaluation (of teachers, schools, or even the students), nor is there any evidence that evaluation will fix the problems that do exist. Hint: we already know where the problems are. To base a massive restructuring of how schools, teachers, principals, and certainly students do business and spend their days is bogus, and the impacts of flawed, misdirected programs in education usually drive us to a cliff.

The bottom line is this: Charleston County School District has embarked on a very large experiment, called BRIDGE, with vaguely defined goals (except, perhaps raising test scores) with the plan of “let’s see if this works, because we have to do something”. Of course, in science, when you’re out there exploring the unknown, you don’t know what you’ll get.

Perhaps I’m missing the point here, so maybe I need to ask my six year old granddaughter and her teacher and principal, all of whom are doing quite well, thank you.

I would like to hear an answer from the school board and superintendent addressed to Grace (who understand quite a bit) to this question:

Why are you doing this BRIDGE thing?

Go ahead. I dare you.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing

How to Evaluate a Teacher, Really

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
85

This is a terrific article that appeared on Huffington Post by Nicholas Ferroni.

He speaks truths that every teacher will understand.

This is what he did this week:

This week of school, like every other week, was pretty normal: I gave out about fifty dollars to various students who didn’t have lunch money; I resolved two teenage relationship issues; I comforted three girls who, for some reason, think they are so ugly that no boys will ever like them; I got three students, who have whispered three words each all year, to speak in front of the class; I paid for four students to join the gym and also offered to train them in order for them to deal with their aggression constructively; I went out of my way to make sure that five of my students, who I know are having problems at home, know that they are intelligent, strong and have so much to offer this world. So, in the education world where you deal with hundreds of uniquely individual teenagers trying to accept who they are, it’s just a normal week. I am not trying to brag because my commitment to my students is not the exception but the norm, especially at the high school where I teach where so many of my colleagues, day in and day out, give their hearts, souls and money to their students without a thought. I also do not want your sympathy because I, like most teachers, went into education for this very reason: to educate, empower and nurture youth.

Yet politicians constantly take pot shots at teachers and try to find a metric to weigh their value, usually with test scores. Teaching is so much more complicated and demanding than test prep, Ferroni explains.

He adds:

Without going into too much off topic, has anyone advocating for teacher evaluation and merit pay ever even consider what impact it will have on the performance of students in the classroom? They are incredibly naïve if they think that the fact that all accountability now lies on a teacher’s performance, and not the student, will not lead students performance to decline. Why would students work harder to excel in the classroom, when they are completely free of any responsibility for their grade? This is ultimately suggesting that each student has no role in their own success or failure in the classroom. Any one of us who has attended school knows that without a doubt that, not only are we responsible for our own academic performance, but that we are far more responsible than our teachers, our parents and even our friends were for our grades.

This brings me back to my opening paragraph; the most important role a teacher plays in the lives of his or her students is not as an examiner, but as a nurturer. Attempting to evaluate a teacher based on standardized tests is like evaluating a doctor solely on whether a patient lives, dies, or is cured. Just as every doctor gives his or her all attempting to save and cure patients, every teacher gives his or her entire self to students (who we treat more like our own children than our students). I can’t imagine a world where teachers are so fearful of losing their jobs because their students, who may be going through so many various and horrible circumstances, that they disregard the emotional role of an educator and focus solely on the academics. I will never tell a student, “Stop crying! I don’t care if you are depressed, or you haven’t eaten breakfast, or your parents beat you. I need you to do your work and study so you do well on your exam, so we meet our district goals and my pay is not garnished!”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching
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