Jersey Jazzman hopes someone will ask Commissioner Chris Cerf to explain “student growth objectives,” when he speaks to NJEA
As JJ points out,the research on this method of teacher evaluation is fundamentally flawed.
What’s the rush? Why not take the time to get it right, rather than plunge ahead with Junk Science?
According to the Providence Journal, Rhode Island won plaudits from the National Council on Teacher Quality. The newspaper, which is notorious for its inattention to background, describes NCTQ as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy group.”
This is not accurate. As I have described on this blog in detail, NCTQ was created in 2000 by the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Foundation at a time when I was a member of the board. It was created specifically to harass teacher-education institutions and to advance an agenda in which untrained teachers could win certification by passing a test.
As I explained in this post, NCTQ floundered about, seeking a strategy and was rescued in 2001 when George W. Bush’s secretary of education Rod Paige gave NCTQ an unrestricted grant of $5 million to keep it alive. The teacher test it created, called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, eventually was turned over to another company that sells online certification for only $1995.00. Is that a high-quality way to prepare teachers for the nation’s children?
The board of NCTQ is dominated by corporate reformers. It may have members from both parties, but it is certainly NOT non-partisan. It is hostile to teacher education and infatuated with the idea that test scores are both the measure and the outcome of education.
Mercedes Schneider analyzed the board and the political agenda of NCTQ at great length on her blog; her posts have been widely reposted.
Its recent, widely heralded report on the nation’s schools of education–which found all but four to be inadequate–was based on a review of their reading lists and syllabi, not on actual visits to the campuses. This was supposed to show the power of “Big Data,” that is, making judgments without any personal interactions, but it really demonstrated that the NCTQ review was a hit job on teacher education. I always have been a tough critic of teacher education, but I also believe that you can’t grade an institution without ever setting foot in its buildings or interviewing its professors and students.
The Providence Journal should have done a few minutes of research on the Internet before lauding the findings of the NCTQ report on Rhode Island. What they have done here is journalism by press release. That’s not journalism. That’s lazy.
Thanks to Kipp Dawson of Pittsburgh for drawing my attention to this letter written by Melissa Tomlinson, the teacher who confronted Governor Chris Christie, who shouted her down and said contemptuously, “What do you people want?”
This is her answer, which appeared on Mark Naison’s blog:
Dear Governor Christie,
Yesterday I took the opportunity to come hear you speak on your campaign trail. I have never really heard you speak before except for sound bytes that I get on my computer. I don’t have cable, I don’t read newspapers. I don’t have enough time. I am a public school teacher that works an average of 60 hours a week in my building. Yes, you can check with my principal. I run the after-school program along with my my classroom position. I do even more work when I am at home.
For verification of this, just ask my children.
I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories.
Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response “I want more money for my students.”
Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years. We got into a small debate about how much money has been spent on education. To me, there is never enough money that is spent on education. To invest in education is to invest in our future. We cannot keep short-changing our children and taking away opportunities for them to explore and learn.
As more money is required for state-mandated curriculum changes and high-stakes standardized testing, it is our children that are losing. Programs are being cut all over the state as budget changes are forcing districts to cut music, art, after-school transportation, and youth-centered clubs.
But let’s put money aside for a moment. What do I want? What do ‘we people’ want? We want to be allowed to teach.
Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth?
This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education. I am all for evaluation of a teacher.
I recognize that I should be held accountable for my job. This does not worry me, as long as I am evaluated on my methods of teaching. I can not be held wholly accountable for the learning growth of a student when I am not accountable for all of the factors that influence this growth. Are you aware that poverty is the biggest determination of a child’s educational success. If not, I suggest you read Diane Ravitch’s new book Reign of Error. Take a moment and become enlightened.
Getting back to the issue of money. I am fully aware of our educational budget. Where is all of this money? To me it seems like it is being siphoned right off into the hands of private companies as they reap the benefits of the charter schools and voucher programs that you have put into place. It certainly hasn’t gone to improve school conditions in urban areas such as Jersey City. The conditions that these students and teachers are forced to be in are horrifying. Yet you are not allowing the funds needed to improve these conditions. Are you hoping that these schools get closed down and more students are forced to go to private charter schools while the districts are being forced to pay their tuition? I know for a fact that this is what has happened in Camden and Newark.
Yet these charter schools are not held to the same accountability as our public schools. Why is that? Because deep down you know that you are not really dealing with the issues that influence a child’s education. You are simply putting a temporary band-aid into place.
Unfortunately [for you] that temporary fix is already starting to be exposed as Charter Schools are showing that they actually are not able to do better than public schools. You are setting up teachers to take the blame for all of this. You have portrayed us as greedy, lazy money-draining public servants that do nothing. I invite you to come do my job for one week Governor Christie. I invite you to come see my students, see how little they really have during the school day as they are being forced to keep learning for a single snapshot of their educational worth.
For that one end-all, be-all test, the NJASK. The one that the future of my job and my life is now based upon. Why do you portray schools as failure factories? What benefit do you reap from this? Have you acquired financial promises for your future campaigns as you eye the presidential nomination? Has there been back-room meetings as you agree to divert public funds to private companies that are seeking to take over our public educational system? This is my theory. To accomplish all of this, you are setting up the teachers to take the blame. Unfortunately, you are not the only governor in our country that has this agenda.
What do “we people’ want, Governor Christie? We want our schools back. We want to teach. We want to be allowed to help these children to grow, educationally, socially, and emotionally. We want to be respected as we do this, not bullied.
BadAss Teacher, Melissa Tomlinson
http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2013/11/letter-to-governor-christie-from-new.html
Students at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a school that accepts only students that have high scores on their entry examinations, boycotted the latest tests to protest their purpose. The students knew that the tests had no purpose other than to evaluate their teachers, and they thought the tests were not only a waste of students’ time but unfair to their teachers.
Geoff Decker of Gotham Schools writes:
A group of students at the elite high school in lower Manhattan pledged to opt out of the English tests that were administered today, saying they’re opposed to the exam’s purpose. The tests are low-stakes for students, but they’ll be used to grade teachers on new evaluations being rolled out this year.
“This movement is meant to support Stuyvesant teachers in opposing an unfair teacher evaluation system,” Senior David Cahn wrote on the Facebook page he created to encourage other students to join in.
Students across the city are taking formal baseline tests this year in many subjects because of new teacher evaluation rules. The rules require teachers to be rated in part by how much their students improve over the course of the year, and schools are using tests this fall as the baseline for determining student proficiency at the beginning of the year.
The extra testing has eaten into class time and taken teachers out of classroom for grading. “
The students at Stuyvesant High School proved that they understand more about teaching and learning than policymakers in Washington and Albany.
Mercedes Schneider here analyzes the tax returns submitted by Michelle Rhee for her two organizations. One engages in political activities, and the other is an advocacy group.
Rhee gives generous contributions to those who seek the privatization of public education.
Schneider notes the close connection between Rhee and the creators of Common Core.
She concludes her review with these thoughts:
“In reading these tax documents, I cannot help but wonder if our democracy is such a farce that it will crumble beneath the weight of the wallets of the wealthy removed. I wonder what it will take for them to realize that they are foolishly destroying the foundation upon which they themselves stand. In their arrogant fiscal elevation they forget that even they require the foundational institutions that form our democracy– public education being one such institution…..
“Here’s a hint: When you hear that a candidate in a local election is being outspent by 10- or 20-to-1, vote for that candidate.”
Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network surveys the wreckage of “test-and-punish” methods of reform. Such methods lead not to “reform,” but to bullied teachers, who are demoralized by their situation. Some leave, some hang on, but the results have been unimpressive.
Bryant sees a slow-motion collapse of the coercive “reform” movement, as its bold promises turn out to be empty. The reformers’ day on the hill is coming to an end.
As Bryant writes:
With the advent of No Child Left Behind, the accountability had its mechanism for targeting individual schools, but with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the accountability arsenal aimed at individual classroom teachers too.
With Michelle Rhee as its celebrity cheerleader, the school accountability movement became the perfect PR campaign promising a way forward to ever increasing education “effectiveness.”
But all those years of promises for this: Studies can prove that teachers are capable of being manipulated by coercive management systems, but the wealth of improvement stemming from expensive new assessment systems has yet to fill the account left barren by the nation’s reluctance to invest in our children’s education.
Michelle Rhee-like accountability systems that have been in place a substantial amount of time have done no better than the one in D.C. A long-standing system in Tennessee, for instance, has done nothing to improve academic achievement and has revealed “almost nothing about teacher effectiveness.”
The most ardent reform enthusiasts now admit to “overselling, and underthinking [sic]” their cause, even as they try to dispel whatever is being proposed as a positive alternative.
Parents and public officials in places as diverse as rural Virginia and uptown New York Cityare more boisterously questioning the whole premise of ramping up more tests on students to determine the value of their teachers.
As the education reform movement’s empty harvest leads us into a winter of discontent, what’s needed are more proposals from multiple sources for a more positive way forward.
Far beyond the media spotlights focused on reform celebrities like Rhee, other credible voices are calling for a different course for accountability and an agenda based on opportunity and support for learning. No wonder more people are listening.
Legislators in the far-right legislature of the once forward-looking state of North Carolina waste no opportunity to demoralize teachers with their wacky punitive policies. They just don’t like teachers. They seem certain that only 25% of the state’s teachers are worthy, even though 96% were rated effective by the state evaluation system.
So the teacher-bashers in the legislature will make sure to play whack-a-mole with the lives of teachers.
The new plan is to strip tenure from all teachers and let teachers compete for four/year contracts and $5,000 bonuses.
North Carolina is one of the lowest paying states in the nation for teachers. One reason to accept low wages is a promise of reasonable job security. That will be eliminated. As Lindsey Wagner reported in NC Policy Watch, some NC teachers are leaving the state, realizing that the legislature wants to destroy their profession and reduce them to public mendicants.
Leaders of the state’s two largest districts see this as bad policy:
“The General Assembly voted this year to eliminate teacher tenure in 2018. In the meantime, school districts across the state are being required to identify which educators will be offered a $5,000 pay raise as part of a four-year contract if they give up their tenure. Roughly one-quarter will be offered the four-year deal.
Some of the most vocal complaints are coming from the Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school systems. Like their counterparts across the state, the large systems are searching for a way to carry out the new state requirements.
“I’m hoping the General Assembly will talk with educators and look at the long-term consequences – both intended and unintended – of this legislation before it does irreparable harm that will take years and years and years to fix,” Wake County school board member Kevin Hill said Tuesday at a school board meeting.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Heath Morrison said the four-year contract and bonus plan has raised a host of questions, and threatens already-rocky teacher morale.
But backers of the change say it provides meaningful education reform by basing job security and pay on performance. They say the old system of giving tenure and then basing pay on seniority rewarded ineffective teachers.”
Contracts and bonuses will be tied to test scores.
A defender of the legislation used the occasion to ridicule teachers:
“Only in the warped world of education bureaucrats and union leaders could a permanent $5,000 pay raise for top-performing teachers be branded as a bad thing,” Amy Auth, a spokeswoman for state Senate leader Phil Berger, a Rockingham County Republican, said in a written statement.
Historically, North Carolina public school teachers who have passed a four-year probationary period have earned tenure, called career status.”
And there is more to this sad story:
Critics of the system, such as Berger, have pointed to the firing of 17 tenured teachers in the 2011-12 school year to argue that too many bad teachers are still being employed. But supporters of tenure argue that it protects good teachers from being fired unfairly, and that many bad teachers are encouraged to resign.
Starting July 1, 2018, North Carolina public school teachers will receive contracts of between one and four years. Teachers will work under contracts that are renewed based on performance – like nearly every other profession, according to Auth.
Some changes go into effect now, such as offering four-year contracts to some educators.
A big question concerns how to determine which teachers will be offered the four-year contracts. Superintendents will present a list of names to their school boards, which can modify the list.
Administrators from 10 of the state’s biggest school districts, including Wake, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Durham, Johnston and Gaston, held a video conference Tuesday to talk about the changes.
“You actually have some school districts that are suggesting that they’ll do a lottery because of concerns about legal issues and concerns about morale,” Morrison said.
Auth stressed that the “top 25 percent of teachers” will get the new contract and raises, saying they’re “highly effective teachers.” Teachers must be rated “proficient” under the state evaluation system to be eligible.
But Ann McColl, general counsel for the N.C. Association of Educators, pointed to state statistics showing that 96 percent of classroom teachers were rated as proficient.”
When State Commissioner John King released the teacher ratings, he said that teachers should be relieved because only 1% were found to be “ineffective.” The implication: You have nothing to worry about; you won’t lose your job based on my untested evaluation system.
Some reacted by wondering why the state had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to determine that only 1% of teachers were ineffective; principals were furious about the mountain of paperwork they had waded through to prove what they already knew.
But this teacher had a word of advice for Commissioner King:
“This just shows how out of touch John King is. He says these numbers should ease teachers concerns because the ratings aren’t bad. This is an insult! Teachers aren’t criticizing this dumb evaluation system based on test scores because they are selfishly concerned about their ratings. Teachers are concerned because the over emphasis on test scores will lead to less effective teaching, squash creativity, narrow the curriculum, suck the enjoyment out of learning and on and on… Maybe King lives his life simply worrying about himself but most teachers are driven by a desire to help their students grow as people. He just doesn’t get it!”
Hoping to calm teachers’ fears about the state’s new, untested, and probably invalid teacher evaluation system, Commissioner John King announced that only 1% of teachers were rated ineffective.
NYC scores were omitted due to failure to reach agreement on time.
“ALBANY—More than 90 percent of teachers outside New York City have earned high ratings in the state’s first year of mandated performance evaluations, a fact that state education commissioner John King said “should” ease unions’ concerns about attaching “high stakes” to testing in a new, more difficult curriculum.
“King presented preliminary numbers to the state Board of Regents Tuesday morning, announcing that nearly 50 percent of teachers received a “highly effective” rating, which is the top score. Another 42 percent were deemed “effective,” with only 4 percent as “developing” and 1 percent as “ineffective.”
“Teachers who earn two consecutive “ineffective” ratings could be fired under the law. Those with “developing” or “ineffective” will be outfitted with an individualized professional development plan to help them improve.
“The state’s data includes evaluations of nearly 127,000 teachers. So, while about 117,000 teachers were rated in the top two categories, nearly 7,000 teachers got the lower ratings and will require professional development. The remaining teachers were not accounted for in those reports.”
Most researchers consider test-based evaluations to be invalid.
Adell Cothorne, DC whistle-blower extraordinaire, offers a warning: Don’t believe so naive as to believe the hype from the District of Columbia public schools about its teacher evaluation system.
Cothorne was there.
She says that the principals were not trained; that school secretaries often did the crucial paperwork.
That the IMPACT system is so complicated that no one, not even its designers, could explain how it works.
That the system continues to lose excellent principals and teachers.
That the evaluation system has no bearing on student achievement.
Cothorne suggests that IMPACT should be applied to central office staff.
