Carol Burris, chosen as principal of the year by her colleagues in New York State, has written a brilliant and frightening critique of the state’s ill-planned principal evaluation plan.
As you read her letter to the New York Board of Regents, you can’t help but wonder whether systems like this are intended to demoralize principals and to destroy public education.
What kind of inexperienced technocrats dream up such flawed and damaging schemes?
This blogger wants you to understand legislation that is sailing through the Michigan legislature.
The teachers’ pay will be based on whether student test scores go up.
Experience and degrees don’t matter.
Only test scores.
Is there any research that supports this idiotic policy?
No.
Thanks, Arne.
“He shot an arrow in the air….”
Parents and teachers in Concord, Massachusetts, are outraged over the firing of the teachers’ union leader, an 18-year teacher of third grade, allegedly for ineffectiveness.
“The catalyst for the protest was the decision by Thoreau Elementary School Principal Kelly Clough not to renew the contract of veteran third grade teacher and Concord Teachers Association President Merrie Najimy.
“Barbara Lehn has been a teacher with Concord’s school system for 25 years. She said she has known Najimy since she was hired 18 years ago. She said the idea that Najimy could have been found deficient in every single area of her evaluation as suspect and “laughable.”
“The evaluation system that exists has been misused and abused,” Lehn said. “It’s not because of her teaching, but because she is president of the Concord Teachers Association. … Merrie has been an exemplary teacher.”
Did it ever occur to any of the proponents of the new teacher evaluations that they could be used arbitrarily and capriciously?
Peter DeWitt, principal of an elementary school in upstate New York, tries here to understand the contradictory messages sent out by Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the NY Board of Regents.
On one hand, she says that teachers should no longer teach to the test, but with the advent of Common Core, there is more testing than ever.
She says that testing is less important than ever as kids sit for hours of it.
The state plans to increase the stakes attached to the testing, but teachers should not teach to the test.
She says the Common Core will introduce a new era of critical thinking, which insults the teachers who have been doing exactly that for years.
Tisch will be honored by Teachers College, Columbia University, on May 21.
The Teachers College community is divided about the institution’s decision to honor Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. Tisch has made her mark as a champion of high-stakes testing and charter schools.
Professor Celia Oyler wrote the following message to her graduate students:
“An Open Letter to Graduating Master’s Students in the Elementary and Secondary Inclusive Education Programs
I will not be attending convocation this year as I am on parental leave. I know if I were attending I would not be able to remain silent while Merryl Tisch is given a TC Medal of Honor. Her actions while Chair of the New York State Board of Regents have wrought incredible damage upon our noble profession.
Merryl Tisch has ushered through the Board of Regents many policies with which I vehemently disagree; these include: decoupling teacher certification and master’s degrees from university-based teacher education (approving Relay Graduate School of Education); allowing InBloom to collect and sell private data on each K-12 student in New York State schools; and requiring all school districts to tie teacher evaluation to Value Added Measures based on student test scores. There are numerous problems with using student test scores to evaluate teachers (Value Added Measures). See here, here and here to start.
Despite these well-documented concerns, Teachers College’s initial press release indicated that TC was awarding Merryl Tisch this honorary degree because of her efforts to establish this system of teacher evaluation. To be honest with you all, when I first read the press release, I sobbed. My chagrin is shared by many. For instance, read New York State Principal of the Year (2013) and TC grad Carol Burris’s comment about Merryl Tisch on Diane Ravitch’s blog posting about the Tisch award.
If I were at the graduation convocation, I would wear a sign on the back of my robe. It would probably say, “USING STUDENT TEST SCORES TO RATE TEACHERS DISHONORS US”. Some people are suggesting that students and faculty could turn their backs when Tisch is talking; other people have the idea to hold up signs. In any case, I know that I couldn’t be silent. I would feel complicit; my silence would be condoning the award. I would make sure to sit next to a colleague or two or three who would also agree to take an action with me.
I cannot sit silently while teachers across this country are being viciously attacked and demeaned by the junk science of VAM. For instance: A district in Florida fired A Teacher of the Year based on her VAM. In Los Angeles, a well-loved community-minded teacher committed suicide after his VAM scores were published in the newspaper and he was ranked as one of the lowest teachers in the district; he specialized in welcoming children who spoke little English.
When I was a child, I voraciously read all the books I could find about the Underground Railroad, the Abolitionist Movement, the anti-Nazi movement (including the White Rose Society), the Civil Rights Movement. As a teacher I often included a focus on the South African anti-apartheid movement. For as long as I can remember, I have asked myself, “Would I have stood up?” “Would I have had the courage to defend the side of freedom and justice?”
There are activists in the educational community and TC alumni who are debating whether to call for a protest of the Merryl Tisch award at your graduation. While there are different opinions on this topic, they are all asking if there will be a protest from the graduating students. They realize that you are entering teaching at a very difficult time and they admire your courage. They are hoping that as beginning teachers you can find small ways to protect both the children and our profession by protesting the horrible anti-child and anti-teacher policies pushed through with Race to the Top funding. They hope you are entering the field of education knowing we need to fight courageously for an education that is based on children’s individual needs and does not try to reduce them to test scores; that you want to teach subjects even if they are not on the tests, such as the arts, music, drama, science investigations, and social studies inquiries. I have assured them you are visionary and courageous and that you see urban communities of color as full of multicultural resources and assets to be cultivated rather than as sinkholes of deficits that need to be corrected into middle class mainstream discourses as measured by the tests.
My heart is beating as I type these words, as I know that public education is under an organized assault by corporate reformers who seek to script your curricula and make you teach to their tests. These corporate reformers—The New Schools Venture Fund, the Gates Foundation; the Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and so on—seem to have nearly unlimited funds.
What we have on our side is our vision for a different kind of education: one that supports children to dance and sing and debate and play and create and dream and make art and design projects that show their ideas about how to make the world a better place. What we have on our side is our belief in humanity, relationships, solidarity, diversity, democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. I know that none of you entered our teacher education program with the mere goal of helping children score well on a standardized test. You entered teaching to touch the hearts and minds of children, and to listen to and value their stories. And to tell them through your words and your actions, “I see you, I expect huge successes from you, and I love you.”
Please walk with dignity into St John the Divine, no matter what you choose to do or not do about Merryl Tisch. And always remember that no Value Added Score can EVER measure how much value you have added to a child’s life.”
With love,
Celia Oyler
Pasi Sahlberg, the great expert on education in Finland, here examines the founding myths of the corporate reform movement.
Reformers search for the teacher who can generate high test scores. They like the idea that teachers compete for rewards tied to scores. Sahlberg points out that a school is a team, not a competitive individual sport. Teachers must work together towards common goal.
Another fallacy is the “no excuses” claim that great teachers overcome all obstacles. Sahlberg reminds us that the influence of the family and student motivation is far greater than the efforts of teachers in determining outcomes.
A corollary to this fallacy is the belief that three or four great teachers in a row eliminates all social and economic disadvantage.
Sahlberg maintains that teacher education requires high standards and even standardization to produce highly skilled teachers. Once the pipeline is improved, teachers should have a high degree of personal autonomy. He notes that there is no Teach for Finland. All teachers go through a highly selective process and are well educated and prepared for their profession.
All in all, a great post.
Send it to your legislators and leaders.
Almost everything you need to know about “reform” in New York State is explained in this fable by Arthur Goldstein, who blogs at NYC Educator.
As usual, Arthur is very funny trying to decipher the mysteries of reform and the personalities of reformers.
At a panel discussion in New York City, Bridgeport Superintendent Paul Vallas made a startling admission. He said that the efforts to develop a teacher evaluation metric was a huge mess and that no one understands it.
He said:
“The Bridgeport, Conn. superintendent — who has served stints in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and earned a reputation as a turnaround consultant for struggling districts with big budget gaps — said reforms he backed were at risk of collapsing “under the weight of how complicated we’re making it.”
“We’re working on the evaluation system right now,” Vallas said of Bridgeport. “And I’ll tell you, it is a nightmare.” Vallas went further and said: ““We’re losing the communications game because we don’t have a good message to communicate,” he said. In separate comments, Vallas criticized evaluations as a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”
A nightmare, yes. A testing-industrial complex, yes.
Professor Audrey Amrein Beardsley at Arizona State has written extensively about teacher evaluation and in her most recent study–not yet published–she reports the results of a 50-state survey. Not a single state has figured out how to use the value-added data to help teachers, and–get this–in every state the formulae are so complex that no one understands them other than those who created them. And the billions invested in this nutty endeavor are supposed to improve education!
David Coleman, as is his wont, was provocative. “Coleman was perhaps the night’s most outspoken panelist, at one point suggesting that those who believe that poverty is an insurmountable obstacle to improving student achievement should offer to cut teacher salaries and redistribute those funds to the poor.”
Why would he suggest cutting teachers’ salaries to reduce poverty? Why not start with the billionaires? I don’t understand this comment or his logic at all. Do you?
Bill Gates gave a TED talk. I confess I didn’t watch. Happily, others did and produced a transcript.
Jersey Jazzman called Bill’s central assertion (that 98% of teachers get a one-word evaluation, “satisfactory”) ridiculous. If you link to JJ’s blog, you cn watch Bill explain how to fix the evaluation problem.
The one time I saw Bill Gates was at Davos in 2006. He spoke then with the same sense of absolute certainty. He knew exactly what was needed to cure all the ills of American education: small high schools with rigor and relevance. He spoke assuredly. He did not admit that the foundation’s evaluations were not so rosy as his description. Two years later, he dropped the small school as panacea.
I don’t know how he approaches software issues, but from his actions, he is the kind of guy who needs to have One Big Powerful Idea. And he won’t give up on that One Big Idea because no one around dares to tell him he is wrong.
Fixing teacher evaluation is his current idee fixe:
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter)
My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else’s in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve. Unfortunately, there’s one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I’m talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was “satisfactory,” I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn’t fair to them. It’s not fair to students, and it’s putting America’s global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve.
Let’s start by asking who’s doing well. Well, unfortunately there’s no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they’re doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn’t number one. We’re not even in the top 10. We’re tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we’re 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there’s really only one area where we’re near the top, and that’s in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.
Let’s look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai’s incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what’s working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.
You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It’s because there’s so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today’s average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.
What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, “Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?” “Do you learn to correct your mistakes?”
And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we’re asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action.
(Music)
(Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let’s talk about what’s going on today. To get started, we’re doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays.
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.
Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I’ve talk about —
I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it.
Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers.
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can’t really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It’s not a perfect shot. It doesn’t catch every little thing that’s going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I’m able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection.
All right, let’s take a look at the long one first, okay?
Once I’m finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I’ll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don’t write things down, I don’t remember them.
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I’m seeing as I’m writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom.
I’m glad that we’ve actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn’t.
I think that video exposes so much of what’s intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy.
Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I’ll see you later.
[Every classroom could look like that]
(Applause)
Bill Gates: One day, we’d like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won’t be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That’s understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate.
Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that’s a big number, but to put it in perspective, it’s less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.
The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it.
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that’s fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn’t just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too.
I’m excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
__,_._,___
In 2010, the Los Angeles commissioned a rating system based on test scores and published the individual names of teachers and their ratings. New York City did the same last year. To say this was controversial is putting it mildly.
Many researchers opposed it, as did Wendy Kopp and Bill Gates. If the purpose of the ratings is to help teachers improve, how exactly does it help to publish those ratings? Shouldn’t they be part of a discussion between principals and teachers? Right after the ratings went public in Los Angeles, a fifth grade teacher committed suicide. His name was Rigoberto Ruelas. Collateral damage, you might say.
John Ewing, the head of Math for America, called this thuggish use of data “mathematical intimidation,” and said that mathematicians have an obligation to speak out against it.
Nonetheless, both candidates for mayor in Los Angeles say they approve the practice.
Is there any evidence that the public releases in either L.A. or NYC improved teaching?
Please, someone, get some informed advisors for these candidates.
