Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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Walton Foundation Gives $8 Million to Rhee’s StudentsFirst

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2013 //
75

Indifferent to John Merrow’s investigative reports on the cheating scandal during Michelle Rhee’s tenure as DC Chancellor, the Walton Family Foundation gave her organization $8 million to continue pushing its radical agenda of attacking teachers and promoting privatization of the nation’s public schools.

StudentsFirst advocates that test scores should count for 50% of teacher evaluation, although most researchers agree that these measures are inaccurate and unstable. It also advocates charters and vouchers, including for-profit charters.

Categories Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Teacher Evaluations, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Parent: I Am Fighting Against the Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2013 //
30

I received an email from a parent in Long Island who has decided to join the campaign against high-stakes  testing. She blames Common Core for her children’s unhappiness with school, but Common Core is just the latest manifestation of the testing obsession embedded in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She blogs, writes letter, button holes elected officials. She is fighting for her children and for all other children. With more parents like her, we could turn this situation around.

She writes:

Hi Ms. Ravitch,

I’m a Mom from Long Island, NY. I would like to share my story about how my son’s kindergarten experience  was Hijacked by the Common Core and how this has motivated me to fight harder for Public Education. I attached a picture of the sad reality of what Kindergarten has looked like this year for my son.

My son started Kindergarten this past September and my daughter entered the second grade. I thought my son would love kindergarten since he loved the Universal Pre K program, but I was wrong, he hates school.  I asked my son why he hates school and he said “It’s not fun and all we do is work and it’s too hard.” Knowing my daughter had a wonderful experience in Kindergarten two years prior I thought my son was giving me excuses. I thought maybe he was having trouble making friends, so I asked the teacher and she said, “No everybody loves Mikey. He is very compliant and eager to please.” Then the Pearson worksheets and graded math tests started appearing in my son’s folder. Then I realized my son was right, there is too much work and most of the content was way too hard for a kindergartner. My son’s kindergarten experience has not fostered a love of learning but it has fostered a hatred for school.

Inline image 3

When my 5 year old said I rather be dead than go to school I knew I had to do something more than just opt out of testing.

I increased my research into CCSS, created a Refusal Guide for state tests which is being circulated on LI, in NYS, and nationally, attended the United Opt Out rally in Washington DC for 4 days to occupy the DOE, and began political action by contacting and visiting state politicians. 

My research has led me to a new philosophy.

State and federal Education departments have been applying band aide after band aide on our current education system for the past 50 years. Education Reform has become part of the norm. We create policy after policy, mandate after mandate, yet nothing changes for the better.  It’s time to rip off the band aides and start developing a whole new system.

In order to have a strong education system we need to rid the old one and develop a whole new education system; an education system designed by educators who have spent years in a classroom, instead of our current system that has been designed by lawyers, politicians and corporations.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read about my Son’s Kindergarten Experience 

Warm Wishes,

Sara Wottawa

http://nocommonsenseeducation.blogspot.com/?m=1

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

John Thompson: “The Party’s Over” for Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2013 //
15

John Thompson confidently predicts that corporate reform has passed the high-water mark.

The collapse of the Rhee story is the tip of a melting iceberg.

The “reformers” are facing a genuine popular revolt.

Nothing they advocate works.

All their alleged reforms are a sham.

Who will be the first to bail out?

Will the hedge fund managers go back to investing in polo ponies instead of charter schools?

It is too soon to pop the champagne corks but it is clear that what is called “reform” is headed for the ash heap of history.

Then we can get back to the serious business of improving our schools.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, U.S. education

KrazyTA: the Meaning of Leadership

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2013 //
17

KrazyTA, a regular commenter on the blog, offered his definition of leadership in dialogue with other readers. It got a great response.

Here goes:

“I once had a job where I was a clerk typist in an academic library. I had three supervisors: from the bottom up they were a librarian-in-training, a professional librarian, and the librarian who ran the entire department I worked in. **Not bragging: I was a good enough typist that I secured several jobs largely because of my typing skills.** Not just in my evaluations [I did very well indeed] but in my day-to-day work, I never resented any one of them evaluating me or offering me suggestions or guidance. It took me a while to figure out why I enjoyed working ‘under’ them, but it finally dawned on me: any one of them, if necessary, could have done my [overall] job as well or better than I could. That’s why they didn’t [and didn’t need to] bully or order me into doing anything: I knew they understand what I was doing, and how to get it done, and what limitations I worked under, and their orders never needed to be more than gentle suggestions because they really and truly knew what needed to be done and the practicalities of how to get from here to there. I wish I could say all my jobs were like that, but why spoil your day and mine?

😦

“In other words, moral leadership, modesty and personal example. The accountabullies know about carrots and sticks because you can add those up, divide ‘em into percentages, use ‘em in ever greater quantities to humiliate teaching staff—but moral leadership and modesty and personal example, now where would that fit into a VAManiac’s neat little faux formula?”

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations

Warning: Don’t Become a Teacher

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2013 //
22

[WARNING: after the following essay was published in Huffington Post, the writer was suspended from his teaching position. The next post will give details.]

This teacher in Missouri loves teaching but he doesn’t love what the legislature is doing to restrict, evaluate, and control him.

After two decades as a journalist, he became a teacher. He has taught for 14 years.

Today, he would urge young people not to enter teaching because the conditions and lack of respect are so wearing. “Classroom teachers, especially those who are just out of college and entering the profession, are more stressed and less valued than at any previous time in our history.
They have to listen to a long list of politicians who belittle their ability, blame them for every student whose grades do not reach arbitrary standards, and want to take away every fringe benefit they have — everything from the possibility of achieving tenure to receiving a decent pension.”

This week, the Missouri legislature will vote on a proposal to tie 33% of his evaluation to test scores and to add student surveys to his evaluation. He writes:

“Each year, I allow my students to critique me and offer suggestions for my class. I learn a lot from those evaluations and have implemented some of the suggestions the students have made. But there is no way that eighth graders’ opinions should be a part of deciding whether I continue to be employed.”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Shameless StudentsFirst Tries to Buy Iowa

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2013 //
14

Even though Michelle Rhee suffered multiple embarrassments in the past few weeks–with John Merrow reporting her refusal to investigate the cheating scandal that occurred on her watch and the Broader Bolder Approach reporting the failure of her “reforms”—her organization continues to push her failed “reforms” on states across the nation.

StudentsFirst pumped over $317,000 into legislative races in Iowa to ensure that legislators would listen to its radical, anti-public education message. It was the single biggest contributor to state races in 2012.

Now it is filling the airwaves with ads urging the legislature to adopt changes that will advance Rhee’s personal vendetta against teachers and public education.

She demands that teacher evaluations be tied to test scores, even though research and experience have shown that this strategy consistently fails, as it failed in DC. She wants a parent trigger law, so that parents can be duped into privatizing their community public school and turning it over to one of the corporate charter chains.

Iowans should demand that StudentsFirst fully disclose the source of its funding so they can find out who is behind this campaign, other than the former leader of one of the nation’s lowest-performing districts. And Iowans should remember John Merrow’s conclusion that DC is worse off after five years of the Rhee-Henderson leadership by almost every measure: test scores, graduation rates, truancy, teacher turnover, enrollments, etc.

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

What Michelle Rhee Told the LA Times About Teacher Evaluation

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2013 //
22

Michelle Rhee was recently invited to meet with the Los Angeles Times editorial board.

The interview occurred after John Merrow published his bombshell post about the mysterious memo, the one showing that Rhee was informed about the likelihood of widespread cheating and did nothing about it. Rhee forgot about the cheating memo or didn’t think it important.

In the same post on his blog, Merrow said that the public schools were worse off after the Rhee-Henderson years than when Rhee started, by every measure, like test scores, graduation fares, teacher turnover, truancy, enrollments, etc.

Nonetheless, the Los Angeles Times wanted to gain Rhee’s wisdom on teacher evaluation. Read the interview. It is clear that she doesn’t know the research, nor has she learned that the high valuation she placed on standardized testing (50% of a teacher’s rating) contributed to the cheating she ignored.

She has her narrative, and she is sticking to it. The Times needs to hear from other people, like David Berliner, who can explain what the research says.

Categories Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations

The Attack on Unions: Which Side Are You On?

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2013 //
123

The attack on unions flared into public view in 2011, when Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin attacked public sector unions, and thousands of people surrounded the State Capitol in protest.

Since so many radical Republicans took office in 2010, the effort to destroy public sector unions–especially the teachers’ unions–has accelerated.

Leo Casey explores the context of the anti-union movement here.

In state after state, legislatures have wiped out collective bargaining rights. That meant teachers would have no voice in the funding of public schools or their working conditions. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

The so-called reformers are closing public schools and turning the students over to private corporations. 90% of charters are non-union.

The questions that I keep asking are, where was Barack Obama as the efforts to destroy America’s workers gained momentum? Why didn’t he go to Madison in the spring of 2011? Why did he go instead at the very height of the Wisconsin protests to hail Jeb Bush in Miami as “a champion of education reform?”

Why did his Secretary of Education effusively praise some of the most anti-union, anti-teacher state commissioners of education in the nation, like John White in Louisiana and Hanna Skandera in New Mexico? Why have Secretary Duncan and President Obama said nothing in opposition to the attacks on teachers, the mass closure of public schools, and the growing for-profit sector in education? Why was the Democratic National Convention of 2012 held in North Carolina, a right-to-work state? When was the last time that the Democratic Party held its convention in a right to work state?

Categories Duncan, Arne, Economy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Obama, Privatization, Support for public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Unions

The Failure of Market-Based Reforms

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2013 //
11

What is presently called “reform” consists of market-based policies such as school choice, high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, and closing schools.

The Broader Bolder Approach to Education just released a report on what they call “market-oriented reforms.” The report analyzes performance data in three “market-oriented” cities–Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York City–and concludes that in these districts, the rhetoric trumps the reality. Non-market-oriented districts consistently outperformed the three “market reform” districts.

The authors say in summary:

“Top-down pressure from federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, bolstered by organized advocacy efforts, is making a popular set of market-oriented education “reforms” look more like the new status quo than real reform. Reformers assert that test-based teacher evaluation, increased access to charter schools, and the closure of “failing” and under-enrolled schools will boost at-risk students’ achievement and narrow longstanding race- and income-based achievement gaps. This new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education examines these assertions by comparing the impacts of these reforms in three large urban school districts – Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago – with student and school outcomes over the same period in other large, high-poverty urban districts. The report finds that the reforms deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from a set of other, less visible policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment.”

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Teacher Evaluations, US Education, Vouchers

Clueless Bill Gates, Redux

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2013 //
108

In the year that I have had this blog, I have never posted the same article twice.

I posted this one yesterday, and I am posting it again, to draw attention to some curious statements made by Bill Gates in the course of an interview. I am not picking on Bill, but drawing attention to his assumptions. What he believes matters a great deal because his billions, in tandem with federal policy (which he shapes) has a large impact on tens of millions of students and their teachers. His influence is multiplied yet again because almost every other foundation follows his lead, assuming that he knows best because he has the most money.

Yesterday I posted the interview to draw attention to the fact that his favorite technology startup is one that his foundation started, though that was not mentioned. It is inBloom, the new tech company Gates funded with $100 million, in partnership with Rupert Murdoch, to collect confidential student data, which may be used by vendors. The vendors will use the data to design and market new products, based on their access to children’s names, address, grades, test scores, disabilities, attendance, suspensions, etc. in 2011, the US Department of Education loosened the restrictions on the federal privacy act (FERPA), allowing this release of data without parents’ permission. The decision to release the data is in the hands of state education departments, not parents.

Today I call attention to two other noteworthy points.

In this exchange, Gates asserts that the foundation has figured out how to make the average teacher as effective as those in the top quartile. He neglects to mention–maybe he doesn’t know–that the implementation of these ideas has not produced this result anywhere. Gates’ ideas about teacher evaluation have been adopted in most states because the federal Department of Education made them a condition of Race to the Top and a condition to receive waivers from NCLB. Gates does not acknowledge that these test-based evaluation programs have created massive snafus, in which the district’s Teacher of the Year was fired because she was “ineffective” the next year, nor does he seem to know that these evaluation systems are inaccurate and demoralizing. In short, his new Big Idea has already failed, but no one has told him. Maybe they are afraid to tell him.

The question:

“During your SXSW speech, you held up a vial of the polio vaccine as an illustration of the power of innovation to solve a problem by redefining it. What’s the big win in education that’s similar in scope?”

Gates’ answer:

“The foundation’s biggest investment, even bigger than what we’re doing to enable technology, is in creating a personnel system for K-12 teachers that lets the average teacher move up to be as good as the top quartile. Instead of just being in isolation and getting no feedback, you can be videotaped, you can have a peer evaluator advise you on your performance. When we combine that with student surveys and principals’ feedback, we can help teachers learn from the best.”

*********************
In this next exchange, the interviewer politely points out that so far none of Gates’ big ideas has been transformative. His response is to say that what works for one group doesn’t work for another, which is a good critique of almost everything Gates does. Another way to read his answer is that he still does not know how to transform the K-12 system; what works for highly motivated adults is not what works for extremely heterogeneous youngsters whose motivation is diverse.

The question:

“The performance of independently run public charter schools has been mixed. Breaking up large schools into smaller ones has yielded few improvements. There is little robust data about the impact of laptops, tablets, and other technology on graduation rates or test scores. Do we know enough about what works and what doesn’t to undertake large-scale interventions?

Gates’ answer:

“These are complex questions, in part because students are heterogeneous. What works for one student won’t work for another.

“I’ll give you an example. The students who go to Western Governors University [an online, not-for-profit university that is on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list in 2013] are older, in their late twenties, early thirties. They have a career goal in mind. They are fairly motivated to finish, and the curriculum is very oriented toward credentialing them for a higher-income occupation. So the persistence you see in that self-selecting group is quite phenomenal. They have very low dropout rates. But you can’t just say, “That course material and structure must work for all 18-year-olds.” In fact, we know it absolutely does not. That population has a less clear idea of why they’re at school, and they have other distractions.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations
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