Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
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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

The Master Plan for Obama Education Reforms

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2013 //
48

Here it is in one neat package: the Obama reform program, drafted by the Broad Foundation and published in April 2009.

Please review the names of those who participated in drafting the plan. Many will be familiar to you. Here you will find the agenda for Race to the Top, which was revealed to the public three months later. These are the people and these are the policies that forged a strong link between No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Here is the framework that saddled the nation with more high-stakes testing, more privatization, more closing schools, more layoffs, attacks on tenure, and other policies that lack any research or evidence.

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, U.S. education

Florida: Now the Lawsuits Begin

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
18

Teachers in Florida are suing because they are being evaluated on the basis of students they didn’t teach and subjects they don’t teach.

This is manifestly unfair.

Imagine being fired because the scores didn’t go up in someone else’s class.

Let the lawsuits begin.

In time, the madness will end, and those who created it and perpetuated will be covered with shame and disgrace.

Categories Florida, Teacher Evaluations

Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff Nonsense

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
36

Nonsense=makes no sense.

Last year, when the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study of teacher effects was published on the front page of the Néw York Times, it created a sensation. It seemed to say that the “quality” of a single teacher would raise lifetime earnings, reduce teen pregnancy, and have other dramatic effects.

The story said: “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.”

One of the authors of the study said that the lesson was “fire bad teachers sooner rather than later.” This was used to support the test-based evaluation systems pushed by Race to the Top that otherwise had no evidence behind them (and still don’t). It also supported economist Eric Hanushek’s view that the “bottom” 5-10% of teachers, judged by their students’ scores, should be fired every year.

Just a few weeks later, President Obama cited the CFR study in his State of the Union address. He said: ” We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.”

But it is all a great exaggeration.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers demolished the study here. He pointed out many flaws, including the fact that most teachers are not rated.

But what about the claim of earning an extra $266,000 or $250,000 per year per class over a lifetime?

Baker writes:

“One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is that “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.” This comes straight from the research paper. BUT… let’s break that down. It’s a whole classroom of kids. Let’s say… for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let’s say we’re talking about earnings careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, 266,000/26.6 = 10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm… no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? 10,000/40 = 250. Yep, about $250 per year (In constant, 2010 [I believe] dollars which does mean it’s a higher total over time, as the value of the dollar declines when adjusted for inflation). And that is about what the NYT Graph shows: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/06/us/benefits-of-good-teachers.html?ref=education”

What this boils down to is that a student can get a lifetime boost of $5 a week if we now spend billions of dollars on value-added rating systems. Maybe. Or maybe not. ”

One of the authors wrote Baker to say that their calculations show that the actual gain per student would be about $1,000 a year or $20 a week.

There have been other criticisms of the study, some noting that the study was based on teaching before NCLB, before high stakes testing. Others questioned whether a large scale study of this kind could connect specific teachers to specific children. And one reviewer insisted that the study contradicted itself and said nothing.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teacher Evaluations

When Smart Academics Say Silly Things

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
44

A teacher in Nevada sent me this article, which was printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

He said he would have laughed at how clueless this Harvard professor was but for the fact that the local opinion makers no doubt would read it and take it seriously.

I started reading it and the first statement was that “The most important determinant of educational quality is teacher quality.”

I thought at once, that’s not true because economists agree that family has a much larger impact than teachers.

Also, he is making the mistake of assuming that “educational quality=test scores.”

Then the author, Edward Glaeser of Harvard, totally confused me by writing: “In an influential paper published in 2005, economists Steven Rivkin, Eric Hanushek and John Kain examined administrative data in Texas and found that 15 percent of the differences in students’ math scores were explained by variations in teacher quality.”

Wait a minute! Didn’t he just claim that teacher quality is “the most important determinant” of educational quality? If teacher quality explains only 15 percent of the differences in test scores then his first assertion can’t be right (it is not). What happened to the other 85 percent? Can 15 percent be the most important part of 100 percent?

But then he proceeds to make an even bigger error. He writes: “My Harvard colleagues Raj Chetty and John Friedman, together with Jonah Rockoff, link school data with evidence on adult earnings and find that replacing a teacher “in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000.””

To be accurate, as an earlier post showed, the Chetty study purported to show that an effective teacher would increase the lifetime earnings of an entire class–not individual students–by $250,000. For a class of 30 students, that works out to about $8,000 each in lifetime earnings; over a 40-year career, it would be an increment of some $200 per year, or less than $5 a week.

Hey, that’s a grande cappuccino at Starbucks every week! For life!

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations

Poor ALEC! Someone Disagrees with Their Radical Agenda

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2013 //
9

ALEC has operated in the background since 1973, funded by major corporations who want to advance a corporate-friendly agenda into state legislatures. Some 2,000 state legislators belong to ALEC and attend its posh conferences, where they hobnob with corporate lobbyists.

ALEC suffered a PR setback when Trayvon Martin was killed last year in Florida by a man who invoked ALEC’s “stand your ground” law. The bad publicity caused some 40 corporations to abandon ALEC.

It has written draft legislation for vouchers, charters, cyber charters, ending teacher tenure, ending collective bargaining, and a host of other measures to “reform” American education so that public dollars flow to private hands with minimal or no regulation or accountability.

Life is unfair, even for ALEC. Common Cause is trying to strip them of their tax-exempt status, saying that they are lobbyists. ALEC Exposed has posted their radical legislation for all to see.

A legislator in Montana wrote a column critiquing ALEC. Ouch!

They were even wounded by a post on this blog. How touching to know that ALEC follows us.

Categories ALEC, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Rhee: SC Teachers Riding a “Gravy Train”

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2013 //
38

Undeterred by the release of John Merrow’s report of widespread cheating on her watch, Michelle Rhee traveled to South Carolina to attack teachers. She said they were defenders of the status quo. She said they were protecting their self-interest. She said they ride a “gravy train.”

The average teacher’s salary in SC is $46,306.67.

Rhee is paid $50,000 for lecturing and taking questions for an hour.

Who is on a gravy train?

Categories Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

The Man Who Launched the Anti-Testing Movement in New York

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2013 //
9

Who deserves credit for creating the anti-testing movement in New York State?

Governor Andrew Cuomo.

He is so devoted to standardized testing that students in third grade in New York will have “six straight days of tests, 90 minutes a day.”

Cuomo loves standardized testing and high stakes, though not for his own children, of course.

Mark Naison also credits State Commissioner John King, who shares Cuomo’s devotion to tests and punishments and regularly displays a “contemptuous attitude…towards parents, teachers, and principals who question the usefulness of so much testing.”

Friends, we do not have to tolerate what we know is wrong for children.

Opt out.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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