Data hounds continue to search for a measuring stick to identify teacher quality.
They can’t believe they are on a fruitless hunt, like trying to find a barometer or yardstick to say which piece of art is best, which doctor is best, which…… as though human judgment means nothing.
Here is Matt Di Carlo summarizing the research on the instability of VAM, meaning that the best teacher this year might be only average next year, or vice versa.
Apparently the mayor and the union in NYC did not reach a deal on teacher evaluation.
Too bad. VAM Is junk science. It should not be legislated or imposed anywhere.
Here is the UFT press release. Count on seeing the mayor blame the union for not accepting a lousy scheme that has no basis in evidence or experience.
STATEMENT BY UFT PRESIDENT MICHAEL MULGREW:
I am sorry to announce that I have notified Governor Cuomo and other state officials that — despite long nights of negotiation and a willingness on the part of teachers to meet the DOE halfway – the intransigence of the Bloomberg administration on key issues has made it impossible to reach agreement on a new teacher evaluation system.
It is particularly painful to make this announcement because last night our negotiators had reached agreement – but Mayor Bloomberg blew the deal up in the early hours today, and despite the involvement of state officials we could not put it back together.
Thousands of parents have gotten a lesson this week, as the Mayor’s “my way or the highway” approach has left thousands of schoolchildren stranded at curbs across the city by the school bus strike. That same stubborn attitude on the Mayor’s part now means that our schools will suffer a loss of millions of dollars in state aid.
Gary Rubinstein, the brilliant math teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, has done it again.
He has dissected the Gates MET study–the one that says test scores are better at determining teacher quality than observations–and he says that the data in the study don’t make the point that has been widely reported.
Gene Glass, Research Professor at the University of Colorado, takes apart the MET study, and like Gary, says that the $50 million was a waste.
I wonder when Gates will abandon his mission to find the perfect metric to measure teacher quality. It isn’t working anywhere; it has perverse incentives; it is inaccurate and unreliable. How long will he stick with this failed idea?
Just think how many musical instruments that $50 million would have bought, how many librarians could have been rehired, how many after-school programs might have been funded.
The Hamburg (NY) teachers union has refused to agree to a deal on teacher evaluations that would give all power to the superintendent; they want an independent person to make the final judgment when a teacher appeals a bad evaluation.
Negotiations broke down when an administrator threatened that teachers would be fired if no agreement was reached.
Remember that the deal is about getting $450,000 for the district to comply with Race to the Top, which requires that teachers be evaluated by the scores of their students. New York has an evaluation plan whose own designers (AIR) have said is not ready for prime time.
By agreeing, the teachers agree to be judged by a methodology that is JUNK SCIENCE.
Be strong, Hamburg Teachers. Minimize the damage to teachers, and you protect your students and your schools against churn and demoralization.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tore apart Rhee’s shoddy report card, recognizing tat it is nothing more than an effort to foist her personal political preferences on the nation’s schools.
Unfortunately the newspaper admires some of her bad ideas–like evaluating teachers by test scores–and is unaware that her IMPACT program in DC hasn’t made a difference. And it accepts her mistaken notion that teachers are the problem, not poverty, not inequitable resource, not overcrowded classes, not bad policies like the ones she is pushing.
The good news is that her act is wearing thin, even with a paper that is inclined to agree with her.
They write: “…issuing arbitrary report cards followed by back-slapping news releases from politicians who have — or will shortly — receive campaign donations is a cynical way to go about standing up for children.”
Jeannie Kaplan is an elected member of the Denver Board of Education. She has been critical of corporate-style reform and of the heavily-funded effort to persuade the public that it is successful. When she heard that Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children told an audience in Tulsa recently that Denver was a national model of success, she decided to review the score card for the district. (Stand for Children boasts of its civil rights credentials but supported a slate of Republican candidates for the state legislature in 2012, as part of its campaign for corporate reform).
Kaplan wrote for this blog:
So Much Reform. So Little Success
Denver, Colorado is a poster child for much of what reformers like to see: standardized testing, teacher accountability, charter schools, choice, co-location, and oh, did I mention testing? Denver Public Schools is trying or has tried almost all of them. Why, even Jonah Edelman, founder of one of the most well-funded, prominent reform organizations, Stand for Children, just today, January 10, 2013, pointed to Denver as a leader in reform because of its “portfolio” of school choice led by its charter schools. So, how is reform really working in Denver?
Let’s start by focusing on achievement, meaning test scores, since that is the focus of all things reform. (This post will have a lot of data since reform and data go hand in hand these days, especially data that can be spun). Denver Public Schools have been rated by the Colorado Department of Education as “Accredited with Priority Improvement Plan,” for the last three years. Out of five grades this is the second to the bottom. To be fair, DPS is inching toward the next category, “Accredited with Improvement plan.” The cut point is 52% of eligible points; Denver is at 51.7%. I am not sure how meaningful this data point is, since the GROWTH points count for 35 points out of 100 and ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, meaning proficiency, counts for only 15.
Colorado now places enormous emphasis on “the growth model.” While no one would contest you need to have growth to get to proficiency, I believe this model masks what is really happening, and so the data I am citing is all about proficiency. To further emphasize how growth can mask proficiency, allow me to quote from one of Denver’s most ardent reformers, Alexander Ooms, who said on in a commentary on EdNewsColorado:
“Denver can celebrate academic growth for years to come without making much progress in the exit-level proficiency of students. And that is simply not the right direction. Growth is means, not end.” http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2012/05/23/38581-commentary-our-unhealthy-obsession-with-growth to read his entire commentary.
I could not have said it better. The data I cite are proficiency numbers, not growth numbers.
In 2005, when reform was in its infancy, Denver Public Schools hired its first non-educator superintendent: Michael Bennet, former businessman/lawyer, former mayoral chief of staff . Mr. Bennet’s childhood friend and fellow businessman, Tom Boasberg, was hired to replace him when Bennett became a Senator. Denver has been experimenting with reform since then. Oh, and BTW, Jonah Edelman grew up as Tom Boasberg’s neighbor in Washingon, D.C.
After 8 years, what academic changes has reform produced?
The following data is from 2005 through 2012, according to Colorado standardized tests. Here is the website for a deeper delve into the data
http://www.schoolview.org/performance.asp
ACHIEVEMENT:
8 yr increase–% incrse per year–% chnge from ’11-’12–% proficient
Reading – — 12———-1.5 ———– 3 –————— 52
Math — — 10———–1.75————–2———————-46
Writing —- 11——— 1.375————2———————41
Science —– 11 —— 1.375 ——— 4 ——————31
Lectura -10 /—–// -1.25 /// -3 /// 46
Spanish Reading
Escruita 4 ////—/ .5 ///// -3 ////// 47
Spanish Writing
We can’t leave achievement without looking at the State of the Union shout-out school, Bruce Randolph. Bruce Randolph Middle School in 3 years of state tracked data shows a gain of 2% in reading to 28%, stayed at 19% in math, increased by 3% in writing to 17%, and increased 7% in science to 17%. It is tied for last in proficiency – 52nd – for all of Denver’s middle schools.
Bruce Randolph High School has declined 10% to 33% in reading, declined 3% in math to 10%, declined 2% in writing to 14% increased 1% to 12% in science. Bruce Randolph is 24th out of 27 high schools in academic achievement.
ACHIEVEMENT GAP increases based on 7 years of CSAPs/TCAPs
Elementary School
Reading 4.17
Writing 5.78
Math 6.46
Middle School
Reading 3.23
Writing 4.71
Math 6.72
High School
Reading 3.01
Writing 5.82
Math 6.30
According to DPS data, the gap between FRL and paid-lunch students has widened by 9% since 2005. In 2005, percent proficient for FRL was 29%, paid was 58%. In 2012 the numbers were 41% for FRL, 79% for paid. The gap has grown to 38%.
ACT RESULTS: (A composite score of 21 is generally accepted as a college readiness benchmark)
From a DPS presentation of September 2012
2005 17
2012. 17.6
GRADUATION for 2011 – we are still waiting state numbers for 2012 but the number of students graduating increased from 2,642 in 2005 to 3,414 in 2012, for a total of 772 more graduates in 8 years…or an average of 96.5 more graduates each year.
Here is how Denver Public Schools compares with the state:
State 73.9%
Denver 56.1%
REMEDIATION (from Fall of 2010)
From the Fall of 2007, when this data was first available to the Fall of 2010 (the latest data available, remediation numbers have increased from 57.1% to 59.7%. The state of Colorado is at 31.8%.
This is the achievement for 8 years of reform.
Need I say more?
Mercedes Schneider prepared a paper explaining value-added modeling, now widely promoted for evaluating teachers. She wrote it for legislators in Louisiana, who have been passing laws mandating VAM without understanding how inaccurate it is. This paper could be used to brief legislators in every state. Also policymakers at your State Education Department, also the U.S. Department of Education.
She introduces the paper as follows:
“Dear Lousiana Senators:
I have written a paper explaining value added modeling (VAM) issues based upon an examination of the Noell and Gleason VAM study presented to the Louisiana legislature in February 2011. I based my paper in part on a detailed Power Point presentation I gave as guest speaker at the Louisiana Association of Parish Textbook Administrators (LAPTA) conference in November 2012. In this current writing, I have removed some of the technical language in order to provide a smoother read.
VAM is highly problematic. I thank you for your time in reading the attached paper. Please contact me if I can offer any additional clarification.
Thank you.
–Mercedes K. Schneider, Ph.D.
Applied Statistics and Research Methods”
A reader sent this notice of a major change in teacher evaluation in Ohio, slipped into legislation at the last minute, with little discussion. The governor is determined to follow the Rhee script and bombard teachers with test-based accountability, despite evidence to the contrary. I have a suggestion for Governor Kasich: How about if you take the students’ end of course exams and publish your test scores?
The bottom line:
If you’re not familiar with legislative language, here’s the summary
HB 555 radically changes the method of calculating evaluations for about 1/3 of Ohio’s teachers. If a teacher’s schedule is comprised only of courses or subjects for which the value-added progress dimension is applicable – then only their value-add score can now be used as part of the 50% of an evaluation based on student growth. Gone is the ability to use multiple measures of student growth – ie Student Learning Objectives or SLO’s.
Teachers and school districts have spent countless months collaborating on the development and implementation of an evaluation system originally detailed in HB153 – only to now find the rules of the game changed at the 11th hour. Furthermore, the change is regressive. We have detailed the growing list of research that demonstrates the very real and serious problems with heavy reliance on value-add, and the need to offset these problems by using multiple measures of student growth.
The Carnegie Corporation doesn’t have as much money to throw into the corporate reform movement as the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Gates Foundation but it is definitely on the same page as the big guys. Here is its report on 2011 spending. The education grants begin on p. 24. And there they are: charter schools, Jeb Bush’s favorite “digital learning,” Common Core, Race to the Top policies, and the usual reformy organizations.
When teachers stand together and refuse to be bullied by the powerful, they deserve our commendation.
The teachers in the Hamburg Central School District in New York voted overwhelmingly to reject a bad deal on teacher evaluation. In the plan at issue, the school superintendent would have been the sole arbiter on any appeals of a teacher’s rating. The teachers held out for an independent arbiter. They voted 217-82 not to accept the deal.
They will be hammered and told that they are costing the district $450,000 in Race to the Top funds, but they know not a penny of that money may be spent to reduce class size or hire social workers or guidance counselors or librarians or anything else that would meet the needs of students.
They also know that New York State has an untried evaluation system designed by AIR, whose researchers warned that value-added methods are not ready for high-stakes uses, such as determining the fate of teachers.
Someday in the future, people will look back on this era of teacher-bashing, this insatiable thirst for metrics, and wonder if our society succumbed to collective madness.
Thank you for your courage, teachers of Central Hamburg.
Stay strong.
Your colleagues support you.
