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Ballard High School Teachers Say NO in Solidarity with Garfield Teachers

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2013 //
13

The revolt against the inappropriate use of standardized testing is spreading in Seattle.

Teachers at Ballard High School in Seattle voted not to administer the MAP test and to support their colleagues at Garfield High School.

“Whereas

The MAP test is a resource expensive and cash expensive program in a district with very finite financial resources,

The MAP test is not used in practice to inform student instruction,

The MAP test is not connected to our curricula,

The MAP test has been re-purposed by district administration to form part of a teacher’s evaluation, which is contrary to the purposes it was designed for, as stated by its purveyor, making it part of junk science,

The MAP test has also been re-purposed for student placement in courses and programs, for which it was not designed,

The MAP test was purchased under corrupt crony-ist circumstances (Our former superintendent, while employed by Seattle Public Schools (SPS) sat on the corporation board of NWEA, the purveyor of the MAP test. This was undisclosed to her employer. The initial MAP test was purchased in a no-bid, non-competitive process.)

The MAP test was and remains unwanted and unneeded and unsolicited by SPS professional classroom educators, those who work directly with students,

The MAP test is not taken seriously by students, (They don’t need the results for graduation, for applications, for course credit, or any other purpose, so they routinely blow it off.)

The MAP test’s reported testing errors are greater than students’ expected growth,

The technology administration of the MAP test has serious flaws district wide which waste students’ time,

Therefore

We, the undersigned educators from Ballard High School do hereby support statements and actions of our colleagues at Garfield High School surrounding the MAP test. Specifically, the MAP test program throughout Seattle Public Schools ought to be shut down immediately. It has been and continues to be an embarrassing mistake. Continuing it even another day, let alone another month or year or decade, will not turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Ballard High School teachers

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Washington State

This Superintendent Is Doing It Right

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2013 //
18

Last week, Wendy Lecker wrote an article in the Stamford Advocate saying that she was in search of one superintendent in the state of Connecticut who was doing the right thing for kids, teachers, and the community. Wendy had read here about the courage of Joshua Starr of Montgomery County, Maryland, and Heath Morrison of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, two superintendents who bravely have spoken the truth about the corrosive effects of the misuse of testing.

Was there one such stand-up superintendent in Connecticut?

I posted her plea and that very same day, I was able to identify Tom Scarice, superintendent of Madison, Connecticut, as the one. He brought together his community, parents, and teachers, examined research, and reached agreement on the best path forward for Madison.

I named Superintendent Scarice to the honor roll as a champion of public education.

Wendy Lecker investigated, and she agreed: Tom is the real deal!

She writes here about his leadership, which involved collaboration, not dictatorship or coercion:

“The district sought volunteer educators and administrators to develop a teacher evaluation plan that adhered to the core principles of the recent state legislation. But one component of the state’s proposed teacher evaluation plan is Value Added Measurement (VAM), a highly controversial system that uses student test scores in part to rate teachers’ effectiveness. The 45-member advisory council studied three areas: the efficacy of VAM, the impact of VAM on teachers and students and the impact of VAM on the quality of education. The overarching guiding principle was the goal of preparing Madison’s students to succeed in our complex world.

“After reviewing extensive research, the council concluded that VAM is unstable, unreliable and of questionable validity. To the council, “[s]tudent learning is too central to our beliefs to rely on unreliable data when making decisions.” This conclusion is consistent with the vast body of research on VAM. Just last month, the American Institute of Research joined the growing chorus of educational experts in advising against using VAM in any high-stakes situation precisely because of its many flaws.

“The council found that VAM has a destructive effect on both students and teachers. The narrow focus on standardized test scores heightens anxiety and leads to children who are less creative, expressive and excited to learn. VAM also negatively impacts two essential components of effective instruction: teacher collaboration, and the ability to meet individual students’ needs. Furthermore, the council determined from the research that VAM’s focus on test scores is detrimental to a quality education because it narrows the curriculum and marginalizes the development of the skills Madison decided were vital to successful life outcomes, such as critical thinking, problem solving and ethical decision-making.”

Read more: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Wendy-Lecker-A-town-doing-it-the-right-way-4187399.php#ixzz2HiaxSJz7

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Connecticut, Honor Roll, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Teachers of Garfield High School in Seattle Say No!

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2013 //
83

By unanimous vote, the entire faculty at Garfield High School in Seattle voted not to administer the MAP test of reading and mathematics.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the faculty of an entire school refused to give mandated tests.

The action of the Garfield High School faculty could have national ramifications because it shows other teachers that there is strength in unity and that they do not have to endure unethical demands with passivity and resignation.

For their courage, their integrity, and their intelligence, I add the faculty of Garfield High School to the honor roll as champions of public education.

The teachers agreed that the tests are a waste of time and money. Students don’t take them seriously because they don’t count toward their grades. But teachers will be evaluated based on the results of these tests that students don’t take seriously. Even the organization that created the tests say they should not be used for teacher evaluation, but the district requires them anyway.

I hope that the example set by Garfield High School will resonate in school districts across the United States and around the world. High-stakes testing is bad for students, bad for teachers, and bad for education.

This is the statement by the teachers of Garfield High School:

SEATTLE – In perhaps the first instance anywhere in the nation, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School will announce this afternoon their refusal to administer a standardized test that students in other high schools across the district are scheduled to take in the first part of January.  Known as the MAP test, it purports to evaluate student progress and skill in reading and math. The teachers contend that it wastes time, money, and precious school resources.

            “Our teachers have come together and agree that the MAP test is not good for our students, nor is it an appropriate or useful tool in measuring progress,” says Kris McBride, who serves as Academic Dean and Testing Coordinator at Garfield.  “Additionally, students don’t take it seriously.  It produces specious results, and wreaks havoc on limited school resources during the weeks and weeks the test is administered.”

            McBride explained that the MAP test, which stands for Measure of Academic Progress, is administered two to three times each year to 9th grade students as well as those receiving extra support services.  The students are told the test will have no impact on their grades or class standing, and, because of this, students tend to give it little thought to the test and hurry through it.  In addition, there seems to be little overlap between what teachers are expected to teach (state and district standards) and what is measured on the test. 

            Despite this flaw, McBride states, results of the MAP tests will be used by district officials to help evaluate the effectiveness of instructors who give the test. “Our teachers feel strongly that this type of evaluative tool is unfair based on the abundance of problems with the exam, the content, and the statistical insignificance of the students’ scores,” she says.

            Refusing to administer a district-mandated test is not a decision the school’s teachers made casually, or without serious internal discussion.

            “Those of us who give this test have talked about it for several years,” explained Mallory Clarke, Garfield’s Reading Specialist. “When we heard that district representatives themselves reported that the margin of error for this test is greater than an individual student’s expected score increase, we were appalled!” 

            After the affected faculty decided unanimously to make a stand against the MAP test, they told the rest of Garfield’s faculty of their decision. In a December 19 vote, the rest of the school’s teachers voted overwhelmingly to support their colleagues’ refusal to administer the test. Not a single teacher voted against the action. Four abstained from voting. the rest voted to support it.

            “We really think our teachers are making the right decision,” said student body president Obadiah Stephens-Terry.“I know when I took the test, it didn’t seem relevant to what we were studying in class– and we have great classes here at Garfield. I know students who just go through the motions when taking the test, did it as quickly as possible so that they could do something more useful with their time.”  History teacher Jesse Hagopian said, “What frustrates me about the MAP test is that the computer labs are monopolized for weeks by the MAP test, making research projects very difficult to assign.” Hagopian added “This especially hurts students who don’t have a computer at home.”

            The $4 million MAP test was purchased by Seattle Public Schools during the tenure of former Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, who left her position in 2011 and sadly passed away in 2012. Goodloe-Johnson sat on the board of directors of Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), the company that markets the MAP test. At the time, some pointed out this potential conflict of interest for Goodloe-Johnson, but the district went ahead with the purchase nonetheless.  NWEA itself warns that districts should not use the map test to evaluate teachers.  We teachers of Garfield High School believe that the NWEA is right—this test should not be used to evaluate teachers.  For secondary teachers the test cannot provide useful information about students’ skills and progress.  Still worse, this test should not rob students of precious class time away from instruction. “We believe the negative aspects of the MAP test so outweigh the positive ones that we are willing to take this step,” said Language Arts teacher Adam Gish.

#     #     #

Categories Education Reform, Honor Roll, Support for public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Expert: Why Cheating in DC Was Never Investigated

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2013 //
29

Mary Levy is a veteran civil rights lawyer and budget analyst in Washington, D.C., who has reviewed developments in the D.C. Public schools for more than 30 years. She wrote the following description of the D.C. cheating scandal, which was revealed by USA Today in March 2011 but never subject to a full and independent investigation:

Re: the U.S. Department of Education Inspector General’s “investigation” of cheating in the DC Public Schools on D.C. standardized tests

It is always interesting to watch power and ideology corrupting people’s judgment, in this case the belief that Michelle Rhee’s approach to education reform must be shown to be effective. There have been no meaningful investigations of the evidence of widespread cheating on DC’s state tests between 2008 and 2010. The ED IG’s statement implies that he relied on the DC IG, who only investigated one school. How could either know about the 102 other DCPS schools flagged for possible cheating? And why is the Department of Education so casual about test integrity? Why did Arne Duncan not ask his IG for a broader investigation?

I’ve studied DCPS data, policies, budget, and history for over 30 years. People with personal knowledge of what occurred during the testing aren’t talking to me any more than to anyone else, but my own data analysis supports the need for a real investigation. Among the top 10 DCPS erasure schools (over one-third of their classrooms flagged over a three year period), scores plummeted at all but one by 2010. At four-fifths of the top 20 erasure schools, scores fell by ten percentage points or more. These are schools with one quarter or more of their classrooms flagged. The bottom dropped out by chance at all those schools?

Contrary to Michelle Rhee’s assertion of “dozens and dozens of schools [with] “very steady gains” or even “some dramatic gains that were maintained,” DC CAS test scores rose significantly after 2008 at only a small number of schools (I counted). Ironically, several of those have been closed or are on the current closing list. Security was only tightened gradually, and is still vulnerable to exploitation, so we’re not at the end of the possibilities even now.

Over the months of preparing the Frontline documentary broadcast on Tuesday, January 7, John Merrow tried very hard to break through on investigating the evidence of cheating. He asked me and my colleagues for contacts and data often, and he actively and persistently sought out witnesses. But witnesses aren’t talking. They’re afraid. People in authority tend to dislike and distrust not only whistleblowers, but critics, even the friendly ones. Principals in DCPS serve at will, and the IMPACT evaluation system makes it easy to terminate teachers who displease their superiors. And after all, since cheating is so unimportant to the Department of Education and the leadership in DC, those who could bear witness can expect no result but retaliation.

Mary Levy
January 9, 2013

Categories Philadelphia, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Gary Rubinstein: Gates’ MET Study Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2013 //
30

Gary Rubinstein took a close look at the new Gates’ study of teacher evaluation and says it is wrong. The media takeaway is tat in evaluating teachers, test scores are more reliable than observations. But Gary, who teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, says it isn’t so.

Bill Gates has put $50 million into finding the ideal way to evaluate teachers.

Gary concludes: “It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. He hired some pretty famous economists, people who certainly know enough about math to know that their conclusions are invalid.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

What Did Rhee’s Report Card Actually Measure?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2013 //
11

G.F. Brandenburg, retired math teacher, has done a close analysis of Michelle Rhee’s. state report card.

He calls it a “Brave New World-type Orwellian fantasy,” in which words mean the opposite of what they say.

Her ranking does not measure whether states have high test scores or high graduation rates. it does not measure whether states have laws and policies that have encouraged better teaching and successful schools. It des not measure anything that matters.

Read the full story on his blog to see how and why Rhee gave out her abysmal grades, in which almost every state gets a D or an F except those run by her rightwing buddies.

Here is a sample from Brandenburg, stating first what Rhee claims she is measuring, followed by Brandenburg’s short explanation of what she really measured:

■ Reduce legal barriers to entry into teaching profession and permit alternate certification programs to provisionally place teachers in the classroom (Brandenburg: In other words, make a 5-week summer program like TFA, or no program at all, the legal equivalent to a traditional one- or two-year professional teaching license system.)

■ Pay structures based on effectiveness and performance pay (Brandenburg: In other words, make teachers’ pay dependent on the score from an arcane mathematical algorithm that no one understands (VAM) and which jumps around widely and wildly from year to year for the same teacher; and which correlates with nothing else. BTW, none of the many studies conducted on performance pay has yet shown that ‘performance pay’ for teachers does anything to help students. What’s more, many teachers in jurisdictions that have bonuses for teachers who score high on these formulas refuse to accept the bonuses, because of the ‘poison pills’ attached to the bonuses.)

■ Parental notification and parental consent for student placement with ineffective teachers (Brandenburg: in other words, public shaming of teachers who happen to end up on the short end of the VAM yardstick; this is part of Rhee’s Orwellian use of the phrase “Elevate the Teaching Profession”)

■ Remove arbitrary caps on public charter establishment and establish alternative authorizing and fast-track process for high-performing public charters (Brandenburg: We now know that charter schools are frankly aimed at destroying public education, not improving it. We also know that in 5/6 of the cases, charter schools do the same as OR WORSE THAN their peer public schools. We also know that the few charter schools that have good student achievement records do so by winnowing out all of the problem students — who are sent back to the public schools — and by having longer days, longer years, and summer programs, all of which cost more money.)

■ Provide comparable funding and prohibit authorizers from charging fees from public charter schools for oversight and administration (Brandenburg: In other words, make sure that charters get MORE money per pupil than the regular schools, since just about all charter schools receive large private donations. My administrator friends in DCPS and elsewhere tell me that private donors essentially refuse to give anything to regular public schools these days, no matter how worthy the program.)

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations

AIR: VAM Not Ready for Prime Time

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2013 //
23

We have been saying it for months, no, since 2009, when Race to the Top started.

Value-added assessment or value-added-modeling is not ready for prime time.

Now we have a technical paper by American Institutes for Research that says it:

VAM is not ready for prime time.

Here is the takeaway:

“We cannot at this time encourage anyone to

use VAM in a high stakes endeavor. If one

has to use VAM, then we suggest a two-step

process to initially use statistical models to

identify outliers (e.g., low-performing

teachers) and then to verify these results

with additional data. Using independent

information that can confirm or disconfirm

is helpful in many contexts. The value of

this use of evaluative change results could be

explored in further research efforts….”

Is anyone at the U.S. Department of Education listening?

Hello?

Categories Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Mayor Bloomberg Compares NYC Teachers Union to NRA

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
34

Mayor Bloomberg is frustrated that the New York City United Federation of Teachers does not agree with his plan to evaluate them by test scores. He has been berating the union, as have the city’s tabloids, for weeks.

But now he hit a new low.

He compared the teachers’ union to the National Rifle Association.

Coming only weeks after the Newtown massacre, this is especially gross.

This is reminiscent of the time many years ago when U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige referred to the NEA as “a terrorist organization.”

Paige had the good sense to apologize. So should Bloomberg.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Teacher Evaluations, Unions

The VAM Mess in Pennsylvania

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2013 //
18

Value-added assessment is all the rage since te introduction of Race to the Top.

Before then, everyone understood that teachers, families, school resources and the student herself (or himself) were the determining factors in student test scores.

But RTTT set off a movement to use scores to evaluate teachers, hoping to identify laggards and fire them.

The only problem: VAM is junk science. The low ratings tend to go to teachers of ELL, special education, and troubled kids. The scores, it turns out, measure WHO you teach, not teacher quality.

VAM isn’t working anywhere, yet our nation will squander hundreds of millions, maybe billions, trying to make it work.

Now we hear from a great blogger in Pennsylvania: VAM is sure to be a mess there, as everywhere else.

Junk science is junk science.

Categories Pennsylvania, Teacher Evaluations

School Board Showdown in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2013 //
10

Steve Zimmer is an alumnus of Teach for America.

He is not your typical TFA-er.

He was elected to the Los Angeles Unified school board in 2009, after seventeen years as a public school teacher.

He will be opposed by Kate Anderson, who has endorsements and major funding from the powerful charter school lobby.

Zimmer, because of his experience as a teacher, has become an outspoken, articulate supporter of students, teachers, and public education.

He has tried to slow down the value-added assessment juggernaut; he wants multiple measures.

The charter folks want to get Zimmer off the board because a few months ago, he offered a resolution calling for a higher level of accountability for charters, better auditing and reporting, more collaboration with public schools, and a moratorium on the opening of new charter schools until the new accountability measures are created.

Los Angeles is a major target for the charter lobby. It now has more than 100,000 children in charters, about 15% of the children in the district, more children than in any other district in the nation.

In light of the rapid growth of charters and their uneven performance, Zimmer said it was time to step back, establish reasonable oversight, and frame a reasonable policy for oversight and future growth.

Superintendent John Deasey said Zimmer’s resolution was “unnecessary.”

Two thousand charter parents turned out to hoot and ridicule Zimmer’s resolution.

And now the charter lobby is poised to knock him out.

Kate Anderson is a lawyer who has worked for Democratic officials. She is a mother of young children who attend public schools. She has pledged to support more charters.

Davis Guggenheim, director of “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” is holding a fund-raiser for Kate Anderson at the Sony Pictures commissary.

Steve Zimmer has the wisdom that comes from his 17 years in the classroom. He has the audacity to post on his website an article that showed that Los Angeles’ public schools outperformed the charter schools.

If the charter lobby manages to defeat him, it will be a very bad omen for the future of public education in Los Angeles.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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