Dennis Sparks has written a powerful post about the narrative of failure and decline that is now being cynically employed to privatize public education. Many of those now telling this story stand to benefit by taking over schools, firing teachers, and replacing them with computers, or selling the computers and software that replace the teachers. Or selling the tests that prove that no one knows anything and then sells the test prep materials to do better next time, and then sells the test security to make sure no one is cheating on the tests.
Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
A little known group called Educators for Shared Accountability designed a rubric for evaluating Secretaries of Education. It incorporates multiple measures.
By its metric, Richard Riley was our best national leader.
Check out Secretary Duncan’s value added rating.
In response to an earlier post about the escalating cost of teacher evaluation programs, a reader submitted this comment. I wish that our elected officials in Washington and in the state legislatures and departments of education would read it.
This voyage is beginning in Connecticut. Every hour that teachers and administrators focus on the new Teacher Evaluation system, and every dollar they spend on training, materials and systems to keep it working means less for students. Now throw in NEW standards, and new books to match the standards, and more training for teachers, and then a new online test in a year, and the corresponding technology requirements again mean less for students. Lastly, add the fact that in 2014 teachers will set goals and compare them to an entirely different test/standards in 2015. The chance for success is very slim. Again, who loses? That would be every single child in the state of Connecticut who senses the anxiety, stress, confusion, pressure to do well on a test, pressure to deny their developmentally appropriate needs to be children all to feed into a poorly designed and completely non-child centered plan. Who wins? Book publishers, technology companies, professional development trainers, administrators, policy makers….but not children.
A reader who is a veteran teacher suggests incorporating the Mayan calendar into VAM evaluations.
It could be one of the multiple measures that everyone talks about and would very likely improve the overall accuracy of the VAM ratings.
Bruce Baker has written an illuminating and disturbing post about how New York is underfunding its highest-need schools.
Governor Cuomo likes to complain that the state spends far too much on education but sees little improvement. Baker demonstrates that the formula hurts the neediest students. The governor goes on to say that he will take money away from those districts if their teacher evaluations are poor. In effect, he is punishing them for enrolling students with high needs and threatening to make things worse.
Here is a small part of this very disturbing analysis of how New York State cheats and punishes the poorest districts:
“Riding the national, Duncanian wave of new normalcy (which I’ve come to learn is an extreme form of innumeracy) & reformyness, the only possible cause of lagging achievement in New York State is bad teachers –greedy overpaid teachers with fat pensions – and protectionist unions who won’t let us fire them. Clearly, the lagging state of performance in low income and minority districts in New York State has absolutely nothing at all to do with lack of financial resources under the low-balled aid formula that the state has chosen to not even half fund for the past 5 years? Nah… that couldn’t have anything to do with it. Besides, money certainly has nothing to do with providing decent working conditions and pay which might leveraged to recruit and retain teachers.
“And we all know that if New York State’s average per pupil spending is high, or so the Gov proclaims, then spending clearly must be high enough in each and every-one of the state’s high need districts! (right… because averages always represent what everyone has and needs, right? Reformy innumeracy rears its ugly head again!).
“So it absolutely has to be the fact that no teacher in NY has ever been evaluated at all, or fired for being bad even though we know for sure that at least half of them stink. The obvious solution is that they must be evaluated by egregiously flawed metrics – and we must ram those metrics down their throats.
“In fact, the New York legislature and Governor even found it appropriate to hold hostage additional state aid if districts don’t adopt teacher evaluation plans compliant with the state’s own warped demands and ill-conceived policy framework.
“As I understand it, legislation passed this past year actually tied receipt of state general aid to compliance with the state teacher evaluation mandate. That, in order to receive any increase in state general/foundation aid over prior year, a districts would have to file and have accepted their teacher evaluation plan.
“That’s it – we’ll take away their general state aid – their foundation aid – the aid they are supposed to be getting in order to comply with that court order of several years back. The aid they are constitutionally guaranteed under that order. I’m having some trouble accepting the supposed constitutional authority of a state legislature and governor to cut back general aid on this basis – where they’ve already failed to provide most of the aid they themselves identified as constitutionally adequate under court order? But I guess that’s for the New York Court system to decide.
“If nothing else, it is thoroughly obnoxious, arbitrary and capricious and grossly inequitable treatment. I hear the reformers (who understand neither math nor school finance) whine… But why… why is it inequitable to require similarly that poor and rich districts follow state teacher and principal evaluation guidelines. Setting aside the junk nature of that evaluation system and the bogus measures on which it rests (and the fact that the reformers’ fav-fab-charters have largely rightfully ignored the eval mandate), it is inequitable because districts serving higher poverty children stand to lose more money per child as a result of non-compliance. And they’ve already been squeezed.”
Connecticut was the scene this year of a bitter battle over legislation that was intended to diminish teachers’ tenure and to impose a punitive evaluation plan tied to test scores. In efforts to promote this legislation (SB 24), There was a great deal of hostile talk about greedy, lazy teachers, protected by their union and tenure, getting paid just to show up.
Jonathan Pelto puts the events of this past year into perspective here.
Pelto is one of those people who follows the money, always a good place to begin any investigation.
This is how he begins:
It started with Achievement First, Inc., the charter school management company co-founded by Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor.
Then came the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), the Connecticut Coalition for Advocacy Now, (ConnAD), Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst (calling itself the Great New England Public School Alliance, GNEPSA) and Students for Education Reform (SFER, an off-shoot of 50-CAN, which, in turn, grew out of ConnCAN)
When Governor Malloy proposed his “education reform” legislation earlier this year, these groups, funded by millionaire and billionaire hedge fund owners, along with the Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations, engaged in the most costly lobbying, advertising and public relations effort in Connecticut history.
Since then, many of the same organizations funded Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch’s record spending effort to eliminate Bridgeport’s elected board of education and replace it with one appointed by the mayor.
Now, with the next session of the Connecticut General Assembly only a few weeks away, comes that news that a group called “Educators 4 Excellence” is opening operations here, as the corporate reformers seek to continue their efforts to privatize and undermine Connecticut’s public education system.
Educators 4 Excellence is a two year-old organization, funded by the Gates Foundation (among others) and set up by the corporate education reform trifecta of Education Reform Now (ERN), Education Reform Now Advocacy (ERNA) and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).
For the past year and more, the New York State Board of Regents has spent a huge proportion of its time designing and debating a test-based educator evaluation system. The system was developed by AIR (American Institutes for Research) and has been criticized as inaccurate by Bruce Baker, who says that even AIR recognizes how flawed the system is. Yet Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Tisch say “full speed ahead.”
Regent Roger Tilles, who represents Long Island on the state Board of Regents, wrote the following letter and distributed it to many people. He asks the right questions:
Last Thursday, Chancellor Tisch and I had a chance to tour some of the schools most affected by Hurricane Sandy. We met with teachers, principals and superintendents, hearing stories of how teachers, many of whom had lost their own homes, had gone door to door in an effort to determine where their students were living and trying to insure that their one constant, their school, would continue as best it could.
Friday, we were all witnesses to the horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. As the story unfolded, we learned of the selfless devotion of the teachers and administrators, putting themselves in danger while trying to protect their students, their children.
In trying to put these events in a context that we, as policymakers must try to do, I asked myself these questions:
1. What kind of algorithm measures the kind of devotion that we saw and I am sure we would see in crisis after crisis in all of our schools?
2. How do you establish a pre- and post-test for the kind of personal responsibility that these professionals demonstrated?
3. How do we measure the trust that these children and their parents have placed in us as educators “in loco parentis”?
4. What kind of virtual teacher would be able to foster the communication needed to create a trusting atmosphere where learning can take place?
Let us remember these questions as we are asked to develop policies that insure the future of our children and our country.
Roger Tilles, Member
New York State Board of Regents
Wendy Lecker, a parent activist in Stamford, Connecticut, has sent a powerful letter to President Obama.
The link is here.
The letter is here:
Parents Across America grieves with the community of Newtown, Connecticut over the loss of their precious children and educators. The following letter, sent yesterday to President Obama from the founder of Parents Across America-CT, expresses some aspects of what many of our members are feeling at this difficult time.
Hon. President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
As a public school parent of three in Stamford, Connecticut, I wanted to thank you for lending your support to the devastated community of Newtown. I listened intently to your remarks at the memorial service last night, especially to the questions you raised: “Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?”
You indicated that you were reflecting on these questions, alluding to the issue of gun control. I hope also, that these questions caused you also to reconsider your approach to education reform.
As you said last night, “our most important job is to give [children] what they need to become self-reliant and capable and resilient, ready to face the world without fear.” You described in vivid detail how skilled the teachers and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School were at dealing with the immediate unthinkable trauma of the tragedy; how they managed to keep children calm and feeling safe in the face of life-threatening danger. We can predict that the teachers of the surviving children will have to be as equipped to handle the trauma these children will carry with them as they will be to teach them the subjects the children learn. We know that these teachers will have to help these children develop the non-cognitive skills that make all the difference to success in life- those skills we cannot measure on any standardized test.
We also know, as you mentioned, that those poor children in Sandy Hook are not the only ones who deal with trauma on a daily basis. Children today, especially those living in our poorest areas, face the stress that crime and poverty exact on their young lives on a daily basis. And we know from research, like that done at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, that when children experience prolonged stress, it becomes toxic and hinders the development of the learning and reasoning areas of the brain. These researchers maintain that a nurturing environment is key to enabling these areas to grow properly. For many children, school is their safe haven; and science, and the awful events in Newtown show us that it is our paramount duty to maintain school as a secure and loving place.
In order to ensure that schools are a safe haven, where children can develop both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, they need to have preschool, reasonable class size, so children can get needed attention from teachers; enough supplies and books, and rich curriculum, including art, music sports and extra-curriculars, so children can explore and understand the world and have many outlets to express themselves; and enough support services, especially for children at-risk.
Many of our schools across this nation do not have the resources to make our schools a safe haven. As you noted in your recent report, for example, in New York City, the number of classes of 30 and over has tripled in the past four years. School districts across this country have been forced to cut support services, teachers, extra-curricular activities, music, art, even AP classes and core classes. They have to delay repairs until a roof collapses, endangering children.
Unfortunately, your policies toward our public schools are making it nearly impossible to keep public schools a nurturing and safe environment. Your chief strategies are evaluating teachers based on standardized test scores and implementation of the Common Core standardized tests in every grade, with a multitude of interim computerized tests as well as summative computerized tests. None of these preferred strategies of yours have ever been proven to raise achievement. Surely you are aware of the studies proving that rating teachers on standardized tests results in a 50% misclassification rate. The ratings vary by year, class, test and even statistical model used. The CCSS is not supported by any research showing that standards or tests improve learning. In fact, the National Research Council concluded that ten years of NCLB testing has done nothing to improve achievement.
Even more damaging, these strategies force teachers, administrators and children to abandon attention to all-important non-cognitive skill development, and focus primarily, if not only, on test scores. This shift of focus includes a diversion of limited resources away from necessary educational basics. You have moved the focus from the well-being of children to the job status of adults.
A recent report from the Consortium of Policy Research in Education reveals just how harmful this strategy is. The report found that NCLB’s test-driven mandates provided little guidance on how to improve. Consequently, schools tried a hodgepodge of strategies akin to “throwing many darts at a target and hoping one of them hits the bulls-eye.” The only consistent tactic used to raise test scores was test prep. As CPRE acknowledged, test prep is shallow and narrow. The report recommends changing accountability systems so schools concentrate less on standardized tests and more on developing the “host of non-cognitive skills found to be related to later success.”
Other researchers found a disturbing trend caused by testing, standardization and scripting: America’s children are becoming less creative. While other countries strive to build creativity into the curriculum, American schools are increasingly forced to homogenize. Consequently, creativity, which increased steadily until 1990, has declined ever since, with the most serious decline appearing in children from kindergarten to sixth grade.
This body of research demands that we rethink our national obsession to use tests as the goal in education. A low test score should be an alarm, not that a school or teacher is failing, but more likely that there are stressors in a child’s life that warrant intervention.
Your waiver and Race to the Top programs, which push the use of standardized tests to judge all teachers and the implementation of even more standardized tests through the Common Core State Standards, only increase this hollow focus on testing. You hold hostage funding to provide the necessary resources described above to the implementation of these narrow and destructive goals. You encourage states to withhold basic funding as well, as evidenced by Governor Cuomo’s threat to withhold basic state school aid unless districts implement a teacher evaluation based on test scores. You hold up as examples of model schools privately run charters that often exclude our neediest children and often are militaristic-style test-prep factories. Moreover you encourage the proliferation of these schools, which are not answerable to democratically elected school boards, and therefore disenfranchise our neediest citizens.
My oldest child is in 12th grade and my youngest is in 7th. I have seen the increased scripting and narrowing of learning that has occurred in just the five-year gap between them. I have seen the increase in stress in my youngest, who has to suffer through meaningless computerized test after test, while units on poetry and other subjects that would expand his world, are jettisoned (to the point where I have opted him out of many of these tests). I have spoken to so many wonderful teachers frustrated and dejected by their new roles as simple proctors, rather than inspiring educators. I have spoken to school nurses who tell me that at test time, they see a spike in headaches, stomachaches and the need for anti-anxiety medication.
Is this the safe haven to which we aspire for our children? Can this stressful and intellectually-empty school experience really teach our children that they are loved, how to love and how to be resilient?
You said last night that we have to change. While I believe you were hinting at gun control, I respectfully request that you expand this resolve to change and include a rethinking of your education policy. We want all our children to feel safe and loved. We want them to be able to find their own, unique voices. We want to protect them and teach them ways to adapt and protect themselves. Please help us do that by helping schools expand our children’s world. Let us build our schools’ capacity to serve all our children, rather than tearing down the foundations of our public education system.
Sincerely,
Wendy Lecker
This year, Florida rolled out its shiny new teacher evaluation program.
In Alachua County, a teacher of the year was rated unsatisfactory.
Officials realized there many errors, and they revised the scoring.
Now 99.5% of the county’s nearly 1,200 teachers are effective or highly effective.
Only one teacher was found to be ineffective!
All of those hundreds of millions of dollars blown away to find one “unsatisfactory” teacher.
If the principals were doing their jobs, that one teacher would have been identified without the grand apparatus and all those millions might have been invested in the arts, playgrounds, reducing class size, social workers and other things that make a real difference.
The New York City teacher evaluations were released, and there was nearly no media coverage.
Mayor Bloomberg noticed. Ad Peter Goodman points out on his blog,
“The mayor didn’t like the original law, didn’t like the law which protected teachers from the public release of the scores and doesn’t like the requirement that the details of the plan must be negotiated with the collective bargaining agent, the union.
“On his weekly radio program he made it clear – he has no intention of negotiating a plan – he’ll accept the $250 million cut in state funding unless the union succumbs to all his preconditions. Apparently he “forgot” that the current law prohibits the release of the scores.”
Goodman checked with principals and teachers and they seemed genuinely puzzled by the ratings.
They don’t know what they mean or how they are supposed to help.
“UFT President Mulgrew announced that 6% of teachers were rated “ineffective” and 9% rated “highly effectively.” In order to be charged a teacher must be rated “ineffective” on their overall score or on the VAM and “locally negotiated” section for two consecutive years. When we consider the “instability” of the scores – wide year to year variation – the percentage of teachers impacted will be quite low.”
So very few teachers will be found ineffective, and anyone who is discharged on the basis of these flawed metrics is likely to sue.
Think of the hundreds of millions wasted on this junk science and how the money might have been used to improve schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 