Merryl Tisch, head of the Néw York State Board of Regents, says full speed ahead with the state educator evaluation plan.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers says she is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Archives for category: Teacher Evaluations
Jeb Bush recognized at his summit meeting that the policies he champions were soundly rebuffed by voters in Indiana (and did he mention Idaho?).
But he assures his rightwing allies that testing, evaluating teachers by student scores, vouchers and charters are the right course, even if educators, parents, and other citizens don’t agree. He apparently compared himself to Lyndon Baines Johnson, fighting to push civil rights legislation when it was unpopular.
Someone should inform him that he is fighting to preserve a failed status quo, not a struggling dissident movement. Someone should tell him that NCLB is federal law and that its ugly step-child Race to the Top bribed the states to double down on the punitive strategies of NCLB.
His lament of “stay the course” is very good news indeed. It is a public admission that the privatizers know they have no popular base.
Their strategies have failed for more than a decade.
When do they admit to themselves that it’s over?
At some point, they will stop pouring money into a losing and unpopular cause.
That’s the day when we can begin to build a genuine movement to improve our schools.
Joanne Barkan has written an excellent summary of how public education fared in the recent elections.
Barkan knows how to follow the money. Her article “Got Dough?” showed the influence of the billionaires on education policy.
She begins her analysis of the 2012 elections with this overview of Barack Obama’s embrace of GOP education dogma:
“Barack Obama’s K-12 “reform” policies have brought misery to public schools across the country: more standardized testing, faulty evaluations for teachers based on student test scores, more public schools shut down rather than improved, more privately managed and for-profit charter schools soaking up tax dollars but providing little improvement, more money wasted on unproven computer-based instruction, and more opportunities for private foundations to steer public policy. Obama’s agenda has also fortified a crazy-quilt political coalition on education that stretches from centrist ed-reform functionaries to conservatives aiming to undermine unions and privatize public schools to right-wingers seeking tax dollars for religious charters. Mitt Romney’s education program was worse in only one significant way: Romney also supported vouchers that allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools, including religious schools.”
Barkan’s analysis shows significant wins for supporters of public education–the upset of uber-reformer Tony Bennett in Indiana, the repeal of the Luna laws in Idaho, and the passage of a tax increase in California–and some significant losses–the passage of charter initiatives in Georgia and Washington State.
The interesting common thread in many of the key elections was the deluge of big money to advance the anti-public education agenda.
Even more interesting is how few people put up the big money. If Barkan were to collate a list of those who contributed $10,000 or more to these campaigns, the number of people on the list would be very small, maybe a few hundred. If the list were restricted to $20,000 or more, it would very likely be fewer than 50 people, maybe less.
This tiny number of moguls is buying education policy in state after state. How many have their own children in the schools they seek to control? Probably none.
The good news is that they don’t win every time. The bad news is that their money is sometimes sufficient to overwhelm democratic control of public education.
New York is very proud of its new Educator Effectiveness Evaluation model, which claims to measure which teachers and principals are effective, relying in part on the increase (or not) of test scores of students.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that the model is biased and inaccurate. It favors classes and schools that start off with higher-performing students.
He concludes with a brief sermon about the importance of ethics:
“I have pointed out that the originators of the SGP approach have stated in numerous technical documents and academic papers that SGPs are intended to be a descriptive tool and are not for making causal assertions (they are not for “attribution of responsibility”) regarding teacher effects on student outcomes. Yet, the authors persist in encouraging states and local districts to do just that. I certainly expect to see them called to the witness stand the first time SGP information is misused to attribute student failure to a teacher.”
“But the case of the NY-AIR technical report is somewhat more disconcerting. Here, we have a technically proficient author working for a highly respected organization – American Institutes for Research – ignoring all of the statistical red flags (after waiving them), and seemingly oblivious to gaping conceptual holes (commonly understood limitations) between the actual statistical analyses presented and the concluding statements made (and language used throughout).”
“The conclusions are WRONG – statistically and conceptually. And the author needs to recognize that being so damn bluntly wrong may be consequential for the livelihoods of thousands of individual teachers and principals! Yes, it is indeed another leap for a local school administrator to use their state approved evaluation framework, coupled with these measures, to actually decide to adversely affect the livelihood and potential career of some wrongly classified teacher or principal – but the author of this report has given them the tool and provided his blessing. And that’s inexcusable.”
Pearson is clearly a major force in American education.
It is the dominant provider of testing and textbooks. It owns the GED. It owns Connections Academy, which runs for-profit virtual schools. It owns a teacher evaluation program being marketed to states and districts. It partners with the agates Foundation to develop online curriculum for the Common Core standards.
This article tries to assemble all the pieces. It builds on an earlier article by Alan Singer in Huffington Post.
Please, someone, time for in-depth journalism or a dissertation that documents how Pearson bought American education and what it means for our children. Standardized minds, indeed!
Students for Education Reform at New York University and Columbia University plan a march to demand that the New York City United Federation of Teachers and the Bloomberg administration reach an agreement on test-based teacher evaluation. These groups are off-shoots of Democrats for Education Reform, the group founded by Wall Street hedge fund managers, the guys with annual incomes in the multiple millions, most of whom went to elite private schools.
The members of SFER pay more in tuition each year than a typical teacher’s annual income. They are students at elite universities. They obviously do not know that testing experts have found the evaluation system called “value-added assessment” to be inaccurate and unstable.
Why are they pushing teachers to accept an invalid measure? Why are these students, many of whom went to private schools that never use standardized tests, so eager to impose standardized tests on public school children and their teachers? Why do they want to see teachers rated and fired based on the results of standardized tests?
They should act like students, read the studies conducted by Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley, Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford, and the joint statement of the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association.
They should not disgrace themselves in public by promoting ideas they do not understand.
Bruce Baker is one of my favorite bloggers. He is smart and irreverent. He is not awed by big names. He actually was a teacher before becoming a researcher. He has the technical skill to crack the statistical analyses that others generate to make spurious claims. Unlike many with the same skill set, he is willing to call a phony a phony. You might say he is our Premier C.D. (Since I have taken a personal pledge not to use vulgarisms on this blog, I will give you a clue to help you figure out what a C.D. is; it is a Cr-p Detector).
In this post, Bruce shows what nonsense The New Teacher Project report “The Irreplaceables” is.
TNTP, you may recall, was founded by either TFA or Michelle Rhee, depending on whom you heard from last. Its purpose was to stock urban districts with shiny new teachers (like TFA) to replace those burned-out veterans with low expectations. Although TNTP is an advocacy group that seeks and wins contracts from urban districts, and although it has a self-interest in certain policies, it nonetheless turns out studies and reports to support its self-interest (fire bad old teachers, hire and retain new teachers). It is not surprising that advocacy groups crank out self-serving “studies,” but it is surprising that the media so often takes them seriously, sort of like taking advice from tobacco companies about the wisdom of smoking.
In his analysis of the latest bit of TNTP puffery, Baker demonstrates how unstable value-added measures are. He reviews the ratings for thousands of NYC teachers and finds that there are very few who remain in the top 20% every single year. In fact, he discovers only 14 in math and 5 in ELA out of thousands of teachers! He writes, “Sure hope they don’t leave.”
Joe Bower asks the right question: “What are you doing to make Obama rethink his education policies?”
Obama will never stand for election again.
He is free to do what he wants.
Congress has given him a free hand.
He knows what is right for his daughters.
He chose a great school with experienced teachers, small classes, a full curriculum, a library, the arts, and NO standardized testing.
The teachers don’t get merit pay for higher student scores; they don’t get evaluated by their students’ scores.
Can we persuade him to see that what he wants for his children is what we want for all children?
What can you do?
Carol Burris demolishes myths about teacher evaluation that were contained in a recent opinion piece in Phi Delta Kappan.
Frankly, it is pretty shocking to see that the editor of this journal for educators believes that standardized testing should have any role in evaluating teachers. We are already seeing a renewed emphasis on teaching to the test and more narrowing of the curriculum as teachers’ careers hinge on student scores.
It’s also shocking to see this editor agree that teachers should have no due process rights. When that happens, we can bid farewell to academic freedom and expect to see many districts where evolution is no longer taught.
The editorial criticized here just parrots the uninformed claims of the corporate reformers. Nothing proposed here will improve education. It’s guaranteed however to demoralize teachers.
Burris once again demonstrates the candor, intelligence and integrity that placed her on the honor roll as a hero of public education.
This post was written by a young teacher in New York City. A law school graduate, she teaches special education in the Bronx in one of he city’s poorest neighborhoods. She requested anonymity, for obvious reasons.
She asks: Is it worse to be called a bitch (by a student) or to be treated like one (by politicians and bureaucrats)?
She is what The New Teacher Project would call an “irreplaceable.” When the New York City Department of Education released the names and ratings of thousands of teachers earlier this year, she was rated 99%. She was not at all happy. She wrote a protest against the whole rating system (which organizations like TNTP love). She knew that this year she might be on top, and next year at the bottom. And she knew that many of her colleagues with low ratings were hardworking teachers who did not deserve to be humiliated. When people wrote to congratulate her, she thanked them and said the ratings meant nothing.
Her new post expresses her outrage towards the system and the politicians who shortchange teachers and students.
She asks, Why do teachers have to buy their own supplies? Why must they beg or borrow the most basic resources?
She understands why a student may call her names, but why does society?
Diane Ravitch's blog 