Archives for category: Teacher Tenure
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Is This Any Way to Improve the Teaching Profession?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
55

This is President Obama’s vision for reshaping the teaching profession. I certainly agree with the idea that entry into teacher education programs should be selective and rigorous, but almost everything else about the program is odious.

The administration proposes a competitive grant program that would do the following [my comments are in brackets]:

The proposed grant program calls for states and districts to undertake a comprehensive set of five reforms including:

  • Reforming colleges of education and making these schools more selective  [good idea, but today the biggest producers of teaching degrees are online “universities” that have no standards at all so it is hard to know how these  diploma mills might be affected, if at all]
  • Creating new career ladders for teachers to become more effective and ensure their earnings are tied more closely to performance [this is merit pay, the same policy that has failed over and over, tying teachers’ earning to the test scores of students and calling it “performance”]
  • Establishing more leadership roles and responsibilities for teachers, improving professional development, and providing autonomy to teachers in exchange for greater responsibility [no problem here, though I bet many teachers would like to have the autonomy to be freed of the high-stakes testing that NCLB and Race to the Top and Obama’s waivers from NCLB require]
  • Creating evaluation systems based on multiple measures rather than just on test scores [what a joke, just like the “multiple measures” now adopted in state after state where test scores are “only” 40-50% of the teacher’s evaluation but outweigh all the other measures]
  • Reshaping tenure to protect good teachers and promote accountability [in other words, no tenure at all, unless your students get higher test scores every year]
This is the same old test-based accountability of NCLB, with a new wrapper. Will the Obama administration ever look at the research? Might they look at the persistent failure of merit pay? Might they look at the National Research Council’s report on the meager results of test-based accountability? Must they continue to shove testing down everyone’s throat for the next four years?
Hey, I know Romney will be worse. But can’t Obama give us something positive to hope for in another term, some possibility of reforming his ruinous Race to the Top?
Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Why Does Ohio Governor Kasich Treat Teachers as Public Enemy #1?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
17

A reader writes in response to the post about New Jersey Governor Christie:

When you solve this mystery please come and help us in Ohio to uncover why Gov. Kascich has made teachers public enemy number one. We may have defeated his infamous House Bill 5, but he and his cronies are managing to slip in most of the laws and regulations in the back door .

Are there any Republican governors who are not at war with the teachers in their state? If so, please let me know. Maybe something happened at the Republican Governors’ conference in 2011.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

What Romney Reform Looks Like

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
8

We don’t have to wonder what Mitt Romney’s education plan would look like if he is elected. It would look like the Jindal legislation passed this spring in Louisiana.

The Louisiana “reforms” represent the purest distillation of the rightwing agenda for education.

First, they create a marketplace of competition, with publicly funded vouchers and many new charter schools under private management.

Second, more than half the children in the state (400,000+) are eligible for vouchers, even though only about 5,000 seats have been offered, some in tiny church schools that don’t actually have the seats or facilities or teachers.

Third, the charter authorities will collect a commission for every student that enrolls in a charter, a windfall for them. And of course, there is a “parent trigger” to encourage the creation of more charters as parents become discouraged by neglected, underfunded public schools.

Fourth, the money for the vouchers and charters will come right out of the minimum funding allocated for the public schools, guaranteeing that the remaining public schools will have less money, more crowded classes, and suffer major budget cuts.

Fifth, the law authorizes public money for online instruction, for online for-profit schools, and for instruction offered by private businesses, universities, tutors, and anyone else who wants to claim a share of the state’s money for public education.

Sixth, teacher evaluation will be tied to student test scores and teachers can be easily fired, assuring that no one will ever dare teach anything controversial or disagree with their principal. Teachers in charter schools, the biggest growth sector, will not need certification.

Rather than go on, I here link to a blog I wrote at Bridging Differences (hosted by Education Week). My blog links to an article written by a Louisiana teacher who happens to have been a professional journalist. You should read what she wrote.

The Jindal plan is sweeping and it seeks to dismantle public education. It is a plan to privatize public education. It is not conservative. Conservatives don’t destroy essential democratic institutions. Conservatives build on tradition, they don’t heedlessly cast them aside. Conservatives are conservative because they take incremental steps, to fix what’s broken, not to sweep away an entire institution. Jindal’s plan is not conservative. It is reactionary.

And it is a template for what Romney promises to do.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Romney, Mitt, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Oklahoma Is Not OK

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
5

I recently printed a blog about the Oklahoma Department of Education’s outrageous decision to publish personal information about some two dozen students who got waivers and did not take the state tests. This seemed like permission to publish their vital statistics on the department’s website, an outrageous and unprofessional action.

Now we hear from a teacher in Oklahoma:

Oklahoma is NOT OK…we’ve had the misfortune to elect a public-school-hating dentist as Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state…she’s in Jeb Bush’s back pocket, so all we have to do is look to Florida to see what’s coming at us. In less than two years she’s begun dismantling our schools.

She recently published the names, personal information, IEP status of students who appealed for graduation (they hadn’t passed the four required tests of seven) and lost…just the names of the students who lost! Their parents had to sign a FERPA waiver in order to appeal at all. We had been told they removed the information, but they only removed students’ names — initials and all disability info is still on the State Department of Ed’s website.

Vouchers, third-grade flunk law, teacher evaluations based on test scores, A-F school grades, weakened due-process for tenured teachers….we’re there. A dust-up at her first State School Board meeting resulted in her being able to hand-pick a Board of ‘yes’ men. We see the ALEC footprints and Mr. Bush’s.

How very sad that we’re all suffering like this, and the ‘reformers’ will ell you they’re doing this for our students. WE are the ones working for our students!

Categories Education Reform, Oklahoma, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Is Ohio the Worst State?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
3

As we scour the nation to identify the state that has reached the zenith in its efforts to destroy our public education system and to discourage its teachers, our eyes must necessarily turn to Ohio. Here a Tea Party Governor, John Kasich, is working in tandem with a Republican-dominated legislature to do their level best to achieve the dubious distinction of creating the most toxic school reforms in the nation. Readers may recall the battle last year when Kasich’s SB 5–which banned collective bargaining–was rejected by 61% of the voters in a referendum. Some observers thought he made a mistake by including police and firefighters along with teachers. That created a united front against SB 5. Of course, that was a minor detail in the ongoing effort to reduce the status of  teachers and their ability to have a say in what happens in the schools of Ohio. Ohio is incredibly welcoming to for-profit charters and for-profit cybercharters.

Here are some readers’ comments:

Ohio is beginning the same idiotic system this coming school year, only 50 percent of our evaluation will be based on student test scores. I hope none of my students have an ear infection, are hungry,had their grammy put in the hospital or their dog run away because my future would be at risk. Does anyone see how absurd this is?

Here in Ohio we have been under attack on a state and local level. We have a union busting governor who tried to take on the firefighters, police and teachers with his infamous SB5 which was put to a vote in 2011 and defeated by a large majority. Recently, the mayor of Cleveland (also in charge of schools because of legislation from a previous mayor), went on the assault of the bargaining rights of teachers and of course it was essential that his proposed legislation be pushed through in Columbus quickly for the sake of the children.
In my own smaller suburban school district, Brecksville-Broadview Heights, 3 recently voted in school board members won the election based on the premise they were going to give the voters a school district they can afford. We have earned an excellent with distinction report card with the state of Ohio 13 years! However, these school board members have been quoted(not publicly of course) that they were going to “break that union”, “that if you teach in Brecksville you should not be able to afford to live there”,”that the proposed 10 percent pay cut would not affect that many families because most of the teachers are women and it is only a second income”. The school board’s proposed contract also would take away our insurance and replace it with a low level plan, decrease our prep/planning time by 50 percent and even has a clause whereby a teacher drinking an adult beverage at a restaurant, imbibes a little too much could be “reported” to the school board and be reprimanded.
Please check out link on our very public web page Brecksville-Broadview Heights schools an click on the link to “Negotiations” and read the half truths.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, On-Line Education, Teacher Tenure, Unions

Update on New Jersey’s Bad Idea

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2012 //
7

Earlier today, I posted a blog about a bill in the New Jersey legislature that would remove seniority and tenure from teachers in that state and require that they be fired after two consecutive negative evaluations.. I just received  the  latest report from a reader in New Jersey.

You will notice two bad things about this “victory”:

1. Teachers and school boards have been pitted against each other. This is wrong. They should be working together.

2. Teachers have been pushed so far into a corner defending due process and seniority that they have acceded to demands to be evaluated by test scores. Interesting that the US will be the only nation to accept this untried, unproven teach-to-the-test approach to teacher evaluation.

I have reports from two teachers in New Jersey. There are differences in what they say, but there is concurrence that the political leadership of the state wants to cut teachersdown by making their jobs less secure. Bear in mind that New Jetsey is consistently among the top three states (the others being Massachusetts and Connecticut) on the federal NAEP. Why teachers need to be humbled in a high-performing state is anyone’s guess (I’d say the same in any state, actually).

So, from teacher #1:

Here’s an update regarding how NJ tenure reform bill S-1455 fared in committee today.

The text of tenure reform bill S-1455 as posted on the legislative web site at this hour still includes a provision requiring principals to revoke teacher tenure after two low performance evaluations.

However, today the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee advanced a substitute bill in which unilateral tenure revocation no longer appears to be a factor.  Instead, an inefficiency charge leveled against a teacher after two low performance ratings would result in binding arbitration.  The New Jersey Education Association supports the substitute version of the bill because, in addition to respecting due process rights, the bill no longer aims to weaken seniority.

The New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA) is not happy to know that experienced, more highly paid teachers will retain the benefit of seniority.  NJSBA governmental relations director Michael Vrancik was quoted as saying, “The war is on.  There’s more to fight.”  http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/06/state_senate_committee_approve.html

And now another take from teacher #2:

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/06/tenure-confusion-in-nj.html

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

New Jersey Has a Bad Idea

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2012 //
11

A reader sends this note, relevant today, but relevant beyond today. It is part of the rightwing assault on the teaching profession. The state gets to define “effective,” then can take the right to due process away from those who don’t meet the benchmarks arbitrarily created by the state, which is eager to fire teachers and make room for teaching temps. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Teachers without the right to due process may be fired for any reason or for no reason. Teachers without the right to due process will never teach anything controversial. Teachers without due process rights will never disagree with their principal. Teachers without due process rights have no academic freedom.

IN NEW JERSEY TODAY (6/18), tenure reform bill S-1455 (the TEACHNJ Act) will be voted on in committee. But not by the Senate Education Committee which discussed this bill at length during its March meeting. No, on Thursday 6/14 this tenure reform bill was “transferred” to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee for a quickie vote to be held Monday 6/18. The main purpose of this tenure reform bill is to dismantle the right to due process by making it not only something a teacher can earn but also something a teacher can lose. If an administrator should give a teacher two summative performance ratings on the lower half of a 4-point scale (“ineffective” or “partially effective”), that teacher will then lose his/her previously earned right to due process and can be fired without the opportunity to appeal the decision to a third party. So in other words, in New Jersey a teacher will be able to EARN the right to due process but it will then be TAKEN AWAY precisely when the teacher might actually need to exercise that right.
Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

How Idiotic Is VAM? Very.

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
21

One of my favorite bloggers is Anthony Cody. Anthony is an experienced teacher of science in California. I always learn by reading his blog “Living in Dialogue.” He recently offered his column to a teacher in Florida to explain how his or her evaluation was affected by “value-added modeling” or VAM.

The idea behind VAM is that teachers should be evaluated based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Arne Duncan made VAM a requirement of the Race to the Top program, despite the lack of any studies or research validating this practice and despite ample warnings that it was invalid and would mislabel teachers as effective or ineffective. Nonetheless, many states pushed through legislation requiring that teachers be evaluated in part by their students’ changing scores. If the scores went up, they were a good teacher; if they did not, they were an ineffective teacher.

This idea was embraced most warmly by very conservative Republican governors like Rick Scott in Florida, where VAM accounts for fifty percent of a teacher’s evaluation. In the column cited here, the Florida teacher explains how it works and how absurd it is. This teacher teaches social studies to students in the 9th and 10th grades. When he/she went to get his evaluation, it turned out that the administrator had no idea how VAM would work, especially since the Florida test does not test social studies for 9th and 10th graders. At first, the teacher was told that his/her evaluation would be based on the whole school’s scores–not just the students in his/her classes–but then he/she convinced the administrator that the evaluation should be based only on those in his/her particular classes. That took a while to figure out. The teacher got the FCAT scores in May, but it took the district or state three months to prepare the teachers’ VAM using those scores.

By the end of the blog, it is obvious that the calculation of VAM is confusing, non-scientific, and inherently unrelated to teacher performance. It will be used to take away teachers’ due process rights and any protection for their freedom of speech. It is a weapon created to harass teachers. As this teacher concludes:

As someone who is not comfortable living life on my knees with duct tape over my mouth (you may have figured this out by now if you have been reading this blog for any length of time), I am not comfortable working on an annual contract. Teachers must be able to voice their concerns about administrative decisions that harm students without fear of losing their jobs. Eliminate continuing contracts and a culture of complacency, sycophants and fear will rule the schools. Senate Bills passed in state after Race to the Top state have included VAMs as a major portion of teacher evaluations all in the name of “Student Success” and “Educational Excellence” when in reality they have been immaculately designed to end the teaching profession as we know it and free state and districts from career teachers with pension aspirations. Some may brush me off as your typical history teacher conspiracy nut, but my daddy didn’t raise no sucker. VAM is a scam.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Florida, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Stand for Children Does Not Stand for Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
11

Stand for Children has moved its campaign for privatization and against experienced teachers  to Massachusetts. Stand’s politically savvy, well-connected, and well-funded leader Jonah Edelman threatened an anti-teacher ballot initiative unless the unions negotiated away their seniority and tenure.

Governor Deval Patrick agreed with Stand for Children that teacher evaluation (based to some extent on standardized test scores of students, which is a wholly unproven measure of teacher quality) will outweigh experience.

Stand for Children believes that experience is unnecessary in teaching. Like Michelle Rhee’s Students First, Stand for Children holds that inexperienced teachers are just as good if not better than experienced teachers. Stand threatened a ballot initiative, backed by millions of dollars in spending, to destroy teachers’ seniority and tenure. The Massachusetts Teachers Association could not match the spending of the hedge fund managers who want to destroy teacher unionism and it capitulated.

Let’s be clear: Stand for Children and its kind want to put an end not only to teachers’  unions but to the teaching profession. They want teachers to be evaluated by test scores, despite the overwhelming evidence that doing so will promote teaching to standardized tests and narrowing the curriculum, as well as cheating and gaming the system.

An underfunded group called Citizens for Public Schools tried to rally support for teachers and opposition to Edelman’s scheme. Former members of Stand for Children signed a petition against its campaign.

Since Massachusetts leads the nation on the no-stakes federal tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it seems difficult to understand how Stand for Children was able to mount a campaign against the state’s teachers. But the national atmosphere is so poisonous towards teachers, that Stand must have latched onto the sentiment generated by the odious movie “Waiting for ‘Superman'” and the public relations machine of those out to belittle teachers while pretending to care about teacher quality.

This Massachusetts teacher blogger will give  you some idea of what teachers think about Stand’s campaign.

At some point in the hopefully not distant future, the “reformers” who are working so hard to remove all job protections from teachers will be held accountable for their actions. When that day arrives, they will be ashamed of what they have done to rob our children and our schools of the experienced teachers they need.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Stand for Children, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

To Fire or Not? They Report; You Decide

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2012 //
11

A very interesting, long article in the Washington Post demonstrates how hard it is to determine whether a teacher “deserves” to be fired and raises important questions about teacher tenure.

I often point out that tenure in K-12 education is different from tenure in higher education. In higher education, a tenured professor has a job for life, unless he or she commits a felony or does something else that is truly heinous. By contrast, a teacher in K-12 with tenure has a guarantee of due process if the principal wants to fire him or her.

Critics say that due process–the right to see the evidence, to confront one’s accusers, and to have the case heard by an impartial hearing officer–is too burdensome and costly. It takes too long, and principals will leave a “bad” teacher in place rather than go through the trouble of gathering evidence to persuade an impartial arbitrator.

From the teacher’s perspective, the right to due process is precious. It means that they will be protected against a vindictive principal and will be protected against pedagogical fashion or community pressure to conform. With the recent proliferation of newly minted principals who have little or no teaching experience, teachers may feel an even greater need for protection. Experienced teachers, in particular, may resent the demands of the novice principal, who not only wants higher test scores, but looks at the veteran teacher as a drain on the school’s shrinking budget, as someone who might be replaced by two young teachers.

Think of the convergence of these three trends: One, lots of brand-new principals who are under pressure to raise scores to prove their worth; two, shrinking budgets; three, the spread of a concept called “fair student funding,” or “weighted student funding,” where each school’s budget is tied to the students in the school and the principal is given “autonomy” to make the most of a shrinking budget for the school. In these circumstances, the veteran teacher is viewed as too expensive rather than as a valued professional.

I cannot say whether this context shaped the trial of Fairfax teacher Violet Nichols. What does seem clear is that Nichols was out of step with the pedagogical ideas of her principal. The principal said her methods were obsolete. Nichols responded with evidence to the contrary. Was her dismissal in any way related to her role in the local teachers’ association? Virginia is hardly a state that coddles teachers’ unions or that gives strong tenure guarantees to teachers.

Does the trial prove that “bad” teachers have too much protection and can never be fired (the test scores of Nichols’ students were similar to those of other teachers in her building)? Does it prove that principals should have the power to fire teachers for any reason or no reason at all? Or does it show that teachers need a modicum of insulation from the pedagogical winds of the day?

What do you think?

Diane

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching
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