Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
Newer Entries »

Bad News for TFA

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
1

Federal Court reaffirms ruling that alternate route teachers are not “highly qualified” and that it is wrong to concentrate them in districts with high-needs students.
Diane

Home › News & Comment › News › Press Releases & Kits
NINTH CIRCUIT REAFFIRMS RULING THAT TRAINEE TEACHERS NOT INTENDED AS “HIGHLY QUALIFIED” UNDER NCLB
Project: Renee v. Duncan
Date: May 11, 2012
But Judges Dismiss Case Because Congress Temporarily Classified Them So

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

The court proceeded to dismiss the Renee v. Duncan case, however, on the grounds that Congress passed a measure in December 2010 temporarily qualifying the country’s approximately 100,000 teachers-in-training in alternate route programs as “highly qualified” through the 2012-13 school year. The court found that there was no relief presently owed to plaintiffs but held the issue was not moot and that, absent further Congressional action, alternate route trainees must once again be deemed not “highly qualified” after June of next year.

The decision is an acknowledgment that the Department wrongly allowed teachers in training to be concentrated in poor and minority schools across the country for the eight years between the Act’s passage and the temporary measure in 2010. It also makes clear that next year, absent additional Congressional action, these less-than-fully-prepared teachers must again be fairly spread across classrooms and that parents must be notified when their children receive instruction from these teachers.

“We think it was premature for the court to dismiss the case since the controlling law will render the Department’s regulation unlawful again in just a little over a year,” said plaintiffs’ lead counsel John Affeldt of civil rights law firm and advocacy organization Public Advocates Inc.. “Nonetheless, it’s very important to have the courts acknowledge that the Department acted unlawfully in treating these underprepared teachers as if they were fully prepared. We look forward to enforcing this precedent next year and to using it to inform the policy discussions in Congress going forward.”

Whether and how NCLB and its teacher quality provisions will be modified anytime soon is an open question. The Act was due to be revised by Congress in 2007 but the reauthorization process has been stalled. In the meantime, outrage over the December 2010 temporary measure — which was slipped into a midnight budget resolution with no public debate —led to formation of the nation’s largest teacher quality coalition, the Coalition for Teaching Quality (CTQ). Made up of 86 national and local civil rights, grassroots, educator and disability organizations, The CTQ is actively pursuing policies in the reauthorization to help ensure every child has a fully-prepared and effective teacher.

Evidence in the case shows that more than half of California’s interns are teaching in schools with 90-100% students of color compared to only 3% of interns in schools with the lowest population of students of color. Research also shows that graduates from alternative programs such as Teach For America and Troops To Teachers can be as effective as traditional route graduates, but that teachers still in training in those and other programs do not improve student achievement as much as fully prepared teachers who have completed their teacher training.

###

Press Kit
1renee_iii_9th_circuit_release_final_05.11.12.pdf
Releated Press Releases
Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Ruling That Trainee Teachers Not Intended as “Highly Qualified” Under NCLB
Diverse Coalition Draws Line On ESEA Teacher Quality
Dozens of Groups Protest Lowering of Teacher Standards
Parents & Students Blast Senate Deal To Call Trainee Teachers Highly Qualified
Intern Teachers Not “Highly Qualified,” Says 9th Circuit

Categories Alternate Route To Certification, California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

What About All Those “Bad” Teachers?

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2012 //
11

Marc Tucker has an interesting blog today in Education Week

(http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2012/05/teacher_quality_and_teacher_accountability.html) about teachers. He recounts his many encounters with incompetent, drunk-on-the-job teachers. But he uses this beginning to say that we really need to give more thought to helping teachers, encouraging the best teachers, and improving the conditions of teachers so as to attract excellent candidates in the future.

I thought and thought but I couldn’t remember a single teacher in my own experience, or that of my children or grandchildren, who was a drunk-on-the-job teacher. I went to ordinary public schools in Houston, and I had my share of ordinary teachers. I remember someone told me once that if you have even one great teacher in your lifetime, you are blessed. I was doubly blessed, as I had at least two.

But I must say, I never came across any of the horrible men or women who seem to give the reformers sleepless nights.

If they exist, and I suppose they must, then they should be fired in their first year on the job. If not, then their principal is not doing his or her job.

From all I have seen of the research, the multiple-choice standardized tests that are now in common use will not reveal who those “bad” teachers are. Who knows, the “bad” teachers might be extra good at drilling kids on test questions. And we might end up giving bonuses to “bad” teachers.

When I spoke in Missouri a couple of years ago, I met hundreds of teachers after the event, as I usually do. So many told me that their father or mother had been a teacher before them. I realized that these are the teachers we have now, in the towns, villages, and cities of America. And in the future we will have their sons and daughters in the classrooms. We owe them a good start. We owe them respect for the hard work they do for all of us. We owe them good leadership. We owe them the autonomy to make decisions in their classrooms, rather than to be treated as automatons or robots. And we owe it to them and their colleagues to treat teaching as a true profession, not as a temp job meant for young college graduates who will be gone in two or three years.

Diane

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Why L.A. Teachers Are Boycotting the L.A. Times

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2012 //
3

A reader wrote to tell me that public school teachers in Los Angeles are continuing a boycott of the Los Angeles Times. This boycott stems from the Times decisions to create value-added evaluations for thousands of LA teachers and to publish them online in 2010. The accuracy of the evaluations were hotly contested by teachers and disputed by scholars who disagreed with the methodology; the reporters at the Times defended their findings and their methodology.

A month after the Times’ series was published, along with the public release of the names and ratings of teachers, Roberto Riguelas committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. He was a fifth grade teacher whose rating had been published. The family said he was depressed by the ratings; the Times did not accept responsibility. And of course it is impossible to know who was responsible and whether there was some other cause.

Two important comments on the LA Times release of its own value-added ratings. When it happened, Secretary Arne Duncan was very pleased, but very few scholars of testing agreed. John Ewing, a mathematician wrote an excellent article called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he excoriated the misuse of value-added as well as the reporters’ actions in browbeating a National Board Certified teacher, whom they said was a bad teacher. http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500667p.pdf

I wrote about all this in the new last chapter of the paperback edition of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

An interesting footnote: When New York City followed LA’s example and released value-added ratings to the media (the media in NYC, unlike LA, did not create the ratings), Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece saying it was a bad idea; Secretary Duncan came out against the release, and so did Wendy Kopp. In fact, almost everyone came out against the public release of teacher ratings except Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

And the public school teachers of Los Angeles are still boycotting the Los Angeles Times. If Eli Broad should buy it, they will have good reason to continue their boycott.

Diane

Categories California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

The Bizarre Editorial in “The New Republic” against Teacher Tenure

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2012 //
16

Now that I have a blog where I can write what I want, when I want, I have the luxury of revisiting some good and bad ideas. In this post, I will revisit a really pernicious idea that appeared about a month ago in The New Republic. You see, the odd thing about our culture is that it is so attached to the present moment that anything that happened or was written about a month ago tends to disappear in the ether. But this editorial was so outrageous that it still annoys me, and I want to explain why.

In an editorial called “Making the Grade: The Case Against Tenure in Public Schools,” the editors argued that it was a fine idea to remove any job protections from public school teachers because they don’t need them. In making this assertion, the editors of this once-liberal magazine were giving support to the far-right Virginia legislature, which was at that moment not only trying to strip teachers of tenure but to require women to have “a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion.” The editorial of course condemned the latter as harsh, but thought that the far-right effort to remove job protection from public school teachers as a “halfway decent idea.” Indeed, the editorial went on to decry teacher tenure as “the least sane element” in our country’s education system.

The editorial claimed that after a few years, teachers get job protection that “makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers.” The source of this claim is the conservative National Council on Teacher Quality. TNR goes on to say that university professors deserve tenure because they are “our country’s idea factories,” so they must be free to explore unpopular ideas and to be protected from “ideological or intellectual retribution.”

By contrast, the editorial maintains, K-12 teachers need no such protection. They don’t create ideas, they don’t delve into controversial subjects. Their job is so important that they should be fired if they aren’t doing it right (let us assume for the moment that “doing their best work at all times” in Virginia means teaching what the Virginia legislature wants to hear and not teaching what it finds abominable).

The Virginia bill was not perfect, sniffed the editors, because “it allowed teachers to be fired for any reason,” and predictably those darn Democrats, so “beholden to teachers’ union,” were able to block the measure. So, for the moment, until Virginia elects a few more conservative Republicans, Virginia teachers still have tenure. The editorial, sorry to see their position embraced mostly by far-right Republicans like Rick Santorum and Chris Christie, called on President Obama to join them in calling for an end to tenure for public school teachers.

What’s wrong with this argument? First of all, tenure for teachers is not lifetime tenure. It is not analogous to the job protection enjoyed by lifetime professors, which is almost beyond challenge. Teacher tenure means the right to due process, nothing more, nothing less. After a teacher has served satisfactorily for a period of years, depending on state law, an administrator decides whether the teacher should receive the right to due process. If administrators are awarding due process to incompetent teachers, then we have an administrator problem.

Once a teacher has the right to due process, she cannot be fired capriciously. She is entitled to a hearing before an impartial administrator, where facts are presented about her performance. If the arbitrator agrees that she should be fired, she is fired. There is nothing comparable in higher education, where tenure means lifetime job protection.

Is there too little turnover of teachers? Not at all. Some 40% or more of those who enter the teaching profession are gone within the first five years. No other profession has the same degree of turnover. Some were fired; some left. That suggests to me that we don’t do nearly enough to support teachers and help them get better at their job.

But why do teachers need due process rights? Are they merely transmitters of information or do they too deal in ideas? I would argue that teachers must be free to teach and students must be free to learn. In the states trying so hard to eliminate teacher tenure–and in those that long ago succeeded–teachers put their jobs in peril if they teach about evolution, abortion, global warming, or many of the other hot-button issues of the day. If they teach a book that offends community values (and the American Library Association has a list of the 100 most-challenged books of the year, which includes Harry Potter books), they can be fired.

The New Republic should be pleased with the law pleased by the law passed recently in Louisiana. Bobby Jindal’s Legislature stripped tenure from the state’s teachers. It is odd to see a once-liberal magazine echoing the principles of the far right. And disheartening to hear the claim that public school teachers need no academic freedom.

An editorial like this one is symbolic of the collapse of the liberal center.

Diane


Categories Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Take the Next Step, Governor Cuomo

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2012 //
1

I read in the Daily News this morning that Governor Cuomo will oppose the public release of teacher ratings (http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/teachers/gov-andrew-cuomo-approve-making-teacher-evaluations-public-article-1.1067628#ixzz1t98iGb9q). I am glad he realizes that teachers’ evaluation should not be published for all to see, but I wish he had taken the next step, which is to shield such evaluations as part of every teacher’s personnel file. No member of the public has the right to see the job evaluations of police or firefighters or corrections officers, yet their jobs are no less important than those of teachers.

The Governor’s position is that parents have a “right to know” the job evaluations of their child’s teacher. I disagree, and I’ll explain why.

The first reason that I think this is wrong is that the ratings themselves, as we learned when they were released by New York City, are inaccurate. Why should parents have the right to know a rating that is wrong? We saw examples of teachers who were assigned students they never taught; teachers who got ratings for years when they were on maternity leave. Given the city’s insistence that teachers be compared to other teachers and graded on a curve, half of the teachers fell in the bottom half of the curve, despite their qualities as teachers.

In one case, a teacher of gifted children was rated a very poor teacher—one of the worst in the city—because the children who started in her classroom gained only .05 of a point when the computer said they should have gained .07 of a point. This is not judgment, this is a mechanical calculation that is meaningless. Her principals says she is an excellent teacher but the computer knows best.

Then there was the New York Post’s “expose” of the woman they called “the worst teacher in the city.” The rankings showed her at the bottom. But the rankings did not explain that she teaches new immigrant students who cycle in and out of her classroom as they learn English. In other words, the rankings are bunk.

Aside from the question of accuracy—a very large question given the crudeness of the measures—there is an issue of practicality. What happens when the parents in a school learn that Ms. Smith has a ranking in the 12 percentile? Will they all go to the principal and ask to have their children transferred to a teacher with a higher ranking? If they do, will Ms. Jones have 65 children in her class, while Ms. Smith sits in an empty classroom? What will be their rankings next year? What will parents do with the inaccurate information the Governor wants them to have?

I suppose this will sort itself out and in time will come to mean nothing at all. One thing seems certain. This is not a method that will improve the teaching profession or improve education or give teachers the respect they now feel is sorely lacking.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching
Newer Entries »