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Stack Ranking in Memphis

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
57

I wrote a blog about the culture at Microsoft, where employees are evaluated by “stack ranking,” meaning that everyone in every unit is assigned a weighting–best, average, worse. I printed comments by people who had been subject to this system, who said that it stifled creativity and collaboration. I discovered that many major corporations have a similar rating system. At Enron it was called “rank and yank.” Jack Welch of GE championed the idea of finding and firing the laggards.

Something similar is happening now in education. Many of the new state evaluation systems, designed in response to Race to the Top (a font of untested ideas), will evaluate teachers and principals on a bell curve. The bell curve decrees that a certain percentage are at the bottom, no matter how effective they are. Economist Eric Hanushek has proposed that 5-10% of teachers (based on the test scores of their students) be fired and replaced by “average” teachers; he says this will produce incredible results: we will rise to the top of the international rankings and the economy will expand by trillions, just by firing those teachers.

A reader in Memphis noticed that the plan of the Transition Planning Committee (led by Stand for Children and advised by the Boston Consulting Group) proposes stack ranking of teachers:

From p. 56 of the Transition Planning Commission’s recommendations regarding the Memphis merger:

“Measures of success
– A meaningful distribution of teacher evaluation scores—approximately 20% evaluated 1s and 2s and less than 20% evaluated 5s
– The teacher evaluation is used as the basis for professional development, decisions about who teaches, and compensation.”

Even if the distribution recommendation is simply hypothetical, it’s pathetic.

There is not a school system in America with 1/5 of its workforce comprised of bad teachers. If there were, that district’s HR department would deserve getting canned first.

But let’s assume 20% is actually a solid estimate. The district fires those teachers. Then what? Fire good teachers you’ve scored “ineffective” in the hopes of hiring even better teachers? Great idea. What teacher would want to work in that sort of system?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

More about Stand for Children in Memphis

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
10

It turns out that Stand for Children is not only the guiding organization behind the plan to transfer large numbers of public school students to charter schools, along with $212 million of taxpayers dollars, in Memphis/Shelby County, but it was previously active in promoting the pro-privatization propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman'” to parents and the public in Memphis.

As you will see in the link below, John Legend, the singer who is on the board of the Wall Street hedge fund manager group Democrats for Education Reform, funded the showing of this mockumentary to low-income communities. The purpose of the film was to show the failure of public education and the superiority of private management.

A reader sent this link. It shows how Stand on Children set the stage for privatization on a large scale in Memphis.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Stand for Children, Tennessee

Is Tennessee the Worst State?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
8

A reader in Tennessee nominates his state as the worst in the nation in terms of implementing the usual stale ideas to “reform” the schools.

How could it not be in contention to win the race to the bottom when it was one of the first states (Delaware was the other) to win the Race to the Top? That guaranteed that Tennessee would adopt every untested and harmful policy idea that Arne Duncan’s team could think up.

Conservative Republicans control the state, and they like the Obama agenda. Go figure. Could it be because Obama’s agenda is a more muscular version of NCLB? Republicans love the tough accountability, they like cracking the whip on the teachers, and they love privatization of public services.

Where other people (like parents and teachers) look at schools and see children, the reformers in Tennessee (and elsewhere) look at schools and see entrepreneurial prospects and a steady stream of government revenue.

So naturally the state is committed to evaluating teachers based on student test scores, and those who don’t teach tested subjects get evaluated by some other teachers’ work. Makes sense, no? And surely there will be lots of new charters in Tennessee to “save” the children.

Then, to add to that state’s woes, the new state commissioner of education, Kevin Huffman, is not only Michelle Rhee’s -ex, but was formerly the PR director for TFA. That guarantees a very big foot in the door for the ill-trained novices who only Teach For Awhile. Huffman hired a charter school leader from Houston to take over the state’s lowest performing schools. Tennessee will soon be charter school paradise, or at least paradise for TFA.

And then there is all that Gates money in Tennessee, now deployed to figure out how to have an effective teacher in every single classroom in the state. Watch Tennessee overtake Massachusetts on NAEP rankings. Wait a minute, isn’t Tennessee the birthplace of value-added assessment under William Sanders, the agricultural statistician? Didn’t Tennessee start measuring value-added by teachers in the 1980s? Why aren’t they already number one?

Yes, Tennessee is a contender.

Last year, TN and our TfA commissioner of ed and Michelle Rhee’s ex, Kevin Huffman, rushed into use a similar teacher evaluation system purchased from the Milken Foundation (the same Michael Milken of securities fraud fame) that measures teacher competence on a 1 – 5 Likert scale, aptly named TEAM. 1-5 is the same crude metric I used to rate my hotel stay and my car dealership. Sensitive to the effects of nuanced teaching practices, it’s not. If scored according to the TEAM trainer, on 15% of all teachers will gain or keep tenure protection. 85% will be subject to firing.
Tied into the teacher’s average TEAM score is 40% VAM scores from the TCAP state assessments in reading in math. Teachers who do not teach reading and math were forced to use the VAMs of the school TCAP average or arbitrarily assigned either the school reading or math average score. Recommendations by an “independent” committee to improve the system suggested adding more tests to include all subject areas.
With the republicans well in control of all branches of government in TN, teachers here have lost their collective voices. In 2010, Ramsey with the help of ALEC ended tenure, collective bargaining, auto deductions for TEA dues, and kicked all teacher reps off of the state retirement board. Three of the largest school systems in the state have Broad trained superintendents. The day after Walker in WI survived his recall, TN’s Lt Gov Ron Ramsey announced he’d propose vouchers in the 2013 legislative session.
For profit, online teacher education is proliferating. Requirements for certification to teach are being dumbed down at the same time requirements to raise achievement are increased to levels nearly impossible. Further, state university teacher education programs are being evaluated according to their graduate’s VAM scores. Huffman posted the VAM scores on the TN website and guess which teacher ed program scored the best? Teach for America! The results were so skewed and improbable that several schools requested the raw data, only to be rebuffed, with great umbrage, by the state.
TN politicians in collusion with wealthy privatizers in both the Democratic and Republican parties are using the full force of state power to crush involvement of teachers and parents in decisions about our children’s schools. God help us all in TN.
Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Unneeded Charters

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2012 //
2

Stories like this one from Nashville (http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120509/NEWS04/305090116), or this one from Los Altos, California (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-15/taxpayers-billed-for-millionaires-kids-at-charter-school.html) remind me how far the charter idea has strayed from its origins.

Parents in Nashville are fighting the Great Hearts charter because they know it is targeting children who are affluent and white; they know that it will cause their own public schools to become more segregated; they know it will drain needed resources from their public school to serve the most advantaged students.

The Bullis Charter is a school for the children of the rich and affluent in a high-end community. It is, in all but name, a private school funded by the taxpayers.

The original vision of charters was that they would serve the neediest, the unmotivated, the dropouts, the kids who had failed in public school. They would find innovative ways to reach those who were hardest to educate and would share what they learned with their colleagues in the public schools.

Now, as we see, there are charters who avoid the very students that charters were created to serve.
There is a reason that corporate reformers prefer charter authorizers who are insulated from the democratic process. By that, I mean that corporate reformers want authorizers who can ignore community protest, override the views of parents, and reject any grassroots opposition to their decisions. The reformers want to plant charters where they are not wanted or needed. And that’s what is happening in a growing number of communities today.

Diane

Categories California, Charter Schools, Tennessee

Is Memphis Next to Go?

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
2

I just got a great comment on an earlier post this morning. It is a great comment because it proves to me that the corporate reform movement is on the move and must be stopped before it wipes out public education. Here we see the nefarious hand of Boston Consulting, already at work dismantling  public education in Philadelphia, now bringing their corporate wizardry to Memphis. Why don’t these guys fix American business? Have they forgotten the catastrophic collapse of the stock market in 2008, brought on by excessive deregulation? What makes them believe that add any value to education?

I have been reading your blog for some time. Whether it is Philadelphia, New York, Camden or other system being “reformed”, Memphis is a twin. We just received our teacher evaluation scores that unfortunately include the ridiculous “stakeholder perceptions” as 5% of our score. What you said in this post is exactly what we are experiencing. To make things even more ridiculous, our teachers were given their ratings with last year’s value added data even though it is this year’s data that actually counts. We will all get new scores sometime this summer when the beloved Pearson and Randa Corp. get the data reports finished. Teachers are being threatened, intimidated and maligned in the media here based on evaluation ratings that are completely trumped up. Through all of this Boston Consulting is advising a planning commission charged with “unifying” our city and county school systems. This is of course a front for dismantling our urban system and turning it over to charters and other entities including those associated with the Gulen movement. I read my life everyday in your posts.
Categories Boston Consulting Group, Philadelphia, Tennessee
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