Random Quotes

...from How to Demoralize Teachers -- Diane Ravitch

Interesting that teaching is the only profession where job ratings, no matter how inaccurate, are published in the news media. Will we soon see similar evaluations of police officers and firefighters, legislators and reporters? Interesting, too, that no other nation does this to its teachers...If ever we get past this terrible time of teacher-bashing and blame-shifting, Arne Duncan and his ignominious Race to the Top have a lot to answer for. And so will the irresponsible leadership of the New York City public schools, which cares so little for the morale and spirit of those whom they presumably lead.

...from This Absurd Takeover of Our Public Life -- Deborah Meier

I've been so used to trying to persuade powerful people that we can't base good schooling on simple tools of "measurement" that I forgot that they truly don't care.

...from Teachers Face Good Cops or Bad Cops in Push for Evaluations -- Anthony Cody

...the idea that we can fire our way to better schools has a fatal flaw. It assumes there are fresh teachers ready to take the place of those we fire. Given that our high poverty schools already have turnover rates in the neighborhood of 20% a year, and about 50% of beginning teachers wash out in their first five years, the idea that we will improve our schools by firing even more is hard to believe. Where are the high quality teachers going to come from to replace those we fire? School improvement is much more complex than this, and the foundation has to be based on building the profession.

...from A corporate reform coup d’etat in Bridgeport -- Norm Pattis

We could turn the schools over to the Koch brothers or to Donald Trump, we could pave the hallways with gold, we could buy each student a diamond studded Rolex, and it would not change the underlying fact that what causes poor performance in the schools is urban distress. Do you want better performance in school? Then provide adequate housing, employment opportunities, safe streets.

...from Why don’t top private schools adopt corporate-driven reforms? -- Bruce D. Baker, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Private independent schools pride themselves on offering small class sizes and a diverse array of curricular opportunities, as well as arts, sports and other enrichment – the full package. And, as I’ve shown in my previous research, private independent schools charge tuition and spend on a per pupil basis at levels much higher than traditional public school districts operating in the same labor market. They also pay their headmasters well!...In fact...private independent schools may just be among the least reformy elementary and secondary education options out there.

...from In Case You Misunderstood Their Power for Something Lesser -- James Boutin

If you misunderstood corporate reform's power for something lesser, I bid you good morning. In my view, corporate reform is in the process of wiping the floor with teachers and their unions in district after district, and state after state. They have more money; they have more time; they have more powerful people; and they have better tactics. While the people who work around education on a daily basis attempt to solve the problems in their schools or districts, corporate reform is figuring out what talking points will be most effective in Newsweek and what political plays will most effectively destroy the power of teachers and their unions. Those of us who are doing meaningful work and understand the potentially devastating effects of corporate reform's solutions (BECAUSE WE HAVE REAL EXPERIENCE IN SCHOOLS) are, in a very real way, too exhausted to mount an effective defense after having dealt with real problems all day long.

2012 Medley #4, Part 2: More from New York...

NYC teachers' rankings based on test scores published.

(Click here to see Part 1, It's all About New York.)

The attacks on public education and public school teachers will continue until America's millions of teachers stand up and say, "No more." No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have shown what the politicians mean to do to America's public schools. Our union leaders tell us we need a seat at the table. The experiences in Los Angeles and New York have shown that strategy to be a mistake. The "seat at the table" has backfired and teachers, who hoped for cooperation from the administration can now see what that cooperation has gotten them.

The students in America's public schools are counting on us to make sure that there is a qualified, well-trained professional in every classroom, not someone with five weeks of training who is marking time between their Bachelors degree and a business career. Our students are counting on us to return content to the curriculum and end the damage that the insanity of mindless testing has caused. Our students are counting on us to be their voice...to tell the nation that enough is enough and that we need to return real learning to the classroom.

Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten take note...we should be fighting to save public education not relying on untrustworthy politicians to do it for us.

How to Demoralize Teachers

Diane Ravitch reminds us that the VAM assessment data is invalid and unreliable. Why then, is it being publicized? She has the answer for that, too.

Most testing experts believe that value-added assessment has many technical problems that reduce its validity and reliability. The most recent research review appears in the current issue of the Phi Delta Kappan. Unfortunately, advocates of measuring teacher quality by student test scores never let research or evidence or, in New York City's case, unequivocal commitments to privacy, get in their way.

The New York Post exulted with a front-page, full-page banner headline: "REVEALED: TEACHER GRADES." On day one, it printed a picture of and story about "the best teacher," and on day two, a picture of and story about "the worst teacher." The Post interviewed parents who said they wanted their child out of that teacher's class or they wanted her fired. In recent years, the Post has often run stories about teachers who allegedly are criminals, perverts, or just plain lazy, greedy dummies who can't be trusted to teach anything and shouldn't be allowed near children. It seems that the Murdoch journal won't be satisfied until every school has been turned over to private management, with no unions, no seniority, and no job protections whatever for teachers.

Why we won’t publish individual teachers’ value-added scores

One publication, Gothamschools.org, has refused to publish the information.

But before we publish any piece of information, we always have to ask a question. Does the information we have do a fair job of describing the subject we want to write about? If it doesn’t, is there any additional information — context, anecdotes, quantitative data — that we can provide to paint a fuller picture?

In the case of the Teacher Data Reports, “value-added” assessments of teachers’ effectiveness that were produced in 2009 and 2010 for reading and math teachers in grades 3 to 8, the answer to both those questions was no.

New York City Teacher Ratings: Teacher Data Reports Publicly Released Amid Controversy

The president of the NYC teachers union, Michael Mulgrew has written a full page ad to explain why the numbers shouldn't be used to evaluate teachers. He includes the facts that the data uses tests which have since been labeled invalid, the reports are full of errors, and the methodology contains a margin of error so large as to make the results meaningless.

He also reminds everyone the procedure was so experimental that even former Chancellor Joel Klein

...promised when it began that the results would be available only to teachers and their supervisors. Then the Department of Education reneged on its pledge and has released them to the public.

From Huffington Post...

In response, the union, the United Federation of Teachers, has launched a city-wide newspaper advertising campaign. The ad headlines, "This Is No Way To Rate A Teacher!" followed by a lengthy and complicated mathematical formula as well as a letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew with a list of all the reasons he says the data reports are faulty and unreliable.

Crunching the New York Teacher Evaluations 2/24/2012 12:00:00 PM

The Wall Street Journal, rarely a friend to public school teachers, posted a video interview with it's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, who tries to explain the "reliability" and unintended consequences of the evaluations.

Bialik said,

...you can reallly only control for data that you can measure...There could be all sorts of unintended consequences that you really want to address ahead of time. Things like, maybe it's harder to get people to enter the profession if they know they're going to be judged based on a number. Maybe teachers start teaching even more to the test than maybe they have been already if their career is decided based on it. Maybe you have a big expense from administering all the data needed to actually get these numbers.

Bialik's point about it being harder to get people to enter teaching is important. Why would anyone want to be an education professional when public humiliation based on inadequate and invalid data hangs over their heads? The threat of public evaluations is going to cause a qualified teacher shortage. Would you want your child to choose a career like that? Maybe we need to use valid instruments to evaluate teachers.

U.S. schools chief endorses release of teacher data

Just as a reminder...a year and a half ago, when the Los Angeles Times released the same data for teachers in LA, Arne Duncan praised the newspaper. From August 16, 2010...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores.

"What's there to hide?" Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest school system. "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."

Parents have a right to know if their child's teacher is effective...but let's use valid and reliable instruments to evaluate teachers. No teacher should be against fair and appropriate accountability.

UPDATE: Here's the story of one NY teacher who was the subject of misinformation, harassment and personal humiliation.

The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

As in many other cases, the story of Pascale Mauclair and P.S. 11 begins with a tale of the flawed methodology and invalid measurements of the Teacher Data Reports.

P.S. 11 is located at the epicenter of a number of different immigrant communities in northern Queens, and over a quarter of its students are English Language Learners. Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months. Two factors which produce particularly contorted TDR results – teaching the highest academic need students and having a small sample of students that take the standardized state exams – define her teaching situation.

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2012 Medley #4 It's all About New York

NYC teachers' rankings based on test scores published.

The New York Times published teacher rankings based on student test scores.

Teachers in the rest of the nation (except for LA, where it's already happened) get ready. It won't be long till your "rank" based on how well your students do on a standardized test is used to judge you and humiliate you.

It doesn't matter if it's accurate, valid or reliable. That only matters when your teaching methods are in question.


NYC releases teachers’ value-added scores — unfortunately

This takes some kind of special nerve: New York City’s Education Department publicly released the rankings of 18,000 public school teachers based entirely on student standardized-test scores — after pleas from educators not to do it because it would be unfair and disparaging. And then it told the news media not to use the results to disparage teachers.

New York Teachers "Assaulted and Compromised:" Lawyers Line Up

Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

Reporting of Teacher Performance

It had to happen sooner or later. Sixteen months after the Los Angeles Times published rankings of 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District that it compiled from seven years of math and English scores, news organizations under the Freedom of Information Law finally received data on 18,000 teachers in the New York City school system...The New York Times published the names of teachers and their schools, and their ranking based on their students' gains on state standardized tests in math and English over five years until the 2009-10 school year ("City's Ratings of 18,000 Teachers Indicate That Quality Is Widely Diffused," The New York Times, Feb. 25).

The rationale was that parents have the right to know how their children's teachers rank. It's a compelling argument if it can be proved that publication of ratings leads to better instruction. But it doesn't...A teacher's score could be 35 points off on the math exam, or 53 points off on the English exam. These numbers hardly instill confidence. For another, teachers who teach English language learners, special education students and disadvantaged students receive lower scores than when they teach affluent students. This raises the question of fairness. Finally, the practice relies on the alleged benefits of naming and shaming, which even Bill Gates opposes ("Shame Is Not the Solution," The New York Times, Feb. 23).

I can't think of data reports with a similar margin of error in any other field that have received such prominent coverage. In fact, most editors would in all likelihood dismiss out of hand any study with such shaky statistics. The imprecision alone would constitute a red flag. Aaron Pallas put it best: "For teachers, the key concern is fairness. Fairness is primarily a procedural issue: Teachers, and the unions that represent them, seek an evaluation process that is neither arbitrary nor capricious, relying on stable and valid criteria that they believe accurate characterize the quality of their work" ("Reasonable doubt," Eye on Education, Feb. 6).

A simple question teachers should now ask about their profession

The reality is that the release of teacher scores based in student test data will exacerbate all of the bad consequences of using test scores to evaluate teachers. Teachers will be even more likely to teach to the test, to resent uncooperative students, and to see fellow teachers as rivals not colleagues. They will hesitate to take on student teachers, who might depress their score...For evidence regarding the unreliability of VAM scores, see here.

We will see a tremendous push by the most skilled, demanding, and well-resourced parents to get each year’s “highly effective teacher” and for district offices to “stick” the ineffective teacher in a class (or school) where the parents are less likely to complain...

...student grades assigned by a teacher labeled less than effective will be challenged...The evaluation scores given to teachers by principals who themselves are rated less than effective, will be challenged as well. Can a teacher be fairly rated by a principal who was rated ineffective that year? And when the “ineffective principal” is dismissed, who will agree to lead that school, if the ineffective rating was based in large part on student achievement? No administrator will risk that move — achievement cannot be turned around that quickly — and the students in struggling schools will lose again.

...teachers with highly effective evaluations in hand, will head for the Gold Coast of Long Island to land a higher paying teaching job. Superintendents in well resourced districts will vie for the highest share of highly effective teachers in the state. Isn’t that the rule of the marketplace that the reformers embrace? Once again, students in financially struggling schools will be left behind.

NY principal: Teacher scores inaccurate at my school

It is wrong to call a great teacher a failing teacher because a few kids got 3-4 questions wrong one year rather than 2-3 questions wrong the year before. It is particularly problematic given that the 3rd grade test in the past was very different from the 4th grade test. It could be that the children in a particular class were always weaker in writing, but the 3rd grade test for the years the TDRs are being released had very little writing compared to the 4th grade test, so the children may not actually do worse; it may be that they are just tested on different material.

I honestly cannot understand how public ranking of teachers by percentile will have anything but a negative effect on teaching and learning. Particularly in middle school, I can imagine teachers losing control as children and parents take the position, “why should I listen to you, you’re a below average teacher.”

Click here for Part 2: More from New York...

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Duncan's Problems

The US Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan, has a new public relations program to "improve the teaching profession". Anthony Cody at his blog, Living in Dialogue, has brought us a report on the program.

For the past two years, the Department of Education policies have been roundly criticized by teachers. The latest response from Arne Duncan is a big public relations push bearing the title RESPECT -- Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.

In his speech launching the project last week, Secretary Duncan laid out what he feels are the problems afflicting the teaching profession.

The Department has solutions to each of these problems - but they often have pursued policies that actually make things worse. Here are the problems, and the solutions the Department of Ed has offered -- many of which are mandatory if states wish to qualify for Race to the Top or escape the ravages of NCLB...

Problems 1 and 2, according to Duncan are focused on teacher training. Too many teachers are unprepared when they get to the classroom. The Ed Secretary's solution is to...

Evaluate schools of education based on the test scores of the teachers they graduate...All schools of education will feel significant pressure to prepare their teachers to focus on test scores.

and...

Continue to support programs such as Teach For America, which places novice teachers in the most challenging classrooms with only five weeks of training.

It's clear that in Duncan's mind "Recognizing Educational Success" means focusing on test scores. "Professional Excellence" means teaching to the test.

The list continues with problems and solutions offered by the US DOE which only make the problems worse.

Problem: Teachers don't have enough time to be successful...and they're under pressure to raise test scores.

The US DOE promotes evaluations based on test scores and closing of "failing" schools or conversion to charters.

Problem: Principals don't know how to attract and keep high quality teachers.

The US DOE requires states to dictate to principals how teachers must be evaluated.

Problem: High performing nations have high requirements for those wanting to become educators. In the US we "allow anyone to teach" and they are often poorly trained.

The US DOE promotes Teach for America, where poorly trained college graduates are often given preferential treatment in hiring over degreed teacher candidates.

Problem: "Here in the U.S., evaluation is too often tied only to test scores, which makes no sense whatsoever."

The US DOE

has required that states mandate the use of test scores in teacher evaluations as a condition of NCLB waivers.

In case after case, the solutions are exacerbated by the hypocrisy and/or incompetence of the US Department of Education.

In anticipation of the response by "reformers" that he is just complaining with no real suggestions for solutions, Cody presents a report he helped write a year and a half ago called, A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: New Report Takes on Evaluation

So much of our school reform dialogue has been poisoned by the assumption that unions (and teachers, by extension) are implacable foes of accountability in any form. What we learned through this process is that most of us already hold ourselves to high levels of accountability, and would encourage evaluation systems that provide us with good feedback and opportunities for growth. This report gives vivid details showing how this might look.

Here's one more problem and solution...

Problem: The US DOE is acting against the interests of public schools and public education.

Solution: Appoint a Secretary of Education who actually knows something about public education and convince the President that all children deserve a school where students are offered...

...a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.

...a school which seeks to be a place...

that nurtures a genuine love of learning and teaches students "to let their lives speak."

Instead of squandering our resources on more and more tests which destroy the love of learning, we should strive to make schools as good as the school that the President chooses for his own children.

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