Teacher Effectiveness Measures - What's the problem?

Below are the remarks I was privileged to share before a full room on the VCU campus in Richmond on Saturday, October 1. The topic was "Merit Pay and Teacher Evaluation."  

The panel discussion was hosted by the Richmond Teachers for Social Justice, South Atlantic Philosophy of Education Society, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education, and the Student Virginia Education Association. 

   I have been a teacher since 1978, and have been in the classroom since the beginning of No Child Left Behind.  Even prior to that, when the Standards of Learning first went into effect in Virginia, I commented to my colleagues that we already knew who was behind and did not need a measuring tool for that.  But removing our ability to evaluate our own students through outside testing was the first step in a campaign to de-professionalize every teacher in America and a clear signal that we would no longer be trusted to perform our jobs.
  What we need, and have needed for the past thirty or more years, are the tools, resources, professional training, and time to educate all children to high levels of performance.  Recently, the lion’s share of resources have been spent in “raising test scores” and not in improving effective practice.  And for that reason, I consider the past decade a complete stagnation, and in some places a reversal, of what teaching professionals consider best practice.
   I would like to state clearly that I am opposed to any merit pay system that is attached to student achievement connected to testing.  There are a number of reasons for my opposition, but the primary one is that it will fundamentally distort the relationship between the teacher and student in potentially damaging ways.
   We should not tie an adult’s livelihood to the performance of vulnerable children.  This immediately shifts our view of our work.  Suddenly children become potential commodities to be exploited or weak performers to be avoided.  This is fundamentally dangerous.  Those who need us most will be least served.
   As the stakes connected to testing have been increasingly raised over the years of NCLB there has been a steady increase in cheating scandals.  We can be assured that these scandals will find their way into individual classrooms and have a profound effect on student learning if teacher performance is measured against these narrow tools.
   The current plan in Virginia, to tie teacher evaluation to student growth causes me a great deal of concern.  To begin with, I do not understand what tools will be used to measure this growth and how they will be untangled from all the factors that affect student achievement.
   To my knowledge there is no reliable tool available for measuring a teacher’s effectiveness within a school year.  The psychometricians have repeatedly argued that Value Added Measures are extremely unreliable.  In addition, the experts clearly state that current criterion referenced tests were never designed to measure teacher effectiveness and is a misuse of their purpose.  In their own words these tools are “highly unstable” and correlate well only to the students in the classroom and not to the work of the teacher in the classroom.  And yet, federal, and now state, policy is being formulated around what amounts to a huge experiment in defining our work.
   One thing that is clear from the Race to the Top plan, which holds all teachers accountable and uses standardized tests as a large percentage of that measuring tool, is that taxpayer dollars will be diverted from the classroom to create and monitor the testing.  This is certain to build more of the downward pressure on teachers that has already proven to have a limited effect on student achievement . It will create a top-heavy bureaucracy that adds nothing to the quality of instruction and student learning.   It is, however, certain to benefit the test makers and the huge testing industry that has thrived during the last decade and has even continued to show rocketing profits in spite of the current economic downturn.
   It has already begun.  In my small district a testing program was purchased over the summer to begin tracking student reading levels, potentially as a measure of teacher effectiveness. Again, a tool never designed for this purpose.  If we are to track “teacher effectiveness” in every subject and grade, there will need to be more tools, some of which are yet to be brought into existence. Imagine what a juggernaut of testing all of our students, even the youngest will face.  Concurrently, our district has had a reduction in force, no salary increases, and cuts to professional development over the past four years.
   Over the past ten years, a the domain of a classroom teacher—evaluating student achievement—has  been “outsourced” to testing companies that produce measurements that are removed in both time and distance from the classroom and are limited in their effectiveness to improve instruction.  Testing programs have systematically stripped teachers of our decision-making abilities while simultaneously holding us accountable for the less-than stellar results. Teachers are frustrated with the decisions made at a distance that ultimately underserve student needs in the classroom.
   Teachers should not be the subjects of experiments in effective teaching.  Teachers must be partners in the study of effective practice.  Studies of effective practice should ultimately result in improved practice, not managerial, personnel decision-making. Is the real goal of the measurement process to pressure school administrators into removing some teachers?  If so, are they also not being trusted to do their jobs?
   We should be celebrating and sharing teacher knowledge, not creating an adversarial relationship with our students and our colleagues as this program promises to do.  Studying our own work, sharing best practice, and developing local, formative assessments will benefit every child and restore teachers to their role as coach, guide and evaluator.
   The current argument to measure teaching effectiveness is, in my opinion, a distraction from what needs to be done to reform our public schools that will create and maintain a robust teaching force ready to prepare our young people for an uncertain but rapidly changing future.

Other panelists were: Kitty Boitnott, President, Virginia Education Association; Tichi Pinkney Eppes of the Greater Richmond Education Reform Alliance; Stephanie Hooks of Richmond Public Schools; Martin Reardon, VCU Education Professor; and Gabriel Reich, VCU Education Professor. 

Trusting Kids to Assume Responsibility for Learning

What happens when you give students the opportunity to choose a direction for their own reading and writing?

Amazing things, apparently.

My students are currently involved in their own reading during Reading Workshop in Academic English 11 (most would call this General English).  The class of 26 students is a mix of abilities.  Though there are many who are performing at the post high school level some are as low as a fourth grade reading level. 

All have chosen books that might surprise those who feel students will not set a high bar for their own performance.

Here is a selection of books that are currently being read and written about in English 11:

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The Hunger Games series.  (This has been extremely popular in the past two years.  One student, and English language learner, has zoomed through all three in just three weeks of reading and has just begun a fourth book.)

The Inferno by Dante

A non-fiction book on the Civil War.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

And numerous young adult romances and coming of age tales.

In general, when given the latitude and a purpose for reading (our stated goal is growing dendrites—i.e. getting smarter—building  vocabulary, focusing on text for longer and longer periods of time, and developing a love of reading) students choose books that are both challenging and generally right on target for their ability level.

Students converse about their books in weekly letters to me and the co-teacher in the room.  We ask them to discuss their books by noticing what the author is doing.  In the weekly letter they tell us:

• What is the setting?  How does this limit the characters in their actions or behaviors?
• Does your author use any of the following?  Provide an example from the book of:         
• imagery
• flashbacks
• figurative language
• How does the author capture and keep your interest from the beginning?
• How would you rate this book?
• How did your prediction compare to the ending of the book?
• Would you recommend the book to others?  Who would like to read this and why?

In just 20 minutes of class time daily, students are able to read a minimum of four books a semester in addition to the titles we learn together.  Their selections, listed above, indicate that most students know what they want to learn. 

Sometimes we need to get out of their way, and let them go for it.

Controlling my own work...

Lately I've been making a mental list of the number of variables that are out of my control when it comes to creating a learning environment for my students.

Next year the state of Virginia will base forty percent of a teacher's evaluation on measures of student growth.  Though it is not clear yet what those measures will be, the state board of education has already said that 20% of the student growth measure must come from the high stakes tests.  Since I teach two courses that have high stakes tests at the end--the end of course reading and writing tests students must pass to get a valid diploma and the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition test students sit for to earn college credit--I know those scores will factor in.

Here are the things within the school year and school day that teachers have no control over, and yet are very important to how well or poorly we are able to teach.

Time:  The biggest factor.  Here are the ways in which the time spent with students can impact instruction.

• What time of day the class will be offered. (End of the day classes are very different from first-thing in the morning classes.)
• How much time we have together.  Though I should have my students for 90 minutes and 90 days that is never true.  Students are frequently released early for sporting events, cutting into the last class of the day. There are assemblies/picture-day/pull-outs for various reasons.  Weather events: snow, storm, electrical failure.  (Two years ago we lost nine consecutive instructional days to snow.  The AP test was still held on the same day.  Thankfully, the state test was moved back.)
• My time:  Many duties and expectations cut in to the time to plan, evaluate work, or confer with students.  For example, since the start of the year, weekends have been spent catching up on duties that are not instructional in nature: learning new software, collecting data, or preparing required reports.

Class make-up:

• The number of students who sit in a class is not selected by the instructor.  Nearly every teacher in the nation faces larger classes than in past years due to staff cuts.  This impacts teacher time (see above) because it simply takes longer to evaluate student work.  That means less time for planning, conferring (sleeping, eating...).  Even though classes are swelling, no one has taken any work away from the classroom teacher (see above non-instructional duties.)
• The teacher's schedule is set by others.  This can mean multiple courses to prepare for ("preps")--or only one course taught repeatedly (one "prep").  Again, this can stretch a teacher or not.
• Mix of students.  Teachers do not control scheduling so must play the hand they are dealt.   That may mean students who do not interact well together for a variety of reasons, or a large load of high needs students.
• The yearly schedule.  Those of us who teach in semester blocks only have students for a little over three months.  Will we be expected to show a year's growth in this amount of time?  After fourteen years of working with ninth-graders, I know they are very different people in September than the more mature people they grow into by April. The second semester AP class gets five less weeks of instruction prior to the test.  This factor is not in the teacher's control.

Curriculum:

• No matter the ability of the student, the curriculum is the same.  Though we strive to differentiate in the classroom, the tests are the same for everyone.  So....?  
• Out in four: Another gem of the NCLB law that is in effect, all students must graduate "on time" ready or not.  This pressures schools and teachers to pass students along.  Their readiness to meet the standards and curriculum means teachers may be starting out far behind.  There is no apparent irony in expecting teachers to differentiate while expecting students to cross the finish line at the same time?

This list does not include any of the variables that a student brings into the classroom.  These are just the work-related ones that occur within a building.  Is it any wonder teachers are crying foul?

Accountability for student growth should be borne by an entire system and community.

Whatever happened to "it takes a village?"

Playing the game of Life...

literally.

On the long drive back from the beach this month, I played Life on the cellphone app my daughter handed to me.

"It's fun.  Try it."

It had been a good 20 years since I played the face-to-face board game when the kids were young. Back then the term "face-to-face" didn't even delineate a choice.  All games were played face-to-face, even the ubiquitous video games.  (My marker for the digital world is 1982, the year my son was born, and we bought an Apple. The first one. With the blinking cursor and the green text.)

The premise of the game is simple: whoever retires with the most money wins.

Though the spinner was fun, even responding to some finesse with touch, and the street level view of the moving pieces was engaging, I found myself more and more angered as I progressed through my "life."

Everything was measured in money.

Birth of a child: receive $5000 in gifts from friends.  ($5000?  Really?  No joy? No fulfillment?  Just $5000 bucks?  A lousy measure of what the birth of my children meant to my husband and I.  It was a hollow reward.)

College earned the player a lot more money right after graduation. The game choice I made - to go into entertainment - didn't pay well at all--but I picked it because it sounded like fun.

In the real game of life, my college years never really resulted in a big pile of money, but they were exciting and fulfilling.  Choosing liberal arts changed me, changed my view of the world, and opened my awareness to a thirst for knowledge that has never abated.  I'm not sure what dollar value I would place on that.

The game went on like that, with the milestones of a rich and varied life reduced to a dollar figure.  I could hardly stand it.  It seemed a little too real, a little too much like our current lives.

Numbers rule our lives here in America.  Rich people are somehow better than poor.  Those with high SAT scores are more valuable than those without.  Wall Street has to hit the numbers. School districts, teachers, students .. all are driven by the numbers.  But for every number, especially the ones my students 'earn', there is a whole story left untold.

Our focus on money and measurement has created a spiritual and cultural wasteland.  Playing "who makes the most, scores the highest" is an unsustainable vision.  It is simplistic, simple-minded and a poor substitute for the richness of human experience. In addition, there can really only be one winner at that game.  It feels as though the piling up of wins would topple over from the sheer pressure to get more, more, more.

But it is something a businessman understands completely. And the business pros are winning at shifting this game into education.

My invisible, virtual opponent won the game.  She retired before me and continued to play the numbers.  She had taken an option out on the number "9" and it paid off several times, earning her well over a million dollars as she basked in retirement while I continued to limp along with my two-year degree. (I went back to school.)

She was divorced (big payout) and ended the game with only one child--no grandchildren.

I imagine her as a bitter, old woman in a toney retirement home sipping martinis, playing backgammon, and yelling at the TV.

As for me, I lived a long, happy life in my log-cabin surrounded by a pile of messy, disorganized grandchildren.

Guess I lose.

Nailing the coffin lid shut

Our district is still in our pre-school week, and for the first time in my professional career we have received an unusual message from our superiors: Please Speak Up.  Specifically about all the good that public educators do for the community.

Historically teachers are reluctant to speak publicly about education issues, especially local issues.  We fear retribution and are also, and rightly so, requested to avoid revealing a political stance since we have a huge influence on shaping minds.

Though the suggestion is a welcome one to me, a trained journalist with a near religious adherence to the right to free speech, it is indicative of just how much of a threat we face in the public education system.

The fact is that we are in the last battle of a long war on a basic pillar of a functioning democracy: our public schooling system.  The foot soldiers are being rallied.

It may be too late.

We should have been marshaled about ten years ago.  Anyone who read the NCLB law could see it as a cleverly disguised method to discredit every school in the country. (For the uninitiated, the goal has always been a 100% pass rate by every student on every test by 2014.  This was never possible.)

Even Senator Edward Kennedy, a long time champion of the disenfranchised, was duped into supporting the law, more evidence for how clever the opposition has been at disguising their true motives.  They have known the ultimate goal from the beginning and have maintained a straight public face while chuckling to themselves in private.

Screaming headlines of "FAILED SCHOOLS" have rolled across every town and community throughout this August.  Couple that with the campaign to silence and discredit teachers that began in earnest in 2010 with the release of Waiting for Superman, that was accelerated by Oprah Winfrey and the media,  and has continued apace with loud arguments against tenure, and the field has been effectively cleared.

Teachers must begin every conversation now by justifying their work, their integrity, their adherence to excellence, an explanation of why we need to retain experienced teachers, how we use our time during the school year, why a summer off is defensible, how many hours are spent grading and receiving additional education, and on and on.

It's a pretty long conversation to have in the check out line.

If you think the fight has been fair, think again.  Using a fair measuring stick has never been the agenda. (See NCLB law for support.)

The goal of providing an excellent education is a canard.  

The real goal has been the privatization of public education.

Another goal is the re-segregation of schools, if not on racial lines then certainly on lines of privilege.

A third goal is to de-professionalize teaching.  When private agencies take over they will not want to have to pay a living wage.  It's more profitable to hire a revolving door of young "teachers" at $10.00 an hour to turn on the computer or recite the scripted lesson plans.  (I ache when young--and naive--teachers defend the loss of due-process by saying something simplistic like "If you do your job well, you should never have to worry about being fired."  Ah, so young and trusting.  You don't have to be fired if you are worked to death, or harassed to death.  You'll just leave and retreat to a job with less stress--like air-traffic controller.)

That will be "teaching" for the masses.

Those who can afford an education that develops critical thinking, creativity, lifelong learning can buy it for their progeny.

Welcome to a return of the feudal system with the new liege lords and serfs in corporate fiefdoms.

Is it too late?  Ask the Florida (Flori-DUH) teacher qutoed below who is now being evaluated by a system that garnerd Race to the Top dollars from our current administration:

50% of ALL high school teachers' ratings will be based on 9th/10th grade FCAT math/reading scores. So even if you teach science to 12th graders, 50% of your rating for "merit pay" a rating that gets published online to the public will be based on something you DON'T EVEN TEACH. And of course, basing pay on these kinds of tests is absurd to begin with.

Even a child can tell you that's not fair.

The camel is entirely inside the tent if our own Secretary of Education thinks this is a worthy way to encourage the best and the brightest to pursue a career in teaching.

But, then again, that's not the point.  And it never was.

The de-formers do not play fair and have consistently written the laws to their own advantage.

Can you hear the hammering?  There is only one nail left to go in.

Better push back, and hard.

I thought I knew TFA but...

Teach for America (TFA) sounded like a good idea the first time I heard about it.  Get the best and brightest into hard-to-staff classrooms and hope their experiences stick and then "the best" will make a career out of helping our neediest children.

It is appealing in the same way the selfless programs of the "Peace Corps" and "Americorps" from the Kennedy era of asking what can we do for our country appealed to my sense of humanity.

But in practice TFA has left much to be desired.  After extensive reading, it's clear the revolving door of TFA recruits damages students in urban areas, destroys the community of a school, and has a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' agenda to change education policy by quickly moving TFA recruits into positions of power (a la Michelle Rhee, the highest profile TFA recruit to date.)

But after attending the TFA workshop "Why Teach For America (TFA) Must Change: Properly Training New Teachers for the Rigors of Teaching" at the SOS Conference on Friday, July 29, I believe that some of what TFA does should be called educational malpractice at best and criminal at worst.

The leaders of the panel were David Green of Fordham University, currently a mentor to TFA recruits in the Bronx; Dr. Barbara Torre Veltri of the College of Ed at Northern Arizona University and author of Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher; Janet Grossback Mayer, a Bronx teacher who has taught for an amazing 51 years in the Bronx; Lawrence Mayer, an award winning Biology teacher and New York City principal; and two former TFA recruits John Bilby and John Williamson (in 2010).

Both of the recruits "failed" in TFA, leaving long before their two-year expected stint was up.  Both felt inadequately prepared for the classrooms they entered.  John Williamson, for instance, was trained to teach secondary mathematics but was moved into three different elementary grade level classes in three different schools in his first two months on the job.

Amazing.

In addition to that, Williamson indicated that he was required to meet regularly in the evenings with a donor, who was purportedly mentoring him.  The advice offered by the high-powered businessman had little validity for the work in the urban classroom, but apparently made the donor feel good about his donation.  Williamson found the required meetings a drain on the time needed to prepare for students. By his own admission he was just one page ahead of the students in his class.

Both recruits indicated that the five-week training in the summer was much like boot camp. Absences, even for legitimate illness (Williamson came down with strep throat) were strongly discouraged.

All TFA's were expected to stick to scripted lessons to prepare students for testing as well as scripts for maintaining control in the classroom.  They were to move ahead to polynomials even if the kids couldn't subtract negative numbers.

A favorite classroom management tool "I'm going to count backwards from four and I want you quiet when I get to one" was laughably inadequate with students who are street-smart, having to negotiate bus schedules, gang territory and other hazards just to get to school.

Mentors who worked with TFAers offered engaging alternatives for classroom management that the novices embraced. But when mentors returned to the classroom, the recruits were back to the scripts because "that is what the TFA management wants."

And about that management.  The five-week summer training sessions are often run by other TFAs with as much as, wait for it, an entire year of experience before they begin to train the next group.

Preposterous.

But beyond that, TFA seems to also be involved in activities I would call criminal.  Among them:

• Placing minimally trained young adults with inadequate training in with special needs populations.  (One young woman was beaten severely when left by herself with high-needs students.)
• Brokering contracts with districts to guarantee that 20% of their workforce will be filled by TFA recruits, even if it means firing experienced teachers to do so.***(See Barbara Torre Veltri's clarification on this point in the Comments.)
• Getting a waiver from the Dept. of Ed. for the highly qualified stipulation.  Then, when that was challenged in court, slipping in legislation during the budget cuts this spring that changed the law so TFA recruits can continue to wear the highly qualified label.
• Moving recruits around at will.  Training them for one subject or grade level, then arbitrarily moving the teacher into another area (as was Williamson's experience.) 

As I listened to the litany, I was outraged.  It seemed clear that TFA was interested solely in their own image and did not care a whit for the students subjected to the program. (There was evidence in their own literature about "hitting numbers" that had little to do with instruction.  One of the numbers they are proud of is the number still in Ed.  Unfortunately, the part of education they are in is shaping policy.  Not good.)

All without being held accountable?

The second grade that Williamson took over before December had already had numerous adults at the head of the class before him and was, unsurprisingly, in chaos.  What has happened to those kids?

Many of the panelists argued that TFA needed to be reformed.  But when the floor was opened to discussion, the young man at right (Sorry for pic quality. Snapped with iphone.) made a passionate argument that "TFA is the devil"  and "I say burn it down."

He was a student in New Orleans when the city was hit by Katrina.  Many of his teachers, some who had Ph.Ds according to the young man, were replaced by TFA recruits.

He argued they failed to connect to the inner city minority students and that resulted in confusion among the student body.  The impromptu speaker had earned the nickname of "Grandpa" because he had filled in where the other adults had failed.  He repeated several times that "New Orleans is dying and nobody cares."

Not even those who advertise that they do care.

Shame.

Matt Damon: A+

Videos are surfacing from the SOS March of interviews with Matt Damon as he awaited his opportunity to speak at the rally held July 30 on the ellipse in humid, 100 degree weather.

Damon is impressive.  Apparently he has been paying close attention to the issue, no doubt in part because his mother is a successful professor of Early Childhood Education.  Regardless, he calls the current reform "punitive" and carrying an "intrinsic paternalism."

In any case, Damon is articulate, informed, concerned, and sometimes angry about what he is witnessing.  He makes it clear that he feels the children are being cheated and won't be prepared to be the problem-solvers and critical thinkers we will need to solve the next generation's problems.

Another video, created by Reason tv, has been making the rounds because of Damon's smack-down of the reporter who posted an SOS March video of a montage of guerilla-warfare interviews with a variety of participants.  In all of the interviews, the 'reporter's' bias was evident in the questioning.  Reason tv is apparently a libertarian outlet created by Drew Carey, the comedian.  I will not reproduce that video here.  It has been seen in multiple venues but drew the ire of Lawrence O'Donnell on his show Tuesday night.

In addition to understanding the issues with 'pay-for-performance' and high-stakes testing, Damon is aware that the participants in the march included the leading thinkers in education.  He argues that they should be included in reform plans and that even he, a successful businessman, has no expertise or right to create education policy.  (In another clip from this interview, not included here, Damon says that he should be paying more in taxes and neither he, nor anyone he knows, created jobs with the tax break they received.)

Thank you Matt Damon for using your star-power to help educators gain a voice in the current debate.  And thank you too, for 'getting it' and taking the risk to stand with those who stand for those who cannot speak: the children of America's tomorrow.