The Right Way to Do Teacher Assessment
a very very long critique
here's the original article in case you want to read what prompted this blog post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/17/AR2010061704565.html
Like it's a brand new problem we've never considered before.
The writer below went to Stanford for her teacher credentials and has taught a year, so she has more time in the saddle than I who remain ungraduated, and only having volunteered with high school kids, and taught small packs of college students for a pittance of ten bucks an hour, but...
... I have some comments to add to this discussion, which are typed in red. ps. after having written a couple paragraphs, I just want to add that I'm writing a counterpoint with some doomsday/worst-case-scenario rhetoric, but try to generally remain moderate and open-minded about most things.
The right way to assess teachers' performance
d
By Michele Kerr
Friday, June 18, 2010
The Obama administration's Race to the Top program demands that teachers be evaluated by student test scores. Florida's legislature passed a bill in April to end teacher tenure and base pay increases on test-score improvement; although Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed that attempt, legislatures in Colorado, New York, Oklahoma and other states have also modified regulations regarding tenure with an eye toward Race to the Top. Teachers protest, but they are dismissed as union hacks with lousy skills, intent on protecting their cushy tenured jobs because they could never cut it in the real world.
And just remember, many teachers protest on bases not related to their "cushy tenured jobs" (which is exhausting, often frustrating, thankless, and the kind of work you take home for many hours each week, albeit a rewarding job to many), but instead protest on the bases of:
a. "teaching to the test" must be worked around.
b. tenure is a flawed but hard-earned right of all the teachers who, knowing no other trade will settle down to become part of the community they teach in and be rewarded with stability for their dedication also ensuring they aren't fired by a new principal who doesn't like them as much as the old principle did.
c. as is too often the case, property-tax based funding systems associated with poverty stricken areas (where students happen to need the most help to pass, and are often the direct major contributors to all the bad statistics we always hear about) will be disproportionately harmed by such Legislation as is being referred to in this article, resulting in poor schools suddenly being filled with teachers who got fired from everywhere else, which thanks to Federal Programs will also be mainly there to get college loans paid off faster or more fully, and will be motivated to go into different careers since they don't get paid much.
d. (icing on cake) meanwhile, crappy teachers in affluent well-funded schools with highly competent students will still have cushy jobs teaching to the test.
I'm a first-year, second-career high school teacher, a "highly qualified" teacher of math, English and social science, a standing I achieved by passing rigorous tests. Rigorous is a relative term (no point, just saying). I'm not a union fan, nor am I in favor of pay increases based on seniority or added education. Like many new teachers throughout the country, I was pink-slipped and am looking for work, so I don't have a cushy job to protect.
I'm not your typical teacher. The typical teacher is a union fan and in favor of pay increases based on seniority and added education, because they believe that having a revolving door of cheap inexperienced teachers is a poor way to govern a family, community, and school. They also believe that by taking more classes, understanding your subject deeper (thereby being exposed to more and more teaching techniques/examples that are current or proven somehow) [and please understand this is a bit of a "meh..." in my tirade, because I agree based on reliable reports that many or some of the "classes" teachers take for credit towards pay raises are iffy on how helpful or enlightening they are, and while I'm at it, I will add that old teachers don't quite double their salary (adjusted for inflation of course) from beginning pay to ending pay, but I sometimes think seventy grand is too much to pay a teacher unless...] ... teachers believe these classes make them better, and would rather walk than be forced to pay for and take these classes for their entire lives without any financial recompense whatsoever, and the alternative is never having to take a class at all which is also no good. But I believe I speak for many teachers when I say I'm willing to be tested on student performance, provided certain conditions are met. So let's negotiate. Heard, thanks for starting negotiations. Here's some what I'd call fair rebuttle.
I propose that:
(1) Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance. This comes up again later, and I'd like to say ten percent of thirty weeks is three weeks and...
90 percent seems very arbitrary, and rather we should base it on a gross average of statistical data or current research findings regarding how many classes a student can miss, all at once or here and there, and still get a passing grade in the class. Such data may have more of an obvious indicator of where the attendance cutoff should be to be fair. But, good idea; good place to start.
Without the missing students, the tests won't yield a complete picture of learning. YES, I'd worry that no matter WHAT, the test won't yield a complete picture of learning because they haven't invented that test yet, unless you think the SAT's predict who has a good life via using their educated brains. But the tests' purpose is to yield a picture of teaching, which isn't the same thing as learning. But they are so directly connected that, if the teachers are teaching kids with the aim of passing that test, then learning (the outcome) becomes the test more or less. Teachers can't teach children who aren't there.
Results will reveal that many students miss this attendance requirement. Put that problem on the parents' plates. Leave it out of the teaching assessment.What about students who attend every day and are discouraged by, taking care of, abused or neglected by, or partially or mostly unsupervised by their parents? They all stay in the assessment even though their parents have failed them as sure as if they didn't make their kids attend daily. I only say this because it is such a root problem and it ties in with my comments about poverty. In other words, attendance is a start, but there are other problems on parents' plates that are going to end up on teachers' wallets.
(2) Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis. I'm pretty sure every teacher is allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis. I'm pretty sure this is what teachers do or try to avoid doing with forty to eighty percent of the time, depending on the age and relative naughtiness of the classroom. I'm sure every school is different though and there are exceptions to every rule, but I think this negotiation point is really just saying, school leadership has to do their discipline job too, which I'm sure they're legally obligated to do somehow.
Two to three students who just don't care can easily disrupt a class of strugglers. Moreover, many students who are consistently removed for their behavior do start to straighten up -- sitting in the office is pretty boring. Or maybe they don't eat well, work a job or take care of their siblings while their parents work. Maybe ten or twelve kids like that are in your class of strugglers, and two or three of them don't speak English well or are in an organized gang.
Yes, teachers could misuse this authority. Teachers have classroom authority, and part of the reason we trust them to not misuse this authority is because they have no financial reward for kicking the dumber kids out of class and letting the smart ones get away with it a bit more - not that any teacher I know would do that, but... But if teachers are evaluated by student learning, they must have control over classroom conditions. Agreed. Then the administration can separately decide what to do with constantly disruptive students or those teachers who would rather remove students than teach them. Administration already does this, unless it's a crappy Administration, which of course, this proposal isn't designed or intended to change. We'd have to base Administrator pay on how many highly paid teachers they can keep and maintain or how many of their school's students pass the tests, which is the logical conclusion if you believe pay for performance will work. But keep the issue away from measuring student performance; leave it as a personnel call.
(3) Students who don't achieve "basic" proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.
I agree with this, though I thought this was what NCLB was in part supposed to address, which to my mind it hasn't been successful at. Also, and even more relevant, isn't this what "tracking" is all about - remedial kids get different classes than slow learners, average fast learners, and accelerated learners? Also, even more importantly, do we hold a village outside of Nome, Alaska to the same "basic" proficiency standard as a school in Beverly Hills? Will the state controlled "basic" levels be used as a political tool to regulate how much pay teachers recieve?
And, are we prepared to suddenly not-graduate swaths and droves of high school students and ballooning our budget to keep them in school another year or three while they become sufficiently proficient on paper?
Students who can't prove they know algebra can't take geometry. Agreed, and most of the time very true. If they can't read at a ninth-grade level, they can't take sophomore English -- or, for that matter, sophomore-level history or science, which presumes sophomore-level reading ability. So schools with high levels of brain damaged or non-English speaking students will have the burden of turning their kids into average sophomore-level history, science, math, reading, etc. and do it with less money and a revolving door of poorly paid teachers ... kind of like they do now, with pressure to pass kids to head towards the NCLB goal of 100%.
The right way to assess teachers' performance {pg.2}
Not only is it nearly impossible for these students to learn the new material, but they also slow everyone else as the teacher struggles to find a middle ground. By requiring students to repeat a subject, we can assess both the current and the next teacher based on student progress in an apples-to-apples comparison.
Yeah, I agree sort of, but these are long-standing problems teachers have dealt with (and University research has dealt with) for many many years. I don't see how pay-for-performance stands a better chance at rectifying the difficulty of kids who fall behind and are poorly educated in the end.
Why do I have to be reminding a Stanford education program graduate that the term "average" means some below, some above, and where most are in the middle, thereby neccessitating the idea that there are some who end up below average. If what you are proposing is to not give Forrest Gump a high school diploma at all, that's great, but does that mean he can't get a job as a mailman, or a receptionist, or a clerk of some kind.
So, the risks we're talking about here (granted there are always risks in changing anything) is that if these changes are implemented, and we don't get a sudden renaissance of highly paid spectacular teachers reaching every student in the Union of States, then we'll have a good couple percentiles of citizens with not even a token high school degree to get jobs with. If neocons had their way, I think they'd send them all into the military, but that's just me thinking out loud...
If Race to the Top is to have meaning, we have to be sure that students are actually getting to the top, instead of being stalled midway up the hill while we lie to them about their progress. Agreed that schools need to get tougher; I would counterpropose that we fund rigorous well-appointed summer programs with vouchers for private versions very available, with the greatest percentage of such funding going to the schools with the greatest percentage of failing schools. The teachers at these summer programs must be mandated to be "high performing" highly paid teachers. Even with all the money in the world however, nothing we do will keep some kids from being stalled midway up the hill. Some people die having been ever stalled midway up the hill.
Agreed we shouldn't lie to kids about their progress and be tougher and sterner on them, especially at home.
(4) That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard -- the so-called value-added assessment.
This is the negotiating point I like the best, so let me elaborate on what this could look like. My wife and I discuss this idea often...
It would be great to have an effective pre-test, and post test for every class, to show off what information a teacher has actually imparted to their kids. However, anything other than testing for wrote memorization is and always has been difficult. We want to develop and test kids' cognitive abilities, maturity, creativity, and probably a whole bunch of other areas that I haven't had enough University Education classes yet to know about. This is hard to do; if there was a magic pill we would have taken it by now.
So, give us some more details, otherwise shhhh - precisely because urging there is a problem and pontificating about the various reasons to choose a particular method of solution, without using a lot of hard evidence as support, is a very sophomoric thing to do. Leaders do well who don't jump into solutions merely at the urging of a constituent of a particular profession - a double edged sword, I agree.
I suspect that my conditions will go nowhere, precisely because they are reasonable. Not unreasonable, I agree, though maybe not quite on point, imo. Teachers can't be evaluated on students who miss 10 percent 5% ?of the class or don't have the prerequisite knowledge for success 30%?. Yet accepting these reasonable conditions might reveal that common rhetorical goals for education (everyone goes to college, algebra for eighth-graders) (I'm pretty sure neither of these are common rhetorical goals for education - they sound more like misconceptions by upperclass people who don't know how kids' brains develop and think trade schools are a waste of public money) are, to put it bluntly, impossible. No apology necessary; you're not being negatively "blunt" by stating the obvious. So we'll either continue the status quo at a stalemate or the states will make the tests so easy that the standards are meaningless. I don't want the status quo at all, though I don't percieve the same "stalemate" that this person percieves - though this person taught in California (most populous State, eight of the fifty most populated cities in the U.S., and among the ten largest economies in GDP of the whole world), which I'm sure has way more than it's share of stalemates and meaningless standards alike. Or maybe their cutting edge, I don't know, but I'm just saying, her last sentance here is a false dichotomy which points out one of the major flaws of tying Federal or State funding to a single battery of tests.
Yes, some students are doing poorly because their teachers are terrible. Yet in good schools, seems like I've read a study that shows even terrible teachers manage to teach their bright little eager learners. Other students are doing poorly because they simply don't care, their parents don't care, their cognitive abilities aren't up to the task or some vicious combination of factors we haven't figured out yes, yes, yes-- with no regard to teacher quality. No one is eager to discover the size of that second group, so serious testing with teeth will go nowhere. Actually, I'd say that everyone is eager to find out which students are doing poorly because they don't care, or parents, cognitive..., vicious combination.... This is the job description of school counselors, special ed teachers, and one of the many tasks of all teachers. I would posit that serious testing with teeth will go somewhere since it's totally and completely on the agenda (Obama, and one of the many things I'm in disagreement with our Centrist President about), because State legislatures are apparently already on it, and because there are terrible teachers which ISN'T not a problem (double negative makes positive).
I object to the undertone of the last comment too, "serious testing with teeth will go nowhere." The connotation seems to gin up disgust at the laziness of teachers to police themselves and stonewall reforms, and it makes two errors I see in other such critiques and commentaries:
a. it falsley assumes that deadbeat teachers can't get fired, which is wrong, or assumes that it costs so much in lawyers and meetings and evaluations that no sane administrator would ever fire a teacher. These things may be true some places, but by and large I dare any would-be Demagogues to substantiate this widely held attitude against unions.
b. we know pretty well which students are doing poorly because they don't care, their parents don't care, cognitive... etc. etc. They typically fall in one or several categories: poor, developmentally challenged, hanging out with a bad crowd, or in need of a fire under their butt or purpose in their life. WHO they are isn't the question, and I take offense on behalf of all the teachers in my life at the connotation that teachers don't care about these kids. WHAT to do with these kids is the question teachers, researchers, and administrators have been payed to solve since the beginning of the profession; if you knew the answer to that question every time, you'd have made millions of dollars long long ago.
That's too bad. We need to know how many students are failing because they don't attend class, done how many students score "below basic" on the algebra test three years in a row pretty sure a determined educator could find that out too (unless everyone who taught that kid has gone to a higher paying school district with smarter kids that is), how many students fail all tests because they read at a fourth-grade level. Totally agreed - huge problem in poor and immigrant laden schools. We need to know if our education rhetoric is a pipe dream only a small part of any spectrum of rhetoric will be proven right in the end, but nobody knows which is the right answer making most of it a pipe dream, instead of an achievable reality blocked by those nasty teachers unions. "Nasty" teachers unions made of honorable souls have been lobbying tirelessly for school funding and special programs in local, state, and national legislatures since your parents and granparents formed them to cure the problems of their status quo. I know they aren't popular and that there are issues with them, but quit throwing the baby out with the bath water and quit dishonoring the sacrifices and struggles of those who gave preganant women the right to teach, mandatory bathroom breaks, and who ensure that you can see a lawyer about possible unfair practices by your administrator without having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars on the day you get threatened by your superior. And, of course, if it turns out that all our problems can be solved by rooting out bad teachers, we need to find that out, too. Here here, but of course not all our problems can ever be solved by taking care of one thing, can they?
So if we're going to evaluate teachers based on student results, let's negotiate some reasonable terms -- and let's not flinch from whatever reality those terms reveal.
New Terms:
a. vast effort and rigorous standards will go into making these all powerful tests that decide if every teacher is a good teacher worth keeping or a bad teacher worth dis-incentivizing.
b. teachers in Title 1 schools will be protected so that good teachers stay in these schools where they are most needed.
c. we quit funding disabled kids' educations six to one what we pay for other kids in search of an unrealistic NCLB bull&^$ law, especially those kids who will end up on public assistance and have access to all the government programs to put resources at their fingertips. If society is going to support them (no guarantee I know, and it sounds harsh and unfair to bleeding heart liberals like me) then we shouldn't screw all the other kids out of a fair education because we want 100% out of everybody.
d. any attempt to move towards this new model first be tested on a random sample of test schools, and the results carefully studied.
e. a national law must be passed that school districts fund schools equally per student, so that rich neighborhoods don't have zanily advanced perfect facilities and such while poor schools have multiple code violations and rotting textbooks and whatnot. I think enacting pay for performance without first addressing this issue is itself a poverty of reason.
The writer, a Stanford teacher program graduate, taught geometry, algebra and humanities at Oceana High School in Pacifica, Calif.
The other writer is an incipant know-it-all and gadfly who wishes everyone in the world would think more before they spoke, including himself. He's a consummate screw-up who loves to work in restaurants, hates school and math, but passionately wants to become a math teacher in order to challenge the next generation to grasp logic and make decisions like Mr. Spock and return some of the many favors that were granted to him.
