Grading Teachers by the Test - NYTimes.com

Grading Teachers by the Test - NYTimes.com:

Grading Teachers by the Test

In 2004, the Chinese government decided there were too many accidental deaths. China’s safety record, it decreed, should be brought in line with those of other middle-income countries. The State Council set a target: a decline in accidental deaths of 2.5 percent per year.

Provincial authorities kicked into gear. Eventually, 20 out of a total of 31 provinces adopted “no safety, no promotion” policies, hitching bureaucrats’ fate to whether they met the death ceiling. The results rolled in: by 2012 recorded accidental deaths had almost halved.

It wasn’t, however, all about increased safety. For instance, officials could reduce traffic deaths by keeping victims of severe accidents alive for eight days. They counted as accidental deaths only if the victims died within seven.

In a study of China’s declining deadly accidents, Raymond Fisman of Columbia University and Yongxiang Wang of the University of Southern California concluded that “manipulation played a dominant role.” Bureaucrats — no surprise — cheated.

This is hardly unusual. It is certainly not exclusive to China. These days, in fact, it has acquired particular importance in the debate over how to improve American education.

The question is, what will happen when teachers are systematically rewarded, or punished, based to some extent on standardized tests? If we really want our children to learn more, the design of any system must be carefully thought through, to avoid sending incentives astray.

“When you put a lot of weight on one measure, people will try to do well on that measure,” Jonah Rockoff of Columbia said. “Some things they do will be good, in line with the objectives. Others will amount to cheating or gaming the system.”

The phenomenon is best known as Goodhart’s Law, after the British economist Charles Goodhart. Luis Garicano at the London School of Economics calls it the Heisenberg Principle of incentive design, after the defining uncertainty of quantum physics: A performance metric is only useful as a performance metric as long as it isn’t used as a performance metric.

It shows up all over the place. Some hospitals in the United States, for example, will often do whatever it takes to keep patients alive at least 31 days after an operation, to beat Medicare’s 30-day survival yardstick. Last year, Chicago magazine uncovered how the Chicago Police Departmentachieved declining crime rates, simply by reclassifying incidents as 

“We don’t know how big a deal this is,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has criticized evaluation metrics based on test scores. “It is one of the main concerns.”

American education has embarked upon a nationwide experiment in incentive design. Prodded by the Education Department, most states have set up evaluation systems for teachers built on the gains of their students on standardized tests, alongside more traditional criteria like evaluations from principals.

Fourteen more states are expected to have fully developed systems this academic year, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality — an advocacy group that supports rigorous assessments. All but six states are expected to have one by the 2016-17 school year.

The assessments are backed by sophisticated research. An important study by Professor Rockoff and two Harvard professors, Raj Chetty and John Friedman, found that teachers who improved students’ scores, termed high value-added teachers, raised the students’ chances of going to college as well as their salaries later in life.

But teachers — and parents — are up in arms. In New York, the teachers’ union strongly opposes Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to increase the weight of test scores to 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. The governor is being hammered over the issue in opinion polls.

“People who claim to be market-based reformers want to sell the theory noncriminal.

Grading Teachers by the Test - NYTimes.com:

Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests - The Washington Post

Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests - The Washington Post:
Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests

 Emily Talmage is an elementary school teacher in Lewiston, Maine who did some research on the new Common Core tests that her students are taking this spring. In Maine, students are taking the Maine Educational Assessments in math and English Language Arts, developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the two multi-state consortia given a total of some $360 million in federal funds to develop new exams that align with the Core standards. In this post, Talmage reports on what she found.

By Emily Talmage

As a teacher of 20 vibrant, curious, and, yes, often challenging fourth graders at Montello Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine, I constantly search for ways to improve my students’ learning experiences and to understand what will best help them succeed.  So, like many teachers around the state, as I began hearing about the new Smarter Balanced Tests (or MEA) that we are required to give our students this spring, I wanted to know how it would help me with the daily task of getting twenty learners to grow their hearts and minds in meaningful ways.

Here is a brief summary of what I have discovered.

First, no matter what my students and I do, statistics have already shown that my students will more than likely fall below proficient on this test.  In the field test given a year ago, 91 percent of English Language Learners and nearly 80 percent of low-income students did not meet proficient.  My class is comprised of 40 percent English language learners and nearly 100 percent are low-income.  Because new state legislation (required by the federal government if we are to keep valuable sources of funding) has already passed that will link my students results to my professional evaluation, this does not bode well for me or for my colleagues.  School “grades” are suspended for one year because we do not yet have baseline data for these tests, but it does not take a statistician to predict that schools like mine, with high levels of poverty and English language learners, will not look particularly good to the public once results are released in 2016.

Second, “assessment experts” (which seem to be primarily business consultants) within major, for-profit corporations like McGraw-Hill, AIR, and ETS were at the forefront of developing these tests.  Throughout the process, some teachers were asked for “input” (I was not one of them and I don’t know any teachers who were), but I have found it impossible to discern in what way this input was actually applied.  Instead, a number of math and literacy experts have said publicly that many test items are far above grade level and are developmentally inappropriate.  It is unclear why their advice was not heeded. Meanwhile, billionaires like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch have espoused the incredible potential these tests have to grow the education market. I am certain that they would pleased to know that in Lewiston, we have already clamored to purchase Common Core-aligned products designed by the same companies that have built these tests.

Third, many teachers in states giving the Smarter Balanced Test were encouraged to hear that unlike its well-known counterpart, the PARCC, our particular version of the Common Core Assessment would be “adaptive,” meaning that it would adjust to student’s ability level as they progressed through the test.  Some teachers, including myself, find that adaptive tests can be somewhat more useful than those that simply label students according to their level of proficiency, as they have the potential to gauge Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests - The Washington Post:

America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox

America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox:
America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters

 By the time a student finishes college, more money is spent on his or her education in America than in nearly every other country in the world.

That's because the US, compared with other developed countries, spends a lot on education. Yet all that money is yielding only middling results on international tests.

So why is American education so expensive? Partly because other social spending is low; education is expected to play a bigger role in social mobility, particularly for low-income students. And partly because education is mostly a state and local policy issue, so the way the money is spent isn't always equally distributed or particularly logical. School districts in some states spend more to educate wealthy students than poorer ones.

Court cases have forced states to divide the money more equally. But often that just increases the overall pot of money rather than redistributing it — even though the spending increases appear to make a difference in students' lives.

1) The US spends more on education but less on other social programs

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has promised to cut domestic spending. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The US spends the most per student of any nation in the developed world: $15,171 per student in 2011. The average in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was just $9,313.

That number factors in spending by everyone, not just governments. And it includes higher education — which is more expensive in the US than anywhere else in the world. Still, even when you look just at K-12, the US is spending more on each student than most other countries.

The US spends $11,193 for each student at the primary levels, more than all but three other nations — Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg. Those three, as well as Austria, also spend more than the US on secondary education. The US spends $12,464 per student on high school.

But nations that spend less on education are faring far better on international tests, and the US isn't seeing bigger scores as a result of its larger spending. Poland, Finland, and South Korea, where 15-year-olds performed better on those 2012 tests than American students, spend less per student than the US does.

There are a few possible explanations for this. The first is that the US spends less on social programs than some other countries. Finland spends much less per student than the US. But it spends more to reduce poverty, and across the OECD, students in poverty have lower test scores than their higher-income peers. The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world — five times higher than Finland's. The money Finland spends to close that gap doesn't show up in the school spending numbers.

Another explanation is that US education is simply inefficient and could be better run without additional spending. Poland, for example, has made dramatic improvements in its students' performance on international tests while still spending much less per student than the US does. Even when education spending is expressed as a share of the economy, South Korea spends about as much per student as the US does and sees much better results.

2) Teachers in the US make more than teachers in other countries, but less than other American college-educated workers

(Shutterstock)

About 60 percent of the $12,608 spent on each public school student in the US in the 2010-'11 school year went to instruction — paying and providing benefits to teachers and teachers' aides.

When compared with teachers in other countries, American teachers are generally well-paid:they make more at all points in their career than the average for teachers in the OECD. But teaching isn't a particularly well-paid profession anywhere. In all OECD countries, teachers make less than the average person with a bachelor's degree.

Because American salaries for people with a bachelor's degree are unusually high, that gap is wider in the US than anywhere else. In other words, teachers are well-paid by international standards for teachers. But they're underpaid by the standards of what college graduates in the US generally make.

Schools spend much more per student today than in 1970 — more than twice that amount, after adjusting for inflation — in part because they employ many more teachers than they used to. There are now about 12 students for every teacher employed by a school, down from 22 students per teacher in 1970. (Salaries have increased only slightly: after adjusting for inflation, public school teachers make about 10 percent more today than in 1970.)

Part of the reason education spending has increased is because the number of children with disabilities has grown much faster than the general population of students, and schools are now required to educate them. Special education students cost, on average, about twice as much to educate as other students. So one reason education in the US has become more America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox:

Record Charter-School Defaults Underscored by Albany Closings - Bloomberg Business

Record Charter-School Defaults Underscored by Albany Closings - Bloomberg Business:
Record Charter-School Defaults Underscored by Albany Closings

(Bloomberg) -- Charter schools are selling a record amount of municipal debt. For investors, the challenge is that defaults by the publicly funded, privately run institutions have also never been higher.

Underscoring the risk to bondholders such as Nuveen Asset Management, two New York schools are set to shut at the end of this school year after their charters were revoked this month for academic shortcomings. The closings represent a default under terms of the $15 million bond deal that financed the land acquisition and construction of Brighter Choice’s middle schools for boys and girls, which opened in 2010 under the same roof.

While charter schools are gaining popularity across the U.S. as an alternative to local systems, their default rate reached an all-time high last year of 5 percent of outstanding issues, according to a biannual study by the New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corp. That’s up from 3.8 percent in 2012.

“Charter schools not only wrestle with financial operations and student demand, but also with maintaining their charter, which is highly dependent on their educational outcomes,” said Matt Fabian, a partner at Concord, Massachusetts-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics.

Record Haul

The schools began tapping the $3.5 trillion municipal market in 1998 and have issued about $10.4 billion of bonds in 800 transactions, according to Local Initiatives Support Corp., a community-development organization. Last year’s tally of about $2 billion was the most yet, according to Municipal Market Analytics.

While accounting for less than 1 percent of sales, the schools are gaining stature in the tax-exempt market as enrollment climbs. The institutions enrolled 4.6 percent of U.S. public school students in 2013, up from 2.1 percent a decade ago, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

For investors who can stomach the risk, the securities offer a way to pad returns.

Brighter Choice obligations sold for the middle schools and maturing in July 2042 priced three years ago to yield 7.5 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was about 4 percentage points above benchmark munis.

Fitch Ratings cut the debt March 20 to C, 11 steps below investment grade. The tax-exempt bonds were sold through a Phoenix industrial development authority.

Securities sold for Brighter Choice’s elementary schools and that mature in April 2020 traded last month at about par, to yield 4.75 percent, or about 4.2 percentage points above benchmark debt, Bloomberg data show. Fitch grades the bonds B+, seven steps above the middle-school debt.

Bond Compliance

The State University of New York Charter Schools Institute’s board of directors, which oversees authorization, voted not to renew the middle schools’ charters this month, even as the organization reported compliance with bond covenants, according to Mahati Tonk, the institute’s director of charter-school information. Brighter Choice’s two elementary Record Charter-School Defaults Underscored by Albany Closings - Bloomberg Business:

 

Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?

Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?:

Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?

 Teaching is often viewed as a noble profession. Almost everyone in society has a strong connection to a teacher: Either their mom or other family member has been in the classroom for an entire career, their sixth-grade teacher changed the course of their life, or they realize the value of education in the workplace that follows. Many of the posts online about the nobility of teaching come from those in the profession themselves, who attest to the ways in which teaching has changed their lives for the better.

These are the reasons why talking about bad teachers, and how to replace them, becomes so difficult. It’s not easy to talk about a group of people who are disparaging the nobility built up around a profession, because too often it seems like an attack on the rest of the teachers, too. But teachers, and the unions that represent them, know there are a few among them who aren’t performing to par. Who, in fact, are doing the profession an injustice.

“No one wants bad teachers in classrooms,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in a discussion about education policies with the Aspen Institute. The AFT is the second largest teachers union in the country, and in this past year opposed a lawsuit that claimed the number of unsuitable teachers in California created an unequal learning environment for the state’s students. The AFT’s opposition wasn’t because the lawsuit sought to change tenure practices or fire the bad apples. Instead, Weingarten said she and the union opposed the court proceedings because the legal action pitted students against teachers.

The heart of the issue for firing bad teachers most recently was the focus of a court case in California, brought by nine students within the state and backed by Students Matter, a coalition of Silicon Valley businessmen led by entrepreneur David Welch. Though some of the articles to follow, including Time’s coverage in its November issue, garnered fierce criticism by the teaching community, it did point out that it was the first case to link the quality of a teacher with a student’s right to an education.

According to the decision in Vergara v. California, Judge Rolf M. Treu found that the effect of “grossly ineffective” teachers have adverse affects on the education students receive. “The evidence is compelling,” Treu wrote in his decision. “Indeed, it shocks the conscience.” Treu cites findings from experts who testified in the case: One ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings within a single year. Based on a four-year study, students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) who were taught by a teacher in the bottom 5% of competence lost 9.54 months of learning in a single year, compared to students with average teachers.

Teacher tenure

One of the main contentions within the court case, and the larger discussion of firing underperforming teachers, is that tenure often protects the people who are making egregious errors in the classroom. LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy testified in the case on behalf of the students, saying that the tenure laws in California as they stood were “patently problematic.”

In practice, lifelong tenure in the state is determined in 14-16 months of a teacher beginning his or her career in any public school, Deasy called this a “ridiculous” short amount of time that doesn’t accurately reflect the teacher’s abilities or means of evaluating whether they are deserving of such status. Plus, the overwhelming majority of teachers receive tenure without incident. In the L.A. district for example, the rate of teachers denied tenure in years past has been as low as 2%. Deasy and Weingarten discuss the court case in depth in the video posted above.Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?:

Q&A: Arne Duncan Talks Testing, Turnarounds, and ESEA at Age 50 - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Q&A: Arne Duncan Talks Testing, Turnarounds, and ESEA at Age 50 - Politics K-12 - Education Week:
Q&A: Arne Duncan Talks Testing, Turnarounds, and ESEA at Age 50

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has less than two years left in office with the Obama administration, and lots of initiatives in the middle of implementation, including school turnarounds, teacher evaluation through student outcomes, and—oh, yeah—a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act. 

Both halves of Politics K-12 sat down with him this week. One big take-away? Duncan is really excited that graduation rates have hit a new high and that traditionally overlooked populations of students are making gains. In fact, he brought up the good grad rate news in answer to just about every question we asked him, whether it was on the federal role in education, NCLB waivers, school turnarounds, or Race to the Top. (We edited much of that out, for brevity. But it's clearly something he wants to hammer home as folks start to take stock of whether NCLB, and the Obama administration's K-12 policies, have been effective.) 

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation. (A few lines have been slightly paraphrased for clarity):

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act turns 50 next month. What do you think we've learned over the past 50 years about the federal role? Where do you see it going forward?

Yes, it's an education law, but it's a civil rights law. That is at the heart of what this thing is. ... The things that I think make sense for the federal government to be doing ... I think, are one, just a focus on equity.  ... For me, that means we would love to see more focus on early-childhood education. ... We would love to increase resources for Title I children. ... We want to continue to be able to turn around underperforming schools. ... [Also] this focus on innovation and sharing best practices and putting resources behind what's working ...  And so [among] those ...a focus on equity and a focus on innovation and a focus on excellence, I think are very appropriate, I would even say critical, for the right federal role. 

You've mentioned, even as recently as Monday at the Council of Chief State School Officers, that increased aid for Title I and a new investment in prekindergarten are your top priorities for ESEA. But both of these ideas seem unlikely to be embraced by Republicans who are eager to slim down the federal role. So some folks, when they saw those comments said, "Oh, the administration isn't really interested in reauthorizing this law." Is that fair? Is that what you were trying to get at? 

I just disagree with the premise, because I look at Republican governors all over the country who are putting huge resources behind early-childhood education. And New Mexico, Nevada, Alabama, you go right down the list.  ... This is an absolutely bipartisan issue, in the real world. If there wasn't a demand for this, I wouldn't be trying so hard to meet that demand ... I don't think it's a partisan issue, I mean, I know it's not. ...We have more Republican governors investing in early-childhood education than we do Democratic. ... The real world is working on this stuff, and we just want to get folks in Washington to look at the real world and meet that need.

The waiver renewals you're working on now will extend beyond your administration, and I know you're hoping for a reauthorization of the law. But are you worried, if that reauthorization doesn't happen, that you have opened the door to the next administration coming in and putting their priorities in place in exchange for getting out of the mandates of NCLB—for instance, expanding school choice?

We have tried to put our best thinking forward. ... I know we've done this imperfectly, but I think we've done a really good job. ... We try to, as best we can, have the principles of being very tight on goals, but much looser on how we get there, and we're learning every day how to be a good partner. ...

The easiest [thing] to do would have been to not do waivers. And just [to have] lived with a broken law and our jobs would have all been a lot easier here. But we would have hurt kids, and we came here to help kids, and we feel really proud of what we've done. ... Again, the law needs to be fixed. And if somehow the law isn't, then you hope the next administration builds upon things we did well and corrects some things, does some things better. ...

Obviously, during your first term, standardized tests really formed a backbone of your agenda in policies like teacher evaluation and dramatic school turnarounds, and now you're talking about paring back the number of tests. Did you have a change of heart here?

I think you're, I want to say, misremembering. A big thing we did in the waivers from the start was to reduce the focus on a single test score. ... What we did was move away from proficiency, we moved to growth and gain, and what you see in so many state accountability systems is going way beyond Q&A: Arne Duncan Talks Testing, Turnarounds, and ESEA at Age 50 - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Teachers union calls for MiSis meeting with LAUSD, state superintendent

Teachers union calls for MiSis meeting with LAUSD, state superintendent:

Teachers union calls for MiSis meeting with LAUSD, state superintendent

In an effort to avoid losing millions of dollars because of a failed record-keeping system, the president of the teachers union called Tuesday for Los Angeles Unified’s superintendent to travel with him to Sacramento and explain the MiSiS crisis to California’s top education chief.

District officials estimate losses of up to $47 million, in part because the system bungled attendance records the state usually requires to determine funding levels.

“The state has a process that ensures school districts are not penalized when there’s an earthquake or a blizzard that affects attendance,” United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl said. “MiSiS is worse than an earthquake and blizzard together in terms of the amount of attendance count loss here.”

California law allows State Superintendent Tom Torlakson to waive the attendance reporting if records have been lost or destroyed, California Department of Education spokeswoman Pam Slater said in a written statement. LAUSD has yet to make such a request, Slater said.

MiSiS launched at the start of the school year, losing attendance records, transcripts, class schedules, grades and other information needed for campuses to operate. Students were left stranded in the wrong classes for weeks. Teachers reverted to taking attendance on paper forms from decades ago.

While district officials continue to reconcile the bungled records, they are not prepared to say precisely how much money will be lost as a direct result of MiSiS, Assistant General Counsel John Walsh said. Without a waiver from Torlakson, district officials will need to nail down and substantiate their figures by the state’s April 21 deadline.

LAUSD reported an average daily attendance of 513,765.9 to the state in January. The preliminary figure is down from the 532,932.8 reported last year, according to LAUSD figures.

The district anticipates losing an additional $10 million due to declining Teachers union calls for MiSis meeting with LAUSD, state superintendent:

SES IS A MESS: Private tutor system falters under No Child Left Behind | www.kirotv.com

Private tutor system falters under No Child Left Behind | www.kirotv.com:

Private tutor system falters under No Child Left Behind

OLYMPIA, Wash. — 

About 1,000 students who need extra help in Seattle and Tacoma school districts are not getting the tutors they signed up for.

Since Washington became the only state in the nation to lose its waiver for the No Child Left Behind policy, schools have had to come into compliance with the controversial federal standards.

The loss of the waiver centered around the state Legislature’s unwillingness to sign a bill requiring standardized test scores to be part of teacher evaluations.

The No Child Left Behind standards include having all children performing at grade level. Most schools in the state, even high-performing ones, do not meet that goal and are thus labeled “failing.”

The greatest effect falls on Title I schools, where there are many students in poverty. Some federal funds designated for low-income students are no longer in local districts’ control.

Instead, some of the money must be used on third-party, private tutors, rather than in-school staff.

Becky Padilla signed up her son for tutoring in Tacoma.

“I filled out the paperwork, hadn’t heard anything by January, so I called the district. They said to call the tutoring company that I chose, and I did. They said there was this backlog of background checks,” Padilla said.

She called the situation a nightmare.

She and a couple dozen parents rallied in front of the Washington Education Association office in Olympia Tuesday. They delivered thousands of signatures to them, and to state lawmakers, hoping Senate Bill 5748 would help regain the state’s waiver.

A House committee on education will hear the issue next Monday.

The bill, similar to one that failed last year, would implement test scores into teacher evaluations.

Rich Wood, a spokesperson for the Washington Education Association, called the rally a “stunt,” focusing on a bill that does not help students.

As for test scores, Wood said, “There’s a tremendous backlash, and this bill and the groups that are supporting it are just part of that problem. Again, they’re drawing the attention away from the small class sizes and the fully funded schools our kids deserve here in Washington.”

Meanwhile, KIRO 7 called several school districts in the area to see how the loss of the No Child Left Behind waiver has affected their programs.

A Seattle Public Schools spokesperson said 450 students out of the 881 who signed up for private tutoring are still waiting to receive services.

A Tacoma Public Schools spokesperson said 500 out of 1,065 students who signed up for tutoring have not yet gotten a tutor. The fear last spring of losing preschools and staff has been avoided, by redirecting other, local tax dollars.

At Everett Public Schools, a spokesperson there said some private tutors were unreliable and Private tutor system falters under No Child Left Behind | www.kirotv.com:

SES IS A MESS: Impacts of Title I Supplemental Educational Services on Student Achievement http://bit.ly/1ijuvGD

The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher — The Atlantic

The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher — The Atlantic:

The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher

When kids can get their lessons from the Internet, what's left for classroom instructors to do?

 Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it’s enough to say that the role is shifting from "content expert" to "curriculum facilitator." Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The "virtual class" will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country’s best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.

I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a "tech") to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the "tech" won’t require the extensive education and training of today’s teachers, the teacher’s union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the "techs" can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore "individualized"); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system.

"So if you want to be a teacher," I tell the college student, "you better be a super-teacher."

I used to think I was kidding, or at least exaggerating. Now I’m not so sure. When I consulted a local career counselor who is on the brink of retirement after a lifetime in the public schools, he said I was wrong about my prediction—but only about it taking 20 years. "Try five or 10," he said.

I smiled and laughed, and then suddenly stopped. I thought about how many times I had heard the phrase "teacher as facilitator" over the past year. I recalled a veteran teacher who recently said with anguish, "we used to be appreciated as experts in our field." I thought about the last time I walked into a local bookstore, when the employee asked if she could order a book for me from Amazon. Are teachers going the way of local bookstores? Suddenly I felt like the frog in the pot of water, feeling a little warm, wondering if I was going to have to jump before I retire in 20 years. Try five or 10.

I started reflecting. A decade and a half ago, I dedicated two years toward earning a master’s degree in English literature; this training included a couple of pedagogy courses, and it focused on classic literature, the nature of reading and writing, and the best ways to teach it. A decade ago, my school sent me to an Advanced Placement English conference at which I studied literary analysis for three days. As with the graduate program, I don’t remember the conference involving technology—it was simply the teacher, students, andThe Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher — The Atlantic:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and teacher evaluations: Standardized test scores are the wrong place to focus.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and teacher evaluations: Standardized test scores are the wrong place to focus.:

Value Subtracted

Gov. Cuomo’s plan to tie teacher evaluations to test scores won’t help our public schools.

 New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposal for overhauling how teachers are evaluated, compensated, and protected from losing their jobs appears to be meeting stiff resistance from the state legislature, which may create a special commission as a next step. The most controversial element of Cuomo’s plan would tie 50 percent of reading and math teachers’ evaluations to their students’ standardized test scores.

If the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of teaching, depending so much on highly unreliable scores is likely to be counterproductive. A much more effective and proven approach is to promote team-based, data-driven support systems to help teachers become better at their jobs, day in and day out.    

Currently, teacher ratings are primarily based on principals’ evaluations, sometimes in combination with parent or student surveys. Few would argue for retaining the status quo, which provides minimal useful feedback to teachers. But embracing standardized test scores because of their purported objectivity is a false promise. Abundant research shows that test scores are a poor proxy for teacher quality and that adopting them will make it harder to implement changes that are proven to help student outcomes. 

New York is running behind the national stampede toward incorporating “objective” measures of student performance in evaluating teachers. Drawing from the vernacular of economics and business, such “value-added” measures suggest that the worth of teachers can be derived from comparing how their students’ standardized test scores change over the course of a school year. The Obama administration has used its Race to the Top grants and waivers of No Child Left Behind requirements to push states to adopt value-added provisions, which are championed by well-heeled foundations as well as conservative critics of teachers’ unions. From 2010 to 2013, the number of states requiring that teacher evaluations include standardized test scores soared from 16 to 41, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. As of September 2013, 35 states’ and the District of Columbia’s public schools require that standardized test scores be counted as either a significant or the most significant factor in teacher evaluations.

Using test scores to judge teachers isn’t just ineffective. It risks draining the lifeblood of otherwise vital schools.

Bad ideas tend to blossom in vacuums, and no one can cogently defend the old-fashioned teacher evaluation system that held sway throughout most of the past century. Typically, a principal would conduct one or two visits to each classroom a year and then grade the entire faculty as satisfactory or better. In New York last year, 96 percent of teachers were rated either effective or highly effective, much like Lake Wobegone’s entirely above-average student body.

Clearly teachers need to be held to higher standards and receive meaningful feedback about their strengths and weaknesses, as teachers’ unions generally acknowledge. But there are better ways of replacing this transparently feckless system.

The research identifies three basic, persistent problems with value-added methods ofGov. Andrew Cuomo and teacher evaluations: Standardized test scores are the wrong place to focus.:

Group founded by Michelle Rhee funds governor’s field trip to New Orleans. | Get Schooled

Group founded by Michelle Rhee funds governor’s field trip to New Orleans. | Get Schooled:

Group founded by Michelle Rhee funds governor’s field trip to New Orleans.

 On the political front this morning, there’s both good and bad news for Gov. Nathan Deal’s bruising campaign to win support for his Opportunity School District.

First, the AJC reports Deal ignored his own executive order banning most gifts from lobbyist and let a pro-charter schools group and top contributor to the state GOP, StudentsFirst, to underwrite for a legislative fact-finding trip to New Orleans last month. StudentsFirst was founded by former Washington, D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee.

The governor took a field trip to New Orleans to see the post-Katrina schools and allowed StudentsFirst to pick up the tab.  (AJC File Photo)

This bending of the gift rules is just one indicator of how important Deal views his proposal to create a state district to absorb failing schools. When the House Education Committee voted Monday on the resolution and bill to create the district, the chairman allowed former committee members to vote, a practice that seemed to have fallen out of favor due to the obvious ethical questions.

Clearly, the governor is not taking any chances. Senate Bill 133 and Senate Resolution 287 could reach the House floor Friday. The package has already passed the state Senate.

On the brighter side for the governor, DeKalb Superintendent Michael Thurmond offered qualified support Tuesday for Deal’s proposal to seize control of failing schools, of which 25 DeKalb schools now qualify.

But Thurmond wants the plan to exclude failing schools showing improvement. If that change was made, DeKalb would only have two schools left on the failing list.

While it may make sense to exempt schools on an upward trajectory, an exemption for schools showing progress would dramatically reduce the statewide list of 137 failing schools, thus defeating the purpose of the state launching its own district.

(Speaking of the state creating its own district, I will post later today a look at the district the state now runs – the schools that serve 7,000 kids in detention centers around the state.)

There is a lot of debate already underway on the MyAJC story on StudentsFirst paying for Deal and company to visit schools in New Orleans. (The AJC sent three staffers on the trip, but picked up the costs.)

The AJC reported:

The two-day trip for Deal and other officials, estimated to cost $14,336, offers fresh evidence of how elastic Georgia’s ethics policies can be in the hands of the elected officials who make them.

Deal’s office claims the trip was allowed despite the governor’s own executive order that limits lobbyist gifts to $25. The order, signed his first day in office and intended to set an example for state government, places strict limits on lobbyist spending for executive branch staff. Food, travel and other expenses paid for by lobbyists are Group founded by Michelle Rhee funds governor’s field trip to New Orleans. | Get Schooled:

The Stealth Campaign Against Public Schools and the Public Space:

The Stealth Campaign Against Public Schools and the Public Space

MARCH 25, 2015 BY NANCY BAILEY LEAVE A COMMENT

By Sheila Resseger, M.A.

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation’s competitive needs. 

Jonathan Kozol

Our children, our families, our neighborhoods, our public schools, and our democracy itself have become pawns in a vast and inter-connected scheme to undermine public institutions for private profit. The vehicle for this travesty in the arena of education is the Common Core State (sic) (Stealth) Standards and their accompanying high-stakes standardized testing—PARCC or SBAC. This incessant testing, orchestrated to be taken on computers, intensifies the myth that 21st century teaching depends on the innovation of software programs that “personalize” education for each child. Nothing could be further from the truth. The entrenched belief that accounting/accountability, i.e. data collection, is the answer to lagging scores on standardized tests as compared to other nations is a travesty.

Human beings learn from other human beings. Human beings are inspired to learn in trusted relationships. The factory model of standardization and culling of the defective is antithetical to a diverse, democratic society. This is a travesty of the extreme right wing (e.g. ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council), the Democratic left (e.g. Democrats for Education Reform and the White House), the business community (e.g. the Chamber of Commerce), and the ed tech entrepreneurs/corporatists (e.g. Bill Gates/Microsoft), with the willing collusion of the federal Department of Education. Critics of this “innovative” strategy are accused of wallowing in the status quo. It is true that the status quo is unacceptable, but the remedies of the corporatists and their ilk are making the situation infinitely worse. And “cui bono” (for whose benefit)? For the benefit of edupreneurs, hedge fund managers, and those bent on the gentrification of trodden down neighborhoods.

Consider the stealthy way the drafters of the Common Core State (sic) Standards were selected. Why were primarily representatives from the college testing industry included (SAT and ACT), when k-12 classroom teachers, specialists in early childhood education, teachers of special needs students, and authorities on students learning English as a The Stealth Campaign Against Public Schools and the Public Space:

To My Readers: An Opportunity to Escape My Terrible Influence | deutsch29

To My Readers: An Opportunity to Escape My Terrible Influence | deutsch29:

To My Readers: An Opportunity to Escape My Terrible Influence

On March 19, 2015, I wrote a post about doxxing.

On March 22, 2015, I wrote a sequel.

The very short definition of doxxing is the publicizing of personally identifiable information on another. Doxxing has its history in the malicious release of private personal information to the public.

What prompted me to write about this issue is that a fellow blogger was accused on Twitter of endangering an individual for his linking to a publicly available property tax document that included a home address.

My position on the issue is that as a researcher, I have no problem linking to public documents, such as nonprofit tax forms and individual resumes. I will not alter the documents by removing personal information. And I have no problem with someone linking to public documents one me if that person is investigating me, especially given that I am in the public eye.

That is where I stand on the issue, in good conscience.

There are those who strongly disagree with me. They insist that I should purge any personally identifiable information (home addresses, phone numbers) even if the document is readily available to the public through expected, legitimate means.

They are concerned that I am leading my readers astray with my position on my own “doxxing.”

Fear not.

In this post, I offer my readers the opportunity to see the light that I apparently refuse to see. As such, I will present some of the commentary from my second post, Doxxing: The Sequel. (Feel free to read the comments section in its entirety.)

Let me begin with my first exchange with a man named Michael Feldstein. (I will not link to his site, but he can be found easily enough via Google should one be so To My Readers: An Opportunity to Escape My Terrible Influence | deutsch29: