Teachers comments hit with bullets

The Governor's teacher liaison has published a draft memo condensing over 1,200 educator comments into an awful lot of cut & paste bullet points. As noted by StateImpact, these bullets have been arbitrarily lumped into 5 categories

• Big Concern #1: Who would / could / should evaluate a teacher under this new system?
• Big Concern #2: What would / could / should be used to evaluate a teacher (or administrator) under this new system?
• Big Concern #3: How would / could / should student growth be measured?
• Big Concern #4: How would / could / should this new system lead to a teacher’s growth?
• Big Concern #5: How would / could / should my pay change if we move to performance compensation?

Not included in this document is any mention of collective bargaining, even though a significant number of teachers expressed that local collective bargaining was the best mechanism to formulate evaluations and pay. It's also not possible to determine the weight to apply to any of these bullet points based on either frequency or validity, but as noted, this is a working draft document.

In the mean time we will continue to publish a wide selection of raw comments. The memo can be found below.

Concerns Ideas Memo

When It Comes To How We Use Evidence, Is Education Reform The New Welfare Reform?

Part of our ongoing effort to bring forth interesting articles covering a range of education realted topics.

There are several similarities between the bipartisan welfare reform movement of the 1990s and the general thrust of the education reform movement happening today. For example, there is the reliance on market-based mechanisms to “cure” longstanding problems, and the unusually strong liberal-conservative alliance of the proponents. Nevertheless, while calling education reform “the new welfare reform” might be a good soundbyte, it would also take the analogy way too far.

My intention here is not to draw a direct parallel between the two movements in terms of how they approach their respective problems (poverty/unemployment and student achievement), but rather in how we evaluate their success in doing so. In other words, I am concerned that the manner in which we assess the success or failure of education reform in our public debate will proceed using the same flawed and misguided methods that were used by many for welfare reform.

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The Ethics Of Testing Children Solely To Evaluate Adults

The recent New York Times article, “Tests for Pupils, but the Grades Go to Teachers,” alerts us of an emerging paradox in education – the development and use of standardized student testing solely as a means to evaluate teachers, not students. “We are not focusing on teaching and learning anymore; we are focusing on collecting data,” says one mother quoted in the article. Now, let’s see: collecting data on minors that is not explicitly for their benefit – does this ring a bell?

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The good, the bad and the uncertainty

Following up on our earlier piece, of experts warning of the dangerous of using student test results to evaluate teachers, Greg at Plunderbund brings into view the notion that HB153 also calls for the use of test results to evaluate principals. This brings forth the uncomfortable connundrum of having a faulty grading system grade principals as "unsatisfatory" and then having those very same "unsatisfactory" principals be responsible for evaluating teachers. As Greg notes, with a bit of math

Crunch the numbers with these components in place and we end up with 797 head principals and 412 assistant principals being categorized as “unsatisfactory” who will be assigned the responsibility for evaluating an estimated 22,000 teachers. Now, we don’t know the evaluation category of all of those teachers, but put yourself in the place of one of those professionals who is expected to take advice from an “unsatisfactory” leader. Wouldn’t you be a bit skeptical?

It's time that lawmakers start to get the sense that education is a team sport, not one of individual competition.

Who profits with more testing?

If Ohio's new teacher merit pay framework survives intact in HB153, testing will become an even greater centerpiece of public education. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, spent nearly $2 million to implement 52 tests, so that a new teacher evaluation system could be trialed. 52 tests! $2 million not spent on teaching.

At the center of this effort in North Carolina is the Eli Broad foundation.

Superintendent Peter Gorman may be the face of public education in Charlotte, but is a Los Angeles billionaire the power behind the scenes?

Locally and nationally, skeptics are questioning the clout wielded by Eli Broad. His foundation, which has helped put Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in the national spotlight, has also paid to train Gorman and the school board, and to help CMS hire administrators with a business bent.

This does all lead to an interesting question posed on the pages of the Washington Post today

In addition, who creates, scores, and maintains these tests? This promises to divert taxpayer dollars from the classroom to the testing companies. Handing public dollars over to private testing enterprises is outsourcing the intellectual work teachers train to do: evaluate students. It is a waste we cannot afford and promises further dumbing-down of our nation’s classrooms.

One might wonder if we are sending kids to school to learn or to simply take tests so we can "evaluate" teachers, and of course, hand over tax dollars to for-profit vampire testing companies.