Bill Gates Dances Around the Teacher Evaluation Disaster He Sponsored

No one in America has done more to promote the raising of stakes for test scores in education than Bill Gates.

Yesterday, Mr. Gates published a column that dances around the disaster his advocacy has created in the schools of our nation.

You can read his words there, but his actions have spoken so much more loudly, that I cannot even make sense out of what he is attempting to say now. So let's focus first on what Bill Gates has wrought.

No Child Left Behind was headed towards bankruptcy about seven years ago. The practice of labeling schools as failures and closing them, on the basis of test scores, was clearly causing a narrowing of the curriculum. Low income schools in Oakland eliminated art, history and even science in order to focus almost exclusively on math and reading. The arrival of Arne Duncan and his top level of advisors borrowed from the Gates Foundation created the opportunity for a re-visioning of the project.

Both the Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers processes required states and districts to put in place teacher and principal evaluation systems which placed "significant" weight on test scores. This was interpreted by states to mean that test scores must count for at least 30% to 50% of an evaluation.

The Department of Education had told the states how high they had to jump, and the majority did so.

[readon2 url="http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/04/bill_gates_dances_around_the.html"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Hard to measure love

Ripped from the comments of this Gates Foundation booster article in the NYT, discussing the measurement of teacher effectiveness

It's almost the end of an exhausting school year, and all I can do is laugh when I read articles like this. I'm supposed to be a "teacher," which I guess means I'm supposed to "instruct" students, and the "effectiveness" of my instruction seems to be what the Gates Foundation claims it's trying to assess. But since I've spent a large amount of my time over the last several months serving as the de facto counselor for teenagers who are depressed, anxious, suicidal, self-injurious, suffering from eating disorders, living in chaotic and destructive family situations, lonely, isolated, scared, and confused, teenagers for whom I am for whatever reason the go-to "trusted adult," I've come to the conclusion that the most important thing I have to offer my students is love. Try to measure that.

Few in the corporate education reform movement grasp this kind of sentiment and reality, which is one reason there is such a large disconnect between those in the classroom delivering education policy and those in the boardroom's making education policy.

How does this manifest itself in the real world? From the Gates article

All along, Gates says, he had been asking questions about teacher effectiveness. How do you measure it? What are the skills that make a teacher great? “It was mind-blowing how little it had been studied,” he told me. So, with the help of Thomas Kane, an education professor at Harvard, the Gates Foundation began videotaping some 3,000 teachers across the country. It also collected lots of other data to measure whether a teacher was effective. All of this work, Kane says, was aimed at “identifying the practices that are associated with student achievement.”

With a wealth of data now in hand, the Gates Foundation was ready for the next step: trying to create a personnel system that not only measured teacher effectiveness but helped teachers improve. Although pilot projects have been announced in four school districts, the one that is furthest along is in Hillsborough County, Fla. That district, which is dominated by Tampa, is in the second year of a seven-year, $100 million grant.

Only 2 years into the pilot program, tension is mouinting in Hillsbrough

Don't count school board member Stacy White as a fan of the teacher evaluation system in Hillsborough County public schools.

"I am not saying that we should not hold teachers accountable," White said today at a workshop on the topic. "But you can put me down as a critic of EET as it stands in its current form."

Empowering Effective Teachers, the evaluation system put in place after the school district accepted a seven-year, $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is nearing the end of its second year.

But the controversy around it is not by any means nearing its end.

"Our teachers feel often times that what they have is Big Brother coming in the classroom to watch over them," White said. "Folks view the peer position as the man or the woman in the black hat."

In fact, in some cases the situation is becoming so tense, one teacher has been suspending for protesting

A veteran teacher was suspended Thursday for rejecting the evaluator chosen for him under a Gates-funded initiative that is revolutionizing the way the Hillsborough County School District assesses its teachers.

School and union officials believe this is the first such act of defiance under Empowering Effective Teachers, a complex system of mentoring and evaluation funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The district's action comes just one day after the couple themselves, Bill and Melinda Gates, toured Jefferson High School, where the computer mogul hailed the program as a national model and called its success "phenomenal."

Joseph Thomas, 43, a social studies teacher at Newsome High School, said he refused to schedule a peer observation because he feels the evaluator, Justin Youmans, is not qualified to judge him.

Youmans, 29, has his experience teaching elementary school and sixth grade, according to his school district biography. "He thinks like an elementary school teacher," said Thomas, a teacher for 18 years.

These concerns have also been exressed in Ohio. Who will perform the hundreds of tohusands of observations, and will they be suitably qualified in the subject and grade areas they are observing? This is a big question, and relates directly to scaling the concept of multiple classroom observations. What sounds simple in theory, in practice is complex, expensive, and judging by the experiences in Florida, controversial.

You can't do reforms like these on the cheap, let alone in a revenue declining environemt, yet that is what is being attempted.

New Gates Study on teacher evaluations

A new Gates study released today finds effective teacher evaluations require high standards, with multiple measures.

ABOUT THIS REPORT: This report is intended for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the implications of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project’s interim analysis of classroom observations. Those wanting to explore all the technical aspects of the study and analysis also should read the companion research report, available at www.metproject.org.

Together, these two documents on classroom observations represent the second pair of publications from the MET project. In December 2010, the project released its initial analysis of measures of student perceptions and student achievement in Learning about Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. Two more reports are planned for mid-2012: one on the implications of assigning weights to different measures; another using random assignment to study the extent to which student assignment may affect teacher effectiveness results. ABOUT THE MET PROJECT: The MET project is a research partnership of academics, teachers, and education organizations committed to investigating better ways to identify and develop effective teaching. Funding is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The report provides for 3 takeaways.

High-quality classroom observations will require clear standards, certified raters, and multiple observations per teacher. Clear standards and high-quality training and certification of observers are fundamental to increasing inter-rater reliability. However, when measuring consistent aspects of a teacher’s practice, reliability will require more than inter- rater agreement on a single lesson. Because teaching practice varies from lesson to lesson, multiple observations will be necessary when high-stakes decisions are to be made. But how will school systems know when they have implemented a fair system? Ultimately, the most direct way is to periodically audit a representative sample of official observations, by having impartial observers perform additional observations. In our companion research report, we describe one approach to doing this.

Combining the three approaches (classroom observations, student feedback, and value-added student achievement gains) capitalizes on their strengths and offsets their weaknesses. For example, value-added is the best single predictor of a teacher’s student achievement gains in the future. But value-added is often not as reliable as some other measures and it does not point a teacher to specific areas needing improvement. Classroom observations provide a wealth of information that could support teachers in improving their practice. But, by themselves, these measures are not highly reliable, and they are only modestly related to student achievement gains. Student feedback promises greater reliability because it includes many more perspectives based on many more hours in the classroom, but not surprisingly, it is not as predictive of a teacher’s achievement gains with other students as value-added. Each shines in its own way, either in terms of predictive power, reliability, or diagnostic usefulness.

Combining new approaches to measuring effective teaching—while not perfect—significantly outperforms traditional measures. Providing better evidence should lead to better decisions. No measure is perfect. But if every personnel decision carries consequences—for teachers and students—then school systems should learn which measures are better aligned to the outcomes they value. Combining classroom observations with student feedback and student achievement gains on state tests did a better job than master’s degrees and years of experience in predicting which teachers would have large gains with another group of students. But the combined measure also predicted larger differences on a range of other outcomes, including more cognitively challenging assessments and student- reported effort and positive emotional attachment. We should refine these tools and continue to develop better ways to provide feedback to teachers. In the meantime, it makes sense to compare measures based on the criteria of predictive power, reliability, and diagnostic usefulness.

MET Gathering Feedback Practioner Brief

When the money runs out

Eventually, even billionaires bail, and when their money is gone problems remain. In some cases, big problems.

Two years into work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve teacher effectiveness, city school officials have determined that the financial outlook has changed so much that the effort will be unsustainable without a major retooling.

By revamping teacher salaries -- paying for test results instead of degrees or years of service -- Memphis City Schools leaders hope to find a big chunk of the $34 million a year it will take to keep going when the Gates money stops in 2015.

The district is now spending another $250,000 on consultants to figure the mess out. Cleaning up that mess left behind by Bill Gates "philanthropy" might be a whole host of lost jobs and school closings.

One possibility, he says, is reducing the nonteaching staff -- secretaries, cafeteria workers, maintenance staff -- who work in every school in the city.

Another is closing schools and funneling the savings back to the Gates' work.

The whole idea was to institute test score based pay for teachers, but the effort turned out to be far more expensive and unsustainable that systems where pay is collectively bargained. If that doesn't strike you are irresponsible enough, it does actually get worse

"We just found out this week that the 400 new teachers in the district will have to use schoolwide data for their TVAAS score.

"Thirty-five percent of their score will be schoolwide data from a time when they were not even part of the district."

Indeed. Imagine having your performance nad pay being evaluated using scores that aren't even your own. Welcome to the wonderful world of Corporate education reform.

Clippy as the model for Bill Gates involvement in schools

Remember the obnoxious, hyperactive paperclip that popped up in Word when you were trying write a letter? As soon as you typed "Dear," up popped up Clippy:

It looks like you're writing a letter.
Would you like help?

Uninvited.

You'd been writing letters for decades, but Microsoft insisted you needed what they called "proactive help." And there was Clippy insisting he could show you how to do your job better. No matter how many times you clicked "Just type the letter without help," Clippy would pop up again, insisting you must need help.

Your train of thought melted as you tried to remember how to get rid of the dorky paperclip.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal , Stanford professor Clifford Nass reports, "One of the most reviled software designs of all time was Clippy, the animated paper clip in Microsoft Office. The mere mention of his name to computer users brought on levels of hatred usually reserved for jilted lovers and mortal enemies. There were 'I hate Clippy' websites, videos and T-shirts in numerous languages." Nass observes that "Clippy's problem was that he was utterly oblivious to the appropriate ways to treat people. Every time a user typed "Dear," Clippy would dutifully propose, "I see you are writing a letter. Would you like some help?" --no matter how many times the user had rejected this offer in the past."

And he wouldn't stop smiling. You're pounding the keyboard trying to find the "DIE!" function but he keeps smiling.

YouTube offers a hilarious "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" audio segment on the death of the reviled Microsoft mascot. Listeners voted this the funniest segment of all time. The show host Peter Segal says, "One day the engineers at Microsoft said, you know, the people using our products, they're frustrated, they're angry, but they're not insane with rage. How can we focus their rage? How about if just in the middle of doing something, an animated paperclip pops up on the screen and says: 'Can I help you? What are you doing? Oh, can I see?'"

The segment includes the Bill Gate memo titled "Clippy Must Die."

But now, teachers across America are discovering that Clippy has been reborn--with Gates barnstorming the country with pronouncements about effective teaching. Never mind you've been teaching for decades, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is there popping up with compulsory proactive help, insisting they can show you how to do your job better. No matter how much you beg, "Just let me teach," Clippy Bill is there insisting you must need help.

[readon2 url="http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=986"]Continue reading[/readon2]

Teacher Town Hall Recap

Here's the video for the MSNBC Teacher Town Hall that occured over this weekend, in case you missed it

Part one:

Part two:

Here's a good recap of the event from the perspective of the pernicious effect billionaires like the Gates are having on public education discussions.

Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score - or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students "learned the material at the end of the year."

If you look closely at how she describes peer observations, the method at work is even clearer. Teachers tend to support peer observation, because it can be a valuable basis for collaboration, which yields many benefits to us beyond possible test score gains. But what does Melinda Gates say about it? It can be worthwhile, BUT: only the models of peer observation that have been proven to raise test scores should be used. And presumably we can count on the Gates Foundation to provide us with that information.

In spite of all the billions they have spent, it appears that the Gates Foundation is laboring under the same logical fallacy that doomed No Child Left Behind. In a way which employs circular reasoning, they have defined great teaching as that which results in the most gains on end of year tests, and then spent millions of dollars identifying indicators of teaching that will yield the best scores.

The most deceptive strategy is how they then try to pretend that these indicators are "multiple measures" of good teaching. In fact, these are simply indicators of teaching practices associated with higher test scores. In spite of Mrs. Gates' feint at the opening of her response, everything she describes, all these things that supposedly go beyond test scores - peer observations, student perceptions - are only deemed valid insofar as they are correlated with higher test scores.

Melinda Gates begins with the question "How do we know a teacher's making a difference in a student's life?" That is an excellent and complex question. However, when we look at her answer, we find she commits the logical fallacy known as "begging the question." One begs the question when one assumes something is true, when that is actually a part of what must be proven.

The question she begs is "what defines great teaching?" This is not answered by finding teaching methods associated with higher test scores. This question remains hanging over the entire school reform enterprise. Until we answer that question, we are devising complex mechanisms to elevate test scores assuming this will improve students' lives, when this is manifestly unproven. In fact, I would argue that many of the strategies used to boost scores are actually harmful to our students.

This episode should remind us of the crucial need to teach critical thinking in our schools - and apply such thinking to the dilemmas we face.

For more on the Gates Foundation you can read our 3 part series, "THE GATES FOUNDATION EXPOSED" Part I, Part II, and Part III.