Budget conference committee take backward steps

If one had hoped that the budget conference committee would take the Governor, House and Senate education policy plans and blend them into a better product, those hopes were dashed yesterday.

The budget continues to disinvest in Ohio's public education system to the tune of $532.7 million compared to 2010-2011 funding levels. To add further insult to that injury, in order to pass along income tax cuts to Ohio's wealthiest citizens, the GOP controlled legislature is also eliminating the 12.5% property tax rollback. A homeowner would face paying an additional $4.38 per mill for every $100,000 in taxable property value on new levies - making those levies a tougher sell for struggling schools.

In other areas of education policy, the conference committee failed too. The Senate had proposed to reduce the weight of a teachers evaluation using value-added from 50% to 35%. However, the conference committee reversed that policy improvement leaving the absurd over-reliance of value-add in place at 50%. Furthermore, the Senate had proposed eliminating the scores from teachers evaluations of students who were unexcused absent for 30 days or more. This would have been down from the current law of 60 days. The Conference committee reset that to an objectionable 45 days. For reference, Ohio Revised Code states that a student is chronically truant after only 15 days of unexcused absence - so why any teacher should be evaluated based on chronically truant students can only be explained by the legislature wanting to be punitive towards educators.

According to Gongwer

Conferees did adopt some last minute tweaks to the school funding that Republicans said would steer some additional money to poorer urban and rural districts.

One amendment would shift some funding from the K-3 literacy fund for all schools to economically disadvantaged districts and charter schools, according to House Republican policy aide Colleen Grady. However, the revision would not significantly alter the bottom line on K-12 spending.

So in order to more adequately fund rural school districts the legislature decided not to add more money to the put but to shift money from their own 3rd grade reading guarantee. This isn't education policy, it is madness.

Other notable changes

• Revise the enrollment count for funding traditional school districts by switching to an annualized processed that would be updated three times a year starting in 2015.
• Remove a funding guarantee for charter schools rated "excellent" for three years consecutively.
• Subject private school students to state testing requirements if more than 65% of the population uses state vouchers, while allowing pupils not on scholarships to opt out of the exams.
• Specify that homeschooled children and students moving into Ohio could obtain for EdChoice vouchers if they live in an eligible school district.
• Ensure that students attending a STEM school can participate in extracurricular activities in their resident schools.
• Create an advisory committee to guide distribution of the Straight A grant program funds and advise the governing board.
• Cap Straight A fund awards at $5 million for a single grantee and $15 million for a consortium, while allowing the Controlling Board to approve higher amounts.

On Teacher Evaluation: Slow Down And Get It Right

One of the primary policy levers now being employed in states and districts nationwide is teacher evaluation reform. Well-designed evaluations, which should include measures that capture both teacher practice and student learning, have great potential to inform and improve the performance of teachers and, thus, students. Furthermore, most everyone agrees that the previous systems were largely pro forma, failed to provide useful feedback, and needed replacement.

The attitude among many policymakers and advocates is that we must implement these systems and begin using them rapidly for decisions about teachers, while design flaws can be fixed later. Such urgency is undoubtedly influenced by the history of slow, incremental progress in education policy. However, we believe this attitude to be imprudent.

The risks to excessive haste are likely higher than whatever opportunity costs would be incurred by proceeding more cautiously. Moving too quickly gives policymakers and educators less time to devise and test the new systems, and to become familiar with how they work and the results they provide.

Moreover, careless rushing may result in avoidable erroneous high stakes decisions about individual teachers. Such decisions are harmful to the profession, they threaten the credibility of the evaluations, and they may well promote widespread backlash (such as the recent Florida lawsuits and the growing “opt-out” movement). Making things worse, the opposition will likely “spill over” into other promising policies, such as the already-fragile effort to enact the Common Core standards and aligned assessments.

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ALEC's Report Card Receives Failing Marks

Via the Great Lakes Center

EAST LANSING, Mich. (May 9, 2013) – Ranking states is a popular tool for education advocacy groups, with the goal of advancing a policy agenda based on ideologically driven pre-packaged reforms. These report cards receive considerable media attention, although few reflect research-based evidence on the efficacy of particular polices. The 18th edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform is no different according to an academic review.

Christopher Lubienski, associate professor of education policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, and T. Jameson Brewer, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, reviewed ALEC's Report Card for the Think Twice think tank review project. The review was produced by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Lubienski and Brewer find that ALEC draws its grades exclusively not from research organizations, but from like-minded market-orientated advocacy organizations.

"Furthermore, when studies are highlighted in this report, they do not represent the peer-reviewed research on a given issue, are often of extremely poor quality, and generally unsuited for supporting their claim."

In their review, Lubienski and Brewer provide two key areas – alternative teacher certification and school choice – to highlight gaps between ALEC's agenda and empirical evidence. Despite multiple claims that a "growing body of research indicates…" – the report offers absolutely no supporting evidence. Math results, which have a lower pass rate, were used to compare traditionally-certified teachers to alternatively-certified teachers. Meanwhile alternatively-certified teachers were portrayed using their reading results.

"Many of the grades given to states reflect the level to which pro-market policies have been implemented while the grades systematically ignore meaningful measurements of equality and outcomes" according to the review.

Readers of ALEC's Report Card should consider it a statement of policy preferences and not an overview of research on education reforms.

The reviewers conclude, "At best, the report serves as an amalgamation of other like-minded think tanks' assessments of states' adoption of pro-market policies, and thus offers nothing new … it provides little or no usefulness to policymakers."

Find the report by Lubienski and Brewer on the Great Lakes Center website: www.greatlakescenter.org

The Foolish Endeavor of Rating Ed Schools by Graduates’ Value-Added

Via School Finance 101.

Knowing that I’ve been writing a fair amount about various methods for attributing student achievement to their teachers, several colleagues forwarded to me the recently released standards of the Council For the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, or CAEP. Specifically, several colleagues pointed me toward Standard 4.1 Impact on Student Learning:

4.1.The provider documents, using value-added measures where available, other state-supported P-12 impact measures, and any other measures constructed by the provider, that program completers contribute to an expected level of P-12 student growth.

http://caepnet.org/commission/standards/standard4/

Now, it’s one thing when relatively under-informed pundits, think tankers, politicians and their policy advisors pitch a misguided use of statistical information for immediate policy adoption. It’s yet another when professional organizations are complicit in this misguided use. There’s just no excuse for that! (political pressure, public polling data, or otherwise)

The problems associated with attempting to derive any reasonable conclusions about teacher preparation program quality based on value-added or student growth data (of the students they teach in their first assignments) are insurmountable from a research perspective.

Worse, the perverse incentives likely induced by such a policy are far more likely to do real harm than any good, when it comes to the distribution of teacher and teaching quality across school settings within states.

First and foremost, the idea that we can draw this simple line below between preparation and practice contradicts nearly every reality of modern day teacher credentialing and progress into and through the profession:

one teacher prep institution –> one teacher –> one job in one school –> one representative group of students

The modern day teacher collects multiple credentials from multiple institutions, may switch jobs a handful of times early in his/her career and may serve a very specific type of student, unlike those taught by either peers from the same credentialing program or those from other credentialing programs. This model also relies heavily on minimal to no migration of teachers across state borders (well, either little or none, or a ton of it, so that a state would have a large enough share of teachers from specific out of state institutions to compare). I discuss these issues in earlier posts.

Setting aside that none of the oversimplified assumptions of the linear diagram above hold (a lot to ignore!), let’s probe the more geeky technical issues of trying to use VAM to evaluate ed school effectiveness.

There exist a handful of recent studies which attempt to tease out certification program effects on graduate’s student’s outcomes, most of which encounter the same problems. Here’s a look at one of the better studies on this topic.

• Mihaly, K., McCaffrey, D. F., Sass, T. R., & Lockwood, J. R. (2012). Where You Come From or Where You Go?

Specifically, this study tries to tease out the problem that arises when graduates of credentialing programs don’t sort evenly across a state. In other words, a problem that ALWAYS occurs in reality!

Researchy language tends to downplay these problems by phrasing them only in technical terms and always assuming there is some way to overcome them with statistical tweak or two. Sometimes there just isn’t and this is one of those times!

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How Do High-Performing Nations Evaluate Teachers?

Who decides if a teacher is effective and how is that determination made? School systems across the United States are struggling to answer that question as they try to design and implement teacher evaluation systems that are fair and accurate. It’s no easy task and is not limited to public schools in this country. School systems around the world are tackling the same issue and are finding consensus among education stakeholders to be elusive.

Teacher evaluations were the main topic of discussion at the 2013 International Summit on the Teacher Profession (ISTP) Summit held last week in Amsterdam. Now in its third year, the ISTP brought together leaders from teacher unions and education ministries to discuss issues around teacher quality, specifically the criteria used to determine teacher effectiveness and its purpose.

In most nations, teacher evaluation systems are essentially a “work in progress,” says Andreas Schleicher of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Schleicher, who attended the ISTP, is the principal author of the study that was presented at the summitt. The report, Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluations to Improve Teaching, takes a look at how different nations are tackling this thorny issue (or not tackling it) and identifying specific models that appear to work – that is, have buy-in from key stakeholders and can point to demonstrable results in student achievement. Because consensus is so frustratingly elusive, most nations are treading carefully, although there is widespread acknowledgement that improved evaluation systems have to be on the menu of education policy reforms.

Of the 28 countries surveyed in the OECD report, 22 have formal policy frameworks in place at the national level to regulate teacher evaluations. The six education systems that do not have such frameworks include Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, but teachers in the countries still received professional feedback. In Denmark, for example, teachers receive feedback from their school administrators once a year. In Norway, teacher-appraisal policies are designed and implemented at the local or school level. In Iceland, evaluation is left to the discretion of individual schools and school boards.

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Stop Saying That

When the governor of my state announced his plan for a new school funding formula, he said, "this is not about teachers, this is about the students." I wish he, and others, would quit saying that.

We hear this refrain almost every time there is an announcement about school reform or funding. It is meant to send a message: teachers do not care about kids.

I had hoped that after Newtown, with teachers selflessly giving their lives for their students, the 'teachers don't care' mantra would stop. Wrong again.

But here is the deal: this type of rhetoric is not only unhelpful, it is just plain wrong.

First, rhetoric like this does not help. We never hear it about other public policy debates. (Imagine: "This farm bill is not about farmers, it is about cows.") I cannot for the life of me figure out why policy makers think teachers are the enemy when it comes to education reform.

It might be that what they really mean is that this is not about the teacher unions. But that approach is incorrect as well. As a veteran administrator, I can assure you that there has not been any proof that non-unionized teachers do better in helping students achieve than those who are unionized. What does matter is how well teacher are supported in doing their jobs, and it's that support that teachers unions fight for.

The real problem with the idea that education reform and budgets are 'not about teachers' is this: if you want students to succeed, any reform must include teachers.

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