Major evaluation change slipped into HB555

Over the Holidays, the Governor signed the latest education bill, HB 555. StateImpact has a decent rundown of most of the items that were addressed in the bill. However, one major piece of policy change made in HB555 has gone totally unreported, not surprisingly since it was done in the 11th hour, with no testimony or hearings. Indeed, we're doubtful many lawmakers even knew it had been slipped in there.

Sec. 3319.112. (A) Not later than December 31, 2011, the state board of education shall develop a standards-based state framework for the evaluation of teachers. The state board may update the framework periodically by adoption of a resolution. The framework shall establish an evaluation system that does the following:

(1) Provides for multiple evaluation factors, including student academic growth which shall account for fifty per cent of each. One factor shall be student academic growth which shall account for fifty per cent of each evaluation. When applicable to the grade level or subject area taught by a teacher, the value-added progress dimension established under section 3302.021 of the Revised Code or an alternative student academic progress measure if adopted under division (C)(1)(e) of section 3302.03 of the Revised Code shall be used in the student academic growth portion of an evaluation in proportion to the part of a teacher's schedule of courses or subjects for which the value-added progress dimension is applicable.

If a teacher's schedule is comprised only of courses or subjects for which the value-added progress dimension is applicable, one of the following applies:

(a) Beginning with the effective date of this amendment until June 30, 2014, the majority of the student academic growth factor of the evaluation shall be based on the value-added progress dimension.

(b) On or after July 1, 2014, the entire student academic growth factor of the evaluation shall be based on the value-added progress dimension. In calculating student academic growth for an evaluation, a student shall not be included if the student has sixty or more unexcused absences for the school year.

If you're not familiar with legislative language, here's the summary

HB 555 radically changes the method of calculating evaluations for about 1/3 of Ohio's teachers. If a teacher's schedule is comprised only of courses or subjects for which the value-added progress dimension is applicable - then only their value-add score can now be used as part of the 50% of an evaluation based on student growth. Gone is the ability to use multiple measures of student growth - ie Student Learning Objectives or SLO's.

Teachers and school districts have spent countless months collaborating on the development and implementation of an evaluation system originally detailed in HB153 - only to now find the rules of the game changed at the 11th hour. Furthermore, the change is regressive. We have detailed the growing list of research that demonstrates the very real and serious problems with heavy reliance on value-add, and the need to offset these problems by using multiple measures of student growth. See here, here, here, and here for examples.

Some Choice

ODE has just released their partial school report card. It doesn't contain any final grades, but it does tell us whether schools made adequate yearly progress, and the news isn't pretty for Ohio's charter school movement.

Of the 352 charter schools listed, 58.2% of them failed to meet their adequate yearly progress (AYP) metrics.

If a student attends a school in any of Allen, Warren, Erie, Hancock, Lake, Madison, or Tuscarawas counties, not a single charter school made adequate yearly progress. Indeed, out of the 36 counties that have charter schools, 24 counties had schools that combined for more than half their charters failing to meet their adequate yearly progress.

County	Not Met AYP	Met AYP
Allen	100.0%	0.0%
Warren	100.0%	0.0%
Erie	100.0%	0.0%
Hancock	100.0%	0.0%
Lake	100.0%	0.0%
Madison	100.0%	0.0%
Tuscarawas	100.0%	0.0%
Stark	83.3%	16.7%
Trumbull	75.0%	25.0%
Summit	73.3%	26.7%
Montgomery	72.4%	27.6%
Mahoning	71.4%	28.6%
Hamilton	67.9%	32.1%
Richland	66.7%	33.3%
Clark	66.7%	33.3%
Fairfield	66.7%	33.3%
Morrow	66.7%	33.3%
Franklin	65.3%	34.7%
Butler	60.0%	40.0%
Lucas	58.8%	41.2%
Lorain	54.5%	45.5%
Marion	50.0%	50.0%
Columbiana	50.0%	50.0%
Greene	50.0%	50.0%
Cuyahoga	42.0%	58.0%
Portage	40.0%	60.0%
Licking	25.0%	75.0%
Muskingum	25.0%	75.0%
Seneca	25.0%	75.0%
Champaign	0.0%	100.0%
Wayne	0.0%	100.0%
Scioto	0.0%	100.0%
Coshocton	0.0%	100.0%
Hardin	0.0%	100.0%
Jackson	0.0%	100.0%
Van Wert	0.0%	100.0%
Grand Total	58.2%	41.8%

There's a lot of students in a lot of schools, in a lot of counties not being served by the "choices" they are being presented with.

RNC Convention Final Day - Upstaged!

On education related issues, the final day of the RNC convention featured Jeb Bush, former Florida Governor and brother of former President George W. Bush. His speech centered on the issue of education, and if you're not a fan of corporate education reform, you probably didn't like what he had to say. The Washington Post reported it thusly

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say about education reform at the GOP convention — schools are failing and teachers unions are bad —
[...]
Here are some other things Bush said in his speech — and things he didn’t say:

* Insisting that American schools are failing, he threw out statistics such as: “Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students rank 17th in science, 25th in math.” But he didn’t note that Americans have always ranked ranked at best average in international rankings.

* “China and India produce eight times more engineering students each year than the United States,” Bush said, without noting, as my colleague Jay Mathews did in this blog post, that “we are light-years ahead of them in providing instruction and opportunity for every child who wants to go to college or adopt a useful trade.”

* Teachers unions are super powerful and their supporters are “masters of delay and deferral,” he said, without mentioning that the unions have lost so much political power that they have been unable to stop the implementation in a number of states of unfair teacher evaluation systems that link teachers’ pay to student standardized test scores. Bush’s implication that teachers unions are stopping academic progress ignores the fact that the problems that ail urban schools are the same in union states as they are in non-union states.

* Bush praised his own school reform program when he was governor from 1999-2007, which became known as the “Florida Miracle” and has been a model for other governors who have adopted its key tenets, which include standardized test-based accountability, charter schools, vouchers, virtual education, an end to teacher tenure, merit pay and assigning letter grades to school.

But he didn’t mention that the standardized testing regime that he pioneered, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is in shambles after a succession of scandals, and that his claims of great progress in student achievement are questionable.

Of course the highlight of the evening was to be the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney, but somewhere along the line the proceedings got sidetracked and overwhelmed by a bizarre 11 minute piece of theater performed by movie legend Clint Eastwood having a conversation with an invisible President Obama, or an empty chair depending upon your perspective.

A new internet meme has been born - Eastwooding (google it, but be prepared to waste some of your day).

Romney's speech lacked any policy specifics, "Where was the policy?" wrote one Washington Post reporter. Here's the word cloud of his speech - he mentioned America, a lot

Parents Agree – Better Assessments, Less High-Stakes Testing

Educators aren’t alone in being fed up with narrow, punitive student accountability measures. Parents also want well-designed, timely assessments that monitor individual student performance and progress across a range of subjects and skills. That’s one of the key findings in a new study by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

NWEA, a non-profit educational services organization headquartered in Portland, set out to find how the views of parents – often ignored in the debate over the direction of public education – stacked up against those of teachers and administrators.

After conducting online surveys of more than 1,000 respondents, NWEA found that these stakeholders essentially want the same thing. Large majorities say that, although year-end tests might provide some sort of useful snapshot, they strongly prefer more timely formative assessments to track student progress and provide educators with the flexibility to adjust their instruction during the school year.

“The research reinforces the notion that no one assessment can provide the breadth and depth of information needed to help students succeed,” explained Matt Chapman, president and CEO of NWEA. “For every child we need multiple measures of performance.”

As the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) slowly moves on Capitol Hill, redefining how student progress is measured will be a key debate. The National Education Association believes it is time to move beyond the No Child Left Behind Law (the 2001 revision of ESEA), scrap the obsession with high-stakes testing and enter into a new phase of education accountability.

“Well-designed assessment systems do have a critical role in student success,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “We should use assessments to help students evaluate their own strengths and needs, and help teachers improve their practice and provide extra help to the students who need it.”

“I use different types of assessments because all students are different,” explained Krista Vega, a middle school teacher in Maryland and NEA member who participated in the NWEA survey. “I use quizzes, games, teacher-made tests, computerized tests, portfolios, and alternative assignments.”

“What I’m looking for is, first, are they mastering the skill I’m trying to teach, or did they not master the skill? I’m looking to see if there is an area of weakness. I’m looking to see if they have background knowledge sometimes. There’s just a whole range of things that I’m looking for,” Vega said.

Source: Northwest Evaluation Association and Grunwald Associates

According to the survey, it is the types of formative assessments Vega identifies, such as quizzes, portfolios, homework and end-of-unit tests that provide timely data about individual student growth and achievement. Respondents cited these types of assessments as providing educators with the necessary information to pace the instruction and ensure students learn fundamental skills.

Parents are also worried about the narrowing of the curriculum. Large majorities believe it is important to measure students in math and English/language arts but also say it is important to measure performance in science, history, government and civics, and environmental literacy.

The students who are often hurt the most by a restricted curriculum are those who don’t have the opportunities, because of their socioeconomic background, to diversify their learning outside the classroom.

Beyond subject matter, parents and educators believe so-called “higher order” thinking skills such as creativity, communication, problem-solving, and collaboration – so critical in the modern economy and workplace – aren’t being properly measured by current assessment systems.

“It is really, really important,” Vega says “that we prepare students for when they enter the workforce to compete in the 21^st century.”

Read the NWEA Report ”For Every Child, Multiple Measures”

More on NEA’s Position on Student Assessments (Word Document)

Parents want small class sizes

StateImpactOhio has an article on voucher expansion in Ohio, and they talked to a few parents of children with special needs using vouchers. But it was why these parents were choosing vouchers that caught our eye.

Corinn starts high school next year, and hopes that a small Catholic school like Villa Angela Saint Joseph on Cleveland’s East side will help her continue her progress.

“I picked the school because it was a smaller class size and they would have the extra help that I would need there,” she explains.
[...]
Youngstown Christian is not a big school by any means. There are just 475 students in grades K-12, and Pecchia says parents are drawn to the school’s small size.

Parents want small class sizes for their children, whether they have special needs or not. Vouchers are setting up a vicious economic cycle. Parents want smaller class sizes, so some choose to use vouchers to enroll their children into smaller schools, which subtracts money from the struggling public schools reducing their ability to maintain smaller classes, which in turn causes more parents to seek schools with smaller classes via vouchers.

If that seems unfair, it's not even the beginning as State Impact reports

That’s because public school districts have to write yearly special individual education programs, known as IEP’s, for special needs students even if they attend a private school. And it’s the public school, not the private school the child attends, that has to monitor the progress of the student and update the plan each year.

“My first thought is frustration because it puts some responsibility on the school for kids that they won’t really know,” says Dennis.

The private schools and parents are supposed to communicate regularly with the student’s home district through progress reports.

The public school district still has responsibilities for the student even after they have taken a voucher and left. Private and charter schools like to dubiously boast about how efficient they are, but rarely if ever acknowledge that that is because the public schools are picking up the hard work for them.

Is Our Students Learning? Yes.

Three mildly heretical thoughts about American education: First, given the impossible assignment we've given them -- an egalitarian mission in a nation rapidly growing more stratified by income and class -- American public schools are probably doing a better job than they ought to be. One big reason is greater professionalism among teachers. A lot has changed since I wrote a Texas Monthly article documenting the awful state of teacher education back in 1979, mostly for the better.

Despite melodramatic pronouncements to the contrary by sundry politicians, tycoons, tycoon/politicians and media-enhanced "reformers" like former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, the available evidence shows American students performing steadily better on standardized assessments of educational progress over the past 30 years.

"The only longitudinal measure of student achievement that is available to Bill Gates or anyone else," writes Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, "is the National Assessment of Educational Progress." Scores on the NAEP have trended steadily upward to where the most underprivileged African-American children do better in eighth grade reading and math today than white students did back when the measurements began in 1978. But no, they haven't caught up because white kids' scores have improved too.

This doesn't mean the United States is turning into Finland or South Korea, to mention two small, ethnically homogeneous nations education reformers like to cite as (quite contrary) examples of how to proceed, but it does indicate that much doomsday rhetoric we hear from the likes of Rhee and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is predicated upon false assumptions.

Yes, we could be doing better; no, the sky's not falling.

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