August 2010 Archives

The latest PDK poll shows that the majority of Americans reject the Department of Education's preferred solutions for struggling schools, and now the Senate is demanding that funding be directed towards practices with strong evidence of success. The evidence from a recent turnaround effort in Los Angeles does not seem to support the "fire half the staff" model praised by Secretary Duncan in Rhode Island. We have been reading reports from high school teacher Chuck Olynyk since last January. Today we get the latest update, with some grim details.

Chuck will be one of the panelists at the Teachers' Letters to Obama Roundtable: TurnAround This Policy, scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 31, from 5:30 to 7 pm Pacific time, 8:30 to 10 pm Eastern time. Register here.

Today is Thursday, August 26, 2010 and Day 62 PF (post Fremont). I wanted to go play at practice yesterday, but there's too much stuff coming out on education and "value added assessment" and where our Secretary of Education stands--like you had any doubt.

Couple that with teachers at the Mont who reapplied, (both successfully and unsuccessfully) complaining about what's going on in Mont-Town, friends of mine at PDs because they start next week and you begin to see my situation. To quote "Babylon 5":

Jeffrey Sinclair: "I'm still waiting for an explanation, gentlemen."
Londo Mollari: "Yes. And I'm prepared to give you one, Commander, as soon as the room stops spinning."
Sinclair: "This station creates gravity by rotation. It never stops spinning."
Londo: "Well, you begin to see my problem."

This situation never gets quiet. We never stop spinning.

And some never stop spin doctoring.

"Value added assessment" continues to send ripples across the educational community. I'm sure that those who were rated highly feel that the methodology is fair. Why would there be a problem. Can't we just see the wisdom of the numbers?

That's an easy out. It reminds me of principals who abused their authority when they abused certain staff members and coddled others, giving them preferential treatment at the expense of the rest of the school: troublesome students removed from some SLCs (Small Learning Communities) and dumped into the "less successful" (read "not liked by the principal") ones, assignment of AP classes, who got help, who didn't. And then there's the Assistant Principal who has become a Mini-Me to the Principal, who put down teachers in front of me, and who, when he asked yet again for me to reapply, said, "Everyone's too political."

That phrase came up every time someone objected to something that was being done. It never was about what was right. To object was to be "political." I guess I was raised differently. "Circumstances are beyond the control of man, but his conduct is in his own power."--Benjamin Disraeli

Yes, I can object, and do, quite frequently. It was easy to object to Mr. Balderas, the appointed principal at Fremont, who could change his colors at the drop of a hat. Half the time, he acted like Captain Kirk losing it on the bridge: "I'm... in command... Spock." But whenever he was confronted with a tough call--or something he didn't want to deal with--he retreated behind, "I'm not in charge here." Gee, at Nuremburg, I believe the quote was, "I was following orders." Well, Sieg freaking Heil.

My peculiar delight is that Dr. George McKenna III, who spits bile at teachers with impressive regularity, seesawed so much between "I'm in charge" to "Oh, I'm not in charge--that's Superintendent Cortines' plan" that with all the waffling, you'd think you were in IHOP.

Can't we just see the wisdom of the numbers?

Even if they are wrong? As Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone's longtime antagonist, said, "There's three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

One set of numbers continues to get ignored: the rising test scores at the Mont (prior to its reconstitution) which made Fremont ineligible for the Race To The Top funds and School Improvement grants anyway. This "turnaround" translates into the upheavals in the lives of the students, and the slandering of the reputations of the teachers -- all for naught.

Another set of numbers being ignored: the current staff shortage at the Mont. While B and C Tracks toiled away short-staffed for the past two months, a matrix for A Track wasn't even prepared. That means the schedules are not ready. More and more teachers are quitting on a school already bleeding teachers. Experienced educators are fleeing the sinking ship; one could be dashedly clever and comment about rats, but I think we've had enough rat stories at the Mont.

For two months, the School Board has ignored what took place at Fremont. This was, after all, supposed to be the jewel in the crown of Superintendent Cortines. This was supposed to be an achievement for Principal Balderas, something to groom him for downtown. Remember, he was supposed to be a hero, no matter what happens at the Mont.

But the Hero of Mont-Town has been unable to conjure teachers out of thin air to plug the gaps. There weren't enough teachers for these last two months, which is why so many teachers have had to teach extra periods. The School Board has ignored the problem. The union ignored the problem and allowed the injustice to continue. And next week, on August 30th, the A Track chapter of the New Fremont begins.

There won't be enough teachers. A former student of mine told me yesterday via Facebook that in one of the classes she was making up via Beyond the Bell lacked a teacher. She and the other students sat for three days without a teacher because their attendance was required to help regain the credits they sought. Who knows if the teacher that took over the class even had the proper credentialing? That in itself ought to point out a huge, glaring flaw: Will Student A. (that's what I'll call her) get her credits? Probably. Will the class be considered "made up"? Ditto. Will she have learned?

Let's expand on that theme. A Track is returning. There's no matrix prepared. There are not enough teachers. How many teachers on B and C Tracks will be press-ganged (think pirates "recruiting" crew) into filling the slots on A? How many students like A. will sit in classes, waiting for a teacher? How many will cover those classes--notice I did not say teach--because they were either instructed to do so and/or because they'll be paid? How many students will have to suffer through this disruption of their education? How much longer?

The media seems to have little concern. After all, it has a new toy to play with: "value added assessment." The situation is sort of like having the observer poke something under study in order to see the reaction to being poked. That makes the Los Angeles Times the news rather than the ones reporting the news. And the numbers are seductive.

Even Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, believed parents have a right to know how well their children's teachers are rated on employee evaluations. She may object to the Los Angeles Times printing data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students, but she still supports the idea of value added assessment. "There's a right way to do evaluation, and we have to keep everybody's feet to the fire," she said. Gives you comfort when a union president talks about keeping everyone's feet to the fire, eh? Makes you feel like your union leadership isn't just going along with the parade, or currying favor with Secretary Arne Duncan, who asks, "What is there to hide?" then cops out with "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."

Speaking of currying favor, what about UTLA's own A.J. Duffy, or as he prefers to be called, "Duffy"? The same man who knew about the turnaround plans of Superintendent Cortines days before the Secretary of Education hit town but failed to even tell the teachers at Fremont? On August 20, he announced to hundreds of people that he was "ready, willing and able" to create a new evaluation system for instructors that is "good for kids and fair for teachers," according to the L.A. Times. And I guess they would know. After all, they are the experts, publishing their "data" with analysis done by a Rand researcher on a private basis for the Times. In spite of the flaws, Duffy even indicated using student test scores might be the way to fly.

He is wrong. The means are flawed. Things are misconstrued.

Our leadership cast Fremont to the fire, for whatever reason. They have grown faint with indignation at all that Fremont suffered, rather than muster the union's attorneys or, it would seem, even to confront the L.A. Times, or the Superintendent, or the Secretary of Education. But, as William Gladstone said, "Any man can stand up to his opponents. Give me the man who can stand up to his friends."

In this case, our friends include UTLA leadership, who have led us to this pass, who have not objected strenuously enough to the assaults on education. Perhaps they are too busy. After all this is an election year. It just strikes me as cursed odd that Duffy would acknowledge (read: embrace) VAA (oooh, has its own initials already, adding to its legitimacy, eh?) that EVEN THOUGH IT IS FLAWED, that it might be even considered as worthy enough to consider having it used to count for as much as 10%-30% of a teacher's overall review. To use flawed data, skewed data for any aspect of evaluation is wrong.

Yet the Los Angeles Times, which had someone from the Rand think tank think about the numbers, reports it as news, and as now sits back and reports on the news it has made.

And the 4600 students at Fremont?

That was July 6th's news.

Chuck Olynyk taught history at Fremont High for 16 years, often in period costume, before he was "reconstituted." He declined to re-apply for his own job, and has been writing about the experience. Join him at the Teachers' Letters to Obama Roundtable: TurnAround This Policy, scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 31, from 5:30 to 7 pm Pacific time, 8:30 to 10 pm Eastern time. Register here.

image by Chuck Olynyk, used by permission.

What do you think of the latest news from Los Angeles? Can we get past the spin in education policy to see what is really happening here?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Fresh research in England has revealed that "Children perform best in exams when teachers are not overly concerned about their test results."

Pupils show greater motivation, are better behaved and are more likely to be independent and strategic thinkers when teachers are not obsessed by grades, the study by the Institute of Education found.

The English educational system, like ours, has become focused on test scores as evidence of learning, and there, as here, government policy places huge pressure on teachers and schools to boost those scores.

According to Chris Watkins, one of the researchers who wrote the report,

Ministers have placed teachers under so much pressure to ensure students perform well in national exams that they increasingly talk at their pupils, rather than talk to them and ask them open questions, he said. The latter leads students to deepen their learning and perform at their optimum.

The researchers cited several fascinating experiments that shed light on what is occurring.

In one study, some teachers were told to help pupils learn while others were told to concentrate on ensuring that their pupils performed well. The students under pressure to perform well obtained lower grades than those who were encouraged to learn.

Another study showed that when teachers focused on their students' learning, the students became more analytical than when the teachers concentrated on their pupils' exam results.

A further study, of 4,203 students, showed classroom behaviour improved when teachers focused on learning rather than grades.

John Holman, a leader in science education, expressed particular concern.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in science learning where relentless preparation for tests and exams drives out the important and engaging aspects, especially the practical work," he said. "All the evidence suggests that 'teaching to the test' results in superficial learning and a level of boredom that can turn pupils away from science.

This sounds very familiar to me. As a sixth grade science teacher, about eight years ago I saw an increase of students who would come to me having never done an experiment. They got most of their scientific ideas from Saturday morning cartoons, and had no idea how to test a hypothesis. What is worse, they did not want to. Some classes were clearly accustomed to rote work. I asked them what plants needed to live. Water, light, nutrients - they had some idea. Then I gave them seeds and soil, and asked them to think about how we might experiment with different conditions to see what would make the plants grow the best. Some of them came up with some good ideas. But a surprising number were utterly flummoxed. "I don't get it." "What am I sposed to write?" The very idea of an open-ended question was foreign to them. They were content to fill in the blanks on worksheets, or behave as stenographers recording what I wrote on the board, but when the responsibility for original thought was tossed their way, many of them did not know what to do with it.

Curiosity is an innate feature of our brain. But like anything, it will grow when it is exercised, and whither when it is neglected. Our obsession with test scores is killing curiosity.

In Oakland most of our schools are under tremendous pressure to raise their test scores in reading and math. Our school board recently enacted a policy directing elementary schools to teach science sixty to ninety minutes a week. We have a thorough support system in place to provide teachers with well-stocked kits, which we rotate three times a year. We are hoping this will result in more students exercising their curiosity by doing real science. There is a growing recognition that not every answer is on the test, and we need to give our students the chance to explore and investigate for themselves if we expect them to develop into a generation capable of thinking through the host of problems they will inherit. Our school board understands this. When will our state and federal policymakers catch on?

What do you think? Have you witnessed the negative effects of focusing on test results? Have you had success with a more open-ended approach?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In the past week on this blog, we discussed the ethical dilemma teachers face when we are finally invited to sit at the table where education policies are made. One reader posted the following comment, which I think is worthy of further discussion. From Oakland teacher Dave Orphal:

Even if teachers and teachers' associations get a place at these educational reform tables, the tables were still set, the menus provided by educational reform pundits who are not teachers. Oh, we may be able to strike some of the items off the menu, and I am sure there will be dishes we don't like... but it's not our dinner party, it's not our chef, it's not our restaurant.

Instead, we need to finance and build our own restaurant, hire our own chefs and create a menu that will serve the needs of our customers (students and teachers.)

For decades, teachers have been political only on defense. We either scream "NO!" at the reforms being offered, or we beg/force for ourselves a seat at the table to try to massage away some of the worst elements of a proposed reform.

We do this, because we are tired after a long day of teaching. We don't have the time to spend in our own think tanks strategizing about what a high-functioning school could look like or dreaming of what skills and knowledge a well-educated graduate will have in 2030 or 2035. We do this because we are strapped for cash. Teachers do not make nearly enough to fund our own think tanks and pay some of us to take a year or two away from the classroom to strategize on our behalf. So we continue to allow the other side to set the agenda and we either decry, "NO!" or beg for a seat at the table.

"NO!" is rapidly becoming an exhausting answer for the public. Teachers and administrators, parents and students, voters and politicians are all now agreeing that the status quo is no longer working. Teachers and teacher unions are losing their credibility and now even our once-political allies are seeing our organizations as obstructionists and more interested in protecting so-called bad teachers than promoting a positive learning environment for our kids.

How would WE fix these problems? How would we evaluate teachers so that good teachers who want to get better can receive meaningful feedback from professionals they trust? How would WE remove the 1-5% of teachers who really don't or no longer belong in our profession? How would WE measure student learning in ways that make sense academically and make sense to the non-teaching community? How would WE organize a charter school that really works? How would WE recruit, train, and support new teachers who can be successful and remain in the classroom after 5 years?

I think this is the next step for teachers and teachers associations in the realm of educational reform. WE have to commit the time and the money to imagining what a well-running public school system will look like and what steps can take us from here to there. The days of saying, "NO!" or for securing a seat at someone else's table are over. It's time to set our own educational reform agenda.

Dave Orphal teaches history at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. After receiving his BA and Teaching Credential at Humboldt State University, Mr. Orphal began a ten-year career at Zoe Barnum High School in Eureka CA and lectured at the University in the Education Department. He is an active member of the Teacher Leaders' Network and CTA's Institute for Teaching. Mr. Orphal and his partner, Wendy Bliss, live in El Cerrito, California.

What do you think? Is it time for teachers to turn the tables?

photograph by David Stacy, used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dr. Stephen Krashen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. He has written numerous books on his research into literacy and language acquisition. In recent years he has emerged as a persistent voice pointing towards the basic steps we should take to build literacy and strong academic skills for our students. In this guest post he offers a critique of the recent Los Angeles Times article rating teachers by their test scores.

by Stephen Krashen

A recent LA Times article, "Who's teaching L.A.'s kids?" (August 15), presented readers with the results of an LA Times-sponsored "value-added" analysis of teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The statistical analysis was done by an economist, and was supplemented by classroom observations made by LA Times reporters.

"Value-added" appears to be a common-sense idea: Teachers are rated by the gains their students make on standardized tests of reading and math. The assumption is that good teachers produce large gains and poor teachers produce small gains or may cause back-sliding. The Times assumes that the value-added method is a valid measure of teacher quality. It isn't.

Problems with value-added analyses

Value-added evaluations of teachers make several assumptions.

First, they assume that higher test scores are always the result of teaching. Not so. Test scores are influenced by other factors:
- We can generate higher scores by teaching "test preparation" techniques, that is, strategies of getting higher scores without students learning anything, e.g. telling students when and how to guess, and familiarizing students with the test format.
- We can generate higher scores by testing selectively, e.g making sure the lower scorers are not in school the day of the test.
- And of course we can generate higher scores by direct cheating, getting inside information about specific test questions and sharing this with students.

Second, value-added analyses assume that teachers are randomly assigned to classes. They aren't. Some teachers are given high-achieving students who will make rapid gains on standardized tests, and some teachers are consistently assigned to teach lower achieving students who will not make clear gains.

Third, value-added analyses assume that the value-added score for a teacher is stable, that a teacher producing high gains one year will always produce high gains. But studies show that value-added estimates for individual teachers can be unstable over time (Schochet and Chang, NCEE 2010-4004). There is also evidence that a teacher's value-added score can be substantially different for different reading tests (Papay, 2010, American Educational Research Journal 47,2).

Fourth, there is always some fluctuation in scores. Even if all teachers were equally effective in raising test scores, a value-added analysis would still find students of some teachers making higher gains than others, due to random factors.

Finally, some standardized tests focus on knowledge of specific facts and procedures. Teachers who prepare students for higher scores on such tests are not teaching, they are simply drilling students with information that will soon be forgotten.

Neglected factors

The heavy focus on measuring teacher quality can give the false impression that teacher quality is everything. Study after study, however, has shown that poverty is a stronger factor than teacher quality in predicting achievement. The best teachers in the world will have limited impact when children are undernourished, have high levels of lead in their bodies, live in noisy and dangerous environments, get too little sleep, and have no access to reading material.

Beyond Cold Fusion

The scientific world was outraged when cold fusion researchers presented their work to the public at a press conference before submitting their results for professional review. The Times has gone beyond this: They clearly have no intention of allowing professional review, and feel that it is their right to present their conclusions on the front page of the Sunday newspaper.

The Times also supplemented their findings with comments from reporters who observed teachers in their classes. This procedure sends the message that the Times considers educational practice to be so straight-forward that it requires no special background.

The Times is a newspaper, not a scientific journal. It has, however, been practicing educational research without a license. Would we accept this in other areas? Would we trust the Times to do a value-added analysis of brain surgery, with reporters critiquing surgical procedures?

What do you think of Dr. Krashen's analysis? Is there any value in the LA Times' approach? Or are their methods flawed?

photo provided by Stephen Krashen, used by permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Many teachers have long clamored for that precious "seat at the table" where decisions about education policy are made. Once there, we often find the experience less than satisfying, as Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen related recently.

But we have entered the era of checkbook reform, and the Department of Education is spending our money left and right to buy as many educational leaders as possible for its dubious ventures.

Last month Stephen Sawchuk reported on several state consortia who are applying for $350 million in federal funding to develop new assessments aligned to the Common Core Standards. These are the projects that Secretary Duncan has assured us will move us away from dependence on end-of-year standardized tests.

What are we looking at?

...both consortia would combine results from performance-based tasks administered throughout the course of the school year with a more traditional end-of-the year measure for school accountability purposes.

There may be opportunities for teachers to participate in the development of such assessments. We may be invited to take a seat at this table. But should we?

I have serious reservations about the trajectory of this project. It seems to promote the idea that the answer to over-dependence on year-end tests is to introduce additional tests spread through the year, to make sure instruction is aligned to the desired outcomes. I can easily imagine monthly tests, dubbed "formative" in utter defiance of the true meaning of this term, which are used to coerce teachers to teach according to rigid timelines and scripted curricula.

Teachers may also be offered jobs as "data coaches," responsible for reviewing interim data, monitoring instruction and "supporting" teachers in more effective teaching to the test. Given other "reform" initiatives, I can also imagine that interim "formative" assessment data could even be used in evaluating and compensating teachers.

This is the brave new world of education reform, where the objective seems to be to make sure all students are learning the same thing at the same rate, and all teachers are using federally approved methods to get them there.

If this is what teacher leadership means today, I want no part of it.

As these opportunities proliferate, often with money attached, we need a real discussion among educators about the ethics of cashing in on phony reform efforts. What is the cost when teachers lend their names and expertise to such projects? Are we actually empowered enough to make a valuable difference in the assessments that are produced? Or are these projects doomed by the test-driven philosophy of their sponsor?

Is a seat at the table an end in itself? What if our students and colleagues are on the menu?

What do you think? Should we accept whatever opportunities are offered and hope we can make a difference? Or should we refrain from participating in projects where the results may be destructive?

image by carbonnyc, provided through Creative Commons.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We are accustomed here on this blog, and elsewhere in education policy-land, of discussing education issues as if they were a realm of their own, with Arne Duncan (and maybe Bill Gates) as the biggest players. We debate policies like merit pay and charter schools, and sometimes reference the influence of economic and social factors, but we sometimes lose sight of the larger political context that is driving these policies.

Things are getting ready to shift.

It is said that education policy is like a pendulum. It tends to swing from one extreme to another. In the 1970s, when the progressive social movements peaked, we had the rise of desegregation, whole language instruction and constructivism, with a great emphasis on student-centered instruction. The past decade the pendulum has swung way back to the other extreme, with the rise of test-driven accountability and pre-digested curriculum.

How educational leaders have responded to this is very instructive. Diane Ravitch is a fascinating case study. She genuinely believed that we could drive improvement in our schools through tough standards and high-stakes tests, and actively promoted these methods. As the decade unfolded and evidence accumulated that this was not working as intended, the honest historian in her forced a change of stance, and she has become a sharp critic. She is a bellwether.

It is a fascinating, frustrating and exciting time, this tipping point we are approaching. The broader political setting is hugely important. We are two years into an administration that made fantastic promises to an America hungry for change. "We are the people we have been waiting for." Obama and his electioneers tapped into every hopeful beat of our hearts. We would bring the troops home from Iraq, close Guantanamo, stop the phone tapping, rein in corporate greed, and inspire the world with a more humane foreign policy.

In education, we were told we would enter a new era of "mutual responsibility," stop spending the year preparing for bubble tests, and stop blaming teachers for all the problems in our schools. We thought we would have a leader smart enough to understand that slogans and profiteers will not be our saviors, and that local leadership at the school and community level is the wellspring of school improvement.

But here we are, approaching the two year mark. At first, we were dismayed, when cruel practices of NCLB were extended. Did they not understand what they were doing? Could they not see this was not consistent with our shared vision? So we wrote, we organized on Facebook, we lobbied, and we spoke by phone with the Secretary himself. It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters.

Teachers are not alone in this feeling. The chance to rein in corporate salaries has been squandered, and companies who received billions in bailout funds have showered their executives with billions in bonuses. The hedge fund managers - heavy investors in charter schools, by the way, have invested in politicians as well, and our system remains rigged in their favor. The war in Iraq, which Obama pledged to end this summer, drags on endlessly, and Afghanistan may well do to the American empire the same thing it did to the Soviets. A mixed blessing, perhaps, but a colossal waste of lives and resources.

Diane Ravitch is gaining company. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, not a radical by any means, just filed a column that describes the situation this way:

...if Duncan really wants to stop the biggest bully in America's schools right now, he'll have to confront his boss, President Obama. In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers.

Milbank points out what many of us have been saying for months.

Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush's No Child Left Behind education law -- an obsession with testing -- and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives.

One must assume that Obama has made a Clintonesque political calculation. Faced with tremendous pressure from an alliance of corporate-sponsored education reform organizations and their allies in the media, Obama chose the easy way. He appointed an education secretary who would advance their agenda, apparently assuming that this was a battle he did not need, given all his other troubles.

But those of us working in the schools are not concerned about political calculations. We are trying to make sense of a society that has abandoned those in poverty in every meaningful dimension, and dropped even the pretense of desegregating our schools, and yet expects teachers to close the achievement gap all by ourselves.

Some of us are pendulum-pushers, and some are pendulum-riders. A curious thing has happened as we approach this tipping point. Even as evidence accumulates and is documented by honest scholars such as Ravitch, the "education reformers" are becoming more desperate to shore up their collapsing project. They are very smart, and have incredible resources at their disposal. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, they have marshaled billions of dollars to purchase people's energy. The Race to the Top was ingenious, and so well-timed, as to put maximum pressure on states struggling with impossible revenue shortfalls. So now we have new projects within the education reform effort. There is money for the "new and better" assessments that will solve all the problems we had before with those "bad" assessments. There is money for teacher pay, so long as it is tied to test scores. Those who buy this (or are bought) increasingly insist this trend is irreversible, and "resistance is futile," as a certain queen once asserted.

Those of us who have a name as teacher leaders may even be offered opportunities on these projects, and may have to do some soul searching and investigation, to be sure we can live with the results that our work may yield.

We who are pendulum pushers are hanging on, holding our ground, and continuing to push back. The time has come for the pendulum to start moving the other way.

With an actual pendulum, it is gravity that eventually wins out over the momentum of the device. In the case of education policy, as with corporate banditry and endless war, we cannot wait for the laws of physics to do the job. We need to be pushing, slowing the swing, and pushing it towards a new direction. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in The Tipping Point, there are moments when ideas catch hold and begin to spread almost like a virus. There is some combination of outrage and hope that crystallizes into social change. I hope these ideas are infectious. It is about time for this pendulum to swing.

Update: An anonymous reader posted the following complaint today: "It's clear what Anthony is against. What is he for?"

Just in case anyone else would like to see some of the alternatives we have been discussing here on this blog, here are some links to recent entries:

These Seven Principles: Our Plea to Congress

A Teachers NEWprint for School Change

A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: New Report Takes on Evaluation

Strengthening our Schools Takes Persistence -- But Firing people is So Satisfying!

We certainly do need strong alternatives to current policies, but claims that these are missing are simply wrong.

What do you think? Are we approaching a tipping point? How can we make it so?

image by rptnorris, provided by Creative Commons license.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This week I received the following message from a teacher in the state of Washington. Her experience sheds light on the theories driving current education reforms.

The first twelve years of my career as a teacher were spent at Clear Creek Elementary School in Central Kitsap School District in Silverdale, Washington. Our school was right next to Bangor Submarine Base. Because most of our families were military, we had a very high mobility rate. Most of my students came from two-parent families, but often one or both parents were deployed. Working with students and families so affected by war was very challenging at times, but I loved what I accomplished with those students and I believe their families were grateful for the time, effort, and love I provided their children. Clear Creek had an incredibly dedicated teaching and support staff that went all out to provide students with a first rate education. During my last year at Clear Creek, I teamed with a regional state teacher of the year and I achieved my National Board Certification. Despite our school's efforts to improve, our students performed poorly on state tests. Based on those tests, one could assume that Clear Creek is an under performing school.

Last year, I moved to the Tri-Cities and got a job teaching at White Bluffs Elementary School in the Richland School District. In some respects my White Bluffs students are very similar to my Clear Creek students. They also come primarily from two-parent families, their parents are interested in their schooling, and they are eager learners. My White Bluffs students are also very different. They don't come to school crying because they are worried about their parents serving in Iraq, or Afghanistan. Their parents are doctors, dentists, and engineers. White Bluffs is located in the most affluent area of Richland, Washington and our students have the top test scores in our district. Even though I was new to White Bluffs last year, my students performed on par with the other 3rd grade classes on their MAP tests. Based on these scores, one could say that White Bluffs is a high performing school.

It is because of the two scenarios that I just outlined that I do not believe in tying teacher evaluation to test scores, or merit pay. I was the same teacher last year at White Bluffs that I was the year before at Clear Creek. Both schools even use many of the same curriculum materials, Houghton Mifflin reading, Lucy Calkins writing, and STC science. At White Bluffs and Clear Creek, my teaching partners and I also utilized many of the same teaching and learning strategies; Mosaic of Thought, guided reading, reader's/writer's workshop, district writing prompts, and hands on science. Both districts also have early release days each week for professional learning communities, professional development, educational literature studies, and curriculum planning and development. Both schools also have a clear system in place for identifying and working with students with special needs. At both schools my teaching partners and I communicated with parents on a regular basis, participated in school related activities outside of the workday and brought our students closer to their community through guest speakers and field trips. I worked just as hard at Clear Creek as I did White Bluffs, so why was I under performing at Clear Creek and high performing at White Bluffs? The only answer I can come up with is the fact that both schools serve two very different communities and the students who come to each school bring very different background experiences, beliefs, and concerns.

Again, I am the same teacher at White Bluffs that I was a Clear Creek. How I build relationships with my students and their families and teach has not changed. However, the scores that my students receive on their tests have. Lately a lot of people have placed the majority of the blame for low test scores on the teachers. These same people seem to believe that if we just fire the "bad" teachers and replace them with "good" teachers, all of our problems will be solved. My question is how do we decide who is a "good" teacher and who is a "bad" teacher? I certainly hope it is not test scores, because if that is the measure we use then I should have been fired years ago at Clear Creek and I would have never been able to demonstrate what a good teacher I am at White Bluffs.

Krista Calvin
3rd Grade Teacher
White Bluffs Elementary School
Richland, Washington

What do you think of Krista Calvin's experience? How can we make our policymakers more aware of this?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This week I got the following message from a teacher colleague.

It seems clear to me that the DOE has made its deal with the devil in its awarding of i3 Grants. The top five "winners" include TFA & KIPP who have the "highest scores."

I can NOT believe that we are going to turn our schools over to business. I feel angry, bitter, and dismissed after the measly little $30 million for the National Writing Project was cut from the budget in order to make room for these charlatans.

It appears that the best hope for professional development for teachers includes throwing enough people at the wall and see who sticks. For those who don't, our kids will pay in terms of varying instruction.

I also find it highly ironic that the awarding of grant money is based on a "Standardize Scaled Score" as if that justifies awarding the money. Hey, they used statistics. It must be true.

I am feeling despair.

Mary Tedrow

Mary Tedrow is not alone. I am feeling rather discouraged myself, after our largely fruitless efforts to convince Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration to shift their policies.

However, we must not despair.

We endured eight long years of the Bush administration, understanding that you could expect nothing but doubletalk, deception and attacks from him and his appointees. Our problem now is that we were lifted, more than even most in this nation, by the euphoric hopes raised by the Obama campaign. Throughout the Democratic primary, both Obama and Clinton pledged to end the punitive elements of No Child Left Behind and extend real support to teachers in public schools. Although Obama emphasized accountability, he spoke eloquently of a new era of "mutual responsibility." In a speech to the NEA in July of 2008, Obama said,

I am tired of hearing teachers blamed for our problems. I want to lead a new era of mutual responsibility in education. One where we all come together, parents and educators and the NEA and the leaders in Washington, citizens all across America united for the sake of our children's success.

Obama addressed parents, and sought to inspire them to turn off the televisions and get their children focused on school. He has provided greater resources for schools -- but because of the nationwide recession, schools have less money than ever.

But as we all know, education policy and federal funding has continued down same the train tracks laid by Bush and Spellings, with some rhetorical tributes to civil rights and equity used to justify the process.

This is bigger than Obama. Just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue like some kind of juggernaut, in spite of the wishes of the voters and even many political leaders. Our system is a machine that operates behind the facade created by our political leaders.

We are in a war of attrition with the business-people who think they know best for our schools. Some of them are driven by visions of profits from schools. Some want to knock out our unions, since teachers are the last large sector of organized people in the nation. Some think our work can be done better and cheaper if we can streamline things and make the workforce more compliant and flexible.

They have a multi-pronged attack under way. They are undermining our unions by relentless attacks that portray these organizations as protectors of bad teachers and self-interested clubs. They are seeking to bring in supposedly superior replacements -- recent college graduates who specialize in raising test scores. They seek to narrowly define student achievement as test score gains so as to simplify our work and make it easy to separate the "good" teachers from the "bad."

And now, as reported in today's New York Times, there is a gold rush of consultants who promise to turn around schools in short order, with little or no track record of success.

We teachers have been almost entirely on the defensive. We have become accustomed to back-pedaling, to conceding that yes, there are some bad teachers, and yes, sometimes it is difficult to fire them.

But the Achilles heel of this assault on our profession is that the solutions it offers DO NOT WORK, even by the narrow test score terms used to justify them. In New York, recent investigations have revealed that the test score gains that were used to tout the benefits of mayoral control were an illusion, created by tests that were made easier to pass. Year after year research continues to show that teachers become more and more effective as they gain experience, at least up until year five. How then can a program like Teach For America serve as a systemic improvement, when the majority of its interns are gone from the classroom after three years? An in-depth comparison of charter schools reveals they are no better than regular public schools.

We are part of what has become an overwhelming consensus of educators who share this understanding. We know that our struggling schools need real support, in the form of time for teachers to collaborate and grow together. They need resources to respond to the ongoing crises their students face -- counseling to deal with violence in their neighborhoods, nutritional services to deal with chronic health issues caused by hunger and obesity. We need tutoring programs, recreational programs, music and art programs to bring our students back to life and give them hope for the future.

As a profession, we need a degree of autonomy and genuine responsibility. Just as a doctor must be trusted to diagnose and prescribe medications to his patients, teachers need the ability to respond to our students, and work together at our schools to develop challenging and relevant curriculum that engages our students and inspires them to learn. Our students are not served by one-size-fits all canned curriculum, or a revolving set of novice teachers. They are best served by a stable core of teachers at their school, who develops a deep understanding of these students, their community, and sustained work with their parents to support their learning.

It is our job to continue to point this out, and as drops of rain on a stone, these truths are wearing down the phony facade of education reform. Obama's speech at the National Urban League last month was a desperate shoring up of what has become a failed set of policies. They are not failed because we say so, or because they are going to collapse on their own. They are failed because they have not worked, will not work, and cannot work.

We continue to offer a clear positive alternative along with our critique. The advantage of our alternative is that it offers the chance to activate and energize a profession that has been demoralized and sidelined. Some combination of political and economic forces would prefer that we stay that way. We will bear witness to this alternative, and to continue to point out the false path we remain on. We cannot despair. Our students need us.

What do you think? Are you feeling despair? How do we stay strong in what we believe?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you follow education reform politics these days, you understand that from President Obama on down, there is a consensus among those who call themselves "reformers" that the main obstacle to improving schools is the way teachers have been insulated from accountability. The result is that there are many ineffective teachers who hold back our students. The worst of these teachers hold low expectations for their students, and must be very highly concentrated in low-performing schools - because, according to Federal policy, such schools have a chance of improving only after at least half the teachers have been fired.

As with many faulty theories, there are some grains of truth here. I worked inside the evaluation process in the Oakland schools, which has more than its share of low-performing schools. As a member of the Peer Assistance Review (PAR) Joint Committee, and then as a PAR coach working with teachers who had been identified for this process due to poor performance, I spent several years working with teachers to make sure problems identified in their evaluations were addressed. I saw scores of evaluations, and then worked closely with many of the teachers who had been evaluated, giving me a unique perspective on the process.

Are there teachers with low expectations? Absolutely. It was my job to work with teachers to make sure they were challenging their students, and most of the teachers on my caseload were not doing so. Many of them had reached a tacit agreement with their students - I will pretend to teach if you will pretend to learn. I observed an English teacher who would read the answers to worksheets to his tenth graders - he called that scaffolding. His biggest assignment of the year was a three-page-long research paper that took three months to complete. My efforts with him and some of the others to whom I was assigned were largely fruitless, but the process worked. He was convinced to retire after many years in the District.

Was it tough to get this individual out of the classroom? Yes, it was. I worked with him for a year, and provided a detailed report to the PAR Joint Committee, composed of five teachers and four administrators. Their recommendation then went back to the principal, and was used as part of the unsatisfactory evaluation that finally convinced the teacher to retire.

This teacher had taught for more than twenty years at one of the toughest schools in the District. Was this type of instruction the norm at this school? I would say that ten or fifteen years ago it was more common, but that in recent years it has become much less so, as administrators have become more vigilant and expectations for students have been raised.

So is it reasonable to have a process that takes at least two years from start to finish to get an ineffective teacher out? I believe it is, because this process protects the integrity of the evaluation process. This is very similar to the safeguards we have through our system of justice. We do not simply allow a police officer to throw someone in jail because they believe they have committed a crime. We need evidence to make this decision. Similarly, before we end someone's career as a teacher, we have a process to follow.

Before an experienced teacher is accepted into the PAR program, we made sure their evaluation was done properly. If the administrator had not performed the necessary observations, or followed the contractually required procedure, the referral would not stick. Once in the program, the teacher would be observed at least once a week, and be offered support, resources and ideas to improve instruction. The teachers had a real chance to fix the issues that got them in trouble. And if the observations showed improvement, or that the referral was not warranted in the first place, the teacher would get a recommendation that they be retained.

So the PAR process works - but the evaluation process at many schools still does not work very well. The primary reason for this has little to do with obstructive unions. In fact, California, with almost all of its schools unionized, has higher termination rates than many right-to-work states where teachers can be fired more easily. The trouble is that at many schools, especially low-performing ones, administrators are overwhelmed by everyday crises and do not have the time or energy to do proper evaluations. The same administrators responsible for teacher evaluations also must do the paperwork on student suspensions, call parents when there are fights, and deal with a thousand other urgent matters. The critically important but less urgent matter of teacher evaluation often falls by the wayside.

We do need to improve teacher evaluation. Administrators need more support in doing this difficult work. We have too few administrators, and their burden is far too great. Many principals in Oakland work more than twelve hours a day, and are still behind on such tasks. Furthermore, evaluation would be far more effective if it were integrated into the professional growth culture at a school. How about a system where a teacher would meet with an evaluator and come up with a growth plan for the year, complete with steps they plan to take to learn, and ways of applying them in their classroom? Then the teacher works with peers to carry out this plan, and writes a report in the spring describing what they have learned. Teachers in Santa Clara, California, benefit from such a process.

We will get much more from evaluation when it shifts from being a "gotcha" game, and becomes connected to each teacher's growth as an educator. There will still be cases where administrators need to use observations to document problem areas, and follow due process to terminate teachers unable to improve, but an evaluation process that encourages growth would do a lot more to improve a school than one that focuses on firing people.

I have worked with a group called Accomplished California Teachers, which developed a detailed report that was released this spring describing improvements in the teacher evaluation process. Many of these processes, such as the ones I describe above, are in use in various districts around the state and nation. Improving our schools, especially the low-performing ones, will take patient steps to build them up, strengthening the instruction and the capacity of the teachers there. A new vision for evaluation will help. Firing people wholesale will not.

What do you think? Is it too hard to fire teachers? Should teachers take more responsibility for the evaluation process?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama last week made a major speech before the National Urban League in which he defended Race to the Top and his education reform agenda. It is rather remarkable that such a defense should be necessary. After all, should not the constituency of a progressive president embrace improvement of schools for children in poverty?

This defense was called for by the threat of open rebellion by major civil rights organizations, who have been, not to put too fine a point on it, hoodwinked by No Child Left Behind's promise that the nation would at long last attend to the debt owed to the educationally disadvantaged.

President Obama opened with the obligatory paean to teachers, then hit the cold heart of the matter:

"... even as we applaud teachers for their hard work, we've got to make sure we're seeing results in the classroom. If we're not seeing results in the classroom, then let's work with teachers to help them become more effective. If that doesn't work, let's find the right teacher for that classroom."

The reason this heart is cold is two-fold. First, although the administration professes great dissatisfaction with current standardized tests, almost every form of accountability relies on these scores, and we are seeing ever-higher stakes attached to them. But the second, bigger issue, is the belief that the primary reason scores are systematically lower in low-performing schools is that we do not have the "right teachers" in place there. The solution, therefore, must be to identify and replace the "wrong" teachers with better ones.

This has led to policies such as the firing of half the staff of schools in Rhode Island, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and teacher evaluations that heavily weight student test scores.

But a fascinating study has just come out that poses some real problems for this approach. Edward Moscovitch has done a systematic comparison of the test scores of students in high and low-performing schools. His conclusion? The different outcomes are largely due to factors brought into school by the students rather than the quality of instruction. He writes:

This view--that the right incentives (positive or negative) will produce the necessary changes in teaching--may be a very common one, but there is no data to back it up. Indeed, a close look at MCAS results shows there is surprisingly little difference between the quality of teaching in so-called "good" schools (wealthy, suburban schools with high MCAS scores)and "bad" schools (inner-city schools with low scores) when the results are averaged across all teachers in the district and disaggregated by student demographics, specifically race and poverty. Put another way, a low-income white student in a "good" suburban school tests essentially the same as a low-income white student in a "bad" inner-city school.

The implications of this finding are enormous: It suggests that the policies we are pursuing are unlikely to make much of a difference, because they don't address the real problem.

What's the point of getting rid of half the teachers at an inner-city school if the ones who replace them also lack the necessary tools? Similarly, replacing a public school with a charter school won't by itself make any difference; either way, teachers need help, not blame. They need help not because they do a poor job of teaching, but because they work with very needy children.

Moscovitch carefully compares groups of students and provides detailed evidence to support his conclusions. Those who think we can improve schools by selecting the "right" teachers should take a close look.

Moscovitch goes further. He points out that the carrots and sticks that are the primary tools of the "education reformers" are useless once the logic that drives them is destroyed. But we must agree with President Obama that the status quo is indefensible. What we must do is embrace a constructive alternative to that reality. Moscovitch highlights the work the Bay State Reading Institute has done to equip teachers to build literacy among poor and minority students. I saw excellent progress at my own school when we had a chance to develop strong cross-curricular collaborative teams, and really worked together to raise academic expectations.

The crazy-making part of the whole education reform debate is that we will hear Obama and Duncan praise the sort of professional development we are advocating. The problem is that the thrust of the reforms being inspired by Race to the Top actively undermines this work. You cannot build the sort of sustained collaborative community of teachers, students and parents that is essential to turning around a struggling school by firing half the staff. In Oakland, schools that were shut down four years ago are now once again under the hammer, and effective principals and teachers are demoralized or even forced out.

President Obama will find no argument when he says our children deserve better than what they now receive. Policies that focus on building the capacity of our teachers and help them respond to the great needs of their students are the way forward.

What do you think? Can we systematically improve schools by replacing ineffective teachers? Or is this a dead end strategy?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend