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Big role of test scores in New York teacher evaluations

May 14, 2011 By

Last year, the New York State Legislature passed a measure that allowed 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on students’ scores on standardized state tests.

Now student test scores will account for as much as 40 percent of the evaluations, according to an article in today’s New York Times. This means they will count more than any other single measure. The new regulations are expected to be enacted on Monday by the state’s Board of Regents.

This change is likely due to pressure from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who, according to the New York Times, said that a high-quality evaluation system had to be in place before he could support Mayor Bloomberg’s push to end seniority protection in layoffs.

But is this a high-quality evaluation system? It gives a great deal of power to tests that we don’t even have yet (as they are being revised) and to a value-added formula that has turned up many eccentricities, to put it mildly.

It is especially dangerous as a means of determining who should and shouldn’t be laid off. Teachers will be compared with each other by means of measures that haven’t stood the test of time yet (and that leave much to be desired). Principals will have little power to go against value-added ratings, even if they are clearly wrong.

New York State is still reeling from the disclosure that its state tests had gotten easier over the years. It is in the midst of revising its assessments and adopting the Common Core State Standards. The outcome of all of this is uncertain. In the meantime, the value-added formula used in New York City has numerous problems. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia, demonstrates that when teachers are graded on a curve in this manner, a few students (in a large class) doing a little better on a test can bring a teacher from the 7th to the 50th percentile. (See all the comments on his post–they are interesting.)

Why, at this uncertain juncture, would the governor choose to make state test scores such a large part of teacher evaluations? Why the push for something clearly flawed?

Seems not only unwise and reckless, but weird.

Update: A few points of clarification:

The 40 percent would apply to those districts within the state that chose to use state assessments for the local-assessment portion of the evaluation. This would require the approval of the union in the district. So, on the one hand, it’s likely that many districts would choose to use local assessments for the local-assessment portion. On the other, the possibility of using state assessments would always be open, and districts might be under considerable pressure to take that route.

In New York Magazine, Chris Smith interprets this as a bargaining chip for Bloomberg: maybe the UFT will agree to a larger role for state tests if Bloomberg agrees to reduce the number of layoffs. It seems an ominous proposition, as the layoffs are (perhaps) a one-time deal, whereas the regulations will likely be in place for a long time.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

The grand sacrifice of teaching

May 11, 2011 By

Is teaching supposed to be a great virtuous sacrifice for the sake of the poor? One might think so from reading Fernanda Santos’s article in today’s New York Times.

Samantha Sherwood had lofty aspirations when she settled on a family-studies major at the University of Connecticut, like redrawing welfare rules or weaving together a sturdier safety net for people in need. She figured that she could change the world in big, broad strokes, and that she might pick up a fancy title and ample salary along the way.

Instead, Ms. Sherwood, 25, joined up with Teach for America, the program that puts top college graduates into the nation’s most poverty-stricken schools, deciding that the best way to make a difference would be, as she put it on Monday, “to be there, where the rubber meets the road.”

I am not passing judgment on Ms. Sherwood; I don’t know her or her teaching. She sounds very dedicated. It’s the article that seems a bit strange. Santos mentions that Sherwood earns $45,000–presumably much less than she would or could have earned as a high-profile social worker.

Is it really that great a sacrifice to go into teaching? I would hope not; I’d hope that those who do it enjoy it enough that they don’t perceive it as a sacrifice. Yes, it’s tough, but it can be immensely rewarding too. Is a salary of $45,000 so bad? Well, it isn’t much money in NYC, but one can live on it, especially if one is 25 and doesn’t have major financial obligations.

The layoffs–which were really the point of the article–will hurt veteran and new teachers alike. They will hurt the classrooms. No layoff system will mitigate that. But one of the weakest arguments on behalf of the younger teachers is that they gave up possible fame and fortune for the sake of the kids.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: ,

Teachers on ed degree's value

August 24, 2009 By

Teachers discuss an education degree’s value (or lack thereof) on the NY Times’ Room for Debate blog. From Mark:

I am a 21-year veteran teacher who took a whole boatload of education courses in furtherance of my BA and MS degrees. They were utterly useless. The only thing that actually prepared me for teaching was student teaching. All of the other courses taught theory, but nothing practical.

Mark has mixed feelings on merit pay.

I am a very successful teacher, and parents and students alike have sought me out over my career. I make the same salary as another teacher who does nothing but shows movies in class all day. I spend my summers revising my work, creating new and interesting facets to the course. I make the same as the teacher who spends the summer not thinking one iota about the next school year.

Merit pay has some merit, it encourages certain behaviors and discourages others. What I am afraid of is that it will be used to reward the wrong people. If a teacher is mediocre, it is because they have been allowed to get away with it, their behavior empowered by administration. There is a great deal of cronyism in the business, and it skews the playing field.

A “frustrated early-childhood education teacher” calls for combining “pedagogy and a strong apprenticeship” program. What she doesn’t want is to sit through time-wasting professional development classes, such as a “five-hour session that culminated in making a caterpillar from an egg carton.”

Update: After qualifying for National Board certification, a veteran teacher was told he lacks enough credits for certification, reports WashPost columnist Jay Mathews. One phone call from Mathews got the bureaucrats to decide the teacher, who’s also a lawyer and Army vet, is qualified to teach.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Frank McCourt: Teacher and writer

July 20, 2009 By

Writer Frank McCourt, who died Sunday of melanoma at the age of 78, spent decades telling stories to New York City students as an English and creative writing teacher, reports the New York Times.  Those stories became Angela’s Ashes on his desperately poor Irish childhood, then ‘Tis and Teacher Man.

Gotham Schools quotes McCourt on his first teaching job at a vocational school on Staten Island. (He was rejected by several schools because of his thick Irish accent.) It was staffed by World War II vets who considered students “the enemy”  and young, Dewey-eyed teachers who wanted to meet the students’ “felt needs.”

From his second book, ‘Tis:

They don’t want to read and they don’t want to write. They say, Aw, Mr. McCourt, all these English teachers want us to write about dumb things like our summer vacation or the story of our life. Boring. Every year since our first grade we write the story of our life and teachers just give us a check mark and they say, Very Nice.

In a closet, McCourt found old student compositions going back to 1942.

The boys back then yearned to fight, to avenge the deaths of brothers, friends, neighbors…

… I pile the crumbling papers on my desk and begin reading to my classes. They sit up. There are familiar names. Hey, that was my father. He was wounded in Africa. Hey, that was my Uncle Sal that was killed in Guam.

When I read the essays aloud there are tears. Boys run from the room to the toilets and return red-eyed. Girls weep openly and console one another.

The old essays, written on brittle paper, are about to fall apart. The students agree to copy them by hand.

We are saving the immediate past of immediate families. . . . This is my father when he was fifteen. This is my aunt and she died when she was having a baby.

They are suddenly interested in compositions with the title, My Life, and I want to say, See what you can learn about your fathers and uncles and aunts? Don’t you want to write about your lives for the next generation?

McCourt was a thoughtful, creative, inspiring and original soul, writes NYC Educator.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Liberating languor

May 24, 2009 By

Over breakfast with New York Times reporter Susan Dominus, Chancellor Joel Klein waxed enthusiastic over the recent book of Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of Education. According to Klein, this book shows how, “through distance learning and other individualized teaching approaches, we may be able to reduce the need in the future for teachers’ overall numbers and increase their pay.”

One might use online courses to supplement existing curricula. But it’s hard to see how they could replace teachers. What would count as an absence, and what would be done about chronic absences? How many students would drop out of contact and slip through the cracks? What would keep children from “learning” on the sofa with the TV on?

Nor would it be fair to use distance learning for the top students. They, too, need teachers in their daily lives. Intellectual advancement and self-sufficiency are not one and the same. Moreover, young people spend so much time online with their peers that they need a counterbalance: adults they must face, places where they must be.

There is no getting around it. Teachers are needed.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Failing in the suburbs

April 21, 2009 By

While some immigrant students are doing fine, others are choosing to join the “rainbow underclass,” writes Jason DeParle in the New York Times.  He looks at Hispanic teens in working-class suburbs, where “failing means fitting in.”

The problems of young people like Jesselyn are sometimes called failures of assimilation. But they can also be seen as assimilation to the wrong things: crime, drugs and self-fulfilling prophecies of racial defeat.

As Jesselyn tells it, she assimilated to the surrounding values of gangsta rap. Writing in her eighth-grade yearbook, she celebrated friends as “my nigga!” and labeled enemies “crackers,” “bamma” and “whyte.”

“If you’re Hispanic, people already expect you to steal, to fight, to be rude, to be ghetto,” Jesselyn said.

Jesselyn’s parents, immigrants from Mexico, have been unable to pass their work ethic on to their daughter.

If you’re feeling overly euphoric, read the whole thing.

Filed Under: Children, Culture Tagged With: , , , ,

Teaching niceness

April 9, 2009 By

“Social and emotional knowledge” can be taught in school “just like trigonometry or French grammar,” some psychologists believe. From the Boston Globe:

. . .  a typical teaching unit might include a role-playing exercise, or a set of diagrams breaking down the components of different facial expressions, or, in older children, a discussion of the subtle differences between disgust and contempt.

Some of this sounds like the social skills classes offered to kids with Asperger’s Syndrome and other forms of autism.

Around 10 percent of American grade school and high school students now go through some form of social and emotional learning curriculum, according to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a Chicago-based emotional learning research organization. A handful of states have instituted emotional learning guidelines for their public schools – the most comprehensive is Illinois’s, which sets “self-management,” “social awareness,” and “interpersonal skills” benchmarks, among others, for kids at each grade level.

At high-scoring Scarsdale Middle School and elsewhere, empathy is showing up in the curriculum, reports the New York Times.

English classes discuss whether Friar Laurence was empathetic to Romeo and Juliet. Research projects involve interviews with octogenarians and a survey of local wheelchair ramps to help students identify with the elderly and the disabled. A new club invites students to share snacks and board games after school with four autistic classmates who are in separate classes during the day.

Los Angeles is using Second Step, which “teaches empathy, impulse control, anger management and problem solving,” in its middle schools.  Seven Seattle elementary schools are using Roots of Empathy.

I’m dubious about adding another responsibility — one traditionally handled by parents — on to teachers’ shoulders. It’s one thing to insist that students learn to behave in class; it’s another to take on their social and emotional development. Also, I know there’s little research backing the effectiveness of these programs in changing students’ behavior.

Teachers, what do you think? Should “relating” become the fourth R?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Know-nothing ‘experts’

March 28, 2009 By

In a column dissing experts, NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes the “Dr. Fox effect,” named for experiments in which “an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators,” psychiatrists, psychologists and graduate students.

The actor was introduced as “Dr. Myron L. Fox” (no such real person existed) and was described as an eminent authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior. He then delivered a lecture on “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” — except that by design it had no point and was completely devoid of substance. However, it was warmly delivered and full of jokes and interesting neologisms.

Afterward, those in attendance were given questionnaires and asked to rate “Dr. Fox.” They were mostly impressed. “Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening,” wrote one. Another protested: “Too intellectual a presentation.”

Students learn more from high-content lectures, researchers concluded, but give the same high ratings to “expressive” Fox-style lectures with no content as they do to “expressive” lectures with content.

Filed Under: Culture, Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

It’s the skills, stupid

March 25, 2009 By

Standards-based report cards tell students how well they’ve mastered specific academic skills, such as “decoding strategies” or “number sense and operations,” reports the New York Times.

Students aren’t compared against each other; they get no extra credit for doing homework or turning in special projects. It’s all about whether they’ve mastered the skills.

In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization. The report card itself is one page, but it comes with a 14-page guide explaining the different skills and the scoring.

Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent, said that standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.

Some parents complain that the system is confusing: Schools typically use numbers rather than letter grades and there’s a lot more on the report card. Others want their children to get credit for hard work, even if it isn’t reflected in mastery of skills.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Down with ‘achievement’

March 18, 2009 By

In a letter in the New York Times, a former teacher, principal and superintendent from Portland, Oregon urges President Obama to improve schools by ignoring “achievement” and “rigor.”

Finally, I’d tell him to lose the words “achievement” and “rigor,” which have no connection to the inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance students need for genuine lifelong learning.

Joanne Yatvin

No connection? I remain dubious about the idea that those who’ve learned little in school will become “lifelong learners” at some happy day in the future.  As for “inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance,” those traits usually lead to achievement in the here and now without the necessity of waiting till winged pigs are ice-skating in hell.  I don’t even think that “achievement” and “rigor” foreclose the possibility of “creative thinking.” Not unless “creative” is a synonym for “wrong” and “thinking” means “making a poster.”

The letter was a response to a Times’ editorial, “Ending the ‘Race to the Bottom’,” which praised President Obama’s education speech.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,
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