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Cheat sheet

June 11, 2010 By

When test scores matter, some educators cheat, reports the New York Times.

“Educators feel that their schools’ reputation, their livelihoods, their psychic meaning in life is at stake,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a nonprofit group critical of standardized testing. “That ends up pushing more and more of them over the line.”

Experts estimate one to three percent of teachers (and principals) give students an advance look at questions, give test takers the answers, change incorrect answers or otherwise cheat to make their schools look good or to earn performance bonuses.

The rise of performance pay could lead to a rise in cheating.

Update: The Times is making excuses for a small number of cheaters to attack testing, writes Richard Colvin on HechingerEd. “When students cheat, we don’t say that testing is to blame.”

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Merit-pay study showed no gains

June 1, 2010 By

Performance pay for teachers didn’t boost student achievement, according to a Mathematica study of the Chicago Teacher Advancement Program. The first two years of the pilot also showed no improvement in teacher retention at participating schools.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was running Chicago schools when TAP was started, with support from the teachers’ union, and his Race to the Top is pushing states to adopt performance-based pay schemes.

Nobody knows why TAP had no effect, reports Education Week. However, Chicago changed the TAP model, spreading bonus money among teachers, principal and staff instead of just teachers.

Because of problems with obtaining student-growth data linked to individual teachers, Chicago also paid bonuses based on schoolwide, rather than classroom achievement growth. The National Institute for Excellence recommends that at least 30 percent of bonus pay be based on the results of classroom measures of student growth.

Chicago also paid smaller bonuses than recommended — an average of $1,100 in the first year and $2,600 for  teachers in schools in their second year of TAP.

The federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which supports performance pay pilots, tells applicants “that average bonus payouts for educators should be ‘substantial,’ perhaps 5 percent of the average teacher salary, and that top-performing educators should earn far beyond that amount, perhaps three times as much,” reports Ed Week. Chicago’s plan may have been too diluted to make a difference.

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Cheaters (and teachers) prosper

May 22, 2010 By

Students are incredibly clever and inventive when it comes to cheating on tests, writes Arthur Goldstein on Gotham Schools. A young teacher filled him on the latest techniques, including how to cheat with a water bottle.

If the teacher’s pay depends on students’ scores, Golstein wonders, why should she crack down on cheaters?

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Teaching with a foam bat

May 11, 2010 By

Education research deserves an F for failing to tell us what works in the classroom, writes Sharon Begley, Newsweek’s science editor. Policymakers want to judge teachers based on their students’ performance, but what if they’re forced to use a poorly designed curriculum or faddish but foolish teaching methods?

. . . the scientific basis for specific curricular materials, and even for general approaches such as how science should be taught, is so flimsy as to be a national scandal. As pay-for-performance spreads, we will therefore be punishing teachers for, in some cases, using the pedagogic equivalent of foam bats. “There is a dearth of carefully crafted, quantitative studies on what works,” says William Cobern of Western Michigan University. “It’s a crazy situation.”

The What Works Clearinghouse has found few rigorous, reliable studies of specific curricula, she writes. When the studies are good, the curriculum often is not. Hence the nickname, The Nothing Works Clearinghouse.

In some cases, there is research on what works, but it’s ignored because it doesn’t fit the zeitgeist. Research on inquiry learning in science, which Begley cites, is an example. Direct instruction works just as well, but it’s out of fashion.

Teachers have no say on curriculum or teaching methods, adds Robert Pondiscio on Core Knowledge Blog. They can’t control the school environment or the principal’s disciplinary policies.

In sum, the proposition for a classroom teacher too often boils down to this: take your third-rate training, your lack of meaningful feedback, your absence of meaningful professional development, this content-free, feel-good pedagogy, and teach it in the cognitively suspect way we demand. And if you fail, the fault is…yours!

In most districts, all teachers have to use the same curriculum and are supposed to use the same teaching methods. But some principals run safe, orderly schools and provide meaningful feedback and support to teachers. Others don’t.. I think that’s a real problem with performance pay.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

The limits of value-added

April 22, 2010 By

With all the plans to evaluate teachers by student performance gains — all relying on “value-added” analysis of test scores — we need to understand the limits of value-added to determine “good teaching,” writes Rick Hess.

For one thing, it’s only possible to generate value-added data for 25 percent to 30 percent of teachers.

As schools get smarter about rethinking staffing and integrating virtual instruction, it’ll be increasingly difficult to attribute a student’s performance to a single teacher (this is already a thorny question for districts where students receive substantial pull-out instruction or work with a reading coach).

Reading and math tests are reliable for “academically at-risk students who historically haven’t been taught the basics,” Hess believes, but may not reflect what advanced students are learning.

Now, we can measure teacher performance in various ways other than value-added scores. Such measures, along the lines that Tom Kane’s shop is piloting at the Gates Foundation, include familiar approaches like observation and more novel efforts like student feedback. Importantly, however, the validity of all of these techniques is being gauged by how tightly they correlate with grades three to eight reading and math scores. In other words, whether these are good measures of student learning is being gauged by how tightly they reflect value-added calculations. So, if our tests are flawed or are not capturing what we really care about, the proxy measures will be flawed or off-key in similar ways.

Despite its flaws,  value-added measures of teacher effectiveness are far better than the status quo, Hess argues. But “we should be careful how we use it.” And aware that critics are making valid points.

I’m not sure we’re ready to use student scores to evaluate teacher performance, but I know many teachers don’t trust principals to evaluate their competence.

Bryan Hassel has more on designing teacher incentives.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

States rethink teacher pay, job security

April 20, 2010 By

Teachers’ unions are fighting on many fronts to preserve tenure and seniority rights and stave off plans to link pay to students’ performance. Florida Gov. Charlie Christ’s veto of SB 6 appears to be one battle in a nationwide war on the status quo.

In Colorado, the state teachers’ union is threatening to torpedo the state’s second-round Race to the Top application unless legislators abandon an attempt to make it easier to fire poor teachers by giving more control the state board of education.  The bill is not anti-teacher, the Denver Post editorializes.

It calls for the kinds of reforms that would help develop good teachers into great teachers, and eventually ensure a quality teacher in every classroom.

. . . The reform mandates that at least half of a teacher’s evaluation depend on academic growth of that teacher’s students.

A California bill backed by the governor would “enable districts to lay off teachers based on a district’s subject needs and teacher effectiveness, instead of by seniority,” notes Educated Guess.

. . . a civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other public-interest attorneys against the state and Los Angeles Unified, challenging seniority-based layoffs, may improve chances of at least the seniority piece becoming law. That would be a major step forward.

The lawsuit, filed earlier this year on behalf of students at three low-performing middle schools, noted the constant churn of new teachers at these schools, where seniority rules make it next to impossible for principals to hire and keep teachers they want.

SB 955 would give principals more latitude in reassigning and transferring teachers. Passage of the bill would make it imperative that districts come up with more comprehensive and transparent teacher evaluations.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is pushing “a list of everything the unions oppose,” writes Education Week, including “charter schools, teacher evaluations tied to student test scores and public schools’ ability to sidestep teacher salary schedules and tenure rules.”

Two bills are drawing much of the ire from the unions: one measure would make public schools function more like charter schools by letting them get waivers from state law and education policies and another would rate teachers in part on student test scores and make it easier to dismiss them if they fail repeated reviews.

Jindal would allow waivers of  teacher salary schedules, teacher certification and student-teacher ratios.

Low-performing schools would have to improve students’ standardized test scores when having the waiver, or face takeover by the state. Higher-performing schools that don’t improve while having a waiver wouldn’t be able to get it renewed.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s trying to cut teachers’ pay to balance the budget,  accused teachers of using scare tactics and “using the students like drug mules” to survey their parents on whether they plan to vote in today’s election and why.

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Crist vetoes teacher pay-tenure bill

April 15, 2010 By

Under heavy pressure from teachers, Florida’s Republican Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed SB 6, which would have ended tenure and linked teacher pay to student performance. Once a supporter of the bill, Crist said the veto was “the right thing to do.”

Via Eduwonk, here’s a link to the text of the bill, which was strongly supported by Republican legislators and rejected by Democrats.

Tenure reform, not choice is the holy grail of education reform, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper. In response, Kathleen Porter-Magee writes that tenure reform and merit pay give principals an opportunity to lead, but don’t guarantee that they’ll lead wisely or well.

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Why Florida's SB 6 isn't 'anti-teacher'

April 14, 2010 By

Florida teachers passionately oppose SB 6, which would end tenure and base teacher pay, in part, on student performance. But the “game-chaning” SB 6  is not anti-teacher, Rick Hess writes.

It promises to shift teaching in Florida from an industrial-era profession in which teachers are treated as largely indistinguishable assembly line workers swaddled in the guarantee of lifelong employment into a 21st century profession that recognizes performance and expects professionals to merit their keep.

Public employees are protected against capricious treatment without the stifling effects of tenure, Hess writes. And “advances in assessment and data systems now make it increasingly possible to gauge teachers on the quality of their work,” rather than than on seniority and graduate credits.

Hess worries that teacher performance metrics are imperfect gauges of teacher quality and concedes that “cementing narrow, test-based measures of teacher effectiveness into state law” could be problematic.  However, nuance isn’t an option: The choice is between SB 6 and the status quo.

That choice is now in the hands of Gov. Charlie Crist.

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Such a deal in D.C.

April 7, 2010 By

After two years of wrangling, Washington, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee has reached a tentative deal with the teachers’ union, reports the Washington Post.

The proposed pact, which must be ratified by union members and approved by the D.C. Council, provides teacher salary increases of more than 20 percent over five years, with much of it paid for through an unusual arrangement with a group of private foundations that have pledged to donate $64.5 million.

. . . The agreement includes a voluntary pay-for-performance program that will allow teachers to earn annual bonuses for student growth on standardized tests and other measures of academic success.

Rhee and her school principals will be able to retain highly rated teachers with less seniority, if layoffs are needed. The greatest weight would be given to the previous year’s evaluation, while seniority would receive the least weight, the Post reports.

. . . Those unable to find new positions in the system could take a $25,000 buyout, or retire with full benefits if they have at least 20 years of service. They could also spend a year searching while still on the payroll, although they would be subject to dismissal after that.

The pay raises will be funded by foundations created by Eli and Edythe Broad, Laura and John Arnold, Robertson and the Walton Family. These choice-oriented foundations must be eager to get performance pay.

Washington Teacher has more details on the contract.

Given what’s happening in other school districts, it sounds like a good deal for teachers.

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DOE names 16 'Race' finalists

March 4, 2010 By

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia are finalists in the first round of  “Race to the Top” funding: Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee. The winners will be chosen in April, and a second round of applications accepted in June.

Some weak applications made the cut, notes Eduwonk.

Some states with good apps here but OH and NY is not a great sign…and IL and CO were arguably bubble states at best and not sure what SC means given how out of step they are with parts of the administration’s agenda.

If too many states get grants, it’s going to look like the kindergarten race at Ravinia School in the 1958: Prizes for all, including those who run diagonally. (And, yes, I ran diagonally and slowly but got the same green “participation” ribbon as my classmates.)

Update: Edspresso wonders why so many charter-restricting states made the finals.

California lifted its ban on the use of test data to evaluate teachers but the Golden State didn’t make it. DC and Florida, along with Colorado and Louisiana, might just be the only reformist states that made the final list. And now that it’s clear that a strong charter law or performance pay system doesn’t seem to matter for the competition, state policymakers can breath a sigh of relief that they don’t have to do any heavy lifting to get or stay in the game, just hire a smart team of consultants to create convincing charts and use flowery language. Read a little of Illinois’ application. It seems to be written entirely in the future tense.

Race To The Top is a “doomed bribery scheme,” says Daniel Willingham.

Flypaper’s Andy Smarick calls the list of 16 a major disappointment. He was hoping for five finalists or even three.

The list of 16 is padded, writes Tom Carroll of Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability. Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee are highly competitive, Colorado, Georgia and Delaware are competitive and the rest should be out of the running, he predicts.

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