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Surveys let students grade teachers

July 16, 2012 by

In addition to value-added measures and classroom observations, teachers could be evaluated by their students, reports Ed Week‘s Teaching Now. At a Center for American Progress event, the Tripod student-perception survey was discussed.

Developed by Ronald Ferguson of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University in partnership with Cambridge, the Tripod surveys have been used in 3,000 classrooms across the U.S. as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project. . . . Teachers are rated on the research-based “7 C’s”—care, control (of the classroom), clarify, challenge, captivate, confer, and consolidate.

Tiffany Francis, a Pittsburgh teacher, said her second-grade students’ views were “enlightening.”  All rated her highly on “care,” but scores were lower for “control,” and on the statement, “to help us remember, my teacher talks about things we already learned.” She plans to make changes in her teaching.

The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers supports the use of student surveys, as well as the use of value-added measures, despite heavy criticism from other union affiliates, said William Hileman, vice president of PFT.  Other union affiliates  ”We have to get better about instructing children,” he said.

 

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Are students learning? Colleges don’t know

April 21, 2012 by

Many college students aren’t working very hard or learning very much, according to recent studies, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, who suggests value-added assessments to show how much graduates have gained.

At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker.

. . . Colleges and universities have to be able to provide prospective parents with data that will give them some sense of how much their students learn.

In 2006, the Spellings commission recommended using the Collegiate Learning Assessment.  There are many other ideas out there, Brooks writes.

Some schools like Bowling Green and Portland State are doing portfolio assessments — which measure the quality of student papers and improvement over time. Some, like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, use capstone assessment, creating a culminating project in which the students display their skills in a way that can be compared and measured.

Colleges could pick an assessment method that “suits their vision,” writes Brooks.

Then they could broadcast the results to prospective parents, saying, “We may not be prestigious or as expensive as X, but here students actually learn.”

. . . If you’ve got a student at or applying to college, ask the administrators these questions: “How much do students here learn? How do you know?”

With many different learning assessment schemes, it would be difficult to compare schools — or to add a do-they-learn metric to the all-powerful U.S. News college rankings.

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Maybe they can use value-added for Sociology profs

April 11, 2012 by

How should we measure college’s success in educating students?  The New York Times‘ Richard Perez-Pena takes a look.

The answer seems to be shaping up to be “tests”.

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‘Creative … motivating’ and fired

March 12, 2012 by

Sarah Wysocki struggled in her first year of teaching fifth-grade at a Washington D.C. middle school, but she earned excellent evaluations in her second year. Then she was fired for low value-added scores, reports the Washington Post.

A majority of her students took the fourth-grade test at a feeder school suspected of cheating. Some who’d tested as “advanced” could barely read when they started fifth grade, she said.  When their scores slipped, her value-added score took the hit. With a low score from her first year of teaching, Wysocki was out.

In classroom observations in her second year, Wysocki’s teaching won praise.

“It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined,” Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation.

Branch asked her to share her ideas with her colleagues. He also praised her ability to engage parents.

After Wysocki was fired, Principal Andre Samuels wrote a glowing recommendation describing her as  “enthusiastic, creative, visionary, flexible, motivating and encouraging.” She was hired immediately by a Fairfax,  Virginia elementary school, where she’s again teaching fifth grade.

Most teachers with low value-added scores also score poorly on classroom observations, says an architect of D.C.’s system for teacher evaluation. But there doesn’t seem to be a way to apply common sense when the system goes wrong.

After years of very low performance, D.C. needs to stress reading and math scores in teacher evaluations, Rick Hess writes.

In response to MetLife’s survey, which found teachers’ satisfaction has declined, he wonders who is unhappy. “If a teacher is lousy or doing lousy work, they should have lousy morale. Hopefully it’ll encourage them to leave sooner.”

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Good teachers, low value-added scores

March 5, 2012 by

At a very high-achieving Brooklyn elementary school, the fifth-grade teachers posted low value-added scores, writes Michael Winerip in the New York Times. They’re a talented, hard-working group, says the principal. So what happened?

Though 89 percent of P.S. 146 fifth graders were rated proficient in math in 2009, the year before, as fourth graders, 97 percent were rated as proficient. This resulted in the worst thing that can happen to a teacher in America today: negative value was added.

The difference between 89 percent and 97 percent proficiency at P.S. 146 is the result of three children scoring a 2 out of 4 instead of a 3 out of 4.

. . . In New York City, fourth-grade test results can determine where a child will go to middle school. Fifth-grade scores have never mattered much, so teachers have been free to focus on project-based learning.

If Winerip’s theory is correct, all of New York City’s fifth-grade teachers should have low value-added scores. Or perhaps there’d be an effect only in schools with students who care about getting into a good middle school.

Update: Winerip provides an example of creative teaching:

Using the new curriculum, children work in groups to solve real-life problems. On Friday, each group spent an hour developing a system to calculate who ate more — eight students sharing seven submarine sandwiches; five students sharing four; or four sharing three. Each child developed his own solution, and the group decided which way was best.

. . . This week, students will advance from dividing sandwiches to comparing fractions with different denominators, to calculating least common denominators.

In another fifth-grade class, students have spent weeks writing research papers on the Mayans. Students might score higher, Winerip suggests, if they drilled on writing essays for tests: Write a topic sentence, three sentences that support the thesis with examples from literature, current events and personal experience and a concluding sentence.

I spent my entire high school career writing topic sentences supported by subtopic sentences supported by three “concrete and specific” details. And I wrote a report on the Mayans in sixth grade. Writing research papers and learning to support a thesis with examples are not incompatible.

If Winerip is correct about the numbers — if it’s possible for 89 percent of students to score proficient and the teachers to look like losers — then the value-added system is not reliable.

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New standards, tests may kill teacher ratings

March 3, 2012 by

New common standards, which will require new tests, may put the kibosh on value-added ratings of teachers, speculates WashPost columnist Jay Mathews.

California will switch to Common Core Standards in 2014, get new tests in 2015, but no new textbooks aligned with the new standards and tests until 2017, teacher Jerry Heverly learned at a conference organized by his union. The state can’t afford new books.

(Heverly) has no strong feelings about the current tests, but the big change in 2015 is akin to watching a rising tide approach sand castles carefully constructed on the beach.

Integrated Math I, II and III will replace the traditional algebra, geometry, advanced algebra sequence, Heverly was told.  (This is a blast from the past: California adopted integrated math — algebra, geometry and statistics are taught at each level — in 1992. After protests, districts won the right to choose a traditional or integrated approach. New math standards were adopted  five years later, which required a new exam. Integrated math went out of fashion.)

The new standards will require changes in other subjects, as well. And developers say the new tests will be quite different, stressing students’ ability to explain their thinking, not just right answers.  Mathews writes:

These new tests in nearly every state will delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements. School districts can’t do that when the tests change so radically. They might have to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests before using them to assess teachers.

Once the new tests are accepted as valid, it will take years of data on students’ progress to create valid value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

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It’s no surprise high- and low-rated teachers are all around

March 1, 2012 by

Top-rated teachers can be found in all sorts of schools from “the poorest corners of the Bronx” to “wealthy swaths of Manhattan,”  reported the New York Times when value-added data reports were released.

The teacher effectiveness gap is a myth, concluded Mike Petrilli.

It’s no surprise, responds Gotham Schools. Value-added measurements . . . control for differences in neighborhood, student makeup, and students’ past performance.

The adjustments mean that teachers are effectively ranked relative to other teachers of similar students. Teachers who teach similar students, then, are guaranteed to have a full range of scores, from high to low. And, unsurprisingly, teachers in the same school or neighborhood often teach similar students.

“I chuckled when I saw the first [Times story], since the headline pretty much has to be true: Effective and ineffective teachers will be found in all types of schools, given the way these measures are constructed,” said Sean Corcoran, a New York University economist who has studied the city’s Teacher Data Reports.

The ratings “cannot compare” teachers who work with different kinds of students in different kinds of schools, concludes Gotham Schools, citing Douglas Staiger, a Dartmouth College economist.

Gotham’s story makes his post “basically moot,” Petrilli writes. However, he also linked to a working paper showing value-added differences between teachers in high-poverty and low-poverty schools aren’t large.

High-poverty, high-minority schools usually employ more new teachers, who are learning on the job, and fewer math, physics and chemistry teachers who studied their subject in college.  And these schools’ students don’t have parents who can teach them at home or hire tutors if they fall behind.  They rely heavily on their classroom teachers.

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NYC releases teachers’ value-added rankings

February 24, 2012 by

After a long legal battle, the New York City Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers on Friday, “while admonishing the news media not to use the scores to label or pillory teachers,” reports the New York Times.

The reports, which name teachers as well as their schools, rank teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over five years and up until the 2009-10 school year.

Over the five years, 521 teachers were rated in the bottom 5 percent for two or more years, and 696 were repeatedly in the top 5 percent.

But citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam — as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.

A teacher’s score can’t be considered in isolation, said the Education Department’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky. “No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone.”

If the margin of error really is that wide, I don’t see any value in the value-added scores.

While Bill Gates editorialized against publishing teachers’ names and scores as “shaming,” Eric Hanushek calls it “prodding”.

 

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If not value-added, then what?

February 19, 2012 by

“Would-be reformers for getting waaaay ahead of themselves” in building systems around value-added data, writes Rick Hess. But value-added can be a useful tool, even if it’s not perfect. And what’s the alternative to value-added? Principals observing teachers in the classroom? Value-added haters don’t like that either.

Only peer review — teachers evaluating teachers — has support from “self-styled teacher advocates,” Hess writes. And peer review rarely has teeth.

. . . few peer review efforts have lived up to their billing. For instance, as Steven Brill has reported, the lauded Toledo peer review program — which has been credited with aggressively weeding out bad teachers — turned out, when studied for The New Teacher Project’s “Widget Effect to have removed just one tenured teacher (in a fair-sized, low-performing system) during the two years studied.

“Public educators who are paid with public funds to serve the public’s children ought to be responsible for how well they do their jobs,” writes Hess.

Low-stakes value-added analysis can provide useful feedback to teachers, writes Matthew Di Carlo on the Shanker Institute (affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers) Blog. Teachers need disaggregated data, he adds.

For instance, if a teacher is told that her English language learners tend to make less rapid progress than her native speakers, this is potentially useful – she might rethink how she approaches those students and what additional supports they may need from the school system. Similarly, if there are strong gains among those students who started out at a lower level (i.e., their score the previous year) and stagnation for those starting out at a higher level, this suggests the need for more effective differentiation.

In a few states, teacher education programs are analyzing graduates’ value-added data to identify weak areas writes Stephen Sawchuk on Education Week.

“It was frustrating at first. Based on earlier assessments, we always had exemplary status, and then to get these data showing some weaknesses—well, it was a shock,” said Gerald M. Carlson, the dean of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “But we ultimately said, ‘Let’s roll up our sleeves and see what we can find out.’ ”

. . . the school set up teams of faculty to look at the curriculum, switched the sequencing of elementary math courses, and is now requiring faculty members to spend more time observing student-teachers, Mr. Carlson said.

Students taught by the university’s elementary teachers struggled with essay questions, the value-added analysis showed. “The university’s teacher-educators have worked with colleagues from the liberal arts department to require more writing instruction in introductory English composition courses.”

 

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A teacher reviews her performance review

February 1, 2012 by

An English and journalism teacher for six years, Coleen Bondy ranked as low average in her effect on students’ test scores this year. The value-added scores — based only on her least-motivated students — are “practically useless in evaluating teacher performance,” she writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

It’s hard for those who finished high school 20 or 30 years ago, as I did, to fathom the conditions in a typical L.A. Unified high school classroom these days. Classes are huge. Students face overwhelming family and social issues. Drugs are rampant. Students are incredibly disrespectful, testing authority constantly at the beginning of the year. Teachers must be able to get a strong grip on their classes all by themselves because consequences for bad behavior in class are often nonexistent outside it.

. . . Today’s teacher must be highly skilled in her subject matter just to make it into the classroom, more so than at any other time in the history of education. She also must play the role of parent, custodian, psychologist, drug and alcohol interventionist and parole officer, to name a few.

“Society has decided to blame many of its failings on teachers,” Bondy writes.

If teachers can’t be evaluated fairly based on their students’ progress (compared to their previous progress’ rates) and they can’t be evaluated based on classroom observations, how can they be evaluated?

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