When Bill Gates says, "Give Teachers What They Deserve," I think many of us can be forgiven for flinching. But over at his blog, His Royal Gateness has done just that. It might seem redundant for me to respond, because the piece is a bit of a teaser for Gates' Big Talk about education, which I've already responded to. But I find this sort of piece instructive, because when somebody has to edit down his own work, he tells you what he thinks the crucial, important parts were.
The crucial important part here is that after all this time monkeying around with education, Gates still doesn't know what he's taking about.
He opens with a wide-eyed tale of how a teacher he talked to begins the year by drawing a line on a piece of paper that aims up and to the right. The bottom-most point is labeled "birth" and then "Fourth Grade" further up the line and still further up the line the teacher puts himself. This is called the learning line, and I can see its value as a construct for fourth graders. But Gates-- a grown man-- apparently found this image inspirational when working on his big education speech, and not for the first time I'm wondering how much real thought Gates has actually put into this education stuff. If I walked into a corporate board meeting and unveiled my chart with a line spearing up from the bottom left corner, and I marked the origin point "birth" and a little way up put "guy working at McDonalds" and a little further up put "Microsoft" and announced proudly that this I called this the Revenue Line, would board members be thinking about that for months? Or would they point out that my chart had showed something that was both obvious and yet still missing so many deeper complexities of the actual truth? I'm just saying.
But Gates thinks the learning line is "a great metaphor for the work we're doing with teachers." And here we go with his thoughts about that work.
Just about every teacher I have ever met is dying to get useful feedback and tools that help them improve their work in the classroom. Unfortunately, they rarely get either one.
This is one of Gates' foundational beliefs-- that the whole educational world, from teachers to parents to students to community members, are all flying blind without data that look the way Gates thinks data should look. Are teachers dying for useful feedback? Well, sure-- that's why most of us live in a perpetual feedback loop. I've designed a lesson, and I wonder if it will work. I watch student reaction as I deliver the lesson. Feedback. I listen to the questions they do, or don't, ask. Feedback. I take an informal assessment of their understanding by asking questions. Feedback. I give a formal assessment of their learning. Feedback. In the interests of teaching reflection, I may even ask directly for their thoughts about how they think it went. Feedback. And I may run all or part of this past my colleagues, asking what they think. Feedback.
But the very next sentence from Gates is about a survey that showed that most teachers don't find professional development sessions useful. Which is kind of a non-sequitor. I also find my lunch period and my parking lot assignment don't help me much in providing feedback.
Gates notes that in some places, the teacher evaluation system doesn't even help teachers become better, but is just used for hiring and firing. He's right-- that's what evaluation should be good for. But Gates might want to talk to some of the groups he pours money into, like TNTP or Bellwether, who really want evaluation to be driven by test scores and to in turn drive "employment decisions."
In other words, most teachers have to move up the learning line on their own. So they proceed slowly.
And a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. There are so many unproven assumptions in these nineteen words. Most teachers develop on their own? All teachers develop slowly? And that word "so"-- we know that the first is the cause of the second? Teachers may arguably develop alone in the sense that most teachers work alone. But teacher development over the first few years in the classroom is, I'd argue, rapid and often dramatic-- again, because a classroom full of students provide real-time high-impact feedback. But then teacher change slows down for (me arguing again) two main reasons. One is that doing the actual work of teaching doesn't leave time for extensive R & D. We read up, pay attention, watch what's happening, and we adjust and change and grow-- but at the same time, we have to keep showing up and doing our jobs. The second is that you don't need to make radical rapid changes each year if most of what you're doing works. Ice cream hasn't changed very much or very rapidly over the last century because it does its job pretty well.
Now let's chop some logic.
And it’s a big loss for their students, because the evidence shows that having an effective teacher is the single most important in-school factor in student achievement.
This is an urgent problem. Right now, only 25 percent of Hispanic students and 10 percent of African-American students graduate from high school ready for college.
First of all, the 25% and 10% figures come from... where? Because if, as I would suspect, they come from reading the tea leaves of Big Standardized Test results, they are bunk because at this point, nobody has showed any link at all between a good PARCC score and being "ready for college." Second, notice how we made that classic reformster jump from "teachers are the most important in-school factor" to "teachers are fully responsible for all student achievement."
But we know that the correlation between socio-economics and test scores is huge. Gates might as easily say that this "urgent problem" means that the feds must make some serious policy decisions to attack systemic poverty in this country. But no-- of all the factors that affect "ready for college" test scores, we'll zero in on teachers. Mind you, we'll readily accept our role on the front lines of this fight-- just don't pretend that there aren't other people who should be on the front lines with us.
If we’re going to solve this problem, we have to create outstanding feedback and improvement systems for teachers. We need to help all teachers move up the learning line faster, and together with their colleagues, so they can help far more students graduate ready for college.
This doesn't sound unreasonable. But what if the learning line looks more like a big, expansive tree with hundreds of wide-ranging branches? And what if the purpose of schools and teaching is more than just to get students ready for college?
Gates goes on to cite some places where success is happening, once again equating test scores with measures of success. He gets a point or two for talking about supporting teachers, then loses some for including "classroom tools aligned to the Common Core standards" on the list of supportive things. And he underlines the crucialness of focusing teacher evaluations on improving teacher skillls, repeating the Common Core's error of focusing strictly on skills and ignoring content. By Gates' measure, taking a class about early American literature or reading current biographies of important literary figures is not a useful activity because it's not skill-related.
Gates is worried that the process is fragile, and that where teacher evaluation is punitive and disconnected from any resources for improvement, teachers are resisting. This emphasis is also in the full speech, and I want to point out that Gates is only concerned that the bad evaluation process will deprive students of test-beating instruction-- not that bad evaluation is destructive of teachers, teaching and the school. Gates simply can't close the circle-- bad evaluation leads to teacher pushback which hinders implementation of the evaluation, but we never mention that teachers push back because the bad evaluation is destructive and toxic. Consequently, the implication here is that the measure of an evaluation system is not how good it is, but whether or not teachers will push back and get in the way. By this reasoning, we should avoid feeding children poison not because the poison is bad for them, but because they will fight back and make it harder to feed them.
So we have to find ways to take what’s working in a few places and
spread it much more widely. In my speech last week I encouraged teachers
to demand excellent feedback and improvement systems, and I urged state
and local leaders to deliver them.
Again with the scaling up and the flat rejection of local solutions for local issues. For Gates and friends, if it can't be mass-marketed, it's not good.
But I'm glad Gates made a speech about these issues and is urging state and local leaders to get on it. I myself recently delivered a speech in which I called for the federal government to reject John King's appointment as secretary of education, another speech in which I called for the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a budget finally, and a speech in which I demanded that Firefox stop crashing every time it ran into a site with flash.
Anybody can deliver a speech. What I find continually astonishing about Bill Gates is that he has no more knowledge, understanding or expertise about schooling and education than any average American pulled in off the street. He has not been appointed or elected to the position of Grand High Arbiter of US Education, and nobody ever said, "Hey, we need to call Bill Gates and get his thoughts on public education in America." His ideas are no more well-supported or well-developed than any other kind-of-interested amateur. (Watch reformy Jay Greene tear Gates a new one for his mangling of ed research.)
In short, if Bill Gates' thoughts about education had to live or die strictly on their merits, we would not be talking about any of this. The ideas laid out in this blog piece are not unspeakably terrible or remarkably extra-awful. They're just kind of dumb half-baked meh, the sort of thing you'd expect from somebody who only kind of sort of knows what he's talking about. That's the hugest mystery to me-- how is it that somehow, Gates is some sort of voice in the US discussion of public education? It's not the power of his insights, and it's not the usefulness of his ideas. But because he has money and connections, he can pretend that he's way up the learning line, where he need not search for any feedback from people who actually work in the field.
Showing posts with label Evaluation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evaluation. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Hatchet Jobs By Video
One of the achingly stupid portions of Andrew Cuomo's budgetary assault on education is the mandated use of outside evaluators.
There has been some spirited discussion of how exactly that would work, or not. Carol Burris looked at it. Daniel Katz broke down all the ways it won't work. The folks at South Bronx School put fake ads for outside evaluators on Craigslist-- and got responses. But it was realitybasededucator at Perdido Street Schools who spotted tweets from a Cuomo flack that hinted at another solution to this boldly baldfaced bowl of balderdash.
The trail of tweetage leads us to an article New York Daily News article by Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor who has carried a lot of water for Bill Gates in his day.
Kane uses a metaphor that he's been milking for quite a while now-- the idea that you can't diet successfully without a mirror and a bathroom scale. I've addressed his use of this monumentally ill-considered and mis-constructed analogy before-- it's a simple image with a whole lot of wrong packed into it, and you can follow the link for the full treatment if you like. The short answer is this: if you need a mirror and a bathroom scale to tell whether or not you're getting healthier, you are either a dope or the kind of technocratic tool who believes that machine-generated data is more valuable than human sensory input.
Kane also uses Cuomo's own talking point to call for "better" evaluations-- too many teachers were evaluated well last year. In other words, we will be ruled by data, but only data that matches our pre-concieved biases about teacher quality in NY. If the data doesn't match our biases (NY teachers mostly suck) then we will keep tweaking the system until it gives us the "right" data.
Cuomo has done his best to tweak the system by expressly forbidding input from parents, community, students, or the teacher's actual boss-- in other words, anybody who's actually familiar with how the teacher does her job. But Kane acknowledges that the outside evaluator requirement presents some logistical challenges. He has a solution.
A lot of time could be wasted as observers travel from school to school. One alternative would be to allow teachers to submit videos to external observers (and, possibly, to their principals as well).
On the one hand, there is some value in watching yourself work on camera. It takes roughly thirty seconds to spot whatever annoying tic you had carefully blocked from your own consciousness, but which your students use to mock you when you're not around.
On the other hand, handing that video over to a stranger as a means of evaluation is just stupid.
First, the camera can only cover so much of the classroom. So the video observer will only see a portion of what was going on and catch only a fraction of the teaching environment.
Because of that, and because of time lag (shoot video, send video, find time to watch video), the feedback will be less useful to the teacher. And how about that, anyway-- if the observer is going to make the trip to have a post-viewing feedback session with the teacher, how much time and hassle have we actually saved, anyway? Of course, we could save more time and hassle if the "feedback" just came in the form of written comments on a form, or a swift e-mail.
That sort of feedback would be considerably less useful. And you know what else it would do?
It would remove the need for the outside observer to look a teacher in the eye when he's scuttling her career. As an outsider, the observer already has zero skin in this game, absolutely no stake on the line at all. Add the video, and the observer doesn't even have the minimal human stake involved in talking to someone face to face.
The distance created by a video version of observation removes one more relationship from the mix. The observee and the observer remain total strangers to each other. The observer need not be concerned about whether or not he's actually helping the teacher, and the teacher has no idea whether the observer is a wise mentor educator whose advice is worth heeding, or some jackass hack who just breezed through fifty videos in a day and whose advice is no more useful than that of some shmoe off the street. Heck, it might be a shmoe off the street who's just ploughing through videos in a Pearson evaluation video sweatshop. (That is, of course, before the day arrives that Pearson announces they've got software that can analyze videos to determine teacher quality).
Video observation is an almost certain guarantee that the observation process will be even less useful, less helpful, less instrumental in helping teachers improve and grow. Of course, is the only point of your observation process is to play "gotcha" with all those awful teachers that you just know are out there, then a video system should work just fine.
Look, there's no way to implement the outside observation idea that isn't bad, and dumb. But observation by video would be the baddest, dumbest method of all. Unfortunately, it would also be the most efficiently profitable for the company that lands the contract, so I'm afraid we may be onto something here. As always, best of luck and good wishes to my brothers and sisters in New York classrooms.
There has been some spirited discussion of how exactly that would work, or not. Carol Burris looked at it. Daniel Katz broke down all the ways it won't work. The folks at South Bronx School put fake ads for outside evaluators on Craigslist-- and got responses. But it was realitybasededucator at Perdido Street Schools who spotted tweets from a Cuomo flack that hinted at another solution to this boldly baldfaced bowl of balderdash.
The trail of tweetage leads us to an article New York Daily News article by Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor who has carried a lot of water for Bill Gates in his day.
Kane uses a metaphor that he's been milking for quite a while now-- the idea that you can't diet successfully without a mirror and a bathroom scale. I've addressed his use of this monumentally ill-considered and mis-constructed analogy before-- it's a simple image with a whole lot of wrong packed into it, and you can follow the link for the full treatment if you like. The short answer is this: if you need a mirror and a bathroom scale to tell whether or not you're getting healthier, you are either a dope or the kind of technocratic tool who believes that machine-generated data is more valuable than human sensory input.
Kane also uses Cuomo's own talking point to call for "better" evaluations-- too many teachers were evaluated well last year. In other words, we will be ruled by data, but only data that matches our pre-concieved biases about teacher quality in NY. If the data doesn't match our biases (NY teachers mostly suck) then we will keep tweaking the system until it gives us the "right" data.
Cuomo has done his best to tweak the system by expressly forbidding input from parents, community, students, or the teacher's actual boss-- in other words, anybody who's actually familiar with how the teacher does her job. But Kane acknowledges that the outside evaluator requirement presents some logistical challenges. He has a solution.
A lot of time could be wasted as observers travel from school to school. One alternative would be to allow teachers to submit videos to external observers (and, possibly, to their principals as well).
On the one hand, there is some value in watching yourself work on camera. It takes roughly thirty seconds to spot whatever annoying tic you had carefully blocked from your own consciousness, but which your students use to mock you when you're not around.
On the other hand, handing that video over to a stranger as a means of evaluation is just stupid.
First, the camera can only cover so much of the classroom. So the video observer will only see a portion of what was going on and catch only a fraction of the teaching environment.
Because of that, and because of time lag (shoot video, send video, find time to watch video), the feedback will be less useful to the teacher. And how about that, anyway-- if the observer is going to make the trip to have a post-viewing feedback session with the teacher, how much time and hassle have we actually saved, anyway? Of course, we could save more time and hassle if the "feedback" just came in the form of written comments on a form, or a swift e-mail.
That sort of feedback would be considerably less useful. And you know what else it would do?
It would remove the need for the outside observer to look a teacher in the eye when he's scuttling her career. As an outsider, the observer already has zero skin in this game, absolutely no stake on the line at all. Add the video, and the observer doesn't even have the minimal human stake involved in talking to someone face to face.
The distance created by a video version of observation removes one more relationship from the mix. The observee and the observer remain total strangers to each other. The observer need not be concerned about whether or not he's actually helping the teacher, and the teacher has no idea whether the observer is a wise mentor educator whose advice is worth heeding, or some jackass hack who just breezed through fifty videos in a day and whose advice is no more useful than that of some shmoe off the street. Heck, it might be a shmoe off the street who's just ploughing through videos in a Pearson evaluation video sweatshop. (That is, of course, before the day arrives that Pearson announces they've got software that can analyze videos to determine teacher quality).
Video observation is an almost certain guarantee that the observation process will be even less useful, less helpful, less instrumental in helping teachers improve and grow. Of course, is the only point of your observation process is to play "gotcha" with all those awful teachers that you just know are out there, then a video system should work just fine.
Look, there's no way to implement the outside observation idea that isn't bad, and dumb. But observation by video would be the baddest, dumbest method of all. Unfortunately, it would also be the most efficiently profitable for the company that lands the contract, so I'm afraid we may be onto something here. As always, best of luck and good wishes to my brothers and sisters in New York classrooms.
Seniority and My Wife
From Students Matter to Campbell Brown, reformsters have been working to erode teacher job security and end the use of seniority in furlough decisions. The current system, they say, is unfairly hurting great young teachers. I have some thoughts about gifted teachers at the beginning of their careers, because I'm married to one of them. This debate, for us, is intensely personal.
My wife and I teach in two different districts in Pennsylvania, and like all districts in Pennsylvania that don't mainly serve rich folks, our districts are caught in big financial vise. Now in budgeting season, both districts are looking (once again) at some serious cuts. But my wife and I are in different situations; I am at the top of my district's seniority list, and she is at the bottom of hers. She and two co-workers have already had The Meeting-- the one where an administrator tells you that your future with the district does not look good.
My wife is good. Really good. Before she landed this full-time job, she was the go-to sub for maternity leaves, the sub always requested by teachers at all levels. She has been hugely successful with her first graders-- creative, loving, gifted, inspiring, and hugely dedicated. I know this not just because I'm married to her, but because people who work with and around her tell me, often. She does all the things you hear about dedicated elementary teachers doing-- spending tons of money on supplies, working a sixth day in the classroom every weekend, going the extra mile to get her students the support they need. If there were ever a teacher who deserved to have a job, my wife is just such a person.
Co-workers have said many things to her in attempts to be supportive. One such comment is "If only we could just find three teachers who don't deserve to be here and just fire them instead."
We've talked about this. "How would that even work," is her response to Just Fire the Worst. She wondered who would make such a decision, and how. I allowed as how lots of reformsters like the idea of doing it based on teacher ratings, but of course in a K-6 school, some of those are based on test scores and some are based on the yet-to-be-fully-explained SLOs, with a helping of school performance ratings and VAM sauce. I've yet to meet anybody in my wife's position who thinks they'd be more secure under such a system of randomly assigned test-based student-dependent numbers.
My wife also notes that the stack-rank, fire-the-bottom-5% model is for lazy managers. "They don't ever have to try to raise anybody up. They just sit in their office and wait. And if they want to get rid of somebody, they can just refuse to help make them better." How would that help a school improve?
And what about building morale. If you're competing with the teacher across the hall for a job, how do you justify lending them the great teaching idea you just came up with? My wife works at a great school, and one of the marks of its greatness is the collaboration and teamwork among the staff; how does that survive a Thunderdome fight for survival?
Morale always takes a hit from furloughs. Just the idea that they are now That School, where people can lose their job because bureaucrats and politicians can't manage finances, is depressing, stressful. My wife is living with uncertainty, sadness, strain (while still doing a kick-ass job). How would it affect a building if every budgetary crisis meant that every single teacher in the building had to live with that uncertainty?
Some PA legislators are once again trying to float anti-seniority laws that would let school districts under financial hardship handle layoffs based on teacher ratings. They would also, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "permit school districts to furlough teachers based on the economic needs of the district."
This is exactly the sort of law that would conceivably save my wife's position. Ironically, it would probably end mine. For a district in economic hardship, the most attractive layoffs would be to axe the most expensive teachers. Under an "economic hardship" rule, my career would have ended a decade ago. So in state like Pennsylvania where the legislature has been systematically underfunding schools, either my wife or I are vulnerable to furlough.
I asked her what she thought about devoting herself to a career in which every step up the ladder of success would mean one step closer to being fired. She responded with some NSFW language (my wife is quite the sassmeister when she wants to be). And that's the thing about non-seniority rules. Under the current system. it's hard to get a lifelong teaching career launched and safely under way. Under anti-seniority systems, it's impossible. The world needs more teachers like my wife, and my wife is not a dope. How do you recruit and retain her by saying, "You can have a short-term job in teaching, but you will never have a career."
Look, nobody has to tell me that the way this is working sucks. Sucks with a giant suckness that could out-suck the suck of the biggest darkest suckingest black hole in the universe. But as much as this sucks, every alternative proposed by reformsters sucks even more. Pennsylvania schools should be properly funded. My wife should be in a classroom for the rest of her life, and all present and future students deserve to have a teacher of her caliber and dedication. That's the world we ought to be living in; destroying seniority gets us further away from that world, not closer.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
My wife and I teach in two different districts in Pennsylvania, and like all districts in Pennsylvania that don't mainly serve rich folks, our districts are caught in big financial vise. Now in budgeting season, both districts are looking (once again) at some serious cuts. But my wife and I are in different situations; I am at the top of my district's seniority list, and she is at the bottom of hers. She and two co-workers have already had The Meeting-- the one where an administrator tells you that your future with the district does not look good.
My wife is good. Really good. Before she landed this full-time job, she was the go-to sub for maternity leaves, the sub always requested by teachers at all levels. She has been hugely successful with her first graders-- creative, loving, gifted, inspiring, and hugely dedicated. I know this not just because I'm married to her, but because people who work with and around her tell me, often. She does all the things you hear about dedicated elementary teachers doing-- spending tons of money on supplies, working a sixth day in the classroom every weekend, going the extra mile to get her students the support they need. If there were ever a teacher who deserved to have a job, my wife is just such a person.
Co-workers have said many things to her in attempts to be supportive. One such comment is "If only we could just find three teachers who don't deserve to be here and just fire them instead."
We've talked about this. "How would that even work," is her response to Just Fire the Worst. She wondered who would make such a decision, and how. I allowed as how lots of reformsters like the idea of doing it based on teacher ratings, but of course in a K-6 school, some of those are based on test scores and some are based on the yet-to-be-fully-explained SLOs, with a helping of school performance ratings and VAM sauce. I've yet to meet anybody in my wife's position who thinks they'd be more secure under such a system of randomly assigned test-based student-dependent numbers.
My wife also notes that the stack-rank, fire-the-bottom-5% model is for lazy managers. "They don't ever have to try to raise anybody up. They just sit in their office and wait. And if they want to get rid of somebody, they can just refuse to help make them better." How would that help a school improve?
And what about building morale. If you're competing with the teacher across the hall for a job, how do you justify lending them the great teaching idea you just came up with? My wife works at a great school, and one of the marks of its greatness is the collaboration and teamwork among the staff; how does that survive a Thunderdome fight for survival?
Morale always takes a hit from furloughs. Just the idea that they are now That School, where people can lose their job because bureaucrats and politicians can't manage finances, is depressing, stressful. My wife is living with uncertainty, sadness, strain (while still doing a kick-ass job). How would it affect a building if every budgetary crisis meant that every single teacher in the building had to live with that uncertainty?
Some PA legislators are once again trying to float anti-seniority laws that would let school districts under financial hardship handle layoffs based on teacher ratings. They would also, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "permit school districts to furlough teachers based on the economic needs of the district."
This is exactly the sort of law that would conceivably save my wife's position. Ironically, it would probably end mine. For a district in economic hardship, the most attractive layoffs would be to axe the most expensive teachers. Under an "economic hardship" rule, my career would have ended a decade ago. So in state like Pennsylvania where the legislature has been systematically underfunding schools, either my wife or I are vulnerable to furlough.
I asked her what she thought about devoting herself to a career in which every step up the ladder of success would mean one step closer to being fired. She responded with some NSFW language (my wife is quite the sassmeister when she wants to be). And that's the thing about non-seniority rules. Under the current system. it's hard to get a lifelong teaching career launched and safely under way. Under anti-seniority systems, it's impossible. The world needs more teachers like my wife, and my wife is not a dope. How do you recruit and retain her by saying, "You can have a short-term job in teaching, but you will never have a career."
Look, nobody has to tell me that the way this is working sucks. Sucks with a giant suckness that could out-suck the suck of the biggest darkest suckingest black hole in the universe. But as much as this sucks, every alternative proposed by reformsters sucks even more. Pennsylvania schools should be properly funded. My wife should be in a classroom for the rest of her life, and all present and future students deserve to have a teacher of her caliber and dedication. That's the world we ought to be living in; destroying seniority gets us further away from that world, not closer.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
NY: Teachers Can Go To Hell, With a Heavy Heart
This has truly been the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. An unpopular proposal that guts teaching as a profession and kicks public education in the teeth, sails through the NY legislature.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
NY: Have Evaluation, Will Travel
The situation with education as described by the New York State budget could best be described as fluid, like the contents of one of those lagoons of pig poop one finds near factory farms.
In the twitterverse some folks have declared the budget a huge win for education, but as the pig poop flows, it becomes seems that actual specific winning portions are as hard to locate as a tiny daisy at the bottom of, well, a lake full of pig poop.
Earlier today, my esteemed blogging colleague Daniel Katz pulled apart the issue of the outside evaluator, the element of teacher evaluation that's supposed to involve somebody outside the school descending, like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, to evaluate complete strangers in a completely unfamiliar setting.
Katz demolished each of the supposed sources of outside evaluators (principals with nothing in particular to do at their own schools, retired teachers who like driving around, college professors who aren't busy not teaching their own classes, or the five teachers who will be found highly effective under the NY system).
But it turns out those assumptions are so Earlier This Afternoon. Sharpeyed tweetists watching NY legislature proceedings have been tweeting the news that actually shouldn't be news to anybody who's been paying attention to the reform biz-- Outside Evaluators don't have to be educators at all.
This gives rise to some hilarious scenarios (what would teacher evaluation by, say, an out of work circus clown look like) as well as some practical ones (at last-- something for all those craigslist-hired test scorers to do in the off season). But we have seen this movie, and we know how it's going to end.
Should the amateur-hour outside evaluation idea stand, we will shortly see the launch of Pearson Teacher Eval R Us. Hell, all they have to do as is adapt the edTPA baloney that's already in place tosuck money from aspiring new teachers help launch bold young careers. They will scarf up a team of crack teacher evaluators (keep your eyes on craigslist), train 'em up right, and offer them to your district at bargain basement prices.
There may be other vendors who enter the market, but the effect will be the same-- more money flowing away from classrooms and toward corporate bank accounts while at the same time trashing careers with a rout of random vandalizing that New Yorkers will support with their hard-earned tax dollars. It will be just one more golden yolk to be extracted in the continuing drive to turn public education into a private profit opportunity.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Happier than a pig upwind of the giant poop lagoon.
In the twitterverse some folks have declared the budget a huge win for education, but as the pig poop flows, it becomes seems that actual specific winning portions are as hard to locate as a tiny daisy at the bottom of, well, a lake full of pig poop.
Earlier today, my esteemed blogging colleague Daniel Katz pulled apart the issue of the outside evaluator, the element of teacher evaluation that's supposed to involve somebody outside the school descending, like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, to evaluate complete strangers in a completely unfamiliar setting.
Katz demolished each of the supposed sources of outside evaluators (principals with nothing in particular to do at their own schools, retired teachers who like driving around, college professors who aren't busy not teaching their own classes, or the five teachers who will be found highly effective under the NY system).
But it turns out those assumptions are so Earlier This Afternoon. Sharpeyed tweetists watching NY legislature proceedings have been tweeting the news that actually shouldn't be news to anybody who's been paying attention to the reform biz-- Outside Evaluators don't have to be educators at all.
This gives rise to some hilarious scenarios (what would teacher evaluation by, say, an out of work circus clown look like) as well as some practical ones (at last-- something for all those craigslist-hired test scorers to do in the off season). But we have seen this movie, and we know how it's going to end.
Should the amateur-hour outside evaluation idea stand, we will shortly see the launch of Pearson Teacher Eval R Us. Hell, all they have to do as is adapt the edTPA baloney that's already in place to
There may be other vendors who enter the market, but the effect will be the same-- more money flowing away from classrooms and toward corporate bank accounts while at the same time trashing careers with a rout of random vandalizing that New Yorkers will support with their hard-earned tax dollars. It will be just one more golden yolk to be extracted in the continuing drive to turn public education into a private profit opportunity.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Happier than a pig upwind of the giant poop lagoon.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Yelp for Teachers?
At Yahoo News (yes, that's a thing) Matt Bai, who usually blogs about politics, has a piece arguing for more transparent metrics for teachers, a "Yelp for teachers. Let's take a look.
He spins off from a suit by a Virginia parent to force the state to release "the ratings that public school teachers get based on the test scores of their students."
Bai considers the arguments, and does so in a fairly even-handed manner. In fact. he uses what I'd call a pretty good baseball analogy for why the test-based VAM scores are not exactly the best possible way to measure teachers.
Did Derek Jeter give up more runs, statistically speaking, than the average shortstop? Yes. Did you want Jeter as your shortstop anyway? Absolutely. A public school teacher who ignites the imagination (and most of us had someone like that) might just be worth more than the one whose students have demonstrated mastery of the Pythagorean theorem.
But Bai is not so much interested in techy test-based teacher tallies and how to best share them with the world. He's more interested in the matter of customer-based ratings. If amazon.com and Yelp can use customers ratings in a transparent manner, why not do the same for teachers.
Ask the parents at any bus stop which teachers have lost their energy for the job or can’t control their tempers, and you’ll find out pretty quickly that they know better than anyone else. But there’s no mechanism for parents to pool that knowledge or to make the school system respond to it.
There are a few issues with this. Some Bai recognizes; some, not so much.
First, the platform that he wants to see has been created, and more than once. For instance, check out ratemyteacher.com, which has been around for over a decade. My school is there, with thirteen teachers rated (including one who doesn't actually teach here); I have six ratings myself, placed in the system between 2004 and 2007.
And there's your next problem-- how do you get enough people to use the platform to get meaningful results? Those six ratings (assuming of course that they were written by students that I actually taught) represent approximately .5% of my customer base. Is that enough data for my employer to make decisions about my job performance, or for me to make tweaks in my teaching style?
How would we get all the parents of my district to log in and evaluate teachers, and would we get data that was useful? Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments-- twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who's angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up. On the other hand, if I somehow encourage parents to just fill it out, go ahead, say anything, just do it-- they may well take to heart the "say anything" implied in that sort of set-up.
I'm actually a fan of feedback. I have course and teacher evaluation forms of my own that my students fill out anonymously at the end of the year, and on more than one occasion it has changed how I do things. But there's something missing in the techy on-line customer comments model of teacher feedback, and while I'm not sure what it is, the very fact that it doesn't exist is our biggest evidence that nobody yet knows what it should look like. After all, we've made it possible for farmers to find their soulmates. Heck-- if this kind of web-based eval was really desired by parents, it would already exist as a bunch of facebook pages.
There are other problems with the customer feedback model for education. For instance, the quality of the "product" is often not evidenced for years. Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, "Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me." Also, parents are not the only customers-- all taxpayers and business owners and community members are also customers of public ed.
Maybe this kind of transparent open-source feedback would be useful. After all, how often are comments and rating features of websites commandeered by trolls and cranks? Well, Bia's comment section is up to 1,500 entries, and I can tell you they're not all winners. Would they be a good evaluation tool for Bia's skill as a writer?
His last line is the final stake in this idea's chest:
Shouldn’t we teach to the parents at least as much as we teach to the test?
I understand his point (isn't parent feedback at least as useful as BS Test results soaked in VAM sauce), but the correct answer is "We should not teach to either. We should teach students."
He spins off from a suit by a Virginia parent to force the state to release "the ratings that public school teachers get based on the test scores of their students."
Bai considers the arguments, and does so in a fairly even-handed manner. In fact. he uses what I'd call a pretty good baseball analogy for why the test-based VAM scores are not exactly the best possible way to measure teachers.
Did Derek Jeter give up more runs, statistically speaking, than the average shortstop? Yes. Did you want Jeter as your shortstop anyway? Absolutely. A public school teacher who ignites the imagination (and most of us had someone like that) might just be worth more than the one whose students have demonstrated mastery of the Pythagorean theorem.
But Bai is not so much interested in techy test-based teacher tallies and how to best share them with the world. He's more interested in the matter of customer-based ratings. If amazon.com and Yelp can use customers ratings in a transparent manner, why not do the same for teachers.
Ask the parents at any bus stop which teachers have lost their energy for the job or can’t control their tempers, and you’ll find out pretty quickly that they know better than anyone else. But there’s no mechanism for parents to pool that knowledge or to make the school system respond to it.
There are a few issues with this. Some Bai recognizes; some, not so much.
First, the platform that he wants to see has been created, and more than once. For instance, check out ratemyteacher.com, which has been around for over a decade. My school is there, with thirteen teachers rated (including one who doesn't actually teach here); I have six ratings myself, placed in the system between 2004 and 2007.
And there's your next problem-- how do you get enough people to use the platform to get meaningful results? Those six ratings (assuming of course that they were written by students that I actually taught) represent approximately .5% of my customer base. Is that enough data for my employer to make decisions about my job performance, or for me to make tweaks in my teaching style?
How would we get all the parents of my district to log in and evaluate teachers, and would we get data that was useful? Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments-- twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who's angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up. On the other hand, if I somehow encourage parents to just fill it out, go ahead, say anything, just do it-- they may well take to heart the "say anything" implied in that sort of set-up.
I'm actually a fan of feedback. I have course and teacher evaluation forms of my own that my students fill out anonymously at the end of the year, and on more than one occasion it has changed how I do things. But there's something missing in the techy on-line customer comments model of teacher feedback, and while I'm not sure what it is, the very fact that it doesn't exist is our biggest evidence that nobody yet knows what it should look like. After all, we've made it possible for farmers to find their soulmates. Heck-- if this kind of web-based eval was really desired by parents, it would already exist as a bunch of facebook pages.
There are other problems with the customer feedback model for education. For instance, the quality of the "product" is often not evidenced for years. Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, "Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me." Also, parents are not the only customers-- all taxpayers and business owners and community members are also customers of public ed.
Maybe this kind of transparent open-source feedback would be useful. After all, how often are comments and rating features of websites commandeered by trolls and cranks? Well, Bia's comment section is up to 1,500 entries, and I can tell you they're not all winners. Would they be a good evaluation tool for Bia's skill as a writer?
His last line is the final stake in this idea's chest:
Shouldn’t we teach to the parents at least as much as we teach to the test?
I understand his point (isn't parent feedback at least as useful as BS Test results soaked in VAM sauce), but the correct answer is "We should not teach to either. We should teach students."
Friday, March 13, 2015
PA: All About the Tests (And Poverty)
In Pennsylvania, we rate schools with the School Performance Profile (SPP). Now a new research report reveals that the SPP is pretty much just a means of converting test scores into a school rating. This has huge implications for all teachers in PA because our teacher evaluations include the SPP for the school at which we teach.
Research for Action, a Philly-based education research group, just released its new brief, "Pennsylvania'a School Performance Profile: Not the Sum of Its Parts." The short version of its findings are pretty stark and not very encouraging--
90% of the SPP is directly based on test results.
90%.
SPP is our answer to the USED waiver requirement for a test-based school-level student achievement report. It replaces the old Adequate Yearly Progress of NCLB days by supposedly considering student growth instead of simple raw scores. It rates schools on a scale of 0-100, with 70 or above considered "passing." In addition to being used to rate schools and teachers, SPP's get trotted out any time someone wants to make a political argument about failing schools.
RFA was particularly interested in looking at the degree to which SPP actually reflects poverty level, and their introduction includes this sentence:
Studies both in the United States and internationally have established a consistent, negative link between poverty and student outcomes on standardized tests, and found that this relationship has become stronger in recent years.
Emphasis mine. But let's move on.
SPP is put together from a variety of calculations performed on test scores. Five of the six-- which account for 90% of the score-- "rely entirely on test scores."
Our analysis finds that this reliance on test scores, despite the partial use of growth measures, results in a school rating system that favors more advantaged schools.
Emphasis theirs.
The brief opens with a consideration of the correlation of SPP to poverty. I suggest you go look at the graph for yourself, but I will tell you that you don't need any statistics background at all to see the clear correlation between poverty and a lower SPP. And as we break down the elements of the SPP, it's easy to see why the correlation is there.
Indicators of Academic Achievement (40%)
Forty percent of the school's SPP comes from a proficiency rating (aka just plain straight on test results) that comes from tested subjects, third grade read, and the SAT/ACT College Ready Benchmark. Whether we're talking third grade reading or high school Keystone exams, "performance declines as poverty increases."*
Out of 2,200 schools sampled, 187 had proficiency ratings higher than 90, and only seven of those had more than 50% economically disadvantaged enrollment. Five of those were Philly magnet schools.
Indicators of Academic Growth aka PVAAS (40%)
PVAAS is our version of a VAM rating, in which we compare actual student performance to the performance of imaginary students in an alternate neutral universe run through a magical formula that corrects for everything in the world except teacher influence. It is junk science.
RFA found that while the correlation with poverty was still there, when it came to PSSAs (our elementary test) it was not quite as strong as the proficiency correlation. For the Keystones, writing and science tests, however, the correlation with poverty is, well, robust. Strong. Undeniable. Among other things, this means that you can blunt the impact of Keystone test results by getting some PSSA test-takers under the same roof. Time to start that 5-9 middle school!!
Closing the Achievement Gap (10%)
This particular measure has a built-in penalty for low-achieving schools (aka high poverty schools-- see above). Basically, you've got six years to close half the proficiency gap between where you are and 100%. If you have 50% proficiency, you've got six years to hit 75%. If you have 60%, you have six years to hit 80%. The lower you are, the more students you must drag over the test score finish line.
That last 10%, incidentally, is items like graduation rate and attendance rate. Pennsylvania also gives you points for the number of students you can convince to buy the products and services of the College Board, including AP stuff and PSAT. So kudos to the College Board people on superior product placement. Remember kids-- give your money to the College Board. It's the law!
Bottom line-- we have schools in PA being judged directly on test performance, and we have data once again clearly showing that the state could save a ton of money by simply issuing school ratings based on the income level of students.
For those who want to complain, "How dare you say those poor kids can't achieve," I'll add this. We aren't measuring whether poor kids can achieve, learn, accomplish great things, or grow up to be exemplary adults-- there is no disputing that they can do all those things. But we aren't measuring that. We are measuring how well they do on a crappy standardized test, and the fact that poverty correlates with results on that crappy test should be a screaming red siren that the crappy test is not measuring what people claim it measures.
*Correction: I had originally include a mistyping here that reversed the meaning of the study.
Research for Action, a Philly-based education research group, just released its new brief, "Pennsylvania'a School Performance Profile: Not the Sum of Its Parts." The short version of its findings are pretty stark and not very encouraging--
90% of the SPP is directly based on test results.
90%.
SPP is our answer to the USED waiver requirement for a test-based school-level student achievement report. It replaces the old Adequate Yearly Progress of NCLB days by supposedly considering student growth instead of simple raw scores. It rates schools on a scale of 0-100, with 70 or above considered "passing." In addition to being used to rate schools and teachers, SPP's get trotted out any time someone wants to make a political argument about failing schools.
RFA was particularly interested in looking at the degree to which SPP actually reflects poverty level, and their introduction includes this sentence:
Studies both in the United States and internationally have established a consistent, negative link between poverty and student outcomes on standardized tests, and found that this relationship has become stronger in recent years.
Emphasis mine. But let's move on.
SPP is put together from a variety of calculations performed on test scores. Five of the six-- which account for 90% of the score-- "rely entirely on test scores."
Our analysis finds that this reliance on test scores, despite the partial use of growth measures, results in a school rating system that favors more advantaged schools.
Emphasis theirs.
The brief opens with a consideration of the correlation of SPP to poverty. I suggest you go look at the graph for yourself, but I will tell you that you don't need any statistics background at all to see the clear correlation between poverty and a lower SPP. And as we break down the elements of the SPP, it's easy to see why the correlation is there.
Indicators of Academic Achievement (40%)
Forty percent of the school's SPP comes from a proficiency rating (aka just plain straight on test results) that comes from tested subjects, third grade read, and the SAT/ACT College Ready Benchmark. Whether we're talking third grade reading or high school Keystone exams, "performance declines as poverty increases."*
Out of 2,200 schools sampled, 187 had proficiency ratings higher than 90, and only seven of those had more than 50% economically disadvantaged enrollment. Five of those were Philly magnet schools.
Indicators of Academic Growth aka PVAAS (40%)
PVAAS is our version of a VAM rating, in which we compare actual student performance to the performance of imaginary students in an alternate neutral universe run through a magical formula that corrects for everything in the world except teacher influence. It is junk science.
RFA found that while the correlation with poverty was still there, when it came to PSSAs (our elementary test) it was not quite as strong as the proficiency correlation. For the Keystones, writing and science tests, however, the correlation with poverty is, well, robust. Strong. Undeniable. Among other things, this means that you can blunt the impact of Keystone test results by getting some PSSA test-takers under the same roof. Time to start that 5-9 middle school!!
Closing the Achievement Gap (10%)
This particular measure has a built-in penalty for low-achieving schools (aka high poverty schools-- see above). Basically, you've got six years to close half the proficiency gap between where you are and 100%. If you have 50% proficiency, you've got six years to hit 75%. If you have 60%, you have six years to hit 80%. The lower you are, the more students you must drag over the test score finish line.
That last 10%, incidentally, is items like graduation rate and attendance rate. Pennsylvania also gives you points for the number of students you can convince to buy the products and services of the College Board, including AP stuff and PSAT. So kudos to the College Board people on superior product placement. Remember kids-- give your money to the College Board. It's the law!
Bottom line-- we have schools in PA being judged directly on test performance, and we have data once again clearly showing that the state could save a ton of money by simply issuing school ratings based on the income level of students.
For those who want to complain, "How dare you say those poor kids can't achieve," I'll add this. We aren't measuring whether poor kids can achieve, learn, accomplish great things, or grow up to be exemplary adults-- there is no disputing that they can do all those things. But we aren't measuring that. We are measuring how well they do on a crappy standardized test, and the fact that poverty correlates with results on that crappy test should be a screaming red siren that the crappy test is not measuring what people claim it measures.
*Correction: I had originally include a mistyping here that reversed the meaning of the study.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Super Slaps School Board Into Submission
Last night was the night for the Ken-Ton School Board and their president Bob Dana to take a stand against the test-and-bully policies of New York State. Faced with an extremely reluctant superintendent, the board blinked.
On Monday, I reported that the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District, located a bit north of Buffalo, NY, was going to consider two resolutions-- one demanding that NY's teacher evaluation system be de-coupled from testing and the other demanding that Governor Cuomo stop holding everyone's money hostage. The "or else" was that the district would stop giving the test and counting it in teacher evaluations. Superintendent Dawn Mirand released a statement expressing her opposition to the move. The statement was pretty clear, but just in case there were any doubts, she reportedly made herself even clearer at last night's board meeting.
Joseph Popiolkowski had the story for this morning's Buffalo News:
"If the district’s state aid, which is currently 32 percent of its budget, or about $50 million, was withheld by the state as punishment, that would result in a 71 percent tax increase, she said. The average home assessed at $100,000 would see a $1,500 tax increase, “or massive layoffs would have to take place,” she [Mirand] said.
On top of that, board members could be removed from office and teachers who refused to administer the test might lose their certification. Furthermore, fire might rain from the sky, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Mirand just wants everyone to be aware of the risks.
You can see from coverage by tv station WKBW that the meeting pulled in a double-full house of community people, and that's a double-full house of people who were vocally in favor of standing up to Governor Cuomo. One parent in the newscast compares the action to taking a stand for civil rights.
Ken-Ton is one of the districts in NY that took a financial hit under the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which has oddly enough created budget gaps in many districts-- in Ken-Ton the cost has been about $40 million.
Mirand has only been in place since May of 2014. While she is clearly not one of those heroic warrior superintendents standing up to reformy nonsense, she is an actual educator, who started out as a teacher and has worked her way up in the region. Bob Dana was president when the board hired her, and he expressed enthusiasm for her at the time. She's having one fun first year.
Other board members range from firmly in Dana's corner to slightly apprehensive, and since the resolutions have only been out there for a few days, several would like a chance to finish thinking things through. The board has also invoked that old stand-by of nervous politicians everywhere-- the waiting period to get a more community input.
The resolutions are tabled until the April meeting of the board. In the meantime, you can bet that there will be some spirited conversing in the Ken-Ton school district.
On Monday, I reported that the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District, located a bit north of Buffalo, NY, was going to consider two resolutions-- one demanding that NY's teacher evaluation system be de-coupled from testing and the other demanding that Governor Cuomo stop holding everyone's money hostage. The "or else" was that the district would stop giving the test and counting it in teacher evaluations. Superintendent Dawn Mirand released a statement expressing her opposition to the move. The statement was pretty clear, but just in case there were any doubts, she reportedly made herself even clearer at last night's board meeting.
Joseph Popiolkowski had the story for this morning's Buffalo News:
"If the district’s state aid, which is currently 32 percent of its budget, or about $50 million, was withheld by the state as punishment, that would result in a 71 percent tax increase, she said. The average home assessed at $100,000 would see a $1,500 tax increase, “or massive layoffs would have to take place,” she [Mirand] said.
On top of that, board members could be removed from office and teachers who refused to administer the test might lose their certification. Furthermore, fire might rain from the sky, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Mirand just wants everyone to be aware of the risks.
You can see from coverage by tv station WKBW that the meeting pulled in a double-full house of community people, and that's a double-full house of people who were vocally in favor of standing up to Governor Cuomo. One parent in the newscast compares the action to taking a stand for civil rights.
Ken-Ton is one of the districts in NY that took a financial hit under the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which has oddly enough created budget gaps in many districts-- in Ken-Ton the cost has been about $40 million.
Mirand has only been in place since May of 2014. While she is clearly not one of those heroic warrior superintendents standing up to reformy nonsense, she is an actual educator, who started out as a teacher and has worked her way up in the region. Bob Dana was president when the board hired her, and he expressed enthusiasm for her at the time. She's having one fun first year.
Other board members range from firmly in Dana's corner to slightly apprehensive, and since the resolutions have only been out there for a few days, several would like a chance to finish thinking things through. The board has also invoked that old stand-by of nervous politicians everywhere-- the waiting period to get a more community input.
The resolutions are tabled until the April meeting of the board. In the meantime, you can bet that there will be some spirited conversing in the Ken-Ton school district.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Throwdown in Upstate NY*
It appears that some board members of the Kennmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District (generally known as the Ken-Ton district) have had enough.
The district is located north-ish of Buffalo, NY, and serves roughly 75,000 residents. And tomorrow night, board president Bob Dana wants to fire a shot across the state capital's bow.
The story has just been picked up by the Buffalo press in the last hour. In that piece, Dana is plenty clear:
“Enough is enough. He’s slowly bleeding us away,” Dana said of Cuomo on Monday. “I have never been a conspiracy theorist. But every time I look at the things that are getting proposed and where they’re coming from, they’re not fair, they’re not legal, they’re not right.”
He has two resolutions drafted and ready to go.
First, a resolution that protests both the current 20% system and the proposed 50% for counting standardized test results in teacher evaluations, and demands that both be abandoned. The resolution calls for a representative council drawing from many of the states educational professional groups to develop a fair and equitable teacher evaluation system. If those demands aren't met,
The Board of Education of the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda UFSD will, upon the approval and acceptance of the KTA & KAA, seriously consider eliminating using student test data as part of our teachers and administrators evaluations. Furthermore, it would be expected that the KTA & KAA would be receptive to recalculating the remaining portion of their evaluations to a total 100%.
Second, a resolution that the governor stop holding school funds hostage and comply with the court-ordered return to districts of the money owed them by the state of New York. If the state won't do so, the district will
seriously consider not administering standardized testing in grades 3-8.
In other words, Dana would like to tell Andrew Cuomo to "go get stuffed." I'm paraphrasing.
While some district folks are calling on parents to support the board by submitting opt-out letters, not everybody is feeling feisty. The district's superintendent Dawn Mirand has sent out a statement that basically says, "I feel your pain. Everybody is frustrated and school boards want to watch out for their children and districts, but it would really be better if we didn't go do something crazy that would earn us a serious spanking by the state. I will keep working within the law to do something about the state's mess of dumb regulations, but in the meantime, the law is the law and let's not volunteer to be made an example of. Vote no on this thing." I'm paraphrasing.
The meeting of the five member board is tomorrow (March 10). It looks like it could be quite the adventure. Granted, a resolution to seriously consider possibly doing stuff leaves the board a lot of wiggle room, but if nothing else, it marks the frustration level in the outskirts of Cuomo's domain. Stay tuned. [Update: The account of how this meeting turned out can be found here.]
*All right. I spent five minutes debating the intricacies of New York geographical subdivisions. I had this argument forty years ago in college with residents of what may be either "Western NY, " "Upstate NY," "Buffalo-area-the-rest-of-the-state-is-really-East-of-Us NY" and other variations I have since forgotten. I mean no malice toward anyone who does not care for my geographical designation. I had to locate it somewhere.
The district is located north-ish of Buffalo, NY, and serves roughly 75,000 residents. And tomorrow night, board president Bob Dana wants to fire a shot across the state capital's bow.
The story has just been picked up by the Buffalo press in the last hour. In that piece, Dana is plenty clear:
“Enough is enough. He’s slowly bleeding us away,” Dana said of Cuomo on Monday. “I have never been a conspiracy theorist. But every time I look at the things that are getting proposed and where they’re coming from, they’re not fair, they’re not legal, they’re not right.”
He has two resolutions drafted and ready to go.
First, a resolution that protests both the current 20% system and the proposed 50% for counting standardized test results in teacher evaluations, and demands that both be abandoned. The resolution calls for a representative council drawing from many of the states educational professional groups to develop a fair and equitable teacher evaluation system. If those demands aren't met,
The Board of Education of the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda UFSD will, upon the approval and acceptance of the KTA & KAA, seriously consider eliminating using student test data as part of our teachers and administrators evaluations. Furthermore, it would be expected that the KTA & KAA would be receptive to recalculating the remaining portion of their evaluations to a total 100%.
Second, a resolution that the governor stop holding school funds hostage and comply with the court-ordered return to districts of the money owed them by the state of New York. If the state won't do so, the district will
seriously consider not administering standardized testing in grades 3-8.
In other words, Dana would like to tell Andrew Cuomo to "go get stuffed." I'm paraphrasing.
While some district folks are calling on parents to support the board by submitting opt-out letters, not everybody is feeling feisty. The district's superintendent Dawn Mirand has sent out a statement that basically says, "I feel your pain. Everybody is frustrated and school boards want to watch out for their children and districts, but it would really be better if we didn't go do something crazy that would earn us a serious spanking by the state. I will keep working within the law to do something about the state's mess of dumb regulations, but in the meantime, the law is the law and let's not volunteer to be made an example of. Vote no on this thing." I'm paraphrasing.
The meeting of the five member board is tomorrow (March 10). It looks like it could be quite the adventure. Granted, a resolution to seriously consider possibly doing stuff leaves the board a lot of wiggle room, but if nothing else, it marks the frustration level in the outskirts of Cuomo's domain. Stay tuned. [Update: The account of how this meeting turned out can be found here.]
*All right. I spent five minutes debating the intricacies of New York geographical subdivisions. I had this argument forty years ago in college with residents of what may be either "Western NY, " "Upstate NY," "Buffalo-area-the-rest-of-the-state-is-really-East-of-Us NY" and other variations I have since forgotten. I mean no malice toward anyone who does not care for my geographical designation. I had to locate it somewhere.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Economist Hansuhek Gets It Wrong Again
When you want a bunch of legit-sounding baloney about education, call up an economist. I can't think of a single card-carrying economist who has produced useful insights about education, schools and teaching, but from Brookings to the Hoover Institute, economists can be counted on to provide a regular stream of fecund fertilizer about schools.
So here comes Eric Hanushek in the New York Times (staging one of their op-ed debates, which tend to resemble a soccer game played on the side of a mountain) to offer yet another rehash of his ideas about teaching. The Room for Debate pieces are always brief, but Hansuhek impressively gets a whole ton of wrong squeezed into a tiny space. Here's his opening paragaph:
Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.
This is a research puzzler of epic proportions. Hansuhek is saying, "We do not know how to tell the difference between a green apple and a red apple, but we have conclusive proof that a red apple tastes better." Exactly what would that experimental design look like? Exactly how do you compare the red and green apples if you can't tell them apart?
The research gets around this issue by using a circular design. We first define high quality teachers as those whose students get high test scores. Then we study these high quality teachers and discover that they get students to score well on tests. It's amazing!
Economists have been at the front of the parade declaring that teachers cannot be judged on qualifications or anything else except results. Here's a typical quote, this time from a Rand economist: "The best way to assess teachers' effectiveness is to look at their on-the-job performance, including what they do in the classroom and how much progress their students make on achievement tests."
It's economists who have given us the widely debunked shell game that is Valued Added Measuring of teachers, and they've been peddling that snake oil for a while (here's a research summary from 2005). It captures all the wrong thinking of economists in one destructive ball-- all that matters about teachers is the test scores they produce, and every other factor that affects a student's test score can be worked out in a fancy equation.
And after all that, experts (and economists pretending to be experts) have figured that a teacher affects somewhere between 7.5% and 20% of the student outcome.
Now when Hanushek says that teachers make a huge difference, he is obliquely referencing his own crazy-pants assertion that having a good first grade teacher will make you almost a million bucks richer over your lifetime (you can also find the same baloney being sliced by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff). Both researchers demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation.
Remember that, as always, they believe that "test scores" equal "student achievement." They note that students who get high test scores grow up to make more money. Clearly, the test scores cause the more-money-making, right? Or could it be that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults?
So, in short, what we know about the "huge difference" created by Hansuhek's idea of a "good teacher" is pretty much jack and also squat. But he's going to build a house on this sand sculpture of a foundation.
Without knowing the background, preparation or attributes that make a good teacher, we cannot rely on the credentialing process to regulate the quality of people who enter the profession. Therefore the most sensible approach is to expand the pool of potential teachers but tighten up on decisions about retention, tenure and rewards for staying in teaching.
Since we don't know how to spot good teachers, says Hanushek, we should get a bunch of people to enter the profession and then throw a bunch of them out. This is a fascinating approach, and what I really want to see is the kind of promotional brochures that Hanushek would help college programs design. "Come run up over $100K of debt on the off chance that you might be one of the lucky few to get a career in teaching." Or maybe "Do you think teaching might be the work you want to do, maybe? Well, don't get your heart set on it, but do commit to years of expensive education to test the waters." How does a career counselor even approach this subject? "We'd like all of you to commit to this profession with the understanding that we plan to find half of you unfit for it." How exactly do you talk a student into pursuing a career that you don't think he's fit for?
Evaluation of teacher performance becomes key. Gains in student achievement should be one element, because improving student achievement is what we are trying to do, but this is not even possible for most teachers. Moreover, nobody believes that decisions should be made just on test scores. What we need is some combination of supervisor judgments with the input of professional evaluators.
What? What??!! Improving student achievement aka test scores is what we're trying to do? First, which "we" do you mean, exactly, because I certainly didn't enter teaching dreaming of increasing standardized tests scores. And what do you mean "this is not even possible for most teachers"? I mean, it could be a sensible statement, acknowledging that most teachers do not teach subjects that are measured by the Big Standardized Test. And if "nobody believes" that the judgment should be made just on test scores, why would you say that raising test scores is "what we're trying to do"?
And "professional evaluators"? Really. That's a thing? People whose profession is just evaluating teachers? How do you get that job? How do you prepare for that job? Is that what we're going to do with all the people we talked into pursuing teaching as a career just so we could have excess to wash out?
Hansuhek closes by trotting out DC schools as an example of how the test and punish, carrot and stick system works so super well. Would that be the system that was revamped to not include test scores because they were such a mess? Or is he thinking of the good old days when She Who Will Not Be Named used the system to spread fear and loathing, creating an atmosphere ripe for rampant cheating?
There's no evidence, anywhere, that test-based accountability improves schools. None. Not a bit. Not when it's used for "merit pay," not when it's used for hiring and firing decisions, not when it's used for any system of carrots and sticks. Nor could there be evidence, because the only "evidence" folks like Hanushek are looking at is test scores, and test scores are a measure of one thing, and one thing only-- how well students score on the Big Standardized Test. And there is not a link anywhere that those test scores mean anything else (and that would include looking back to the days when US low test scores somehow didn't stand in the way of US economic and international success).
It's tired baloney, baloney sliced so thin that it's easy to see through it. You may want to argue that I am just a high school English teacher, so what do I know about big-brained economics stuff. I'd say that if a high school English teacher can see the big fat hole is your weak economist-generated argument, that just tells you how weak the argument is. Hansuhek has become one of those go-to "experts" whose continued credibility is a mystery to me. He may an intelligent man, a man who treats his mother well, and is fun to hang out with. But his arguments about education are baseless and unsupportable. If you're going to read any portion of the NYT debate, I recommend you skip over Hanushek and check out the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, whose piece is much more closely tied to reality.
So here comes Eric Hanushek in the New York Times (staging one of their op-ed debates, which tend to resemble a soccer game played on the side of a mountain) to offer yet another rehash of his ideas about teaching. The Room for Debate pieces are always brief, but Hansuhek impressively gets a whole ton of wrong squeezed into a tiny space. Here's his opening paragaph:
Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.
This is a research puzzler of epic proportions. Hansuhek is saying, "We do not know how to tell the difference between a green apple and a red apple, but we have conclusive proof that a red apple tastes better." Exactly what would that experimental design look like? Exactly how do you compare the red and green apples if you can't tell them apart?
The research gets around this issue by using a circular design. We first define high quality teachers as those whose students get high test scores. Then we study these high quality teachers and discover that they get students to score well on tests. It's amazing!
Economists have been at the front of the parade declaring that teachers cannot be judged on qualifications or anything else except results. Here's a typical quote, this time from a Rand economist: "The best way to assess teachers' effectiveness is to look at their on-the-job performance, including what they do in the classroom and how much progress their students make on achievement tests."
It's economists who have given us the widely debunked shell game that is Valued Added Measuring of teachers, and they've been peddling that snake oil for a while (here's a research summary from 2005). It captures all the wrong thinking of economists in one destructive ball-- all that matters about teachers is the test scores they produce, and every other factor that affects a student's test score can be worked out in a fancy equation.
And after all that, experts (and economists pretending to be experts) have figured that a teacher affects somewhere between 7.5% and 20% of the student outcome.
Now when Hanushek says that teachers make a huge difference, he is obliquely referencing his own crazy-pants assertion that having a good first grade teacher will make you almost a million bucks richer over your lifetime (you can also find the same baloney being sliced by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff). Both researchers demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation.
Remember that, as always, they believe that "test scores" equal "student achievement." They note that students who get high test scores grow up to make more money. Clearly, the test scores cause the more-money-making, right? Or could it be that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults?
So, in short, what we know about the "huge difference" created by Hansuhek's idea of a "good teacher" is pretty much jack and also squat. But he's going to build a house on this sand sculpture of a foundation.
Without knowing the background, preparation or attributes that make a good teacher, we cannot rely on the credentialing process to regulate the quality of people who enter the profession. Therefore the most sensible approach is to expand the pool of potential teachers but tighten up on decisions about retention, tenure and rewards for staying in teaching.
Since we don't know how to spot good teachers, says Hanushek, we should get a bunch of people to enter the profession and then throw a bunch of them out. This is a fascinating approach, and what I really want to see is the kind of promotional brochures that Hanushek would help college programs design. "Come run up over $100K of debt on the off chance that you might be one of the lucky few to get a career in teaching." Or maybe "Do you think teaching might be the work you want to do, maybe? Well, don't get your heart set on it, but do commit to years of expensive education to test the waters." How does a career counselor even approach this subject? "We'd like all of you to commit to this profession with the understanding that we plan to find half of you unfit for it." How exactly do you talk a student into pursuing a career that you don't think he's fit for?
Evaluation of teacher performance becomes key. Gains in student achievement should be one element, because improving student achievement is what we are trying to do, but this is not even possible for most teachers. Moreover, nobody believes that decisions should be made just on test scores. What we need is some combination of supervisor judgments with the input of professional evaluators.
What? What??!! Improving student achievement aka test scores is what we're trying to do? First, which "we" do you mean, exactly, because I certainly didn't enter teaching dreaming of increasing standardized tests scores. And what do you mean "this is not even possible for most teachers"? I mean, it could be a sensible statement, acknowledging that most teachers do not teach subjects that are measured by the Big Standardized Test. And if "nobody believes" that the judgment should be made just on test scores, why would you say that raising test scores is "what we're trying to do"?
And "professional evaluators"? Really. That's a thing? People whose profession is just evaluating teachers? How do you get that job? How do you prepare for that job? Is that what we're going to do with all the people we talked into pursuing teaching as a career just so we could have excess to wash out?
Hansuhek closes by trotting out DC schools as an example of how the test and punish, carrot and stick system works so super well. Would that be the system that was revamped to not include test scores because they were such a mess? Or is he thinking of the good old days when She Who Will Not Be Named used the system to spread fear and loathing, creating an atmosphere ripe for rampant cheating?
There's no evidence, anywhere, that test-based accountability improves schools. None. Not a bit. Not when it's used for "merit pay," not when it's used for hiring and firing decisions, not when it's used for any system of carrots and sticks. Nor could there be evidence, because the only "evidence" folks like Hanushek are looking at is test scores, and test scores are a measure of one thing, and one thing only-- how well students score on the Big Standardized Test. And there is not a link anywhere that those test scores mean anything else (and that would include looking back to the days when US low test scores somehow didn't stand in the way of US economic and international success).
It's tired baloney, baloney sliced so thin that it's easy to see through it. You may want to argue that I am just a high school English teacher, so what do I know about big-brained economics stuff. I'd say that if a high school English teacher can see the big fat hole is your weak economist-generated argument, that just tells you how weak the argument is. Hansuhek has become one of those go-to "experts" whose continued credibility is a mystery to me. He may an intelligent man, a man who treats his mother well, and is fun to hang out with. But his arguments about education are baseless and unsupportable. If you're going to read any portion of the NYT debate, I recommend you skip over Hanushek and check out the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, whose piece is much more closely tied to reality.
Friday, February 20, 2015
Testing vs. Student Teaching
This week the e-mail came out as it does every year. Who's willing to take a student teacher next year? Let the office know.
For the first time in my career, I wondered if that was a good idea. In fact, I wondered if I should send a reminder to my colleagues to think hard before saying yes.
Mind you, I am a big believer in being a co-operating teacher. I have always believed that helping train the next round of teachers is a professional responsibility. It's kind of like jury duty-- you can't complain that it's being done poorly if you say "no" every time it's your turn. Like most teachers who take on a mentee, I've had the full range of student teachers in my room, from a young woman who was better after two months than I had been after two years, to a gentleman who was a great guy but could not teach a puddle how to be wet (for what it's worth, neither is a teacher today).
It's a real journey. I believe hugely that a student teacher is not there to become a mini-me, but to find her own voice in the classroom, to figure out who he is when he's a teacher. I expect my student teachers to eventually take over, design their own stuff, plan their own materials; I stay with them every step of the way, but it has to be their way, not mine. It's a tough process; inevitably there will come a moment when I'm telling him or her, "That's okay. If you don't cry at least once during student teaching, you don't understand the situation." It can be a huge challenge, but the next generation of teachers has to come from somewhere.
But times have changed, and teachers in public schools face a new question-- can you really turn your class over to a trainee for any significant amount of time when so much is riding on Big Standardized Tests?
If I'm teaching under a system like NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed 50% test score weighting for teacher evaluations, how can I possibly turn over my class and my professional future to a green college kid? What about a system like Pennsylvania's, where every teacher is partially evaluated based on a building rating? In PA, my buddies the shop teacher and the band director depend on me to get a good score out of my students' Big Reading Test, because those scores will affect their professional rating-- how do I turn that responsibility over to an inexperienced newbie?
I could take on a student teacher and keep her on a short, tight leash, never letting her do anything except exactly what I've laid out for her to do. But the world does not need any more Content Delivery Specialists who just unpack the program and mindlessly follow the directions; the world needs more teachers.
I suppose we could also just say to heck with actually training teachers and just take people with any kind of degree and drop them into a classroom where, under the newer accountability systems they would quickly wash out after a year or two and have to be replaced over and over and-- oh, wait. Now I see it. If you wanted to de-professionalize teaching, this would work just fine.
But for the rest of us, it's just one more bad side effect of test-driven accountability.
For the first time in my career, I wondered if that was a good idea. In fact, I wondered if I should send a reminder to my colleagues to think hard before saying yes.
Mind you, I am a big believer in being a co-operating teacher. I have always believed that helping train the next round of teachers is a professional responsibility. It's kind of like jury duty-- you can't complain that it's being done poorly if you say "no" every time it's your turn. Like most teachers who take on a mentee, I've had the full range of student teachers in my room, from a young woman who was better after two months than I had been after two years, to a gentleman who was a great guy but could not teach a puddle how to be wet (for what it's worth, neither is a teacher today).
It's a real journey. I believe hugely that a student teacher is not there to become a mini-me, but to find her own voice in the classroom, to figure out who he is when he's a teacher. I expect my student teachers to eventually take over, design their own stuff, plan their own materials; I stay with them every step of the way, but it has to be their way, not mine. It's a tough process; inevitably there will come a moment when I'm telling him or her, "That's okay. If you don't cry at least once during student teaching, you don't understand the situation." It can be a huge challenge, but the next generation of teachers has to come from somewhere.
But times have changed, and teachers in public schools face a new question-- can you really turn your class over to a trainee for any significant amount of time when so much is riding on Big Standardized Tests?
If I'm teaching under a system like NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed 50% test score weighting for teacher evaluations, how can I possibly turn over my class and my professional future to a green college kid? What about a system like Pennsylvania's, where every teacher is partially evaluated based on a building rating? In PA, my buddies the shop teacher and the band director depend on me to get a good score out of my students' Big Reading Test, because those scores will affect their professional rating-- how do I turn that responsibility over to an inexperienced newbie?
I could take on a student teacher and keep her on a short, tight leash, never letting her do anything except exactly what I've laid out for her to do. But the world does not need any more Content Delivery Specialists who just unpack the program and mindlessly follow the directions; the world needs more teachers.
I suppose we could also just say to heck with actually training teachers and just take people with any kind of degree and drop them into a classroom where, under the newer accountability systems they would quickly wash out after a year or two and have to be replaced over and over and-- oh, wait. Now I see it. If you wanted to de-professionalize teaching, this would work just fine.
But for the rest of us, it's just one more bad side effect of test-driven accountability.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Feds To Maine: Make Teacher Evals Worse (Or Else)
Maine joins the list of states that have received a spanking from the US Department of Education.
Maine came to the waiver party with the other last-minute slackers of the third wave, still working on passing a plan that they could submit for federal approval in the summer of 2013. The account of that work (including eleven months of negotiation with the USED) is a reminder of how completely state ed departments have become focused not on figuring out the best plan for students of their, but on achieving compliance with the federal USED.
Those negotiations had hit some snags as they came down to the wire. Internally, lawmakers could not agree how to handle the requirement that states base a significant portion of teacher evaluations on student test results.
It seemed that all that was settled, but according to Maine's NPR last week, the work has come undone. The waiver acceptance had included a promise by the Maine legislature to hammer out the details of a fed-acceptable teacher eval system. But after the work was completed last spring and sent off to the Us Department of Education, it came back (albeit slowly) with a big red F. Maine now faces the risk of joining Washington on the list of Naughty States That Didn't Do Exactly What USED Wanted.
"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.
Says Desjardin, when it comes to teacher eval, "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent."
Maine's evaluation system has the support of its teachers union. MEA president Lois Kilbey-Chesley says the Maine plan "represents what Maine wanted." She also expresses concern that the Maine plan has already begun implementation.
Pro-testing advocates were also happy with the Main plan
State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.
Granted, Langley wants to see a system where local districts can go higher than 20% if they wish, so clearly there's some disagreement in the state about the role of testing in teacher evaluation. But the point is that Maine worked out a system that its legislature got behind and which left some flexibility for local control by school districts.
It appears the Maine legislature will get back to the important job of making the US Department of Education happy, though some legislators aren't sure they're ready to get to work yet.
Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.
And so another state in the union gets to experience the inefficiency of a system in which the USED tries to control state education programs without looking too much like it's controlling state education programs. Maine has to scrap its work and rewrite it to better include a failed policy for teacher evaluation, because state autonomy is so last-century.
Update: Rep. Brian Hubbell has another view of what the letter from USED actually requires (h/t to reader Nancy Hudak).
Recently, the state has received a letter from the federal Department of Education seeking clarification about Maine’s implementation of the compromise amendment on the rules for teacher evaluations that I helped to negotiate last session.
The Maine Department of Education is concerned that this notice jeopardizes the state’s waiver from the onerous and outdated federal requirements of No Child Left Behind. The Department’s immediate suggestion is to amend the rules to incorporate more uniform standardized assessments and remove the provisions for local flexibility.
But, after consultation with other state educators and staff from Senator King’s office, I believe that the USDoE concerns may be addressed more productively simply by clarifying Maine’s process and providing better explanation of Maine’s efforts to improve both proficiency-based learning and professional development for educators
So, in response to the USDoE letter, in collaboration with the Maine School Management organization and the new state Commissioner of Education, I hope to have a better proposal ready for federal consideration in the next week or two.
Maine came to the waiver party with the other last-minute slackers of the third wave, still working on passing a plan that they could submit for federal approval in the summer of 2013. The account of that work (including eleven months of negotiation with the USED) is a reminder of how completely state ed departments have become focused not on figuring out the best plan for students of their, but on achieving compliance with the federal USED.
Those negotiations had hit some snags as they came down to the wire. Internally, lawmakers could not agree how to handle the requirement that states base a significant portion of teacher evaluations on student test results.
It seemed that all that was settled, but according to Maine's NPR last week, the work has come undone. The waiver acceptance had included a promise by the Maine legislature to hammer out the details of a fed-acceptable teacher eval system. But after the work was completed last spring and sent off to the Us Department of Education, it came back (albeit slowly) with a big red F. Maine now faces the risk of joining Washington on the list of Naughty States That Didn't Do Exactly What USED Wanted.
"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.
Says Desjardin, when it comes to teacher eval, "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent."
Maine's evaluation system has the support of its teachers union. MEA president Lois Kilbey-Chesley says the Maine plan "represents what Maine wanted." She also expresses concern that the Maine plan has already begun implementation.
Pro-testing advocates were also happy with the Main plan
State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.
Granted, Langley wants to see a system where local districts can go higher than 20% if they wish, so clearly there's some disagreement in the state about the role of testing in teacher evaluation. But the point is that Maine worked out a system that its legislature got behind and which left some flexibility for local control by school districts.
It appears the Maine legislature will get back to the important job of making the US Department of Education happy, though some legislators aren't sure they're ready to get to work yet.
Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.
And so another state in the union gets to experience the inefficiency of a system in which the USED tries to control state education programs without looking too much like it's controlling state education programs. Maine has to scrap its work and rewrite it to better include a failed policy for teacher evaluation, because state autonomy is so last-century.
Update: Rep. Brian Hubbell has another view of what the letter from USED actually requires (h/t to reader Nancy Hudak).
Recently, the state has received a letter from the federal Department of Education seeking clarification about Maine’s implementation of the compromise amendment on the rules for teacher evaluations that I helped to negotiate last session.
The Maine Department of Education is concerned that this notice jeopardizes the state’s waiver from the onerous and outdated federal requirements of No Child Left Behind. The Department’s immediate suggestion is to amend the rules to incorporate more uniform standardized assessments and remove the provisions for local flexibility.
But, after consultation with other state educators and staff from Senator King’s office, I believe that the USDoE concerns may be addressed more productively simply by clarifying Maine’s process and providing better explanation of Maine’s efforts to improve both proficiency-based learning and professional development for educators
So, in response to the USDoE letter, in collaboration with the Maine School Management organization and the new state Commissioner of Education, I hope to have a better proposal ready for federal consideration in the next week or two.
Testing: What Purposes?
As the Defenders of Big Standardized Tests have rushed to protect and preserve this important revenue stream this monster program, they have proposed a few gazillion reasons that testing must happen, that these big bubbly blunt force objects of education serve many important purposes.
The sheer volume of purported purposes makes it appear that BS Tests are almost magical. And yet, when we start working our way down the list and look at each purpose by itself...
Teacher Evaluation.
The notion that test results can be used to determine how much value a teacher added to an individual student (which is itself a creepy concept) has been debunked, disproven, and rejected by so many knowledgeable people it's hard to believe that anyone could still defend it. At this point, Arne Duncan would look wiser insisting that the earth is a giant flat disc on the back of a turtle. There's a whole argument to be had about what to do with teacher evaluations once we have them, but if we decide that we do want to evaluate teachers for whatever purpose, evaluations based on BS Tests do not even make the Top 100 list.
Inform Instruction: Micro Division
Can I use BS Tests to help me decide how to shape, direct and fine tune my classroom practices this year? Can I use the BS Tests results from the test given in March and sent back to us over the summer to better teach the students who won't be in my class by the time I can see their individual scores? Are you kidding me?
BS Tests are useless as methods of tuning and tweaking instruction of particular students in the same year. And we don't need a tool to do that any way because that's what teachers do every single day. I do dozens of micro-assessments on a daily basis, formal and informal, to determine just where my students stand on whatever I'm teaching. The notion that a BS Test can help with this is just bizarre.
Inform Instruction: Macro Division
Okay, so will year-to-year testing allow a school to say, "We need to tweak our program in this direction." The answer is yes, kind of. Many, many schools do this kind of study, and it boils down to coming together to say, "We've gotten as far as we can by actually teaching the subject matter. But test study shows that students are messing up this particular type of question, so we need to do more test prep--I mean, instructional focus, on answering these kinds of test questions."
But is giving every single student a BS Test every single year the best way to do this? Well, no. If we're just evaluating the program, a sampling would be sufficient. And as Catherine Gerwitz pointed out at EdWeek, this is one of many test functions that could already be handled by NAEP.
Measuring Quality for Accountability
It seems reasonable to ask the question, "How well are our schools doing, really?" It also seems reasonable to ask, "How good is my marriage, really?" or "How well do I kiss, really?" But if you imagine a standardized test is going to tell you, you're ready to buy swampland in Florida.
Here's a great article that addresses the issue back in 1998, before it was so politically freighted. That's more technical answer. The less technical answer is to ask-- when people wonder about how good a school is, or ask about schools, or brag about schools, or complain about schools, how often is that directly related to BS Tests results. When someone says, "I want to send my kids to a great school," does that question have anything to do with how well their kid will be prepped to take a narrow bubble test?
BS Tests don't measure school quality.
Competition Among Schools
"If we don't give the BS Test," opine some advocates, "how will we be able to stack rank all the schools of this country." (I'm paraphrasing for them).
The most obvious question here is, why do we need to? What educational benefit do I get in my 11th grade English classroom out of know how my students compare to students in Iowa? In what parallel universe would we find me saying either, "Well, I wasn't actually going to try to teach you anything, but now that I see how well they're doing in Iowa, I'm going to actually try" or "Well, we were going to do some really cool stuff this week, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the Iowans."
But even if I were to accept the value of intra-school competition, why would I use this tool, and why would I use it every year for every student? Again, the NAEP is already a better tool. The current crop of BS Tests cover a narrow slice of what schools do. Using these to compare schools is like making every single musician in the orchestra audition by playing a selection on oboe.
The Achievement Gap
We used to talk about making the pig fatter by repeatedly measuring it. Now we have the argument that if we repeatedly weight two pigs, they will get closer to weighing the same.
The data are pretty clear-- in our more-than-a-decade of test-based accountability, the achievement gap has not closed. In fact, in some areas, it has gotten wider. It seems not-particularly-radical to point out that doubling down on what has not worked is unlikely to, well, work.
The "achievement gap" is, in fact, a standardized test score gap. Of all the gaps we can find related to social justice and equity in our nation-- the income gap, the mortality gap, the getting-sent-to-prison gap, the housing gap, the health care gap, the being-on-the-receiving-end-of-violence gap-- of all these gaps, we really want to throw all our weight behind how well people score on the BS Tests?
Finding the Failures
Civil rights groups that back testing seem to feel that the BS Test and the reporting requirements of NCLB (regularly hailed as many people's favorite part of the law) made it impossible for schools and school districts to hide their failures. By dis-aggregating test results, we can quickly and easily see which schools are failing and address the issue. But what information have we really collected, and what are we actually doing about it?
We already know that the BS Tests correspond to family income. We haven't found out anything with BS Tests that we couldn't have predicted by looking at family income. And how have we responded? Certainly not by saying, "This school is woefully underfunded, lacking both the resources and the infrastructure to really educate these students." No, we can't do that. Instead we encourage students to show grit, or we offer us "failing" schools as turnaround/investment opportunities for privatizers. Remember-- you don't fix schools by throwing money at them. To fix schools, you have to throw money at charter operators.
Civil Rights
For me, this is the closest we come to a legit reason for BS Tests. Essentially, the civil rights argument is that test results provide a smoking gun that can be used to indict districts so steeped in racism that they routinely deny even the most rudimentary features of decent schooling.
But once again, it doesn't seem to work that way. First, we don't learn anything we didn't already know. Second, districts don't respond by trying to actually fix the problem, but simply by complying with whatever federal regulation demands, and that just turns into more investment opportunities. Name a school district that in the last decade of BS Testing has notably improved its service of minority and poor students because of test results. No, instead, we have districts where the influx of charter operations to fix "failing" schools has brought gentrification and renewed segregation.
BS Testing also replicates the worst side effect of snake oil cures-- it creates the illusion that you're actually working on the problem and keeps you from investing your resources in a search for real solutions.
Expectations
On the other hand, one of the dumbest supports of BS Testing is the idea, beloved by Arne Duncan, that expectations are the magical key to everything. Students with special needs don't perform well in school because nobody expects them to. So we must have BS Tests, and we must give them to everyone the same way. Also, in order to dominate the high jump in the next Olympics, schools will now require all students to clear a high jump bar set at 6' before they may eat lunch. That includes children who are wheelchair bound, because expectations.
Informing parents
Yes, somehow BS Test advocates imagine that parents have no idea how their children are doing in school unless they can see the results of a federally-mandated BS Test. The student's grades, the students daily tests and quizzes and writing assignments and practice papers provide no information. Nor could a parent actually speak to a teacher face to face or through e-mail to ask about their child's progress.
Somehow BS Test advocates imagine a world where teachers are incompetent and parents are clueless. Even if that is true in one corner or another, how, exactly, would a BS Test score help? How would a terrible teacher or a dopey parent use that single set of scores to do... anything? I can imagine there are places where parents want more transparency from their schools, but even so-- how do BS Tests, which measure so little and measure it so poorly, give them that?
Informing government
Without BS Testing, ask advocates, how will the federal government know how schools are doing? I have two questions in response.
1) What makes you think BS Tests will tell you that? Why not just the older, better NAEP test instead?
2) Why do the feds need to know?
Bottom Line
Many of the arguments for BS Testing depend on a non sequitor construction: "Nutrition is a problem in some countries, so I should buy a hat." Advocates start with a legitimate issue, like the problems of poverty in schools, and suggest BS Testing as a solution, even though it offers none.
In fact there's little that BS Tests can help with, because they are limited and poorly-made tools. "I need to nail this home together," say test advocates. "So hand me that banana." Tests simply can't deliver as advertised.
The arguments for testing are also backwards-manufactured. Instead of asking, "Of all the possible solutions in the world, how could we help a teacher steer instruction during the year," testing advocates start with the end ("We are going to give these tests") and then struggle to somehow connect those conclusions to the goal.
If you were going to address the problems of poverty and equity in this country, how would you do it? If you were going to figure out if someone was a good teacher or not, how could we tell that? How would you tell good schools from bad ones, and how would you fix the bad ones?
The first answer that pops into your mind for any of those questions is not, "Give a big computer-based bubble test on reading and math."
Nor can we say just give it a shot, because it might help and what does it really hurt? BS Tests come with tremendous costs, from the huge costs of the tests to the costs of the tech needed to administer them to the costs in a shorter school year and the human costs in stress and misery for the small humans forced to take these. And we have yet to see what the long-term costs are for raising a generation to think that a well-educated person is one who can do a good job of bubbling in answers on a BS Test.
The federal BS Test mandate needs to go away because the BS Testing does not deliver any of the outcomes that it promises and comes at too great costs.
The sheer volume of purported purposes makes it appear that BS Tests are almost magical. And yet, when we start working our way down the list and look at each purpose by itself...
Teacher Evaluation.
The notion that test results can be used to determine how much value a teacher added to an individual student (which is itself a creepy concept) has been debunked, disproven, and rejected by so many knowledgeable people it's hard to believe that anyone could still defend it. At this point, Arne Duncan would look wiser insisting that the earth is a giant flat disc on the back of a turtle. There's a whole argument to be had about what to do with teacher evaluations once we have them, but if we decide that we do want to evaluate teachers for whatever purpose, evaluations based on BS Tests do not even make the Top 100 list.
Inform Instruction: Micro Division
Can I use BS Tests to help me decide how to shape, direct and fine tune my classroom practices this year? Can I use the BS Tests results from the test given in March and sent back to us over the summer to better teach the students who won't be in my class by the time I can see their individual scores? Are you kidding me?
BS Tests are useless as methods of tuning and tweaking instruction of particular students in the same year. And we don't need a tool to do that any way because that's what teachers do every single day. I do dozens of micro-assessments on a daily basis, formal and informal, to determine just where my students stand on whatever I'm teaching. The notion that a BS Test can help with this is just bizarre.
Inform Instruction: Macro Division
Okay, so will year-to-year testing allow a school to say, "We need to tweak our program in this direction." The answer is yes, kind of. Many, many schools do this kind of study, and it boils down to coming together to say, "We've gotten as far as we can by actually teaching the subject matter. But test study shows that students are messing up this particular type of question, so we need to do more test prep--I mean, instructional focus, on answering these kinds of test questions."
But is giving every single student a BS Test every single year the best way to do this? Well, no. If we're just evaluating the program, a sampling would be sufficient. And as Catherine Gerwitz pointed out at EdWeek, this is one of many test functions that could already be handled by NAEP.
Measuring Quality for Accountability
It seems reasonable to ask the question, "How well are our schools doing, really?" It also seems reasonable to ask, "How good is my marriage, really?" or "How well do I kiss, really?" But if you imagine a standardized test is going to tell you, you're ready to buy swampland in Florida.
Here's a great article that addresses the issue back in 1998, before it was so politically freighted. That's more technical answer. The less technical answer is to ask-- when people wonder about how good a school is, or ask about schools, or brag about schools, or complain about schools, how often is that directly related to BS Tests results. When someone says, "I want to send my kids to a great school," does that question have anything to do with how well their kid will be prepped to take a narrow bubble test?
BS Tests don't measure school quality.
Competition Among Schools
"If we don't give the BS Test," opine some advocates, "how will we be able to stack rank all the schools of this country." (I'm paraphrasing for them).
The most obvious question here is, why do we need to? What educational benefit do I get in my 11th grade English classroom out of know how my students compare to students in Iowa? In what parallel universe would we find me saying either, "Well, I wasn't actually going to try to teach you anything, but now that I see how well they're doing in Iowa, I'm going to actually try" or "Well, we were going to do some really cool stuff this week, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the Iowans."
But even if I were to accept the value of intra-school competition, why would I use this tool, and why would I use it every year for every student? Again, the NAEP is already a better tool. The current crop of BS Tests cover a narrow slice of what schools do. Using these to compare schools is like making every single musician in the orchestra audition by playing a selection on oboe.
The Achievement Gap
We used to talk about making the pig fatter by repeatedly measuring it. Now we have the argument that if we repeatedly weight two pigs, they will get closer to weighing the same.
The data are pretty clear-- in our more-than-a-decade of test-based accountability, the achievement gap has not closed. In fact, in some areas, it has gotten wider. It seems not-particularly-radical to point out that doubling down on what has not worked is unlikely to, well, work.
The "achievement gap" is, in fact, a standardized test score gap. Of all the gaps we can find related to social justice and equity in our nation-- the income gap, the mortality gap, the getting-sent-to-prison gap, the housing gap, the health care gap, the being-on-the-receiving-end-of-violence gap-- of all these gaps, we really want to throw all our weight behind how well people score on the BS Tests?
Finding the Failures
Civil rights groups that back testing seem to feel that the BS Test and the reporting requirements of NCLB (regularly hailed as many people's favorite part of the law) made it impossible for schools and school districts to hide their failures. By dis-aggregating test results, we can quickly and easily see which schools are failing and address the issue. But what information have we really collected, and what are we actually doing about it?
We already know that the BS Tests correspond to family income. We haven't found out anything with BS Tests that we couldn't have predicted by looking at family income. And how have we responded? Certainly not by saying, "This school is woefully underfunded, lacking both the resources and the infrastructure to really educate these students." No, we can't do that. Instead we encourage students to show grit, or we offer us "failing" schools as turnaround/investment opportunities for privatizers. Remember-- you don't fix schools by throwing money at them. To fix schools, you have to throw money at charter operators.
Civil Rights
For me, this is the closest we come to a legit reason for BS Tests. Essentially, the civil rights argument is that test results provide a smoking gun that can be used to indict districts so steeped in racism that they routinely deny even the most rudimentary features of decent schooling.
But once again, it doesn't seem to work that way. First, we don't learn anything we didn't already know. Second, districts don't respond by trying to actually fix the problem, but simply by complying with whatever federal regulation demands, and that just turns into more investment opportunities. Name a school district that in the last decade of BS Testing has notably improved its service of minority and poor students because of test results. No, instead, we have districts where the influx of charter operations to fix "failing" schools has brought gentrification and renewed segregation.
BS Testing also replicates the worst side effect of snake oil cures-- it creates the illusion that you're actually working on the problem and keeps you from investing your resources in a search for real solutions.
Expectations
On the other hand, one of the dumbest supports of BS Testing is the idea, beloved by Arne Duncan, that expectations are the magical key to everything. Students with special needs don't perform well in school because nobody expects them to. So we must have BS Tests, and we must give them to everyone the same way. Also, in order to dominate the high jump in the next Olympics, schools will now require all students to clear a high jump bar set at 6' before they may eat lunch. That includes children who are wheelchair bound, because expectations.
Informing parents
Yes, somehow BS Test advocates imagine that parents have no idea how their children are doing in school unless they can see the results of a federally-mandated BS Test. The student's grades, the students daily tests and quizzes and writing assignments and practice papers provide no information. Nor could a parent actually speak to a teacher face to face or through e-mail to ask about their child's progress.
Somehow BS Test advocates imagine a world where teachers are incompetent and parents are clueless. Even if that is true in one corner or another, how, exactly, would a BS Test score help? How would a terrible teacher or a dopey parent use that single set of scores to do... anything? I can imagine there are places where parents want more transparency from their schools, but even so-- how do BS Tests, which measure so little and measure it so poorly, give them that?
Informing government
Without BS Testing, ask advocates, how will the federal government know how schools are doing? I have two questions in response.
1) What makes you think BS Tests will tell you that? Why not just the older, better NAEP test instead?
2) Why do the feds need to know?
Bottom Line
Many of the arguments for BS Testing depend on a non sequitor construction: "Nutrition is a problem in some countries, so I should buy a hat." Advocates start with a legitimate issue, like the problems of poverty in schools, and suggest BS Testing as a solution, even though it offers none.
In fact there's little that BS Tests can help with, because they are limited and poorly-made tools. "I need to nail this home together," say test advocates. "So hand me that banana." Tests simply can't deliver as advertised.
The arguments for testing are also backwards-manufactured. Instead of asking, "Of all the possible solutions in the world, how could we help a teacher steer instruction during the year," testing advocates start with the end ("We are going to give these tests") and then struggle to somehow connect those conclusions to the goal.
If you were going to address the problems of poverty and equity in this country, how would you do it? If you were going to figure out if someone was a good teacher or not, how could we tell that? How would you tell good schools from bad ones, and how would you fix the bad ones?
The first answer that pops into your mind for any of those questions is not, "Give a big computer-based bubble test on reading and math."
Nor can we say just give it a shot, because it might help and what does it really hurt? BS Tests come with tremendous costs, from the huge costs of the tests to the costs of the tech needed to administer them to the costs in a shorter school year and the human costs in stress and misery for the small humans forced to take these. And we have yet to see what the long-term costs are for raising a generation to think that a well-educated person is one who can do a good job of bubbling in answers on a BS Test.
The federal BS Test mandate needs to go away because the BS Testing does not deliver any of the outcomes that it promises and comes at too great costs.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Schneider on Evaluation
Regular readers here know that I'm a huge fan of Mercedes Schneider, whose attention to detail, relentless research skills, and sharply analytical mind are an inspiration. Also, she once called me the Erma Bombeck of education bloggers, so I kind of love her for that, too.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Six Recommendations for Responsibility
Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue should be on your bookmark list. In addition to Cody's own valuable voice, the blog provides a great assortment of voices from the education world.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Cuomo to Teachers: Drop Dead
If you have not yet seen the letter from Cuomo aid Jim Malatras to ed leaders Tisch and King, you can find a copy right here. If you want to see just how direct and ugly an attack by a governor on his own state's public education system can be, you should read it. If you are a teacher in New York, you should read it twice.
I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.
It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.
Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:
Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.
I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.
Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:
Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession.
(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.
Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.
1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?
2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?
3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.
4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.
5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.
6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.
7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?
8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.
9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.
10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).
11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.
12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?
Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.
Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy.
Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.
In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.
Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.
I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.
It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.
Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:
Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.
I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.
Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:
Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession.
(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.
Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.
1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?
2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?
3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.
4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.
5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.
6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.
7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?
8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.
9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.
10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).
11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.
12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?
Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.
Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy.
Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.
In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.
Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.
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