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.

Speak Up for the Profession Now

We're coming down to the wire on your chance to speak out about one of the dumbest ideas to come out of a Department of Education that breeds bad ideas like bunnies.

This particular bad idea is the idea that VAM should be used to evaluate teacher prep programs. In other words, after we get done evaluating my performance based on my students' test results as processed by a piece of junk science that has been soundly rejected both by experts in education and experts in the science of measuring stuff, we will go ahead an use MY made-up evaluation results to evaluate the college education program that gave me my teaching degree in the first place.

This is a dumb idea. It is the emperor of dumb ideas. If dumb ideas were a country, this would be the capital city.

Do not just sit and sputter. Do not go fume in the teachers' lounge. Do something.

I'm kind of amazed-- there are several million teachers in this country, most of whom have to know that this is a dumb idea. There are many colleges of education in this country, all of which are staffed by a variety of people who have to know this is a dumb idea.

And yet, as I type this, the federal website shows 2062 comments on the proposed alterations. 2062.

So here's the link. I'm going to once again make it huge so that you can't miss it. We are talking about the programs that are the gatekeepers of our profession, and what we're talking about is making the gatekeepers stupid. This is fundamental to determining which people will be joining us in our schools, working side by side with us. We cannot sit silent.

We only have until Monday, February 2, to speak up. If you like, you can be part of a crowdtasked mark-up of the bill here at the wire. If you're not sure what to say, just be brief. Copy and paste or link to your favorite commentary on the subject. But don't just sit silent.

Yes, I know the odds do not favor the administration actually listening to what we have to say. But we can be absolutely guaranteed that they won't listen to us if we don't speak. What they're proposing is wrong, and we need to say so. Time's running out. Take the minutes to leave a comment.

Take Me To Your Leader

 It is currently popular to rebut teacher evaluations by brandishing student test results. "Only 50% of our students were ranked proficient on the Big Test," some Deeply Concerned Public Official will intone. "So how can only 4% or so of our teachers be rated substandard?"




There are so many things wrong with that construction, not the least of which is the idea that a teacher's single task in life is to get students to pass a Big Standardized Test about reading and math.
But I don't think the folks who are expressing this concern really care about the problem of these phantom bad teachers in school, anyway. And I don't believe they really care, not because of what they are doing, but because of what they aren't.

Let's take New York State. The expectation there is reportedly that 10% of the state's teaching staff will be found wanting. Let's think about what you would do as a state education leader, if you truly believed that 10% of your teaching staff was no good.

Consider first that there are only two possible explanations for that 10%, that tiny mini-mountain of pedagogical incompetence now esconced in classrooms. Either:

1) school leaders hired and awarded tenure to a big bunch of incompetent teachers or

2) school leaders hired 100% competent teachers and somehow broke 10% of them

You see the common thread here. If classrooms are infested with terrible, awful, no good, very bad teachers, then the logical place to look for a solution is to the school leaders who, apparently, keep putting the bad teachers in there.

If we really believed that there were a pipeline spewing toxic teachers into our schools, would we keep endlessly trying to mop up the mess or would we try to find the valve that would simply stop the flow?


We would be developing tools for determining whether a school hired bad teachers or hired good ones and messed them up. We would be retraining principals and superintendents and human resources department so that they were much better at hiring. We would be insisting that school leader training included extensive programs about how to hire good teachers and not ruin them once you have them. We would be looking at which sorts of school environments made teachers better and which sorts made them ineffective. We might even come up with punitive regulations to put pressure on school leaders to be better managers.

Now, I don't for a moment think we have a real crisis in school leadership that is opening this Pipeline of Awful into our classrooms, because I don't believe there's a crisis of awful in our classrooms to begin with. But if someone did sincerely believe that 10% of their state's teachers were no good, wouldn't they be using the approach I've laid out?

I have to conclude that reformsters aren't really concerned about an excess of bad teachers (real or imaginary) in US classrooms, but are instead using the supposed crisis as one more hammer with which to beat away at the teaching profession. If you think I've missed something here, you're welcome to tell me about it in the comments.

Originally published in View from the Cheap Seats

The Work We Have To Do

Even if you've only read this blog once or twice, you're aware that I am a noisy supporter of traditional public education in this country. But that doesn't mean my loyalty is unquestioning.

As much as it pains me to say it, as much as I hate what modern reformsters have brought us in public education, if I'm being honest, I must admit that we asked for some of it. Well, maybe we didn't ask for it-- but we certainly left the door wide open for it to come waltzing in.

It's worth talking about these things because even if the entire reformster movement dried up and blew away today, tomorrow we would still be facing these issues.

Teacher Training

Much of what passes for teacher training is a joke. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that teacher training is in the hands of not-teachers. How many co-operating teachers help their student teacher stage a fake lesson to make the visiting drive-by supervisor happy? How many future teachers' careers have been decided for good or bad by the random luck of the student teaching draw? How many college hours are wasted studying teaching "techniques" developed but untested by somebody who has no idea what he's talking about? How many college ed programs wouldn't flunk a candidate unless he was caught on video feeding chopped up puppies to orphans?

How many teachers are good teachers in spite of their college training instead of because of it? The door for some foolish program like TFA has always been standing wide open.

Quality

Everybody knows that some teachers are better than others. But our line in the profession for decades has been, "That's hard. We aren't going to talk about it."

It's true that assaults on tenure and pushes for stack ranking teachers are all about the money, about making a school a more profitable enterprise for an investor. But those assaults would never have gotten traction if there were not a great untapped well of resentment and frustration out there over a system that doesn't seem to do anything about differentiating or improving when it comes to less-than-awesome teachers.

Equity and Justice

When civil rights groups spoke up last week in favor of keeping a federal testing mandate in ESEA, many folks were shocked and upset. But civil rights groups and community leaders in poor black neighborhoods have been supporting the reformster agenda for years.

Instead of exclaiming "How can they do that" rhetorically, we should be asking, "Why do they do that" critically and sincerely.

The promise of reformsters has been, "We will create a program that gets every kid ready for success, and we will make it federal law that every school in every city must have that program in place. We'll have a test that proves whether that program is in place or not, and we will give exactly the same test to every student, white or black, rich or poor, in this country."

Do not dismiss that promise because it's empty. Recognize that the promise is powerful because our country includes a whole lot of people to whom no such promise has been made before.

Look. If you offer someone a piece of spoiled tofu sculpted to look like a bad piece of fish, and they eat it up quickly, and then you start lecturing them about can't they see it's not really fish and the tofu is actually spoiled and did somebody pay them to eat that awful stuff-- you are missing the most important piece of information. That person was hungry enough to be excited about a bad tofu fish. You can take away the bad tofu fish and feel good about how you're protected that person, but she's still hungry, and until you get her some actual food, you're not helping.

Poor and minority schools need resources and support, the kinds of programs and materials that wealthier schools take for granted. They need support. Their students need to see teachers who look like them in the building (and, I would argue, people who live and grew up in the neighborhood). They need to be in a system that respects their culture and background. They need to be in a system that is neither overtly nor subtly racist.

We can bitch and moan about the reformsters and privateers and charteristas all pretending to care about equity and civil rights as a way to grab some power and money, but we should look in the mirror and ask what it means that Pretending To Care about Equity is enough to make someone stand out these days.

We can sweep the reformsters and their faux solutions away, but unless we're prepared to look for real solutions, we won't be moving forward. We supporters of public education must remember that even if the reformsters are thrown out and shut down, there are still problems in our schools-- problems that nobody was particularly working on when reformsters stepped in to take advantage of real needs. We must always remember that even when the conflict with reformsters is over, there is still work we have to do.

The Great Chain of Effectiveness

The USED is ready to forge the next link in the Great Chain of Effectiveness.

We're already familiar with the two links. The very first chain is the testing link-- a standardized test covering narrow slices of two subject areas is forged as a measure of the full education of a child. The second link is from that test to the teacher. Soaked in magic VAM sauce, that second chain says that the test results are the responsibility of the teacher, and so the second link measures how effective that teachers actually is.

Link number three is on the way. That link will stretch from the classroom teacher back to the college department that trained her to be a teacher. The USED is proposing a heaping side order of VAM sauce for colleges and universities.If a student's results for bubbling in answers on questions about certain narrow areas of math and reading are too low, that is clearly the responsibility of the college department that certified the student's teacher. They should be rated poorly.

But why stop there?

That college education department is composed of professors who are clearly ineffective. The institutions that issued their advanced degrees should be rated ineffective. And their direct oversight comes from college administration-- so let's include their ineffectiveness of the college president's evaluation.

And where did that guy come from? This is more complicated, but we'll need to cross-reference his salary, because we know from Chetty et al that a good elementary teacher would have made a difference of several hundred thousand dollars in salary. So if our ineffective college president is also not super-well-paid, we can clearly conclude that his first grade teacher was ineffective-- let's hunt her down and downgrade her evaluation.

Of course, that raises another problem in our great chain of accountability. College presidents aren't generally young guys, so it's possible that his first grade teacher is dead. But now that we've located her, we can locate all the students she ever taught. Now, it's possible that some of her students went on to have successful careers even though she was ineffective-- we can discard those from the sample and assume that those are all students with grit. The rest of her former students who are not making big bucks must be the result of her ineffective instruction, and the government has an obligation to send letters to all of their employers indicating that federal government has determined that, due to an ineffective first grade teacher, those employees are losers.

Now if, any of those students went on to become teachers, we have a bit of a bind. If that teacher turns out to be ineffective, do we blame his college or his first grade teacher?

But back to our ineffective college president. Somebody hired him, so those people must also be rated ineffective. Those university trustees and directors are usually folks with successful careers, but their hiring of the president who ran the department that trained the teacher who taught the child who bubble in several wrong answers on his test reveals them to be actually ineffective. Good government oversight requires that any products produced by their companies should be stamped with a warning: "Warning. This product was produced by a company run in part by an ineffective human being."

Of course, some of those college presidents are in charge of public universities. These state schools are ultimately run by state level bureaucracies, and those are of course ultimately answerable to a governor. So the governor would have to be rated ineffective as well.

But the ineffective governor was elected by the people. I realize that it would require a breach of values that we've long held dear, but I think we've established that in the pursuit of effectiveness labels for education, long-held American values can go straight into the dumpster. So-- let's find out exactly who voted for that ineffective governor, and let's rate them ineffective voters and maybe we should take away their votes in the future and just bring in a charter voting company to do the voting for all those people, who in the meanwhile, have to be Great Chained back to their own first grade teachers who are clearly responsible for their ineffective voting.

You may say that the Great Chain of Effectiveness is built out of tin foil and tenuous connections, and that it violates laws of common sense and decency. Just watch it. That's the kind of talk that gets a person's first grade teacher on a list.

Speak Up Now for Teacher Prep Programs

The holidays are over, life is back to normal(ish), and your classroom has hit that post-holiday stride. It is time to finally make your voice heard on the subject of teacher preparation programs.

As you've likely heard, the USED would like to start evaluating all colleges, but they would particularly like to evaluate teacher preparation programs. And they have some exceptionally dreadful ideas about how to do it.

Under proposed § 612.4(b)(1), beginning in April, 2019 and annually thereafter, each State would be required to report how it has made meaningful differentiations of teacher preparation program performance using at least four performance levels: “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective,” and “exceptional” that are based on the indicators in proposed § 612.5 including, in significant part, employment outcomes for high-need schools and student learning outcomes.

And just to be clear, here's a quick summary from 612.5

Under proposed § 612.5, in determining the performance of each teacher preparation program, each State (except for insular areas identified in proposed § 612.5(c)) would need to use student learning outcomes, employment outcomes, survey outcomes, and the program characteristics described above as its indicators of academic content knowledge and teaching skills of the program's new teachers or recent graduates. In addition, the State could use other indicators of its choosing, provided the State uses a consistent approach for all of its teacher preparation programs and these other indicators are predictive of a teacher's effect on student performance. 

Yes, we are proposing to evaluate teacher prep programs based on the VAM scores of their graduates. Despite the fact that compelling evidence and arguments keep piling up to suggest that VAM is not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness, we're going to take it a step further and create a great chain of fuzzy thinking to assert that when Little Pat gets a bad grade on the PARCC, that is ultimately the fault of the college that granted Little Pat's teacher a degree.

Yes, it's bizarre and stupid. But that has been noted at length throughout the bloggosphere plenty. Right now is not the time to complain about it on your facebook page.

Now is the time to speak up to the USED.

The comment period for this document ends on February 2. All you have to do is go to the site, click on the link for submitting a formal comment, and do so. This is a rare instance in which speaking up to the people in power is as easy as using the same device you're using to read there words.

Will they pay any attention? Who knows. I'm not inclined to think so, but how can I sit silently when I've been given such a simple opportunity for speaking up? Maybe the damn thing will be adopted anyway, but when that day comes, I don't want to be sitting here saying that I never spoke up except to huff and puff on my blog.

I just gave you a two-paragraph link so you can't miss it. If you're not sure what to say, here are some points to bring up-

The National Association of Secondary School Principals has stated its intention to adopt a document stating clearly that they believe that VAM has no use as an evaluation tool for teachers.

The American Statistical Association has stated clearly that test-based measures are a poor tool for measuring teacher effectiveness.

A peer-reviewed study published by the American Education Research Association and funded by the Gates Foundation determined that “Value-Added Performance Measures Do Not Reflect the Content or Quality of Teachers’ Instruction.”

You can scan the posts of the blog Vamboozled, the best one-stop shop for VAM debunking on the internet for other material. Or you can simply ask a college education department can possibly be held accountable for the test scores of K-12 students.

But write something. It's not very often that we get to speak our minds to the Department of Education, and we can't accuse them ignoring us if we never speak in the first place.

Duncan Chases Teachers Away

Arne Duncan's new policy initiative is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences in action.

Duncan proposes that teacher prep programs be evaluated by looking at the test results of the students of the graduates of the college. If that seems like a twisted sentence, that's because it's a twisted program. We can make two early and easy predictions about what effects it will have.

The first is simple. It will mean the college education departments will cut spending on programs so that they can afford whatever administrative assistant has to be hired to spend all their time chasing the numbers necessary to make the report to the feds. Some bunch of adjunct professors are going to have their hours cut so that somebody else can spend his days wending through the labyrinthian process of tracking down alumni, then tracking down their scores.

The second is, well, also simple. We already know that the best predictor of good student test scores is family income. Every college education department that doesn't want to get spanked by the US Department of Education has to do one simple thing-- they must do everything in their power to keep their graduates from getting jobs in poor urban schools.

Urban school districts that have tried to foster good relationships with college ed programs will find that they can't get their calls returned. College ed departments will screen school districts carefully and be cautious about which job openings they pass along to their grads.

If one of Duncan's goals is to put great teachers in poor urban classrooms, he could not have better designed a policy to do the exact opposite. This new policy is just one more step in the process of labeling some schools and some districts as career-killers, schools to be avoided at all costs if you wish to devote your life to teaching. This new policy will just add one more voice to the conversation saying, "Whatever you do, don't get a job at Poor Kid High School."

This is good news for TFA (or at least, it would be if they weren't suffering recruiting woes of their own) because Duncan's policy will help create more artificial teacher shortages in poor urban schools. But it is nothing but bad news for the schools themselves, branded with big scarlet F's and surrounded by signs screaming, "Whatever you do, don't come here to teach!" It is one of Duncan's poorest policy choices yet.