Before We Evaluate Teachers

Policy hounds have been searching for a tool to accurately and fairly evaluate K-12 teachers for years, and to date, they have been largely unsuccessful. That has left us stalled in versions of the following conversations:

Policy leaders: We are going to evaluate teachers by flipping this magical coin.

Teachers: I really don't want to be evaluated by the flip of a coin, magical or otherwise.

Policy leaders: You teachers! You're all opposed to evaluation and accountability.

This is not a useful conversation.

The root problem with the current state of teacher evaluation is that we never had the necessary conversations about what we think it is for. The old system basically said, "We'll hire someone to be the teachers' boss. If that person is happy with the individual teachers, that'll be just fine." If the boss is okay, that system works okay. But if the boss is not so great, that system works out poorly for someone-- taxpayers, teachers, students, someone.

Contrary to what some claim, teachers are fine with accountability. Teachers aren't very happy about teaching next door to Mrs. McAwful. Yes, teachers' unions defend bad teachers for the same reason defense lawyers defend bad criminals-- because the alternative is a system in which powerful people can hurt others at will. A spirited defense of the accused is how we keep people in power accountable. Nevertheless, teachers are perfectly happy to be held accountable by a system that is fair and accurate and that makes sense. Accountability by student standardized test score is not that system.

Before we can design that system, we have to answer some basic questions.

What is it for? Do we want a system that can weed out the dead wood, or do we want a system that helps us find the truly excellent? Do we want it to target teacher weak spots as part of a plan to help them improve? Are we trying to locate teacher-created gaps in the curriculum and instruction? Are we trying to stack rank our entire staff? To make explicit and clear to teachers what exactly we expect from them? This matters because the top and the bottom require different measures. Stack-ranking is hard, corrosive and not always helpful. How do you compare the high school shop teacher to the first grade teacher? How do you get staff to work together when everyone understands that when your colleague wins, you lose? And "taller than everyone else in the room on Tuesday" does not tell you how tall someone actually is.

Who is it for? Are trying to show local taxpayers that they're getting their money's worth? Are we trying to satisfy state and federal bureaucrats? Is the data to be used in house by the teachers and administration themselves? Will this information be for private use or for public vivisection?

What are we going to measure, exactly? Any job evaluation is a matter of saying "This is what we're paying you to do." I don't think any taxpaying parent in the country would say, "We are paying teachers to get Junior to bubble in more correct answers on a standardized test," and yet here we are. This is where the "who" part becomes sticky, because bureaucrats aren't big on "Makes students feel positive about themselves" because that's hard to boil down to a data set of deliverables. But if your own child came home from school, crying because the teacher made her feel like a small, useless person, you would not think "No biggie-- that's not what I pay that teacher for, anyway." So what do we want to measure? Imparts content knowledge? Develops skills? Helps student become a better person? Creates a healthy environment? Helps individual student grow as best that student can? Or helps that student grow as measured against some outside metric? We've gone with standardized test scores because they're easy data to crunch-- but that doesn't mean they're useful.

Creating a teacher evaluation system is hard-- really hard. Jason Kamras thought he really cracked the code with IMPACT in the DC schools, but given time and reflection, it seems to have established a culture in which rampant cheating and misbehavior were encouraged. Kamras has been hired as a superintendent for Richmond Public Schools and he has already said that he will not take IMPACT with him. IMPACT is a dud.

What we have in most corners of the country is a system that attempts to do all of these things at once, resting on a standardized test that wasn't designed to help do any of them. And notice-- I have only talked about teacher evaluation. In most states, the same many-dys-functional hydra is also supposed to evaluate the entire school as well. That adds more multiple layers of complexity (for a thoughtful look at one response, pick up Beyond Test Scores by Jack Schneider.)

When you start to contemplate how huge the task is, it is really astonishing how little discussion there has been about how to do it well. And while this debate is raging, there are folks who argue for the CEO model of charter or public school where the Visionary Leader can just hire or fire at will as he sees fit. Which is just like the old evaluation system we wanted to get rid of-- only worse.

Accountability is important, but if we get it wrong, we end up with a system that does more harm than good, which is in fact where we are. To get to a better place will require a lot of conversation between a full range of stakeholders, and ESSA still keeps districts' hands tied more than is healthy. But somehow we have to move beyond the flip of a magical coin.

Originally posted at Forbes.      

Impact for Education Finances Reform

One of the challenging and mysterious things about ed reform can be the question of "How do these guys get their hands on money?" If I'm a gazillionaire who wants to invest some money in some ed reform scheme like a charter school or some other program, who am I gonna call?

Here's one answer. Meet the organization "Impact for Education." The slogan on their front page, in bold white-on-blue type: "Impact for Education engages forward-thinking philanthropists to catalyze systemic change in public education." And other than a list of the "team" and a form for getting on the mailing list, the site offers little else. Like a classy store on Rodeo Drive, it shows off how much space it can use for nothing, because if you're their kind of clientele, you don't need to be sold.

Philanthropy is, of course, not what it used to be. Modern philanthropy looks a lot like investment, and while all the cool corporations are doing it, they are looking for enough of a return (often in terms of shaping the world more to their liking) that we can talk about philanthrocapitalism. Meanwhile, the rising tool of "social impact bonds" literally turns philanthropy into investment banking. It's a fertile field.

So who are the people who run an operation like Impact for Education? There are nine members of the team:

-- Mallory Hutchison, Associate. Previously worked under Governor Janet Napolitano, senior director at Leadership for Educational Equity, a group "dedicated to empowering Teach for America corps members and alumni to grow as leaders in their communities." She moved on to Chief of Staf for Vice Mayor of Phoenix, and "led strategic and corporate partnerships for the StartupsAz Foundation (empowering the next generation of Arizona entrepreneurs).

-- Devansh Pasumarty, Senior Analyst. Worked in consulting developing business strategies for Fortune 100 companies and asset and wealth managers. I give him a bonus point because even though his Columbia BA is in economics, he has a special concentration in Jazz Studies.

-- Deneice McClary, Associate. Previously nine years as operations leader at JP Morgan Chase, then became district program manager of Virtual Learning and Credit Recovery programs for Chicago schools.

-- Erin C. Watts, Associate. Worked for Story Pirates, then moved on to CCS Fundraising where she helped figure out how nonprofits could raise money and develop "operational structures to drive mission impact."

-- Matt Arciniega, Senior Analyst. Founded a charter management organization (Caliber Schools) and did research and strategy work for DFER, 50CAN, KIPP Foundation, and New Sector Alliance.

-- Lauren Givner, Senior Associate. Did a lot of work in NYC mayor's office, including eight years under Bloomberg and with NYC Service. Chief of Staff at America Achieves and Education Prospects.

-- Mike Wang, Partner. Former senior vice-president of Teach for America, as well as Mid-Atlantic region exec director for TFA. Education policy advisor to governor of Louisiana. Worked on expanding charters in Philly. And he founded Leverage Impact, "a mission-driven consulting practice working with philanthropists to deepen their impact."

-- Danielle M. Allen, Managing Partner. Worked in Office of School Innovation for DCPS "supporting the district's portfolio of turnaround schools." An Education Pioneers Fellow at NewSchools Venture Fund, then on to Mass Insight Education, an outfit that will come in and totally fix your school.

And finally, President and Founder of Impact for Education, Alex Johnston. Johnston launched this organization after seven years as CEO of ConnCAN (The CAN's are long-time advocates for reform in general and charters in particular-- here he is in that role back in 2009). He's also worked as a school board member in New Haven and as an advisory board member for the Center for Reinventing Public Education.

In short, a business composed entirely of people who have worked the money-making entrepreneurial side of the education biz, with nary an actual educator among them (nope, I'm not counting their brief stint as TFA temps).

Founded in 2012, the business is located in New Haven and claims revenues of under $50K. Johnston's LinkedIn page also suggests that Impact is broadening its mission. In addition to the line offered on their website:

We help our clients to hone their theories of change and effectively execute their chosen strategies. We also design personalized learning experiences and create collaborative opportunities designed to amplify the impact of our clients' giving.

That's a lot to offer, but I suppose when you hear that "personalized learning" is a hot new buzzword you feel comfortable leaping all the way from financial advice to designing curriculum. Johnston has remained an advocate for charter systems. In 2016, contemplating the collapse of the left-right alliance in education reform, Johnston still came down hard for school choice and charters.

It's not yet clear that a passion-filled social movement for transforming education in America actually will arise, but perhaps one of the best chances for this will be around one of the issues that arguably has the greatest potential to unite communities of color and conservatives — school choice. 

Groups like Impact exist as matchmakers between gazillionaires and the Reformsters who would like to spend their money. Having government throw money at public schools is Bad, but having philanthropists throw their money at private education businesses is Awesome! You can see that Impact's actual direct knowledge and expertise when it comes to education is somewhere in the zero-to-none range, but part of the reform movement has been the assertion, implicit or explicit, that business folks, policy wonks, and professional bureaucrats know the Really Important stuff about education; the people actually working in classrooms are just meat widgets whose expertise can be safely ignored. It's too bad-- imagine what a group whose mission was to match up philanthropists with public schools could do.

FL: Slapping Pre-K Into Shape

Florida's approach to education policy has long been marked by a striking level of hostility to both teachers and children. This is the state that tried to force a dying child to take its Big Standardized Test; it's also the state that wanted to force nine year olds to repeat a grade for non-compliance with the testing regimen.

So it should come as no surprise that Florida intends to make life more miserable for four year olds.

What do you mean, I have to repeat being three?

Florida has piloted a new kindergarten readiness test. ostensibly to see which pre-school providers are doing a good job. According to the test, barely half of the Voluntary PreKindergarten (VPK) graduates were prepared.

There are several problems with this test.

One is that the test is given in the fall, as the students begin kindergarten. In other words, three months after then have finished pre-K and have spent the entire summer (1/20th of a five year old's entire life) away from school. Chances that littles have forgotten some of what they learned are excellent.

Another is that the test is given on computer. Yes, a five year old child has to take a test that involves comfortably using a computer mouse or tablet. The state argues that they totally give the children little computer tutorials before the test starts, so it's no biggie. On this point, the state is an idiot.

And the test focuses primarily on literacy, with no attention paid to social and emotional gains. And the test is a single snapshot and not a measure of growth.

These are all valid criticisms and excellent reasons to take the whole business back to the drawing board.

But beyond all of this is one other important point, and I cannot say this hard enough.

If your test tells you that half of kindergarten students are not ready for your kindergarten, the problem is not with the children..

I repeat: The. Problem. Is. Not. With. The. Children.

Florida's test results do not show that around half of kindergarten students are not ready for kindergarten. Florida's test results show that Florida's kindergartens are not properly prepared to teach the children.

Okay-- there is another possibility that the test results actually show that the tests are crap. This is Florida, so that's a very real possibility.

But if we are going to insist that the results are valid, those results are indictment of the kindergarten expectations and not of the children or their pre-schools.

All the pre-school in the world will not alter the speed and stages of human development. All the expectations in the world will not increase the academic capabilities of four year olds. This whole business is foolishness of the rankest kind, a program that can have no good effects and will have the effect of damaging littles either by making them hate school or by convincing them and their parents that they are defective somehow.

Can there be such a thing as a kindergarten readiness assessment that shows if children are ready for the Big K? Yes, there can.

But if that test shows that a vast number of children are not ready, the fault is not in the children. It is not a four year old's job to Get Ready for School. It is the school's job to get ready for that child. Honestly, Florida-- just once, get your act together.

PA: Trying To Fix The Pipeline

Pennsylvania's teacher pipeline is busted.

You can see it in the numbers. In 2009-10, the state issued 14,247 teaching certificates. In 2016-17, it issued 4,412. You can see it in the health of college ed departments and the cuts to some ed majors that have been occurring. And much of that is a reasonable reaction to plummeting numbers of students enrolling in education programs. 

There are plenty of cause for the drop in interest. Some like the idea that people stop heading into teaching when the economy blossoms and better alternatives appear. It also seems clear that teaching has not exactly been showered with prestige and respect for the last twenty years, aka the entire life of people who would now consider college. The emphasis on testing and test prep certainly hasn't been attractive. These have helped bust the teacher pipeline all across the country.

And in Pennsylvania there's one other factor-- under the previous governor we had a period in which education spending shrank pretty dramatically. Now, this was not entirely Tom Corbett's fault-- his predecessor used stimulus money as a bandaid for education cuts, so that when the stimulus money ended, suddenly a giant fiscal sinkhole opened up. None of that really matters at this point. What matters is that for several years, Pennsylvania school districts dealt with the cuts by slashing positions. For a while that created the illusion that we weren't having a teacher shortage here (outside of the usual suspects like special ed), but at the same time, a generation of students grew up seeing no new hires and no new job openings in their school district. Many of my own students told me, "I might like teaching, but there aren't any jobs around here and I don't want to leave the state to get a job." And indeed, my students who did pursue teaching ended up leaving the state-- and their younger peers saw that, too.

So here we sit, our teacher pipeline broken and moldy.

Governor Tom Wolf has proposed a solution-- a two million dollar bet on residency programs.

Eight universities will be getting a chunk of the grant to develop and implement residency programs in which proto-teachers have a full year of clinical experience on their way to their own classroom.

The eight schools-- Drexel, Indiana, Robert Morris, Cabrini, Lehigh, Millersville, Penn State Harrisburg and University of Pennsylvania-- do not touch the entire northwest corner of the state (my neighborhood), so that's a bummer. 

Part of the grant requires the school to partner with one high-need local education agency. The money will come from the state's Title II funding. A few of universities already have a residency program; the grant wil help maintain and expand it.

There's some debate over the effectiveness of residency programs. My judgment-- residency will be like student teaching, only more so. If your mentor teacher is great, a full year of support will be great. If your mentor teacher is less than stellar, well... good luck to you. Personally, I'm inclined to like the residency idea in part because it somewhat resembles the non-traditional program that trained me. 

The extra level of support and preparation may keep some proto-teachers in the pipeline and make them less likely to bail on teaching within a few years. What's not clear is how the programs will help get more proto-teachers in the pipeline to begin with. 

The same problems will remain-- the lack of respect, the low pay, the de-professionalizing of the work, the test-centered schools, the lack of jobs, which often goes hand in hand with increasingly lousy work conditions (the last is still an issue-- when I retired last June, my district chose not to replace me). Wolf could address some of that. In particular, he could move PA further away from test-based assessment of teachers and schools that currently pushes administrators to run test-prep factories instead of actual schools. On top of the many flaws of the test itself, we still use PVAAS (brother of the VAAS system that lost in court in Texas). On top of that, we are also a state where if you don't teach a tested subject, a chunk of your evaluation still comes from the building score, and the building score comes from the test score. "I want a job where my evaluation is based on things I can't control," said no person ever. "I want to grow up to spend my days convincing children that bubbling correct answers is cool and worthwhile," said the same no person.

Governor Wolf's grant probably isn't going to hurt anything, but if the goal here is to increase the number of new teachers coming out of the pipeline, I don't think residency programs will be a silver bullet. You can't retain what you don't recruit in the first place, and the recruitment piece is where the PA pipeline is busted.

PA: Democrats MIA On Education

So, the Pennsylvania Democrats have a survey out, because they want to like listen and stuff, asking what folks think are the most important issues. If you take a look at it, you might notice that something didn't make the list-- not the "which issues are most important list" and not the "what issue do you wish Democrats talked more about" list. And that would be education.

Sigh.

"I'm sorry. What?"

Meanwhile, this morning Caitlin Emma reports that DFER (Democrats [sic] fort Education Reform) plans to pump $4 million dollars into races in support of Democrats who support education reform (or who support public school, but whose support is judged malleable enough to suit DFER). DFER, you may recall, is the ultimate "in name only" package of hedge funders who want to privatize education. Their resemblance to actual Democrats is suspect enough that Colorado Democrats asked DFER to get the D out of their name. Now DFER is planning to dump some money into the Colorado gubernatorial race to back the candidate that education supporters tried to beat in the primaries. They also plan to back NY's Andrew Cuomo and the supposed successor to Governor Malloy in Connecticut. And they want to push Marshall Tuck as state school superintendent in California; Tuck is an excellent example of how Democrats can end up as darlings of the right wing by supporting the privatization of public education.

If all of that seems to conflict with the agenda of education progressives, DFER has a solution-- just redefine what "education progressive" means. Charter schools are about civil rights, and if you strand in their way, you're just like George Wallace. DFER, on the other hand, sides with Obama and Duncan and King and Rosa Parks.

Meanwhile, later this week ALEC is getting together for one of its lobbyist, profiteer and legislator shmoozefests. Highlights will include a Thursday keynote by lawsuit façade Janus and a session on "Ed Choice In a Challenging Environment."(Part of the track "Restoring the Balance of Government") The session will be hosted by Romy Drucker, CEO of The 74 (just in case you still wondered whether they had picked a side or not) with EdChoice CEO Robert Enlow discussing how you can "deflect the mistruths and correct the myths" when this "awkward water cooler topic" comes up.

So lots of folks have their sights set on education. There are individual Democrats who are supporting public education, but the party itself seems MIA. Folks who prefer to defend and improve public education, folks who intend to demand that all public education be properly funded and supported-- those folks should make it a point to speak up.

In Praise of Inputs

One continuing thread throughout modern education reform has been the focus on outputs. Let's direct our attention to outputs, preferably measurable ones, has been the refrain again and again.

The argument is not entirely without merit. It's not enough to account for your work in the classroom by saying, "Well, I threw a unit about adjectives at them, and hopefully something will stick." We have to do better than that.

But the complete rejection of inputs in education leads to the old drunk under the streetlight problem. That would be the classic story where a man is found searching for her car keys at night under a streetlight. "Why did you lose them so far from your car," asks a bemused bystander. "Oh, I didn't." Replied the man. "I lost them over there somewhere. But the light's much better here."

The problem with education-- and this has always been the problem with education-- is that the most important outputs are nearly impossible to measure. Has an education helped make this person wise, insightful, thoughtful, capable, kind and knowledgeable, in that critical thinking way that goes beyond mere factual recall and the performance of simple tasks? We don't know. We can't know, and sometimes when we can know, we don't know for years afterwards. Like any teacher who's been at it for a while, I have dozens-- hundreds, even-- of stories from students who, years later, told me that X turned out to be useful or that Y has helped them their entire life. Sometimes it's an academic insight, and sometimes it's something more personal. And as is true for most teachers, I can't think of many of these stories where the student thanks me for something that would have been a measurable outcome when they were a high school senior.

Sometimes there's an educational moment that dramatically changes a student's direction, but mostly it's nudges, a shift that is barely perceptible at the time. Right now, their path has only changed a quarter of an inch from its original trajectory. But once you extend that path out for years and years, the difference expands to become huge.

So it's not that outcomes don't matter. They matter tremendously. It's just that most of the really important ones are unknowable, sometimes for decades, sometimes forever.

And though I'm here to praise inputs, I have to point out that their nature is also shrouded and obscure. Human beings are not machines. There is no predictable science that tells us, "If you do X to a small person, that small person will grow up to be an adult who values Y." Human beings are not programable. This is the problem of an output-focused approach; the mistaken belief that if we know what outputs we want, we just select the inputs that get us those outputs. That is not how human beings work. There is real formula, for instance, that says, "Do these ten things and the person you desire will fall in love with you." The dream is that if I know exactly what outputs I want, it will tell me exactly what inputs to select. This only works with vending machines. Human beings are not vending machines.

Among those "You made a difference in my life" stories that every teacher saves and treasures are stories in which the teacher, years ago, did something that was really important to the student, but which that teacher remembers as some quick off-the-cuff nothing burger (or, once you reach a certain point, the teacher doesn't remember at all).

There are two important truths that every teacher can tell herself at the beginning of every day:

1) Something that you do today will make a huge difference in a person's life.

2) You will have no idea ahead of time what that thing might be.

There's only one way to manage this puzzle-- we must do our best to make sure all our inputs are good ones. Make sure each lesson is rich in quality content. Make sure we treat each child with kindness and consideration. Make sure we set a good example. Make sure we visibly live out the best principles. Make sure that everything we do in our classroom is built around the ideal of becoming our best selves and building our understanding of what it means to be human in the world. Make sure we behave in ways designed to foster growth in learning and skills.

We have a problem these days because of all of the items I just listed, only that last one gets anything like support. At the rest, our reform leaders will cock and eyebrow and ask, "But will that raise test scores?"

This is our problem. We have accepted cheap, small, simply measured outputs in place of larger, more global, more human-centered but hard-to-measure outputs. And in doing so, we have savagely chopped up our inputs, narrowing the whole range and depth of human experience and learning to the narrow sliver of "Will this raise the output test scores?"

Let's feed our children well. But instead of worrying about how we can choose food to create a certain physical form, let's just feed them healthy food, the healthiest and richest and best food we can find, and let the growing take care of itself. Yes, we will have huge and endless arguments about what exactly a healthy meal will look like, and yes, we will have students who really challenge our ability to feed them well. But focusing on outputs (like, say, deciding there's a specific size, shape and color of poop that we expect from each person) just gives us the illusion of mastery of a big, beautiful, chaotic, artful and often mysterious human process that we cannot control. In trying to control it, we just damage it.

Yes, there are specific things we could do (for instance, I'll bet interviewing every grad when they hit 35 will tell us far more about our system than their teen-aged test scores). But mostly we need to commit to making the best inputs we know how. We should not ignore outputs, but as long as we focus too carefully there,. we will never find the keys.

ICYMI: My Nephew's Wedding Edition (8/5)

My family gathered from all over creation this week to help celebrate my nephew's wedding yesterday. It's been a lot of busy family fun, but I have still had time to collect some pieces of reading for you. Remember to pass them along.

Why Some Parents Turn Their Backs on Public School and What Can Be Done About It

Great piece from Nancy Bailey that deals with some difficult issues.

What New Orleans Tells Us About the Dangers of Putting Schools on the Free Market

From the New Yorker, one more lok at the truth of what "miraculouis" NOLA tells us about using market forces to "fix" schools.

Federal Court Rules Lawsuit Against Success Can Proceed

The folks trying to sue Success Academy just cleared one more hurdle, and in the process, gave the court a chance to make note of many of SA's less admirable practices.

A Classroom Library

An impassioned and solid argument for replacing Accelerated Reading programs with a good classroom library. Like maybe we could get kids to enjoy reading rather than hating it.

College Board Botches the Scoring of June 2018 SAT

You may have heard the story-- a few students are put out that their number of correctly answered questions went up, but their SAT score went down. Only it turns out there are more than a few, and they've been doing their homework. Mercedes Schneider rounds up the story.

How We Define Teaching Makes All the Difference

Jan Resseger with some great thoughts about the profession (along with some thoughts about Arne Duncan's swell new book).

DeVos Money Is All Over The News Right Now  

Sigh.