Oligarchs Pay For Evaluation of Oligarchs' Teacher Evaluation System

When Arne Duncan came out publicly in support of Kaya Henderson as Chancellor of DC Schools, it was a clear sign that the same failed approach that led to Wonderwoman's departure would remain in place as long as Henderson was ostensibly in charge.  From Rhee's sordid history in DC, we know that she was a cartoon super-heroine, with scripts provided by the Broadies and Waltons. 

That arrangement continues, with DCPS announcing that an "independent" evaluation of the pay per score evaluation system called IMPACT will be undertaken by Harvard's most famous tenured panderer to the Oligarchs, Roland Fryer. Ha ha, ha ha ha. Excuse me. 

Will Mayor Gray continue to allow this charade?

From Bill Turque at WaPo:

By Bill Turque

The Harvard think tank that experimented with paying D.C. middle schoolers for good grades and behavior will also study the IMPACT teacher evaluation system.

DCPS confirmed late Wednesday that the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University, aka EdLabs, is the mutual selection of the District and the Washington Teachers' Union to conduct an independent evaluation of the evaluation. EdLabs is headed by Roland G. Fryer Jr., the economics professor who has been studying the effects of cash awards on students in D.C., Chicago, Dallas and New York.

An independent look at IMPACT is provided for in a side letter to the collective bargaining agreement signed last year by DCPS and the union, which has major objections to the system.

I might be missing something, but on the surface at least, Fryer seems like a peculiar choice. He's clearly a rising star--one of the youngest Harvard profs to win tenure--but much of his published work involves the achievement gap and race-based economic and social issues. His papers include "An Empirical Analysis of Acting White" and "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names."

The other issue is EdLabs "partners," or financial backers. They include at least two of the private foundations providing some of the tens of millions for the performance pay bonuses that are a central element of IMPACT. They include the Eli and Edy Broad Foundation, and the John and Laura Arnold Family Fund. They might like IMPACT just the way it is.

Fryer's voicemail at Harvard is full and not taking messages, and I'm scheduled to speak with WTU president Nathan Saunders later today. Whatever DCPS's reasons for wanting Fryer, it is keeping them to itself for the moment.

"We won't be saying anything more about Fryer at this time," said spokeswoman Safiya Simmons. That includes any details about exactly how deep Fryer will be diving or how long he'll take. It matters because the issue is heating up politically, given Mayor Vincent C. Gray's recent comments questioning IMPACT's fairness to teacher in high-poverty schools.

The cash-for-grades initiative, called Capital Gains, ran for two school years (2008-09 and 2009-10) and involved about 3,000 middle schoolers, who earned up to $100 a month. Fryer's assessment of the first year found that the money led to higher reading test scores for Hispanics, boys and students with behavior problems. But the overall effect, however, was less significant and Fryer acknowledged that the relatively small sample made it difficult to draw strong conclusions.

Former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who brought Fryer to D.C., said she liked the program but that budget issues made it difficult to continue. Cap Gains is not running in the current school year, although DCPS has never formally announced that it has been discontinued.

DC Mayor Says Oligarchs' VAM Has "a long way to go to be a fair evaluation of our teachers."

From WaPo:

By Bill Turque

As a candidate, Mayor Vincent C. Gray treaded cautiously when it came to questions about the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, arguably former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's signature initiative. The Washington Teachers' Union, a major financial supporter, has big issues with the system, which uses growth in student test scores as part of the basis for assessing some educators. Rhee supporters -- including the philanthropic community that is investing tens of millions of dollars in DC schools -- see it as the heart of her program because it holds teachers more accountable than ever for what their students learn. Low IMPACT scores led to the dismissal of 126 teachers last year.

But on Saturday, at a panel on school reform and poverty at Adas Israel synagogue, Gray offered the most explicit criticism of IMPACT I've heard from him, asserting that the system is unfair to teachers in high-poverty schools. It is also the first substantive evidence that Gray and Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson -- looked to by Rhee supporters as the keeper of the reform flame -- are not quite on the same page:

"It's better than what we had, but it certainly hasn't arrived," he said of IMPACT. "One element of it that I'm still unsatisfied with is. ... It's not the same to teach in Horace Mann [Elementary in Northwest] as to teach in Stanton Elementary School [in Southeast]. That's a very different challenge. And frankly I'm not convinced that we have figured out yet how, with an evaluation system that covers all teachers across the city, that you account for the social challenges that inevitably are to be addressed by a teacher at Stanton Elementary School in ways that are different from those at Horace Mann.

"So I guess I would say at this stage... it's a step in the right direction, but it's got a long way to go to be a fair evaluation of our teachers. And frankly any system that isn't sensitive to the differences in challenges of the kids in the schools only encourages teachers to teach in one part of the city and not in the other parts."

This is a direct challenge to the philosophical core of Rhee's vision: that really good teachers can reach kids no matter what their social or economic backgrounds. It also addresses a central teacher complaint about IMPACT. Many educators objected bitterly to a Nov.13 story I wrote, reporting that just 5 percent of the 636 teachers found to be "highly effective" under IMPACT in the 2009-10 school year work in Ward 8, while 22 percent work in Ward 3. They argue that many highly effective teachers in Northwest would see their IMPACT scores plummet if they worked with students in Wards 7 or 8.

All of this raises the more practical question of what will happen to the approximately 700 teachers who received "minimally effective" IMPACT scores last summer. Under the rules as written, they have until the end of the current school year to raise their scores or face dismissal. Gray did not address this Saturday. His education position pape says he wants to "move swiftly" to implement the independent study of IMPACT. . . .

Gates and Broad Instruct Rhee to Roll Out Pay-Per-Score in DC Schools

Yesterday WaPo reported that America's Gang of Oligarchs led by Gates and Broad and their puppet, Arne Duncan, have their new evaluation plan for America's urban teachers ready to be imposed. They chose as their field test site Washington, DC, where the Oligarchs' main acolyte has sneered and snarled her way to into the hearts of Business Roundtable members and urban mayors bent upon shutting down elected school boards and any public oversight of the corporatization of urban public schools. After all, if this new scheme fails in DC, no one's child of any importance will have been negatively affected, since none of the developers or supporters of this plan would be caught dead sending their children to DC Schools--the President included.

Teams of lawyers, MBAs, and economists have been working since this past summer, apparently, to iron out the kinks of this new system, which is based on tying teacher pay to test scores and a new evaluation regimen that will reward teachers for making their classrooms look like the KIPP brainwashing camps that have become so popular with the "no excuses" reformers--the President included.

We know that total KIPPster compliance is constantly refreshed through repeated chanting, and KIPPsters dare not take their eyes off the teacher or fail to nod their assent to everything the teacher says. From Bill Turque's article yesterday, explaining the new evaluation techniques that will quantify every aspect of the teacher-student interaction, while looking for KIPP techniques:

IMPACT documents suggest that no nuance will be left unexamined in the 30-minute classroom visits. Observers are expected to check every five minutes for the fraction of students paying attention. Teachers are supposed to show that they can tailor instruction to at least three "learning styles" (auditory, visual or tactile, for example). They can lower their scores by "using sarcasm that visibly hurts or decreases the comfort of one or more students." Among the ways instructors can demonstrate that they are instilling student belief in success is through "affirmation chants, poems and cheers."

One has to wonder if the new Rhee system gives bonus points for effective instilling of learned helplessness, Dr. Martin Seligman's discovery upon which the total compliance model of KIPP is grounded.

Here are some other reactions to the new scheme, among them Randi Weingarten, who pretends that she did not give her consent to this scheme from the beginning:

DCPS has an ideology that everything is dependent on individual teachers and it doesn't matter whether they've gotten help they need," Weingarten said.

Other teaching experts said IMPACT might be top-heavy with well-intentioned criteria, forcing teachers to jump through pedagogical hoops rather than focus on their students."What I would worry about is trying to quantify it in too fine a way," said Jon Saphier, author of "The Skillful Teacher" a popular educator text, who was consulted by Kamras on the framework and likes it overall.

Even experts who support a value-added approach warn of pitfalls. One is that the smaller the student sample, the more statistically unreliable the result. Kamras said classrooms with fewer than 10 students will not be subject to growth monitoring.

Classroom observations have started, and officials said the feedback from teachers has been positive. But instructor interviews yield a more mixed picture. Some fear that master educators have been given marching orders to be tougher on veteran teachers.

"I foresee a lot of teachers, even decent ones, getting low evaluations through this system," definitely at first, said a teacher at West Elementary in Northwest Washington, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals by administrators.