Expelling Care from the Teacher-Child Relation

Published at Common Dreams:

Expelling Care from the Teacher-Child Relation

by Jim Horn and Rachel Squires Bloom

The social impact of high stakes testing in poor urban schools has grown particularly acute over the past 10 years.  For beyond the shrinkage of school curriculums to fit the narrow boundaries of annual tests, along with the disappearance of recess and play, research in poorer schools has uncovered another most tragic outcome to high stakes testing: the effective elimination of care as the ethos that has bound together teacher and child for longer than there have been schools in America.   Sadly, many of the teachers 10 years ago who were the protectors of and the advocates for children, who often served to help children bear their burdens that result from poverty, neglect, and racism, have left the field or have since suffered a relentless erosion of that close teacher-student bond that historically characterized the relation between educators and children in urban elementary schools.  

Ironically, that erosion has been due to a desperate effort among teachers to emphasize the positive and to avoid the negative in the face of the ever-present threat of failure and the reality of failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.  For as teachers quickly learned during the past decade to focus on the promised improvements under NCLB’s standards and accountability framework, rather than on the tangible failures of many and sometimes most of the children in their classes, the needs of children as fragile human beings was supplanted in many teachers viewfinders by an image born of disembodied data and graphs and achievement scales.  Avoiding failure seemed to require the full embrace of the ideology of testing and accountability, and the advocacy for children that at was the core of teaching began to be rooted out by the false promise and a failed effort to leave no child behind.

As sanctions have become stiffer, including the likelihood of staff replacement and school closure, the utterly impossible AYP demands have escalated even as poor schools grow poorer. Those early positive attitudes by teachers, then, became impossible to sustain, even as heroic teaching efforts continued in many schools.  Not surprisingly, negativity began to fill the void as even wishful thinking drained away, and clenched fists began to replace open hands.   Disappearance of hope becomes accompanied by a detached bitterness that expanded and spilled over into teachers’ attitudes toward themselves and toward the brothers and sisters of children who just a few years back were viewed so differently.  The sweetness teachers once felt about their students, their children, their “babies,” began to sour and curdle.  In the process, nurturance gave way to looking to place blame, and blaming, then, degenerated quickly to the most dangerous of excuses of all for ignoring children’s needs, the excuse known infamously as “No Excuses.”  

And so situations that may have been touching before are now viewed with toughness. Poverty is not going to go away, boys and girls, so it is time to “man up” and pretend as if it had.  No excuses.  Never mind that roughly 7 of every 28 of America’s invisible poor children in our classrooms, whether in New Orleans or New Bedford, live in households where the annual income is less than $23,000 for a family of four.  No Excuses.  And so the new pedagogy for the poor requires enforcement and moves into a penal phase. Any resistance by children to increasing pressures to perform in the new boot camps is quickly countered by teachers whose every move is now monitored and written up if it departs from the scripted curricular catechisms that have replaced lesson planning and humane teaching in most urban schools.  

And now waiting in the wings to be implemented by states and cities that sold their souls for Race to the Top cash is, yet, another indignity and assault on the teacher-pupil relationship.   For inasmuch as that special bond between teachers and children is surely on life support after 10 years of an enforced failure strategy devised for the benefit of poor children, the creation of a teacher evaluation scheme accompanied by merit pay, both based on student test scores, amounts to pulling the plug. 

With teachers already squeezed to focus on the curricular shards that are tested at the expense of a rich and relevant curriculum, teachers who are evaluated based on test scores will begin to focus on student groups whose scores could be boosted to whatever number or category is deemed worthy of enhancing a paycheck or avoiding a sacking.  In some classrooms, students on the lowest and highest ends of ability and achievement may be neglected, as they would provide less “bang for the buck.” One teacher recently spoke facetiously or cynically (it is hard to tell the difference these days) of how students entering her classroom may be labeled as “pay cut” or “bonus.”  This is harsh, but the reality is that a model that explicitly ties children’s scores to monetary worth creates such an atmosphere. Even caring, effective, and empathetic teachers to some degree would be aware of how individual students may influence their pay.  
High-achieving students could be left behind as well if teachers believe that effort is better spent on students whose scores can be edged up more easily.  And even though most teachers still take seriously, or want to take seriously, their responsibility for the academic and emotional progress for every student in their class, tying job security or pay raises to test score promises to further damage one of the most important relationships with adults that children have outside of family. 

Relationships among teachers would also suffer if career status and pay were linked to test scores.  Ideally, colleagues support, inspire, collaborate with, empathize with, and mentor one another.  Teacher collaboration at grade level and on vertical teams is an integral area of support and creativity within which teachers create, implement, and fine tune curriculum and instruction.  If standardized test scores become part of the evaluation of teacher quality, collaborative relationships will transform into competitive ones. Within schools and districts, teachers would explicit or implicitly be set against rather one another as they competed to teach the most remunerative or status-linked student groups.  Even if unconsciously, favoritism and “who you know” would become factors (more than they currently may be) when deciding teacher placement.  Some teachers would request and even campaign for transfers to wealthier schools within districts.  Teachers would inevitably be pitted against other teachers in assuring that their classes are “stacked” with high achieving students, with students likely to earn low standardized test scores (students with special educational needs, English language learners and student in poverty) unwanted before they ever appear at the classroom door.

It is difficult to see how tying pay raises to standardized test scores would serve as an incentive for teachers to design stronger, engaging and comprehensive curriculum, or to give effective and empathetic instruction.  Caring educators choose to teach for many reasons, but bonus pay or grinding out test scores are not among them.  There is a perception that teachers and their unions represent a group of entitled whiners, but that is far from the case.  Teachers take seriously the job of educating the students in their charge, and they consider themselves accountable for student achievement.  Teachers, parents and administrators value and measure this achievement in ways far more comprehensively than can be measured by standardized tests.  Tying teacher pay or job security to scores will not make teachers more accountable for student achievement, but it will have a deadly impact on the now tenuous relationships at the heart of student learning and growth.

Summing up what happened to her school after the high stakes hurricane hit in 2000, a retired principal from a Title I school in Louisiana concluded, “caring went out the window.”  It was sucked away by the endless swirl of stress and the anxiety of testing and never-ending test prep in a school where half the children regularly failed 4th grade. Left in the wake of that continuing catastrophe across Louisiana remains a sense of helpless loss and a corrosive aggression among both teachers and children, as they pick through the remains to see what can be salvaged of their human dignity and hope after this ten-year blow.  

This new teacher accountability storm that is now brewing promises once more to devastate areas already ravaged, but this time moving deep into the heartland to bring ruination to relationships that heretofore have defined the lives of children, teachers, and parents in and around America’s once-treasured public schools.

The Folly and Unfairness . . .Part II

THE FOLLY AND UNFAIRNESS OF TYING TEACHER SALARIES TO TEST SCORES

Rachel Squires Bloom

Part Two:  How Tying Teacher Salaries to Test Scores Will Unravel the Student-Teacher Bond

Tying teacher pay to standardized test scores would irremediably and inevitably result in the destruction of the many interconnected relationships on which learning is built, including the vital and inviolable relationship between student and teacher.  Doing so creates clear disincentive for teachers to work with districts, schools, or classrooms which contain student populations who historically do not perform well on standardized tests.  The mentality that certain student populations generate higher salaries would inevitably and unconscionably damage teacher/student relationships.

Students whose scores often remain entrenched in the Needs Improvement or Warning categories of standardized tests come overwhelmingly from populations which fare poorly on the limited measure provided by such assessments. Teachers with influence could jockey for placement in wealthier schools, and teachers with less influence and experience – often the newest teachers – would end up at schools with student populations who do poorly on standardized test, i.e., poor schools.  This caste system would result in the least-experienced teachers being in classrooms containing students with the greatest educational, emotional, social and economic needs.  Boundaries would quickly be drawn along economic, cultural and race lines. Certain schools in a district, and certain districts themselves, would be considered “dumping grounds” for teachers without sufficient experience or who lack professional connections.

Teachers already feel pressure to focus on the curricular shards that are tested at the expense of a rich, relevant curriculum. There is temptation for districts to pressure teachers to focus on student groups whose scores could be boosted to whatever number or category was deemed worthy of enhancing a paycheck.  Students would not be viewed as unique components parts of a dynamic classroom of individuals.  In some classrooms, students on the lowest and higher ends of ability and achievement may be neglected, as they would provide less “bang for the buck.” One teacher spoke of how when students would enter her classroom she would think of them as “pay cut” or “bonus.”  This is harsh, but the reality is that a model that explicitly ties children’s scores to monetary worth creates such an atmosphere. Even caring, effective and empathetic teachers would to some degree be aware of how individual students may influence their pay.  High-achieving students could be left behind as well if teachers believe that effort is better spent on students whose scores can be edged upward.  Most teachers take seriously their responsibility for the academic and emotional progress for every student in their class.  It is ironic that altering (and damaging) one of the most important adult relationship that children have would indeed leave many children far behind.      

Relationships among teachers would also suffer if teacher are linked to test scores.  Ideally, colleagues support, inspire, collaborate with, empathize with, and mentor one another.  Teacher collaboration at grade level and on vertical teams is an integral area of support and creativity within which teachers create, implement and fine tune curriculum and instruction.  If standardized test scores become part of the evaluation of teacher quality, collaborative relationships would transform into competitive ones. Within schools and districts, teachers would explicit or implicitly be set against rather one another as they competed to teach the most remunerative student groups.  Even if unconsciously, favoritism and “who you know” would become factors (more than they currently may be) when deciding teacher placement.  Some teachers would request and even campaign for transfers to wealthier schools within districts.  Teachers would inevitably be pitted against other teachers in assuring that their classes are “stacked” with high achieving students, with students apt to earn low standardized test scores (students with special educational needs, English language learners and student in poverty) unwanted before they even set foot in a classroom.

It is difficult to see how tying pay raises to standardized test scores would serve as an incentive for teachers to design stronger, engaging and comprehensive curriculum, or to give effective and empathetic instruction.  The person who has entered the field of education in order to become wealthy has not yet been found.  Caring educators become involved in the field for many reasons; getting rich is not one of them.  There is a perception that teachers and their unions of entitled whiners, but that is far from the case; teachers take seriously the job of education the students in their charge, and consider themselves accountable for student achievement.  Teachers, parents and administrators value and measure this achievement in ways far more comprehensively than can be measured by numbers, particularly when numbers are the limited data produced by standardized tests.  Tying teacher pay to scores will not make teachers more accountable for student achievement, but will have a greatly negative impact on the relationships at the heart of student learning and growth.

The Folly and Unfairness of Tying Teacher Salaries to Test Scores

Dr. Rachel Bloom, teacher-administrator, offers this needed primer on why linking teacher pay to testing children is a bad idea:

 THE FOLLY AND UNFAIRNESS OF TYING TEACHER SALARIES TO TEST SCORES

Rachel Squires Bloom

Part One: Students are Not Widgets: The Unfairness of Using a Business Model to Measure Teacher Effectiveness      

Evaluating educator effectiveness by linking salaries to test scores would destroy the relationships on which sound teaching and learning are built.  While teachers are unquestionably responsible for the progress of their students, creating monetary incentive to “teach better,” as defined by the narrow confines of standardized test scores, undermines relationships among students, teachers, schools and systems. A model which relies on standardized test scores as indicators of teacher quality measures student performance very narrowly, and fails to account for relevant factors such as economic level, attendance, special educational needs, and language ability of students, all which influence student progress.

Tying test scores to salaries is based on the business model and its reliance on numbers (the “bottom line”) to assess and subsequently reward effectiveness. Numbers, after all, make great sound bites.  They convey an often superficial tone of authority and trustworthiness, particularly if one does not dig too deeply, inquire about cofounding variables, or examine them in context.  Numbers may be taken at face value by those who are reluctant to examine statistics more closely and who are comfortable with facile treatment of issues.  The business model may be useful when gauging the efficiency of production of cars or widgets, but such a pay-for-productivity model is not appropriate for measuring student achievement.  If widgets (or car parts, cans, bolts of fabric) are produced by machine, how many that are produced per hour can be measured, and a person running that machine can be said to “make production” or not.  Schools, however, are not factories and students are not widgets. Teachers do not operate machinery, nor are they themselves machines. Transposing a math-based business model onto the human and humanity rich field of education is neither valid nor fair.

Flawed attempts to tie “trustworthy” numbers to quality, bean-counting masquerading as valid assessment, encroaches in other fields as well. Tying professional effectiveness to one particular measure in any field is flawed.  Similar uses of contextless data occur increasingly in health care.  Attempts are being made to use numbers generated from patient data to determine whether or not a physician is a “good doctor.”  Statistics, such as blood pressure or sugar levels, are used to assess physician effectiveness without accounting for variables such as compliance, follow-up appointments, co-morbidity, and variables which, as in education, stem from poverty.  

This would be similar to comparing the blood pressure statistics of a general practitioner with that of a specialist. A specialist’s numbers may appear different, since he or she is likely to see patients with more severe symptoms, and who may be more (or less) compliant with medications. These patient numbers create a metric; metrics are easy to generate and may reveal information about and individual case.  The danger in medicine, (as in education) is that because numbers are easy to generate, that the metrics themselves become part of the definition of quality, rather than being only part of the bigger picture of the quality of a doctor’s care or of a particular patient’s outcome. Like students, patients are individuals who arrive with histories that include factors beyond what can be remedied in classrooms or medical offices.  Poverty is one such enormously negative influence on a child’s academic and physical health.

            Enhancing the pay in many professions, including education, by relying on statistics is particularly misguided when teachers are responsible for student populations which do not traditionally succeed on standardized tests.   Any profession contains multiple variables which interact and which enormously affect outcomes.  While numbers are useful and sometimes necessary measurements, they can be misused or, worse, easily manipulated by those determined to simplify a complicated assessment of progress.

Quantitative data from state-mandated tests can provide useful information when taken in context with other variables affecting student performance.  Valid uses include viewing student performance as one component in determining how well districts and schools align curricula with state frameworks.  Data can provide limited insight to teachers as to how individuals or students groups perform in a subject based 40-50 questions.  Using such scores to garnish or set salaries, however, is not valid.  It is especially specious when this is done with the allege purpose of improving teaching and learning.      

             Standardized tests are part of the fabric of students’ and teachers’ lives, including the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and state tests such as Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP).  Standardized test scores allow college admissions committees to sort and rank students from among thousands of applicants. Standardized testing has valid critics, including those who say that such tests discriminate by class because wealthier parents pay for expensive test prep, and that the tests themselves allows students to demonstrate understanding in a very limited way.

What would a formula tying teacher salaries to test scores look like?  For teachers of lower elementary grades, whose students are not yet subjected to standardized tests, would teacher salaries be tied to reading fluency tests such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy (DIBELS) or other assessments that are administered as early as kindergarten.  How feasible is it to create a formula to reward a teacher when so many teachers influence a particular student at a particular time?  In many cases, it is a confluence of teachers who are responsible for a student’s performance.  Struggling students in may work with a classroom teacher as well as with resource room, skill support, or English Language Learner teachers.

If salaries were tied to test scores, how would such factors as economic status, home support, parent engagement, culture, and English language skills be calculated?  Adequate nutrition, sleep and exercise affect ability to pay attention, to process and retain information, and to sustain task engagement are factors in achievement and in test-taking ability. Children who lack these basic securities, which research has linked to performance and achievement, are unlikely to attain the same test scores, even with the same teacher and curriculum, of students who take these things for granted.

Teacher effectiveness includes quality of curriculum, instructional methods, knowledge of students, and the development of lifelong learners. Standardized testing already compels teachers to reluctantly narrow curricula. Teachers are pressured to race through units before students thoroughly understand concepts, to encourage memorization rather than thoughtful understanding, and to teach items out of context because “they might appear on the test.”  In the weeks before a state-mandated exam, students are most likely doing review work or being force-fed topics which appear at the end of the school year after tests are taken.  What is lost is enormous.  Students are deprived of opportunities to explore topics in depth, with curiosity and reflection.  Insufficient time is given to activating background knowledge, interest, and relevance, all which increase retention, engagement, and the desire to learn. 

Good teachers provide instruction that creates well-rounded, curious students.  How is teacher effectiveness and quality currently measured? All states have mandated requirements in order to be licensed.  Exams are in the areas of reading, general knowledge, and in content areas. In Massachusetts, to receive an initial teaching license an individual must possess a Bachelor's degree, passing scores on the MTEL (Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure) and must have completed an approved educator preparation program, which includes pre-practicum and practicum work.  To gain a professional license, teachers work for three years under an initial license and must complete an approved teacher induction or mentorship program. Teachers apply for relicensure every five years, during which they must demonstrate evidence of relevant coursework or professional development to assure that they remain current in the field.  These standards are part of what define a teacher as “highly qualified.”           

In addition to licensure, teachers are regularly evaluated by principals or administrators. These evaluations, which become part of a teacher’s permanent personnel file, may make recommendations for professional teaching status or may recommend areas for remediation. It is the role of the principal or administrator to assure that teachers who struggle receive the support that they need in order to be effective.  Of course, poor and ineffective teachers exist and it is crucial that administrators understand the power and the necessity of honest evaluations.  Such evaluations may document poor teaching, provide remediation for struggling teachers, and in necessary cases, provide a route out for teachers who are not effective or who are harmful to student learning.

Evaluation of educators will never be a perfect science because much that teachers contribute cannot be measured by numbers. An effective teacher is one under whose tutelage students make progress, progress being far deeper than can be measured by a multiple choice test.  Tying salaries to scores is an inaccurate, unfair, and ultimately injurious, creating neither incentive for sound teaching nor sound learning.  This model is particularly inappropriate when the “products” are not products at all, but are human beings with unique minds, histories and learning needs.  This is what “effective” teachers know.  

Teacher Merit Pay Has No Merit, Again

First, the ground-splitting Vanderbilt study.  And now this from New York City, a study conducted, no less, by pay for performance fan, Roland Fryer.  If this doesn't finally end the fascination with this line of stupidity, what will. 

From Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools (ht to Monty Neill):

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

The program handed out bonuses based on the schools’ results on the city’s progress report cards. The report cards grade schools based primarily on how much progress they make in improving students’ state test scores. A so-called “compensation team” at each school decided how to distribute the money — a maximum of $3,000 per teachers union member, if the school completely met its target, and $1,500 per union member if the school improved its report card score by 75%.


The deal was seen as a landmark in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced it with then-United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by his side. “I am a capitalist, and I am in favor of incentives for individual people,” Bloomberg said then, while Weingarten emphasized that schools could decide to distribute bonuses evenly among educators. She called the program “transcendent.”

In his study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Fryer writes that researchers were surprised to see that schools that won bonuses overwhelmingly decided to distribute the cash fairly evenly among teachers. More than 80 percent of schools that won bonuses gave the same dollar amount to almost all of the eligible educators.

Researchers were also surprised to find that middle school students actually seemed to be worse off. After three years attending schools involved in the project, middle school students’ math and English test scores declined by a statistically significant amount compared to students attending similar schools that were not part of the project. . . .

Sixty-Five Percent of Tennesseeans Do NOT Want Their Teacher Pay Based on Test Scores

How much plainer can the message get for Arne and the Oligarchs who appear hellbent on tearing down public education?  Will the Spirit of Cairo take hold in America?  Do we have it in us to end the corporate dictatorship of American education policy?

From the Tennessean (ht to Monty Neill):

A Vanderbilt University statewide poll  shows 65 percent of Tennesseans do not favor paying teachers whose students do well on tests more than teachers whose students do poorly. Only 35 percent of residents support paying teachers whose students do well on tests more money.

The poll results may be the upshot of parents' not wanting to see schools so focused on standardized testing. . . .

Merit Pay Fails to Raise Scores: Duncan Says Full Steam Ahead with Meritless Plan

The U. S. Education Department has tremendously expensive pay for test score grant programs that don't have a lick of empirical evidence to support them.  In fact, the National Research Council has warned Duncan that his value-added pay per score incentive systems that he is "incenting" have no scientific credibility (look immediately to your right).  That has not stopped the billionaires who run the department from going all in with a $437 million grant project to bribe states and localities to come up with pay for score plans in the poorest schools.

The results of a three year study are out, and the news is not good for the Team Gates-Duncan.  From WaPo:

A study released Tuesday found that offering teachers annual bonuses of up to $15,000 had no effect on student test scores - a result likely to inflame debate about performance pay programs sprouting in D.C. schools and many others nationwide.

The study suggests that teachers already were working so hard that the lure of extra money failed to induce them to intensify their effort or change methods of instruction. The experiment, in Nashville public schools, calls into question a key aspect of market-driven initiatives to improve schools that have become the vogue in some education circles.

"Pay reform is often thought to be a magic bullet," said Matthew Springer, a Vanderbilt University education professor who led the study. "That doesn't appear to be the case here. We need to develop more thoughtful and comprehensive ways of thinking about compensation. But at the same time, we're not even sure whether incentive pay is an effective strategy for improving the system itself."

With backing from federal and state governments and private foundations, a growing number of public schools in recent years have embraced paying teachers at least in part on how much they raise student achievement.

President Obama has encouraged the movement despite skepticism from some teachers unions and from lawmakers within his party. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee became a hero to reformers in part because of her insistence on a new teachers' contract that allows performance bonuses.

Central to such reforms is the notion that teachers should be rewarded when their students achieve outsize gains on standardized tests. That is a major shift from the tradition of determining pay by seniority and credentials such as master's or doctoral degrees.

But the study from the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt casts doubt on hopes that performance pay alone can dramatically improve public schools.

In a three-year experiment backed by federal funding, researchers tracked what happened in Nashville schools when math teachers in grades 5 through 8 were offered bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 and $15,000 for hitting targets in annual test-score gains. About 300 teachers volunteered, and half were assigned to a control group ineligible for the bonuses.

Researchers designed the bonuses, funded by a private donor, to be large enough to function as a legitimate incentive. There were no additional variables - no professional development, mentoring or other elements in the experiment meant to help elicit better test scores.

On the whole, researchers found no significant difference between the results from classes led by teachers who received bonuses and those led by teachers who did not.

Obama administration officials and a wide range of experts were quick to note that the study did not examine the effect of performance pay in combination with other measures to improve teaching.

"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Peter Cunningham, assistant U.S. education secretary for communications and outreach. "What we are trying to do is change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better while rewarding and incentivizing the best to teach in high need schools, hard to staff subjects. This study doesn't address that objective.". . .

To put it politely, Peter Cunningham does not speak the truth.  Prior to this year the Feds did have some grant money available to attract teachers to high needs schools, but the announcement in May 2010 changed all that by holding any grant money for such purposes hostage to the necessity to put into place pay for score plans.  The Federal Education Budget Project's Facebook page makes it quite clear that Cunningham is a liar, to put it clearly:

by Federal Education Budget Project on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 5:15pm

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the release of applications for $437 million in Teacher Incentive Fund grants (TIF). TIF grants are competitively awarded federal grants that local education agencies (LEAs), state education agencies (SEAs), and partnerships between either of these entities and non-profit organizations can use to implement programs that address the distribution of high quality teachers among high-need schools and subject areas. These grants are made possible through both a fiscal year 2010 appropriation of $300 million and a carryover appropriation of $137 million from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The Department of Education is likely to award between 40 and 80 grants ranging from $5 million to $10 million, and applications are due July 6, 2010.
These grants will be awarded specifically to programs that support Performance Based Compensation Systems (PBCSs) for teachers and principals. In the past, TIF grants have been available for other basic types of teacher compensation programs like pay incentives for teachers that work in hard-to-staff schools and subjects. However, the Obama Administration shifted its focus for the grants over to PBCSs after the Department of Education announced that ARRA funding for the TIF will go to support these performance-based programs. . . .

More Evidence Against Using Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

Last year it was the Division of Behavioral and Social Science from the National Academies of Science that wrote Arne Duncan a long, long letter waving the red flag on the Oligarchs' idea of using test score gains to make high stakes judgments on teacher hiring and firing. (Look to the top right on this page for the link).

Now another prestigious group of scholars has weighed in, offering another warning message with some increased urgency built in.  Here is the list of scholars:

EVA L. BAKER is professor of education at UCLA, co-director of the National Center for Evaluation Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), and co-chaired the committee to revise testing standards of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. 

PAUL E. BARTON is the former director of the Policy Information Center of the Educational Testing Service and associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

LINDA DARLINGHAMMOND is a professor of education at Stanford University, former president of the American Educational Research Association, and a member of the National Academy of Education. 

EDWARD HAERTEL is a professor of education at Stanford University, former president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, Chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment, and a former chair of the committee on methodology of the National Assessment Governing Board. 

HELEN F. LADD is professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University and president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. 

ROBERT L. LINN is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, and has served as president of the National Council on Measurement in Education and of the American Educational Research Association, and as chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment. 

DIANE RAVITCH is a research professor at New York University and historian of American education. 

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. 

RICHARD J. SHAVELSON is a professor of education (emeritus) at Stanford University and former president of the American Educational Research Association. 

LORRIE A. SHEPARD is dean and professor, School of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, and the immediate past president of the National Academy of Education.

Download the document here.

Let's Have Performance Pay for Economists Who Muck Around in Education Issues

The NYTimes blog, Economix, has a posting by Harvard economist, Edward Glaeser, on a recent conference in Cambridge to air some of the research on teacher pay based on test scores.  The conference brought together the customary lineup of pro-corporate and pro-privatization forces, those described by Dr. Paul Peterson as the good against the evil (see Bush v. Holmes (Fl. Sup. Ct.) for some background on Peterson's self-described "small band of Jedi attackers, using their intellectual powers to fight the unified Death Star forces led by Darth Vader, whose intellectual capacity has been corrupted by the urge for complete hegemony”(p. 3).

This illustrious group of Jedi warriors are now ensconced at Harvard within The Program on Policy and Governance (PEPG), whose Advisory Committee is headed by Jeb Bush and whose members include the Who's Who of research chefs and ideologues who earn their bread by manufacturing reports to support the corporate vision of schooling.

Since there was no U. S.  research presented at the conference to support the current plan to base tenure and pay on test scores, Glaeser focuses on a rehash of a study done ten years ago in Israel and a more recent one done in India, both of which show some evidence to support performance based pay. 

Glaeser also focuses on a study by Jedi warriors, Jay Greene and Scott Buck, that found that local administrators and teachers often subvert the intent of pay per score plans.  Glaeser also fumes that teachers will probably cheat to make their increase their pay, since they hate the performance pay plan, anyway.  While there is good reason to believe that teacher cheating will indeed occur when money for test scores comes to town, Glaeser offers no such warning when he presented the Israeli and Indian studies mentioned earlier.  Obviously, cheating is only a problem in the U. S. and in systems where pay per score is unpopular.

What Glaeser does not mention at all is the research presented at HIS conference by Goodman and Turner from Columbia that shows the New York pay for performance plan has not worked.  Valerie Strauss has a rundown that includes other recent evidence that would make any sane national policymaker change course from the full speed ahead that Arne's Oligarchs have chosen:

Just the other day we heard that a program in Chicago that attempted to link teacher pay with student standardized test scores wasn’t working, at least not in the first two years.

A 2009 analysis of a major program in Texas that also linked teacher pay to student achievement gains on tests showed no evidence of success. The multi-year Texas Educator Excellence Grant involved teachers at about 1,000 campuses, with a total of more than 140,000 students in lower-income neighborhoods. It was discontinued because of “design problems.”

Now, a paper prepared by two Columbia University researchers for a recent education conference at Harvard University said that the New York City Bonus Program, which attempts to raise student achievement by paying teachers for it, was -- you guessed -- also unsuccessful.

The researchers, Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner, investigated the impacts of group-based incentive pay over two academic years (2007-2008 and 2008-2009) on a range of outcomes that included teacher effort, student performance in math and reading, and classroom activities. Also evaluated were impacts on the market for teachers by examining teacher turnover and the qualifications of newly hired teachers.

“Overall, we find the bonus program had little impact on any of these outcomes,” the researchers concluded.

In each of these reports, the authors noted that the design of the program was flawed in some way. Teachers weren’t paid enough or they were not paid individually or some other part was not well conceived.

The Goodman/Turner study says, for example, “We argue that the lack of bonus program impacts can be explained by the structure of the bonus program. Group bonuses led to free-riding, which significantly reduced the program’s incentives.”

Maybe. But maybe not. And this is our problem: Nobody yet knows.

That hasn’t stopped performance-based pay from becoming the new mantras in school reform. It was, in fact, a key part of the new teachers' contract negotiated in Washington, D.C., by Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and just ratified by members of the Washington Teachers' Union. It is also part of a number of school reform laws recently passed in various states to win favor -- and federal Race to the Top dollars -- from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. . . .

More Research on Teacher Performance Pay for Duncan to Ignore

One has to wonder what it will take for the corporate edu-idiots to notice that there is no evidence to support any, i. e., ANY of their "reform" proposals.  The most recent bad news for the billionaire boys club, reported by Valerie Strauss:

A study released today by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. shows no evidence that the Chicago Teacher Advancement Program improved student math and reading tests when compared with a group of similar schools that did not use the system, Education Week reported.

Chicago’s program is a version of the national Teacher Advancement Program, or TAP, which was first implemented in Chicago in 2007-08, when Duncan led the schools.

The analysis looked at the first two years of a four-year program, which has multiple steps, including increased teacher development, and an incentive payment scheme in which teachers are paid more when their students do better on standardized test scores.

The concept ignores the fact that standardized tests in schools today were not designed as teacher assessment tools and aren’t valid measures, but that isn’t stopping a headlong rush into implementation in school districts across the country.

Remind Governor Ritter to Be a Real Leader and Not a Follower of Ideology

136 State Capitol, Denver, CO 80203 | (303) 866-2471

(Please feel free to copy and paste the letter below).



May 15, 2010

Dear Governor Ritter:

As Governor we know that you have earned the reputation of leading the nation in cutting edge ways. Please be a fearless leader again by choosing to be the first governor to use scientific evidence and the best scientific opinion to "just say no" to the dangerous and undocumented education bill, SB 191, which was passed by the Colorado legislature last week with no evidence or testing to show that the policy therein will do more good than harm.

An important report has just been issued by the National Academy of Education. Please have your staffers read it, and then ask them if SB 191 satisfies the major or minor concerns of the National Academy and the National Research Council regarding the use of value added testing models to make high stake decisions regarding teacher evaluations. If it does not, please veto SB 191. If it does, we encourage you to sign quickly.

Be the first governor in a long time to put science ahead of ideology, while protecting the taxpayers in your state from the lawsuits that are sure to filed in the event that SB 191 becomes law. Now that would be a real leader!

Respectfully,

Jim Horn

Ed Deformer Jeb Bush and the Party of Stupid Prevail in the Florida Legislature

It's all up the Governor Charlie Crist now:

• Email the Governor

• Email the Lt. Governor

• Telephone:
  • Citizen Services Hotline: * (850) 488-4441*
  • Executive Office of the Governor Switchboard: * (850) 488-7146* [Office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time]

• Fax: (850) 487-0801

• For individuals with hearing loss or speech disability:
  1-850-922-7795 (TTY)
  OR
  711 (Florida Telecommunication Relay)

• Mailing Address
  • Office of Governor Charlie Crist
    State of Florida
    PL-05 The Capitol
    Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

• Delivery Address
  • Office of Governor Charlie Crist
    State of Florida
    The Capitol
    400 S. Monroe St.
    Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

From Valerie Strauss at WaPo:

Already approved by the Senate, the legislation now rests with Crist, who first said he supported it but has been hinting that he may now use his veto because it is so unpopular.

Teachers, parents and students have been loudly protesting the legislation, which, if it becomes law, would:

*Make Florida the first state to eliminate tenure for new teachers, putting them all on one-year contracts for the first five years.

*Eliminate class experience and advanced degrees (in most cases) as factors in teacher evaluations and pay increases.

*Require that at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, and pay increases, be based on standardized test scores. Test experts say this method is faulty because teachers can’t control every factor that affects the test-taking process.

*Require the creation of a slew of new standardized tests for every subject, in every grade that is not already assessed. This must come as good news to companies that create tests and that prepare students for taking tests. There could be a lot of new business for them in Florida [Disclosure: The Washington Post owns Kaplan, an education company with a test prep divison.]

A look at some of the details of the bill passed by the House helps explain why critics say it was not thought out or written with much care.

It requires all school districts in the state to develop end-of-course exams that will determine “learning gains” made by students ( a plan that also would require exams to be given at the beginning of the school year, too, so that student progress can be measured). It doesn't, however, explain what a student “learning gain” -- on which teachers will be judged-- actually is.

Within a few years, Florida second-graders could, perhaps, sit down, with pencil in hand, to take a test on how well they did in art class that year. What kind of test? Nobody knows. The bill doesn’t say.

The new tests will cost millions of dollars. A legislator from Duval County told the House that the state Education Department is developing three end-of course exams right now, at a cost of more than $1 million. The Miami-Dade County school system alone has something like 900 course offerings.

To pay for the course development and performance pay for teachers and other parts of the legislation, 5 percent of federal, state and local Florida Education Finance Program funds are to be set aside beginning in 2011. That’s about $900 million.

But here’s the catch: It’s not new money. It would come out of the already stretched budgets of county school systems. School officials say they can't possibly afford this.

The bill also doesn’t mention how special-needs students should be factored in, although Crist said this week he was concerned about this omission.

The backers of the bill say these are details that can be worked out later in rules by the Department of Education.

That’s the same thing they said when former Florida governor Jeb Bush pushed through a statewide standardized testing program called the FCAT. The legislation had few details, which had to be worked out over years. The adults fiddled while students had to suffer taking tests that had no meaning.

The bill has been hailed by some conservatives outside the state, including Stanford University economist Eric Hanusek, who praised Florida in the April edition of Education Next magazine for being "poised to lead the nation in crafting student policies."

Hanusek was a big supporter of then-president George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind education reform, once writing that it was "raising overall student performance." Bush's own administration issued reports showing that it did not, in fact, raise overall student performance.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, a former official in the administration of president George H.W. Bush who once supported NCLB, has looked at data and changed her mind, saying it actually harmed education, in part by emphasizing high-stakes standardized tests. The New York University professor wrote an open letter to the Florida legislature expressing her opposition to the state's reform approach.

The legislation's supporters have repeatedly said that its reforms will improve schools and encourage good teachers to stay in the profession because they will be paid more for their good work. Supporters may indeed believe this. But good teachers know that they can't fairly be judged by test scores alone. It isn't surprising that no teachers were involved in the drafting of the legislation.

Certainly there are teachers in every school system who should not be in the classroom, and certainly principals should have the flexibility to remove ineffective teachers. In fact, in some counties, they do already. Nobody wants bad teachers to be forced out better than good teachers. But taking away job security, linking pay to test scores and forcing kids to take more tests is going to hurt the good teachers as least as much as the bad.

Opponents of the bill accuse its sponsors of disliking teachers and trying to tear down public education. Sen. John Thrasher, sponsor the Senate bill on teacher tenure and testing, who was recently installed as chairman of Florida’s Republican Party with the help of former governor Jeb Bush, denied this. Incidentally, he didn't ask any educators for their input on the reform.

During a recent debate on the Senate floor, Thrasher pointed to his daughter who was sitting in the gallery. She’s a former teacher, according to this piece from WUSF, Tampa Bay’s public broadcasting station.

“She’s told me she’s not fearful of this bill. Because she thinks that when this bill passes, it’s gonna inspire teachers to get into the classroom, and do a better job than they’ve been doing, even now,” Thrasher said.

Of course she's not fearful. She doesn’t teach anymore.

How BIll Gates Won the Race to the Top, and Why Every Parent and Teacher Should Boycott Microsoft

Every so often we glimpse small stories stuck into the back pages of the corporate press on the continuing payouts by Microsoft for settlements to years-old State claims that Gates "had stifled competition and broken state antitrust laws by overcharging consumers for software and computers." California settled for $1.1 billion, and this story last week shows more payouts continuing today, with Wisconsin figuring out how it will use $80 million that Gates promised years ago while continuing to deny any wrongdoing.

So bare-knuckled tactics are nothing new to the Gates team, as Bill's cadre of crooks continue to demonstrate in the big all-in bet to help Arne stifle any competition in the rigged RTTT, corporate ed reform's blueprint for the dismantling of public schools and the destruction of the teaching profession. Eerily, this is the same pattern of philanthro-capitalist bullying that Gates has used in other venues to restrict any diversity of views, as within the World Health Organization in the fight against malaria, as documented by Diane Ravitch in her new book:

The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientist in the field were "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making process, he charged, was "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself" (p. 204).

This pattern is at work, of course, in the RTTT, which awarded its first grants last week to Tennessee and Delaware. Not only does Gates have the house keys at the Department of Ed where the Gates and Broad Foundations have set up shop, but the Foundation has also tutored each state in how to write grants to fit the criteria of judging that the Foundation "helped" to develop. In addition, the Foundation is actively funding pilots at the state level, such as the 90 million dollar one in Memphis, which served as Exhibit A in Tennessee's winning proposal. And let's not forget the lobbying and lunching that Gates's goons did in Nashville in the months leading up Governor Bredesen's presentation of the Foundation's plan to clear the way for teacher evaluation by test score and uncapped corporate charter schools. The easiest part was then to buy the cheap and cowardly prostisuits who run the Tennessee Education Association.

Here are some of the highlights of the Tennessee plan provided by the right-wing Education Consumers Foundation, which gives the Tennessee plan high marks:

11. Effective and ineffective teachers and principals will follow differentiated career paths

The state will track and publish system-by-system promotion, compensation, and retention averages for high- and low-performing teachers and principals. Under terms of the $90 million Gates grant in Memphis, the state may create differentiated career paths for teachers and principals. The categories of Beginning, Intermediate, Professional, and Master Teacher would be tied to job performance and underpinned by alternative salary schedules. A supplemental compensation fund of $375,000 per year will be available to support compensation reform for teachers and principals.

From pages 89-91 of the application:

No longer will our teachers and principals be treated as interchangeable parts, because the data clearly tell us that teacher and principal effectiveness varies widely. For Tennessee to increase student achievement dramatically, the state not only has to consistently identify its most talented teachers and principals, but also has to be intentional in finding ways to compensate, promote, and retain them. That means doing things far differently than we have done in the past. As part of the school improvement planning process, districts will be required to differentiate their retention data of top performers, growth of teachers and leaders from lower levels of effectiveness to effective, and attrition of less effective teachers and leaders. Tennessee will track and publicize differential retention rates of our districts, showing the ability of our districts to grow and retain top performers and effectively manage poor performers.

While Tennessee has experimented with career progression programs and differentiated pay plans in the past, we are proposing a bold, comprehensive strategy that builds upon the work already underway in the Memphis Teacher Effectiveness Initiative under a $90 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This innovative partnership between the district, union, and community is implementing an entirely new teacher effectiveness paradigm that encompasses joint development of differentiated roles for teachers, evaluation that uses data as a significant factor and is used to make critical human capital decisions, and implements a compensation structure that rewards effective performance. Please see Appendix D-2-5 for a summary of the Memphis initiative.

Informed by the Memphis strategy, Tennessee will work with and provide support for its LEAs to create clear, differentiated career paths for teachers and principals, based on their performance levels using the new evaluation system. These may include categories such as Beginning, Intermediate, Professional, and Master, each of which would have a high bar for entry, as well as expanded roles and higher compensation. The state, with Race to the Top funding, will provide support to participating LEAs to design and implement new career paths.

Coupled with creating differentiated roles, the First to the Top Act permits LEAs to adopt alternative salary schedules to the current state salary schedule, which is based on education credits and experience. Research shows that a salary scale based on credentials and seniority does not necessarily lead to better student outcomes. Alternative salary schedules can be developed to reward teachers and principals for their abilities to increase student achievement levels. Compensation packages will be aligned with the new career paths and take the form of base salaries, as well as performance and retention bonuses. Race to the Top will provide Tennessee with the funding to help LEAs with design and implementation of new compensation structures that reward our highest performing educators. Tennessee will create a competitive Innovation Acceleration Fund to support the adoption and implementation of alternative compensation systems at the local level. With $12 million from the Race to the Top award, the state and local communities will also aggressively seek private matching funding. Funds will be awarded to districts for the purposes of designing and/or implementing sustainable compensation systems based upon alternative salary schedules. Districts must have the agreement of their local teacher’s union where one exists. If there is an ongoing additional funding burden at the local level, the district must have the full agreement of the local municipality in order to apply for an Innovation Acceleration Fund Award.

The state also will create a competitive supplemental fund of $375,000 per year for innovation in those school districts whose share of funds is within the bottom 20% of the total share of the LEA funds under this application. These districts can apply for supplemental funding within their scopes of work to encourage compensation reform or turning around of low-performing schools.

Along with developing strategies to retain high performers, districts will be encouraged to design clear paths to dismiss those teachers and principals who after receiving ample opportunities to improve, continue to underperform as measured by the new evaluation.

12. Only “effective” teachers will be tenured

The granting and holding of tenure will primarily depend on the teacher’s demonstrated ability to increase student achievement. Only teachers who have reached the “effective” level of performance will be granted tenure. Only teachers who remain “effective” will retain tenure. The state will annually assess and publish for each district the correlation of tenure-granting rates with student outcomes such as attendance, test scores, and on-time graduation rates.

From pages 91-93 of the application:

Historically, tenure in Tennessee has largely been granted by default. Because past statutes dictated teacher effect data could only be used if a teacher had a three-year average to examine – and tenure may be granted at 27 months – most teachers were granted tenure without examination of perhaps the most powerful tool available. Once tenure was granted, little attention, except in the most progressive districts, was paid to teacher effect data for the vast majority of teachers. However, districts now have the ability and responsibility to use this data strategically, bringing only those who demonstrate effectiveness into a long-term opportunity to serve our children.

Given Tennessee’s new mandate to redesign the evaluation system using multiple measures, to incorporate a targeted use of data, and to collaborate with teachers and principals to arrive at a fair and transparent set of tools to use, the state is in an unprecedented position to ensure only teachers who have a met an established performance threshold are granted tenure. It also will be recommended that local boards only grant tenure to teachers who achieve at least an “effective teacher” rating on the new multiple-measure teacher effectiveness evaluation, of which a significant portion will be based on student achievement data.

With the new evaluation system, districts will be able to, and will be expected to, identify tenured teachers whose performance, as measured by the evaluation system, falls in the bottom tier of teachers. Principals will be able to notify these teachers and provide them with significant, targeted support. If after receiving support, the teacher has not moved into the “effective” category of performance, the evaluation results can provide documentation for the termination to occur. As part of the implementation of Race to the Top, and as part of their scopes of work, districts will be encouraged to examine those teachers who are consistently categorized in the lower levels of effectiveness for the possibility of termination. With the new flexibility afforded districts to submit an alternative salary schedule, they can also choose to reward teachers financially upon attaining tenure status as well as for continuing to maintain and/or grow in effectively helping students gain in their learning.

At the state level, we will collect and publicly disseminate data, by LEA and school, on tenure-granting rates. We will work with the Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee developed pursuant to the First to The Top Act to include tenure-granting rates in principal evaluations. Additionally, we will annually assess and publish the correlation of tenure-granting rates with student outcomes (e.g., attendance, test scores, on-time graduation rates).

13. Rigorous workforce development goals will be met through retraining or, if necessary, dismissals

Thirty percent of Tennessee’s current teacher and principal workforce is not producing a year’s worth of achievement growth per year. The goal of the present reform plan is to reduce that percentage to ten within four years and to zero thereafter. The primary route to change is to increase effectiveness through the use of training and supports, but present law permits dismissal for inefficiency and/or incompetence even during the course of the contract year.

From pages 93-94 of the application:

Tennessee students deserve professional educators and leaders who not only have their best interests at heart, but who have the skills and demonstrate the ability to affect student academic growth. Our goal is to ensure that in four years, we will have reduced the percentage of teachers and principals who are ineffective to below 10%, and thereafter we will strive to drive that percentage to zero. Currently, approximately 30% of our teacher and principal workforce is not able to achieve a year’s worth of growth for their students. Please see the performance measure chart for D(3)(i) for teachers and Appendix D-3-8 for principals. The state’s new evaluation system will serve to assist these teachers and principals, as well as all teachers and principals needing improvement, by providing an array of customized supports that includes coaching and professional development. Teachers and principals who do not engage in this work, or are unable to improve their practice after it has been deemed to be ineffective over a period of time when they have been given opportunity to improve and the supports to do so, should be considered for termination.

Documentation for action will include the evaluation documents themselves and the data used to inform them. In this way, documenting performance – both positive and negative for every teacher and principal – becomes standard operating procedure. District and building leadership should be able to rely on the teacher and principal evaluation system to serve them and their students by supporting effective work as well as by easing pathways to dismissal if that becomes necessary. Please see process above in Section D(2)(iv)(c).

The first priority for increasing teacher effectiveness is to focus attention, resources and supports on what teachers need to improve their practice. It is expected for the vast majority of teachers this strategy will bear fruit for them and the children they teach. However, in the rare instance when poor performers have been unable to improve even after receiving adequate support and professional development, there must be policies and procedures for triggering termination proceedings. Using existing state law, Tenn. Code Ann. §49-5-501, which defines inefficient and/or incompetent, and Tenn. Code Ann. §49-5-511, which determines these reasons as among the causes for dismissal, the new multiple-measure teacher effectiveness evaluation will play a role in such decisions. This determination will be made at the local level and recommended to the board for approval when such an action is necessary.

Until a teacher attains tenure, he or she is only on a one-year contract. However, the teacher evaluation will provide a thoughtful tool for providing targeted coaching and professional development intended to improve teacher effectiveness. When necessary it will also provide useful data, analysis and documentation needed to determine what teachers shall be dismissed during the contract year.

And the Winners Are . . . The Test Scores

With the first round of bribes being announced today in Duncan's Race to the Trough, it is now apparent that destroying the teaching profession is even more important to the Business Roundtable than containing, segregating, and psychologically neutering the poor in penal pedagogy charter schools. And so it is today that Duncan's classic behavior mod bribery system recognizes Tennessee and Delaware, where the good unions have become partners with the corporations to create a system of teacher evaluation, advancement, and remuneration that will be based on test scores. And the message to the bad union recalcitrance in DC? The ultimate non-reward of being placed 16th out of 16 finalists.

There is another advantage, too, of putting all the bucks on rewarding state plans to develop pay per score systems for teaching: it is the only one of the Oligarchs' reform strategies new enough to not already have a demonstrated track record of failure.

Rothstein Educates Pay Per Score Advocates

From Ideas in Action: