BREAKING: America's poorest schools have the poorest children

It's telling that the Apple that is about to
be gavelled is indeed fresh and ripe. 

Good journalism is hard to come by -- finding good journalism on education is like discovering a four leaf clover on February 29 during a Venus Transit eclipse. 

Over decades, American main stream media has shifted their relationship with public education and teachers from neglectful to abusive.

Like Time Magazine's teacher bashing cover, a recent headline out of Minneapolis is indicative of how most American Media are so drunk on teacher bashing that they can't report the real news: Minneapolis' worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show.

Too often, when American media looks at poverty, they don't see poor children, they see bad teachers. What's worse is that some education leaders (who should understand how poverty is education's kryptonite) are made to be accomplices to the teacher witch-hunt.

In Minneapolis, Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson is quoted as saying, "It's alarming that it took this to understand where teachers are. We probably knew that, but now have the hard evidence." Johnson is referring to the junk science of using standardized test scores to identify good and bad teachers.

In my article Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing, I take a closer look at what standardized tests really tell us. Too many people assume that standardized test scores are the window into the quality of our schools and teachers when the inconvenient truth about standardized testing is that socio-economic status is responsible for the majority of the results:

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

What's alarming is that so many Americans have declared war on teachers and public education. Some people are so desperate not to address poverty that when they should see poor children, they need to see bad teachers.

Real journalism is not distracted by teacher witch-hunts. Real journalism doesn't report that there are bad teachers in poor schools -- real journalism reports America's poorest schools have the poorest children.

Alberta Education’s Task Force on Teacher Excellence Report: There’s Some Serious Cherry-Picking Going On Here

This was written by Laura Servage who is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta. She blogs here. This post was originally found here.

by Laura Servage

It is hard to anticipate the outcomes of the brewing political war in Alberta over The Education ministry’s release of the “Task Force for Teaching Excellence.” Nor can I begin to address the array and complexity of the issues it raises within one short blog. For the moment, I want to use a small segment of the report to highlight the partisan nature of the “teacher excellence” debate. The segment in question may be absorbed without too much question by a reader, which is why I wish to draw attention to it. Namely, it is the report’s citation of two US studies correlating student achievement with teacher effectiveness.[1] What is so disturbing about this aspect of the report (and it is not at all the only disturbing aspect) is that the inclusion of a couple of sexy graphs gives the whole thing a roundly undeserved air of scientific rigour.

Few would argue that there is a link between teacher effectiveness and student learning, and few would disagree that this link is of central importance. Measuring the link is another matter entirely – a matter so complex as to warrant reams – and I mean reams – of academic research focusing on the challenges of such measurement.

“Value Added” Measures of Teachers: A Taste of Methodology Concerns

“Methodology” describes researchers’ efforts to come up with the best ways to do their work. In addition to doing research, researchers are always debating the accuracy and reliability of the methods used to collect data, represent it, and draw conclusions from it. Such debates occur in both quantitative (statistical) research, and qualitative research. An even cursory search of research databases yields some of the methodological concerns around measuring the impacts of teacher effectiveness on student learning.[2] Here, I’ll implore you to read just until your eyes glass over (it won’t take long) and stay with me by jumping down to the point of this very boring sample of material I’ve pulled from studies concerning the measure of a teacher’s “value added”:
Value-added models have been widely used to assess the contributions of individual teachers and schools to students’ academic growth based on longitudinal student achievement outcomes. There is concern, however, that ignoring the presence of missing values, which are common in longitudinal studies, can bias teachers’ value-added scores.
Value-added approaches to teacher evaluation have many problems. Chief among them is the commonly found class-to-class and year-to-year unreliability in the scores obtained.
In this article, the authors provide a methodological critique of the current standard of value-added modeling forwarded in educational policy contexts as a means of measuring teacher effectiveness. An alternative statistical methodology, propensity score matching, [would] allows estimation of how well a teacher performs relative to teachers assigned comparable classes of students.
Despite questions about validity and reliability, the use of value-added estimation methods has moved beyond academic research into state accountability systems for teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Prior studies of value-added measurement for TPPs test the validity of researcher-designed models and find that measuring differences across programs is difficult.
Empirically, we reject nearly all assumptions underlying value-added models.

I want to make it clear that I did not spend hours picking out snippets to support my position. I am not a statistician, and I cannot even comment on the validity of the studies just sampled. My point in including the above segments from research papers is to illustrate just how complex this measurement problem is. Which should lead one – anyone, statistically inclined or not – to challenge the authority of a report that cites exactly two quantitative studies on the matter and declares “problem solved.”

It’s Not “About the Kids”

In media interviews accompanying the release of this report, Task Force Chairperson Glen Feltham declared that “the interest of the student was paramount – the child came first.” Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson echoed, “If we truly want to do what’s best for kids and students, we’ve got to have the guts to have these conversations.” The thing is, saying you want what’s “best for kids” is like saying you like kittens, puppies and ice-cream. Who doesn’t? The Alberta Teachers’ Association backs its position with the same language.

Really, then, who isn’t in it “for the kids?” The Task Force for Teacher Excellence report is “about the kids,” sort of. But it’s much more about a high stakes ideological battle for the hearts and minds of Alberta’s electorate. And here is where it’s important to note that the two studies cited in the report are not contextualized politically any more than they are by academic research. The cited studies come out of the United States: a country so rife with partisanship as to warrant skepticism when it comes to almost any public policy research it produces. It is about the last place we should be looking to for education research, and it is certainly the last place on which we should be modelling public policy debates.

There is little doubt that there are a few (very few) Alberta teachers who ought to be put out to pasture. But this report isn’t any more about teacher excellence than it is “about the kids.” It’s about a political battle represented chiefly by two organizations – Alberta’s Ministry of Education and the Alberta Teachers’ Association – and reflecting two very different perspectives on the extent to which education ought to remain public, or move toward the PC government’s preferred vision of increasing privatization. And it is endlessly frustrating to see research “cherry-picked” on ideological grounds rather than assessed on its own merits. I call Data Abuse. When an entire policy platform is built around the premise that there is a solid causal link between teacher “excellence” (however that’s defined, but that’s a whole other problem) and students’ learning, we ought to have some confidence that this link is sound. I’m not seeing it.



[1] Chetty, R., Friedman, J., & Rockoff, J. (2011). The long-term impacts of teachers: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. Working paper 17699, National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w17699.pdf. The lengthy report concludes with (sensible) caution about the application of its findings to policies impacting teacher pay, assessment, and retention.

Sanders, W. & Rivers, J. (1996). Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center. Retrieved from http://www.cgp.upenn.edu/pdf/Sanders_Rivers-TVASS_teacher%20effects.pdf

[2] Here I jumped into the University of Alberta’s subscription to ProQuest, which aggregates peer-reviewed research from many different academic journals and disciplines. The search terms “value added” and “teachers” yielded 562 hits, and I skimmed the abstracts (the article descriptions) for the first two dozen of these hits.

3 potential problems with Alberta's new Task Force on Teacher Excellence

Alberta's Education Minister Jeff Johnson has announced the establishment of a Task Force for Teacher Excellence. The task force has a broad mandate to review provincial guidelines, conduct public consultations and report to the minister by January 31, 2014, on future directions for legislation related to teaching and other education professions.

Let me be crystal clear:

I believe Alberta's already excellent teachers need to continue to innovate and improve.

As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching, and as a parent, I want my children to have better teachers than I had. I feel very strongly about this.

Creating a Task Force on Teacher Excellence might be a great idea, and I hope that it leads to evidence-based conversations that lead to improving teacher quality in Alberta. And yet,  I have three potential problems with this new task force:

• If I was Jeff Johnson and the Alberta Government, I may want to distract the public from funding cuts in public education by creating a task force that focuses on teacher quality. For this school year, the Alberta Government cut school board budgets by $14.5 million even though 11,000 new students entered Alberta's schools. This will lead to all sorts of problems for teachers' working conditions including larger class sizes. While it's true that reducing class sizes is not a sufficient move to improve an education system, it most certainly is necessary. Alberta Teachers' Association President Mark Ramsankar describes the problem aptly when he said, "a Ferrari still can't perform on a gravel road." Check out this video on the inequities in Calgary's schools. Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society.

• Why didn't Jeff Johnson and Alberta Education work with the Alberta Teachers' Association to have teacher representation on the Teacher Excellence Task Force? Why was the only active teacher on the task force unilaterally assigned by Johnson? Before the Alberta Government legislated a settlement last spring, teachers were pleased to see the creation of an advisory committee where half of the members are certified teachers recommended for appointment by the Alberta Teachers' Association. This was all outlined by Alison Redford's comfort letter addressed to teachers. To create a task force on teacher excellence without actively collaborating with teachers seems contrary to the promises Redford made last year. There is a big difference between keeping teachers passively informed and encouraging them to actively participate in improving Alberta's schools.

• No agreement exists on what constitutes an excellent teacher. While some parents might be looking for a teacher who assigns lots of homework, teaches from the textbook and to the test, rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour, other parents couldn't get their kids out of that classroom fast enough. What's worse, some would have us reduce the magnificently messy nature of teaching and learning to conveniently tidy test scores. The case against the use of standardized testing is profound -- and even though Alberta has announced the end of Provincial Achievement Tests, I'm concerned that this Task Force might be seduced by the junk science of value added measurements.

This task force might be an opportunity for us to make Alberta's great teachers even better -- but it might be a distraction from properly funding and supporting public education. 

How will this turn out?

To have your say, I suggest you consider registering your intent to participate in this task force by signing up here.  I did.

More on Evaluating Teachers

Some architects of the test and punish accountability movement claim that through value added measurements (VAM) they are able to better use student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Well, the truth is they still can't.

In their report titled Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers, Linda Darling Hammond, et al. write:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable. Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Who Are Assigned to Them. Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and others with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress. Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores

.

Darling-Hammond on Evaluating Teachers

There's a lot of talk in education about accountability and teacher evaluation. Recently, New York released their Teacher Data Reports that ranked teachers according to their students standardized test scores.

Diane Ravitch has taken a strong stance against this kind of bastardized accountability and now so has Linda Darling-Hammond in her article Value-Added Hurts Teaching, she writes:

I was once bullish on the idea of using “value-added methods” for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. 

Why? 

First, test-score gains—even using very fancy value-added models—reflect much more than an individual teacher’s effort, including students’ health, home life, and school attendance, and schools’ class sizes, curriculum materials, and administrative supports, as well as the influence of other teachers, tutors, and specialists. These factors differ widely in rich and poor schools. 

Second, teachers’ ratings are highly unstable: They differ substantially across classes, tests, and years. Teachers who rank at the bottom one year are more likely to rank above average the following year than to rate poorly again. The same holds true for teachers at the top. If the scores truly measured a teacher’s ability, these wild swings would not occur.
Third, teachers who rate highest on the low-level multiple-choice tests currently in use are often not those who raise scores on assessments of more-challenging learning. Pressure to teach to these fill-in-the-bubble tests will further reduce the focus on research, writing, and complex problem-solving, areas where students will need to compete with their peers in high-achieving countries. 

But, most importantly, these test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach. In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students. This is true even when statistical methods are used to “control” for student characteristics.

Reduced to Numbers

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." 

-Albert Einstein

Last year, teachers in Los Angeles suffered under the LA Times printing of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores.

This year, New York teachers are the target of a naming and shaming operation that took place when the New York media published evaluations that ranked teachers by their students' standardized test scores.

There's a lot wrong with all this and Diane Ravitch aptly explains how reducing the quality of a teacher to a score and then making this unreliable and invalid data public is nothing more than a ploy to undermine public confidence in public education.

The problem here isn't just that these teacher evaluations and rankings were made public -- although making them public certainly does make things worse -- the real problem here is that the complex work of teaching is being reduced to a number at all.

Teacher evaluations via test scores are prone to such error that they are not valid or reliable regardless of whether they are public or private.

After reading one New York teacher's response to being labelled "below average" despite what other anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests, I took note of one of his points:

As with many things in life, teaching cannot be simplified into an algorithm.

What if the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the most important things that happen in school cannot and should not be reduced to a number?

What if Rog Lucido is right in saying:

We delude ourselves into thinking we have measured learning because we uncritically accept the premise that 'learning is measurable'.

How many teachers are demoralized or angered about having their complex work reduced to a number but then go to school the next day and do exactly that to their students?

With every crisis there comes an opportunity. Could it be that there is an opportunity for us all to see that neither teaching or learning should be reduced to numbers?

If there's a silver lining to all this I hope it is this:

It wasn't until the system tried to grade teachers that teachers could finally see why they should not be grading students.

For more on abolishing grading from school check out this page.

To join a movement for abolishing grading, check out The Grading Moratorium.

You might also want to check out Alfie Kohn's article The Case Against Grades.

"Overhauling" teacher preparation

I've said before that if we talked even half as much about making good teachers as we do about firing the bad ones, I think we could make a difference, and in the United States there is momentum for overhauling teacher education and preparation. Education Week explains a recent development:

Momentum appears to be gathering behind a U.S. Department of Education plan to hold teacher education programs accountable for the achievement of students taught by their graduates.

At an event hosted here Friday by the think tank Education Sector, a diverse group of stakeholders, including Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, spoke in favor of the initiative, which was first outlined in the Obama administration’s fiscal 2012 budget request. ("New Rules for Ed. Prep Are Mulled," March 9, 2011.)

"It’s a really important piece to change the system and to build this profession," said Mr. Van Roekel. "We agree no student should have a teacher who is not well prepared. We agree every candidate must meet rigorous standards. We have to combine meaningful input with meaningful output [data]."

The NEA has generally been wary of value-added test score data. Mr. Van Roekel said that its use in general continues to give him pause, but it shows promise for being used in the aggregate to help teacher preparation programs improve.

Through a negotiated rulemaking process, the Education Department wants to streamline and rewrite the reporting requirements contained in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Colleges of education participating in student financial aid currently must report information on candidates’ pass rates on licensure exams and identify low-performing programs.

Among other steps, the Education Department would require education schools to report on three new measures: how much their graduates help students learn; whether teacher-candidates are placed in high-needs subjects and areas; and whether school administrators are satisfied with the quality of program graduates.

Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee already link teacher education graduates to student records, while 11 states and the District of Columbia have committed to similar initiatives through the federal Race to the Top program.

I'm all for improving and overhauling teacher preparation in order to improve the teachers that work with our children so that they are experts on how children learn, but not like this. This kind of overhaul is just another way of doing more of the same -- that is, using test scores to not only track students, but now track teachers. When people say "how are we going to hold teachers accountable" what they really mean is "how are we going to punish teachers". Tracking students, and now teachers, via their test scores actually helps legitimate these punishments by offering a new way to derive them. The stick used to be hidden in the carrot, now it's hidden in the data.

Marc Tucker, the president and chief executive officer of the National Center on Education and author of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform:

We contrast the strategies that appear to be driving the policy agendas of the most successful countries with the strategies that appear to be driving the current agenda for education reform in the United States. We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States, and, conversely, that the education strategies now most popular in the United States are conspicuous by their absence in the countries with the most successful education systems.

"Overhauling" teacher education by marrying student test scores to teacher records is being sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really it is a tactic taken from same same strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades. The accountability mantra behind this kind of teacher preparation reform goes something like this: High test scores indicate good teaching because good teachers have high test scores.

I think Alfie Kohn summarizes this kind of teacher preparation overhaul nicely in his post What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities:

A productive discussion about who's a good teacher (and why) is less likely to take place when the people with the power get to enforce what becomes the definition of quality by default: high scores on bad tests.

I don't expect the founder of a computer empire like Bill Gates, or a lawyer like Joel Klein, or a newspaper editor to understand the art of helping children to understand ideas, or of constructing tasks to assess that process. I just expect them to have the humility, the simple decency, not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us with the force of law.

To fight back, an awful lot of teachers who have been celebrated for their students' high scores -- those teachers who can't be accused of sour grapes -- will have to stand up and say, "Thanks, but let's be honest. All of us who work in schools know that you can't tell how good a teacher is on the basis of his or her kids' test results. In fact, by being forced to think about those results, my colleagues and I are held back from being as good as we can be. By singling me out for commendation -- and holding other teachers up to ridicule -- you've lowered the quality of schooling for all kids."

If you aren't disturbed enough by how data (test scores) are driving education reform and teacher evaluation, I suggest you read the dangers of building a plane in the air.