(From previous issue) :
On the surface, SLO’s are our friend, no? In the past school year, we were allowed to pick our students when we wanted to fix the data. During this school year, the teacher has only control over who is chosen as the constant. What is not taken into account for ELL teachers is the nature of the student. How long will they be in the class? Will they be there in April as they were in August? Will they move out of one class to another and therefore their scores are no longer counted? Will the family be deported or have to go underground?
If one is a lousy math teacher but the same student excels in music, who gets credit for imparting mathematical wisdom? I would argue the music teacher but s/he (if that position even exists in the school) gets no recognition for this student’s mathematical advancement.
The stress related to conducting the tests is enormous for the teacher. Not just in administering the tests, but teachers go through hours and hours of first trying to understand all that the SLO is required of us to complete, and then to have to revise it because of miscommunication ‘from above’ on how to complete it. Additionally, much of the confusion my colleagues in particular were faced with coincided with end of semester/quarter grading, unit testing, etc.
When teachers’ evaluations are based on dubious data, the sense of professionalism goes out the window. Not necessarily in my school, but in many schools teachers in the clique of the principal’s domain will be asking for the best possible classes to teach when it’s their turn to be ‘SLO’d’. English Language Teachers who teach the lowest levels of English proficient students will, by the very nature of the class, not likely to show the kind of growth compared to their peers. English language acquisition can take five to seven years. Teacher evaluations are based often on just one year’s worth of formal education. I mention ‘formal’ as so many of our particular students have interrupted education or lack any formal education whatsoever. Just being acclimated to an educational environment can easily take more than one single school year.
However, both the AFT and NEA endorse tying teacher evaluation to student performance, even though there is no data to show its effectiveness. In fact, our NEA affiliate, PGCEA, has been conspicuously silent to the cries of its union members regarding this haphazardly executed SLO demand on them. Ken Haines responded to the opposition coming from the rank and file within by saying, “PGCEA does not have a position of opposition to Student Learning Outcomes.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s published “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers”. In part, they conclude:
For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.
When asked of the President of PGCEA why this association has shown so little support to the teachers in addressing this serious concern, Ken Haines was non-responsive to one written request and hostile to one school’s Faculty Advisory Council (equivalent of a union chapter) by quoting from the handbook what a FAC can and cannot do, thus attempting to shut the door on this particular group of teachers’ fight over last year’s end of year SLO’s.
Adding salt to the wounds, with PGCEA support, students take a survey regarding their teachers. This survey goes towards the teachers’ end of year evaluation. Let’s say “Edgar’s” evil twin brother is also in your class. You had just had a parent conference due to his poor behavior, attitude, and academic performance. Now, he is randomly selected to be part of the survey. He’s a smart, wily one. He knows what this survey means. Would he sabotage his teacher’s evaluation? What if he is unfamiliar with computers and is limited in his English. What does pressing a button on a survey really mean to him? To the teacher, it’s one’s career. Again, the association supports this even though it’s flies in the face of professional integrity.
Although touched upon above regarding SLO’s and VAM’s, one aspect of public education that has truly turned this noble profession into an unrecognizable industry is the excessive use of testing of the students and how the teachers must be complicit in it.
In Prince George’s County (Maryland) alone 52 days (of 180) are scheduled for High School Assessment testing. This includes make-ups and on-line testing. This does not include FAST tests (Formative Assessment Systems Tests), MUST (Mandatory Unit Systems Test), AVID testing (Advancement Via Individual Determination), SATs, PSATs, and teachers’ own assessments. I like to think that we do have one week in February where we actually can teach but it snowed last year. This year we’re inundated with WIDA, and a number of late openings due to weather.
Teachers are professionals but are also workers/employees, part of the labor force and the labor that goes into educating our youth. The excessive testing has been responsible in part for creating a very oppressive work environment, not just for the students. It pains us when we are not permitted to teach in order to get the next series of tests out of the way.
It pains us when we are scripted in how we teach and how we prepare our students for high stakes tests. One recent workshop regarding the new PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests to replace the High School Assessments had one teacher saying, “I don’t think our AP (Advance Placement) students could do this.” We also had a variety of answers from the teaching staff, nearly all holding Masters’ degrees and above. It doesn’t seem to bother those legislating PARCC exams to examine the fact that there is no data that shows that the Common Core curriculum even prepares students for college.
Morale amongst the working staff at not just my school but across the country is at an all time low. Why is teacher attrition so low? According to a 2004-2005 Met Life Survey of the American Teacher, “new teachers reported being greatly stressed by administrative duties, classroom management, and testing responsibilities, as well as by their relationships (or lack thereof) with parents.”
Attempts to retain teachers in spite of the harsh working conditions have not met with great success. An approach has been that of merit pay. One would think that if one bases their salary on the progress of students, than that would boost retention of a teaching staff. It should be no surprise that teachers by and large are always doing the best they can for their students and additional money does not make a better teacher.
The National Center on Performance Incentives of Vanderbilt University and the RAND Corporation have determined that merit pay has no effect on teacher performance.
To some, the only advantage of merit pay is extra pay. The same Ken Haines of PGCEA argued on behalf of merit pay when he was a teacher at a neighboring high school before ascending to the presidency of the association. His argument was simply he wanted more money. The fact that merit pay pits teacher against teacher, destroys collegiality and invites disunity amongst the teaching staff held no sway for him and other teachers who take that position.
One last aspect of the plight of labor conditions in our public schools is over the role of the teacher in society. To our English language learners, the role of the teacher takes on a higher status in society for many reasons. However, to the American public at large, one can’t seem to ‘sink’ any lower than that of a teacher. Gone are the accolades at the grocery store when people would say thank you and ‘I could never do what you do’ to what we are witness today to be nothing short of public shaming.
The story of Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr. is an unfortunate human tragedy most likely related to such shaming. He was an elementary school teacher in LA who chose to take on a challenging elementary school. “Based upon the test scores of 149 students, Ruelas was dubbed “ineffective.” Although the ratings were attacked as being imprecise, unreliable, and inconsistent, Ruelas was understandably humiliated and depressed over being called ‘ineffective’ in the media. Just over a month after the publication of the ratings, Ruelas’s body was found in a ravine…The coroner determined that Ruelas committed suicide. Although a direct correlation cannot be made, this anecdote ought to highlight one likely consequence of such shaming.” 1
In the May 8, 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Times, one could go on to their database and see the ratings of all teachers and schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The New York Post on February 25, 2012 reported how the city of New York had just released the performance grades of over 12,000 teachers. Included in their subheadings were of teachers receiving a zero and another that only 32 teachers overall received a 99% rating.
At the highest level of the federal government, we see other cases of how society treats the teaching profession with disdain and public humiliation. President Obama joined the chorus of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others in their praising of the wholesale firing of the teaching staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island in January 2010. This was a poorly performing school that was also in a very poor district.
A survey conducted by Deborah Lynch of Chicago school teachers during the 2011-12 school year showed why morale was so low. “When asked about the most serious challenges facing them today, the urban teachers in the study reported that public perception was their most serious problem-far more serious than even student behavior or school safety.” The survey included space for comments. One read, “We are being used as scapegoats for a lot of problems…Nobody can figure out how to solve the problems of poverty, broken families, lack of role models…hard problems to solve and it’s just easier to that teachers are all bad.”
So what can be done to improve the morale, return sanity and perhaps reverse course, with union leadership trying to catch up with the rank and file? Badass Teachers Association is one such organization that has taken teacher advocacy to new heights. Started in the summer of 2013, it now has a membership base of over 53,000. Its stated mission and goals are:
MISSION: Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education. BAT members refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning.
GOALS: BATs aim to reduce or eliminate the use of high-stakes testing, increase teacher autonomy in the classroom and work to include teacher and family voices in legislative decision-making processes that affect students.
This organization bridges the political divide. Made up of leftists, libertarians, Democrats and even Tea Partiers, BATs are joining with Opt Out (of testing) organizations, parent groups and other advocates for public education. Bats are pro-union, certainly at the consternation of some of its more conservative members, and pro-public schools. Contrary to media, congressional and White House hype, our public schools are indeed popular and supported by the general population. It is the power of the educational ‘advocates’ like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, President Obama and Arne Duncan, who have done much to hurt public education.
(To be continued)
On the surface, SLO’s are our friend, no? In the past school year, we were allowed to pick our students when we wanted to fix the data. During this school year, the teacher has only control over who is chosen as the constant. What is not taken into account for ELL teachers is the nature of the student. How long will they be in the class? Will they be there in April as they were in August? Will they move out of one class to another and therefore their scores are no longer counted? Will the family be deported or have to go underground?
If one is a lousy math teacher but the same student excels in music, who gets credit for imparting mathematical wisdom? I would argue the music teacher but s/he (if that position even exists in the school) gets no recognition for this student’s mathematical advancement.
The stress related to conducting the tests is enormous for the teacher. Not just in administering the tests, but teachers go through hours and hours of first trying to understand all that the SLO is required of us to complete, and then to have to revise it because of miscommunication ‘from above’ on how to complete it. Additionally, much of the confusion my colleagues in particular were faced with coincided with end of semester/quarter grading, unit testing, etc.
When teachers’ evaluations are based on dubious data, the sense of professionalism goes out the window. Not necessarily in my school, but in many schools teachers in the clique of the principal’s domain will be asking for the best possible classes to teach when it’s their turn to be ‘SLO’d’. English Language Teachers who teach the lowest levels of English proficient students will, by the very nature of the class, not likely to show the kind of growth compared to their peers. English language acquisition can take five to seven years. Teacher evaluations are based often on just one year’s worth of formal education. I mention ‘formal’ as so many of our particular students have interrupted education or lack any formal education whatsoever. Just being acclimated to an educational environment can easily take more than one single school year.
However, both the AFT and NEA endorse tying teacher evaluation to student performance, even though there is no data to show its effectiveness. In fact, our NEA affiliate, PGCEA, has been conspicuously silent to the cries of its union members regarding this haphazardly executed SLO demand on them. Ken Haines responded to the opposition coming from the rank and file within by saying, “PGCEA does not have a position of opposition to Student Learning Outcomes.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s published “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers”. In part, they conclude:
For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.
When asked of the President of PGCEA why this association has shown so little support to the teachers in addressing this serious concern, Ken Haines was non-responsive to one written request and hostile to one school’s Faculty Advisory Council (equivalent of a union chapter) by quoting from the handbook what a FAC can and cannot do, thus attempting to shut the door on this particular group of teachers’ fight over last year’s end of year SLO’s.
Adding salt to the wounds, with PGCEA support, students take a survey regarding their teachers. This survey goes towards the teachers’ end of year evaluation. Let’s say “Edgar’s” evil twin brother is also in your class. You had just had a parent conference due to his poor behavior, attitude, and academic performance. Now, he is randomly selected to be part of the survey. He’s a smart, wily one. He knows what this survey means. Would he sabotage his teacher’s evaluation? What if he is unfamiliar with computers and is limited in his English. What does pressing a button on a survey really mean to him? To the teacher, it’s one’s career. Again, the association supports this even though it’s flies in the face of professional integrity.
Although touched upon above regarding SLO’s and VAM’s, one aspect of public education that has truly turned this noble profession into an unrecognizable industry is the excessive use of testing of the students and how the teachers must be complicit in it.
In Prince George’s County (Maryland) alone 52 days (of 180) are scheduled for High School Assessment testing. This includes make-ups and on-line testing. This does not include FAST tests (Formative Assessment Systems Tests), MUST (Mandatory Unit Systems Test), AVID testing (Advancement Via Individual Determination), SATs, PSATs, and teachers’ own assessments. I like to think that we do have one week in February where we actually can teach but it snowed last year. This year we’re inundated with WIDA, and a number of late openings due to weather.
Teachers are professionals but are also workers/employees, part of the labor force and the labor that goes into educating our youth. The excessive testing has been responsible in part for creating a very oppressive work environment, not just for the students. It pains us when we are not permitted to teach in order to get the next series of tests out of the way.
It pains us when we are scripted in how we teach and how we prepare our students for high stakes tests. One recent workshop regarding the new PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests to replace the High School Assessments had one teacher saying, “I don’t think our AP (Advance Placement) students could do this.” We also had a variety of answers from the teaching staff, nearly all holding Masters’ degrees and above. It doesn’t seem to bother those legislating PARCC exams to examine the fact that there is no data that shows that the Common Core curriculum even prepares students for college.
Morale amongst the working staff at not just my school but across the country is at an all time low. Why is teacher attrition so low? According to a 2004-2005 Met Life Survey of the American Teacher, “new teachers reported being greatly stressed by administrative duties, classroom management, and testing responsibilities, as well as by their relationships (or lack thereof) with parents.”
Attempts to retain teachers in spite of the harsh working conditions have not met with great success. An approach has been that of merit pay. One would think that if one bases their salary on the progress of students, than that would boost retention of a teaching staff. It should be no surprise that teachers by and large are always doing the best they can for their students and additional money does not make a better teacher.
The National Center on Performance Incentives of Vanderbilt University and the RAND Corporation have determined that merit pay has no effect on teacher performance.
To some, the only advantage of merit pay is extra pay. The same Ken Haines of PGCEA argued on behalf of merit pay when he was a teacher at a neighboring high school before ascending to the presidency of the association. His argument was simply he wanted more money. The fact that merit pay pits teacher against teacher, destroys collegiality and invites disunity amongst the teaching staff held no sway for him and other teachers who take that position.
One last aspect of the plight of labor conditions in our public schools is over the role of the teacher in society. To our English language learners, the role of the teacher takes on a higher status in society for many reasons. However, to the American public at large, one can’t seem to ‘sink’ any lower than that of a teacher. Gone are the accolades at the grocery store when people would say thank you and ‘I could never do what you do’ to what we are witness today to be nothing short of public shaming.
The story of Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr. is an unfortunate human tragedy most likely related to such shaming. He was an elementary school teacher in LA who chose to take on a challenging elementary school. “Based upon the test scores of 149 students, Ruelas was dubbed “ineffective.” Although the ratings were attacked as being imprecise, unreliable, and inconsistent, Ruelas was understandably humiliated and depressed over being called ‘ineffective’ in the media. Just over a month after the publication of the ratings, Ruelas’s body was found in a ravine…The coroner determined that Ruelas committed suicide. Although a direct correlation cannot be made, this anecdote ought to highlight one likely consequence of such shaming.” 1
In the May 8, 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Times, one could go on to their database and see the ratings of all teachers and schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The New York Post on February 25, 2012 reported how the city of New York had just released the performance grades of over 12,000 teachers. Included in their subheadings were of teachers receiving a zero and another that only 32 teachers overall received a 99% rating.
At the highest level of the federal government, we see other cases of how society treats the teaching profession with disdain and public humiliation. President Obama joined the chorus of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others in their praising of the wholesale firing of the teaching staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island in January 2010. This was a poorly performing school that was also in a very poor district.
A survey conducted by Deborah Lynch of Chicago school teachers during the 2011-12 school year showed why morale was so low. “When asked about the most serious challenges facing them today, the urban teachers in the study reported that public perception was their most serious problem-far more serious than even student behavior or school safety.” The survey included space for comments. One read, “We are being used as scapegoats for a lot of problems…Nobody can figure out how to solve the problems of poverty, broken families, lack of role models…hard problems to solve and it’s just easier to that teachers are all bad.”
So what can be done to improve the morale, return sanity and perhaps reverse course, with union leadership trying to catch up with the rank and file? Badass Teachers Association is one such organization that has taken teacher advocacy to new heights. Started in the summer of 2013, it now has a membership base of over 53,000. Its stated mission and goals are:
MISSION: Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education. BAT members refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning.
GOALS: BATs aim to reduce or eliminate the use of high-stakes testing, increase teacher autonomy in the classroom and work to include teacher and family voices in legislative decision-making processes that affect students.
This organization bridges the political divide. Made up of leftists, libertarians, Democrats and even Tea Partiers, BATs are joining with Opt Out (of testing) organizations, parent groups and other advocates for public education. Bats are pro-union, certainly at the consternation of some of its more conservative members, and pro-public schools. Contrary to media, congressional and White House hype, our public schools are indeed popular and supported by the general population. It is the power of the educational ‘advocates’ like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, President Obama and Arne Duncan, who have done much to hurt public education.
(To be continued)
