State Board to Revoke Licenses of Effective Teachers

Tomorrow, the State Board of Ed will consider changes to the state's teacher licensing process.  This comes on the heels of their unfortunate decision to lower the already-low floor of this state's teacher salaries.

So what is this about?  The state wants us to believe that this is about increasing the qualifications of teachers entering the profession, but it still provides the same license to people who have graduated with an education degree as those with five weeks of training after a bachelor's degree in a field unrelated to what they will be teaching.  The PRAXIS scores required in Tennessee are already higher than those in Arkansas and Mississippi which, at least in our corner of the state, means that our teachers are often better-qualified - according to the almighty test - than those in surrounding districts.  Of course, the PRAXIS is not required for the teachers that helicopter in from Teach for America and some other "alternative pipelines", so while teachers from the education schools still have to meet minimum requirements, there is no such threshold for favored "stakeholders".

If we want to "raise the threshold" by "increasing the minimum score", we know how to do that - believe me, the state education department is particularly good at that particular trick.  But Commissioner Huffman is not willing to submit a proposal that raises the threshold for all teacher candidates, only the teacher candidates without lobbyists.

The real debate in this latest round of the Haslam administration's efforts to put teachers in their place is over whether a teacher's license should be linked to their students' performance.

Let's start with how other state-licensed professions govern themselves.  Turns out whether we're talking about doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, or nail technicians, the license issued by the state has to do with whether the candidate has met Tennessee's academic and practical requirements, and maintenance of the license has to do with obtaining continuing education credits.  Revocation of the license has to do only with disciplinary issues, not generally with everyday performance.  Doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and nail techs don't have to show acceptable levels of performance, no one checks in on them, they mainly have to hope that none of their customers complains to their respective Boards.  Based on my quick review, most of the common reasons for discipline have to do with substance abuse or criminal convictions.

Certainly, I think that our children deserve better than the general public deserves from their doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and nail techs.  Our responsibility to them, vis a vis their education, should be much greater.  But let's be honest about how we treat the most well-respected professions - we give them a high level of autonomy in how they provide their services, we generally allow the professions to govern themselves, and once they meet the entry requirements, as long as they get their continuing ed credits, we pretty much leave them alone.  That's how we treat professionals.

So let's just dispense with casting this proposal as elevating the classroom education profession to the level of "real" professions.

This is about a very particular kind of micro-management by the state's Department of Education, and it actually does not have anything to do with teachers, or really even the kids.  It has to do with principals and school districts.  The Haslam administration does not actually believe that principals and school districts will hire the "right" people.  As much as Commissioner Huffman and the TNTPers tout the concept of "mutual consent", they don't actually believe in it.

Cast in the most favorable light, here's the scenario that the state wants to prevent:  a teacher realizes that their overall evaluation score will come in at a "2" or below, and resigns before they are terminated.  They then seek another job in another district and manage to get hired, because their license is valid anywhere in Tennessee, where they continue to teach at an under-performing level.  ADDITION:  the proposal requires that teachers achieve a 2 in two of the last three years in both evaluation and the value-added measure, prior to the year where the license is up for renewal.

Look, no one's arguing that ineffective teachers should manage to effectively stumble their way to their more and more Datsun-like retirement benefits on the backs of under-educated children. 

But beyond arguing that Tennessee school districts don't have the ability to correctly evaluate job candidates that apply for jobs - that they could be tricked, Tricked I tell you, by a smooth-talking classroom teacher - or that they don't have the ability to ask the teacher about his or her performance and/or challenges, or verify it by talking to the teacher's former principal or district officials, Commissioner Huffman must believe that principals and school districts are protecting their own ability to continue to employ ineffective teachers.  In order to protect them from their bad decisions, Commissioner Huffman's proposal is to prevent these incompetent?  untrustworthy?  bumpkin?  bribed?  related?  principals and school districts from being able to continue to employ teachers by preventing those teachers from even being eligible to teach.

So why am I so concerned about these teachers?  Let's review the teacher evaluation system.  Test scores (well, TVAAS) make up 35% of a teacher's overall score, with another 15% made up of another test metric (chosen from several options) - this was true in both legacy districts (MCS using its own system, SCS using the state system), and is true in the merged district.  Back when BCG was comparing these things for the Transition Planning Commission, the average MCS overall score was 2.7, and the average SCS overall score was 2.9.  Review BCG's analysis here. 

So the average overall score in both legacy districts was in the 2.0 to 2.9 range.  Below 3.  Not the same as a median, but notable, primarily because of the outsize number of Level 1 teachers (more than any other Level) in each legacy.

So let's quickly review teacher evaluation.  Let me just repeat to you what I have heard at least a dozen district-level administrators explain:  a Level 3 teacher is a rock solid teacher, who is doing exactly what they need to do to get one year of growth from their classroom.  In order to obtain a Level 4 or 5, the teacher must be getting more than one year's worth of growth.  This is most important for students who are not proficient in a subject, who must make more than one year's worth of growth to have any hope of ever catching up to where they are supposed to be.

So why would any teacher worth their salt (or our taxpayer dollars) possibly obtain less than a Level 2?  Well, they might, for instance, be one of the 60% (SIXTY PERCENT) of teachers in this state who don't teach a tested grade or subject.  If a non-tested teacher teaches at a school that is under-performing, then they get the school's under-performing score.  Let's say a teacher only gets a Level 4 for their evaluation (remembering that Level 3 is rock-solid, meeting expectations, doing what they are supposed to do), and their school is a Level 1 school - that teacher ends up below the required Level 3 to maintain their license.  Here's a more accurate scenario lifted from Andy Spears over at Tennessee Education Report:  "Math Teacher has overall performance evaluation scores of a 3 in all three of the years before his license is up for renewal.  However, his value-added scores are a 1-2-1.  So, he’s license is not renewed, he goes under review and could potentially lose his license.
     Band Teacher has performance evaluation scores of 2-2-1 in the three years leading up to renewal.  Band Teacher has no value-added data. Band teacher is automatically renewed under the streamlined licensure scheme.
     So, Math Teacher, whose overall scores were higher than Band Teacher’s, is in danger of dismissal.  Band Teacher is renewed.  Math Teacher (and other teachers similarly situated) complain and/or sue."
Let's say that teacher is only a rock-solid teacher who is exactly meeting pedagogical evaluation expectations and gets a rock-solid Level 3 - they better be teaching at a Level 2 school or better.  Why would they ever teach at a school doing worse than that if they had any choice in the matter?  You know, if they want to maintain their license?

Under this rubric, a Level 1 teacher terminated for ineffectiveness may not lose their license, but a Level 4 or Level 5 teacher per the evaluation could lose their license and their ability to teach in the state of Tennessee because of the school at which they teach.

This is the part where the Haslam administration will explain to you that they are trying to minimize the number of teachers who teach in untested subjects and grades by promoting the standardized testing of students in kindergarten, first, and second grades.  The test promoted by the state is the SAT-10.  How do you test students who can't read?  Why, you read the test to them.  Because you don't have enough teachers to individually read the tests to each student, you seek volunteers - volunteers who you hope won't let the inflection of their voice suggest answers.  After all, it worked for the ASD's schools, right?  When they had to recruit volunteers, in some instances from some of their philanthropic-funding organizations to "proctor" the exams to students who couldn't yet read?  Totally reliable - testing children who don't yet know how to fill in bubbles with recruited volunteer proctors with no education training.  Should be fine.

It is, of course, in the Haslam administration's interest to reduce the number of teachers whose scores rely on kids not currently in their classrooms.  A similar scheme in Florida - where teachers at K-2 schools were evaluated based on the scores of the 3-5 schools that their kids fed into - was invalidated when the state legislature passed a law that teachers could not be evaluated based on the scores of students that they didn't teach.

Why else should we be concerned about these teachers with low scores?  The Gates folks want us to believe that a great teacher will be great anywhere.  What the research shows is that for teachers who stay in the same school, "teachers who were ranked the highest on average produced the highest student achievement the following year".  This makes sense within a school - where kids are more or less from the same kind of neighborhoods year-over-year.  The researchers did not attempt to move teachers to different schools.  We know, intuitively, that's that a different question entirely.

It will take at least another post, maybe a book, to explain why I just don't buy that student test scores are an accurate measure of teacher effectiveness.  My conclusion is that student test scores are fundamentally unreliable indicators both of how well a teacher taught the material, or of how well a student learned the material - there are just too many other variables.  Those variables keep a teacher's overall evaluation scores, likewise, too variable.  Read here about a teacher's whose scores have fluctuated from a Level 5 to a Level 1and back.  While the state reassuringly tells us that the test scores are a snapshot, one measure of student achievement, I'm yelling plaintively "the test scores are only a snapshot, only one measure of student achievement!"

I'm also convinced that there are shenanigans in the teacher evaluation process, but that's also another post I haven't had time to write.  While the state is concerned about principals inaccurately judging their teachers too high, I'm concerned about principals using the evaluations to undermine teachers they don't like.  Ask many of the excessed teachers Level 3, 4, and 5 teachers of Shelby County whether they were fairly treated by their principals during that process, or whether less-good teachers were kept because the principals liked them better.  By trying to convince us that teaching can be accurately measured by purely objective methods ("objective methods" administered by humans observing other humans and making judgments about those humans), and trying to take subjectivity out of the equation, the state has created a situation where principals are incentivized to manipulate the objective measures to take their sometimes-very-valid, sometimes-much-less-valid subjective concerns into consideration.

These proposed changes are yet another solution without a problem.  I don't believe that there's a historical problem with poor teachers manipulating their way past hapless hiring officials and principals, hopscotching their ineffectiveness across the state by lying about their abilities. A teacher's performance is easily verified by previous employers.  Linking student performance to licensure will reduce the number of effective teachers eligible to teach (Level 3 and Level 4 teachers in untested subjects at Level 1 schools, for instance), particularly in under-performing schools, where the new policy will also contribute to the instability of more constant turnover, as teachers are incentivized to get out of those under-performing schools just as quickly as they can.

Another solution without a problem creating more problems.  Hard to say whether Commissioner Huffman likes the solutions to those problems - increasing non-traditional teacher pipelines - even more than this disingenuous solution which will absolutely have the effect of reducing the number of traditionally-trained effective, rock-solid, experienced teachers in hard-to-staff classrooms.

If you'd like to know more about the Tennessee Board of Ed, here's the link.  Our representative from Memphis (the 9th Congressional district, anyway) is Teresa Sloyan, the Executive Director of the Hyde Family Foundations. 

If you'd like to email them your views, you can just cut and paste this list:

frolston@ecu.org, medwards@knoxvillechamber.com, lroberts@trh.com, cpearre@comcast.net,  jarogersod@bellsouth.net, ayers.janet@gmail.com, wrightmelvindds@bellsouth.net,  teresa.sloyan@gmail.com, richard.rhoda@tn.gov

The Third District representative does not have an email address listed, and there is no information about the student member of the Board.

[Author's note:  I've updated this article as of the evening of August 16 to better reflect the details of Commissioner Huffman's proposal.  I appreciate your patience.]

Movement Against Huffman

Earlier this week, I drew attention to a petition to remove Department of Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman from his position.  I didn't mention it before, but be careful on change.org - only sign the petition you intended to sign.  A number of people have found that they signed seemingly-innocuous petitions in favor of changes in public education, only to find that they are now counted as members in Michelle Rhee's astro-turf organization, with no way to get off of her "list".

Now, a few days later, there's also a Facebook page where Tennesseans are airing their grievances on Commissioner Huffman's experimental policies.

UPDATE:  There are TWO facebook pages mobilizing against Commissioner Huffman:
https://www.facebook.com/RemoveKevinHuffman?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/TdoeCommissionerKevinHuffmanHasToGo

And they are showing up as a sponsored ad and sponsored page in my facebook feed.  Interesting - someone's putting some money into this thing.

Is this thing gathering a head of steam?  Even if it did, is Governor Haslam engaged enough to care?

Let's at least make him notice.

Lament. (Lay-Offs Part I)

I'm heartsick for you.  I've been laid off before, and I know well those feelings of loss and uncertainty.  There are many of you who put your heart and soul into the work of educating our children, and many of us are grateful.  Grateful for your years of service in the face of a revolving door of short-time superintendents, unpredictable and sometimes foul-mouthed supervisors, constantly changing standards of performance shaped by the wind of whatever trendy un-tested education reform has come into vogue, unexpected promotions for questionable colleagues, a County Commission that undervalues the worth of educating our children or how much it costs to do so, and school boards up to their eyeballs in politics.

In the name of your commitment to our children, you've lost sleep, worked more hours at more difficult tasks than we paid you for, given up family time, comforted criers, maybe shed a few tears yourself, tried to decipher how to do your job better, assisted children with problems that we could not have imagined at that age, and often taken some level of abuse from our children, our elected (and appointed) state and local officials, parents, your bosses, and often self-proclaimed state and local "stakeholders" who have decided that they simply know better than you do.

I'm a supporter of the merger, and I remain a supporter of the merger.

There are a lot of folks who can directly blame the merger for their job loss, and are correct to do so.  Either s/he, or their counterpart on the other side of the building, was going to be notified that their service was no longer needed.  When both of those people were more than qualified, wonderfully talented, and so committed to their jobs that they worked in favor of the merger of their departments knowing that their job, and those that report to them, might not survive that merger - it's just heartbreaking.  We knew that day would come, but it doesn't make it less hard.  Thank you for your service.  It is valued.

But there's another batch of folks who have been made casualties not of the merger, but of unwillingness to acknowledge what it takes to educate children, what it takes to provide the educational services to which all of our children should be entitled, and who has been pulling the purse strings.  We just didn't have the votes, in the end, for the financial support to keep your job - and for a lot of jobs both in the classroom and the office.  I didn't see that coming. 

I thought that there might be some political games, some grandstanding, some cheap shots.  But I thought that when it came down to it, our politicos would act in good faith and fully fund the cost of public education in Shelby County.  Instead, they've used the merger to punish those with whom they disagree, hoping to lay the blame for the loss of your job at the feet of others.  They haven't convinced me that it's about fiscal responsibility, or about what tax burden we can bear - it's been about what political cost they can extract. 

And so you suffer.  And I know that your sense of loss is not just for yourself, but also reflects your concerns about whether the services that your position or your department provided to our children will continue with the remaining staff, and how the kids will respond, personally and academically, to reduced or discontinued services.  I share your concerns.  This level of funding will bear out a dimunition of educational services, and under Norris-Todd, I thought I understood that it simply couldn't happen.  Even after the Transition Planning Commission recommended increased class sizes and reduced educational services, I still thought that our elected officials would stand in opposition to actually forcing a reduction in educational services for our children.  It's no comfort to me that I'm not the only one who was wrong.  For this batch of folks, I am particularly heartbroken.  Your service is valued, and I wish our local elected officials valued it the same way, searching for a path for you to continue in your service of our children.

I'm praying for you and your families, hoping that you land on your feet, and sending you strength to keep your head high in honor of the work that you did and what you accomplished for our children.  Thank you for your work and for your sacrifice.

Here's Part II.

Petitioning Against Huffman

It was bound to happen.  Governor Haslam's Department of Ed appointee, Commissioner Kevin Huffman has had a couple of years to show his stripes, and show them, he has. 

Parents and teachers, along with others in the state who care strongly about truly Public Education, are starting to reach their limit of experimental policies, corporate mandates, and outright disrespect.

A Tennessean has started a petition to the Governor for Huffman's removal.  You don't have to make your name public on the petition website, though it will be on the petition presented to the governor and both houses of the legislature.  We can hope that retaliation would be difficult and inefficient, but regardless, I encourage you to take a stand with others across the state and respectfully request Huffman's termination.

I suppose it's true that we haven't seen the rubric by which Commissioner Huffman is evaluated, hard to know if his livelihood is tied to student achievement, or who would perform his in-person observations.  But we're seeing the effects of his hastily-enacted policies in the morale of our educators, in the revolving door of new teachers and the resulting instability for our poorest children, and in the highly-prized, high value contracts he has awarded to profiteers.

Sign the petition here.

Huffman Will Reduce Teacher Pay. Tomorrow.

Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman says that he values teachers and the work that they do.  Commissioner Huffman wants to "re-structure" compensation systems so that the "best" teachers make the "most" money.  We "of course" want to "attract" and "retain" the best teachers.

According to the Commercial Appeal, the Tennessee Board of Education is poised to, TOMORROW, adopt the recommendation of Commissioner Huffman to reduce teacher salaries across the board.  The Memphis Daily News also covers the story (no paywall).  Here's a link to the old salary schedule - from the choices on the right, select 2012-13 for the most recent salary listings.  Here's a link to the salary schedule that will go into effect on July 1, if the state Board of Ed approves it tomorrow.  Under the proposal, the top step, which maxes out in Year 11 and an "advanced degree," is $40,310.  The current schedule differentiates among the advanced degrees, and maxes out at Year 20 and a doctorate with $54,105.

Thankfully, the Commercial Appeal has done the math (or asked other people to do the math) for us:  "The Tennessee Education Association estimated that over a 30-year career (the minimum required for full retirement benefits in Tennessee), the aggregate missed earnings is $69,025 for teachers with master’s degrees, $145,960 for those with master’s plus 30 years, $200,705 for those with education specialist degrees and $319,855 for those with doctorates."  The article also explains that "Clay, Hancock and Pickett counties pay at the minimum; 20 districts pay within 2 percent of the minimum and about half pay within 10 percent."  By my math, that means that more than 30 of the 135 districts in the state pay more than ten percent above the pay schedule - Memphis and Shelby County were both in that group of comparatively high compensation districts.

Commissioner Huffman will be the first to tell you that this change to the salary schedule does not require that local school boards adopt this minimum level of compensation.  It only sets the floor, and it cannot affect anyone who is already employed by the system.  My guess is also that Huffman would tell us that he encourages local school systems to exceed the minimum standards in order to "attract" and "retain" the "best" teachers.  He could encourage them to do that by not lowering the minimum levels of compensation, but he would rather just verbally and philosophically (and hypothetically) encourage them to do something in the future

But we all know what happens when the floor is lowered, right?  We're seeing it right now as plans for the merger progress and are implemented.  On the Transition Planning Commission's recommendation, many aspects of educational services, from class size limits to assistant principals, are being adjusted to the state's minimum requirements.  And the community is accepting and supportive of these reductions, no?

The basics of this is that the current talking points of the reform movement say that when teachers get their master's degrees or other advanced degrees, that the degrees do not lead to increased student achievement, and that years of experience in the classroom also do not lead to increased student achievement.  Therefore, teacher pay should not reward getting older and going to school.  In this discussion, we also usually hear from someone in the "private sector" who says "I don't get a raise every year" and "I don't get paid unless I do my job".  This is easily refuted by even simple television sitcoms like The Office, and of course, the unfortunate statistics regarding US productivity and consumer spending and debt levels.  But whatever.  Experienced, highly educated teachers just simply are not worth their weight in gold according to Governor Haslam's Education Department.

But let's say that what I call "talking points", you call "facts".  Perhaps my "evidence" regarding fictional television shows isn't "compelling".  Commissioner Huffman is still being sneaky.

Also according the Commercial Appeal's Richard Locker, "the governor two years ago proposed a bill to eliminate the state minimum salary schedule and leave pay fully up to local school boards. [Then] Haslam pulled the bill after lawmakers, including leaders of the Republican majority, opposed the idea.  Huffman submitted the new plan as a rule change to the appointed State Board of Education in April as the legislature was adjourning for the year. The Board approved it on the first of two required readings on April 19. The second and final vote is set for Friday."  It is worth noting that even with a Republican Super-Majority, this proposal was not a legislative priority of the Education Department.  Either that, or the Commissioner couldn't get anyone to carry the bill. 

There are at least a couple of levels of sneakiness here.  Not only is there the avoidance of the (Republican super-majority) legislature that would likely (okay, possibly) decline to adopt such a dramatic reduction in teacher pay, but there's the fundamental change in philosophy behind the unfortunate salary schedule being pushed through merely as a "rule change" by an unelected state board.  Commissioner Huffman, along with those who tell him that he's right, often believe that elected officials just won't make the hard education policy decisions because they might lose the next election.  That's not really a view that supports a democratic system of government, but that is the approach being taken here:  couldn't do it in the legislature, so let's still make it happen even though it couldn't happen in the legislature because Tennesseans don't want it. 

This is also a state board that apparently is not considering whether to adopt minutes from the last meeting, so there's no draft of the minutes to review in order for the public to understand who was present, and who voted which way.  Following the minimum rules of Tennessee transparency, and providing the public with as little information as possible . . .

If you'd like to know more about the Tennessee Board of Ed, here's the link.  Our representative from Memphis (the 9th Congressional district, anyway) is Teresa Sloyan, the Executive Director of the Hyde Family Foundations. 

If you'd like to email them your views, you can just cut and paste this list:

frolston@ecu.org, medwards@knoxvillechamber.com, lroberts@trh.com, cpearre@comcast.net,  jarogersod@bellsouth.net, ayers.janet@gmail.com, wrightmelvindds@bellsouth.net,  teresa.sloyan@gmail.com, richard.rhoda@tn.gov

The Third District representative does not have an email address listed, and there is no information about the student member of the Board.

Please take a moment to send a note to these appointees to let them know that you support teachers, and that you oppose the reduction in pay for Tennessee's teachers.

If you can't get past the Commercial Appeal paywall, try these links to the story in other publications:
Chattanooga Times Free Press
The Leaf Chronicle
KnoxNews

Here's the TEA's notice about the salary reduction.

Principals Can't Tell Who the Good Teachers Are

As you probably know, Memphis is one of the sites where the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET) is researching some central questions about how we can figure out who effective teachers are.  This puts Memphis in what should be the awkward position of making policy decisions based on as-yet-incomplete research.

Well, it's probably a good thing, then, that the Gates Foundation has finally finished the last stage of its research.  Here's the executive summary.  You know, since districts and states across the country have made huge, mainly controversial changes on the basis of what the Gates Foundation was pretty sure the research was going to say.

The Huffington Post has a story about the research results.  (You can compare the HuffPo report to  the glowing review of the research in the Commercial Appeal.)  HuffPo summarizes the results as "teacher observation less reliable than test scores" in measuring effective teaching.  The Gates Foundation research has now found that effective teaching can be measured - through some combination of teacher observation, test scores, and student surveys.  The basic methodology is that teachers had a baseline year to establish their effectiveness (2009-10) - the Foundation calls this "produc[ing] estimates of teaching effectivness for each teacher."  The report states:  "we adjusted those [original] measures [of teaching effectiveness] for the backgrounds and prior achievement of the students in each class.  But, without random assignment, we had no way to know if the adjustments we made were sufficient to discern the markers of effective teaching from the unmeasured aspects of students' backgrounds."  So the next year, academic year 2010-11, "we then randomly assigned a classroom of students to each participating teacher."

By "background", the Foundation is obliquely referring to students' socioeconomic backgrounds.  The researchers at RAND (the ostensibly independent corporation that Gates Foundation hired to conduct the research) hoped to answer two questions:  "First, did students actually learn more when randomly assigned to the teachers who seemed more effective when we evaluated them the prior year?  And second, did the magnitude of the difference in student outcomes following random assignment correspond with expectations?"  The short answer, according to the RAND researchers, is yes and yes.

Interesting.  Should we be surprised that the Gates Foundation research finds what the Gates Foundation thought it would find?  Or that it cost $50 million to find it out?

A couple of things jump out at me.  The first has to do with the role of teacher observations and the principals who conduct them.  Traditionally, teachers were judged only on the basis of their principal's once-every-several-years announced-in-advance observation.  Teachers generally performed very well in these observed lessons.  Where students did not make "adequate yearly progress" but teachers were uniformly rated as effective and highly effective, critics found a disconnect.  The solution has been to require that student standardized test results be included in teachers' overall assessment.  So - no surprise that the researchers have found that principals actually do not adequately assess their own teachers in the classroom observations.  Districts have tried a number of methods to "norm" their evaluators - they have to take a class before they can be evaluators, they have to grade a video of a teacher within an accepted range of how the researchers have "objectively" graded the video, etc.  But despite all of that "norming", principals' observations are viewed as unreliable.

Now the summary doesn't just come out and say that - instead, the summary states that "adding a second observer increases reliability significantly more than having the same observer score an additional lesson."  The researchers go on to qualify this statement in three ways.  First, they acknowledge that it may be too expensive to have enough observers if they have to observe full-length lesson, and so portions of lessons could be observed. 

The second and third qualifying statements both have to do with principals, and embedded in the second is what underlies the Foundation's concern:  "although school administrators rate their own teachers somewhat higher than do outside observers, how they rank their teachers' practice is very similar and teachers' own administrators actually discern bigger differences in teaching practice, which increases reliability."  Essentially, principals do not objectively recognize effective teaching, but they can recognize how teachers within a school stack up against each other.  Talk about a back-handed compliment.  So even if principals don't actually know if they have a good teacher, if they observe all of the teachers at their school, then they can tell you who is better than who.  So the principals' observations still have some value.

But then there's the third qualifying statement - the crux of the Foundation's concern:  "adding observations by observers from outside a teacher's school to those carried out by a teacher's own administrator can provide an ongoing check against in-school bias."  There's the there.  Principals can't be trusted to adequately judge their own teachers.  If you don't believe the Gates Foundation, just ask Tennessee's Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, who says that Tennessee's teachers observation scores are consistently inflated. 

I have mixed feelings about principal evaluations to start with - I'm not really all that opposed to administrators from outside the school doing the observations.  I've known enough bad principals - who unfairly reward their favorites and unfairly criticize their less favorites that I've viewed that as a bigger problem than generalized inflation.  I guess I assumed that principals could objectively observe teachers, but chose not to.  May be time to re-think that.  But I do think that principals do understand teachers' fears about the new evaluation systems that so heavily weight student achievement, and the principals do, after all, walk a fine line between supervision and maintaining working relationships with their subordinate teachers.  Therefore, some inflation - just for good employee relations - should not be all that surprising.  Principals don't always get a lot of training in how to handle walking that fine line, and they are human.  And we know that principals are not selected because they are the best teachers, though they are now required to be instructional leaders whatever their teaching success.  Still thinking about this one - but suspicious of a "measurement" that encourages the devaluation of the observations of the one person that most likely understands the teacher, the students, and the realities of teaching and learning in a particular school - and in some neighborhoods, the dangers of just getting to school.  Teachers - how do you look at your principals in this particular role?

The second thing that jumps out at me is the methodology.  So the idea is that a teacher has her principal-assigned class the first year, and the RAND randomly-assigned class the second year to see if the teacher can meet or exceed the expectations based on their baseline year.  But these aren't just any students who are assigned - these are students that attend the same school.  Teachers are not assigned new schools, just new kids.  Why is this important?  Because - at least in Memphis - we use "neighborhood schools".  Generally, schools serve kids that live near the school.  So the students are generally going to be more similar to each other than dissimilar.  At least in Memphis, our neighborhoods are still fairly racially segregated, and definitely defined by socioeconomic status. 

So let's tease that out.  If you're a good 4th grade teacher at Richland Elementary, you'd probably be a good 3rd grade teacher there, too.  And you would likely do well with a different set of 4th graders at the same school.  But let's acknowledge that a 4th grade teacher at Richland Elementary could be hard-pressed to be an equally as great 4th grade teacher at Coro Lake Elementary.  The Gates Foundation acknowledges that "as a practical matter," they could not "randomly assign students or teachers to a different school site."  I think what students the teacher teaches matters as much as how well the teacher teaches - and while value added measures get closer to this issue than traditional did-the-student-meet-this-benchmark testing - none of the testing addresses how what is happening in students' lives outside of the classroom impacts what is possible inside of the classroom.

Underlying this all is my fundamental disagreement that a student's achievement should be measured based on that student's performance on any particular standardized test.  We know, from the dozens of studies on the SAT and the ACT, that the single best predictor of a student's performance is that student's socioeconomic background.  I'm just not convinced that standardized tests measure how well a teacher taught something, or even how well a student learned something.  And they definitely do not measure a number of other things that are hugely important, including creative and critical thinking.  Don't get me wrong - student achievement is hugely important on its own - I'm just not sold that the testing products being sold to our school districts are the correct tool to measure it.

Still more to read in this executive summary - working to get the full report.  I'm very interested in what the Gates Foundation calls its ambiguous results on "peer effects" (the demographics and average prior achievement of each student's classmates), as well as the "trade-offs" of the different models for how we can weight the various measures of teacher effectiveness - for example, test scores as 50% versus 33% versus less.  Let me know what you think about it.

Bipartisanship in Education Rheeform? Not so much.

Michelle Rhee was controversial enough in Washington, D.C. that the mayor that appointed her Chancellor of the school district lost his election because of her.  She resigned in the days following the election.  She's been busy since then getting her start-up education advocacy organization, Students First, off the ground.

It turns out that she's about as well-connected as you can get in Tennessee.  Her ex-husband is the Tennessee Commissioner of Education, Kevin Huffman.  They met during their stints as Teach for America corps members.  She moved to Nashville in 2011, where their children attend school, and splits her time between Nashville and Sacremento, California, where her current husband (another controversial figure and former professional athlete) is mayor.

Since she left D.C., Rhee has been attempting to burnish her bipartisan credentials.  The reforms that Rhee champions are inherently very conservative - privatizing, pro-charter, anti-union, etc. - but she knows that the overall arc of progress for her reforms will suffer if linked too closely to either political party.  She therefore sought out both conservative and liberal backers and employees to work on behalf of Students First.

The Huffington Post reports that several left-leaning staffers are departing the organization, with policy reasons being cited.  Professor Diane Ravitch picked up on the story, and was surprised to get a response from one of the subjects of the story.

The staffer, Hari Sevugan, writes:  "In this post you ask, 'What part of [Rhee’s] agenda is bipartisan?' There are many Democrats, including this one, who work toward reform because public schools are not currently serving every child – too often children of color and from poverty – as they should. These children are being denied a fundamental civil right. It is a core Democratic value to ensure that their civil rights are enforced. It is a core Democratic value to ensure poverty or socio-economic status is not a barrier to opportunity. It is a core Democratic value to ensure teachers are respected for the work they do."

It's a nice deflection that, of course, does not answer the question about Rhee and bipartisanship.  He's right about the core Democratic values, values that I generally subscribe to.  But he's wrong about whether Rhee's proposals and political leanings align with those values.  And it's unfair to suggest that people who don't support Michelle Rhee are advocating against children's interests.  I would agree with Rhee's criticism of traditional public education, where she complains that School Boards have picked winners and losers among children, and that the children suffer.  I would argue, however, that all Rhee is doing is picking slightly different winners and losers, and that many of the same children that lose out in traditional public education continue to lose out under the reforms, and often with worse results - personally and academically.

That Democrats who favor education reforms are now realizing that Michelle Rhee and Students First favor a different brand of education reform is a welcome relief to some of us.  Party alignments have gone wonky on education reform issues, but maybe we are finally seeing a reset where we can call union busting "union busting" and recognize privatization and outsourcing for what they are.

This will be particularly important in Tennessee as the legislature comes back in to session with a Republican super-majority.  Let's remember which side we're on.

Memphis On Another List It Shouldn't Be (Because Huffman Says So)

Last week, Jane Roberts told us that "Memphis is the ninth-fastest growing charter school market in the nation."  And that's based on last year's enrollment, prior to the ASD's recruitment of 3 charter schools in Memphis this year + the 3 that the School Board approved last year + the 2 that won their appeals that had enough time to open for this school year, and definitely prior to next year's huge charter expansion - which will include the 12 charter schools that won their appeals to the state, but did not have enough time to open for this 2012-13 school year, as well as any charter schools that are approved this year (school board's consideration to happen by the end of the year on applications that were due on Oct. 1, 2012), plus the several that the ASD is ushering in for 2013-14.

So, yes, charter school enrollment is increasing, or as the charter school operators would say, their "market share" is increasing.  You know, because public education is a market in which entrepreneurs compete for engaged families.

What these charter schools are not competing for:  "reward school" status, bestowed by Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman on the 169 schools (in 70 Tennessee school districts) who are in the the top 5 percent of schools in the state for annual growth OR the top 5 percent for academic achievement.  Not a single charter school made that list.  Want to know who did make the list?  20 MCS schools and 4 SCS schools.  While Memphis City Schools is often roundly and soundly criticized for the 63 MCS schools in the bottom 5% - the most (by far) of any district in the state.  But with 20 schools in the top 5% - again, the most (by far) of any district in the state - MCS is clearly doing important work that the charter schools have just not been able to replicate.

Chief among my objections to the continued expansion of charter schools is their collective inability to perform any better than traditional public schools.  There are charter schools that have great success and do honorable work by getting higher student achievement than traditional public schools.  However, they are in the minority and provide cover to the great majority of charter schools that underperform compared to their public school counterparts, or are only able to equal the student achievement in traditional public schools.

Charter school proponents will tell you that they do not get their full per-student funding allotment.  They'll suggest that they actually have to "do more" than traditional public schools "on less" than full funding.  What they decline to fully disclose is what they actually spend per pupil, taking into account the full amount of private funding and in-kind gifts (in the form of goods and services, including volunteer tutors) donated to the schools by private donors - that, of course, are tax deductions for the donors by virtue of the charter schools' non-profit status.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, Jane Roberts wrote an article detailing a Stanford University CREDO study on local charter school performance.  Ms. Roberts summarized that of the charter schools in Memphis, less than half of them (ten of twenty-three studied) outperform traditional neighborhood public schools.  Five charter schools perform as well as traditional public schools.  And traditional neighborhood public schools outperform 8 charter schools.

Charter school proponents will want to tell you that the important takeaway from the CREDO Memphis research is that just over 65% of Memphis charter schools perform as well as or better than traditional public schools (that's the 10 + 5 of 23).  But just as important is the 57% of charter schools that, at best, only perform as well as traditional public schools, and the 35% that cannot manage to perform as well as Memphis public schools - Memphis public schools which are famously under-performing (that's the 5+8 out of 23, and the 8 of 23, respectively).

So isn't the question how to "brand" those 5 charter schools that perform as well as traditional public schools?  Both sides claim them - the charter proponents say, "yes, we can do just as well as traditional public schools" and charter opponents say, "but they can only perform as well as traditional public schools."  I think the line has to do with how public money is shifted to private vendors.  Sometimes government should "outsource" particular tasks to the private sector, where the work can be done more efficiently.  But the function of public education, I believe, is uniquely a government function.  And particularly where charter schools cannot do the task they promised, and certainly cannot do it more cheaply, they have less utility - and, certainly, a weakened argument for their continued governmental support.

Now that Memphis is on the list, Commissioner Huffman is working to make sure that it stays there.  There were the dozen or so charter school applications that the Shelby County School Board rejected that were later approved by Commissioner Huffman.  Then there are the 10 new ASD schools coming for next year.  But Commissioner Huffman does not allow local school boards to vet charter schools they same way that he does.  Commissioner Huffman and his ASD head Chris Barbic crow that they bring the most talented charter schools from around the country to Tennessee.  They recruit them to come here.  There are charter schools that would be thrilled to come to Tennessee that Commissioner Huffman and Supt. Barbic choose not to bring here, for whatever reason.  But local school boards do not have the same ability to pick and choose the best.  Shelby County found out last year that despite significant finanical implications, the state will grant any and all appeals.  Nashville found out this year that the state will reduce funding (to the tune of $3.4 million in one month) when they didn't approve a charter that the state wanted.

The state will only pick the best, but will punish local authorizers that don't take just anyone.  And let's be honest, the charters that are failing are usually failing because they were started by "just anyone" - people with no education background, no pedagogical insight, and no desire to educate children that don't come from families willing to navigate and then jump through application hoops. 

More on the state's solution to this little quandary at a later date - but it involves a "state authorizer" that would remove all local control from charter school application processes and decisions.