It’s your new job, added smack dab on top of your old one. What will you do when you’re asked to do work that was another person’s job last year?

Several tests exist in my district. Really, only two of them are of any importance. Those two tests are used when determining student placement from freshman to sophomore year. Those two tests give students a chance to show that they would do fine in the next level of English, that they should be moved on even if other marks don’t show it. So the DRP and benchmark are important to give to our freshmen because it allows them another chance.

Trouble is, we don’t have a testing coordinator. Now, that’s trouble on many different levels because she rocked and will be sorely missed. But from this vantage, she was the one who printed out answer sheets, gathered test booklets, counted out booklets and answer sheets, distributed said booklets and sheets, collected them all, and stored them. Whose job does that now become?

Who should take over these things when there’s no one around to do them and it doesn’t fit into anyone’s job description? These things need to be done, but there is no one around to do them. Now what?

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No rewards for desired behavior exist, only punishments. It’s as if ESEA/NCLB set out to doom public education. The overarching goal of 100% proficiency is almost necessarily impossible; the premise from which the law generates destines some percentage of schools to failure. Punishments the law puts in place easily snatch schools in and only release them with incredibly difficulty. Take the Program Improvement (PI) designation as an example.

Punishment Instituted

My district recently received PI status, a pit out of which I am certain we will never climb. A single school within the district failing to meet its AYP growth for two years in a row moves the entire district into PI.

In order to move out of PI, all eleven schools need to meet each goal included in the AYP measurement for two years in a row. My district is comprised of eleven schools. It only took one school to push us into PI. It’ll take all eleven to get us out.

My school missed AYP in the ’05-’06 school year because we had 92% STAR participation from our Hispanic population. We needed 95%. Another school in my district missed AYP because of insignificant growth in assessed content areas. According to ESEA/NCLB, both schools fail. Missing participation by 3% is just as bad as students not demonstrating growth.

Poorly Implemented

As a result of PI, my district instituted READ 180 at all schools without time to grow the program from within or properly equip campuses to meet technological demands. Several sections of the course were added, many to schools who only had a few sections previously (my school had two; we currently have six).

Additionally, the district adopted a set of essential English standards for the freshman and sophomore years, a responsibility foisted on us in mid-June. Teachers need to give a mid-year and year-end district-wide assessment to all freshmen this year, with other grade levels to follow in the coming years. Released test questions? I was told to look at the released CST questions. Number of test items? The test hasn’t been written yet. We haven’t even come to terms with what it means if a student passes the course, but fails the assessment. Yet we give the inaugural assessment sometime in January 2008. The law forces us to.

Practical Implications

Some administrators have pushed for my district to adopt English curriculum maps, spelling out what is taught each day of the year (“other departments do it, why is it so impossible for English to be on board?”). We’ve pushed back, made some concessions, and argued reasonably in order to be released of that task. The writing is on the wall, though: the day is coming when English curriculum will be prescribed and teachers will be required to teach to that map. Will anyone be paid to create the curriculum maps? Will all English departments have a say in what is taught and when? If so, when do those collaboration meetings happen? Who is paying for the massive numbers of novels we need to buy in order to teach, say, To Kill A Mockingbird to 600 freshmen at the same time? We currently only have 124 copies.

The biggest hurdle is that all freshman English teachers need to get together for a group collaboration meeting once a month. Freshman math teachers need to do the same. When is that supposed to happen? Are teachers compensated for the time required to meet? Are teachers compensated for the time required to create the meeting agenda and run the meeting? At least one administrator is required to attend this meeting. Are administrators compensated for that time? My district is already seeing English department chairs resign due to all the time needed to manage this new requirement.

All that PI has done is required each math and English department to hold monthly meetings, regardless of whether or not they are necessary, and rush to react to laws. My district’s reaction was to quickly adopt a few programs and implement them all in the same year. Some blame for the poor execution lays firmly on the plate of my district, sure. But the law that created that reaction shares a slice. Given the quick calendar of PI status (we were literally told a list of demands in the final weeks of last school year), most districts will react this same way. And the results will likely be the same: more programs adopted without an analysis of their need and no follow through to determine their effectiveness.

Public education needs help. It needs to be better than what it is. But a reactionary public education system is little better than an unaccountable one.Similar Posts:

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I can’t even get 29 students in my classroom to agree on whether or not my shirt matches my tie.

As In… Magnum?

We’re in PI status because of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a number determined by a formula generated by the federal government. AYP can be seen as a school’s report card… sort of. It’s made up of student performance (on CAHSEE and STAR), graduation rates, and participation percentages.

Just getting a kid in the seat to bubble in a few circles counts toward our AYP.

On the contrary, a student cutting school on the day of testing or in jail unable to attend school or who has relocated but is still on our records or whose parent has exempted him/her from taking the STAR hurts our AYP.

No joke.

Same Pay, More Kids

Because we are now a PI district (and because my district has decided to treat all campuses as PI schools), schools must provide support classes for strategic (2-3 years below grade level) and intensive (4 or more years below grade level) students. Those are more classes that need a teacher.

As such, Morgan-Hart funding is out the window for mainstream students. Instead of hiring more teachers, the current number of teachers will instruct more students per period and also take on the support classes. All English 1 and freshman math classes will now be stacked at 30:1 (32:1 for those math classes). They have been loaded at 20:1 for the last decade or more.

Raising the ratio equals more students in a teacher’s class, lowering the number of sections needed. With fewer sections of freshman English and math, teachers are available to teach other courses, namely those support classes.

Those sections of English and math that are associated with a support class will continue to enjoy the 20:1 perk. But if you’re a core kid (no more than 1 year below grade level), you’re thrown in with 10 more students than your previous year compatriots ever lived with.

Who Is Going To Fight?

The sad thing is that all of this is very complicated; the majority of our parents have no idea why this is happening and no one from the district office is going to explain it to them. You, faithful reader, probably don’t even entirely understand it. I’m sitting waist deep in the repercussions of all this and I’m not entirely certain I’ve explained it accurately. API? AYP? APR? Base vs. growth?

Is this convoluted mess the best system of “accountability” we can muster?Similar Posts:

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Ultimately, the trouble with the suggestions boils down to these questions: Is the STAR test so good that it not only evaluates student skill, but also evaluates teacher effectiveness? Is STAR worth the time and money and resources that we are currently in order to improve performance? Is it fair to put demands on only three subject areas that teachers in other areas and teachers of seniors don’t have to worry about?

I fear that the answer is no to those questions. Teachers are not the only reason students perform the ways they do on tests like STAR. How can I be held accountable for a student having a stellar English class last year, so good that it causes them to do an excellent job on this year’s STAR test? The opposite also causes concern.

Teachers of a certain subject area are not the only reason for student performance. If the Art teacher squawks all day about how pointless STAR is and encourages kids to blow it off, why should I be taken to task if my kids bomb the test? The work I do in forcing my kids to calculate their grades and class averages on assignments may pay off when completing the mathematics test, yet I don’t get credit for teaching/enforcing those skills. We don’t teach in a box and we are not limited in our impact to a certain period or certain year. Similarly, we aren’t responsible for everything. What if the parent is the one squawking about blowing off STAR?

Educational policy needs to be set by teachers, not by politicians. Politicians don’t understand how to teach or what it’s like to work with kids. That’s key in my dislike of ESEA/NCLB and the Aspen Institute. While the suggestions sound good to people uninvolved in education, it’s a different story in practical application. Students don’t make the kind of progress in real life that we want them to on paper. And there are many different reasons for this. To rest them all on the shoulders of a teacher is ignorant.

As I said yesterday, to be evaluated on student performance is a long time coming. However, perhaps STAR isn’t the performance we should be looking at. Something that a student genuinely has an interest in doing well on would be a much more accurate depiction of skill. I’ve said something similar to this before: if the test measures a teacher’s ability to motivate students, that’s different than measuring a teacher’s ability to teach content knowledge. If we’re trying to assess both things, we need to use two different measuring devices. Students have no reason to take the STAR seriously so why should my worth as a teacher be tied into that?

For STAR results to count for no less than 50% puts those results on a pedestal, suggesting that first-hand observation of your teaching doesn’t show any more than what a single test shows.

At the same time, I love that the discussion of a teacher’s worth has begun. We need to evaluate teachers based on something. Maybe STAR isn’t it. Maybe current funding levels of ESEA/NCLB don’t provide the incentives we need to make STAR meaningful. Maybe STAR is a flawed test. But that evaluation needs to happen somehow.

I don’t think this one recommendation from the Aspen Institute is it, but I still like the direction it’s taking us. Let’s get a better definition of what it means to educate students. Is it teaching a set of standards? Is it shoveling information down their throats? Is it letting them “get in touch” with their inner muse? Is it pushing kids to do better than they thought they could? Is it encouraging school pride? Until we decide what it means to educate, how can we measure how well teachers do it? Let the Aspen Institute suggestions be the beginning of this conversation, not the end. And let’s not enact anything that we can’t actually monitor nor are sure is effective.Similar Posts:

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Does This Frighten You?

Under HQET [Highly Qualified Effective Teacher], states would be required to put in place systems for measuring the learning gains of a teacher’s students through a “value-added” methodology, using three years of student achievement data, as well as principal evaluations or teacher peer reviews. (source)

To be evaluated based on the performance of students is a long time coming. I’d love to have an indication that I am or am not doing my job. Even more, I’d like to be shown the door if I’m not doing a good enough job. This sounds like a way to get bad teachers out of the classroom and students free of the tyranny of tenure jockeys.

But…

There are problems here. The term “‘value-added’ methodology” is vague. I want something clear if we’re talking about an evaluation of my job performance.

A teacher with a full load of AP students doesn’t have to worry anywhere near as much as a teacher with a full load of repeating students. It’s pretty hard to bet your job on the performance of at-risk students who have poor academic histories.

Depending on how Far Below Basic a student is, even a huge jump in skill might not knock them out of the FBB ranking. The current teacher is then blamed for this, even though the student’s inability may be due to several years of poor teaching and/or poor diligence.

Teachers who fall in the top 75 percent of producing learning gains in the state and receive positive evaluations would achieve HQET status. (source)

So what is this, first come, first served? I don’t like a system that necessarily creates a failing class of 25%.

This ranking only impacts English, math, and science teachers. I’d prefer a holistic approach to improving teaching.

Perhaps A Better Way

There are lots of reasons for poor performance on tests like STAR, not the least of which is student laziness. However, also to be considered is poor teaching and that’s what we can do something about. It’s no surprise that the latest suggestions for ESEA (NCLB) include a proposal to tie teacher evaluations into student performance on tests. I can see this leading to teachers caring more about these tests (which means that students will care more about the tests by virtue).

NEA has some suggestions about how to improve ESEA, but none of them seem specific enough to enact. They are good talking points, though, and should be the basis of reinvention of this legislation.

I don’t like my evaluation tied into how well or poorly students perform on a single assessment It’s important to evaluate students (and teachers) based on multiple assessments.

There are all kinds of reasons for me to not like this idea. But you know what? I actually do like the sounds of where ESEA (NCLB) is going. I just hope this isn’t the final word.Similar Posts:

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