Apparently the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not find "Waiting for Superman" to be worthy of an Oscar nomination in the documentary category (see below).
I'm sure Michele Rhee and Bill Gates will be both surprised and disappointed. Lots of folks assumed that the film was headed for an Oscar and that the award would be used to expand the roll out of the film - and the propaganda campaign. (So far it has only opened in a limited number of strategically chosen markets - mainly markets with large charter school sectors: Washington DC, New Orleans, Ohio, etc.).
But apparently not only was it a grossly misleading film, it was apparently not a very well done one either.
The folks at Rethinking Schools have been compiling a lot of the commentary and analysis on the problems with "Waiting for Superman" at http://notwaitingforsuperman.org/.
---------------
The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films. Here are the nominees:
Documentary (Feature)
"Exit through the Gift Shop"
"Gasland"
"Inside Job"
"Restrepo"
"Waste Land"
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The Governor Gets It Wrong on Pensions
While we very much appreciate the Governor's decision not to support an increased shift in the costs of teacher pensions onto local counties, we believe he is listening to bad advice on how to restore the long term financial health of the pension plan. It is not necessary to gut the plan's benefits in order to 'save' it.
Understanding the State Teacher Pension Plan Issue
1. What is referred to as the state teacher pension plan covers most school system employees as well as most employees of the state’s public libraries and community colleges.
2. In 2000 the state teacher pension plan was fully funded.
3. In 2004, the General Assembly voted to begin underfunding the plan: each year contributing less than the actuarially determined funding level. (One estimate has calculated the underfunding at close to one billion dollars).
4. In 2006, the General Assembly voted to increase employee contributions from 2% to 5% to pay for improved benefits. The improvement was to be phased in over 22 years. The increased employee contribution paid the full cost of the improvement going forward. The General Assembly agreed to make the improvement retroactive eight years back to 1998. They took no further action to improve funding.
5. In 2008 the economy and investment markets crashed. The plan’s asset values dropped by twenty percent. There is general agreement that the market crash accounts for about 85% of the last report on the unfunded accrued liability, which the General Assembly’s underfunding formula accounts for the other 15%.
6. In 2011, The Governor has proposed reneging on the 2006 agreement. His proposal would have plan participants paying more than they are now, for benefits that are as bad as they were before 2006 – when Maryland was recognized as having one of the worst teacher pension plans in the nation. For a retirement benefit that teachers paid 2% of their annual salary for in 2005, teachers would now have to be paying more than three times that amount – at 7% of their annual salary. Not only would teachers lose the phase in of the improved pension benefit approved by the General Assembly in 2006, they’d essentially end up with a 5% pay cut to maintain the same inadequate retirement benefit they had before 2006.
7. There are adjustments that can be made in the pension plan to improve its long term financial health. Issues of the vesting period and early retirement rules can and should be reviewed. The State Retirement Board itself has proposed changes in corridor funding and smoothing rules that both could reduce the unfunded accrued liability. The Board is also conducting an experience audit this spring that will update plan assumptions about salary growth, retirement age, etc;, and it is expected that the audit will improve the plan’s financial outlook as well.
8. In 2010 the markets have recouped more than half their losses The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back above 11,000. These market improvements will begin to be reflected in the pension plan's next annual valuation. As State Treasurer Nancy Kopp has so accurately observed, the timing of the state’s annual plan valuation in relation to the peaks and valleys of the market, has a significant and random impact on the plan valuation. It is simply a snapshot in time.
9. Just as it was a mistake for the General Assembly to begin underfunding the plan on the heels of the booming investment market; it would be a mistake for them to gut pension benefits based on worst point in the recent bear market.
10. It is in all our interests that the state pension plan be restored to its former financial health. But it doesn’t have to be done by slashing promised retirement benefits to teachers, librarians, janitors and school bus drivers.
Tom Israel, MCEA Executive Director
Understanding the State Teacher Pension Plan Issue
1. What is referred to as the state teacher pension plan covers most school system employees as well as most employees of the state’s public libraries and community colleges.
2. In 2000 the state teacher pension plan was fully funded.
3. In 2004, the General Assembly voted to begin underfunding the plan: each year contributing less than the actuarially determined funding level. (One estimate has calculated the underfunding at close to one billion dollars).
4. In 2006, the General Assembly voted to increase employee contributions from 2% to 5% to pay for improved benefits. The improvement was to be phased in over 22 years. The increased employee contribution paid the full cost of the improvement going forward. The General Assembly agreed to make the improvement retroactive eight years back to 1998. They took no further action to improve funding.
5. In 2008 the economy and investment markets crashed. The plan’s asset values dropped by twenty percent. There is general agreement that the market crash accounts for about 85% of the last report on the unfunded accrued liability, which the General Assembly’s underfunding formula accounts for the other 15%.
6. In 2011, The Governor has proposed reneging on the 2006 agreement. His proposal would have plan participants paying more than they are now, for benefits that are as bad as they were before 2006 – when Maryland was recognized as having one of the worst teacher pension plans in the nation. For a retirement benefit that teachers paid 2% of their annual salary for in 2005, teachers would now have to be paying more than three times that amount – at 7% of their annual salary. Not only would teachers lose the phase in of the improved pension benefit approved by the General Assembly in 2006, they’d essentially end up with a 5% pay cut to maintain the same inadequate retirement benefit they had before 2006.
7. There are adjustments that can be made in the pension plan to improve its long term financial health. Issues of the vesting period and early retirement rules can and should be reviewed. The State Retirement Board itself has proposed changes in corridor funding and smoothing rules that both could reduce the unfunded accrued liability. The Board is also conducting an experience audit this spring that will update plan assumptions about salary growth, retirement age, etc;, and it is expected that the audit will improve the plan’s financial outlook as well.
8. In 2010 the markets have recouped more than half their losses The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back above 11,000. These market improvements will begin to be reflected in the pension plan's next annual valuation. As State Treasurer Nancy Kopp has so accurately observed, the timing of the state’s annual plan valuation in relation to the peaks and valleys of the market, has a significant and random impact on the plan valuation. It is simply a snapshot in time.
9. Just as it was a mistake for the General Assembly to begin underfunding the plan on the heels of the booming investment market; it would be a mistake for them to gut pension benefits based on worst point in the recent bear market.
10. It is in all our interests that the state pension plan be restored to its former financial health. But it doesn’t have to be done by slashing promised retirement benefits to teachers, librarians, janitors and school bus drivers.
Tom Israel, MCEA Executive Director
Friday, January 21, 2011
90 Teachers Achieve/Renew National Board Certification
Last night over 200 teachers, family and friends came to the MCEA Center for Leadership and Learning to take part in a pinning ceremony honoring 71 teachers who achieved National Board certification, and 19 teachers who renewed their certification. School board members Chris Barclay and Mike Durso were present for the occasion, as well as Dr. Lacey, Deputy Superintendent of Schools.
MCEA Vice President and NBCT Chris Lloyd provided the following remarks:
MCEA Vice President and NBCT Chris Lloyd provided the following remarks:
Broadcast Journalist Dan Rather said, “The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth.’ “ For those of us who teach, who are entrusted with the care of this community’s children, we indeed have days where we tug to help move a child along…where we push in order to bring a level of confidence in the unseen…and where we lead to new learning, often through difficult and challenging lands. Indeed the schools we all attended are no longer reflections of the schools that exist today.
Being a teacher is soulful, passionate, and artful work – that too often goes unrecognized and yet always has a profound impact on a community and its children. So this afternoon is indeed a wonderful occasion, because we recognize accomplished teaching – and in doing so, recognize the complexity of the craft. President Doug Prouty and I are proud of you, the work you do, and this certification. We applaud you, and the difference you are making with children.
Being a National Board Certified teacher is all about being a reflective practioner. You have demonstrated that through a rigorous professional process, to which you voluntarily “subjected” yourself. This past year I’m sure was one filled with all kinds of emotions. But you persisted, carried on, and can now join the ranks of 634 NBCTs here in MCPS. You are examples of teacher leaders.
If you’ve been subjected to me long enough, you’ve heard me quote Peter Senge. He’s a systems thinker…and a great mind. Senge writes that, “Leadership is the capacity of the human community to shape its destiny, and to sustain the significant processes of change required to do so.” I love this quote, because not once does it frame leadership in terms of position. Leadership is about vision, and moving the arc of history, and sustaining through some really tough times.
And if ever we face tough times, and we need leaders – it is now. Make no mistake, the stakes are high on so many fronts. We have a state superintendent who believes that evaluating teachers is as easy as looking at a test score, which doesn’t honor the complexity of our craft. We find it to be a simplistic and frankly demeaning look at the work of our 12,000 members. The National Board standards and propositions we know so well – they honor that craft.
And in these tough economic times we need leaders – we need advocates for children. Any influence I have as an NBCT is magnified over 600 times with all of you and our colleagues around the county, and we need to make our voices heard now.
Catherine Ryan Hyde wrote a book called “Pay It Forward.” It was made into a movie, and the premise is quite simple. The character chooses 3 people, does three good deeds, and then asks those people to do the same – resulting in 9, and 27, and 81 good deeds – and so on – in an exponential pyramid of good will. If ever a book described what we do as teachers, this is it…30 children, who will impact hundreds more, who will impact thousands more.
I challenge you this afternoon to “pay it forward” to National Board candidates as yet unseen. Recruit them, become involved, support them, coach, and guide. See yourself not just as a leader in your classroom, but as a leader in our system, in our community. The profession of teaching demands nothing less. There is a moral calling right now that we must heed. Education is at the end of the day about social justice, and National Board certification is not the end of a journey, but a beginning. Congratulations to each and every one of you on this accomplishment, so richly deserved, so humbly accepted – Doug and I thank you for all of the work you do each and every hour, as leaders bending the arc of history.
Find more information on National Board certification.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Budget testimony to the Board of Education
Montgomery County Board of Education
Public Hearing on the Proposed FY11 Operating Budget
January 12, 2011
Testimony of
Doug Prouty, MCEA President
Good evening President Barclay, members of the Board, and Dr. Weast. Thank you for this opportunity to testify on the Superintendent’s Recommended Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2012. I am Doug Prouty, president of the Montgomery County Education Association which represents 12,000 teachers and other non-supervisory professional educators. I appreciate this opportunity to comment tonight. We are also deeply appreciative of the continuing commitment you have made to work together with us and other stakeholders to craft the best possible MCPS budget in this exceedingly difficult circumstance.
Dr. Weast asked in his introduction of the FY ’12 budget what a child’s education is worth. That is exactly the right question, especially when one considers that each of our students, and the students to come, do indeed get only one chance at that education. As you debate and finalize this budget and send it on to the County Executive and Council, keep in mind that question, as you always have in the past. Even were it not required by state law, sending forth a maintenance of effort budget is the right thing to do. It is your responsibility – your duty – to advocate for the needs of our students. A maintenance of effort budget simply maintains the current level of per-pupil spending. Recent hand wringing about this law notwithstanding, our children deserve this most modest of efforts.
We realize that there will be cuts to all agencies in Montgomery County when the budget process concludes in May. Our efforts together last year resulted in an outcome that was, while far from ideal, better than what might have been. A similar, perhaps even more Herculean, effort will be needed this year. You will hear tonight and next week from teachers, parents, students, other MCPS employees, and community members about specific programs that deserve to avoid paring or elimination. The problem is that, at the end of the day, most if not all of them are right. What we have should be enhanced. What a sad thing that instead we will have to decide on what cannot even be maintained. And in this year of increased class sizes and decreased levels of support for schools, our employees have given 110% to maintain quality. They have sacrificed not only money but also time to ensure that students get the best education. But we cannot assume it is reasonable, or even feasible, to continue to ask more to be done with fewer resources.
The Board of Education, the Superintendent, the employees, and the community have worked together to create a model school system. Indeed, we have entertained visitors from a wide range of states and countries who want to know about our work as a means of improving their own. Further proof of the fruits of our collaboration came last week. I meet and communicate with the other local presidents in Maryland frequently. An email was sent by one president asking if the rest had received an invitation from the U.S. Secretary of Education to attend a conference next month to learn about the experience of ten districts from around the country which had improved student achievement through labor-management collaboration. I tried to be humble in replying that yes, Montgomery County had been invited- in fact, we were selected to be one of the ten to share our story.
But collaboration itself has not resulted in the progress we have made. Rather, it is the focus on the people in MCPS that is to be credited. Education is about people. This seems obvious, given that what we do is help the young prepare to be the people who will shape our country next. But too often these days it is the people in public education who are accused of being the problem. We have recognized that, much as education is the best and most sound investment we as a community can make, investing in our workforce is the best investment we can make. Even in flush times, something as complex and controversial as the Teacher Professional Growth System is difficult to undertake. And yet we have managed to keep this system in place, not as robustly as we could were revenues not as poor as they have been, but nonetheless still going strong. I believe there is a direct link between our ongoing commitment to enhancing the skills of our workforce and our ability to improve student success and close the achievement gap.
We have a Professional Growth System and Professional Learning Communities that discuss the role that race plays in student achievement in a frank and honest way that others shy away from because it is so hard.
These are the kind of investments in the skills of the workforce that make the most difference for kids.
And so I conclude by commending you for all you have done, all that we have done together. And I implore you, each of you and as a body, to continue to work with MCAAP, SEIU Local 500, our PTAs, and MCEA, to advocate for our students.
The challenges we will face over the next several months to minimize the damage to the MCPS budget are worth it because a child’s education is worth it, because all of our students are worth it. Time will tell which of them becomes a NIH researcher, which becomes a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, which becomes a second grade teacher helping the next generation- I could go on- but they have to have the chance. They depend on us to ensure that chance.
Thank you for your time, hard work, and commitment to this most worthy of endeavors.
Public Hearing on the Proposed FY11 Operating Budget
January 12, 2011
Testimony of
Doug Prouty, MCEA President
Good evening President Barclay, members of the Board, and Dr. Weast. Thank you for this opportunity to testify on the Superintendent’s Recommended Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2012. I am Doug Prouty, president of the Montgomery County Education Association which represents 12,000 teachers and other non-supervisory professional educators. I appreciate this opportunity to comment tonight. We are also deeply appreciative of the continuing commitment you have made to work together with us and other stakeholders to craft the best possible MCPS budget in this exceedingly difficult circumstance.
Dr. Weast asked in his introduction of the FY ’12 budget what a child’s education is worth. That is exactly the right question, especially when one considers that each of our students, and the students to come, do indeed get only one chance at that education. As you debate and finalize this budget and send it on to the County Executive and Council, keep in mind that question, as you always have in the past. Even were it not required by state law, sending forth a maintenance of effort budget is the right thing to do. It is your responsibility – your duty – to advocate for the needs of our students. A maintenance of effort budget simply maintains the current level of per-pupil spending. Recent hand wringing about this law notwithstanding, our children deserve this most modest of efforts.
We realize that there will be cuts to all agencies in Montgomery County when the budget process concludes in May. Our efforts together last year resulted in an outcome that was, while far from ideal, better than what might have been. A similar, perhaps even more Herculean, effort will be needed this year. You will hear tonight and next week from teachers, parents, students, other MCPS employees, and community members about specific programs that deserve to avoid paring or elimination. The problem is that, at the end of the day, most if not all of them are right. What we have should be enhanced. What a sad thing that instead we will have to decide on what cannot even be maintained. And in this year of increased class sizes and decreased levels of support for schools, our employees have given 110% to maintain quality. They have sacrificed not only money but also time to ensure that students get the best education. But we cannot assume it is reasonable, or even feasible, to continue to ask more to be done with fewer resources.
The Board of Education, the Superintendent, the employees, and the community have worked together to create a model school system. Indeed, we have entertained visitors from a wide range of states and countries who want to know about our work as a means of improving their own. Further proof of the fruits of our collaboration came last week. I meet and communicate with the other local presidents in Maryland frequently. An email was sent by one president asking if the rest had received an invitation from the U.S. Secretary of Education to attend a conference next month to learn about the experience of ten districts from around the country which had improved student achievement through labor-management collaboration. I tried to be humble in replying that yes, Montgomery County had been invited- in fact, we were selected to be one of the ten to share our story.
But collaboration itself has not resulted in the progress we have made. Rather, it is the focus on the people in MCPS that is to be credited. Education is about people. This seems obvious, given that what we do is help the young prepare to be the people who will shape our country next. But too often these days it is the people in public education who are accused of being the problem. We have recognized that, much as education is the best and most sound investment we as a community can make, investing in our workforce is the best investment we can make. Even in flush times, something as complex and controversial as the Teacher Professional Growth System is difficult to undertake. And yet we have managed to keep this system in place, not as robustly as we could were revenues not as poor as they have been, but nonetheless still going strong. I believe there is a direct link between our ongoing commitment to enhancing the skills of our workforce and our ability to improve student success and close the achievement gap.
We have a Professional Growth System and Professional Learning Communities that discuss the role that race plays in student achievement in a frank and honest way that others shy away from because it is so hard.
These are the kind of investments in the skills of the workforce that make the most difference for kids.
And so I conclude by commending you for all you have done, all that we have done together. And I implore you, each of you and as a body, to continue to work with MCAAP, SEIU Local 500, our PTAs, and MCEA, to advocate for our students.
The challenges we will face over the next several months to minimize the damage to the MCPS budget are worth it because a child’s education is worth it, because all of our students are worth it. Time will tell which of them becomes a NIH researcher, which becomes a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, which becomes a second grade teacher helping the next generation- I could go on- but they have to have the chance. They depend on us to ensure that chance.
Thank you for your time, hard work, and commitment to this most worthy of endeavors.
Dangerous Pension Cuts
The following commentary by MCEA President Doug Prouty was just run in Baltimore Sun.
Reducing teacher benefits, as a state commission proposes, would harm Maryland's top-ranked education system
By Doug Prouty
3:45 PM EST, January 12, 2011
Maryland educators have kept their promises to the students they serve every day. We've kept our promise to make Maryland's schools No. 1. We've kept our promise to work tirelessly every day to ensure that every child has the education he or she needs to succeed in the future. And we've kept the promise that we made in 2006 to more than double our pension contributions and improve our pension system from the worst in the nation to about average.
Unfortunately, the recommendations issued late last year by the Public Employees' and Retirees' Benefit Sustainability Commission and likely to be taken up during the General Assembly session that began this week would threaten the promise of a secure retirement for our educators, exceptional public services for our citizens and world-class public schools for our children.
As members of the commission acknowledged, this process was rushed. At the same time that the commission was voting on drastic, potentially devastating proposals to shift pension costs to the counties or reduce educator benefits, members of the commission decried the insufficient time they'd had to thoroughly study the proposals. With better actuarial data coming in the spring — and with the commission voting to extend its life until October 2011 — one cannot help but conclude that this process was hasty.
Unfortunately, the commission's recommendations would saddle hundreds of thousands of working families with the burden of fixing the underfunding of the state's pension system. The system was fully funded as recently as 2000, but it now has assets sufficient to cover just 65.4 percent of its obligations, and the funding gap is increasing every year.
Two major developments have been the main cause of this underfunding. One is a new method of determining appropriate state funding levels for the system, which was adopted by the legislature in 2000. Known as the "corridor method," it has allowed the state to short the pension fund each year since it was passed. The other is the stock market crash of 2008, which accounts for 85 percent of the funding shortfall, according to information presented to the commission.
What do these two causes have in common? Neither has anything to do with the salaries or benefit levels of those in the pension system.
The pension commission's recommendations call for an increase in our contributions or a reduction in our benefits. As it stands, the state pension system is modest by any measure and below the national average. Under the present system, teachers hired today would earn 54 percent of the average salary they earned in their final three years if they retired after 30 years in the classroom. Teachers who began working before the 1998-99 school year earn less than that. Nationally, teacher pensions are typically 60 percent after 30 years of service.
Following the commission's recommendations could send our system back to being the worst in the nation, which would present a major obstacle to Maryland's recruitment and retention of excellent educators. The commission also recommended shifting some of the costs of our pensions to the counties, which do not have adequate resources to take on these costs. Such a shift — in some counties, of tens of millions of dollars — would cripple the ability of each county to adequately fund its school system, to prevent ballooning class sizes, or to adequately provide other important public services. No consideration seems to have been given to the dire financial straits in which Maryland's counties find themselves.
While the state budget crisis is serious, Marylanders should demand a thoughtful process in solving it — one that will consider the long-term effects of any proposed changes. In recommending such dire changes, the commission is playing with the future of Maryland's schools and schoolchildren. With such high stakes, it hardly seems too much to ask for any recommended changes to be based on the best available data and for there to be sufficient time to fully consider their impact in the long and short term.
Thanks to the benefits, education funding and support that elected officials have provided — and the promises that they've kept — our public schools were ranked No. 1 in the nation for the third year in a row. As the 2011 General Assembly begins its work, we urge the governor and the legislature to reject permanent changes in reaction to temporary circumstances and to keep their promise to maintain a sustainable pension system and an excellent public education system. Together, we can find sensible ways to secure funding for our pensions without jeopardizing funding for our public schools and our other priorities.
Doug Prouty is president of the Montgomery County Education Association. His e-mail is dprouty@mcea.nea.org.
Reducing teacher benefits, as a state commission proposes, would harm Maryland's top-ranked education system
By Doug Prouty
3:45 PM EST, January 12, 2011
Maryland educators have kept their promises to the students they serve every day. We've kept our promise to make Maryland's schools No. 1. We've kept our promise to work tirelessly every day to ensure that every child has the education he or she needs to succeed in the future. And we've kept the promise that we made in 2006 to more than double our pension contributions and improve our pension system from the worst in the nation to about average.
Unfortunately, the recommendations issued late last year by the Public Employees' and Retirees' Benefit Sustainability Commission and likely to be taken up during the General Assembly session that began this week would threaten the promise of a secure retirement for our educators, exceptional public services for our citizens and world-class public schools for our children.
As members of the commission acknowledged, this process was rushed. At the same time that the commission was voting on drastic, potentially devastating proposals to shift pension costs to the counties or reduce educator benefits, members of the commission decried the insufficient time they'd had to thoroughly study the proposals. With better actuarial data coming in the spring — and with the commission voting to extend its life until October 2011 — one cannot help but conclude that this process was hasty.
Unfortunately, the commission's recommendations would saddle hundreds of thousands of working families with the burden of fixing the underfunding of the state's pension system. The system was fully funded as recently as 2000, but it now has assets sufficient to cover just 65.4 percent of its obligations, and the funding gap is increasing every year.
Two major developments have been the main cause of this underfunding. One is a new method of determining appropriate state funding levels for the system, which was adopted by the legislature in 2000. Known as the "corridor method," it has allowed the state to short the pension fund each year since it was passed. The other is the stock market crash of 2008, which accounts for 85 percent of the funding shortfall, according to information presented to the commission.
What do these two causes have in common? Neither has anything to do with the salaries or benefit levels of those in the pension system.
The pension commission's recommendations call for an increase in our contributions or a reduction in our benefits. As it stands, the state pension system is modest by any measure and below the national average. Under the present system, teachers hired today would earn 54 percent of the average salary they earned in their final three years if they retired after 30 years in the classroom. Teachers who began working before the 1998-99 school year earn less than that. Nationally, teacher pensions are typically 60 percent after 30 years of service.
Following the commission's recommendations could send our system back to being the worst in the nation, which would present a major obstacle to Maryland's recruitment and retention of excellent educators. The commission also recommended shifting some of the costs of our pensions to the counties, which do not have adequate resources to take on these costs. Such a shift — in some counties, of tens of millions of dollars — would cripple the ability of each county to adequately fund its school system, to prevent ballooning class sizes, or to adequately provide other important public services. No consideration seems to have been given to the dire financial straits in which Maryland's counties find themselves.
While the state budget crisis is serious, Marylanders should demand a thoughtful process in solving it — one that will consider the long-term effects of any proposed changes. In recommending such dire changes, the commission is playing with the future of Maryland's schools and schoolchildren. With such high stakes, it hardly seems too much to ask for any recommended changes to be based on the best available data and for there to be sufficient time to fully consider their impact in the long and short term.
Thanks to the benefits, education funding and support that elected officials have provided — and the promises that they've kept — our public schools were ranked No. 1 in the nation for the third year in a row. As the 2011 General Assembly begins its work, we urge the governor and the legislature to reject permanent changes in reaction to temporary circumstances and to keep their promise to maintain a sustainable pension system and an excellent public education system. Together, we can find sensible ways to secure funding for our pensions without jeopardizing funding for our public schools and our other priorities.
Doug Prouty is president of the Montgomery County Education Association. His e-mail is dprouty@mcea.nea.org.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Understanding the Challenges Facing Our Schools
Many thanks to the more than 100 concerned and motivated educators who woke up to a frigid morning and falling snowflakes this past Saturday and still drove to Rockville for MCEA's Annual Legislative Breakfast to talk about the needs of our schools with our state legislators. Thanks also to our friends and fellow education advocates from MCAAP, SEIU, MCCPTA, and the Board of Education who joined us.
To learn more about the issues:
Courage in Challenging Times - welcoming message by Chris Lloyd, vice-president of MCEA and a National Board Certified Teacher who teaches Television Production at Baker Middle School. Chris also serves as co-chair of the Peer Assistance and Review Panel.
Truth and Myths about the State Pension Fund – analysis by David Helfman, executive director of the Maryland State Education Association. David began his career as a Certified Employee Benefits Speciaiist (CEBS). Read MSEA’s Pension Action Guide to learn more.
Race-To-The-Top, Teacher Evaluation and Student Testing – briefing by Betty Weller. Betty is co-chair with state superintendent of education Nancy Grasmick, of the recently created Maryland Council for Educator Effectiveness. Betty is vice-president of the Maryland State Education Association, and a teacher from Kent County. Go to the Council on Educator Effectiveness' website to follow the work of the Council.
Keeping the Promise: A Quality Education is a Fundamental Right of Every Child – a call to action by Doug Prouty, MCEA president, high school english teacher, and father of two MCPS students.
Background Materials:
• Historical trend of Montgomery County Government local funding of MCPS, Montgomery County Government Office of Management and Budget data
• Comparison chart of county expenditures on K-12 education, Maryland State Dept. of Education data
• Comparison chart of historical trends in county spending on education compared to Maintenance of Effort obligations, Maryland State Dept. of Education data
• Comparison chart of health insurance premium cost-sharing formulas in major Maryland school systems
• MSEA Pension Action Guide
To learn more about the issues:
Courage in Challenging Times - welcoming message by Chris Lloyd, vice-president of MCEA and a National Board Certified Teacher who teaches Television Production at Baker Middle School. Chris also serves as co-chair of the Peer Assistance and Review Panel.
Truth and Myths about the State Pension Fund – analysis by David Helfman, executive director of the Maryland State Education Association. David began his career as a Certified Employee Benefits Speciaiist (CEBS). Read MSEA’s Pension Action Guide to learn more.
Race-To-The-Top, Teacher Evaluation and Student Testing – briefing by Betty Weller. Betty is co-chair with state superintendent of education Nancy Grasmick, of the recently created Maryland Council for Educator Effectiveness. Betty is vice-president of the Maryland State Education Association, and a teacher from Kent County. Go to the Council on Educator Effectiveness' website to follow the work of the Council.
Keeping the Promise: A Quality Education is a Fundamental Right of Every Child – a call to action by Doug Prouty, MCEA president, high school english teacher, and father of two MCPS students.
Background Materials:
• Historical trend of Montgomery County Government local funding of MCPS, Montgomery County Government Office of Management and Budget data
• Comparison chart of county expenditures on K-12 education, Maryland State Dept. of Education data
• Comparison chart of historical trends in county spending on education compared to Maintenance of Effort obligations, Maryland State Dept. of Education data
• Comparison chart of health insurance premium cost-sharing formulas in major Maryland school systems
• MSEA Pension Action Guide
- MSEA's "Keep The Promise" Apple Pledge - Let your elected officials know you expect them to "Keep the Promise". Print out this Apple Pledge and send it to your representatives in Annapolis.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Tackling the myths regarding public sector unions and their role (or lack thereof) in the current fiscal crisis
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#40902120
Rachel Maddow's Show on MSNBC, with Chris Hayes hosting, earlier this week [January 3] debunked the myths (union bashing) being circulated by some politicians blaming public sector unions for the fiscal state of the states. It is well written, full of facts with solid sound bites. It is a short video segment worth circulating and talking about.
The host marches myth by myth (overpaid state government workers, bloated pensions and benefits) knocking down each myth with facts and data.
Bottom line: blaming the public sector unions--you, your friends, your neighbors--is a distraction from the real culprits that caused the fiscal crisis, namely bankers, Wall Street, and other actual profiteers who made the fiscal decisions. These are myths masquerading as facts. Once you disassociate teachers, fire fighters, trash collectors, and other public workers from the unions, they're an easy political target.
For a good read about the fiscal culprits, please consider "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis” by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera [reviewed in the Washington Post Dec. 30th by Daniel Gross.]
Again the clip is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#40902120
Rachel Maddow's Show on MSNBC, with Chris Hayes hosting, earlier this week [January 3] debunked the myths (union bashing) being circulated by some politicians blaming public sector unions for the fiscal state of the states. It is well written, full of facts with solid sound bites. It is a short video segment worth circulating and talking about.
The host marches myth by myth (overpaid state government workers, bloated pensions and benefits) knocking down each myth with facts and data.
Bottom line: blaming the public sector unions--you, your friends, your neighbors--is a distraction from the real culprits that caused the fiscal crisis, namely bankers, Wall Street, and other actual profiteers who made the fiscal decisions. These are myths masquerading as facts. Once you disassociate teachers, fire fighters, trash collectors, and other public workers from the unions, they're an easy political target.
For a good read about the fiscal culprits, please consider "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis” by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera [reviewed in the Washington Post Dec. 30th by Daniel Gross.]
Again the clip is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#40902120
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Valerie Strauss: On Point Again!
America’s disdain for its children
By Valerie Strauss
Americans don’t really think very much of their children. Not really.
Yes, we love our own children, and sometimes the kid next door. But a look at the education world as we enter 2011 reveals how little we really care about childhood and the importance of creating the conditions in which young people can grow and learn in safe and secure and smart environments.
If we did actually give a hoot about kids:
*We would never tolerate a poverty rate among children of 21 percent.
That’s one in five kids who live in poverty, or nearly 15 million children in the United States who live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, currently pegged at $22,050 a year for a family of four.
And that, of course, doesn’t include the kids who live in families of four who make $22,051 a year. Or $22,052. In fact, research shows that families need an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic costs, so at that rate, 42 percent of American children live at or close enough to the poverty level so that basics aren’t being covered.
*We would never pretend that any single institution, especially public schools, can overcome the problems caused by a life in poverty. Reformers would stop staying that citing poverty as a problem is “an excuse.”
Don’t, please, write me and tell me that I am offering teachers an excuse not to work hard. You know I’m not.
Acknowledging that poverty matters means that we have to counter its effects when children come to school -- making sure they eat, can see, hear, aren’t exhausted – and more broadly, address the causes of poverty on a societal level.
*We would stop our hypocrisy over standardized tests.
On one hand we admit that they are too rudimentary to be used for any high-stakes decisions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in 2009 at the National Education Association’s annual conference: “I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense."
And on the other, we use them for high-stakes decisions anyway.
When the Los Angeles Times published so-called “value added” test scores to rate teachers in the city’s public schools last summer, Duncan said, “What’s there to hide? In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success."
*We would not demonize teachers, but rather treat them as professionals.
This means paying them a professional salary, ensuring that they have professional training (not a summer crash course), giving them a large role in what happens in their own classrooms, and finding fair ways to evaluate teachers so that those who don’t belong in a classroom can be removed.
*We would stop thinking that we can tell anything about really young kids by subjecting them to silly tests and recognize the value of learning through play. Quality pre-kindergarten would be a national priority.
*We would stop underfunding public school systems.
We hear plenty about how much public money is being wasted, and, certainly, one can always find places where it is. But the bigger problem is that public systems are being starved. Some systems have cut out a day of school each week because they can’t afford it, and there is talk in California about cutting an entire month out of the public school calendar.
This is nothing but sickening.
*We would never allow the public school system to be dependent on the good will of private citizens or foundations.
*We would stop pretending that charter schools are the be-all and end-all of public education.
Yes, yes, some of them are tremendous schools. But most of them aren’t any better than their local traditional public school, and many have less “accountability” than traditional schools, but you couldn’t tell that by listening to some school reformers and wealthy funders.
*We would stop pretending that teachers unions are the cause of all of the ills of public education, and accept the common-sense refutation that the problems are the same in states without teachers unions. You don’t have to love unions to accept this reality.
*We would really try to consider what kids need and think.
For example, we know that for biological reasons, teenagers fall asleep later at night, and one study showed that students attending high schools with later start times were less likely to report being sleepy during the day. But we stick to early start times anyway.
*We would remember that the public school system is our most glorious civic institution. Yes, it needs to be improved, but not in the way we are doing it now. We would, in fact, inject humanity into public schooling.
Somehow we’ve let that slip away.
Add up all of this, and then tell me how much America really likes its children.
Follow my blog every day by bookmarking washingtonpost.com/answersheet.
By Valerie Strauss
Americans don’t really think very much of their children. Not really.
Yes, we love our own children, and sometimes the kid next door. But a look at the education world as we enter 2011 reveals how little we really care about childhood and the importance of creating the conditions in which young people can grow and learn in safe and secure and smart environments.
If we did actually give a hoot about kids:
*We would never tolerate a poverty rate among children of 21 percent.
That’s one in five kids who live in poverty, or nearly 15 million children in the United States who live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, currently pegged at $22,050 a year for a family of four.
And that, of course, doesn’t include the kids who live in families of four who make $22,051 a year. Or $22,052. In fact, research shows that families need an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic costs, so at that rate, 42 percent of American children live at or close enough to the poverty level so that basics aren’t being covered.
*We would never pretend that any single institution, especially public schools, can overcome the problems caused by a life in poverty. Reformers would stop staying that citing poverty as a problem is “an excuse.”
Don’t, please, write me and tell me that I am offering teachers an excuse not to work hard. You know I’m not.
Acknowledging that poverty matters means that we have to counter its effects when children come to school -- making sure they eat, can see, hear, aren’t exhausted – and more broadly, address the causes of poverty on a societal level.
*We would stop our hypocrisy over standardized tests.
On one hand we admit that they are too rudimentary to be used for any high-stakes decisions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in 2009 at the National Education Association’s annual conference: “I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense."
And on the other, we use them for high-stakes decisions anyway.
When the Los Angeles Times published so-called “value added” test scores to rate teachers in the city’s public schools last summer, Duncan said, “What’s there to hide? In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success."
*We would not demonize teachers, but rather treat them as professionals.
This means paying them a professional salary, ensuring that they have professional training (not a summer crash course), giving them a large role in what happens in their own classrooms, and finding fair ways to evaluate teachers so that those who don’t belong in a classroom can be removed.
*We would stop thinking that we can tell anything about really young kids by subjecting them to silly tests and recognize the value of learning through play. Quality pre-kindergarten would be a national priority.
*We would stop underfunding public school systems.
We hear plenty about how much public money is being wasted, and, certainly, one can always find places where it is. But the bigger problem is that public systems are being starved. Some systems have cut out a day of school each week because they can’t afford it, and there is talk in California about cutting an entire month out of the public school calendar.
This is nothing but sickening.
*We would never allow the public school system to be dependent on the good will of private citizens or foundations.
*We would stop pretending that charter schools are the be-all and end-all of public education.
Yes, yes, some of them are tremendous schools. But most of them aren’t any better than their local traditional public school, and many have less “accountability” than traditional schools, but you couldn’t tell that by listening to some school reformers and wealthy funders.
*We would stop pretending that teachers unions are the cause of all of the ills of public education, and accept the common-sense refutation that the problems are the same in states without teachers unions. You don’t have to love unions to accept this reality.
*We would really try to consider what kids need and think.
For example, we know that for biological reasons, teenagers fall asleep later at night, and one study showed that students attending high schools with later start times were less likely to report being sleepy during the day. But we stick to early start times anyway.
*We would remember that the public school system is our most glorious civic institution. Yes, it needs to be improved, but not in the way we are doing it now. We would, in fact, inject humanity into public schooling.
Somehow we’ve let that slip away.
Add up all of this, and then tell me how much America really likes its children.
Follow my blog every day by bookmarking washingtonpost.com/answersheet.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers
Over the holidays, the New York Times ran a thoughtful article assessing the shortcomings of current efforts to link teacher evaluations to student test scores through "value added analysis". They (unlike most press coverage of the issue) point out the research that says "a teacher was likely to be misclassified 35 percent of the time".
They also reveal that (at least in New York City) the "value added" model is scored on a curve, so that "each year 50 percent of teachers will receive “average” rankings, 20 percent each “above average” and “below average,” and 5 percent each “high” and “low.” - a disclosure that raises serious questions about the fundamental design of value added analyses. Apparently this is more about a competition between teachers than it is about the actual achievement of students on standardized tests.
One can only wonder whether the US Department of Education - as well as the Maryland Department of Education - is paying attention to the actual research.
_____________________________________________________________________________
December 26, 2010
New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN
For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city's teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.
“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.
Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.
“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.”
It is becoming common practice nationally to rank teachers for their effectiveness, or value added, a measure that is defined as how much a teacher contributes to student progress on standardized tests. The practice was strongly supported by President Obama’s education grant competition, Race to the Top, and large school districts, including those in Houston, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Washington, have begun to use a form of it.
But the experience in New York City shows just how difficult it can be to come up with a system that gains acceptance as being fair and accurate. The rankings are based on an algorithm that few other than statisticians can understand, and on tests that the state has said were too narrow and predictable. Most teachers’ scores fall somewhere in a wide range, with perfection statistically impossible. And the system has also suffered from the everyday problems inherent in managing busy urban schools, like the challenge of using old files and computer databases to ensure that the right teachers are matched to the right students.
All of this was not as important when the teacher rankings were an internal matter that principals could choose to heed or ignore. City officials had pledged to the teachers’ union that the rankings would not be used in the evaluation of teachers and that they would resist releasing them to the public.
But over the past several months, the system of teacher rankings has been catapulted to one of the most contentious issues facing the city’s 80,000-member teaching force. A new state law, passed this year to help New York win Race to the Top money, pledges that by 2013, 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on a value-added system. The city has begun urging principals to consider rankings when deciding whether to grant tenure. And the city now supports the release of the data to the 12 media organizations, including The New York Times, that have requested it.
The departing schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, defended the release of the rankings in an e-mail to school staff members, acknowledging that they had limitations but calling them “the fairest systemwide way we have to assess the real impact of teachers on student learning.”
"For too long,” Mr. Klein wrote, “parents have been left out of the equation, left to pray each year that the teacher greeting their children on the first day of school is truly great, but with no real knowledge of whether that is the case, and with no recourse if it’s not.”
But the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has sued to keep names in the rankings private, arguing that the data is flawed and would result in unnecessary harm to the reputation of teachers. The matter is now before Justice Cynthia Kern of State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
New York City began ranking teachers in the 2007-8 school year as part of a pilot project intended to improve classroom instruction. The project, which cost $1.3 million, with an additional $2.3 million budgeted over the next 18 months, was expanded in the 2008-9 school year to give rankings to more than 12,000 fourth- through eighth-grade teachers.
In New York City, a curve dictates that each year 50 percent of teachers will receive “average” rankings, 20 percent each “above average” and “below average,” and 5 percent each “high” and “low.” Teachers get separate rankings for math and English.
In support of the model, Douglas Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, cites research showing that if a teacher receives a high-performing score one year, there is a modest likelihood that he or she will receive a high-performing score the following year. The correlation is about 0.3, he said, with 1 being perfect, and 0 being no correlation. This means that about one-third of teachers ranked in the top 25 percent would appear among the top quarter of teachers the next year.
While that year-to-year link may seem low, in the budding and messy exercise of trying to quantify what makes students learn, it is one of the strongest predictors of future student performance, along with the reduction of class size. That means that, on average, students placed for a year with a high-value-added teacher will do better than those placed with a low-value-added teacher. Dr. Staiger placed the improvement at about three percentile points on a typical standardized test.
“This information is useful but has to be used with caution,” he said. “It’s that middle ground. It’s not useless, but it’s not perfect.”
Yet a promising correlation for groups of teachers on the average may be of little help to the individual teacher, who faces, at least for the near future, a notable chance of being misjudged by the ranking system, particularly when it is based on only a few years of scores. One national study published in July by Mathematica Policy Research, conducted for the Department of Education, found that with one year of data, a teacher was likely to be misclassified 35 percent of the time. With three years of data, the error rate was 25 percent. With 10 years of data, the error rate dropped to 12 percent. The city has four years of data.
The most extensive independent study of New York’s teacher rankings found similar variability. In math, about a quarter of the lowest-ranking teachers in 2007 ended up among the highest-ranking teachers in 2008. In English, most low performers in 2007 did not remain low performers the next year, said Sean P. Corcoran, the author of the study for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, who is an assistant professor of educational economics at New York University.
The high margin of error for most scores, something the city refers to as the confidence interval, is another source of uncertainty, Dr. Corcoran said. In math, judging a teacher over three years, the average confidence interval was 34 points, meaning a city teacher who was ranked in the 63rd percentile actually had a score anywhere between the 46th and 80th percentiles, with the 63rd percentile as the most likely score. Even then, the ranking is only 95 percent certain. The result is that half of the city’s ranked teachers were statistically indistinguishable.
“The issue is when you try to take this down to the level of the individual teacher, you get very little information,” Dr. Corcoran said. The only rankings that people can put any stock in, he said, are those that are “consistently high or low,” but even those are imperfect.
“So if you have a teacher consistently in the top 10 percent,” he said, “the chances are she is doing something right, and a teacher in the bottom 10 percent needs some attention. Everything in between, you really know nothing.”
In New York, the rankings face an additional set of issues. The state tests on which they were based became, over time, too predictable and easy to pass, and this summer the state began to toughen standards. Daniel Koretz, a Harvard professor whose research helped persuade the state to toughen standards, said that as a result it was impossible to know whether rising scores in a classroom were due to inappropriate test preparation or gains in real learning. Rankings that include the tougher standards will not be available until the next academic year.
“It would make sense to wait until the problems with the state test are sorted out, because we are going to get it wrong a lot of the time,” Dr. Koretz said.
City officials defended using the state tests as a basis for the rankings, saying that they remained predictive of other outcomes, like graduation rates. Echoing Dr. Corcoran, the officials said they were most interested in identifying teachers at the extremes. “We have read the studies on it, and it is the best quantitative method that we have,” said John White, a deputy chancellor. “When used in concert with other pieces of information, it can help us judge teacher effectiveness.”
Beyond the formulas and tests, individual errors — like the one that led Ms. Ward to be left out altogether — have generated controversy. The teachers’ union claims that it has found at least 200 such errors, including teachers’ getting rankings for subjects they did not teach (sometimes they did well, sometimes poorly). Mr. White would not provide an estimate for the error rate, but noted that principals had 18 months to correct mistakes in class lists, starting from when the scores were first distributed.
Mr. White said on Tuesday that before the next round of rankings was released, teachers would be able to review class lists to verify which students they taught, a practice that generally did not happen in the past. Douglas N. Harris, an economist affiliated with the center at the University of Wisconsin that produces the city’s rankings, called the science behind them promising, and said that they had jump-started a wider effort to come up with better measures of teacher performance, which was long overdue.
But Dr. Harris urged caution in reading too much into the early crop of rankings, and added, “As a general rule, you should be worried when the people who are producing something are the ones who are most worried about using it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/nyregion/27teachers.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all # # #
They also reveal that (at least in New York City) the "value added" model is scored on a curve, so that "each year 50 percent of teachers will receive “average” rankings, 20 percent each “above average” and “below average,” and 5 percent each “high” and “low.” - a disclosure that raises serious questions about the fundamental design of value added analyses. Apparently this is more about a competition between teachers than it is about the actual achievement of students on standardized tests.
One can only wonder whether the US Department of Education - as well as the Maryland Department of Education - is paying attention to the actual research.
_____________________________________________________________________________
December 26, 2010
New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN
For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city's teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.
“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.
Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.
“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.”
It is becoming common practice nationally to rank teachers for their effectiveness, or value added, a measure that is defined as how much a teacher contributes to student progress on standardized tests. The practice was strongly supported by President Obama’s education grant competition, Race to the Top, and large school districts, including those in Houston, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Washington, have begun to use a form of it.
But the experience in New York City shows just how difficult it can be to come up with a system that gains acceptance as being fair and accurate. The rankings are based on an algorithm that few other than statisticians can understand, and on tests that the state has said were too narrow and predictable. Most teachers’ scores fall somewhere in a wide range, with perfection statistically impossible. And the system has also suffered from the everyday problems inherent in managing busy urban schools, like the challenge of using old files and computer databases to ensure that the right teachers are matched to the right students.
All of this was not as important when the teacher rankings were an internal matter that principals could choose to heed or ignore. City officials had pledged to the teachers’ union that the rankings would not be used in the evaluation of teachers and that they would resist releasing them to the public.
But over the past several months, the system of teacher rankings has been catapulted to one of the most contentious issues facing the city’s 80,000-member teaching force. A new state law, passed this year to help New York win Race to the Top money, pledges that by 2013, 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on a value-added system. The city has begun urging principals to consider rankings when deciding whether to grant tenure. And the city now supports the release of the data to the 12 media organizations, including The New York Times, that have requested it.
The departing schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, defended the release of the rankings in an e-mail to school staff members, acknowledging that they had limitations but calling them “the fairest systemwide way we have to assess the real impact of teachers on student learning.”
"For too long,” Mr. Klein wrote, “parents have been left out of the equation, left to pray each year that the teacher greeting their children on the first day of school is truly great, but with no real knowledge of whether that is the case, and with no recourse if it’s not.”
But the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has sued to keep names in the rankings private, arguing that the data is flawed and would result in unnecessary harm to the reputation of teachers. The matter is now before Justice Cynthia Kern of State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
New York City began ranking teachers in the 2007-8 school year as part of a pilot project intended to improve classroom instruction. The project, which cost $1.3 million, with an additional $2.3 million budgeted over the next 18 months, was expanded in the 2008-9 school year to give rankings to more than 12,000 fourth- through eighth-grade teachers.
In New York City, a curve dictates that each year 50 percent of teachers will receive “average” rankings, 20 percent each “above average” and “below average,” and 5 percent each “high” and “low.” Teachers get separate rankings for math and English.
In support of the model, Douglas Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, cites research showing that if a teacher receives a high-performing score one year, there is a modest likelihood that he or she will receive a high-performing score the following year. The correlation is about 0.3, he said, with 1 being perfect, and 0 being no correlation. This means that about one-third of teachers ranked in the top 25 percent would appear among the top quarter of teachers the next year.
While that year-to-year link may seem low, in the budding and messy exercise of trying to quantify what makes students learn, it is one of the strongest predictors of future student performance, along with the reduction of class size. That means that, on average, students placed for a year with a high-value-added teacher will do better than those placed with a low-value-added teacher. Dr. Staiger placed the improvement at about three percentile points on a typical standardized test.
“This information is useful but has to be used with caution,” he said. “It’s that middle ground. It’s not useless, but it’s not perfect.”
Yet a promising correlation for groups of teachers on the average may be of little help to the individual teacher, who faces, at least for the near future, a notable chance of being misjudged by the ranking system, particularly when it is based on only a few years of scores. One national study published in July by Mathematica Policy Research, conducted for the Department of Education, found that with one year of data, a teacher was likely to be misclassified 35 percent of the time. With three years of data, the error rate was 25 percent. With 10 years of data, the error rate dropped to 12 percent. The city has four years of data.
The most extensive independent study of New York’s teacher rankings found similar variability. In math, about a quarter of the lowest-ranking teachers in 2007 ended up among the highest-ranking teachers in 2008. In English, most low performers in 2007 did not remain low performers the next year, said Sean P. Corcoran, the author of the study for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, who is an assistant professor of educational economics at New York University.
The high margin of error for most scores, something the city refers to as the confidence interval, is another source of uncertainty, Dr. Corcoran said. In math, judging a teacher over three years, the average confidence interval was 34 points, meaning a city teacher who was ranked in the 63rd percentile actually had a score anywhere between the 46th and 80th percentiles, with the 63rd percentile as the most likely score. Even then, the ranking is only 95 percent certain. The result is that half of the city’s ranked teachers were statistically indistinguishable.
“The issue is when you try to take this down to the level of the individual teacher, you get very little information,” Dr. Corcoran said. The only rankings that people can put any stock in, he said, are those that are “consistently high or low,” but even those are imperfect.
“So if you have a teacher consistently in the top 10 percent,” he said, “the chances are she is doing something right, and a teacher in the bottom 10 percent needs some attention. Everything in between, you really know nothing.”
In New York, the rankings face an additional set of issues. The state tests on which they were based became, over time, too predictable and easy to pass, and this summer the state began to toughen standards. Daniel Koretz, a Harvard professor whose research helped persuade the state to toughen standards, said that as a result it was impossible to know whether rising scores in a classroom were due to inappropriate test preparation or gains in real learning. Rankings that include the tougher standards will not be available until the next academic year.
“It would make sense to wait until the problems with the state test are sorted out, because we are going to get it wrong a lot of the time,” Dr. Koretz said.
City officials defended using the state tests as a basis for the rankings, saying that they remained predictive of other outcomes, like graduation rates. Echoing Dr. Corcoran, the officials said they were most interested in identifying teachers at the extremes. “We have read the studies on it, and it is the best quantitative method that we have,” said John White, a deputy chancellor. “When used in concert with other pieces of information, it can help us judge teacher effectiveness.”
Beyond the formulas and tests, individual errors — like the one that led Ms. Ward to be left out altogether — have generated controversy. The teachers’ union claims that it has found at least 200 such errors, including teachers’ getting rankings for subjects they did not teach (sometimes they did well, sometimes poorly). Mr. White would not provide an estimate for the error rate, but noted that principals had 18 months to correct mistakes in class lists, starting from when the scores were first distributed.
Mr. White said on Tuesday that before the next round of rankings was released, teachers would be able to review class lists to verify which students they taught, a practice that generally did not happen in the past. Douglas N. Harris, an economist affiliated with the center at the University of Wisconsin that produces the city’s rankings, called the science behind them promising, and said that they had jump-started a wider effort to come up with better measures of teacher performance, which was long overdue.
But Dr. Harris urged caution in reading too much into the early crop of rankings, and added, “As a general rule, you should be worried when the people who are producing something are the ones who are most worried about using it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/nyregion/27teachers.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all # # #
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