Standing up to test based evaluations

Here's something you don't hear often, principals protesting. A group of principals in New York state have signed a letter protesting the use of test scores in teacher and administrator evaluations. They cite a lot of the same concerns everyone has about implementing the "reforms" of Race to the Top; not every course has a test, the tests aren't always reliable when they do and the student tests are not designed to evaluate teachers.
The New York Times has the story here.

Wage freeze hurts more than employees

If anyone thinks a wage freeze does not hurt students, think again. As wages fall, many will look to jobs in the private sector and many talented and dedicated educators will leave their classrooms. Others who may have considered bringing their talents to the classroom will look elsewhere. As schools fail to recruit and retain effective teachers, students are the ones who suffer. 


Julie Rasicot of Bethesda Magazine writes about Donna Thomas, formerly of Sherwood High School, in her story "MCPS loses a bright star." Ms. Thomas, a computer sciences teacher was part of a winning team of educators at the 2011 Global Innovator Educator Awards sponsored by Microsoft. Rasicot chronicles Ms. Thomas' decision to leave teaching because of effects of another year without a raise and a 2% increase in the contribution to her pension, meaning her salary, like all other MCPS teachers' salary, actually decreased this year.


This is becoming a trend for educators. A recent Ed Week story estimates that nearly 20% of teachers nationwide have additional jobs to make ends meet. In Texas, nearly 40% of teachers moonlight to make ends meet and a 2007 study of North Carolina teachers concluded that 72% of teachers hold additional jobs. 
From Ed Week: "While moonlighting isn't unique to teachers, they do tend to have second or third jobs at a higher rate than other professionals. One researcher estimates their moonlighting rates may be four times higher than those of other full-time, college educated salaried workers."

Teachers around the country have seen their wages frozen and many, like here in Maryland, are making less than they did two years ago. This coupled with the constant attacks on teachers and the profession itself is going to continue to drive our dedicated and effective teachers out of the classroom. This hurts our students.


Let's work to stop this. Come to one of our Town Hall Meetings between December 6 and December 15 to talk to your state legislators about protecting education funding. 

MCEA to host Town Hall meetings in December

MCEA will be hosting eight Town Hall meetings between December 6 and December 15 and there’s one near where you live or work. State delegates and senators have been invited to the meetings in their district and will be appearing and  answering your questions. Please see the schedule below and click on this link to register:http:// www.surveymonkey.com/s/MCEATownhalls

It is important to have a good turn out so that our elected officials see how important protecting education funding is. For more information, go to: http://www.mceanea.org/action/moe.php

MCEA’s EDUCATION FUNDING TOWN HALL MEETINGS

Tuesday, Dec. 6th                  3:30-5:00pm                Churchill HS               Meet with District 15 delegation

Wednesday, Dec. 7th             3:30-5:00pm                B-CC HS                   Meet with District 16 delegation

Thursday, Dec. 8th                 3:30-5:00pm                Wood MS                  Meet with District 17 delegation

Thursday Dec. 8th                  3:30-5:00pm                Einstein HS                 Meet with District 18 delegation

Monday Dec. 12th                 3:30-5:00pm                Blair HS                      Meet with District 20 delegation

Tuesday Dec. 13th                 3:30-5:00pm                Seneca Valley HS       Meet with District 39 delegation

Wednesday Dec. 14th            3:30-5:00pm                Kennedy HS               Meet with District 19 delegation

Thursday Dec. 15th                3:30-5:00pm                Sherwood HS             Meet with District 14 delegation

More education cuts on the way?

As the Congressional Super Committee tries to come to some sort of agreement on a debt reduction plan, everyone is scattering to see how the possible automatic cuts that could kick in if they fail to meet their deadline would affect them. Education is not immune. If the committee falters, the NEA estimates a $3.54 billion cut coming to federal education funding.

This could be yet another blow to classrooms everywhere. The White House recently released a white paper showing how teaching jobs are at risk across the country. Since the recession began, nearly 300,000 education jobs have been lost. This is over half of all public sector jobs that have been eliminated. The report goes on to estimate that over 200,000 education jobs may be lost in the next year with these cuts. You can read the Congressional Budget Office's report on education cuts here.

This shows the importance of the need for our continued vigilance in lobbying our local, state and national legislators as we move into the state and local budget sessions in the coming months.

Union-District collaboration and 21st century bargaining

Over the last few years teacher unions have been blamed for all sorts of problems; the declining economy, the ballooning debt of our municipalities and poor student performance. While public approval remains high for teachers, that is not the case for their unions (ironic, isn't it?). Some see the unions as an impediment to increasing student achievement and improving teacher performance. We know that is not the case. In fact, some research has been done on this issue, making it clear how difficult it is to pin down. 

Some have taken to attacking teachers rights to collectively bargain over their working conditions and benefits (Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana). We all know that if you want good learning conditions, you need good teaching conditions. 

People like to ignore that unions and districts can work together to achieve the goals of  creating good teaching conditions, so teachers can provide great learning conditions. We have been able to work collaboratively here in Montgomery County over the years to do this and other districts around the country are beginning to do so as well. 

Ed Week released a report on collective bargaining and how it is being changed as more unions and districts work more collaboratively rather than adversarially. You can read the report here. 

Become a teacher! Brought to you by Bill Gates

It was recently announced that Arne Duncan is giving control of the Education Department's TEACH.org website to Bill Gates and Microsoft. It will now be the property of Microsoft's Partners in Learning division. The purpose of the website is to encourage people to become teachers and provide them with education and job hunting resources.


To their credit, they recognize that there is an aging teaching workforce and shortage of teachers in high needs areas, but this marketing campaign is just something that increases corporate America's reach into education policy and our classrooms.The irony here is that the corporate ed "reformers" (Gates et. al) are always pushing the idea that we need to fire a bunch of teachers, when not long ago they were all pumping money into programs to reduce class size. Now they want to help recruit what they see as effective teachers and then schools can save money by increasing class size because the wonderful Microsoft Brand^TM educator can easily and effectively teach classes of 40 plus. Of course we will know that these Microsoft Brand^ТМ teachers are effective because of their test scores. Not that Bill Gates would have that size of a class for his own kids.

We know the stats. Roughly half of teachers quit within five years of beginning teaching. But could all of this high stakes testing be keeping people away from teaching? As the media is filled with anti-teacher messages, are potential teachers being pushed away? That is one question a retired teachers is asking. If our education model continues to be "drill and kill" when it comes to math and reading, and we squeeze out other subjects, what is the impact? Does this create a shallower talent pool?


Maybe if we started by treating teachers better, paying teachers better and including teachers in the decisions that affect them professionally, we wouldn't have to have a billion dollar corporation recruit teachers. People would come to it on their own. 

Why tying test scores to evaluations doesn't work

The ed "reformers" like to say that the best way to evaluate teachers is to tie their evaluations to student test scores. Fire the teachers whose students have bad scores, give bonuses to those whose students have good scores. Simple. Easy. But it's not.

There is plenty of research that indicates that these tests are not good measures of overall student learning, yet people want to use these tests to help evaluate teachers. This debate is going on in Illinois, where the state is preparing to roll-out its new evaluation system. The system could make up to 50% of a teacher's evaluation based on state test scores, despite the fact that these types of tests are not intended to evaluate teachers. It creates a problem for those who do not have these types of tests in their classes. It could cause them to be evaluated on other peoples test scores as is happening in Tennessee or you could be rated on school wide test scores, as is happening in Delaware. Or it may lead to more and more spending on creating standardized tests for those classes. This type of system leaves little room for evaluating educators on their content knowledge, their ability to manage a classroom, their proficiency in assessing their students in multiple ways and being able to get their students actively engaged in their own learning.

There are those who prefer to look at student growth or Value Added Models (VAMs) when evaluating teachers. VAMs have not yet been proven to be accurate either. This piece from the Washington Post , breaks down the problems with VAM, showing the variability from class to class, year to year and test to test. This report from the National Education Policy Center shows that the VAMs used in the much reported on story in the L.A. Times last year that publicly identified teachers and their VAM's (which was to show their effectiveness) was inadequate at best.

Teachers may be the most important in-school contributor to student achievement, but there are a myriad of other factors that may trump that; wealth, poverty, home support, attendance, health care and many others. Those never factor into a standardized test score.

Study: charters provide no significant performance gains

Education "reformers" of the "Waiting for Superman" ilk, love to tout charter schools as the saviors of education in the United States. The corporate reformers love the idea of having public funds go to private, for-profit organizations that run charter schools. This may not always be the best idea as we are starting to see with investigations of a national for-profit charter chain in St. Louis.


A recently released study of charter schools, specifically those that are part of large Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), show that they achieve no better results than traditional public schools on standardized tests in reading, math, science and social studies. While we know that standardized test scores aren't the end all be all when assessing student learning, but as the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss points out; "...but test scores are the measure that these reformers swear by, so, when you live by test scores, you die by them too."


This is not lump all charter schools into one heap. There are some good ones out there.  MCEA does not have a blanket policy either in favor or opposed to charter schools in Montgomery County. We have participated in the evaluation of charter school applications in the past: have supported the applications in some case and opposed them in others, based on the merits of the particular proposals. You can read about our criteria here.

Do you think you're overpaid? (update)

Last week, we told you about a survey that tried to argue that teachers are overpaid. 

Education Secretary Arne Duncan responded to the study with this editorial in the Huffington Post. He does well in pointing out that while money is not a top reason people come into teaching, it tends to be a top reason they leave it. With an average starting salary of $35k and average top salary of $65k, it's no wonder that there is a nation wide problem recruiting and retaining teachers. 

Nice to see the Secretary of Education have teacher's backs. 

Teacher evaluations gone wild

Two recent stories have highlighted some of the strange byproducts of the "ed reform" movement's push to change teacher evaluations.
The first comes from Tennessee, a Race to the Top winner, that has mandates that standardized test scores must be a part of a teacher's evaluation. While we may be used to hearing about that, what is troubling is that teachers who do not teach courses with such tests must rely on the scores of other teachers teaching other grade levels!
The next comes from Idaho where teacher bonuses, part of their new evaluation system, would rely on teachers being able to make "meaningful contacts" with parents of their students.
While we all agree that student achievement is important and  that parent contact is important, is it fair to make a teacher's pay, evaluation and job security rely so heavily on other people?

Do you think you're overpaid?

The Heritage Foundation presented a study this week in which they make the argument that teachers are paid too much.

You read that correctly. They argue that in comparison to private sector workers teachers are over paid.
They believe that local governments who are struggling with their budgets should start looking at reducing teacher salary and benefits.They make the same tired arguments about summers and holidays off. They argue that the job security of teaching adds to the value of the compensation package. Tell that to the over 200,000 education professionals who have lost their jobs over the last three years.

There have been many studies that show that teachers make less than their private sector peers. You can view a breakdown of them here. What the Heritage Foundation folks openly ignore is that many teachers take on jobs inside and outside of the schoolhouse to make extra money to make ends meet. They ignore the hours put in at home after work and on weekends. They ignore the work that is done by teachers on their holidays and summer lay-offs.They say that the data is not quantifiable. Here is a nice accounting of how that data is something that can be crunched.

Nobody is banging down the doors of school system human resource offices to apply for teaching positions. Prior to the recession and this period of ballooning class sizes, most districts were clamoring to find teachers. If the job was more about the money than the passion and dedication to teach and engage our youth, why do 50% of teachers leave within five years? Surely being overpaid would be enough to keep them around...

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Breaking Down the NCLB Renewal

If you were wondering what the different proposed plans for the NCLB re-authorization looks like, check out this comparison done by Edweek; http://issuu.com/edweek/docs/renewal-debate-pdf/1
It breaks down the key pieces of the law and compares the current law, the Senate plan, and the Department of Ed's waiver program. Notice the contrast between the Senate bill passed by the committee and the current law and waiver program. While the House of Representatives has not yet provided details on many pieces of the proposal, you can also see that the Senate bill is at odds with the House's views on program funding and special grants.
We will have to keep watch on what, if any, changes are made to the Senate bill as it is debated within the full Senate or if this bi-partisan effort is moved on the house as-is.