MCEA Statement on the Washington Post

MCEA is deeply offended by the allegations made today in an unsigned editorial in the Washington Post. Like clockwork, the Post has once again attacked the Montgomery County teachers union days before a school board election in a last ditch effort to influence voters. The Post’s anti-union animus is longstanding and widely recognized. Their reliance on hearsay and anonymous sources does a disservice to their readers.

MCEA has worked closely with Ms. Rebecca Smondrowski in her role as a leader in the Montgomery County Council of PTAs. She has been a partner with MCEA on the Superintendent's Operating Budget Committee and we have worked together to develop budget recommendations that were supported by both MCCPTA and MCEA. The Post relies on unnamed "sources" to claim that MCEA has threatened elected officials to support other candidates in the upcoming Board of Education election in lieu of Ms. Smondrowski.

Ironically, the Post points out that Ms. Smondrowski has been endorsed by State Senator Jamin Raskin and State Delegate Ben Kramer. The Post fails to mention that each has been endorsed and supported by MCEA. Just this week, MCEA ran newspaper ads praising Raskin and Kramer – among others – for being “champions of education”. If MCEA were indeed “bullying” these politicians, lavishing praise on them is a funny way of doing it.

Montgomery County voters are lucky to have a number of qualified candidates in this year's Board of Education election. MCEA members chose to recommend support for Fred Evans, a former MCPS principal, and Jeanne Ellinport, a former White House staffer.

How about talking to the teachers?

Following up yesterday's post about the Metlife Survey of the American Teacher, we came across this post from Linda Darling-Hammond.  In it she points out that the internal and external disincentives that educators face are causing more to struggle with staying in the job and will undoubtedly impact recruiting new educators. 

"We have never heard more policy rhetoric about the importance of developing, recruiting, and retaining strong teachers, especially in our most troubled schools. Ironically, our policies have also never done more to ensure that good teachers will have little incentive to serve and stay in those schools."

Further reliance on standardized tests as the end all, be all measure of what a student has learned and how well a teacher has taught it, will not solve this problem.  Ignoring the impacts of poverty and other social issues on students and their ability to learn will not help recruit and retain the best possible educators.

So maybe it's time to gather more input from the teachers.  Give them the opportunity to have authentic participation in looking at how to deal with the affects of poverty in their schools and giving them more latitude in providing instruction in deeper and more meaningful ways.  The politicians and pundits need to start talking with educators, rather than talking at them. 

Survey: Teachers Place Little Value on Standardized Tests

A recently released report by Scholastic found that only 28% of teachers believed that state standardized tests as being an essential component of measuring student achievement.   Only forty five percent of teachers felt that students take these tests seriously. That raises a question: would more teachers feel that these tests were important if the tests had an impact on the student's grade?  

Could a million teachers be preparing to exit the classroom?

Anthony Cody, in his Ed Week blog, takes a look at the recently released Metlife Survey of the American Teacher and some of its surprising results.  Overall, teachers are less satisfied in their work than they ever have been.  Much of this is due to the challenges the economy has placed on students and the teachers themselves.

One would imagine that the current anti-teacher sentiment in this country contributes to this as well.  With the corporate "reformers" trying to push an agenda of expanded class sizes and faulty value added evaluation measures and the continued fight to secure adequate funding for our public schools,  it is no wonder that more teachers find themselves thinking of doing something else.  And that is a shame.  Educators get into this profession for the love of it and it seems more and more that this test driven, shallow curriculum culture will drive away many talented, creative and dedicated educators in a time when they are needed more than ever.

Washington Post features MCEA

Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a story featuring MCEA Vice President Chris Lloyd. The story looks at how union/management collaboration can be be effective in forging a high performing school system.

The main article is here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montgomery-teachers-union-wields-power/2012/02/13/gIQAMojD2R_story.html

You can see the photo gallery here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-teachers-union-emphasizes-collaboration/2012/03/09/gIQAkvV61R_gallery.html

‘Creative ... motivating’ and fired

More on the misuse of testing in evaluating teachers from today's Washington Post. This is a the story of a teacher, who by all accounts was a model professional, but ended being fired because of her test scores:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative--motivating-and-fired/2012/02/04/gIQAwzZpvR_story.html

More on NYC rankings and VAM

Last week we posted about the release of teacher rankings in New York City.  There have been several pieces that were worthy of sharing that have come out since.

The first comes from Julie Cavanagh, a NYC teacher who was rated highly by this scale.  While she rates in the 95th percentile, she sees the folly of using such measures to rate teachers.

Linda Darling-Hammond looks at the issue from the perspective of Pascale Mauclair, the teacher who was singled out to be the worst teacher in NYC based on these rankings.  Ms. Darling-Hammond writes that the principal of the school backs the teacher and that Ms. Mauclair has received high ratings in her evaluations.  What seems to continue to be dismissed is:

"Most troubling is that the city released the scores while warning that huge margins of error surround the ratings: more than 30 percentile points in math and more than 50 percentile points in English language arts."

That is the the problem with releasing such complex data without the proper context being provided and a layman's explanation of the data and formulas.  


Others feel that the release of the data will ultimately undo the plans of ed "reformers" like Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee.  This article shows graphically how this data cannot show that an educator will be consistently good or bad.  Pretty heavy math, but a could plain English explanation.