Canary in the community

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Schools are the canary in the community, penned an astute letter writer from one of the countless Ohio communities with school levies on the May 3 ballot. What a perfect analogy. Yet unlike the canary in a coal mine, closely monitored as a harbinger of coming crisis, the fiscal condition of public schools in the state is ignored by policy makers who are unwilling to give the crisis an urgent response.

But the near financial collapse of some districts may force Columbus to reconsider its indifference. Until Gov. John Kasich's proposed budget yanked life-support funding from schools and left educators in budget-induced shock, people liked to pretend that the gasping canary in their midst wasn't that sick.

They assumed the cornerstone of the community could take even more abuse, get by with less, and still make quantum leaps in academic excellence. What a perfect illusion. But it worked for Mr. Kasich and Republican lawmakers, who took teachers down a few notches and cut school funding to ludicrous levels.

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Time to get serious Governor

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It's a little strange to ask for input once you've already decided what it is you're going to do, but the Governor and his education Czar seem to be doing just that, according to a report in the Dispatch

Gov. John Kasich wants Ohio's teachers to help him establish guidelines for judging them in a merit-based pay system.

It was an invitation he issued today after he signed a bill that will welcome a new batch of teachers to the state through Teach for America.

Kasich asked Ohio's 115,000 public-school teachers to suggest how to judge their performance in the classroom; that's to be the sole determinant of how they will be paid, based on changes in collective-bargaining laws for the state's public employees.

An email will do.

If the Governor truly wants to collaborate on this, then he needs to have the merit pay provisions stripped out of the budget bill to give people time to design a real solution. The Governor and his Czar need to bring all the stakeholders together and not simply ask people to email ideas.

As a means to solving complex problems like teacher evaluation and merit pay, emailing isn't a serious suggestion. The process needs to be open and deliberative. you don't design a merit pay system using a suggestion box.

You can ask the Governor to create a serious framework for collaboration on this issue here.

How to fix our schools

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Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public school system, and Michelle Rhee, who resigned October 13 as Washington, D.C. chancellor, published a “manifesto” in the Washington Post claiming that the difficulty of removing incompetent teachers “has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.” The solution, they say, is to end the “glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher” and give superintendents like themselves the authority to pay higher salaries to teachers whose students do well academically. Otherwise, children will remain “stuck in failing schools” across the country.{i}

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Value add limitations debated in HB153

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As the budget bill, HB153, moves through the sausage making factory, hearings and testimony have taken place on the provisions to use Value Add measurements as a component of teacher evaluation and pay. We have previously discussed the limitations of this approach, and now those limitations have been expressed to legislators.

Michele Winship from the Ohio Education Association expressed concern at the proposal, because value-added data can only be calculated for 75% to 80% of teachers, those that teach reading and math in grades 4-8. A fact that even the education Czar, Mr. Sommers has acknowledged.

How would the group of teachers who are left out of this scheme be compensated? This is to say nothing of the wholly inadequate level of funding being made available for incentives, as was pointed out by Greg Mild recently.

Gongwer reports

Matthew Cohen, executive director for policy and accountability at the Department of Education, said the state's Race to the Top proposal is already working to develop some of what the budget bill's proposal would employ. Whereas value-added data currently is reported on school building and district levels, funding through the grant will facilitate the development of teacher-level data.
[...]
The effort, however, is meant to produce a report teachers can use to affect their instruction. It is not proposed as a way to evaluate or compensate educators, Mr. Cohen said.

The RTTT proposal also includes an expansion component that would allow schools to voluntarily join a pilot project to explore ways to apply value added to other grades and subjects, he said.

To allow all teachers to be compensated and given bonuses based on student performance, assessments would have to be crafted for all grades in all subjects. Mr. Asbury said he does not think the state has any such measure readily available.

"Teaching is a complex art. I think the assessment of teaching is equally complex," he said. "I think there's potential, but value added is not a silver bullet like anything else."

Ms. Phillips pointed to the relative newness of the field itself. "I wouldn't want the data to be used in a way that's not appropriate or fair or effective, but beyond that is this issue of whether we have any reliable measures."

Ms. Winship said research indicates that the value-added measure is unreliable because indicators can fluctuate from one year to the next.

"A teacher who has high value-added ratings one year could have low value-added ratings the next year," she said. "The bottom line is that the tests on which these data are based were never developed to measure teacher effectiveness."

The report goes on to discuss the significant burden this massive expansion of measurement and evaluation would have on administrators - much as we pointed out a number of weeks ago.

While there is no guarantee that legislators will listen to facts and solid reason, the case has at least been made.

The state budget is no place for complex policy such as teacher evaluation. Such radical changes deserve more careful consideration and broader consultation before being implemented.

The Limits of School Reform

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Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

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