Teachers comments hit with bullets

The Governor's teacher liaison has published a draft memo condensing over 1,200 educator comments into an awful lot of cut & paste bullet points. As noted by StateImpact, these bullets have been arbitrarily lumped into 5 categories

• Big Concern #1: Who would / could / should evaluate a teacher under this new system?
• Big Concern #2: What would / could / should be used to evaluate a teacher (or administrator) under this new system?
• Big Concern #3: How would / could / should student growth be measured?
• Big Concern #4: How would / could / should this new system lead to a teacher’s growth?
• Big Concern #5: How would / could / should my pay change if we move to performance compensation?

Not included in this document is any mention of collective bargaining, even though a significant number of teachers expressed that local collective bargaining was the best mechanism to formulate evaluations and pay. It's also not possible to determine the weight to apply to any of these bullet points based on either frequency or validity, but as noted, this is a working draft document.

In the mean time we will continue to publish a wide selection of raw comments. The memo can be found below.

Concerns Ideas Memo

What teachers are telling the Governor: Day 1

The Governor and his education Czar, Bob Sommers, have been requesting teacher input via a web form as they attempt to design a teacher evaluation and merit pay system. We here at JTF continue to believe the best way to achieve this isn't through random submissions via the web, but in a more deliberative and collaborative manner with stakeholders and subject matter experts.

But since this common sense approach has been set aside, we thought we should share the input teachers and others are providing the Governor through is website governor.ohio.gov/Contact/Teachers.aspx. We obtained these responses via a public records request. We'll publish a representative selection of responses each day. We have decided not to publish the names or contact information of any respondants.

Subject: "Merit Pay"
Dear Governor Kasich,
My first suggestions is to create a team of teachers and administrators to head this committee. We need people with a background and degree in education. A qualified person would have to have been in a classroom setting in their adult life. A person with a business degree would not be qualified to discuss this issue. A set criteria would need to be developed based on a set number of students in the classroom. You can not judge someone who has 20 students in a classroom verses a teacher with 30 students in the classroom in the same manner. The amount of students who are at risk or have special needs would need to be spread out evenly throughout the teachers at each grade level. That way the test scores would be more even throughout the grade level. This is just my first few thoughts concerning "fair" merit pay. I will continue to send emails concerning this issue.
Thank you,
----- -------
Highland Local School District
Medina, Ohio

Subject: Evaluate this...
I'd like to ask the Governor to take on a typical American class of 45 low-income mixed grade junior high students in an inner city school himself for at least one month and allow a panel of senior teachers (20 years+ experience) to evaluate his ability to lead in this situation and to bet his governorship on getting success for learning with this underfunded class of kids while on a teacher's wage.

Subject: fair method to pay teachers fairly
Governor, I am a retired teacher in Ohio after a 31 year career in Trumbull County. Considering all they do, much of it "off the clock", teachers have never been paid what they are worth and probably never will. But, for the largest majority, teachers are quite intelligent, tending toward altruism, and fair minded folks. The best way to come close to making sure they are payed fairly is to KEEP AND CONTINUE USING COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.

Maybe the process needs a bit of an overhaul, but to get rid of it totally is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Collective bargaining may not be in our country's constitution, but intelligent people over a long and intense history hammered out this process and it is a good one, very much in keeping with democratic principles. All people in this country have the right to speak for themselves in order to be treated fairly. All people of the world have this right whether it is honored or not. Most especially in the USA, that right should always be honored.

Collective bargaining for all public employees, including teachers, needs to be maintained in Ohio and restored or instituted in all other states where the process either doesn't exist or is being threatened. Thank you,

Subject: Fair pay for teachers
Governor Kasich,
“Fairness” cannot be legislated. The complexities are too subtle, and too large, to be encompassed in any law. The fair way to arrive at fair compensation and fair benefits for teachers is through collective bargaining.
That’s all!
Sincerely,

Finally for today,

Subject: No Subject
Funding for public education has been identified as illegal for years. You should be doing something to make funding more equitable so students' have the same advantages in their schools across the state; instead you want to increase salaries in salary heavy districts. Teachers who usually have the highest success rate also usually work in the wealthiest districts. The rich will get richer and we poor will stay poor.

We'll bring you more thoughts and comments tomorrow - we have over 1,300 to go through...

In Ohio, Charter School Expansion By Income, Not Performance

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the “pilot district” for charters) and in the “Ohio 8” urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a “challenged district,” as measured by whether the district received a state “report card” rating of “academic watch” or “academic emergency.” This is a performance-based standard.

Under this system, there was of course very rapid charter proliferation in Lucas County and the “Ohio 8” districts. Only a small number of other districts (around 20-30 per year) “met” the performance-based standard. As a whole, the state’s current charter law was supposed to “open up” districts for charter schools when the districts are not doing well.

Starting next year, the state is adding a fourth criterion: Any district with a “performance index” in the bottom five percent for the state will also be open for charter expansion. Although this may seem like a logical addition, in reality, the change offends basic principles of both fairness and educational measurement.

[readon2 url="http://shankerblog.org/?p=3652"]Read more...[/readon2]

Why educators oppose SB5 and vote no on issue 2

Here are some of the reasons educators and educational support professionals are opposed to SB5 and will be voting no on Issue 2

Issue 2 is Unfair

"Teachers care deeply about our kids. When I discovered that special education students in my school district didn't have the books and resources they needed, I turned to my colleagues. The union contract helped my students get the tools they needed. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2. I know that without collective bargaining, my special needs students would fall through the cracks—and that's just not fair for them, or anyone else."

—Marjorie Punter, special education teacher, Dayton, Ohio

Issue 2 is Unsafe

"I take my job very seriously. After all, parents trust me to make sure their child is safe. It's a huge responsibility, and I'm afraid Issue 2 will put our kids' safety in jeopardy. For me, that's just too much to risk, which is why I am voting NO on Issue 2."

—Ian Ruck, bus driver, Pataskala, Ohio

Issue 2 Hurts Us All

“As a teacher and a mother, I worry about our children. Politicians may think they are fixing our schools, but they haven't spent any time in the classroom, and their one-size-fits-all reforms are risking our children’s future. Our kids are not widgets, and shortchanging them is not only irresponsible and shortsighted, but it hurts us all. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2.”

—Kyley Richardson, high school Spanish teacher, Continental, Ohio

Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

As more and more states push legislation tying teacher evaluations to student achievement – a policy incentivized by the federal Race to the Top program – many are scrambling to put data systems in place that can accurately connect teachers to their students. But in a world of student mobility, teacher re-assignments, co-teaching, and multiple service providers, determining the roster of students to attribute to a teacher is more complicated than it may sound.
[...]
Jane West, vice president of policy, programs, and professional issues for the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, stressed that while there's a need to track the performance of teacher-education graduates, "we have a long way to go" before the data can be considered reliable.

Teachers who leave the state, teach out-of-field, or move to private schools are nearly impossible to track, she said. And teachers in non-tested subjects and grades are out of the mix as well. Last year, the University of Central Florida was only able to get student-achievement data for 12 percent of its graduating class, yet that information was reported publicly. "What's the threshold?" West asked. "Where's the check to ensure that's a valid and reliable measure? It needs to be more than 12 percent."

In all, the Data Quality Campaign’s conference was tightly managed and left little opportunity for audience participation, offering attendees a controlled (though still controversial) takeaway: that improved student achievement hinges on improving the teacher-student data link.

[readon2 url="http://aacte.org/index.php?/Media-Center/AACTE-in-the-News/linking-student-data-to-teachers-a-complex-task-experts-say.html"]Read the entire article..[/readon2]

Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts

Consider this scenario. You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful, and expensive treatment— and you have to pay for it. What she doesn’t tell you—because she has not consulted the research – is that most studies show the treatment is ineffective and fraught with negative side-effects. You go through the procedure, suffer severe pain, and spend a lot of money. Unfortunately, as with most patients, the procedure proves ineffective. You later uncover the research your doctor failed to consult. When you ask why she didn’t use this evidence, she answers, “Who pays attention to studies? I have years of clinical experience. Besides, the protocol seemed like it ought to work.”

Does that sound like malpractice? It does to us. Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors. Not so in most of our workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being and organizational performance. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

No workplace practice is as important—and apparently vexing—as pay. Many people believe that pay for-performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is implemented again and again to solve performance problems -- even in settings where evidence shows it is ineffective. Consider the recent decision to end New York City’s teacher bonus program after wasting three years and 56 million dollars. As this newspaper reported in July, a Rand Corporation study found this effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.” This bad news could have been predicted before squandering all that time and money.The failure of such programs to boost student performance has been documented for decades. A careful review of pay for performance in schools in the 1980s showed these programs rarely lasted more than five years and consistently failed to improve student performance. The 300 page Rand report emphasizes that (although exceptions exist) evidence against the efficacy of teacher incentive pay in U.S. schools continues to grow stronger and is especially evident in the most rigorous studies.

This practice doesn’t just waste money. As Chicago economist Steve Levitt and others show, strong incentive programs can entice – or scare -- teachers and administrators to “cheat” on the tests, either by providing students with questions and answers in advance or changing student’s answer sheets to increase apparent performance. Recent well-publicized cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and elsewhere could have been foreseen by anyone who read and heeded this research. Building a culture of cheating in schools corrupts both students and teachers for no good purpose.

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