Are we serious about evaluations?

We were reaing an interesting article on development of teacher evaluations in California, that has this passage

The Los Angeles Unified School District rolled out its technology-based teacher evaluation system in August. Seven hundred fifty “pioneer” teachers volunteered to test the new system, featuring a newly-negotiated set of teaching and learning standards. The new framework was devised with input from over 1,000 educators working in small groups. To begin the process, teachers grade themselves (from “ineffective” to “highly effective”) on 63 teaching standards, then fill in a lesson plan template, identifying which of the 63 standards their lesson addresses, and to what degree. Trained observers download the lesson, observe the teacher using it, and enter their own data. Everything but the observation itself is managed online.

Teachers at the September conversation showed a real willingness to reform their own approach to evaluation; not one spoke up to say they would not participate, or be against the new system. Of course, many stated historical concerns: did we really expect that a new system would foster collaboration, when the current system supposedly depends on collaboration but doesn’t produce enough of it? What about principals who are not experts in the teacher’s content area? Are we really going to continue using standardized test scores, when there is so much evidence that many learning gains happen in ways the tests cannot measure?

Cue the screech to a halt sound effect. "The new framework was devised with input from over 1,000 educators working in small groups"

In Ohio, the evaluation system has been half crafted in closed door, smoked filled legislative chambers, with the rest done through a half-baked online comment form and just 18 "meetings" with hand picked teachers.

Are we serious?

Teacher attrition and education policy

One of the genuine major issues facing education is one of teacher attrition. Each year significant numbers of teachers leave the profession. From a human capital perspective, this is hugely expensive and impacts education delivery. A large number of studies have been performed to asses this problem. A recent study, published by the american Education Research Association looked at all the major studies in this area. The study can be found here (pdf). What follows are come of the concluding remarks.

This literature review provides a summary and critical evaluation of the recent published research on the topic of teacher recruitment and retention. We reviewed studies that examined (1) the characteristics of individuals who enter teaching, (2) the characteristics of individuals who remain in teaching, (3) the external characteristics of schools and districts that affect recruitment and retention, (4) compensation policies that affect recruitment and retention, (5) pre-service policies that affect recruitment and retention, and (6) in-service policies that affect recruitment and retention.

The reviewed research offered several consistent findings. The strongest results were those relating to the influence of various factors on attrition due to the widespread availability of longitudinal data sets that track the employment of teachers. Below, we summarize the findings that emerged in the recent empirical research literature.

1. Results that arose fairly consistently regarding the characteristics of individuals who enter the teaching profession were as follows:
• Females formed greater proportions of new teachers than males.
• Whites formed greater proportions of new teachers than minorities, although there is evidence that minority participation rose in the early 1990s.
• College graduates with higher measured academic ability were less likely to enter teaching than were other college graduates. It is possible, however, that these differences were driven by the measured ability of elementary school teachers, who represent the majority of teachers.
• A more tentative finding based on a small number of weaker studies is that an altruistic desire to serve society is one of the primary motivations for pursuing teaching.
2. Several findings emerged with a strong degree of consistency in empirical studies of the characteristics of individuals who leave the teaching profession:
• The highest turnover and attrition rates seen for teachers occurred in their first years of teaching and after many years of teaching when they were near retirement, thus producing a U-shaped pattern of attrition with respect to age or experience.
• Minority teachers tended to have lower attrition rates than White teachers.
• Teachers in the fields of science and mathematics were more likely to leave teaching than teachers in other fields.
• Teachers with higher measured academic ability (as measured by test scores) were more likely to leave teaching.
• Female teachers typically had higher attrition rates than male teachers.
3. Regarding the external characteristics of schools and districts that are related to teacher recruitment and retention rates, the empirical literature provided the following fairly consistent findings:
• Schools with higher proportions of minority, low-income, and low-performing students tended to have higher attrition rates.
• In most studies, urban school districts had higher attrition rates than suburban and rural districts.
• Teacher retention was generally found to be higher in public schools than in private schools.
4. The following statements summarize the consistent research findings regarding compensation policies and their relationship to teacher recruitment and retention:
• Higher salaries were associated with lower teacher attrition.
• Teachers were responsive to salaries outside their districts and their profession.
• In surveys of teachers, self-reported dissatisfaction with salary was associated with higher attrition and decreased commitment to teaching.Teacher Recruitment and Retention
5. Rigorous empirical studies of the impact of pre-service policies on teacher recruitment and retention were sparse. In general, few results emerged across studies, and the following findings were therefore not particularly robust:
• Graduates of nontraditional and alternative teacher education programs appear to have higher rates of retention in teaching than national comparison groups and may differ from traditional recruits in their background characteristics.
• There was tentative evidence that streamlined routes to credentialing provide more incentive to enter teaching than monetary rewards.
• Pre-service testing requirements may adversely affect the entry of minority candidates into teaching.
6. Findings from the research on in-service policies that affect teacher recruitment and retention were as follows:
• Schools that provided mentoring and induction programs, particularly those related to collegial support, had lower rates of turnover among beginning teachers.
• Schools that provided teachers with more autonomy and administrative support had lower levels of teacher attrition and migration.
• A tentative finding was that accountability policies might lead to increased attrition in low-performing schools. The entry, mobility, and attrition patterns summarized

One can see from the results of these studies, creating a lower paid, less secure profession as some current corporate education reform policies would do, would create a situation of worse renention, to the determiment of students. The importance of workplace conditions, classroom resources, and support are also critical, and may be lost without the ability to bargain for them.

Clearly, delivery of high quality education at an affordable cost is a complex subject with many complex variables at play. SB5 and HB153's highly prescriptive, and simplistic appoaches to reform without any broad expert consultation are bound to produce sub-optimal results. Ohio should take advantage of it's localized control and delivery of education, and its vast expert resources in education and pedagogy to experiment in reform before committing to a one size fits all simplistic approach.

A second literature review on teacher attrition an be found here.

Evaluations gone wild

Now that teacher evaluations are the latest education reform fad, all manner of crazy ideas are being put forward, and in some cases, being implements.

Local Teachers' Merit Pay Hinges on How Well They Engage with Parents

At Wendell High School, teachers will receive merit bonuses based on the percentage of parents who show up for the conferences.
[...]
Wendell Superintendent Greg Lowe said his district decided to base teacher bonuses on parent participation in high school conferences because it’s been a problem in the past.
[...]
Up to 70 percent of the possible bonus school employees can receive is based on how many parents show up for conferences throughout the year.

In order to earn the maximum bonus, 40 percent of parents must attend. Lowe said the percentage of parents who attended the first conference of the year was “way above that.”aaf1db459719.html#ixzz1btdJ5e6K

That may be one extreme example, but it is hardly the only one. We're also going to be using very young children to evaluate teachers, simply because, well, we can

D.C. public school second-graders will take the DC CAS for the first time this spring, part of an effort to expand the pool of teachers eligible to be evaluated on the “value-added” they bring to student test scores. Until recently, only grades 3 through 8 and high school sophomores took the exams.

Extending the CAS to second grade means that third-grade reading and math teachers will enter IMPACT’s “Group 1,” where half of their evaluation will be determined by their students’ ability to exceed projected levels of annual growth. DCPS needs second-grade test data to assemble a predictive model for the third-graders.

Teachers will now have to test their second grade students so that third grade teachers can be evaluated using test scores! It's like some circular logic of insanity.

Lost in all of this is whether it actually improves the quality of education, let alone the cost in time, money and moral. We really are in a period of reform gone wild.

Are Ohio's Republicans threatening to pass SB5 again if it is defeated?

After the SB5 debate last night, State Sen Niehaus was asked "If you look at the polls they seem to indicate that voters, even though they are polling against SB5 support portions of it, are you prepared in the senate to move forward worth separate legislation if this fails next month?"

State Sen. Neihaus responded, "Well I think Senator Faber spoke to it, I mean the issues that drove the necessities of having SB5 or issue 2 haven't changed. were on an unsustainable path we cannot continue paying the cost of local government level or state level so those fundamental factors have not changed so we have not prepared anything at this point, given the fact that the situation will remain exactly the same on Nov. 10, then we certainly have an obligation to the voters and residents of Ohio to find a way to make sure, to ensure the continuation of local government services in a reasonable way"

You can fast forward to the 2minute 37 mark for the exchange

I cannot imagine anything that would great more chaos and anger than thwarting the will of Ohio's voters.

When Governors Talk Education, It's About the Economy, Stupid

Interesting.

Most governors are fond of talking about education—why it needs to be improved, how they're going to improve it, the consequences of not improving it, and so on.

But when governors attempt to use the bully pulpit to sell their ideas about education to the public, what are their favored rhetorical themes? A new analysis examines that question, and finds that governors overwhelmingly choose to frame education as important for economic reasons, rather than for the development of individual abilities, or as a matter of civic responsibility. And that political strategy has implications for society and its schools, the researchers say.

The analysis, published in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership, is based on a detailed review of governors' "state of the state" addresses between 2001 and 2008. Why focus on those speeches? Because they're the most widely reported examples of gubernatorial rhetoric, and, the record shows, they typically provide an accurate roadmap of where governors' policies are headed, according to the authors.
[...]
Over the time period studied, the authors found that governors defined the importance of education in economic terms much more often—62 percent of the time—than they did in other ways.

Governors touched on the importance of education for self-realization only 27 percent of the time. And they connected education to civic responsibility just 7 percent of the time.

Teacher evaluations are becoming big business for private companies

New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually for companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools.

Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating another source of revenue for those in the business of education. More than half of states are changing their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations and adding requirements for the classroom observations used to rate teachers. The main intent of the new laws is to identify which teachers are doing a good, bad, or mediocre job and to help them improve. One early outcome of such recent legislation, however, is a booming market that sells services and products to help states and school districts scrambling to meet the new standards.

“It’s an incredibly heavy lift for states,” says Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. “Some have contracted out big pieces of it, whether it’s someone internal in the state or an outside provider.”

Nonprofit groups and for-profit companies alike are vying for contracts to design evaluations, train teachers and principals to use them, and set up online platforms to help sort the data that schools will be collecting. Private foundation money is subsidizing some of the contracts, but districts are also spending millions of public dollars, much of it from the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” initiative.

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