czar

Czar leaves as "work calls"

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It was announced in late breaking news that the Governor's education Czar, Robert Sommers will be leaving his highly paid post to start his own education consulting company. In his own words

Shortly after his appointment by the governor, the Plain Dealer ran an article with the headline "Can Ohio Gov. John Kasich's education adviser and state superintendent co-exist?", the answer was no, since Sommers was seeking the post for himself.

But even as Sommers was passed over and Stan Heffner assumed the role, the question still remained. Could an education Czar and State Superintendent co-exist? Stories, like this one abounded of the Governor's office of 21st century education duplicating and working at crossed purposes to the Department of Education.

He leaves while Ohio's school funding mechanism is in shambles, school budgets in ruins, and a workable teacher evaluation system is yet to be developed. He advocated for the policies that have led to this situation, and leaves for corporate pastures greener now that the destruction is complete, and all the actual work left to be done putting it back together.

He acted like a corporate raider to the end, and it's not like we didn't see it coming.

We constantly call on the administration to include educators in the development of policy. Not because we believe they have all the right answers, though they have many. Not because they have all the experience, though they have much. But, because unlike those who espouse the latest fads, they are the ones who will still be on the front lines executing policy and doing the work of educating our children long after the fadsters have gone.

That's the real work that calls.

Lesson Learned?

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Just a few short days ago we wrote

Their difficulties will certainly have been further complicated by severe funding cuts as a result of HB153 raiding school budgets, and alienating most school districts and communities with bills like SB5 and HB136. It's hard to collaborate with hundreds of stakeholders when the previous 12 months have been spent attacking them and their mission.

If the administration have learned this lesson we should expect to see more outreach and consultation, and eventually arrive at a funding formula that works for most. Otherwise the administration is going to find itself having traveled a bridge too far.

any signs that the administration is going to take a more collaborative, friendly approach? Erm, no.

That's a recent tweet of the governor's education Czar, Robert Sommers. The last sentence he refers to?

What happened at the OSBA is a warning to old-school traditionalists: Adapt to the public's call for meaningful school reform or be left on the sidelines.

Sounds a lot like the old rhetoric of get on the bus or be run over by it. Lessons can be hard to learn.

Students are not widgets

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We wrote the other day about the bi-annual teacher observation provision in S.B.5 that if implemented, would cause a serious administrative strain on schools. Today, promoted by a Dispatch article, we want to expand our look at the other proposed teacher evaluation policies being pushed by the governor and his education Czar

Gov. John Kasich wants teachers to be paid based on performance: They should earn more if they can prove that their students are learning.

But the tool at the heart of Kasich's merit-pay proposals is reliable with only 68 percent confidence. That's why the state plans an upgrade to make "value-added" results 95 percent reliable.

With 146,000 teachers in Ohio, even at 95% accuracy, if that can be believed, 7,300 teacher evaluations would be based on inaccurate data. That's bad enough, if only that were the problem.

But let's just take a step back for a second. What is value added assessment?

Value added assessment assumes that changes in test scores from one year to the next accurately reflect student progress in learning. It evaluates teachers by tracking progress and linking it to schools and teachers. These estimates can be used as indicators of teachers’ and schools’ effectiveness. Sounds good, right ?

In theory. In practice many teachers do not teach classes that are tested, and in many schools, as is pointed out by this terrific article, who is responsible isn't so cut and dried either

In the school where I work teachers are expected to teach reading “across the curriculum” meaning that all teachers are supposed to teach reading. Also, all teachers are supposed to teach writing “across the curriculum.” So, students would have to be tested in those areas as well. But if it taught across the curriculum, how would we know to which teacher to attribute the child’s performance?

Indeed, how would we know?

When you get beyond these obvious problems with value added assessments, there are also serious methodological problems too, as is brought to light by this paper from the Economic Policy institute

there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.

For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers.

Oh.

Back to that Dispatch article

Robert Sommers, Kasich's top education adviser, said he thinks Ohio's accountability system is ready for merit pay. Value-added has been used in Ohio only to rate schools, not teachers.

"As far as I'm concerned, it is a very, very solid system," he said. "It has had lots of years of maturation."

The Governors education Czar is simply not correct. The system as it pertains to teacher evaluation is not accurate enough, has demonstrably problematic statistical issues, and requires deeper study.

Students are not widgets being processed on a production line by a single teacher. Modern education is a team effort, and attempts to isolate individual contributions to that team effort are going to require approaches far more robust.

Sommers sweats gifted student question

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The reckless budget includes moving $60 million for gifted student services into a larger pot of state aid with no spending requirements. As budgets are slashed across the board the clear ramification of this will be the wholesale elimination of gifted student programs around the state, as districts use this money for general revenue and operating purposes.

This is proving to be politically difficult for the administration. One the one hand it wants to claim it cares about excellence in education, but the realities, with examples like this, are running contrary.

These difficulties can be seen and heard in this interview with the administration's education czar, Mr. Sommers