Stop blaming teachers

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines scapegoat as one that bears the blame for others, or one that is the object of irrational hostility. Those of us in the education profession would define scapegoat this way: teacher.

Scapegoating teachers has become so popular with policymakers and politicians, the media, and even members of the public that it has blurred the reality of what’s really happening in education. What’s more, it’s eroding a noble profession and wreaking havoc on student learning, says Kevin Kumashiro, author of Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture.

In his book, Kumashiro, president of the National Association for Multicultural Education and professor of Asian American Studies and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explains how scapegoating public-school teachers, teacher unions, and teacher education masks the real, systemic problems in education. He also demonstrates how trends like market-based reforms and fast-track teacher certification programs create obstacles to an equitable education for all children.

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Are you an entertainer?

As we seeing an explosion of technology both in our personal lives and being pushed into the classroom, studies like these are important, and interesting.

There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus.

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.
[...]
Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention.

“I’m an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention,” said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

You can read the entire study from Common Sense Media, here, titled "Children, Teens, and Entertainment Media: The View from the Classroom."

Certainly provocative.

2 new studies question value add measures

Evidence is overwhelming, as yet more studies show that using value add to measure teacher quality is fraught with error.

Academic tracking in secondary education appears to confound an increasingly common method for gauging differences in teacher quality, according to two recently released studies.

Failing to account for how students are sorted into more- or less-rigorous classes—as well as the effect different tracks have on student learning—can lead to biased "value added" estimates of middle and high school teachers' ability to boost their students' standardized-test scores, the papers conclude.

"I think it suggests that we're making even more errors than we need to—and probably pretty large errors—when we're applying value-added to the middle school level," said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, whose study examines the application of a value-added approach to middle school math scores.

High-school-level findings from a separate second study, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., complement Mr. Harris' paper.

"At the elementary level, [value-added] is a pretty reliable measure, in terms of predicting how teachers will perform the following year," Mr. Jackson said. "At the high school level, it is quite a bit less reliable, so the scope for using this to improve student outcomes is much more limited."

The first study mentioned in this article concludes(emphasis ours)

We test the degree to which variation in measured performance is due to misalignment versus selection bias in a statewide sample of middle schools where students and teachers are assigned to explicit “tracks,” reflecting heterogeneous student ability and/or preferences. We find that failing to account for tracks leads to large biases in teacher value-added estimates.

A teacher of all lower track courses whose measured value-added is at the 50th percentile could increase her measured value-added to the 99th percentile simply by switching to all upper-track courses. We estimate that 75-95 percent of the bias is due to student sorting and the remainder due to test misalignment.

We also decompose the remaining bias into two parts, metric and multidimensionality misalignment, which work in opposite directions. Even after accounting for explicit tracking, the standard method for estimating teacher value-added may yield biased estimates.

The second study, replicates the findings and concludes

Unlike in elementary-school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding tracks effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, algebra teachers have modest effects and there is little evidence of English teacher effects.

Unlike in elementary-school, value-added estimates are weak predictors of teachers’ future performance. Results indicate that either (a) teachers are less influential in high-school than in elementary-school, or (b) test-scores are a poor metric to measure teacher quality at the high-school level.

Corporate education reformers need to begin to address the science that is refuting their policies, the sooner this happens, the less damage is likely to be wrought.

Do Politicians Know Anything About Schools and Education? Anything?

Diane Ravitch poses a dozen piercing questions on education and school policy. Some of them turn conventional thinking on its ear, and each could be a starting point for reporting on elections, from the presidency on down to local school boards

1. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of charter schools - that is, schools that are privately managed and deregulated. Are you aware that studies consistently show that charter schools don't get better results than regular public schools? Are you aware that studies show that, like any deregulated sector, some charter schools get high test scores, many more get low scores, but most are no different from regular public schools? Do you recognize the danger in handing public schools and public monies over to private entities with weak oversight? Didn't we learn some lessons from the stock collapse of 2008 about the risk of deregulation?

2. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of merit pay for teachers based on test scores. Are you aware that merit pay has been tried in the schools again and again since the 1920s and it has never worked? Are you aware of the exhaustive study of merit pay in the Nashville schools, conducted by the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt, which found that a bonus of $15,000 per teacher for higher test scores made no difference?

3. Are you aware that Milwaukee has had vouchers for low-income students since 1990, and now state scores in Wisconsin show that low-income students in voucher schools get no better test scores than low-income students in the Milwaukee public schools? Are you aware that the federal test (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) shows that - after 21 years of vouchers in Milwaukee - black students in the Milwaukee public schools score on par with black students in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana?

4. Does it concern you that cyber charters and virtual academies make millions for their sponsors yet get terrible results for their students?

5. Are you concerned that charters will skim off the best-performing students and weaken our nation's public education system?=

6. Are you aware that there is a large body of research by testing experts warning that it is wrong to judge teacher quality by student test scores? Are you aware that these measures are considered inaccurate and unstable, that a teacher may be labeled effective one year, then ineffective the next one? Are you aware that these measures may be strongly influenced by the composition of a teacher's classroom, over which she or he has no control? Do you think there is a long line of excellent teachers waiting to replace those who are (in many cases, wrongly) fired?

7. Although elected officials like to complain about our standing on international tests, did you know that students in the United States have never done well on those tests? Did you know that when the first international test was given in the mid-1960s, the United States came in 12th out of 12? Did you know that over the past half-century, our students have typically scored no better than average and often in the bottom quartile on international tests? Have you ever wondered how our nation developed the world's most successful economy when we scored so poorly over the decades on those tests?

8. Did you know that American schools where less than 10% of the students were poor scored above those of Finland, Japan and Korea in the last international assessment? Did you know that American schools where 25% of the students were poor scored the same as the international leaders Finland, Japan and Korea? Did you know that the U.S. is #1 among advanced nations in child poverty? Did you know that more than 20% of our children live in poverty and that this is far greater than in the nations to which we compare ourselves?

9. Did you know that family income is the single most reliable predictor of student test scores? Did you know that every testing program - the SAT, the ACT, the NAEP, state tests and international tests - shows the same tight correlation between family income and test scores? Affluence helps - children in affluent homes have educated parents, more books in the home, more vocabulary spoken around them, better medical care, more access to travel and libraries, more economic security - as compared to students who live in poverty, who are more likely to have poor medical care, poor nutrition, uneducated parents, more instability in their lives. Do you think these things matter?

10. Are you concerned that closing schools in low-income neighborhoods will further weaken fragile communities?

11. Are you worried that annual firings of teachers will cause demoralization and loss of prestige for teachers? Any ideas about who will replace those fired because they taught too many low-scoring students?

12. Why is it that politicians don't pay attention to research and studies?

Add end And another question that came to mind after the initial posting of this article:

13. Do you know of any high-performing nation in the world that got that way by privatizing public schools, closing those with low test scores, and firing teachers? The answer: none.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a distinguished historian of American education.

UPDATED: Oops, You're fired!

If you read a lot of corporate education reform "studies" as we do, there's one common theme running through most of them. Much like Mitt Romney, they would really like to fire people, teachers specifically.

The rate at which they want to fire teachers varies, some only want to fire 1 in 20, others would really prefer to fire 1 in 5. The Governor himself would like nothing more than to fire some teachers too (though taking his axe to the states education budget is already doing the heavy lifting)

"We pay good teachers more, but I'm going to suggest that we hold all teachers accountable. Teachers who can't teach shouldn't be in the classroom. ... If we've got teachers who can't do the job there's no excuse for leaving them in the classroom."

The latest round of this fad came in a much ballyhooed study, with front page New York Times treatment.

The New York Times published an article on a new National Bureau of Economic Research study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers on their students
[...]
After a discussion on the costs of keeping a minimally effective teacher, one of the authors, John N. Friedman, remarks, “the message is to fire people sooner rather than later.” His co-author, Raj Chetty, goes further: “Of course there are going to be mistakes—teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.”

That's an uncharacteristic moment of truth. In the desire to fire lots of teachers using unproven data models and evaluation rubrics, there's going to be some collateral damage. Sure you may have spent tens of thousands of dollars, and years of your life earning your degrees so you can pursue your passion, but if some secret proprietary data model says you've got to go, well, them's the breaks, and besides, there's always some casino dealer TFA recruit with 5 weeks of training to ride to the rescue on their white horse.

Nobody want's to see chronically bad teachers in the classroom, but why don't these corporate backed studies and reforms first turn to employing policies to improve struggling teachers abilities, instead of immediately reaching for the ejector cord? Where are the think tank studies on what an effective intervention program would look like? Where's the money for professional development? The Governor, in his own words says he wants to pay good teachers more, when is that going to happen? It's all stick and no carrot.

Who would want to work in a profession that treats its workforce in such a callous and arbitrary manner?

When it comes to increasing the effectiveness of the teacher workforce, school districts should first give an ineffective teacher a chance and the necessary supports to improve. If the teacher does not improve, the district should fire her. But if a teacher can be fired—or believes that she could be— due to a statistical error, the impact on the quality of teaching workforce could be disastrous. Why would a bright young professional choose a career where she could be the mistake?

That's a big important question. It's also a question we have an answer to. Michelle Rhee's legacy of firing "ineffective teachers" is now in plain view, and the view isn't pretty

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Washington Post reporter Bill Turque's analysis of Michelle Rhee's legacy one year after she left the D.C. public schools. Turque writes about the "churn and burn" in the D.C. teacher corps since the introduction of the controversial new IMPACT teacher evaluation and merit pay system: One-third of all teachers on the payroll in September 2007 no longer work for the district, and inexperienced teachers are more clustered than ever in low-income schools and neighborhoods. We know this is problematic because DC's own data shows that 22 percent of teachers with six to 10 years of experience are rated "highly effective," compared to just 12 percent of teachers with less than six years experience.

Policies the describe the need to fire lots of people will have a significant, negative, first order effect on the entire workforce. In the end, perhaps like Mitt Romney, those proposing such solutions just like to fire people.

UPDATE

Speaking of liking to fire people. Wow

Teach for America ‘research’ questioned

Recently I exchanged emails with a Teach for America employee in my city. On my last exchange, I tried to press her to answer at least one of my questions.

"Given the choice, would you see a doctor with 5 weeks of training or a certified doctor? A lawyer? An actuary?"

Answering with a ‘yes’ would be absurd. Answering with a ‘no’ would indicate a blatant disrespect for teachers.

Unfortunately this disrespect is exactly what we have going on in our country at this time: a blame-the-teacher mentality that ignores real world issues and concerns.

The TFA employee directed me to the organization's "research" page where TFA claims this: "A large and growing body of independent research shows that Teach For America corps members make as much of an impact on student achievement as veteran teachers."

This claim, based on the "studies" supplied by TFA, is misleading at best and demonstrably false at worst. I read all of the 12 "studies" available on TFA's website, and here is what I found.

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