Dr. Newquist says read this article, and we should!
This example from Washington, D.C., probably isn't enough to get Governor Daugaard to see the error of his ways and veto HB 1234, his signature education reform legislation. But it seems worth noting that a value-added teacher evaluation system much like what the Governor plans to impose on South Dakota's schools has gotten at least one aspiring D.C. teacher with positive evaluations fired:
By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own.
"It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation.
He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings.
Two months later, she was fired.
Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers [Bill Turque].
Now read the entire article (and Troy Jones most definitely will!), and you'll find that Wysocki started off somewhat slow in the D.C. district. She came from a private school in Washington state that didn't focus on testing. In her rookie year as a full-bird teacher, she got low scores on classroom evaluations (some 2's on a 1-4 scale). She took heed and improved her performance in her second year, won praise from administrators and parents, and bumped the low 2's on her first-year evals up to 3's and 4's. She was still far from the greatest teacher, but she was doing exactly what we want to see in new teachers: getting to know her kids and the system, learning from her mistakes, and becoming a better professional.
But her kids' test scores sandbagged her and pushed her talents out of the district.
So there's an anecdote to back up the broader indictment of value-added measures offered by psychology professor David Willingham.
Governor Daugaard, I know it's a long shot. I know HB 1234 is so big for you that you might even throw a little ceremony for your cronies to come cheer your signature. But if you'd like to have a come-to-Jesus moment (or what would we say in public education... come to Dewey? come to Gatto?), there's a fair amount of evidence that your specific proposals, particularly the test-based teacher evaluations that remained unchanged in every iteration of your bill, will actually get rid of good teachers. You could declare mission accomplished on starting a serious conversation about education, veto the bill, and save the schools (and yourself) a lot of trouble.
* * * * *
You might dismiss Wysocki's story as some readers dismissed William Johnson's critique: mere whining from "bad" teachers. If that's the case, then try this critique from a Brooklyn teacher whose kids' test scores put her in the 95th percentile. Julie Cavanagh isn't celebrating; she's saying the tests used to rate her so highly mean nothing:
There is no question that teachers are responsible for the learning and growth that take place inside of their classrooms. However, standardized tests are just not a reliable measure of learning. If we are truly interested in increasing the quality of education, the conversation surrounding accountability must shift.
Imagine if doctors were held accountable based on the death rate of their patients, regardless of environmental factors and whether prescribed treatment was followed.
Imagine if firefighters were held accountable based on fire injuries and deaths, even though they didn't start the fires, their budgets had been cut and most of the homes in their district didn't have fire alarms.
That would be unreasonable. So why do we only apply this impossible standard to teachers?
No standardized test score can quantify what we do. In fact, we succeed in spite of — not because of — the testing culture that has pervaded our classrooms since Mayor Bloomberg took office [Julie Cavanagh, "Test Scores Mean Nothing," New York Daily News, 2012.03.04].
Instead of throwing money at more tests, Cavanagh says we should spend our dollars on proven student boosters like smaller classes and experienced teachers.
Update 22:10 MST: By the way, the math scores on those New York tests have a 35% margin of error; the English tests, 53%.
Actually, Doctors are held accountable by their outcomes, which does consider and factor the circumstances of the complications. This is possible in education as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh22HBZMHvM
Watch this presentation, read the study, and then make some informed contributions to this debate. There certainly is room for debate, but not in the superficial ways Dems and teacher's unions have done so far.
Also, I realize you want to give people time to develop as teachers, but every year you let a bad teacher hang around is another year where students don't learn as much.
This debate is focused too much on teachers and not enough on students.
Excuse me, I don't see superficiality in the way Dems and the teachers union have opposed HB 1234. And while I agree that we should not keep bad teachers on staff, current law gives school boards all the power they need to eliminate such teachers.
If casting this as a "War on Teachers" is not superficial to you, then I will excuse you.
Ultimately it is about what is best for students, not teachers. And the best, most current research available suggests HB1234 would be good for students (see link above). Also, good teachers will be getting paid more.
If "War on Teachers" isn't superficial, do you mind, "Progressives want the Status Quo in Education" or "Opponents Put Teachers First, Students Last" or "Keep More Bad Teachers" etc? No? Well I agree, similar to the slogan used by the unions and teachers, slogans like these actually dumb down the debate.
Tests are almost definitively not good for students. I'll mention once again the lack of teaching conic sections in high school algebra. Newton developed calculus specifically to use and calculate conic sections, and by not teaching the basics in high school, it's much harder to teach them in college.
Teaching for tests is a horrible practice. Most people in charge of writing the tests are not teachers, or experts in the field of education, or even experts in the field of mathematics/science/what have you. The requirements for standardizes tests are fairly arbitrary and do not represent the knowledge needed in certain fields in the future, but rather whatever the test developers decided was "good".
I'll give you a personal story. In my small town high school, we had two math teachers. One was my mother, the other was one of the good ol' boys who got the job because he has about 4 relatives on the school board.
Because of the times they were hired, my mother ended up teaching the 7th and 8th graders, and the "trouble" kids (Any teacher can tell you about the kids who do not, no matter what, want to learn anything). The other math teacher got the smart students. The upper level math classes that weren't required, but actually took some amount of intelligence to do.
My mother spent countless hours doing work outside of school preparing for class (70+ hours per week working, roughly), and very carefully made sure every student understood what she was teaching (and having been taught by her, she was quite good. Certainly not Teacher of the Century, but quite good all the same).
The other teacher spent about 10 minutes lecturing, then sat down at his desk to watch sports online.
My mother carefully taught the students the math they needed to know to go on to higher level math. The other taught whatever was going to be on the test. He would literally tell us what types of questions had and had not been on previous standardized tests, and specifically taught us how to do each problem, so we could do well.
He has always been considered the better teacher, when from personal experience, he does not teach. I restarted math from Algebra when I got to college because I had no idea what any of the math was. He was objectively awful, and yet he is considered superior because of standardized testing (and because he fudges grades to allow athletes to keep playing, but that's another story).
The point is, standardized testing is not good for students, and it is not good for teachers. It does not find which teachers are bad, and which are good. In fact, it merely supports the main lesson you learn in high school, which is that you get a lot more out of life when you let someone else do all the leg work, and then take credit for it. Standardized testing is a war on teachers and a war on students. It helps no one.
Well put, Carter. HB 1234 will not be good for anyone. It does not ensure more pay for good teachers; it may direct more pay to the best local-politics players.