Teacher World

Some good news for a change for educators! This past Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan met with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and delivered a strong message that No Child Left Behind needs to be revamped because it sets too many schools up for failure, something teachers have been trying to say since its inception.

Duncan stated that, according to his department, it is estimated that four out of five schools in the United States, which could be as high as 82%, will be unable to reach the NCLB benchmark which states that all students will test at a proficient level by 2014. (Educators have made this same claim since the bill was passed in 2001, but our concerns have fallen upon deaf ears. Ironic that suddenly the Department of Education has come to a conclusion we have known from the start, isn’t it?)

Duncan further stated that when this current year’s test scores are counted, the numbers could reveal that our nation’s schools are already at risk, but he is not putting the blame on schools, which seems to be the favorite past time of many these days. Instead, he is putting the blame where it finally belongs; on No Child Left Behind.

“This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk,” Duncan told the committee.

One of the contributing factors making it increasingly more difficult to reach the goal of 100% proficiency is that each year the standards are higher than the year before. As a result, Duncan told the committee that the percentage of schools that are not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress could rise from the current level of 37% to 82%.

He further stated that all states and districts have to “implement the same set of interventions in every school that is not meeting AYP, regardless of the individual needs and circumstances of those schools” because they are governed by the same federal law. Duncan called this concept “fundamentally flawed.” He explained, “By mandating and prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, No Child Left Behind took away the ability of local and state educators to tailor solutions to the unique needs of their students.”

Duncan was not just there to ask for the reauthorization and speedy revamping of NCLB; he was also defending President Obama’s budget request for 2012. In his statement, he expressed his concern that the United States under-invests in education compared to higher-performing countries.

Arne Duncan is my new hero, at least at this moment! I admit that I have not always agreed with what he has said or done, and I have frequently taken issue with Race to the Top, one of his pet projects. But hearing these welcome words about NCLB, a law that has angered teachers due to its impossibility, helps to relieve some of the disappointments and worries teachers are going through in these difficult times.

I have blogged that I volunteered to teach in a co-taught, self-contained classroom for at least two years. SPED students make up half of my classroom population. Now, anyone who has worked with these students knows how ridiculous it is to expect that we will be able to get every one of these students to pass the OAA. We have one student who got only 7 questions correct on last year’s math test! Yes, you heard me right! A few of our SPED students will probably pass one or more of this year’s tests, but most will not. How many teachers are going to want to work with these students if they, by law, must get them to reach a level of proficiency on all of their tests? It’s impossible, it’s ludicrous, and it is ultimately unfair to these students who deserve teachers who are excited to work with them, not assigned to do so against their will.

And there are always those students who do not qualify for SPED services but fall between the cracks nonetheless. Getting these students to pass, in spite of multiple attempts at intervention is often equally impossible.

So, while it astounds me that it took this long for those in power to realize that No Child Left Behind was a flawed piece of legislation from the get go, I am grateful that it sounds like it is going to be analyzed more realistically now. When Diane Ravitch, a staunch supporter of NCLB initially, has been speaking out against it and claiming that it will destroy public education, it’s clear that it is long past time to make some necessary changes to this law.

So, thank you, Arne Duncan, because, with these simple words, you have given educators everywhere some real hope for the future at a time when we are desperately searching for any hope at all.

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I have written to you about Diane Ravitch before; a powerful woman well-grounded in education and one-time staunch supporter of No Child Left Behind but now just as staunchly opposed to all that No Child Left Behind stands for. Well, my respect for this woman has grown as she has now spoken out about what is happening in Wisconsin. Here are some of her salient points.

First, she accuses conservative Republican governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, John Kasich of Ohio, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, and Scott Walker of Wisconsin of wanting “to sap the power of public employee unions, especially the teachers’ union, since public education is the single biggest expenditure for every state.”

Thousands of public sector workers have camped out in Wisconsin protesting Walker’s plan to reduce their take-home pay by increasing the amount they will have to contribute to their pension plan and their health care benefits at the same time that they plan to restrict their collective bargaining rights. Walker claims these cutbacks had to be imposed because the state is broke, but, Ravitch claims, “Teachers noticed that he offered generous tax breaks to businesses that were equivalent to the value of their givebacks.”

Ravitch goes on to enumerate the cause of the “simmering rage” felt by the nation’s teachers. “They have grown angry and demoralized over the past two years as attacks on their profession escalated. The much-publicized film Waiting for ‘Superman made the specious claim that ‘bad teachers’ caused low student test scores. A Newsweek cover last year proposed that the key to saving American education was firing bad teachers.”

Following this was the outrage felt by teachers everywhere when the leaders of the Central Falls School District in Rhode Island threatened to fire the whole staff of the town’s only high school due to poor performance on test scores. She points out that what really concerned teachers when they heard this news was the positive way it was received by both the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama, who both felt it was a fine idea, even though there had been no evaluations of anyone at the high school.

Ravitch points to the Race to the Top program as another way that teachers have felt under attack. “The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program intensified the demonizing of teachers, because it encouraged states to evaluate teachers in relation to student scores. There are many reasons why students do well or poorly on tests, and teachers felt they were being unfairly blamed when students got low scores, while the crucial role of families and the students themselves was overlooked,” wrote Ravitch.

Finally, she points to the despair teachers felt in August when we read about the outrageous report in the Los Angeles Times in which this paper rated 6,000 teachers in Los Angeles as either effective or ineffective using the Value Added Model and students’ test scores. As you recall, the publishing of these ratings online led to the apparent suicide of one of these teachers who was rated ineffective, in spite of his consistently good evaluations. But as Ravitch points out, “Testing experts warn that such ratings are likely to be both inaccurate and unstable, but the Times stood by its analysis.”

Now, teachers are facing the latest and most demoralizing attack of all, the plan to abolish our right to due process, our seniority, and, in some states, the loss of collective bargaining rights. Ironically, Ravitch points out, “Actually, the states with the highest performance on national tests are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where teachers belong to unions that bargain collectively for their members.”

She points out that the reason conservative governors want to reduce the power of the unions is because they actively lobby to increase funding for education while reducing class size. If they can shut down teachers unions they also shut down the biggest opposition to making cuts in education.

Ravitch eloquently and masterfully summarizes what those of us in public education are feeling when she concludes: “There has recently been a national furor about school reform. One must wonder how it is possible to talk of improving schools while cutting funding, demoralizing teachers, cutting scholarships to college, and increasing class sizes. The real story in Madison is not just about unions trying to protect their members’ hard-won rights. It is about teachers who are fed up with attacks on their profession. As the attacks on teachers increase and as layoffs grow, there are likely to be more protests like the one that has mobilized teachers and their allies and immobilized the Wisconsin Legislature. “

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Let’s talk about the Value Added Model or VAM, the newest method being pushed to evaluate teachers. It is based on the theory that a teacher’s effectiveness can be judged by measuring the progress that teacher’s students make on standardized tests over the course of the year. It is being suggested that this be the measure with which teachers are retained or let go. It’s the same method of evaluating teachers which was printed in Los Angeles by the L.A. Times, and we all know how that worked out.

Here’s the problem with VAM, according to neatoday’s January/February magazine: “Every respected, independent testing expert in the country agrees that VAM is not a valid or reliable measure for making high-stakes decisions about teacher effectiveness. It is junk science.” And it gives these examples to support their findings:

* The Board on Testing Assessment wrote an open letter to Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan in October, 2009, stating that not enough research had been done on VAM’s validity to use it as a basis for determining teacher effectiveness. It also concluded that a student’s scores can be affected by various factors other than their teacher.
* The Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences published a 36-page analysis of VAM in July, 2010, in which it stated that “more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under the control of the teacher.”
* The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) assembled a panel of experts in August, 2010, who warned against giving substantial weight to VAM scores as a tool for measuring teacher effectiveness.
* Researchers for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis, concluded, “The research base is currently insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions about individual teachers.”
* And in the wake of the L.A. Times debacle, Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker concluded, after an analysis of the study, that its ratings of teachers are racially biased. He cited that the lowest VAM scores were earned by black teachers while the highest were earned by Asian teachers.

Additionally, a policy letter drafted by ten prominent education scholars, including Eva L. Baker, a UCLA professor and co-director of the National Center for Evaluation Standards and Student Testing, and Paul Barton, former director of the Policy Information Center of the Educational Testing Service; Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond; education historian and New York University Professor Diane Ravitch; and several other prominent figures, warns of the danger of linking teacher evaluations to standardized tests. In this letter, they state: “Too many policymakers have recently adopted the misguided belief that improvements in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading can be heavily relied upon to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students. However, even the most sophisticated use of test scores, value added modeling (VAM), is a flawed and inaccurate way to judge whether teachers are effective or ineffective.” They go on to cite evidence from recent research that concluded that VAM was too inaccurate to be used as the primary means of evaluating teachers.

Which brings us full-circle in asking whether VAM scores can be used as a reason for firing teachers. First neatoday states that tenured teachers cannot be fired without “just cause”, and using VAM as that “just cause” is not appropriate when its value has not been proven. Secondly, it explains that if Professor Bruce Baker is correct that VAM is racially disparate, a study would have to exist that proves the validity of using VAM as an accurate measure of teacher effectiveness, and again, no such proof exists.

As part of its report, EPI experts cited these two concerns about the use of VAM:

* It will likely lead to “expensive…litigation in which experts will be called to testify, making the district unlikely to prevail.”
* And it is also likely to “demoralize teachers.”

Shortly after the L.A. Times published its list of the most effective to least effective teachers in local schools in Los Angeles, Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a fifth grade-teacher who was rated less effective according to the Value Added Model, in spite of his “great performance rating” at his school, jumped off a bridge to his death.

The awful tragedy is that a performance measure was used publicly here to demoralize teachers; a measure which has never been proven to be an accurate gauge of a teacher’s effectiveness, a measure which has actually been discounted by reliable sources, including one directly affiliated with the Education Department.  Which can’t help but leave teachers fearful of the future since proposed House Bill 21 is asking for Value-Added Data to be a requirement for renewing licensure which means using VAM as an evaluation tool.

Teachers need to get vocal with their legislators and demand that they vote this bill down, or we all will be held to a standard that has not even been proven to be a fair or accurate evaluative tool. Go to this site and sign a letter against VAM, but speak up now, before it is too late!

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This is the last in my series on Diane Ravitch. I have been blogging about her recent article from the August/September issue of neatoday magazine. In her article, “Stop the Madness”, she explains why she no longer supports NCLB, and she ends her article discussing how we can improve our schools.

According to Ms. Ravitch, “We must first of all have a vision of what good education is.” We should be asking what constitutes a well-educated person, what we want students to learn before they graduate, what we want them to accomplish, and why we educate students. In other words, we need to agree on what education is, what it looks like, and why we want to be a part of it as teachers.

Second, she says we need to look beyond reading and mathematics and decide what other qualities are synonymous with a well-educated, well-rounded student. We want to turn out students who are able to think for themselves, have good character, are able to make good decisions, have courage and humor, and who treat others with compassion and fairness. And we need to teach students to be responsible citizens who make educated decisions by rationally studying different points of view.

Finally, she states that we need to send out academically well-rounded students who are able to use both math and science to understand and solve real problems in their communities and in their world and who can also appreciate and participate in their artistic and cultural heritage. In other words, we need students who participate in  significant ways, who enjoy the world around them, and who are willing and able to work to improve it. We need to teach them about the world in which they live and help them to find their niche within it.

What kind of test could ever adequately measure these truly important things? There is no such test because the true test of these qualities is life and the purposeful living of it. As Diane Ravitch states, “If these are our goals, the current narrow, utilitarian focus of our national testing regime is not sufficient to reach any of them. Indeed, to the extent that we make the testing regime our master, we may see our true goals recede farther and farther into the distance.” She concludes by stating that, if we continue on this current path, we are likely to produce a generation who equate learning with the drudgery of “worksheets, test preparation, and test-taking”.

In her final plea to turn the current tide by doing away with NCLB in the hopes of saving our public schools, Ms. Ravitch wraps up with this eloquent, heart-felt statement: “As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our public schools once again the pride of our nation. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.”

(Diane Ravitch’s article was based on her book entitled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,)

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I have been blogging about Diane Ravitch’s article in the August/September issue of neatoday magazine, entitled “Stop the Madness”. If you have read my previous blogs, you know that Ms. Ravitch has held a number of prestigious positions in the education field and was a staunch supporter of Bush’s NCLB until she began to study the results of these policies and what it has done to public education. Because she is so knowledgeable and makes such valid points, I have been spending intensive time discussing some of her most critical points. So here goes my third blog on what this remarkable woman has to say about NCLB.

One of Ms. Ravitch’s strongest arguments against NCLB states, “NCLB assumed that shaming schools that were unable to lift test scores every year-and the people who work in them-would lead to higher scores. It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals. Perhaps, most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions were wrong.”

I love this statement because it resonates with truth. Public educators and principals are being shamed to improve test scores. Our results are publically displayed every year and compared to other districts’ scores. Even within school systems, individual schools are compared to each other, and those schools that did not produce excellent scores are made to feel inferior in comparison with those who did. In reality, those differences probably had more to do with the difference in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools, which make up each school’s population, than differences in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the schools’ staffs. I have seen it in my own district. For three years in a row now, my elementary school has gotten higher test scores than our sister elementary school. The competition and fear that this has created between our two principals has been extremely unhealthy for both staffs. This is only one sad example of the result of “shaming” schools into achieving higher test scores. Anyone who believes that creating this level of competition and frustration is an educationally sound practice needs to spend some time in schools that are panicked over raising test scores.

I applaud Diane Ravitch for admitting that the policy she initially supported whole-heartedly is flawed and is not “synonymous with good education”. When I look back over my years of teaching, and this will be my 31st, I feel such sadness for young people just starting out in the teaching profession who think that what we are being asked to do is excellent teaching. Somewhere along the way, teachers have metamorphosed from well-rounded, creative lovers-of-passing-on-the-excitement-for-knowledge to test-taking trainers. And while I still love working with kids, and I love being involved in co-teaching and the strategies of co-teaching, I have lost some of the wonder of teaching. As we fast approach 2014, and the ridiculous expectation to achieve 100% passage of state achievement tests, I dread the panic that is going to become synonymous with “good education”.

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Let’s discuss what Diane Ravitch calls “the danger of the culture of testing” that has been created as a result of NCLB, as reported in the August/September 2010 issue of neatoday magazine. Feel free to say a few “amens” and “you’ve-got-that-right-sister” as you read her critical points.

Ms. Ravitch states that “one of the unintended consequences of NCLB” has been the “shrinkage of time available to teach anything other than reading and math”. Since these are the only test scores used to calculate a school’s adequate yearly progress, she claims that teachers feel forced to put much more time into the teaching of these subjects, leaving less time for science, social studies, and the arts. She goes on to say that many schools have even done away with recess in order to better prepare students for math and reading tests.

In our district this year, we are required to attend grade level team meetings which will meet twice a week. Guess what we are discussing and brainstorming in these meetings? We will be looking at formative assessments for (you guessed it) reading and math to identify areas of weakness and collaborate as a grade level to improve upon these skills in order to bring up test scores. What are conspicuously lacking from this list are science, social studies, and the arts. My guess is that most teachers out there would agree that they are spending more time and effort teaching reading and math than in teaching other subjects. And we all know why we are.

Diane voices legitimate concerns too that our focus as teachers has also shifted, due to the emphasis on test scores, from thorough knowledge of the subject matter to test-taking skills and strategies. She cites the use of previous tests, which are available on the Department of Education website, to prepare students and claims that “in urban schools, where there are many low-performing students, drill and practice became a significant part of the daily routine” as a result of NCLB.

Ms. Ravitch, thank you for bravely stating what every teacher out there knows. We teach differently, but we don’t teach better. We teach differently because instead of trying to educate our children, we are trying to get them to pass tests that make our schools look good. And, as a result, we are doing our children a disservice; a disservice we are forced to continue to do because our jobs are on the line. Don’t you just wish we could get back to being real teachers preparing our students for real life and real careers, to be responsible citizens and real community leaders, and to love learning simply for the sake of learning, not to pass a bubble test? Do I hear an “Amen, sister”?

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Wow! Have you read anything written by Diane Ravitch? The latest neatoday magazine had a lengthy article written by her which answers a lot of questions about NCLB and Obama’s policies to “reform” NCLB. Over the next few blogs, I will be going over some of the interesting facts she presents regarding what has become, for most teachers and principals, a very heated issue.

Diane Ravitch is an educational historian who was appointed to public office under both Presidents Bush and Clinton and is a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education. As such, she was a strong proponent of NCLB when it was originally proposed, but her opinion about Bush’s educational reform has dramatically reversed itself in recent years. This is important for us to keep in mind: she was not against it from the start but has become disillusioned with it over time. This gives her comments, in my opinion, far more credibility.

In this article, Ms. Ravitch discusses how recent educational reform was born. She points a finger at “The Billionaire Boys’ Club”; foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation that have taken a keen interest in failing schools and low test scores leveraging their way into a position of influence in American education. As she says, “There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state.”

She continues to point out that, while public schools and teachers are being held to an incredible degree of scrutiny and accountability, these foundations have no accountability whatsoever. This means that there is no consequence to them if a policy they have advocated should fail, but the schools that had to administer that failed policy may face consequences.

The goal of these foundations seems to be to privatize public education as much as possible. They point to the few charter schools that were successful in 2009, as the role models for educational reform. (Interestingly, out of the 4,600 charter schools operating in 2009, only about 300 were visibly successful.) Now, Diane makes a good point. If more charter schools are introduced into urban areas where poverty abounds, these schools “will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.”

Ms. Ravitch makes the point that privatizing public schools is as ludicrous as privatizing police and fire departments. And she predicts the demise of public education if we do not stand up to politicians and these wealthy “reformers”. She closes this section of her article with a valid argument for public schools when she states, “As we lose neighborhood public schools, we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors.”

A sobering thought in sobering economic times. Just think back to your public school education and all of the community events that were inspired by your school: band, choir, school plays, athletic events, science fairs, art shows, etc. These are the kinds of things that tests can’t measure, but they most assuredly build character and dedication, and for some, lead to eventual careers. And these are the kinds of things that build community.

I, for one, will continue to be vocal about my love for and dedication to public education, as Diane Ravitch is doing. What about you?

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