Teacher World

I recently blogged regarding the announcement that half of the nation’s public schools failed to meet No Child Left Behind progress goals, which has added incentive for U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and others to give waivers to states allowing them to change the standards for “adequate yearly progress” in schools. One such state which plans to apply for a waiver happens to be my own home state of Ohio.

Ohio public schools did better than the nation, with 60 percent meeting federal goals during the last school year, but half of its districts failed to meet these goals.

Under current NCLB policy, all public school students are to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. To guarantee that this occurs, the federal government required states to set “adequate yearly progress” goals. Each year or every few years, these goals must be raised. Due to this practice, most states now require approximately 90 percent or more of their students to pass the state tests.

Since Ohio and Kentucky recently adopted demanding math and reading curricula and are also developing new, college-preparatory tests for students, Duncan has argued that this high bar penalizes states like these.

How bad is the problem in Ohio? Well, in the Cincinnati area, 45 percent of its public schools failed federal annual academic progress goals. The largest district, Cincinnati Public, had 67 percent of its schools fail, and the second largest, Lakota, had 9 out of 20 of its schools fail. Winton Woods had all six schools fail.

So what is the common problem within these schools? Steve Denny, the executive director of accountability for Winton Woods, says it is the schools’ diversity; he says that the more diverse the school is, the harder it is to meet federal requirements. Which makes a lot of sense.

Here’s how it works: for a school to meet federal standards, each demographic student group, or subgroup, must pass the tests. Subgroups are based on several factors including ethnicity, poverty, disability, and limited-English-speaking level of students. Schools that don’t have many of these students have few federal progress goals to meet. But, according to Denny, it only takes a few students in a subgroup to fail for the school and district to fail as well.

Janet Walsh, the district spokesperson for Cincinnati Public, explained that in the 39 schools in the district which failed to meet federal goals, learning disabilities were a factor. She went on to explain that about 5 percent of the students in the district are unable to take the regular state tests due to severe disabilities. Yet, Ohio only allows these schools to give alternative tests to one percent of its students. This means that the other four percent fail the tests.

Jeanine Molock, director of accountability at the Ohio Department of Education said, “Ohio is in a better position than most states. Our story wasn’t as dramatic as most states were reporting.” She explained that part of the reason for this is the fact that Ohio allows its schools to meet federal standards four different ways, which exceeds the chances which other states have.

First, there is the traditional way: if the required numbers of students pass their state tests, as in other states, Ohio schools can meet federal goals. However, if an Ohio school fails that, it can still pass if one of the following goals is met:

• its two-year average for passing grades meets the federal standard,
• or enough students are on a trajectory to pass tests within two years,
• or the percent of students failing declines by 10 percent from the prior year.

But, Molock said that, in spite of this flexibility, Ohio will seek a waiver from federal progress restrictions by February. Those of us who are Ohio teachers will be watching to see if our state gets a waiver, and if so, what exactly that waiver means for our schools.

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Education Week reported on a national survey commissioned by Common Core, a Washington-based research and advocacy group which has voiced concern for some time over the impact of No Child Left Behind on our schools’ curriculum. The results of the survey, which were released on December 8, are not all that surprising, but it is interesting, nonetheless, to hear what other teachers are feeling across the nation.

Not surprisingly, most of the random sampling of educators who were surveyed said they felt that the high-stakes testing in math and English/language arts is pushing out other important subjects from classroom instruction. In fact, about two-thirds of the 1,001 public school teachers who were surveyed specifically indicated that such subjects as art, social studies, and science are getting less instructional time than math and English/language arts.

Ninety-three percent of those surveyed said the crowding out of other subjects is due, to a large extent on the state tests. In fact, 60 percent felt that in recent years their school has devoted more time to teaching test-taking skills. And 77 percent of them felt that the extra time devoted to English and math affects all students, not just struggling students.

Lynn Munson, president and executive director of Common Core stated in a press release, “During the past decade, our public schools have focused—almost exclusively—on reading and math instruction” in an effort to make “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. She noted that even though the federal law “clearly identifies our ‘core curriculum’ as reading, math, science, social studies, and even the arts,” many of these subjects have been “abandoned.” She concluded, “As a result, we are denying our students the complete education they deserve and the law demands.”

Interestingly however, 46 percent felt that the additional time given to English and math have improved students’ “skill and knowledge” in one or both subjects. Thirty-two percent disagreed with that statement and 22 percent were unsure.

In the survey, teachers were asked to identify which subjects they felt were specifically getting less attention. The following indicates the percent of teachers surveyed who felt the following subjects were getting less time:

• Art: 51 percent say it gets less time.
• Music: 48 percent
• Foreign languages: 40 percent
• Social studies: 36 percent
• Physical education: 33 percent
• Science: 27 percent

Other random but interesting facts include the response by 24 percent who felt that science was getting more instructional time, which is far more than any other subject besides English and math. And, oddly, 10 percent of educators surveyed thought math was taking a hit and 12 percent said English/language arts were getting less time. Go figure.

I strongly suggest that you follow this link to see the whole survey. There are some rather interesting responses regarding what the typical elementary school student, middle school student, and high school student will have done before moving on from that level of their education. I think you will find the responses very interesting.

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Recent reports out of Atlanta concerning the teachers and administrators found guilty in our nation’s biggest school cheating scandal ever hit the news yesterday. And while it was the news most of us were probably hoping to hear, it couldn’t have been worse news for those who were involved.

If you recall, it was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which first drew attention to statistically improbable test scores by students who attend Atlanta Public Schools last year. Its claims led to the state releasing audits of test results after the newspaper published its own analysis. This launched an investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation which determined that at least 178 teachers and administrators were involved in this mammoth cheating scandal.

The GBI reported that under a cloud of “fear and intimidation” educators gave answers to students on their state achievement tests, changed the answers on tests, used nonverbal cues to get students to change wrong answers, and so on. Principals in these schools were usually the ones who encouraged and even orchestrated the cheating. Teachers who were not involved and tried to report the cheating faced retaliation and punishment. Some even lost their jobs.

Yesterday, a Georgia state commission voted to revoke the teaching licenses of eight of these teachers and three school administrators, implementing the first round of sanctions in what has been a horrific educational travesty.

The Georgia Professional Standards Commission voted on this, the first batch of cases that stem from the GBI probe which was released in July. This probe revealed that widespread cheating had occurred in almost half of the district’s 100 public schools dating back as far as 2001. By the end of the year, it is expected that the commission will rule on all 180 teachers and administrators who were involved in the cheating scandal.

The eight teachers who lost their licenses can reapply for licensure in two years, if they choose to do so, but the administrators’ revocations are permanent. The ruling can be appealed up through state administrative and the Fulton County Superior Courts in the Atlanta area, and some of these cases may take years to be finally resolved under the appeals process.

Kelly Henson, head of the licensing agency, said, “These are 11 cases we felt like had compelling evidence to give to the commission. Education is the most honorable profession, and part of our job is to protect not only the students, but the integrity of the institution.”

Names of the educators who were sanctioned were not released by the commission, as it was noted that they have 30 days to appeal the commission’s decision.

Educators who have been named by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation could also face criminal charges as investigations continue in Fulton and DeKalb counties in the greater Atlanta area.

The state probe led to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General and the Georgia Department of Education. They say that the district may owe thousands in federal money for low-income schools that have high test scores.

And investigators for the state also concluded that the superintendent at the time of the cheating scandal, Beverly Hall, who just happened to retire right before the results of the probe were released (does anyone think that was a coincidence?) either knew that cheating was going on or at least should have known what was happening in the district she was hired to serve. From the start, Hall has denied any allegations of involvement and apologized for not doing more to prevent what was happening.

Finally, as if all of this isn’t bad enough, the district is awaiting a decision regarding the possibility that it may lose its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and School over issues with its school board. The national agency had placed the district on probation in January due to these problems and is expected to rule on whether to revoke their accreditation completely in the coming weeks.

With all of the turmoil this district continues to face, I want to send out a heartfelt message to those who work in these shell-shocked schools to hang in there, and show a watching nation what truly dedicated teachers and administrators can do under extreme pressure.

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Educators in the state of Rhode Island will be returning to the classroom soon, and when they do so, they will be faced with a new teacher evaluation system which, for the first time in Rhode Island’s history, will be closely linked to student performance as evidenced from classroom observation and state assessment tests.

Six of the state’s largest school districts sent representatives to be trained on the new system this past Tuesday. This new system of evaluation will be employed at all of Rhode Island’s schools, changing forever the way teachers will be assessed. The goal is to make certain that teachers across the state are being held to the same standards and that children are being taught properly.

Colleen Callahan, the director of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers explained that the system will assess educators based upon both student growth and “what the teacher’s or principal’s contribution is to that student growth.”

Callahan explained to Eyewitness News’ Nicole Estaphan, “Teaching and learning is so complex now-a-days.” And that, according to her, is one reason that the state spent two years to develop the new evaluation standards.

She further explained, “Those standards are going to take a look at their practice, whether it’s classroom practice or leadership practice, they’re going to take a look at their professional growth and responsibilities, the kinds of things they do to ensure that they’re good at what they do, and it’s also going to include information on their impact on student learning.” Obviously, teachers in the state have been evaluated on many of these standards in the past, but before now, districts within the state were not using common standards to measure performance.

Callahan spoke of results from statewide assessment tests being used for the first time to evaluate teachers, saying that the evaluation system will offer a second look which some teachers feel may not always be an accurate representation of student performance.

“Portfolios of student work, the common tasks that are given in classrooms, and you have to look across all of those measures to see if they are consistent; if there is a red flag somewhere in order to get an accurate picture,” Callahan told Estaphan.

Teachers who do not receive adequate evaluations have two years to improve their performance before facing penalties, which could include termination.

In summary, Callahan says that when all is said and done, the new system is primarily about professional growth.

And for the most part, that is how the list of evaluated standards sounds to me, that is until it added utilizing state assessment results as part of a teacher’s evaluation. I know many of you who are not educators out there will read this and disagree, but I am saying it anyway.

Those state tests do not measure my daily job performance; they measure student performance at one particular time of the year. And if you think those test results matter to all students and all parents, you are kidding yourself! I could be the best teacher in the world and have done everything I could possibly do to prepare my students for success, but on test day, it’s all about my kids. Did they get enough sleep the night before, did something go wrong at home the night before or in the morning to upset them, do they have attention problems, are they feeling sick, are their allergies flaring, did their parents say not to worry about the tests because they don’t really matter, did they get bullied on the bus coming to school and are worried about recess, is a parent battling an alcohol or drug addiction, did Dad just move out last night, is their stomach growling and hurting because there is no food in the house, are their parents really getting a divorce, is Mom going to hit them again when they get home…So many outside factors influence children’s performance on these tests which teachers have no control over.

I know, some of you are saying to yourself that it’s only part of Rhode Island’s evaluation, but you should not use a tool designed to measure student performance (which may not even be an accurate tool anyway) not teacher performance. In no way should state test results impact teacher evaluations, or you are setting teachers up to be tempted, as we saw in Atlanta, to go to any means to get their students to pass those tests. Oh, I know it’s wrong, and I am not condoning cheating to inflate test scores. But if you were the sole supporter of your family, and their financial survival depended on you alone, what would you do to keep your job in order to provide for your family’s needs?

My fear is that other states will see what Rhode Island is doing and jump on the proverbial band wagon. In my opinion, this is a recipe for disaster.

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This will be my last blog specifically addressing the widespread cheating that occurred over the last ten years in Atlanta Public Schools. In order to avoid more of these scandals in the future, it is important to understand why this one occurred. This blog will delve into the GBI report and its conclusions as to the motivation behind the madness and what it may foreshadow.

First, it is clear that things began to change in 1999, when Dr. Beverly Hall became the superintendent of APS. How could one person be blamed for jump-starting the madness? Well, Hall was all about data and reaching targets. And she set up a “target” program which held principals and teachers responsible for their students’ achievement. According to the report, “These targets were used to quantify expectations so that academic progress was measurable, based primarily on the prior year’s CRCT results.”

According to the report, “The unreasonable pressure to meet annual ‘targets’ was the primary motivation for teachers and administration to cheat on the CRCT in 2009 and previous years. Virtually every teacher who confessed to cheating spoke of the inordinate stress the district placed on meeting targets and the dire consequences for failure. Dr. Hall articulated it as: ‘No exceptions. No excuses.’ If principals did not meet targets within three years, she declared, they will be replaced and ‘I will find someone who will meet targets.’ Dr. Hall replaced 90% of the principals during her tenure. Principals told teachers that failure to improve CRCT scores would result in negative evaluations or job termination. The unambiguous message was to meet targets by any means necessary.”

Under the target program used in APS, schools were expected to move students test scores in two ways: from the bottom to the middle, and from the middle to the top, which means focusing on both the lower and higher performing students.

Targets were set each year by the administration working with outside consultants, which were then approved by the Board of Education. These targets were set for the district, for each school, and for each grade based on percentages of expected improvement, which were naturally higher for low-performing schools.

Keep in mind that as schools met their targets, those targets would increase each year. And the new targets weren’t based upon the new students coming into a grade level, but the scores achieved by the previous year’s students.

If you are a teacher, you know that each year’s students have their own strengths and weaknesses and have different levels of motivation. This target program makes no accommodations for those differences; instead the expectation is that each year there is a certain percent increase in student progress no matter what each group’s strengths or weaknesses might be.

Teachers and administrators at APS told investigators that “this element of targets, combined with the fact that the targets increase every year, makes them unreasonable. For instance, if last year’s fourth graders were mostly high-performing students, but the fourth grade class this year contains more low performers, the fourth grade targets are still set based on last year’s high performing students’ scores.” As teachers reported to investigators, it was like comparing apples to oranges.

As targets continued to increase each year, teachers reported that it was harder to attain the required results, and many resorted to cheating rather than risk disciplinary action or termination. It became that proverbially snowball effect; each year it required more cheating in order to go beyond the level of cheating the previous year in order to meet the new unreasonable target. And “the gap between where the students were academically and the targets they were trying to reach grew larger.” The cheating, once started, took on a life of its own.

While some of those who cheated were motivated by bonuses (schools that met 70% of their targeted goals received bonuses for all of their employees ranging anywhere from $50 to $2000 per employee) most of them seemed to be more motivated by their fear of recrimination if they were unsuccessful in meeting their targets. (A little sidebar from the GBI report that you might find interesting: Dr. Hall received tens of thousands of dollars based on her district’s doctored CRCT results.)

And to sweeten the pot a little more to motivate staffs, the district held a celebration annually at the Georgia Dome to honor and recognize those schools which had made their targets. At the Convocation, attendance from all schools was mandatory, and those who were being recognized for a job well-done got to “make the floor,” that is, they got to sit in a prominent place on the floor of the Dome, while those who did not reach their targets were forced to sit in the uppermost sections.

The report noted that for many it became very important to “make the floor,” especially for principals. For these individuals, the means by which this was accomplished became unimportant; the recognition, even if it was a fabricated sham, was so much better than the humiliation of sitting in the nose-bleed section.

Those schools who failed to meet their targets were usually placed on PDP’s, professional development plans. The original purpose of a professional development plan was to provide a tool for helping a staff to improve areas of weakness, in other words, to provide a low-performing school some strategies and professional development which would enable it to turn around and achieve success.

However, under Dr. Hall’s leadership, a PDP brought negative performance evaluations, threats of termination, and for some, outright termination. She made it clear that if these low-performing schools did not reach their targets in three years, she would replace the principal with someone who would find a way to meet those targets. (Her poster boy, Principal Waller, is a fine example of the kind of principal she hired to replace those principals who couldn’t make the grade.)

It comes as no surprise that those principals who feared that they would lose their jobs reciprocated in kind, putting that same negative pressure with its unreasonable expectations and demands on their teachers. And the pattern of threats and humiliation and termination became acceptable at all levels of this school district, which operated more like the mafia than a school system.

It is hard to say how any of us, placed in this hostile and vicious work environment would have reacted. I would like to think that the majority of us would have stood our ground and refused to be a part of this criminal behavior against children. But in this educational environment in which test scores have become more important than the children we teach, should we be so surprised when it creates a monster?

What is wrong with education? The scandal in Atlanta makes it very clear, and they are not the only school district to resort to cheating to improve test scores. No Child Left Behind has done more damage to our public schools than any doctrine or educational reform I have ever seen as a veteran teacher. If Congress doesn’t wake up and heed Arne Duncan’s warnings to rewrite NCLB legislation, than what we have seen here over the past week is just the tip of the iceberg.

If nothing else, APS has proven what can happen when you are sailing in troubled waters. The 2014 iceberg is looming, and unless Congress reroutes this ship, we will all be witnesses to the tragic sinking of our public education system. 

S-O-S!

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I’ve given a lot of information in the last two blogs concerning the terrible scandal reported by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations of widespread cheating in Atlanta Public Schools on the CRCT. The purpose of this blog is to discuss two related items: the reaction of the community to this damaging report and who pays the highest price for the actions of so many.

For a community whose schools have been under suspicion for cheating on state tests, the reaction to the confirmation of involvement, far exceeding anyone’s expectations, has ranged from anger to relief because they finally have some answers, as shocking as those answers have been.

The ordering of the investigation into possible cheating in APS by former Governor Sonny Perdue a year ago, after he rejected the district’s own investigation, was poorly received by many in the community. Many felt that for a school system where three-quarters of its student population are black and poor, such an investigation would only further hurt the city’s schools.

And many questioned Perdue’s motives. Bert Brantley, Perdue’s former spokesman said, “There were a lot of people who thought this was a witch hunt, that Governor Perdue was doing this because he didn’t believe poor African-American children could learn. But his point was that it’s the people who were doing the cheating who don’t believe kids can achieve, because they’re not letting them do it on their own, they’re changing answers because they don’t believe it’s possible.”

“Everybody wanted to believe that the kids in Atlanta were really turning a corner after a long period of not succeeding, so there’s the real tragedy,” says Mr. Brantley. “Those kids have been cheated and they’ve been robbed.”

Parent activist Shawnna Hayes-Tavares had this to say about those 178 individuals who were involved in the rampant cheating, “178 of them should be lined up right now, marching in shame out of Atlanta Public Schools.”

Shawnna, the mother of 3 children in APS, believes that one of her children is the victim of the cheating conspiracy, and she has been pushing the district to take action for more than two years. “I believe that this is the worst travesty that could ever happen, where teachers, administrators, and even superintendents of schools, and including board members have all been a part of a cover-up.”

“We know that the majority of the leaders in Atlanta Public Schools and the majority of the students in Atlanta Public Schools are African American. And so, this is the worst case of Black on Black crime because we are doing it to the innocent,” Shawnna told Atlanta AP.

Another parent, Valerie Irvin, told Channel 2 News, “A lot of people need to be arrested. Not fines. I think people need to go to jail. I think people need some pain for what they’ve done to these poor kids and parents who think they’ve done well on their test scores.” 

But other parents, like Phyllis Brown, a parent of two children who attend schools in southwest Atlanta, were more forgiving of the teachers who were involved after reading the reports of the use of fear, intimidation, and retaliation by principals and administrators to force them to comply. “It’s the people over them, that threatened them, that should be punished,” Brown said. “The ones from the building downtown, they should lose their jobs, they should lose their pensions. They are the ones who started this.”

Even though she didn’t feel teachers should be punished, she expressed her anger that the children who were victims of this scandal will face embarrassment if they are promoted to the next grade before they are ready to do the more challenging work.

And what about the students, the ones who will pay the biggest price for this scandal? Armoni Howard, a 4th grader from Gideons Elementary, where the character word flashing in its lighted sign is ironically “truthfulness” said, “At Gideons, it made all the students feel sad. We lost our principal, Mr. Salters. Everybody liked him.” (Principal Salters confessed to the cheating that was going on at Gideon Elementary.)

These innocent children were pawns in this tragic game where the adults, who should have known better, lost sight of their primary, honorable goal: to educate, serve, and protect the students in their care. In the process, students who should not have advanced were pushed forward due to inflated scores and, according to the GBI report, “children were denied special-educational assistance because their falsely reported CRCT scores were too high.”

The academic damage that has been done here is potentially catastrophic. With huge turnover in staff at these 44 schools, and huge gaps to fill in student achievement, the APS certainly have their work cut off for them.

But there is hopeful news. The day after the scandal hit the news, the 2011 CRCT results hit the schools. The good news: student results were up in almost every grade and content area. There was a one-year improvement on 23 of the 30 content-area tests. Five tests did not show one-year progress, and only two tests showed a decrease.

“I am encouraged that the CRCT results show many more of our students mastering a more rigorous curriculum,” said State School Superintendent Dr. John Barge. “The credit for these tremendous results goes back to the local level, where they have raised the bar for all students.” Under the circumstances, these results rather than raising suspicions, reflect a more expected raising of the bar.

The parents, students, teachers, principals, and administrators of the Atlanta Public Schools have much work to do. It won’t be easy. In a district which faces economic issues and has had a history of low-performance even before this terrible scandal, and will now see an influx of new staff members, it looks to be an uphill battle. But with honest, hard-working, child-driven rather than data-driven people at the helm, anything is possible. Choose your administrators and teachers wisely, APS. This is your chance to clear house and get back to what so many of you were doing all along; educating and inspiring children to be all that they can be.

Many children will come back to you less trusting; some may be angry. It is up to those of you who remain and those of you who will be newly hired to lead by example and to regain the trust and faith of your students and your community. We wish you success in your endeavors and real, not doctored, achievement of your educational goals.

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In February of this year, I blogged about the Atlanta Public Schools which were being investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations for possible cheating on their state tests. Well, the news is in, and it isn’t pretty!

On Tuesday, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal released a statement from his office revealing the report from the GBI: 178 teachers and principals were involved in undoubtedly the biggest test-cheating scandal in our country’s history. Would it surprise you to learn that 38 of the 178 who were involved were principals, which tells you how high up this operation went, and 6 of them would not answer investigators’ questions? The report also indicated that 82 of the 178 have confessed to cheating.

Atlanta Public Schools earned national prominence over the last ten years (and, yes, that is about how long this has been going on) due to the steady improvements they were making on their test scores. Because of these improvements, they received both notice and funding from the Gates and Broad Foundations. Sadly, this report makes it clear that those gains were made due to 44 of the 56 schools which were under investigation in this school district erasing and changing test answers. In a district with 100 schools, that means almost half of the APS were involved in this scandal!

Scathing news, but there’s more! The report states that the district repeatedly refused to investigate or take responsibility for the cheating, and the central office actually told some of the principals to be uncooperative when the investigators talked to them. One administrator went so far as to tell their employees to tell GBI investigators to “go to hell!” Teachers who tried to report what was happening were referred to as “disgruntled” in order to discredit their warnings, and one principal went so far as to open an ethics investigation against someone who was trying to report the truth.

The house of cards crumbled earlier this year when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and state investigators discovered a pattern which has become consistent in other incidences of cheating on state tests. In each case, there has been  a dramatic increase at one critical grade level which drops drastically the next. In all of these comparable situations, there was also a high incidence of erasure of wrong to right answers.

Superintendent Beverly Hall, who has been the head of the school system for twelve years and was named U.S. Superintendent of the Year in 2009, mainly due to the amazing gains that had been made by an inner-city school system, has resigned from her position under a cloud of suspicion. Although she admitted to wrongdoing, she did not take any blame herself. In fact, she blamed the scandal on other administrators. But while investigators say she hasn’t been directly tied to any of the wrongdoing, they maintain that she probably was aware of what was happening, or at the very least, she should have been aware.

One article I read gave examples from the 800 page report by GBI of the pervasiveness of the cheating. At Parks Middle School, one of the worst examples, the percentage of eighth-graders who exceeded expectations rose from 1% to 46%. Audits of the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) reveal that 89% of the classrooms at this school were flagged by the state for possible cheating, and several of the school’s teachers have already admitted that they provided answers to their students or changed test scores.

The report further states that once Christopher Waller became the principal at Parks “the school immediately made dramatic gains on the CRCT and other tests.” It states that Superintendent Hall should have realized something was not right, but instead Waller and Parks Middle School were publicly praised for the achievements they had made.

Also in the report was the fact that four educators from Gideons Elementary confessed that they met at a home in Douglas County one week to change students’ answers from wrong to right. They called it a “changing party.”

Investigators found evidence of intimidation of teachers to get them to comply with what was happening around them. For example, the principal at Fain Elementary forced a teacher to crawl under a table in the middle of a faculty meeting to humiliate the individual because the teacher’s students’ test scores were so low!

And a teacher from Perkerson Elementary told the investigators that a student who sat under a table randomly filling in answers on the CRCT somehow had passed. And the report indicated that although several of this school’s first grade students passed the reading test, they were having great difficulty reading in third grade.

On Wednesday, Mayor Kasim Reed responded to the devastating report from the GBI, saying, “Yesterday morning was really the hardest day I have had as mayor of Atlanta or anytime. Just to hear all of it laid out in a fashion, that is almost irrefutable, by a serious person (Gov. Deal) is really, very hard.”

Reed admits that city leaders should have recognized that something wasn’t right. He said, “We all have a part of the blame here. The statistical differences certainly should have shocked people within the profession, and I think we should have looked harder as well. I think that we will turn this into something positive. We are going to stop the harm. There were children being moved and advanced that shouldn’t have. We are going to let everyone know, it is all hands on deck. But, we are going to recover and we are going to get through it and have a better system. Because the things that occurred here simply will not be allowed to occur again, and that is what we have to take from this.”

Maureen Downey, the education columnist for Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote, “The [Atlanta] teachers, principals and administrators wanted to prove that the faith of the Broad and Gates Foundations and the Chamber of Commerce in the district was not misplaced and that APS could rewrite the script of urban education in America and provide a happy, or at least a happier, ending for its students. And that’s what ought to alarm us, that these professionals ultimately felt their students could not even pass basic competency tests, despite targeted school improvement plans, proven reforms, and state-of-the-art teacher training.”

This has been a difficult blog for me to write because it will unfortunately reinforce some of those negative opinions out there concerning public schools and its teachers. But these are the facts, and I am presenting them to you without any comment for today. Tomorrow I will voice some thoughts and feelings regarding this horrific scandal. For now, I just have to let this all percolate for awhile in the hope that it may lose some of its bitterness.

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I am sure you are already aware of the allegations of cheating on Maryland state achievement tests in two Baltimore public schools over the last two years. Bear with me as I tell you what I have learned and my gut reaction to this news.

First, the facts: On June 23, news stations from Baltimore reported that some staff members, whose names are not being made public at this time, have been accused of cheating on their students’ state tests in order to inflate test results during the 2009-2010 school year.

At Fort Worthington Elementary, several students left their tests blank, yet the answers were somehow filled in after the fact with (go figure) the correct answers. Also, staff members were accused of violating state testing laws by providing some students special accommodations. “Students (were) being taken out of classrooms and tested individually or in small groups even though they were not students with disabilities,” Andres Alonso, CEO of the Baltimore City Public School System, said.

At Abbottston Elementary, a school which was honored in 2009 by a visit from Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, for their academic achievement, someone changed answers on the tests by erasing wrong answers and replacing them with correct answers. The number of wrong to correct answers was so large that it is statistically impossible for this to occur in any normal situation. In other words, someone cheated.

Suspicions grew when third graders’ tests results dropped dramatically from 100% passage of both math and reading in 2009-2010 to only 50% passage of reading in the following year at Abbottston.

Alonso expressed his anger over this humiliating affair when he said, “It was a real figurative act of violence against our communities our parents and our students. You are not reaching kids, you should respond in a certain way. You lie about it and tell the world that you are…doing unbelievably, and then you don’t do the things you need to do in order to move those kids. And that’s the figurative crime…”

Alonso further referred to the actions on the part of the staff members involved a slap in the face and a lack of faith in what their students are capable of achieving. He said that the incident should not negate the progress that the students made in these two schools because the children were victims of teachers who were “gaming the system.”

Needless to say, this cheating scandal has spurred some additional safeguards in an effort to prevent future cheating. Nancy Grasmick, Maryland’s School Superintendent reviewed the procedures already in place: teachers cannot see the booklets ahead of time, test booklets must be locked in a secure place, and teachers and administrators sign statements that they understand what is considered cheating.

And starting this year all standardized tests will be checked electronically for any signs of cheating, including erasure marks, and all completed test documents will be transported and stored in tamper-proof boxes.

Also as a result of recent evidence suggesting that tests were tampered with last year, 157 monitors were brought in by the school to observe the testing procedures and the collecting of this year’s tests, costing the district almost $400,000.

So far, the principals from both schools have been removed, and Alonso told WBAL 1090 AM’s Robert Lang, “This is so difficult to assign culpability. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the bottom in terms of what happened in individual cases, and that’s what we’ve found in our investigation and the numbers are very small. I’m trying to figure out exactly how far to push to hold people accountable. Right now, I am terminating people and pushing for suspension of licenses. These people go through the process and we make sure they never work in the schools again.”

In the meantime, two more of the city’s elementary schools are under investigation. 

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “Our kids and our students work too hard to make advancements for everyone’s ability to be called into question because of the few people who don’t want to play by the rules. It’s certainly troubling. I’m concerned, and I know Dr. Alonso is concerned. That’s why he implemented the oversight with the latest round of tests so that he could protect the integrity of the tests.”

“On the one hand, it awakens the skeptics,” Dr. Alonso said. “On the other hand, it becomes an opportunity to demonstrate that it’s not tolerated. It is not going to be tolerated.”

And now for my gut reaction: There is never an excuse for cheating whether you are a child or an adult. That old adage, honesty is the best policy, is always true and should be applied to any situation.

But let me pose this question: If your job security was based on someone else’s performance, and you felt, for whatever reason that that person who held your future in their hands was unable or unwilling to perform at the expected level, would you be tempted to tweak the numbers, fudge the balance sheet, or add more sales to their tally in order to save your job?

Teachers are held accountable for attitudes, behaviors, disabilities, and environmental issues outside of their control all of the time. With 2014 looming and no sign of changes to NCLB, in spite of Arne Duncan’s appeal to revisit this legislation, (the subject of a future blog) it should come as no surprise that staff members at schools which are considered low performing are beginning to panic. And when you add in the concerns over maintaining jobs in the present economy, the warning signs are there for potential danger.

As long as these state achievement tests continue to be the standard by which a school’s effectiveness is measured, this is not the last time you will hear stories such as this.

Is it wrong? Yes, absolutely! But is it wrong to judge a school and its teachers on a test that measures learning of random concepts once a year? Yes, absolutely!

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The Tulsa Public School System has implemented a new evaluation tool to critique teachers. While teachers were evaluated in the past utilizing a simple checklist, this new questionnaire is far more thorough and has many teachers leaving the district rather than to go through what has been categorized as the toughest year-end evaluation ever used in this school system.

Apparently, the newer evaluation is based on a 1 to 5 rubric system and teachers are rated on how they teach, how their students have performed, and how the teachers communicate with their students.

Kim, a kindergarten teacher for the past four years from Barnard Elementary School, told FOX23, “I love working with the kids. I loved the people who I worked with.”

But she was so fearful of this new evaluation, which she said gives the evaluator all of the power, that she resigned rather than face the consequences of a poor evaluation. And what is that consequence?  Termination! 

Kim is not the only one choosing to leave. FOX23 reports that dozens of teachers turned in their resignations rather than face potential termination.

So what was Tulsa Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. Keith Ballard’s response to the resignations? He admitted that he realized this tougher evaluation might force some teachers to quit, but he said it was worth it in order to get the best teachers working in the classroom. 
“I believe, in the absence of having an effective evaluation system for years, there were ineffective teachers who might possibly be not able to make that grade,” he told FOX23. “(The new tests) are much more involved, they’re much more detailed they’re really centered on what is good teaching.”

Dr. Ballard claims that the new system was discussed with both the TPS Teacher’s Association and outside consultants.

Okay, those are the facts. Now let’s break it down. First, I find it interesting that Dr. Ballard says that this new evaluation was discussed with the teachers union, but he doesn’t say they were in favor of it. I am curious to know what their real reaction was to the “discussion.”

Second, I have always stated that any form of evaluation which is completed by only one person, is potentially unfair, and it sounds like this is such an evaluation. Strictly based on human nature, when an evaluation involves only one individual it is a flawed system because the evaluator’s personal feelings for the one being evaluated, whether good or bad, will almost certainly affect the outcome of that evaluation. So, unless this evaluation is being completed by a team of impartial evaluators, it is simply not credible.

Third, what criteria are being used to evaluate how they teach, how their students have performed, and how the teachers communicate with their students? Are multiple observations occurring throughout the year by a team of  individuals including the principal? Is student performance being monitored throughout the year to show progress, or is student performance being judged by state test scores? And how, for Pete’s sake, are teachers being evaluated on how they communicate with their students? Who, the heck is in the classroom enough to put a 1 to 5 judgment on that?

The whole thing is so subjective, which is always the problem with teacher evaluations. But, in this case, the subjective score could cost you your job! No wonder some teachers fled in order to try to get another job without the stigma of being fired from their last teaching position.

Oh, I can just hear some of you out there saying, “Well, if they were really good teachers, they wouldn’t have to worry about their evaluation.” But, what if they happen to be great teachers who just happen to have personal problems with the one evaluating them? Or, what if they have had the misfortune of being assigned a group of students one year, and believe me, it happens, who are difficult to teach due to behavioral and/or academic challenges? Should they lose their job after that year because their children didn’t show enough academic progress?

Which leads me to my last point. Where is there any mention of working with teachers who receive a poor evaluation during the next year in order to try to improve those areas considered weak on the evaluation? Provide them with a mentor teacher and give them opportunities for professional development. Schools are in the business of teaching and improving individual’s skills. Shouldn’t that pertain to struggling teachers as well? What if, with a little mentoring, that borderline teacher, who they would have fired, could become a great teacher? Sounds to me like that isn’t an option in Tulsa Public Schools.

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Yesterday, I began a blog about President Obama’s plan to fix No Child Left Behind. Since his plan is rather lengthy, I tried to make it more palpable by breaking it down into two blogs. If you haven’t read my previous blog, you will want to start there or this will make little sense. I had discussed Obama’s first four details of his plan, so I will start this blog with his fifth.

Because schools that are doing well are frequently mislabeled “failing” under NCLB, the President’s fifth proposal is to offer states and school districts more flexibility when it comes to determining areas which require improvement and strategies which would address poor performance. He would continue to place expectations on struggling schools to make necessary changes to become more successful.

Frankly, I think most schools are already working to identify where improvements need to be made and developing the necessary strategies through collaboration to do just that, so I’m unclear how this is different from current policy, except perhaps doing away with the label “failing.” Unless, I’m not reading this correctly, this seems like a lot of gobbledygook.

The President’s sixth proposal addresses the valid concern that at this time it is frequently the case that schools which face the greatest challenges don’t have the most effective teachers. Obama proposes providing incentives and accountability to get effective teachers to work in these schools and to identify effective teachers and use them as mentors for less effective teachers.

Let’s face it; the reason why many effective teachers are unwilling to work in challenging schools is because these schools are usually intercity schools where the teachers battle far more than low academic performance. I would also assert that there are probably many effective teachers in these schools already but they are laboring against such unbelievable odds that their effectiveness is not even recognized.  But if teachers who have been labeled effective are willing to take advantage of incentives to teach in challenging schools, more power to them. I would hope that the effective teachers already in those schools would receive the same incentives to stay.

I heartily support President Obama’s sixth proposal: to get away from federal government’s “one size fits all” solutions, and increasing local control to track down their own solutions to address problems in their schools. Yes, get the federal government out of our business so that we can more effectively proceed with the business of educating our children!

The next phase of President Obama’s plan addresses the fact that NCLB does not promote or reward innovation in our schools. His plan calls for extending the school day and school year, creating smarter tests, using collected data to improve teaching methods, raising standards for all kids, and supporting grant programs which reward both states and schools who find better ways to get highly effective teachers in the classroom.

The only issue I have with this last part of his plan is the idea of increasing the school day. I recently wrote a blog which advocates going to year-round school. We all know that the first month or so of school is spent reteaching the skills from the year before because our students all suffer from amnesia over the summer. If we want to stay competitive with other nations, we must look realistically at year-round schools. But a longer school day? No way! We risk student and teacher burn-out if our days are made significantly longer, and I believe the extra minutes tacked on are not worth the price we will pay.

Next, Obama addresses the fact that, under NCLB, the schools which are the lowest-performing schools simply do not have the resources or the reforms to make necessary improvements. The President’s solution: “Invest in ambitious and bold efforts to transform our nation’s lowest achieving schools, while demanding new and dramatic change in their leadership and reforms to teaching and learning at those schools.”

I’m sorry, but this just sounds like political talk, in fact I couldn’t even figure out how to put this in my own words, which is why I gave you the exact quote. What does this really mean? How is this really going to happen? And who’s paying for it? Blah, blah, blah!

The President then claims that currently, many parents are not engaged in their children’s education, and schools are not always welcoming of parents. Again, I must quote directly from Obama whose plan supports that we “double the federal investment in family engagement” (what the heck does that mean?) and that incentives be provided for schools which create innovative ways of engaging parents and community members.

Yes, parents do need to get more involved in their children’s education, although I’m uncertain how doubling “the federal investment” is going to encourage that. (What does that even mean?) If President Obama’s plan could focus as much attention on ineffective parents as it does on ineffective teachers, we might see some real changes in our schools.

And, while it may be true that some schools are not welcoming of parents, I would argue that the vast majority of elementary schools are. In my school, for instance, I can honestly say that I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t see parents in our building helping their child’s teacher, attending a function in their child’s classroom, meeting with the principal over a school project, etc. 

President Obama’s final focus is on rural schools, as he concludes that currently states don’t have the resources to adequately provide support for rural schools which face unique challenges. Obama’s plan supports the innovation, reform, and better funding of rural schools particularly in regards to better use of technology. Finally, and here we go again, he calls for the need to recruit and retain effective principals and teachers in rural schools.

So, how do I feel about these proposals to fixing No Child Left Behind? Frankly, I am somewhat ambivalent. While I wholeheartedly support fixing this ridiculously punitive legislation with its cookie-cutter view of education, and its idiotic expectation of 100% passage of state tests by 2014, I have been in education long enough to know that whatever new policy is adopted will eventually be thrown out only to be replaced with a new policy, which in time will also be thrown out only to be replaced with a new policy yet again…

And educators become pawns in the hands of those who have the power to make the decisions; we are expected to embrace the policies, or we will be held accountable when the newest policy fails. Ironically, we who know the most from first-hand experience in the trenches are not asked to share our opinions. We have no voice, but we will be expected to be good, little soldiers ready to fight the next policy’s battles. It just gets old after awhile. And I get so tired of the political rhetoric instead of real solutions to real problems.

Those of us who teach have no choice but to wait this next round out. The good news is that, from the looks of President Obama’s plan and based on how terrible NCLB has been, anything he is proposing would be better than this broken, unrealistic policy.

So, my ultimate reaction is to wait it all out, to try not to be too cynical, and to hope for the best. What about the rest of you? Let us know how you feel.

Educational Reform, low-performing schools, No Child Left Behind, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Educational Reform, effective teachers, No Child Left Behind, President Obama, state achievement tests