Administrators Union Protecting Bad Bosses or Just Business as Usual?

While the teachers unions have been quick to jump on the evaluation reform bandwagon in hopes of appearing “reasonable” and “professional,” the real movers and shakers behind the Eval Reform movement are primarily interested in making it easier to fire bad teachers.  Their presumption (at least the one conveyed to the press) is that there are a lot of bad teachers out there—how else to explain the deplorable state of public education in America. Never mind that graduation rates are higher than they were in the 40s or 50s and the number of kids from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds taking and passing AP and SAT exams is higher than ever.

Yet where in all this hysteria about rotten schools and our duty to the poor, innocent children is the scrutiny of the administrators, the ones who are ultimately responsible for all that occurs in their schools?

In Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), Superintendent Deasy fired the entire teaching staff at Miramonte Elementary in response to sexual abuse allegations against two teachers, in a PR game intended to trick the public into thinking he and his under-administrators were doing a good job when, in reality, LAUSD ignored many prior allegations against one of the teachers and lost personnel files on him.

Now, in an unrelated case, LAUSD will have to pay $1.4 million to a fourth-grade special needs student who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a male classmate. The incidents occurred at an after school program where LAUSD failed to provide adequate supervision. There was only one staffer supervising up to 100 students at a time. Consequently, the boy was able to take the 9-year-old to various secluded locations on campus away and sexually abuse her. The girl’s attorney said the district “minimized her harm throughout the trial,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and the “jury found that offensive.”

But hey, $1.4 million is chump change, right? No administrators will be punished. Business as usual will continue. And everyone can go back to presuming the classrooms are filled with pervy teachers protected by selfish unions.

Another UTLA Sell-Out on VAM

Most people would argue that teachers should be evaluated based on how well they teach and help their students to grow academically. The problem is that there is no accurate or consistent method of measuring the teacher impact on student academic growth. High stakes state and NCLB tests are particularly ill-suited for this.

Nevertheless, a growing number of school districts across the nation are either imposing Value-Added Measures (VAM) of teacher “effectiveness” on their teaching staffs, or forcing them to accept student test scores as part of their evaluations in exchange for other concessions like raises and maintaining benefits. VAM, which attempts to calculate teachers’ impact on their students’ improvement on standardized tests, has been shown to be inaccurate and unreliable (see here, here and here).

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has been under court order to reform its evaluation system. The ruling by Judge James Chalfant mandated that LAUSD comply with the state’s Stull Act, which requires that some measures of student academic progress be factored into the evaluations, though the law does not specify what kind of student data must be used. This has led to a protracted battle with United Teacher of Los Angeles (UTLA) over what kind of data will be used and to what extent.

Last Friday, the two sides came to an agreement on a new evaluation system that will include student test data. The evaluations will use both local and state standardized test scores, but there is no agreement yet on how much the test scores will count toward teachers’ evaluations. Superintendent John Deasy hailed the agreement as a victory for labor-management collaboration, while UTLA President Warren Fletcher was simply grateful the accord didn’t give LAUSD more than it did, according to John Fensterwald, writing for Ed Source. The agreement must still be approved by the school board and ratified by the UTLA membership.

Deasy had been pushing for a method called Academic Growth Over Time (AGT), a type of VAM that supposedly controls for external factors like students’ past test results and background. UTLA rightly opposed AGT as unsound, which it is. The agreement does not permit the AGT scores of individuals to be used in their evaluations, though school-level AGT can be used as one of several factors. Additionally, individual AGT scores will become part of teachers’ confidential personnel files, no longer accessible to the public or the press.

While this latter stipulation could be spun as a win for teachers, the fact that student test data is being used to evaluate teachers at all should be seen as a serious blow to both students and teachers. The use of student test data to evaluate teachers is terrible for students precisely because it does nothing to improve teacher quality, while potentially forcing many good teachers out of the profession because of its unreliability and inconsistency. Furthermore, it encourages the continued use of high stakes standardized exams, which take away class time from real learning, encourage teaching to the test, and unnecessarily increase the stress and anxiety children already face at school.

LAUSD Lays Down Hammer on Evaluations

Image from Flickr by r8r

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has filed a declaration of impasse, according to the Daily News, after failed negotiations with United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) over a new teacher evaluation system based on student test scores. LAUSD is under court order to revise its evaluation system by December 4. However, Superior Court Judge James Chalfant has mandated that the district negotiate with the union over the new system.

UTLA President Warren Fletcher said last week that his 40,000-member union was engaged in "good-faith bargaining with LAUSD officials over developing a fair and effective teacher evaluation system.” This, of course, is typical union mumbo jumbo meant to convince the public that the union was playing by the rules and trying to do right by the students and that any blame for the stalemate lies squarely on the shoulders of LAUSD.

While Fletcher’s quote may sound good to the press, it is patently untrue. If UTLA was really interested in creating a fair and effective teacher evaluation system they would refuse to accept any use of student test data in their evaluations, as such data is unreliable, inconsistent and leads to many false positives and negatives (see here, here and here). This is obviously bad for teachers who could receive bad evaluations despite being good teachers simply because they work in a low income school with the perennially low test scores that are common in lower income schools. However, it is also bad for children in several ways. They could end up losing excellent teachers because of the inaccuracies inherent in this evaluation system. Conversely, bad teachers could easily slip through the cracks and remain in the classroom because they happen to work in higher income schools, which tend to have higher test scores and larger gains on their scores.

If UTLA and LAUSD were truly interested in a fair and effective evaluation plan they would demand that well-trained outside evaluators be brought in to evaluate teachers blindly, using a combination of classroom observations and portfolios. This would eliminate the bias inherent in being evaluated by the boss (i.e., site administrators), who may ding a teacher for not embracing and carrying out his pet projects and reforms with sufficient vigor or for speaking out on children’s or teachers’ behalf at faculty or board meetings. It also would eliminate the problem of site administrators being poorly trained and lacking the time to make sufficient and competent observations and evaluations. And it would eliminate the bias and problems inherent in the use of student test data.

That LAUSD is declaring impasse suggests that they are fed up with UTLA’s position on the matter. Yet UTLA, despite Mr. Fletcher’s criticisms, has embraced student test data to evaluate its teachers. The big stumbling block, at this point, is that LAUSD wants the data to be based on individual classrooms, which can be directly linked to individual teachers, whereas UTLA wants it aggregated school-wide.

The union is also saying that it wants evaluations that provide useful feedback for teachers so they can improve their practice. Yet regardless of how student test data is acquired or aggregated, it fails to provide such data. This is because the test scores are a measure of student test taking ability. They tell us nothing about how students learned the content or developed their test taking skills and their scores are influenced far more by their socioeconomic status than by their schools and teachers.

UTLA, having already accepted the use of student test data, is unlikely to strike over the matter, especially when the district is under court mandate to include student test data in its new evaluation system. Unions have become overwhelmingly averse to challenging court orders and injunctions (e.g., the Chicago Teachers Union, which supposedly struck over student test data being used to evaluate teachers was, in reality, only fighting over the extent to which it would be used, having already  accepted that it was required by Illinois state law). Thus, the question is not whether, but how, student test data will be abused to evaluate teachers.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

LAUSD To Apply for Paltry RttT Grant

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

3 Easy Tricks to Maximize Profits From the Public Sector

1.      Demand low taxes to increase personal income while decimating school budgets, thus making public education look like a disaster in need of corporate management

2.      Claim your private enterprise will solve these problems and should be funded with public tax dollars (e.g., charter schools, Common Core Standards, laptops for every child, new textbooks or ebooks, tutoring services, etc.)

3.      Insist that teachers’ unions are the main impediment to reform and lobby to have them weakened, eviscerated or outright banned

All of the above have been on the table for years at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), one of the 176 California school districts currently at risk of going bankrupt. The district’s budget deficit for the 2012-13 school year was projected to be $390 million as of 3/13/12, according to the LAUSD website.

There is no question that record low tax rates combined with revenue losses due to the housing market collapse have contributed to LAUSD’s budget woes, which in turn have led district officials to attempt all sort of ludicrous shenanigans, like asking teachers to take 20 furlough days (and consequently asking students to give up 20 days of instructional time). The latest absurdity is Sup. Deasy’s plan to plug the nearly $400 million dyke with a measly $25 million federal Race to the Top (RttT) grant (see the Los Angeles Times).

For the first time, RttT grants will be offered to individual school districts, and not just states, willing to sell their souls for chump change. Aside from the fact that the grant would only cover 6% of the current budget hole, the one-time grant would expire at the end of the school year, leaving the district with the same problem the following year unless it can increase its revenue stream or find longer-term and bigger cuts.

There are those who would argue that $25 million is better than nothing and in these dark times one must take what one can get. However, one must consider what must be sacrificed in order to get this “free” money before one can call it a good deal.

Interestingly, the state of California found the eligibility requirements for RttT so burdensome that it voluntarily withdrew its grant proposal because the money was too little for what was being asked. Unfortunately, it did not make this realization until after it had already implemented some RttT requirements, like adoption of Common Core Standards (CCS), which are projected to cost the state more than $1 billion in new textbook and curriculum costs—far more than it would have won in RttT grants.

One of the biggest sticking points is that the state or local districts would need to get union support before moving ahead, since RttT requires the use of student test score data in teacher evaluations, something that cannot occur without changes to teachers’ contracts. Some NEA and AFT locals around the nation have rolled over and accepted this, despite the fact that the data is inconsistent and often inaccurate even when used properly and, in many cases, it is not even used properly (see here, here and here). Consequently, many good teachers could be mischaracterized as ineffective and possibly fired as a result, thus depriving students of good teachers. Worse, it could drive many good teachers away from challenging lower income schools, or from the profession entirely, thus worsening the problem evaluation reform purports to fix.

Gimme an A or I’ll Get You Fired—Student Blackmail, Latest in Ed Deform

Hot off the wire from Good Education and the Hechinger Report: a new K-12 pilot program in Georgia has students at every grade level evaluating their teachers, evaluations that will determine whether a teacher keeps her or his job.

Sounds crazy, but it is becoming more and more common for administrators to demand evaluation reform that includes student test data, evaluations of teachers by their students (and/or students’ parents), and even evaluations by other teachers.

This new trend is particularly dangerous and should be vigorously opposed by all teachers.

As I have written ad nauseum in this blog, student test scores primarily reflect their socioeconomic backgrounds, not their teachers’ skill. Value Added scores are notoriously inconsistent, with teachers being rated good one year and bad the next, primarily due to fluctuations in student ability from year to year and the inconsistency of the algorithms used to assess them.

Asking students to evaluate their teachers’ curriculum, pedagogy and rapport can be a useful exercise for teachers to initiate themselves in order to improve their practice. However, having administrators ask students to evaluate their teachers and use this data to determine if the teacher will be retained creates a dynamic in which students can blackmail their teachers (e.g., “Give me an A or I’ll write a bad evaluation.”) Even if students do not blackmail teachers, the dynamic will still encourage teachers to have softer disciplinary policies, allow students to break rules, assign easier and fewer homework assignments and make it easier to get As in hopes of bumping up their ratings with students.

Furthermore, students are not reliable evaluators of adults. They lack the experience and maturity to understand why teachers do many of the things they do and many lack the communication skills to provide meaningful evaluations. This is true even at the high school level, but especially in the K-5 grades. At the end of the year when I ask students to reflect on the course and my teaching, I routinely get comments like, “It was fun,” or “It was boring,” while I rarely get any kind of concrete suggestions or criticisms, like “you should pause more during lectures to give us time to digest what you have said.”

What student evaluations do provide is an opportunity for administrators to collect teacher data without doing any work (or by doing much less work). Shift one more of their job responsibilities onto someone else.

The biggest problem with the current evaluation system is not that it cannot work or that too many bad teachers are slipping through the cracks. The biggest problem is that administrators are biased, poorly trained and lack the time to adequately observe their teachers.

To obtain accurate assessments of teachers, the evaluator must be an objective, well-trained 3^rd party, who lacks the power to fire teachers and does not work for the teachers’ district. Ideally, the evaluations should be done blindly, without the evaluator even knowing the teachers’ names. And their caseloads must be easily manageable. Currently, high school administrators may have 20-40 teachers on their caseloads, making it impossible for them to get in more than a short observation or two per year or to write any detailed and meaningful comments.

According to the article in Good Education, student surveys already count for 5% of teacher evaluations in Memphis and will soon count for 10% in Chicago.