by Alain Jehlen in Schools and Youth
Posted on June 5, 2011 at 10:12 pm
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If you think there’s already too much focus on test scores in our schools, you should know it’s about to get worse.
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is considering new regulations that would dramatically up the ante on test scores and expand their scope from math and reading to all subjects.
The deadline for comments on these draft regs is June 10. Let’s give the board an earful!
Comments should go to 2011EvaluationRegulations@doe.mass.edu.
The draft regs are at http://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/
Here’s why the regs would hurt our children:
There’s a lot in the draft about “multiple measures of student learning” and “highly relevant lessons” and “active learning.” All that’s fine.
But they also say that districts must have at least two measures of “student performance” for every grade and every subject, and these measures must be a “significant factor” in all teacher evaluations.
Even that doesn’t sound so bad until you think about what it means.
If you’re a teacher and you don’t boost your kids’ scores enough, you can lose your job. So a class of slow learners becomes a threat to your livelihood. Instead of rewarding teachers for taking on tough challenges, we’re going to punish them.
Possibly the best explanation of how this system hurts kids was written by a New York State principal in a Washington Post blog.
Let’s voice our opposition to this huge escalation in the pressure for test prep. People in other communities are speaking out, too.
Comments don’t need to be long or cover all the bases. Even one sentence is enough to register your opposition.
We may not be able to keep the state board from approving these regs, but they should know that the opposition is broad and deep. The campaign will continue even if the regs are adopted.
If you want to get involved, please let me know because I’d like to put together a Somerville group. My email is ajehlen@gmail.com.
You may also want to join the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education email list by sending a message to care-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
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Somewhat apropos: I am of the opinion that some evaluation metric of teaching prowess is appropriate. I don’t think you’ve actually supported your claim that “a class of slow learners becomes a threat to your livelihood”. It will all depend on how the metrics are applied, won’t it?
I’d like to understand more before I consider supporting or opposing these regulations.
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Thanks for responding, Jonah.
“Some evaluation metric of teaching prowess is appropriate”–Fine, but not a test score. Teaching is a human activity and kids are people. They can’t be boiled down to a few numbers. Effective teaching is not the same as raising test scores.
Human beings need to do the evaluating. For example, there’s the “Peer Assessment and Review” system, called PAR, in which master teachers evaluate other teachers, and some teachers are let go as a result. There was an article in the NY Times on PAR just a few days ago.
Now–why will slow learners be a threat to a teacher’s livelihood?
Because teachers will be evaluated according to “value-added” scores, which don’t really measure the value a teacher adds, they measure how fast a kid’s scores go up.
If a teacher consistently takes on (or is assigned) slow students, that teacher will be called on the carpet and eventually fired.
But if a human being does the evaluating, that human being will watch the teacher at work, see the skill or lack of skill, judge how well or not well the teacher is reaching each student.
It’s far from foolproof because human beings are subjective, so there need to be safeguards built in, and there are in PAR programs.
There may be other effective programs that I don’t know about.
But so far, a decade of obsession with test scores has accomplished nothing for American kids. There’s been little or no effect on national tests or on international tests.
There are better ways to judge–and improve–teaching and learning.
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How will teachers be assessed properly if they must test all students in class, including those who only just moved to their district recently. The teacher hasn’t had a chance to make a difference for that student. Teachers in Somerville frequently have students whose first language is not english move in and out again after brief periods. How will success for those kids be measured? They have to take MCAS and various other ridiculous assessments (ridiculous for them if their family is only in the country during a parent’s brief work assignment, for instance). A good principal can tell if learning is happening after a couple of visits to the classroom. Teachers who get the kids taught by the teachers before them know if the kids have been taught anything.
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Alain,
Thanks for the response and the link. The PAR system the NYT article covers sounds like a good idea – honestly I assumed that everywhere would handle review like that. It’s certainly been used in the corporate world (in my experience) in many cases. It’s good to know that such teacher evaluation systems have been used successfully elsewhere.
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Thank you for organizing a campaign, Alain. It seems to me that people who lack deep knowledge of what good teaching looks like want to impose this; without such knowledge what else can they rely on? Do you know if any studies have been done to correlate peer assessments with these type of value-added approaches? I would think a good psychometrician would insist on such a study in other cases of switching from one type of assessment to another. I agree with Linda that most principals were effective teachers before they became administrators (I don’t have a citation for you, but this was a conclusion I drew after reviewing literature for a grant proposal I worked on while I was still at EDC). I worked on several certificates offered by NBPTS and these were like peer-reviewed performance assessments of student work, videos of teaching, teacher’s descriptions of teaching decisions they made and why. It’s a complicated human process especially when taken to the scale of dozens of students at a time (though I do think most people can teach something they know well to another person or small group–otherwise human culture wouldn’t be where it is now). I am opposed philosophically to the idea of allowing non-teachers to boil the value of a teacher’s work down to test scores. Consider the manipulations that could happen if people in any helping profession were evaluated solely by a particular change in the folks they help.
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That’s a very good thought!
No, I don’t know of any study linking value-added measures to expert evaluation of teaching quality, and I doubt very much whether there are any.
I do know of a study that found students’ value-added scores correlate with their future teachers, whom they may never even have met.
[Go to http://www.epi.org/page/-/pdf/bp278.pdf?nocdn=1. That's the pdf of a report by leaders in the world of education testing. Search the pdf for the word "predictors" and you'll see the reference.]
What that seems to mean is that slow learners tend to get assigned to some teachers, and fast learners to others.
Maybe the people doing the assigning know that teacher A is great with slow learners. If the proposed regs are adopted, teacher A will get called on the carpet because someone else assigned her the slow learners.
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This week, two groups made public their strong opposition to these proposed regulations.
One is the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators Association. These are the people who will have to carry out the regs. Their main point: It can’t be done.
The MSSAA statement is on their website, http://www.mssaa.org, in the right column under “hot topics.”
MSSAA points out that principals already don’t have enough time to do the very limited amount of assessment that’s called for in the current system. The new system would be enormously more expensive and nobody has suggested where the money would come from.
The other group is FairTest. Their press release, which is a great summary of the argument, is exerpted on Blue Mass Group at http://bluemassgroup.com/2011/06/new-report-says-state-proposal-would-impose-costly-testing-mandate-and-damaging-teacher-eval-scheme/.
FairTest’s full report is at http://fairtest.org/flawed-ma-teacher-evaluation-proposal-report-home.
FairTest advocates for assessment that’s fair and that measures what we actually want students to learn–a lot more than how to fill in bubble sheets.
FairTest hates high-stakes testing so maybe this isn’t too surprising but MSSAA is a different story.
When the pilot says, “I can’t fly this plane,” do you decide to take off anyway?
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