Teachers on Strike: Classic or Dud?

If a school is only 50% full, and only 60% of the kids graduate, doesn't that illustrate failure, on every level?

no

why?

actually, i'm not saying it *doesn't*, i'm curious though why you say it does illustrate failure

failure of society more than anything

If a school is only 50% full, and only 60% of the kids graduate, doesn't that illustrate failure, on every level?

I don't even know where to start with this, tbh. The inequalities that lead some schools to do THIS BADLY while the director of a top private school needs 20K per child to provide "basic resources" are a sign that everyone is failing at education EXCEPT possibly the teachers and the students. They get handed a situation where they basically can't succeed and then fired/closed for not succeeding?

i'm with jordan on this one

In Florida a few months ago our beloved governor proposed redoing our own teacher evaluation system in a way that mirrors Chicago's.

in orbit OTM

a school that is only 50% full is definitely a failure of something, though probably not the teachers, seems like a district-level misallocation of resources more than anything else

speaking as a college instructor for the last 14 years, let me say unequivocally: fuck you to Jeb Bush and fuck you to No Child Left Behind.

You should have to factor socio-economics and poverty into the equation when evaluating teachers

why would you? It's easier to fire them.

maybe, maybe not. i'm divided on that one because we don't want to stigmatize poor people as being disinterested in education because some are very, very interested. but i do think an affective survey of students ("do you think college is important?") should be factored in.

also: if they can raise or maintain that #, from when students come in school to when they leave, of seeing ongoing learning and lifelong education (even if it's apprenticing as a plumber or whatever) as an important goal, regardless of "achievement" i think that's an important societal gain

because lord knows as a lot of kids go from elementary school -> jr high -> high school they become less and less interested in what becomes a more and more factory-like, standards-based education

tbf, has anyone actually proposed evaluating teachers on the basis of absolute (compared with other schools) as opposed to relative (i.e. self-compared improvement) test scores? The former is obviously ridiculous, but if it's not actually on the table then let's not go tilting at windmills.

Government used to either be less invested in education purely as the manufacture of sausage-meat citizens / wage slaves, or did a better job of hiding their goals.

The best school in our district, btw, in the most well off and white part of town, just fired its principal for faking test scores.

Still we haven't learned anything from Annie Ross in Pump Up the Volume. (derived from a true story, I recall)

tbf, has anyone actually proposed evaluating teachers on the basis of absolute (compared with other schools) as opposed to relative (i.e. self-compared improvement) test scores?

this is already part of accreditation, not sure if its part of NCLB though

speaking as a GIGANTIC HIPPIE of a teacher ...

i strongly believe that if we want to create a better, gentler, more equitable, more democratic and more sustainable society we as teachers need to busy ourselves with

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/080/Designing-Groupwork-9780807733318.jpg

and the focus on standardized test scores seriously undercuts / dis-incentivises this work

and i am not saying that there's this zero sum game happening, ideally doing good groupwork is going to raise standardized test scores, not hurt them

i am just talking about what the incentives are for teachers and what you are going to be pushing them toward doing as you make these standardized test scores more important, the quicker, easier, more seductive way to raise test scores is to just cut groupwork out of the equation and track each kid onto specific worksheets

we don't want to stigmatize poor people as being disinterested in education because some are very, very interested.

Someone can be interested in education but so busy working that they can't spend lots of time reading with and to their child; buying reading material; getting the kid to the library;

this is already part of accreditation, not sure if its part of NCLB though

yes, yes it is. class sorting mechanisms ahoy!

people whose education was crappy/didn't serve them very well aren't 'disinterested' as much as 'unconvinced' and it's up to the teachers and administration to change their mind. all well and good, but the emphasis on test-centered education takes the teacher out of the facilitator role and mechanizes their function, further diminishing the contact/interaction with the unconvinced parents, and deep-sixing various potential avenues for improvement.

Someone can be interested in education but so busy working that they can't spend lots of time reading with and to their child; buying reading material; getting the kid to the library

likewise someone can be so busy getting botoxed, shopping at gucci store, buying hovercraft vacation in greece that the same happens

also, common core/nclb/funding isn't the problem. common core (at least for the ELA classes I teach) are actually an improvement on state standards. the problem, as i see it, lies with the onus of responsibility for quality education shifting out of the good-practice classroom and onto a bunch of well-intentioned bureaucratic mid-level administrative MBAs who measure various metrics to determine pseudo-scientifically, what quantifiable gains have been made in their schools.

Distant xposting, but I've stressed repeatedly it's a massive socio-economic failure on every level. Meaning the system is so broken that even the best schools and best teachers will have a tough time fixing it, let alone any time soon. 60% graduation rates and 50% enrollment levels are manifestations of many of those problems, but also clear failures themselves. Like I said, they could take testing, evaluations, all that stuff out of the equation, and things would still be messed up or broken.

xxxp i totally know what you're saying and i know it's the best of intentions behind it but its considered a somewhat controversial stance, cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action

most of the guidance counsellors I ever had were LITERALLY bad people.

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2)

my high school counselor was basically the joe paterno of the district, longtime head football coach who clearly didn't give a shit about anything not football-related. i only met with him once in four years! he was also party to covering something up. nothing paterno-level, merely the drunken driving arrest of the future star QB, who ended up being more ron powlus than joe montana tbqf.

common core math standards are a GIGANTIC improvement over old CA math standards

problem is they're going to have a devil of a time figuring out how to test those standards, looking forward to seeing that

Well the Jonathan Kozol line on all that is that we shouldn't use things we can't change as an excuse not to fix what we can. I think it would be deluded to argue that if only we spent what Lab School spends in public schools, we'd duplicate the results. I also think it's probably impossible for public school systems to spend what Lab School spends per student (btw, tuition alone is almost certainly more than $20K by now, and most of these schools fundraise in addition to tuition). But we still ought to try our damnedest to provide smaller class sizes, better teachers, enriching activities like art, music, p.e., whatever we can reasonably do to improve schools. And we probably should also focus on savings where we can get rid of waste and inefficiency (duplicative administrative and support positions, "technologies" that don't actually improve classroom learning, and, sometimes, consolidation of schools where facilities are vastly underused).

"line on all that" = xp Josh in Chi

buying hovercraft vacation in greece

Don't these folks usually hire someone to tutor their kid

u would think!

i think it's easier to hire a private school to just give them all A+ and get them into college based on name

I don't think there's a real debate over what could be done to improve schools, is there? I think the debate is, per Kozol, what we can do with what we have. Which is not much.

i disagree! why do you say "not much"?!?

My guidance counselor was also the longtime head football coach! But he didn't even win games.

Karen Lewis, the head of the teacher's union, is saying:

Socio-economic status is the largest predictor—up to 75 percent— of student success.

http://ctulocal1.tumblr.com/post/30468476985/president-karen-lewis-puts-the-chicago-tribune-on

Not just the late Daniel Moynihan.

xpost Not much money/resources.

i think the issue is not whether it's a predictor (i know it is) or not but how we interpret that - is it the family's fault for working 2+ min-wage jobs and not being able to support the kids? or is it down to kids seeing that 2+ min wage jobs is their likely future and checking out of school? or is it just that students with low socioeconomic status tend to be underserved by the schools they attend?

i just think it can very easily turn into a "blame the victim" thing of "oh it's so hard to reach poor kids and their families because education is not a priority for them, they don't have good role models, etc"

see the part in the wikipedia article on "blaming the victim"

xpost All of the above. Like I said, systemic failure: i blame parents, teachers, city and students, and there's a legit reason all four of them have for not adhering to some ideal measure. Not saying I have a solution, but not sure how what the teachers are asking for helps anyone but themselves. (which is their prerogative!).

sounds like you're quite down on education, not sure "there's no solution" is a good starting point for fixing education

i mean, we have one of the better educational systems in the world by any measure except perhaps spending-to-results ratio

here's an excerpt from an email written by a berkeley economist who studies teacher-evaluation methods. let me know if i can help anyone parse this. i think it's one of the most even-handed things i've read about this:

Teacher evaluation is a difficult business. I have done some research on the limitations of test-score based measures of teacher effectiveness, and have become quite skeptical of these measures as a result. Other researchers are more positive about them. But there are a few things to know about what the research shows that rarely, if ever, make it into the reporting about them:

A) There is evidence that test score based measures are correlated with careful classroom observations and with principal evaluations of teachers. But the correlations are quite weak, *even after you adjust for the fact that the test score measures are noisy*. A typical result is that the underlying trait measured by value-added-type measures and the underlying trait measured by classroom observations are correlated around 0.4. Now, no one knows which is right, as one can criticize either measure. But they aren't the same -- the idea, common among reformers when talking to the press, that any measure will identify the very worst teachers, is just not supported by the evidence.

B) All of the studies of value-added take place in low stakes settings. The real concern about relying too much on it for evaluations is that high stakes will distort the measure -- in short, lead teachers to redirect effort toward improving test scores at the expense of other things teachers ought to be doing. No one knows how big the distortion would be. But this, I think, is the reason that just about every researcher will say (at least when talking to their peers; some have a bad habit of saying different things to the public) that VA should be no more than one component among many in a teacher's evaluation. This includes vocal proponents of VA-based evaluations like Tom Kane and Rick Hanushek. Rick excoriated me this summer at a conference for criticizing moves to base as much 50% of a teacher's evaluation on VA, saying that no one would propose doing any such thing. Rahm is proposing 40%; that doesn't seem enormously different to me.

C) The rub in this area is that the _other_ components of evaluation are very expensive, especially if you want to do them well. No one is proposing putting the kinds of resources into hiring classroom observers/evaluators that would be required. My guess is that the teachers unions would oppose evaluations even if they were done carefully and well. In that case, I'd have some sympathy for management. But no one is seriously proposing to do that. And it is easy to imagine how a badly designed evaluation system could be worse than none at all -- see (B) above.

D) One can compute a value added measure only for teachers in certain grades and subjects -- typically, for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of teachers. Policies like the Illinois law require that student achievement be a specified percentage of _every_ teacher's evaluation. So you have to figure out what to do with the teachers for whom there isn't a value-added measure (typically because they teach in non-tested grades or subjects). Typical approaches -- I'm not sure what CPS has proposed -- are to use average test scores or value added in tested grades & subjects for the student achievement component of the evaluations of teachers in non-tested grades/subjects. It is pretty hard to defend a system in which 40% of a PE or social studies teacher's evaluation is tied to the school's average reading scores.

This is long enough, so I'll stop here. But it simply isn't the case that opposing a particular evaluation system must arise from not caring about the kids, as it is sometimes characterized.

also i gotta give credit where it's due: jim derogatis, one of the worst music critics to ever take up a word processor, has written a very cogent argument in support of the CTU:

http://www.wbez.org/blogs/jim-derogatis/2012-09/chicago-teachers-rock-102377

careful classroom observations and with principal evaluations of teachers

i would say that one principal measure of teacher evaluation should be growth based on classroom observation - if your principal comes in and says "yell at kids from the front less and spend more time over their shoulders" and you learn how to do it, that's great! even if you're still not a master of classroom management, your growth as a teacher is what is important to the school

The real concern about relying too much on it for evaluations is that high stakes will distort the measure -- in short, lead teachers to redirect effort toward improving test scores at the expense of other things teachers ought to be doing.

agree 100%

No one is proposing putting the kinds of resources into hiring classroom observers/evaluators that would be required. My guess is that the teachers unions would oppose evaluations even if they were done carefully and well.

disagree! esp if you did peer observation and evaluation, but built enough time into the day for teachers to actually do this. we could cut back on some less important stuff like, i dunno, grading worksheets every night

One can compute a value added measure only for teachers in certain grades and subjects

interesting point

thank you, amateurist! could you link the original article?

i would say that one principal measure of teacher evaluation should be growth based on classroom observation - if your principal comes in and says "yell at kids from the front less and spend more time over their shoulders" and you learn how to do it, that's great! even if you're still not a master of classroom management, your growth as a teacher is what is important to the school

which is to say, growth with respect to autonomous professional standards rather than with respect to result-production (better students, better scores)?

what kind of agreement is there in education about how to do that? i occasionally look at the ed. lit out of my own higher-ed professional interests, and it always looks like a big mess that has been utterly colonized by / conceded to neoliberalized/bureaucratized ideas that make even assessment in terms of autonomous professional standards, i would imagine, really fraught.

i can try to find an article but most of 'em are published in economics journals and who wants to read that stuff (...who is not a professional economist). i'll see if i can find something and link to it.

i don't have JSTOR anymore so if i need that forget it

i mean the idea would be that the observer would also be able to observe gains in "better students" - ie more student self-management, better student self-efficacy, more engagement in the material, more signs of understanding, more signs of authentic work being produced

i'm not a proponent of *removing* test scores because student achievement is important, the problem is deciding exactly what achievement is (i.e. is recognizing "the four types of lines" really an authentic understanding of algebra?)

the second and third parts of that post are to j.

xxxxxxxx...post

My guess is that the teachers unions would oppose evaluations even if they were done carefully and well.

there's some truth in this, sadly. i'm in a union (currently decertified, thanks scott walker!) and have sat in on contract negotiations and sometimes i kind of wanted to hide my head.

that said... i've been told that to counter rahm's testing-first evaluation proposals, the CTU's evaluation committee responded with some proposals of their own, but those were either rejected out of hand or the city simply decided they would cost too much. but who knows when all the bargaining takes place behind closed doors.

this shit is complex. americans don't really do complex, unfortunately.