Can it make a big difference if we pay top teachers a top salary?

A recent Mario Koran story at Voice of San Diego leads with the results of some new research:

 "...[R]esearch shows teachers don’t react to financial incentives the way you might expect."

This is true as far as it goes, but this research applies to people who are already teachers.

We need to pay lots more to some teachers to draw a higher number of exceptionally-gifted individuals into the profession.

A few years ago I was happy to hear a school board member say that we needed more highly-intelligent teachers.

But I seemed to be the only person present who agreed with the board member.

"Oh, no!" another attendee protested. "We've already got very talented teachers! Just the other day I was talking to  a woman who is a paramedic who is very excited about becoming a teacher. She seemed so enthusiastic and dedicated."

Well, that's great. I agree that quite a few paramedics could make a successful transition to teaching, but the woman completely missed the point. We're talking about people who function at an even higher level than a good paramedic. We're talking about luring doctors and other similarly high-functioning people.

We need to pay the top 25-35% of teachers enough, and give them enough responsibility, so that people will choose teaching instead of medicine or science or journalism, etc.

Research shows that teachers today are drawn from lower-achieving college graduates than was the case decades ago. When I was a child many women who could have been doctors actually did become teachers. These days we'll need to pay high achievers much more money to get them in the schoolroom door.

Once they're in the classroom, I believe that the research on incentives cited by VOSD will prove true: financial incentives won't make a difference in how those new teachers teach.


Here's the VOSD story:

Why Paying Teachers More Won’t Fix Education

A major court ruling upheld state laws on teacher hiring and firing, leading one reader to ask why we can’t just pay good teachers more money. But research shows teachers don’t react to financial incentives the way you might expect.

By Mario Koran |  
 April 21, 2016
Voice of San Diego
 
A California appeals court last week reversed a 2014 decision that declared state laws governing teacher hiring and firing violated students’ equal rights to a quality education.
Plaintiffs in the Vergara v. California case –nine students represented by high-profile attorneys – argued state laws made it too easy to hire and too difficult to dismiss a small but significant number of ineffective teachers who disproportionately ended up in impoverished schools.
Last week’s decision vindicated teachers unions who saw the lawsuit as an attack on the tenure, layoff and dismissal policies they support.
In the reversal, a three-judge panel determined plaintiffs failed to show the statutes necessarily harmed students:

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“Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers; instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach. Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students.
With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes. The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are “a good idea.”

“I’m not going to mince words — we lost,” David Welch, founder of the group driving the lawsuit, said in response to the decision. “This is a sad day for every child struggling to get the quality education he or she deserves — and is guaranteed by our state constitution.”
Welch pledged to take the case to the California Supreme Court.
State superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson and the California Teachers Association applauded the ruling.
“Stripping teachers of their ability to stand up for their students and robbing school districts of the tools they need to make sound employment decisions was a wrong-headed scheme developed by people with no education expertise and the appellate court justices saw that,” CTA President Eric Heins said in a statement.
Vergara has become symbolic of public skepticism that teacher protections like tenure are good for kids. Groups in both Minnesota and New York have initiated similar efforts to challenge teacher protections.
Last year, a poll conducted by USC and the Los Angeles Times found the overwhelming majority of  respondents thought teachers receive tenure too quickly (after 18 months on the job) and that performance should matter more than seniority when teachers are laid off.
“The judges are saying things are not right in California, that there are drawbacks to the current system, but this is not something for the courts to decide,” Katharine Strunk, an associate professor of education at USC,  told the New York Times regarding the Vergara decision.
“I don’t think anyone believes that these laws are the best we can do.”
In other words, regardless of Vergara’s outcome, there’s broad consensus the system could be better.
But if making it easier to fire ineffective teachers wouldn’t necessarily improve teacher quality, what would?
One reader wonders if there’s a way to incentivize better teaching with better pay.
Question: Why are teachers’ unions unwilling to allow for a more pay-for-performance model of teacher evaluations, compensation, promotions, terminations, etc?  We should want to reward the best teachers with better compensation and benefits so as to attract top talent and motivate great results; and we should rid ourselves of underperforming and/or burnt out teachers.  — Jon Bellmonte, interested reader
In 2014, then-Congressional Candidate Carl Demaio announced he’d lead a series of education town hall meetings in San Diego.
The Vergara decision had created a vacuum for teacher evaluation, Demaio said, and he wanted to fill it with measurable performance standards developed by local school boards, teachers and parents. Based on those standards, school districts would reward exceptional teachers:

“I want parental involvement in how we evaluate our teachers. But the most important thing is that we need to make sure that the dollars go to our best teachers. Our best teachers that are actually making progress with our kids should receive whatever available monies we have for pay increases or bonuses,” Demaio told KUSI.

Teachers unions typically reject merit pay. They say teachers aren’t motivated by money.
Lindsay Burningham, president of the local teachers union, told me in 2014 that teachers are motivated not by money and corporate values – but by working in collegial environments where teachers collaborate with colleagues and principals:

“If pay was tied to student performance, or test scores, I don’t think teachers would risk it. Because so many factors impact learning that have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom – things like poverty and home life.
Don’t get me wrong, competitive pay helps, especially when you consider that San Diego Unified teachers are among the lowest paid in the county. If you look at the our Fight for 5 campaign, and see the things we’re pushing for, pay and benefit increases is one component – but it’s not the only one.
If salary is what attracts people to the teaching profession, those are the ones who leave after a few years and contribute to the high turnover rate. There’s so much more to it when it comes to retaining teachers, things like low class sizes.”

This was the same argument school board trustee Richard Barrera used when he testified during the Vergara trial.
Barrera pointed to inner city schools like Central Elementary – the school once led by current Superintendent Cindy Marten – as evidence San Diego Unified had raised performance at high-poverty schools by creating collaborative environments in which teachers wanted to work.
Things like merit pay, or even evaluating teachers based on the improvement shown by students in their class, would divide teachers and make them less likely to share information with their colleagues, Barrera said.
This might sound like a cynical attempt to preserve the status quo, but there’s evidence to support Barrera and Burningham’s points.
After the Vergara ruling in 2014, education writer Dana Goldstein highlighted some of the reasons merit pay has had trouble gaining traction:

“From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major cities—including Los Angeles—a $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they weren’t scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores.”

Firing bad teachers, Goldstein writes, doesn’t address the larger problem: getting good teachers to take jobs in high-poverty, racially isolated schools.
To do that, Goldstein writes elsewhere, we need to reimagine the problem, such as by focusing more on principals, instead of only looking to teachers.
That’s not to say school districts should stop looking for better ways to recruit, train and evaluate teachers. But reforms focused exclusively on teachers overlook the larger systems in which high-poverty schools operate.

I'm not surprised that the US is 11th in world literacy, but I was surprised by Japan and the Netherlands

Most literate nation in the world? Not the U.S., new ranking says.

By Valerie Strauss 

WP

March 8, 2016

A new world ranking of countries and their literacy rates puts the United States at 11th. Who’s No. 1? Finland.

The study, conducted by John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn., analyzes  trends in literate behavior and literacy in more than 60 countries...

Cuomo throws in the towel on teacher quality

I am hard pressed to decide who is  more opposed to effective teacher evaluations: the teachers union or administrators. We don't need test scores to evaluate teachers. Unfortunately, most administrators are not good evaluators. In many, if not most, cases administrators were not gifted teachers themselves.  (That's  often exactly why they became administrators.)

We should evaluate teachers, but we shouldn't fire ineffective teachers. We should just give teachers jobs commensurate with their abilities. Plenty of classroom activities can be done by less-than-brilliant teachers and we can use the best teachers to train the less gifted teachers. Heaven  knows administrators aren't good at training teachers. Here is my plan to share responsibility for student learning between a regular teacher and a part-time master teacher.

Would a guarantee to not fire ineffective teachers get the teachers union on board? I think it might. The main goal of the teachers union seems to be to protect the teachers who have political connections. Sadly, these union leaders and their cronies are not generally the most effective teachers. Why don't we protect their jobs, and protect the kids at the same time?
--Maura Larkins

 Cuomo throws in the towel on teacher quality

By Post Editorial Board

December 19, 2015
Gov. Cuomo once called himself the “students’ lobbyist.” Now he’s got a new message: Sorry, kids — maybe someday.

On Tuesday, the Board of Regents officially said amen to that. In a near-unanimous vote, the board took the recommendations of a Cuomo panel and banned any serious consequences for rotten teachers — no matter how embarrassing their students’ scores on state tests.

Teachers who can’t teach, in other words, will get to keep standing in front of whiteboards, confidant that no one will ever lay a glove on them. And too bad on the kids.

True, the new no-consequences rule is supposed to last “only” four years. “At least” is a lot more like it...
 
Rewind to 2010: State lawmakers, drooling over hundreds of millions in bribe money from Washington, required schools to use test scores in deciding a teacher’s future employment.

But the lawmakers’ plan, as Cuomo would later say, was “unworkable by design.”...

Just last week, the state reported its latest teacher-rating stats: Nine out of 10 teachers scored as “effective” or better — even though two out of three kids continue to flunk the tests...

In Cuomo’s case, because the teachers unions (with help from the likes of West­chester County Exec Rob Astorino) have managed to panic massive numbers of parents into “opting out” of having their kids take the tests. Those parents are voters...

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew boasted of his “gum up the works” battle to prevent evaluations in the city...

Teachers Union screws up an entire public school system; Washington loses its NCLB waiver for refusing to use test scores in teacher evaluations

Gov. Jay Inslee tried to get the legislature to pass a bill to save the waiver, but the lawmakers balked. (AP Photo/Rachel La Corte)

Democrats need to show a little spine and not let the teachers union harm children by protecting incompetent teachers. It's time for effective evaluations. Why shouldn't student test scores be one small part of the evaluation system?

Washington becomes first state to lose its waiver from No Child Left Behind
By Niraj Chokshi
Washington Post
April 24, 2014

Washington state lost its waiver from implementing certain parts of the No Child Left Behind education law, an action that could lead to layoffs and program cuts, Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement Thursday.

In a letter to the state superintendent, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that he would not renew the waiver because the state had failed to implement promised changes to how it evaluates teachers and principals. The state is the first to lose its waiver.

In February 2012, the state committed to making student learning growth a substantial factor in those reviews. Last August, it was placed on high-risk status for failing to implement that and other changes, giving the state until May 1 to produce a plan. Because that would require a legislative change and Washington’s legislature won’t reconvene until next January, Duncan said the state would be losing its waiver.

“Washington has not been able to keep all of its commitments,” he said in the letter. “Thus, although Washington has benefitted from ESEA flexibility, I regret that Washington’s flexibility will end with the 2013–2014 school year.”

Inslee criticized lawmakers in his statement on the loss of the waiver, saying it “could have been avoided if the state legislature had acted last session.”

As a result, districts will lose flexibility on how to use nearly $40 million in federal funds, he said: “Loss of that funding means those districts now face potential impacts that could include laying off some of Washington’s tremendous teachers or cutting back on programs that serve at-risk students.”

Forty-three states, including Washington, were approved for waivers, according to an Education Department page last modified Tuesday.

Arne Duncan Revokes Washington State's NCLB Waiver
By Alyson Klein
Education Week
April 24, 2014

UPDATED

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan yanked Washington state's waiver Thursday, making the Evergreen State the first to lose the Obama administration's flexibility from many of the mandates of the outdated No Child Left Behind Act.

But, in an important twist, the state will not be returning to an accountability system that's exactly like the one it had under NCLB, particularly when it comes to intervening in low-performing schools. Specifically, like other waiver states, Washington will still single out "priority" and "focus" schools this spring, even as it largely reverts back to NCLB-style interventions, such as tutoring, sources say.

Sound complicated? Accountability experts think so too. "I think it's going to be really confusing for the public and for parents to understand this," said Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation. "There are going to be a lot of questions about how this affects local districts and schools."

The decision to pull the waiver comes as no surprise to Washington state officials, who have said for weeks that they fully expected to lose the flexibility. The issue? Washington state doesn't require state test scores to be integrated into teacher evaluations—instead districts can choose either state or local assessments.

How Will This Work?

The move means that, for starters, districts in Washington state will lose control over nearly $40 million in federal money. That's because schools will now have to begin setting aside that money for NCLB-prescribed remedies for low-performing schools, such as tutoring and school choice. The state will also have to return to the NCLB law's much-maligned yardstick, gauging schools based on "adequate yearly progress," or AYP.

In fact, in the fall, Washington state will need to make AYP determinations based on the goals for the 2014-15 school year. As anyone who has ever read the NCLB law knows, that means 100 percent of students are supposed to be proficient. From there it gets tricky. To decide where schools fall on the improvement timetable, the state will have to determine what the school's status would have been prior to the waiver. Under this retroactive labeling scheme, a school that would plan for "restructuring" (the most dramatic NCLB intervention) might have to implement those interventions next year, sources say.

And there's another very particular wrinkle here because of Washington's unique ex-waiver status. Like other waiver states, Washington will continue to identify schools that are foundering the most using a system that looks more like the waiver rules than NCLB. The Evergreen State is still choosing to pinpoint "priority" schools (the lowest performers) and "focus" schools (other struggling schools.) The result will be an accountability system that is a mishmash of NCLB and the state's waiver system, potentially resulting in some muddled messages for low-performing schools.

"I appreciate that transitioning back to NCLB is not desirable, and will not be simple," Duncan wrote in a letter explaining his decision.

The department also made it clear to Washington officials that the state could be eligible for a new waiver if it is able to make the necessary changes to its teacher evaluation system.

State Politics

But that may not be politically possible. The state's governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, and schools chief, Randy Dorn, had tried to save the waiver, but were unsuccessful. Despite heavy lobbying from both leaders, Washington state lawmakers were unable to pass a bill earlier this spring that might have appeased the Education Department by calling for state tests to be a factor in evaluations by the 2017-18 school year.

Inslee laid blame for the waiver's revocation at the legislature's feet, and warned that the loss of funding flexibility could lead to layoffs. "The loss of this waiver could have been avoided if the state legislature had acted last session," he said in a statement. "The waiver provided districts flexibility to use nearly $40 million in federal funds to support struggling students. Loss of that funding means those districts now face potential impacts that could include laying off some of Washington's tremendous teachers or cutting back on programs that serve at-risk students."

But it's uncertain if the fix would have even saved the waiver—the administration has required every other state to get its teacher-evaluation system fully in place by the 2016-17 school year, at the latest. (Notably, the Obama administration will leave office in the middle of that school year, and it's anyone's guess what will happen with the waiver scheme under a new administration.) And for its part, the Washington Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, stands by its decision to lobby against the change.

"WEA believes the Washington Legislature did the right thing last session when it rejected Duncan's inflexible, and bureaucratic demands," the union's president, Kim Mead wrote in a statement. "Republicans and Democrats alike saw that Duncan's failed federal mandates would have done nothing to help Washington's kids or their teachers, but rather would impose broken federal law on our students."

Federal Politics

Although Washington state's waiver was the first to go, it may not be the last. The Education Department has awarded waivers to 43 states and the District of Columbia so far. And three other states have had their waivers put on "high risk" status: Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon. Like Washington, all three are hung up on the issue of teacher evaluation.

Last year, Duncan told the Council of Chief State School Officers that he was likely to "revoke a waiver or two or three." Washington state's new accountability regime could be a harbinger of what other high-risk states have in store, should they lose their waivers. And it could also have implications for any states that elect not to extend their waivers.

Kate Tromble, the director of government relations for the Education Trust, said revoking the waiver was the right thing to do.

"The department needed to set a bottom line" to make it clear to states that they are serious about waiver enforcement, she said. "It is unfortunate because Washington students are going to bear the burden of the failure of adults" in the state.

Tromble is worried, however, about what may happen when all students in the state take the rigorous Smarter Balanced Assessment next school year. The test may prove to be a lot tougher than Washington's current exam—and all schools may be labeled as "failing" to make progress.

"It's important that we hold schools accountable, but schools need to feel the system is legitimate," she said. The impetus is on Washington state leaders to find a way to work through this issue, she said.

So far, the department has thrown the hammer down on states that didn't follow through on their plans when it comes to teacher evaluation.

But it's been another story when it comes to another requirement for waiver states: using assessments aligned to college- and career-ready standards, Hyslop noted.

States, including Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Utah, said they planned to use participation in either PARCC or Smarter Balanced—the two consortia developing tests that align with the common-core standards—to fulfill that requirement. And then they ditched the consortia. The U.S. Department asked for their Plan B, but so far hasn't put any of those states on high-risk status.

Coming down hard on those states may carry more political risk than getting tough on teacher evaluation, Hyslop said, given the pushback around the country on the Obama administration's championship of common core.

"Teacher evaluation is a very politically charged issue, but common core is even more so," she said. "Stepping in and really getting tough on assessments I think would have a lot more political ramifications."

Will the waiver revocation prod Congress to actually act on renewing the NCLB law? Maybe. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who may be next in line to head up the Senate education committee, said in a statement that the waiver's revocation points to the need to revise the ESEA law. "What's most important now is that we all do our part to rectify this situation," said Murray, who reportedly spoke to the department on her home state's behalf. "I have made clear time and again that I will work with anyone who is willing to reauthorize ESEA, but to date, making progress on updating this law has been an unnecessarily partisan fight."

English 15-year-olds beat peers from the U.S. and every European nation except Finland

English teenagers are among best at solving a practical problems
Nation's 15-year-olds beat peers from the U.S. and every European nation except Finland
By Laura Clark
DailyMail
Apr 1st 2014

English teenagers are among the best in Europe at solving practical problems, a league table revealed yesterday.

The nation’s 15-year-olds came 11th in the world in a new test – ahead of their peers in the United States and all other European countries except Finland.

The results are welcome news following England’s demotion from the top 20 nations in maths and reading. Could you pass the practical test?

However Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, which all have strong academic records, did better.

The rankings, based on a test taken by 85,000 pupils across 44 jurisdictions, show that English teenagers are better at solving real-life problems – such as adjusting a thermostat or selecting the cheapest rail tickets – than they are at tackling academic subjects.

England is one of only a handful of countries where teenagers are better at problem-solving than maths, reading and science.

Boys did slightly better than girls in the test - a reversal of the picture seen in national GCSE exams taken a year later.

Experts said the finding suggested GCSEs may be ‘unfair’ to boys.

The OECD, which produced the league table, insisted the difference in performance between boys and girls was not statistically significant.

The computer-based 40-minute test was the first of its kind run by the OECD, which regularly examines pupils’ performance in richer nations.

Pupils in England scored 517, against an OECD average of 500.

Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland didn’t take part.

The highest score was achieved by Singapore, with 562.

Outside East Asia, the highest marks were achieved by Canada, Australia and Finland, with England coming 11th.

‘In England, students perform significantly better, on average, in problem solving than students in other countries who show similar performance in mathematics, reading and science,’ the OECD report said.

‘This is particularly true among strong performers in mathematics, which suggests that these students, in particular, have access to learning opportunities that prepare them well for handling complex, real-life problems.’

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Our young people are strong in problem-solving. This is a skill we should build on.’

California sees a surprise drop in student test scores

I agree with CTA President Dean Vogel that budget cuts are partly to blame. Also, districts can only get so much improvement by pushing teachers harder. To keep improving, teacher culture has to change. Teachers need to think on their feet, not merely be trained.

Interestingly, kids taught using Common Core standards did well.

California sees a surprise drop in student test scores
Reversal of a long-term trend in student test scores disturbs educators. But L.A. Unified students outperform many.
By Teresa Watanabe
LA Times
August 8, 2013

Related: L.A. teachers union urged to improve training for bad teachers

For the first time in a decade, California standardized test scores in English and math slipped this year, flummoxing educators who blame budget cuts and new national learning standards that have required curriculum changes.

Despite the statewide slip in scores, released Thursday, Los Angeles Unified School District largely held its own: Students posted the highest gain in math among 10 large urban school districts and a smaller drop in English than statewide peers.

Scores rose particularly in two grades — sixth and ninth — that have adopted new academic learning standards, even as some educators pointed to them for the statewide decline.

Overall, the percentage of students at grade level in English slipped to 56.4%, from 57.2%, and in math to 51.2%, from 51.5%. Achievement in both subjects had steadily improved since 2004, when only about a third of students performed at grade level.

The uncertainty surrounding the annual scores underscored the dicey nature of predicting student test performance or placing too much stock in year-to-year changes, experts said. Some said it could have been a statistical anomaly.

"It's very counterintuitive," L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy said of the state decline. "I don't know how to make sense of it."

Schools that might have been expected to slip improved. Miramonte Elementary scored gains in both reading and math despite upheaval over the arrest of a teacher charged with lewd conduct involving students. Several small schools at the Roosevelt and Mendez high school campuses made strong gains even as they experienced the major distractions of reorganization.

And some campuses that made significant progress last year slipped this year. Test scores at Jordan High School, which posted the largest gains among the district's traditional high schools last year, fell across the board. Officials there attributed the setback to the midyear departure of the principal, two major outside reviews, a campus reconstruction project and other challenges.

Roosevelt, Mendez and Jordan are operated by the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit started by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Several elementary schools operated by the nonprofit posted smaller-than-expected gains. Colleen Oliver, its chief academic officer, said assessments throughout the year had indicated that scores would be higher.

Overall, however, the number of Partnership students at grade level in reading, math, science and history increased. "There are some areas where I'm scratching my head," Oliver said. "It did make me wonder whether there is something happening with this state test."

But John Rogers, a professor with the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, cautioned against reading too much into one year's scores — particularly at individual schools, where students and teaching conditions can easily change.

"There shouldn't be too much concern about a blip this year," he said. "If this becomes a trend in three years with a stalling out or continued decline, that would raise serious concerns."

Deasy, Oliver and others credited teachers for the steady performance despite widespread cuts during the recession. The state has slashed $20 billion from campuses in the last five years, resulting in the loss of 30,000 teachers, a shorter academic year, larger classes and cutbacks in summer and after-school programs and other offerings.

"In the midst of the ridiculous recession, we made progress," Deasy said. "This is all due to teachers. I couldn't be more proud of them."

Dean Vogel, president of the California Teachers Assn., said the statewide fall in scores was not surprising amid budget cutbacks. But he called the overall improvement of the last decade a "success story ... that's a testament to teachers."

State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson additionally blamed the decline on the state's transition to the new Common Core national learning standards. Those standards aim to challenge students by presenting less subject material but teaching it more deeply and are being phased in across the state, for full introduction by next fall.

"As you would expect for a school system in transition, results varied ... but the big picture is one of remarkable resilience despite the challenges," Torlakson said in a statement.

In L.A., however, Deasy said the students who shifted this year to Common Core standards made the greatest improvement. Among ninth-graders, for instance, the percentage at grade level in English rose to 45% from 40%, and in algebra I to 31% from 27%.

Despite such gains, the district failed to achieve its ambitious performance goals, falling far short of targets for English, math, algebra and third-grade English. Overall, 48% of students were at grade level in English and 45% in math. L.A. Unified schools have always lagged behind the state, but the district typically has improved at a faster rate.

Deasy singled out Hoover Elementary, King Middle School and Venice High School to praise for impressive improvements.

Statewide, the test results showed no gender differences in math, but girls outperformed boys in English. The achievement gap between students who are African American, Latino, low-income and limited in English and their white and Asian peers showed little sign of closing, however, remaining largely unchanged between 2003 and 2013.

Less than half of African Americans and Latinos were at grade level in English and math, compared with three-fourths of Asians and more than two-thirds of whites.

Elsewhere, the percentage of students at grade level in both reading and math fell in six of the state's 10 largest districts. The largest declines came in Santa Ana Unified, but districts with small slippage in both subjects included Fresno Unified, San Bernardino City, Corona-Norco Unified, Capistrano Unified and Elk Grove Unified. San Diego Unified and Long Beach Unified made the greatest gains in reading, while L.A. Unified and San Francisco Unified did so in math.

About 4.7 million students in grades 2 to 11 took the annual standardized tests this year. The subjects covered include English and basic math until students move up to more specific courses, such as algebra or geometry; various history and science courses also are included. The tests include five performance levels, ranging from "far below basic" to the desired levels of "proficient" and "advanced."

Torlakson said that many students will be shifting to Common Core tests this year, marking the likely end of the 11-year California Standards Test.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.

Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett believes in standardized tests for accountability in schools--except if it would make a GOP donor unhappy

Accountability for you, but not for me, seems to be a common policy in schools I've worked in. Now it's been exposed in the state superintendent's office in Indiana.

"Christel’s ninth- and 10th-grade students got brutally low scores on the English and math tests, with only 70 percent passing English and just a third passing math...

"Bennett’s staff swung loyally and swiftly into action; within a day they had found what they called a “loophole” in the state law that allowed them to change Christel’s grade."

The Case of the Missing Zeroes
An astonishing act of statistical chutzpah in the Indiana schools’ grade-changing scandal.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Slate.com
Aug. 2, 2013

Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett resigned Thursday amid claims that, in his former position as superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, he manipulated the state’s system for evaluating school performance.

Bennett, a Republican who created an A-to-F grading protocol for Indiana schools as a way to promote educational accountability, is accused of raising the mark for a school operated by a major GOP donor. Bennett calls that charge, which arose from emails among Bennett’s staff obtained by the AP, “malicious and unfounded” and “frankly so off base.” He offered a different explanation for why the grades for Indianapolis charter school Christel House Academy—whose mark soared from a C to an A—and 12 other schools were changed at the last minute. According to Bennett, he was just correcting a simple math mistake.

Bennett’s explanation is perfectly mathematically reasonable, and it would get him off the hook. The only problem is that the story he’s telling appears to be totally false.

Bennett told AEI’s Rick Hess, “As we were looking at the grades we were giving our schools, we realized that state law created an unfair penalty for schools that didn't have 11th and 12th grades. Statewide, there were 13 schools in question had unusual grade configurations. The data for grades 11 and 12 came in as zero. When we caught it, we fixed it.”

Bennett’s stated rationale makes sense. Here’s an analogy. You’re teaching a course with three exams, and each student’s overall exam grade for the class is computed as an average of her three individual exams

(1/3) * (exam 1) + (1/3) * (exam 2) + (1/3) * (exam 3)

But what happens if a student misses exam 3, with a justified absence, and the test can’t be made up? Then we have what’s called a “missing data” problem—we have to infer something about the student’s performance without the full complement of data we have for everybody else. One natural approach is to compute that student’s overall exam grade as the average of the exams she did take:

(1/2) * (exam 1) + (1/2) * (exam 2).

What you shouldn’t do is give the student a zero for the exam and average it into her grade.

Christel House had started out as a middle school and was adding one high school grade each year; for the 2011-12 school year, it served students through the 10th grade. High schools, according to Indiana statute, were to be graded on four metrics, averaged like so:

30% * (English scores) + 30% * (algebra scores) + 30% * (graduation rate) + 10% * (college and career readiness score)

But, as Bennett said in an official statement, “Christel House only served students in grades K-10, thus the graduation rate and college and career readiness measures could not be calculated because the school did not serve grades 11 and 12.” So it faced a missing data problem, like the student who had to miss an exam.

Indeed, it wouldn’t be fair to count those scores as zero! The obvious fix, just as with the student, is to grade such a school on the two scores that it does have:

50% * (English scores) + 50% * (Algebra scores)

Does that mean Bennett really did get railroaded, and he was just fixing an obvious error?

No—because the “fixed” version of the grade was what Indiana was already using before Bennett started tinkering with the gears. When you dig into the numbers, the story about the unfair zeroes looks like a complete fabrication.

Christel’s ninth- and 10th-grade students got brutally low scores on the English and math tests, with only 70 percent passing English and just a third passing math. Here’s how Jon Gubera, then the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, described Christel’s performance in one of the emails released by the AP:

“OK, here is their breakdown ...

They served grades K-10 in 2011-12 so they are a combined school but do not have any graduates. So their grade is a combination of the standard E/MS model and the HS 9&10 model which only counts ECA proficiency.

E/MS results: 3.00 on E/LA (no growth bonuses) and 4.00 on math (bottom 25% bonus) = 3.50 points (B)

HS results: 2.00 on E/LA (70% pass rate) and 0.00 on math (33% pass rate) = 1.00 points (D)

Final Combined results: E/MS 3.50 x .76 (76% of school is in grades 3.8) = 2.66 + HS 1.00 x .24 (24% of school is in high school) = .24. Thus overall grade is 2.66 + .24 = 2.9 (C).

Bottom line: their terrible 10th grade Algebra I results (33% passing) was the principal factor in earning a C grade."

Christel’s grade 3–8 scores came to a 3.50, or a B, and their high school scores, thanks to the algebra fiasco, were a 1.00, or a D. The school’s score is then an average of the grade 3–8 scores and the 9–10 scores, weighted according to the proportion of students in each group.

Where are the zeroes for the graduation rates and readiness score that got averaged into Christel’s score—the “unfair penalty” that Bennett claims he fixed? They’re not there, because that’s the part that Bennett, as far as I can tell, simply made up.

Gubera’s computation wasn’t satisfactory for Bennett, because it didn’t give Christel an A, and—judging by the emails obtained by the AP—he had already told Christel administrators they were getting an A. No mere numbers were going to make a liar out of him!

What’s more, Bennett wrote in one of the emails, the low grade for Christel meant “legislative leadership as well as our critics of A-F are going to use this against us to undo our accountability metrics through legislation.” He went on: “If you can’t tell, I am more than a little miffed about this. I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past 6 months.”

Bennett’s staff swung loyally and swiftly into action; within a day they had found what they called a “loophole” in the state law that allowed them to change Christel’s grade. The statute clearly states that high schools without 12th-graders get a score made up half of the English score and half of the algebra score. What’s more, the law said schools that combined high school grades and lower grades should use a weighted average of the elementary/middle school measures and the four high school measures.

Here’s where Bennett’s team found the loophole big enough to drive a charter school through. A normal person would do exactly what Chief Accountability Officer Jon Gubera did—give Christel the weighted average of its elementary/middle school score, according to the rules for elementary/middle schools, and its high school score, according to the rules for high schools.

But Bennett had a better idea. Christel was, technically speaking, not a high school, so the statutory formula for the high school grades didn’t apply. But it also didn’t have all four high school measures, so, he argued, the rules for combined schools didn’t apply either. There were just 13 schools in the state that had both middle school and high school grades but no seniors. For these schools, Bennett reasoned, the Indiana education poobahs should have a free hand to set the grades however they pleased. You can guess what happened next: Bennett ruled that the ninth- and 10th-graders in these schools didn’t count at all. So it was that the offending algebra grades vanished in a puff of bureaucratic smoke. (Anne Hyslop at Ed Money Watch has an even more detailed accounting of the process, if you like watching sausage get made.)

This was an act of astonishing statistical chutzpah. Suppose the syllabus for my math class said that the final grade would be determined by averaging the homework grade and the exam grade, and that the exam grade was itself the average of the grades on the three tests I gave. Now imagine a student gets a B on the homework, gets a D-minus on the first two tests, and misses the third. She then comes to me and says, “Professor, your syllabus says the exam component of the grade is the average of my grade on the three tests—but I only took two tests, so that line of the syllabus doesn’t apply to my special case, and the only fair thing is to drop the entire exam component and give me a B for the course.”

I would laugh her out of the office. Or maybe suggest that she apply for a job as a state superintendent of instruction.

The saddest part is that I’m guessing Bennett sincerely felt he was doing the right thing. In his mind, he knew Christel was a great school, so if the scores said otherwise, the scores had to be wrong. In this respect, ironically, he ends up echoing his policy opponents, adopting the position that a mechanistic testing and scoring procedure can’t be allowed to override firsthand knowledge about teachers and schools.

Saying this out loud wasn’t an option, so any test scores that seemed to indicate learning problems at Christel had to be eliminated from the spreadsheet with extreme prejudice. (I attempted to reach both Tony Bennett and Jon Gubera and have not received a reply from either man. If I do hear back, I will add an update to this story.)

Bennett told AEI’s Hess, “I'm a track and field guy. I run, I try to keep my weight down at about 190. Christel has been a track-performing school for a number of years. If I get on the scale one day, am doing everything the same, and am still wearing my same clothes and they fit, and the scale suddenly reads 215, I am going to question what's going on.”

But Christel wasn’t doing everything the same. It didn’t have a 10th grade before, and then it did, and whatever it was doing to teach those new 10th-graders math, it didn’t lead them to pass algebra.

Bennett could, and should, have faced up to that fact, given the school the C it earned, and delivered them some honest tough love: “You’re still doing well at the stuff you’ve always done well, but you obviously haven’t succeeded at the new stuff you’re trying to do. We believe you can do it, but until you do, your grade’s going to suffer.” Isn’t that what accountability in education means, if it still means anything at all?

Middle class and poor kids are scoring lower on tests than in the past compared to rich kids

Our society discards the potential contributions of gifted poor kids in order to keep the children of rich and middle class families in top positions. The rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago. This statistic has nothing to do with race.

Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.

No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013

...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.

There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Standardized test cheating may be widespread in school systems throughout the U.S.

See all posts on cheating on tests.

Report: Test cheating may be widespread
by Donna Krache
CNN
March 25th, 2012

(CNN) An investigative report published in Sunday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution found indications of standardized test cheating in school systems throughout the U.S.

The seven-month long investigation of testing data examined 1.6 million records from almost 70,000 public schools nationwide. Suspicious score increases, high numbers of erasures and other irregularities were uncovered in about 200 school districts. The indicators found were similar to those discovered in Atlanta Public Schools, says the AJC.

Atlanta as cheating ground zero

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has broken news before about test cheating. In 2009, the paper reported “statistically unlikely” test score gains at some Atlanta schools. A state review determined that some cheating had occurred in more than half of the district’s elementary and middle schools. About 180 teachers have been implicated in the scandal.

So far, one teacher, Damany Lewis, has admitted to cheating and been fired. Other educators suspected of cheating who have not accepted a “resign or be fired” deal are being brought before a tribunal to hear their cases and determine what actions will be taken.

Former University of Georgia Chancellor Dr. Erroll Davis was named interim superintendent of APS last year. He replaced Dr. Beverly Hall. Hall resigned in June 2011 after 11 years as the head of APS. She was the recipient of praise and awards for her role in the district’s increased graduation rates and higher test scores.

Officials from APS and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation are still investigating what has become known as the “biggest cheating scandal in American history," but according to the AJC, Atlanta is not alone in its testing irregularities.

A nationwide problem

According to the AJC, the paper’s investigation does not prove that any widespread cheating occurred, but “it reveals that scores in hundreds of cities followed a pattern, like, in Atlanta, indicated cheating in multiple schools.”

The report says that in nine districts, test scores fluctuated so much that “the odds of such dramatic shifts occurring without intervention such as tampering were worse than one in one billion.” Houstonschools, the report says, experienced test score jumps two, three or more times than typically seen in one year. When these students went on to the next grade, their test scores plummeted, so the likelihood that the score increases were due to learning is slim. A spokesman for the Houston school district, however, questioned whether cheating was the cause of all the irregularities that the AJC found.

The AJC says that 196 of the country’s 3,125 school districts had enough irregularities that the odds of these irregularities happening by chance alone are worse than one in 1,000.

The paper’s statistical analysis of test scores red-flagged more than one in six tests inSt. Louis and one in seven in Detroit. Officials in the St. Louis district have acknowledged the unusual score changes, but say that cheating is not the cause. Detroit officials have said that score increases were due to “better teaching,” according to the report.

According to the investigation, “dozens” of mid-sized school systems, including those in Gary, Indiana, East St. Louis, Illinois, and Mobile, Alabama exhibited “suspicious” tests in high concentrations.

No Child Left Behind and student outcomes

Standardized testing is a key point of No Child Left Behind, the bipartisan federal legislation signed into law ten years ago.

At the heart of the law is is a mandate for accountability and measured student outcomes, derived primarily from state-administered standardized tests that are given annually in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading.

Critics say that the law promotes “teaching to the test” and that it cultivates a climate for cheating, especially when teachers’ and administrators’ jobs and pay are tied students’ performance on tests.

But supporters say that there needs to be accountability for student learning among teachers and administrators, and that reliable, valid testing is one way to establish that. They call for stricter test-taking measures.

Regardless of the possible reasons behind them, inaccurate test results also erode public confidence in school systems and the credibility of public information.

And experts agree that when cheating happens, it’s the students who suffer. Schools with inflated test scores may look good on paper and earn praise for their staffs, but low-performing students who are entitled to tutoring and other educational options lose out when their scores don’t reflect their deficiencies.

Read the AJC report: “Cheating our children: Suspicious scores across the nation” here.

Perspective on the 12 Indicators: 'Quality Teaching'

Perspective on the 12 Indicators: 'Quality Teaching'
Voice of San Diego
Apr 23, 2013
By OSCAR RAMOS

I’m working my way through San Diego Unified’s leaked draft of their 12 indicators for quality schools. Since this document apparently hadn’t been shared out with other stakeholders (the union, parent groups, the general community, etc.), I imagine it’s going to go through a lot of changes.

But that doesn’t stop us from basing our discussion on the assumptions this document makes, so I’ll go ahead and dive in. For now I'm only going to focus on the first indicator of school quality (Quality Teaching). I'll delve into the rest of the document in the future.

I was surprised that Objective 1.1 (Engaging and supporting all students in learning) was such a large proportion of the rating system (40 percent), given that student achievement represents a comparatively much smaller percentage (it’s there, though, as I’ll get to later).

One problem with giving so much importance to Objective 1.1 is that the evidence it describes needs to happen every day in the classroom, but the principal usually only observes teachers a couple of times a year (sometimes only once). For the ratings in this category to be mean anything, the principal would need to observe teachers constantly. One way to improve this measurement would be to expand the responsible party to include a student feedback component, or even a parent/community feedback component.

Now, I don’t like the idea of people randomly walking into my classroom unannounced, looking specifically to find faults in my instruction. I can imagine such a situation bordering on teacher harassment in a worst-case scenario. But it is possible to create a healthy school culture in which teachers are comfortable with people visiting their classes. The Preuss School, where I teach, has many visitors who want to learn about our instructional practices, and many of our teachers are accustomed to a steady stream of visitors. Nurturing a culture of constructive, open observations requires a lot of cooperation and trust between principals and teachers.

Another important prerequisite for frequent observations is principals who are well-versed in instructional practices and who are their schools’ education leaders. This may sound obvious, but I’m concerned that many in the current wave of self-designated education reformers from the business sector don’t value school leadership that is capable of engaging on the instructional level with teachers. They seem to favor data managers as school leaders.

Peter Orszag (President Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and current vice chairman of corporate and investment banking at Citigroup) has written about this concern.

[The Gates Foundation researchers] found that teacher analysis could be done without having observers make random visits to the classroom; allowing a teacher to submit a self-selected set of videos from the classroom worked just as well, because even the best classes conducted by bad teachers were worse than those from better teachers. I’m not anti-data. Data is an important tool for guiding teacher instruction, and for assessing whether teachers are responding to their students’ strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think it should be used primarily as a punitive tool, especially given that students don’t have a stake in these assessments. As a reader for the AP European History exam last year, I had the pleasure of reading all kinds of nonsensical letters written by students who sat for the exam but didn’t attempt to answer the essay question I was grading — a few actually wrote that they were too tired to write the essay. Granted, it’s a long exam, but I wouldn’t want their teacher’s livelihood to depend on whether a student had enough energy to complete an exam that has little to no bearing on his/her future (some colleges won’t even give credit for high AP scores).

I would use test scores (in the case above, AP scores) to assess whether a teacher is updating his or her lesson plans to address student deficiencies, as measured by a variety of data. I think this is a critical component of teacher quality assessment, but it is currently under-weighted in this draft of Quality Teaching.

The way I’m reading the document, there is a section dedicated to student achievement: Indicator 1.5.2, which is under Objective 1.5: Assessing Student Learning (10 percent). Being able to adapt lesson plans to target individual and group weaknesses is the mark of a good teacher. Even a great teacher can have a group of students that doesn't respond to his or her lessons because of a glaring underlying weakness, be it academic or personal. That teacher is going to have to develop new approaches in order for students to succeed. That’s going to require collaboration with colleagues, research on content and teaching techniques and developing new lesson plans.

I had such an experience at one point in my career, a few years back. I had just finished a successful school year with a group of students that had responded well to the academic supports I had implemented that year, so I was pretty happy. It became immediately clear the next year, however, that my lesson plans weren’t working on my new students. They were dealing with motivational issues — something my lesson plans didn’t account for. I worked with my colleagues to address my class's needs throughout the year, and I feel better-equipped to address those sorts of issues in the future. But I may get a group of kids with issues I’ve never dealt with before, and I’ll need to work quickly in order to address their needs.

It’s like a batter who hits home runs every time the pitcher throws a fastball. That’s great, as long as he keeps getting fastballs. But pitchers are going to discover his weakness (let’s say it’s the slider), and then throw that. The mark of a good hitter is one who can make the necessary adjustments and learn to hit sliders for extra bases. It takes time for good teachers to develop new tools and techniques to adapt to their students' academic needs.

The catch, though, is that teachers actually need to put in the work to make those adjustments and get better results. Indicator 1.5.2 means collecting data on student achievement. It means that teachers have to learn how to adjust to shifting circumstances in their classrooms. It also means that principals (currently the responsible party for this indicator) have to work with teachers to help them make those adjustments and assess whether those changes are appropriate. It also means that we need to have accurate metrics by which to assess student learning. That’s a whole lot of effort for something that counts for only 10 percent.

It's Not the Test That Made Them Cheat

It's ridiculous to say that teachers and administrators in Georgia and elsewhere committed crimes only because they had to give high-stakes tests to students.

The Georgia indictments are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg of White Chalk Crime in schools.

The indicted educators tried to get rewards that they had no right to, and to take them away from those who deserved them. This happens all the time in schools. It's the reason the education system is failing. The wrong people are in charge of most districts, and too many of the wrong people are teaching kids.

If we had a system for correctly evaluating teachers, like this one, we wouldn't need to test kids so much, and we would save billion dollars a year. We could trust the teachers to do their job, and part of that job is to know exactly what each child knows and how each child learns best. Standardized testing could go back to its original purpose: to make an official determination of which kids are most advanced academically.

It's Not the Test That Made Them Cheat
By Michael J. Feuer
Edweek.org.
April 9, 2013

News came down, or up, earlier this month about the indictment of the former Atlanta schools chief Beverly Hall and 35 other current and former officials for their alleged roles in a massive cheating scandal that has rocked the city for the past three years.

The best coverage of this story is by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Heather Vogell and her colleagues, whose fine journalism uncovered the muck.

There is nothing good to say about cheating on tests, which, in this extraordinary case, involves allegations of tampering with student answers, racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy, and making false statements. It’s wrong, period, and if Ms. Hall et al. are found guilty, they will hopefully use their time in jail to think about the damage they have caused to the kids, to the system, and to the public’s trust in schools and in the measures we use to gauge their quality.

Still, some of the reactions to the scandal have been surprising, if not scandalous in their own right. The most troubling response comes from people opposed to standardized testing generally and to current federal policy specifically. They somewhat gleefully use this sorry episode as the ultimate smoking gun, the perfect we-told-you-so case that clinches their claims about the evils of testing, and, by extension, the entire reform movement. It’s a big nail, they hope, in the coffin of test-based accountability.

"Shall we excuse individual or group criminality because certain social institutions create pressures for greed and misconduct?"

Among the more remarkable statements is one posted by William C. Ayers on Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post blog. For Bill Ayers, an education professor emeritus from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Atlanta story proves that “teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the ‘outcomes’ both incentivizes cheating and is a worthless proxy for learning.”

Mr. Ayers goes further. Not only does he attribute the alleged cheating to the testing policy, thereby essentially absolving Ms. Hall and her colleagues of their own ethical and professional lapses, but he uses the example to issue a sprawling condemnation of the U.S. Department of Education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and even the president. As he puts it, “the road to the massive cheating scandal in Atlanta runs right through the White House.”

I have four problems with this logic (echoed in other commentaries, such as Jason Stanford’s bold assertion in the Huffington Post that “high-stakes testing makes cheating inevitable”; and FairTest’s pronouncement in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed last year that “[t]hese scandals are the predictable result of overreliance on test scores”).

First, shifting the blame for egregious mischief away from the perpetrators and onto the system strikes me as morally and politically bankrupt. Here’s an analogy to consider: Do we react to the worst instances of tax evasion by condemning the concept of taxation rather than by prosecuting the evaders? I assume that Mr. Ayers would not call for abolition of the graduated income tax as a way to finance public goods and redistribute wealth just because the system has its imperfections and because some people lie on their tax returns. Shall we excuse individual or group criminality because certain social institutions create pressures for greed and misconduct? Banking executives accused of fraud will be delighted.

Second, even if one could make an evidence-informed case that testing “inevitably” leads to illegal behavior—as if high-stakes testing overwhelms the human capacity for moral choice—there is the added problem of guilt by association. Pinning the responsibility for the Atlanta disaster on the White House is an extravagant example of misdirected blame. Maybe current federal policies lead to unwanted outcomes, such as narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test, but that’s a far cry from the outright fraud of the sort listed in the Atlanta indictment. Nothing in the No Child Left Behind law requires states or districts to use test scores to fire teachers and principals or to protect and reward those who achieve targets by tampering with answer sheets. In any case, there’s no evidence that federal policy causes cheating, or that “cheating is inevitable.”

Third, indicting testing, rather than cheating, undermines the possibility for reform in the design and uses of tests. The compelling logic in Campbell’s Law—“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures ...” —is supported by abundant empirical evidence on the effects of overreliance on tests for accountability.

But what’s often ignored in the popular frenzy against testing, especially in the wake of cheating scandals, is the benefits side of the argument: Tests can help gauge individual learning, give teachers additional information about their students’ progress, provide objective indicators of student achievement, and expose inequalities in the allocation of educational resources.

We may never be able to completely “overturn” Campbell’s Law, but what’s needed is a sensible approach to assessing the ratio of benefits to costs and to the design of mechanisms meant to keep the ratio strongly positive.

Fourth, it turns out that in Atlanta there were schools, and kids, that actually did improve during Ms. Hall’s tenure, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics Sean P. “Jack” Buckley noted, “There were obviously rampant violations of testing integrity going on there, but there were also schools there that were legitimately improving.”

We shouldn’t allow score gains inflated from cheating to be misconstrued as evidence that any measured improvement in student learning—especially among poor and minority children—must always be the result of cheating or other mischief. This kind of smoking-gun logic saps the morale of educators, parents, and policymakers working in behalf of our most disadvantaged students and provides free ammunition to those who believe investments in public education are essentially futile. Just when we education researchers and social scientists are facing increasingly mean-spirited political challenges to our profession, Bill Ayers’ and others’ evidence-free diatribes further erode public confidence in the credibility of our work. One can only hope that the temptations of guilt by association won’t prevail, and that the research community as a whole won’t be blamed for the shoddy logic of some of its members.

Michael J. Feuer is a professor of education policy, the dean of the graduate school of education and human development at the George Washington University, and president-elect of the National Academy of Education.

Grand jury indicts 35 in Georgia school cheating scandal

See further discussion here.

What do you expect when you allow schools to keep their culture of secrecy and backdoor politics? If you want real reform, you have to change the culture of the education establishment.

Schools don't like people who make waves. They like people who fall in line with school politics.

"For example, teachers who reported other teachers who cheated were terminated, while teachers who were caught cheating were only suspended."

Beverly Hall reminds me of the administrators and board members I knew at Chula Vista Elementary School District.

Report: Test cheating may be widespread

Grand jury indicts 35 in Georgia school cheating scandal
35 employees indicted over alleged cheating
By Chelsea J. Carter
CNN
March 29, 2013
Watch this video

Atlanta (CNN) -- In what has been described as one of the largest cheating scandals to hit the nation's public education system, 35 Atlanta Public Schools educators and administrators were indicted Friday on charges of racketeering and corruption.

The indictment is the bookend to a story that was once touted as a model for the nation's school districts after the district's test scores dramatically improved in some of its toughest urban schools.

Among those indicted by a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury was Beverly Hall, the former schools superintendent who gained national recognition in 2009 for turning around Atlanta's school system.

"She was a full participant in that conspiracy," Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard told reporters during a news conference announcing the charges.

"Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree in which it took place."

The indictment follows a state investigation that was launched after a series of reports by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper found large, unexplained gains in test scores in some Atlanta schools.

A state review determined that some cheating had occurred in more than half of the district's elementary and middle schools. About 180 teachers were initially implicated in the scandal.

Threats and intimidation

Hall has denied any role in the cheating scandal. In 2011, she told The New York Times that her subordinates had allowed the cheating to occur, but denied she was involved.

Hall resigned from her position in 2011 following the state investigation, which lambasted her leadership and found widespread cheating in dozens of Atlanta schools.

The alleged cheating is believed to date back to early 2001, according to the indictment, when standardized testing scores began to turn around in the 50,000-student school district.

For at least a period of four years, between 2005 and 2009, test answers were altered, fabricated and falsely certified, the indictment said.

Hall allegedly oversaw a system where threats and intimidation were used against teachers, it said.

"As a result, cheating became more and more prevalent," the indictment said.

By the time the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, as the standardized test is known, was administered in Atlanta Public Schools, "cheating was taking place in a majority of APS's 83 elementary and middle schools."

The allegations, the indictment said, are substantiated by the Georgia Governor's Office of Student Achievement analysis of erasures on standardized tests.

'Suspicious' test score gains

According to the indictment, Hall placed unreasonable goals on educators and "protected and rewarded those who achieved targets by cheating. It also alleges she fired principals who failed to achieve goals and "ignored suspicious" test score gains throughout the school system.

In 2009, Hall was named the National Superintendent of the Year by the Schools Superintendents Association, which at the time said her "leadership has turned Atlanta into a model of urban school reform."

But the indictment paints another picture of Hall, one of a superintendent with "a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat," Howard told reporters.

"For example, teachers who reported other teachers who cheated were terminated, while teachers who were caught cheating were only suspended," the indictment alleges.

"The message from Beverly Hall was clear: There were to be no exceptions and no excuses for failure to meet targets."

At the heart of the conspiracy to cheat, the indictment said, was money.

"It is further part of the conspiracy and endeavor that targets achieved through cheating were used by Beverly Hall to obtain substantial performance bonuses," the indictment said.

It also alleges a number of others received performance bonuses based on test scores.

2011: Seven edcuators step down as scandal unfolds

Racketeering and conspiracy

Of the 65 counts in the indictment, Hall and 34 others were charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

In addition to racketeering, Hall also is charged with making false statements and writings and theft by taking.

If convicted on all counts, she could face a maximum of 45 years in prison.

Among those also indicted were four of Hall's executive administrators, six principals, two assistant principals, six testing coordinators, 14 teachers, a school improvement specialist and a school secretary.

These Atlanta Public Schools officials are among those named:

-- Millicent Few, director of human resources, is accused of participating in the conspiracy and making false statements during the investigation.

-- Tamara Cotman, a regional supervisor who oversaw dozens of Atlanta's schools, is accused of intimidating witnesses, including a principal and other staff, in an effort to hinder an investigation.

-- Sharon Davis-Williams, who also oversaw a region of Atlanta's schools.

-- Michael Pitts, who oversaw a region of Atlanta's schools, also is accused of intimidating witnesses, primarily staff at Parks Middle School, in an effort to hinder or delay an investigation.

-- Christopher Waller, principal at Parks Middle School in Atlanta, where at least four teachers are accused of conspiring to cheat on standardized tests, is also alleged to have pressured teachers to cheat as early as spring 2006.

-- Armstead Salters, principal of Gideons Elementary School, where at least four teachers say he allegedly pressured them into cheating.

Hall and the 34 others named in the indictment have been ordered to surrender to authorities by Tuesday, said Howard, the district attorney.

Florida Adopts Different Standards For Students Based On Race

It seems that Florida teachers should get a cut in pay along with their new achievement goals for kids. As a teacher, I knew how easy it was to improve scores of average and high-performing kids. I knew my real achievement was bringing the kids who were behind up to grade level and above grade level. Kids in middle class families tend to get more intellectual stimulation outside the classroom, including verbal interactions with parents.

Florida is pretty much telling teachers to worry only about Asian, white and Hispanic students, and forget about black students.

Florida has not only given up on equal achievement for all races, it has also given teachers permission to pretty much ignore black students altogether. They not only have lower goals for black students, but they also say that fewer black students need to meet those lower goals!

Florida Adopts Different Standards For Students Based On Race
JONATHAN TURLEY
JonathanTurley.org
October 15, 2012

As the Court considers the future of affirmative action in higher education, the Florida State Board of Education is moving to create different grading in schools on the elementary and secondary levels in terms of the levels of proficiency expected for students based on their race.

The plan would set different goals for students in math and reading based upon their race. The plan would expect schools to show that Asian students meet 90 percent to be performing at or above grade level in English and white students would have to meet 88 percent of the goals. However, Hispanics would be expected to meet only 88 percent while black students would be expected to meet just 74 percent of black students.

In math, the schools would need to reach 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient and 86 percent for white students. Hispanics would be expected to be at 80 percent while blacks would be expected to be at 74 percent.

By lowering the percentages for hispanic and black students, the school officials hope to satisfy federal and state guidelines. However, it also institutionalizes the lower scores for minority groups. It also raises the danger that teachers might push harder with white and asian students to achieve higher levels of performance after achieving lower levels for hispanic and black students. I understand the frustration with these state and federal goals. I also understand the differentials found in the baseline for different communities. However, in my view it is still a mistake. I have long argued for a greater investment in our public school system with additional teachers and better pay for teachers. My wife and I are committed to public schools and send our kids to public schools. We believe strongly in the key role that public schools play not only in socializing children but in society as a whole in having a common educational experience...

Chicago teachers are suspending seven-day strike

Chicago teachers suspend strike, classes to resume
September 18, 2012
(CBS/AP)

Chicago teachers are suspending a seven-day strike in the nation's third-largest city, a move that will send thousands of students back to classrooms.

The union's House of Delegates voted Tuesday to suspend the strike after learning details of a tentative contract agreement.

A proposed settlement was presented to delegates during the weekend. Sticking points included teacher evaluations and job security, provisions at the core of a debate about the future of public education across the nation.

The union delayed its vote to give teachers more time to assess the contract they'll vote on in the coming weeks.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had pushed for a quick resolution as parents found alternatives for about 350,000 students. He even went to court to try to force teachers back to class...