Link of the week: A Letter to Arne Duncan

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!  On Monday, education blogger Sabrina Stevens Shupe crafted an eloquent and powerful response to Arne Duncan’s open letter to teachers, in which he praises our work and promises, “I hear you, I value you, and I respect you.”  Unfortunately, the Secretary’s actions do not match his words.

. . . Change the Rules!

As promised in my post "If at first you don't succeed. . .", I return to the topic of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.  After combing through the full text of the document, I am disappointed to find the changes to Bush’s original legislation to be either minimal or flat-out harmful.

We’ll start with the minimal.  Fortunately, instead of holding fast to the ridiculous deadline that mandates all students be 100% proficient in all subjects by 2014, the bill allows for the Secretary of Education to adjust the requirements every three years.  This creates a kind of escape hatch for the government to get out of following through with the punitive measures of the current law.  These measures would have required closing the thousands of schools that are nowhere near meeting the rapidly approaching deadline.

Another change includes rewording the definition of a “highly qualified teacher” to include first year TFA teachers and others who have undergone minimal training but are pursuing certification while teaching full-time.  The bill reads, “the teacher should be considered highly qualified for purposes of this part based on a showing that the teacher is making progress toward becoming highly qualified.” Do we consider a teenager on the day they pass their written permit exam to be Highly Qualified Drivers, based on a showing that they are making progress toward earning their license?  Do we consider pre-med undergraduates to be Highly Qualified Doctors based on a showing that they are making progress toward becoming doctors?  In what other profession do the words highly qualified refer to someone who is in the early stages of their training?  Instead of tackling the greater problem of improving teacher training programs and providing funds for bright young professionals to enroll and complete these programs, like countries with successful public education systems, the new bill is simply lowering the bar.  The idea that the U.S. Government is even bothering to confer the distinction of “Highly Qualified” upon any teacher with this revised definition is laughable.

Finally, one of the changes I consider to be most harmful involves increasing the budgetary allocations for developing newer and more frequent standardized tests.  In a time of budgetary crisis, why are we allocating more money to hand over to companies like Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing, or ETS K-12, which we know produce flawed and inadequate products?  As is, many states are already spending an exorbitant amount of money on standardized testing without any tangible improvements.  This simply does not make any sense.

Needless to say, my initial cautious optimism about the reauthorization of NCLB has been replaced with a grim frustration.  If teachers want to do what is best for our students, it will continue to be in spite of, rather than because of, current national policy.

Link(s) of the week:

Teach for America is no longer simply filling gaps in areas with teacher shortages.  The superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools just fired nearly 100 teachers in order to replace them with Teach for America Recruits.  The same thing recently happened in Los Angeles, where teachers were told they would be fired during administration of the state standardized tests.  One teacher who did not lose her job in the L.A. fiasco wrote, “It's been a horrible week here. Very depressing. Plus we're in the middle of our state tests. How smart is that to fire teachers while they are giving their students the TEST?   We work for idiots.”  As I hope I made clear in my previous post “Charity vs. Equity”, I don’t believe the expansion of TFA is a healthy decision for children and communities.  I also don’t understand how this makes financial sense in a time of budget crisis, considering the hefty recruitment fee TFA demands for the placement of its teachers.

*Thanks to Sydney for the link!

Merit Pay and the Myth of Monetary Motivation

Conventional wisdom dictates that providing monetary incentives to employees will effectively increase quality and quantity of work produced.  Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, among other influential education reformers, are buying into this wisdom and pushing for policy changes that would link teacher pay to student test scores.  This works for executives who earn bonuses for meeting sales goals, right?  What could possibly be different about teaching?  And why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

We HAVE thought of this before- - and it has proved a failure over and over again since the 1920s.  Within the past five years alone, merit-pay programs have been proven ineffective in Nashville Public Schools, New York City Public Schools, and Duncan’s native Chicago Public Schools, to name a few.  The following are direct quotes from the research reports in question, with links to the documentation:

o   Nashville:  “POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an effective intervention that improved student outcomes.  By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis.”

o   New York: “I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”

o   Chicago: “We found no evidence that the [TAP merit-pay] program raised student test scores . . . We also found that TAP did not have a detectable impact on rates of teacher retention in the school or district during the second year it was rolled out in the district.”

Why anyone continues to push merit-pay programs in the face of such overwhelming data regarding their ineffectiveness is beyond me.  It is unclear why education reformers act on the assumption that education should function like a business, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  To quote Diane Ravitch: “Education is not a business. It is supposed to provide good education to all children, not to segment its market and compete with others in the marketplace. It operates on the principle of equality of educational opportunity, not a race to see who can sell the most or win the biggest market share and beat out the others.”

Furthermore, there is something fundamentally wrong with the market-driven view of children and their education as a product.  In Duncan’s merit pay plan, which bases teacher salary on test scores, the product in question is how well a child does on a standardized test.  I fundamentally disagree with this for two reasons.  First, I argue that focusing so narrowly on this singular metric ignores the true heart of education: a complex process of joy, discovery, collaboration, problem solving, creation, and social-emotional growth.  Second, the tests by which we are currently judging students and teachers are flawed.  At present, there is no accurate way to measure how a specific student has grown over time with a specific teacher.  Teachers are judged on all scores, regardless of how long a student has actually been in their class.  In areas like D.C., where there is a high percentage of charter school students being unceremoniously kicked out come test time, the public school teachers are then assigned the punishment for failing students who have only been in the class for a few days.  Is this a reasonable and fair way to judge teacher effectiveness?

Finally, there is new evidence from scientist Daniel Pink disproving the conventional wisdom that the best way to motivate someone is with external rewards like money.  Pink found in his research that “the secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”  Teachers have known this for hundreds of years.  Clearly, we didn’t choose the profession because we were dazzled at the prospect of earning a few extra hundred dollars for raising test scores.  We do this work because we love “those rare moments when understanding of the world alters and a previously impossible thing is admitted” (Audrey Niffenegger).  In honing our craft year after year, we feel we are, in the words of Daniel Pink, “doing better by ourselves and our world.”  We are already motivated and working as hard as we can.  Let’s stop trying to force merit-pay to work and begin looking at actual solutions.

Easter Sunday and the Texas Miracle

This week has been busier than I expected, so I am still working on my merit-pay post.  In the meantime, I encourage you to check out this article, written by retired principal Katherine Cox.  It tells the tale of “The Texas Miracle”, a well-documented lie that bafflingly continues to influence educational policy today.

Here is an excerpt:

“In the 1990′s, Houston Superintendent of Schools, Rod Paige, made principals and administrators accountable for the drop-out rate and for test scores. When those two criteria did not improve at a particular school, Paige fired the school administrator. Scores suddenly shot up at schools all over the district. Some schools made incredible progress with both the drop-out rate and student achievement scores. When George Bush campaigned for President in 2000, he thought he had found “the magic bullet” to reform America’s public schools and touted “the Texas miracle” during his campaign. But, as we shall see, the improvement turned out to be based on lies and fabrication. Houston had not improved its scores or its drop-out rate.

Even though the sham was known in inner circles by 2000, President Bush, once elected, appointed the very shaman himself, Rod Paige, as U.S. Secretary of Education.”

Unfortunately, this is only where the story begins.  Read the rest of the article here.

Link of the Week:

Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell just announced a plan to spend $3 million on a pay for performance pilot program for hard to staff schools in the Commonwealth.  Citing a previous unsuccessful attempt at a similar program, Virginia’s largest school district declined the plan and all attached funds.  Why aren’t more school systems drawing on actual data and historical record to make reasonable decisions about improving schools?  Paying teachers based on student test scores does not, nor has it ever, resulted in higher test scores or the effective recruitment and maintenance of great teachers.  I am off the rest of the week on an overnight field trip with my class, but check back over the weekend for more on the subject of performance pay. 

A Grave Disservice

         Recently, I signed on to help coordinate volunteers for the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. I believe in the mission of the March to promote teacher, family, and community leadership in forming public education policy and curriculum; secure equitable funding for all public school communities; and end high stakes testing for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation and punishment.  What I enjoy the most about my new role is the opportunity to collect stories from public school educators around Virginia and help these educators turn their frustration into action as we prepare for the March.

         The following is an excerpt from an email written by special educator about the impact of high stakes testing (in this case the Virginia Standards of Learning exam, ironically given the official acronym SOL) on students with special needs. This teacher describes an experience with the VGLA, Virginia’s iteration of alternate assessment for special needs students.

“Each year the impact of the SOL tests seems to become worse and worse.  I work in a school that pretty much demands that special education students take the grade level alternate portfolios regardless of whether they ethically meet the criteria (meaning without doctoring the data) or should be assessed in that fashion.  With the change in documentation for students to talk the VGLA assessment, I found myself testing my students at an obnoxious and ridiculous level.  One of the criteria is that the students demonstrate that they do poorly on multiple choice tests.  Since my students actually did better on the multiple choice tests, my guidance counselor and principal continuously told me to keep testing until they fail the MC test.  That's nuts, and it's a symptom of life in a public school in the time of high stakes testing especially as more and more decisions are being based on the results of these tests.  

I've also read over and over from groups like Students First and many of their fans that teachers are the root of much of the evil in our children's education.  I'm tired of being vilified and demoralized.  I want to do my part.”

This teacher’s story is not unique.  Special education students are seen as an obstacle to schools trying to make AYP, rather than individuals who have a right to a quality education.  There is extreme pressure on schools to have students with special needs take an alternate assessment, typically a massive portfolio of student work samples accompanied by teacher evaluation.  Students are more likely to pass this type of assessment; therefore their scores will not have a negative impact on the school’s overall test results. With the enormous amount of work required to put the portfolios together, the burden to ensure they will pass review, and the increasing number of students in each special educator’s caseload, there is little time left over for the actual business of teaching.  In addition, a study from the University of Dayton found that states with the most punitive sanctions for schools that do not make AYP tend to place special needs students in more restricted settings, rather than finding the most appropriate and least restricted setting required by IDEA. 

Special educators are overworked, underpaid, and not given the autonomy to do what is right for their own students.  In emphasizing test results above all else, we are doing a grave disservice to all our children, especially those with special needs.