Score card

It's the last week of June, and I just wrapped up another school year.  My 29th overall, which still seems kind of impossible to me until I realize that a child of a former student graduated from high school this year.  Then it seems pretty real, along with a realization of "Good lord, I'm getting old."

So I've been at this for a long time, and with, I think, some measure of success.  Which is why I read my letter from the school district awarding me my numerical grade for the school year with a mixture of amusement and irritation.

I won't leave you hanging; I got an 81.  I got an 84 last year and a 91 the year before that, so according to the state rating scale, I'm becoming incrementally less competent.  It can't, of course, be because the metric is flawed, that the three grades are comparing different assessments of different students put together in different ways.  No, in the minds of the geniuses at NYSED, this number means something fundamental about my effectiveness as a teacher.

In fact, that's what an 81 gets you; a designation of "Effective."  You have to have a 92 to be "Highly Effective."  If you're below 75, you're "Developing."  I'm glad I didn't land in that category.  If after 29 years at this game, I'm not "Developed," I don't hold out much hope.

What amused me most about all of this nonsense was the paragraph that said, and I quote:

Please remember that your scores are confidential and should not be shared in any way.  In accordance with state regulations, the parent of a child in your class may request your composite score and rating as well as that of the principal.  For your own protection, teachers are strongly discouraged from sharing their own scores outside of the district process.

Which is a recommendation I'm happy to toss to the wind (along with the aforementioned letter).  If we keep our scores and the way they were generated under wraps, it allows the statistics gurus at the State Education Department to keep everyone under the impression that they actually know what they're doing.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let me get specific, here.  My 91 two years ago was based upon the scores of my Critical Thinking classes and my AP Biology class.  Critical Thinking is an elective, and while the day-to-day work is difficult (requiring a lot of thinking, surprisingly) the material that is suitable for an exam at the end of the year is actually quite easy.  So my students performed brilliantly, as I would expect.  Additionally, that year's AP class was an extremely talented group who knocked the final exam clear out of the park.

Fast forward to last year.  My score last year was based on a combination of my Regents (Introductory) Biology class and my AP Biology classes.  Because of a strange policy of piling students who are classified as learning disabled into the same class, last year's Regents Biology was half composed of students who have been identified with learning disabilities.  Many of these students were hard-working and wonderful to teach, but it's unsurprising that that part of my grade went down.  My two AP classes last year were a friendly, cheerful lot who also happened to be somewhat motivationally challenged, and who by the end of the school year were far more invested in playing Cards Against Humanity than they were in studying for my final.  So that accounts for the remainder of the decline in my score.

This year, my score was a composite once again between Regents and AP Biology, but this time my Regents classes were among the most talented, hardest-working freshman and sophomores I've ever had.  My AP class was small but outstanding, but because of the way the scoring is done, they would have to score on my (very difficult) final exam higher than a target determined by their score on the (far easier) Regents Biology exam for me to have that student's score count in my favor.  On the part of my assessment that came from my AP class, I got a grand total of three points of of a possible twenty -- mostly because of students who got an 81 or 82 on an exam where their target was 85.

So my three scores in three consecutive years have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and (I would argue) nothing whatsoever to do with my competence as a teacher.  But because there's no idea that is so stupid that someone can't tinker with it to make it even stupider, next year the State Department of Education has informed us that we'll be assessed a different way.  Our joy at hearing this pronouncement was short-lived, because once we heard how they're going to score us, we all rolled our eyes so hard it looked like the email was inducing grand mal seizures.

Next year, unless over half of your students are in classes that take a mandated state exam at the end of the year, 50% of your score will be based on an average of the "Big Five" exams, the ones that all students have to take to graduate -- English, US History, Algebra I, Global History, and Biology.   (The other half, fortunately, will be based on evaluation by an administrator.)  If you think you can't have read that correctly, you did; the half of the high school band teacher's grade (for example) will come from students' scores on exams that she had absolutely nothing to do with.  Even for me, who teaches one of the "big five" -- less than half of my students next year will be in Regents Biology, so I'll be getting the composite score, too.

But don't worry!  Because students mostly score pretty well on these exams, and the score will be calculated using the time-honored statistical technique of averaging averages, we'll all look like we're brilliant.  So in effect, they took an evaluation metric that was almost completely meaningless, and changed it so as to make it completely meaningless.

Because that's clearly how you want an evaluation system to work.

All of this, it must be said, comes from the drive toward "data-driven instruction" -- converting every damn thing we do into numbers.  Couple this with a push toward tying those numbers to tenure, retention, and merit pay, along with a fundamental distrust of the teachers themselves, and we now have a system that is so far removed from any measure of reliability that it's almost funny.

Almost.  Because NYSED, and other state educational agencies, look upon all of this as being deadly serious.  It's all very well for me -- a veteran teacher of nearly three decades who is looking to retire in the next few years -- to laugh about this.  I wouldn't be laughing if I were a new teacher, however, and I'd be laughing even less if I were a college student considering education as a profession.

In fact, it'd make me look closely at what other career options I had.

Standardized incompetence

Why is it that the people trying to "fix the education system" seem hell-bent on making it worse?

It's a mysterious phenomenon.  There is now a mountain of evidence that (for example) standardized test scores are unreliable measures of both student progress and teacher competence, and yet we are increasingly using exactly those metrics for gauging both.  In my home state of New York, 20% of my "final grade" as a teacher is mandated to come from high-stakes standardized tests (in my case, the Living Environment Regents Exam, which may be the most poorly-constructed exam I've ever seen).

So given that we've had incontrovertible evidence that it's a bad idea to put the futures of our students and the careers of our teachers in the hands of the corporations who are paid big bucks to write ineffective standardized tests, what do you think would make sense, as a next step?

1. Reduce the emphasis on those tests, and go with measures devised to assess growth, creativity, and critical thinking.
2. Make the standardized test scores have an even higher impact by giving them more weight in end-year assessments for both students and teachers.

If you went for option #2, all I can say is, you understand the system of educational oversight all too well.  This latest idiotic idea was proposed by New York Chancellor of Schools Merryl Tisch, who wants test scores to trump everything else, including the evaluations of teachers done by competent school administrators.

In Tisch's own words, she proposes to:

... (e)liminate the locally selected measures subcomponent, established through local collective bargaining. The data reveal that the locally-negotiated process for assigning points and setting targets in this subcomponent do not differentiate performance in terms of the composite ratings that teachers and principals receive. Instead, assign 40 percentage points to student growth on State assessments and other comparable measures of student growth – including performance-based assessments.

And what is her rationale for proposing this?  It is, she says, because too many teachers were rated as competent by the previous metric.  The number rated "ineffective," Tisch said, was simply too low.  In other words: if the metric says that most teachers are doing their jobs, then the metric has to be inaccurate.

She also proposes monetary incentives for "high-performing teachers" and "teachers taking leadership roles," thus pitting one teacher against another in terms of who gets the highest-performing classes.

Let me take my own situation as an example.  This year, I am teaching only one section of Regents Biology (which I steadfastly refuse to call "Living Environment," largely because the last "paradigm shift" we had in New York State was called "Raising the Bar," and they "raised the bar" in my course by renaming it, which was considered raising the bar because "Living Environment" has more letters than "Biology" does).  In our school, primarily because of staffing and financial issues, we have gone to a model of dealing with special-needs students called "co-teaching."  Co-teaching allows the district to put virtually all of the "classified" (i.e. special education) students together in one class, and then to assign a special education co-teacher to be in the classroom with the subject-area teacher.

This year, I got the "co-taught" class.  Half of my 24 students are "classified."  In this class, I have students who read on the fifth grade level.  I have students who have behavioral disabilities.  I have an autistic child who shuts down whenever things get stressful, which averages four days out of five.  I have ten students who have yet to pass a single quiz this year, despite extra help from myself and the co-teacher, and "modifications" (i.e., quizzes that have been adjusted to be easier to pass).

This is one of the classes on which I will be evaluated this year.  What do you think my chance of being rated "effective" is going to be?  If there was a monetary incentive this year, I'd be unwise to make advanced plans for spending it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the kids in that class.  They are, by and large, sweet, cooperative, funny, and earnest.  My co-teacher is a wonderful educator, and we have a great working relationship.  But to call the two of us incompetent because we can't get this group of kids to pass the state assessment is to ignore the reality that we cannot treat teachers like factory workers, and kids like widgets that have to be made to a particular specification.

The ironic piece of all of this is how completely obvious this is to anyone who has spent any time in a public school, and how mysterious it all seems to the people in charge.  Merryl Tisch, for example, has in her career spent only seven years teaching children -- and these were years spent in wealthy private schools.  I would humbly suggest that perhaps, wild idea though it may be, we should have the people in charge of public education be individuals who have devoted their lives to teaching children, of all sorts of backgrounds, in public schools.

I would also humbly suggest that Ms. Tisch doesn't know what the hell she's doing.  Nor did our former Commissioner, John King, who oversaw both the APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) and Common Core implementation disasters that have taken place in New York over the last couple of years.  But since in government, you can't screw something up badly enough to stop you from getting promoted, King is now going to work as a top assistant to U. S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

How have we gotten here, to treating teachers like untrustworthy assembly-line workers, and children like little cookie-cutter images?  It doesn't take being a teacher to see how absurd the latter is; anyone who has children of their own knows that they develop at different rates, excel at different things, have different problems, different stumbling blocks.  The idea that anyone could take a random group of tenth graders (for example), and get them to the same place at the same time, is moronic.

And the idea that if the kids aren't all at the same place at the same time by the end of the year, it's the teacher's fault, is somewhere beyond moronic, in that ethereal realm that there really isn't a word in the English language to describe.

I think the answer about how we got here is twofold.  First, people want a uniform product.  That 1950s-mentality, construction-line model is sunk deep into the American psyche.  And if we can't achieve it, we naturally look around for scapegoats.  Teachers are convenient in that regard, aren't they?

The second reason, though, is more pernicious, and it is, to state it bluntly, the almighty dollar.  It's financially expedient to blame the teachers, turn everything into numbers, and act as if those numbers mean something real.  By doing so, you (1) pretend that the problem is fixable without actually changing anything substantive; (2) frustrate the absolute hell out of experienced teachers, who then get out of the profession, saving districts money; (3) avoid considering solutions that might truly work, like reducing class sizes, creating classrooms with differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of children with different abilities and challenges, and allowing schools to beef up programs that encourage creativity, such as music and art.

Nope.  That's not the way, say policy wonks like Tisch.  Test the little buggers to a fare-thee-well, because that somehow will tell you what is really going on, both with the kids and with the teachers who are trying their best to teach them, despite larger classes, less funding, and more absurd busy-work from state agencies.  Reduce funding via state taxes, and simultaneously put a cap on local levies, thus forcing school boards into the Hobson's choice of cutting virtually the only thing they have control over, which is staffing.  (And guess what goes first?  The aforementioned "non-core" subjects like art and music.)

But the wonks keep rising to the top, and the teachers keep saying this sort of thing, and keep getting ignored.  To pay attention to us would be to admit that we're on the wrong course, and have been on the wrong course for some time.  Which would mean that our educational leaders have achieved a score of...

... ineffective.  And we can't have that, right?

Of course, right.

The turning of the tide

Sometimes writing this blog seems like whispering into a windstorm.

There are so many loopy ideas out there that attacking them is like taking on the Hydra -- cut one down, and there are nine more lurching up to take its place.  Now, to be fair, they're not all equally destructive; my attitude is that if you'd like to believe in Bigfoot, or ghosts, or astrology, there's no real harm in it as long as you don't mind people like me laughing in your general direction sometimes.

On the other hand, there are some crackpot ideas that cause direct harm, and to me, this crosses a line.  At that point, I tend to stop poking gentle fun, and start getting hostile.  These include homeopathy, anti-vaxx, and treating mental illness as if it were demonic possession (and, of course, as if demons themselves were real).

But nothing makes my blood boil like attacks on education.  Not only are we talking about my career, here; we're talking about the children.  We're talking about the young people who will grow up to lead our country, our next generation of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, scholars, and lawyers.

The whole battle has become increasingly heated lately, to the point that the powers-that-be on the state and federal level are feeling a little... beleaguered.  And they should be.  They have sold out to corporate interests, to the likes of Pearson Education and the Educational Testing Service.  They have ceded our nation's future to a group of men and women who believe that only that which is quantifiable is real, who value test scores above creativity and depth of understanding, and who believe that it is fair to hook the evaluation of educators to these same meaningless streams of numbers.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.  Parents are, in increasing numbers, opting their children out of high-stakes standardized tests.  No, I'm sorry, my child won't be in school today.  He's sick.  Oh, he has a standardized test today, and it'll have to be rescheduled for three weeks from Tuesday?

I'm sorry, he's going to be sick that day, too.

Teachers, too, are fighting back, where they can.  Unfortunately, school districts' hands are often tied by capricious laws that link funding to cooperation with poorly-thought-out state mandates.  But our voices are getting louder.  Just last week, a New Jersey teacher named Melissa Tomlinson confronted New Jersey governor Chris Christie at a rally, asking him, "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?"

He shouted at her, "Because they are!"

Tomlinson, undaunted, threw back at him his record of defunding public education, a record that included cuts of over one billion dollars in his first year in office.  At this point, Christie lost it completely, screaming at her, "I am tired of you people!  What do you want?  Just do your job!"

Another teacher, Mark Naison, had the following to say about the encounter:

What do I want? What do 'we people' want? We want to be allowed to teach. Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth. This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education.

Christie's not the only one who's under siege for his support of destructive educational policy.  Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin has come under criticism from several fronts over her support of a teacher assessment model that gives each school a grade of A through F based solely upon students' performance on standardized tests.  Schools scoring in the D to F range can be closed, the entire teaching staff fired (with a maximum 50% rehire rate), and then reopened -- under state control.

This, despite a joint study by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University found that what schools are doing is only responsible for 20-30% of student achievement -- the remainder being accounted for by factors outside of school control, such as socioeconomic status and parental support.  A spokesperson for the governor, Alex Weintz, said that he was "dismayed" to find that teachers' unions were using the report to discredit the A-F evaluation model, and that the governor "does not support" the findings of the report.

"It’s not helpful to anyone’s cause," Weintz said.  "It seems to be some opponents are absolutely bent on undermining the credibility of the entire system.  The fact of the matter is this grading system, regardless of whether or not you believe it should have been put together differently, is the law."

Regardless, apparently, of whether or not the grading system actually reflects anything real.

Then, just two days ago, Dr. Gary Johnson, Director of Special Education Advocacy and Instruction at the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center in Utah, testified before the Wisconsin State Legislature -- and said that the tests associated with the new Common Core Learning Standards amount to "cognitive child abuse."  The exams, he said, have little in the way of norming or peer review, and no validation studies -- meaning that using the scores to evaluate anything would be questionable, but using them to draw conclusions on the success or failure of schools is downright absurd.  "The US Department of Education's testing policies are like The Wild Wild West," Johnson said.  "They are doing what they want with no accountability, no constraints, and no oversight."

Here in my home state of New York, the backlash against the people who put us in our current predicament has been so strong that there have been demands that Commissioner of Education John King resign -- the latest from the New York State Allies for Public Education.

Troubled times, these.  It's easy to lose hope, and heaven knows my morale lately has been at its lowest since I can remember.  But there are signs that the tide might be turning.  My post last week about the lack of trust in educators got hits from all over New York State, and beyond -- and responses that included support from principals, superintendents, and school board members.  As a result of what I wrote, I've been invited to be part of a regional panel that will look at the teacher evaluation model, and other current issues in education.  All around me, I see people organizing, participating in peaceful resistance, speaking their minds and refusing to be silenced.

And perhaps this will, finally, be enough to turn things around.  Maybe we can break the stranglehold on education wielded by the top-down micromanagers, the b-b stackers in the state and federal departments of education who have never taught a day in their lives, but who think they know best how to educate children and evaluate teachers.  This is not a fight against accountability, as it has been characterized by the besieged politicians who still support the current model, and who are (sadly) still in charge of crafting educational policy; this is a demand for reasonable accountability, for an approach to education that gives every child a chance to excel, for assessments that generate statistics which actually mean something.

So I'm trying to stay optimistic, here, and toward that end I keep telling myself, over and over, that wonderful quote from Mohandas Gandhi: