Pearson's Pineapple Socked Your Kid; Tentacles into Teacher Evaluation

(Scroll to bottom for links to parents' groups against the tests.)
Media roundup on Pearson PLC [wikipedia article link], (Pearson's "Investors" page showing double digits assets growth since 2007 --a global economic slowdown, but a boom in government spending on tests and texts to support test-driven curricula), target of 400 protesting parents this week in mid-town Manhattan: (Here's Lindsey Christ's NY1 story with video yesterday "Schools Boycott Latest Round Of Standardized Testing" on high-stakes and protests over the test mania.)
Pearson mis-used children's author Daniel Pinkwater's story about a talking pineapple in standardized tests in April and it baffled many kids. Only a wide-spread public outcry got the question dumped from counting on students' test results.
When the New York Times is outraged ("When Pineapple Races Hare, Students Lose, Critics of Standardized Tests Say") people listen. Parents Across America noted Leonie Haimson's role in exposing this fiasco. She blogged on a Thursday, by the next day, April 20, 2012, the story snowballed and the New York State Education Department (NYSED) Commissioner had to pull the question. (But what about other baffling, illogical questions? Don't get me started on another standardized test in New York City that same week stumping students by using the phrase "giddy-up". Hello? This is 2012, not the 50s or 60s or 70s. Western --cowboys and "Indians"-- culture references went out decades ago.)

Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss May 7, 2012 reprinting Diane Ravitch on Pearson's expanding reach:
The closing clincher:

Many years ago, I interviewed a famous [professor] at MIT about the role of standardized tests in education. He said something I never forgot. He said, “Let me write a nation’s tests, and I care not who writes its songs or laws.”

Are we prepared to hand over our children, our teachers, and our definition of knowledge to Pearson?

Ravitch's endorsement of parents' June 7, 2012 rally against Pearson:
"Parents Vs. Goliath":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-pearsons-expanding-role-in-education/2012/05/07/gIQApr4H8T_blog.html

Ravitch, June 7, 2012, on "Pearsonizing Our Children":
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/07/pearsonization/

Valerie Strauss, June 9, 2010, on Montgomery County [Maryland] Public Schools' selling out to Pearson:
"MCPS selling its reputation to Pearson"
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/montgomery-county-public-schoo/mcps-makes-a-bad-deal-with-pea.html
* * *
PEARSON'S REACH INTO TEACHER EVALUATION AND LICENSING:
From Strauss' May 7, 2012 column: Barack Obama / Arne Duncan's U.S. Department of Education, Pearson and testing:

With the U.S. Department of Education now pressing schools to test children in second grade, first grade, kindergarten — and possibly earlier — and with the same agency ["Ed Dept seeks to bring test-based assessment to teacher prep programs," Strauss at Post, April 23, 2012] demanding that schools of education be evaluated by the test scores of the students of their graduates (whew!), the picture grows clear. Pearson will control every aspect of our education system. [Link is to Michael Winerip's May 6, 2012 NY Times column, "Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest."]
Now we learn from Michael Winerip in the New York Times that Pearson has made a deal with Stanford University to license teachers, no matter what state they are in.
The deal is this: the school of education is supposed to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of the prospective teacher, plus the response to a written examination. Someone in the Pearson shop–possibly a retired teacher–will evaluate the prospect and decide after a brief review, whether they should get a license to teach.

From Winerip's above linked May 6, 2012 article:

Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.
The UMass students say that their professors and the classroom teachers who observe them for six months in real school settings can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.
They have refused to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching, as well as a 40-page take-home test, requirements of an assessment that will soon be necessary for licensure in several states.

From Madfloridian's Journal, May 2012:
Testmaker company Pearson makes deal with Stanford University to license teachers long distance.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8398

Pearson's press release touting their teacher evaluation contract with New York State:
"Pearson Named Approved Provider of New York State Teacher Evaluation Rubrics; NYSTCE Framework for the Observation of Effective Teaching Designed to Meet Unique Needs of Local Education Agencies":
http://www.pearsoned.com/pearson-named-approved-provider-of-new-york-state-teacher-evaluation-rubrics/
* * *
Education imperialism too? / Or Education Deform goes international
They are attempting penetrate India with their student testing wares:
"Pearson Brings America’s No.1 School Test to India" --a boosterist blurb at "digitalLearning: Learning Through ICTs":
http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2012/06/pearson-brings-americas-no-1-school-test-to-india/
Pearson's "Investors" page trumpets their move into several of the "BRIC" countries: " . . . a significant expansion into fast-growing developing economies including China, India, Africa and Brazil."
Links to parents' groups:
Change the Stakes
Class Size Matters Fair Test (National Center for Fair & Open Testing) Parents Across America
ParentVoicesNY
Time Out From Testing
United Opt Out National
Related:
Performance Assessment.org

BREAKING: CTU Might Have 90 Percent for a Strike of Chicago Schools; Obama's Weingarten's Damage Control

Organized labor suffered a demoralizing set-back Tuesday with the failure to recall Scott Walker, the viciously anti-labor governor of Wisconsin.

To its south, the inspiring mobilization of a strike authorization vote.  The Chicago Teachers Union has voted this week on whether to strike.  The media have been variously patronizing or damning.  In some instances, there are glimmers of understanding of what teachers there are facing.
And Chicago Public Schools "CEO" [sic] Jean-Claude Brizzard sent a teacher-bashing letter to homes that got one grandparent considering supporting the teachers' strike. See the grandparent's letter in the Chicago Tribune.  Brizzard criticized teachers for not waiting until a July report has been released.  But he is ignoring the fact that holding a vote in the summer impedes the ability to get a strike vote quorum.
Years of teacher bashing, capped with mayor Rahm Emanuel's demand for a ten percent lengthened school day, without an adequate raise, fueled the climate for a strike vote."He created an incentive for them, the causes and conditions for teachers to mobilize in a way they haven't mobilized before," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

(CTU President Karen Lewis casts her ballot.)
BREAKING: NBC reports multiple sources reporting that the CTU has as much as 90 percent of vote-participating teachers voting in support of a strike.  Report at NBC. The state government interfered with union autonomy and forced them to get 75 percent support in order to launch a work stoppage.  "He created an incentive for them, the causes and conditions for teachers to mobilize in a way they haven't mobilized before," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"He created an incentive for them, the causes and conditions for teachers to mobilize in a way they haven't mobilized before," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 --an Associated Press Report at ABC.
After the release of an official vote count on Monday, we will see if the CTU exceeded the required percentage.
UPDATE:
Substance News, the best source of accurate news and analysis of Chicago education news, reports that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made a trip to Chicago to publicly praise mayor Emanuel.
Read the quote to the end. It is a classic case of Orwellian double-speak.

"Whether it's the mayor's infrastructure program here in Chicago, or eventually everything else we're doing around the country, is that when labor and business start working good together on trying to put people back to work with good jobs, when we start building things, it builds hope around the country," Weingarten said. ABC News, which quoted her above, reported that "Mayor Emanuel is in a love fest with the American Federation of Teachers today."

What a nasty distortion of reality. As Jim Vail of Substance News says, Weingarten's trip to Chicago was a mission from the President Barack Obama White House, a trip to do damage control on what is a public relations disaster [the Emanuel war on teachers and the teachers' fight-back against Emanuel and Brizzard] for President Obama, a trip to actually extend more support for the 1% than for the working teachers of the city.

Kudos to Vail, for pointing out that Weingarten never taught a full program for a full year in her life.

Not Just Field Tests: Across U.S., Parents Mobilizing Against Test Mania

Ed Notes reports that Parents are mobilizing here in New York, on June 7, 11 A.M. in a Field Trip against the Field Tests, outside Pearson Headquarters, at 1330 6th Avenue. Parents are rebelling, across the U.S. against the deformers' tests; and they're making news. Round-up from FairTest, Huffington Post, New York Times SchoolBook:

From FairTest: "Testing Protests Expand Across the Nation" From Boston to Florida to Oakland:

Protests against high-stakes exams surged across the country this spring as grassroots groups in a dozen states staged events to voice their opposition to the increased use and misuse of standardized testing in public education. Ranging from small local gatherings to statewide rallies, the events were united by their denunciations of reliance on standardized test scores to determine whether students will be promoted to the next grade or receive a high-school diploma.
Parental resistance has grown steadily in response to high-stakes testing policies. More than 20 states now require students to pass an exit exam to receive a high school diploma. Several more will soon impose such requirements, though some other states are now retreating from such mandates (see story p.7). Organizers of at least a dozen events collaborated through the Assessment Reform Network (ARN), a project based at FairTest. ARN now supplies technical assistance and other resources to over 30 state and local organizations across the country that work to improve assessment and accountability practices.

 Rallies and Marches

• More than 1500 people, from both cities and suburbs, converged in a statewide demonstration in Albany, New York, on May 8 to oppose the state's use of the Regents exams to determine high school graduation and the growing power of state tests to undermine teaching and learning.

 • A May 5 rally in Los Angeles, California, drew 300 people. The Coalition for Education Justice, which organized the event, urged city and state educational officials to protect students from "racist and class-biased high-stakes testing."

 • Also on May 5, in Detroit, Michigan, the first rally sponsored by FREE, a coalition of parents, students, teachers and university professors, drew about 75 to call on the state legislature to "get rid of the MEAP," the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests.

 • Rallies were held at opposite ends of Massachusetts. A hundred protesters attended a May 8 demonstration in Northampton, while 300 gathered on the Boston Common on May 15 at a rally initiated by the Students Coalition for Alternatives to the MCAS (SCAM) and sponsored by the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education (CARE) and other organizations.

 • Arizona activists have been staging a series of smaller events, such as marches in Tempe in April carrying signs and letters addressed to state legislators, pickets at busy street intersections in Tucson, and leafleting at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Phoenix. Arizona officials have already backed off from this year's graduation test requirements.

 • Other rallies were held in Austin, Texas; Olympia, Washington; and Columbus, Ohio.

 Test boycotts

• Schools in dozens of California communities had low test participation as students and parents refused to take annual Stanford-9 state tests. These included 600 students at two high schools in wealthy Marin County, and dozens in largely low-income Oakland. Opting out of the tests is legal and has become common across California. Press reports said up to 90% opted out at some schools

 • Close to 100 eighth and tenth grade students in Massachusetts protested the April test outside their schools, refused to answer the essay prompt on the test, or wrote their own essay on the exam explaining their opposition to the test. In May, when testing resumed, boycotts continued across the state. Though grade 10 students will have to pass the test to graduate (barring changes in policy), dozens of tenth graders boycotted. Hundreds of students in earlier grades in towns and cities across the state also refused to take the test.

 • Nearly 200 middle grade parents in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale kept their children home on test day. Unusually, this boycott had the open support of the school system. Students in Rochester and Ithaca also refused the exams.

 • In Washington state, about seventy high school families in the Vancouver area announced they would refuse to have the test administered to their children, using an "opt out" procedure allowed by state law. Students in other locales across the state also opted out.

 • Wearing white shirts, jeans and badges bearing student identification numbers, about half of the students at Boulder Colorado's New Vista High School protested the first day of the Colorado Students Assessment Program tests (CSAP) in February, chanting "standardized tests produce standardized students."

 • Across the nation, several teachers refused to administer standardized tests. Teach-ins • Ad-hoc parent and teacher groups organized teach-ins in Sacramento, California, and Portland, Maine, to raise awareness about the harms of high-stakes standardized testing.

 • In Virginia, parents conducted a variety of events in local neighborhoods across the state. At one local library, parents invited families to read and discuss children's books written about standardized tests.

 • At a student-organized citywide conference in Boston, Massachusetts, participants in the Teen Empowerment program used music, skits, poems and stories to voice their views on the MCAS while urging state leaders to listen to the experiences youth have with the tests.

 • A student-moderated forum at a high school in Panama City, Florida, screened a student-created TV advertisement and discussed the problems associated with use of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) to grade and rank schools.

 Next Steps

The visible rallies and boycotts are the tip of an "iceberg" of growing opposition to the misuse and overuse of flawed standardized tests. From small events in small towns to larger events in cities, the protesters represent the public face of many thousands of parents, students, teachers and others who are meeting, talking, petitioning and organizing to stop high-stakes testing. Many of the organizations which sponsored rallies, boycotts and other events will continue to share experiences, research and information through the ARN, which connects groups through a national web site, email discussion groups, conferences and other activities.

Contact information from organizers of the events, sample flyers and press releases can be found under "What's New" or the ARN page at www.fairtest.org, along with information about the ARN and participating organizations.

From Huffington Post: Public School Standardized Testing: Enough Is Enough for New York State Kids Christine Wachtell offers a refreshing proposal: Let the private school students and teachers go through the same test mania non-sense. Let those students get an all prep education. Let those teachers get pulled from the classroom to score tests.

Here is a modest proposal. Let's have private school students take the same standardized tests that public school students now take each year. While we are at it, let's require private school teachers to be absent from their students' classrooms for the same number of days as public school teachers, who now must serve as conscripted graders for the standardized tests. For public school children, it has been a long spring, shaped far too much by mandated testing. And the testing is not over. The latest outrage is that public school children are now expected to serve as free product testers for Pearson, the test preparation company awarded a $32 million, five-year contract to develop New York State's 3-8 grade tests. [The wikipedia article on Pearson.]

 From June 5-8 "field tests" -- tests composed entirely of trial questions that do not count towards students' annual test scores -- are supposed to be administered to one full grade at each public elementary and middle school. In trolling the internet, I discovered the English Language Arts and Mathematics Field Tests School Administrator's Manual. My favorite lines in it read: "Do not permit students to obtain information from or give information to other students in any way during the field tests. If you suspect that such an attempt has occurred, warn the students that any further attempts will result in the termination of their field tests." Students caught cheating on a test that won't be scored get to finish early.

When did we cross into the realm of the absurd? Let's just review how much of the spring already has been given over to testing. In April my fifth grade son, along with his aggrieved seventh grade brother, spent six days being tested in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. At ninety minutes per day, the tests were significantly longer than in past years. Then came May, when teachers at both my sons' New York City public schools were obliged to leave their classes in the hands of substitutes, while they graded other schools' standardized tests. My son's fifth grade teacher missed every Thursday for three weeks. Teachers at my older son's school missed even more days with their students. The principal of his middle school wrote to parents in late April: "Monday began a five-week period in which testing interferes with every aspect of the school program. During the six days of testing, three this past week and three days next week, every student will miss a minimum of 18 class periods. The six test days will be followed by three weeks, in which fourteen teachers ... will each be pulled out of school for five days, so they can assist in grading the tests ... This is what we are expected to do so the students can be tested!"

 A great deal of attention has focused on the flawed questions that appeared on this year's tests created by Pearson. Most notably, a nonsensical reading passage appeared on the 8th grade ELA test, concerning a race between a pineapple and a hare. The public outrage regarding that passage, quickly dubbed "Pinneapplegate," resulted in the invalidation of six questions. So too, my fifth grade son was asked on his math test to determine the perimeter of a trapezoid, even though it was later established that the particular trapezoid described does "not exist within the bounds of mathematics."

 How much testing is too much? Let's keep in mind that the SAT takes under four hours to measure college-bound students' verbal, mathematical, and writing skills. Should assessing my fifth grader's mastery of these same subjects take 9 hours? And does he really need to sit through more testing this school year to help Pearson make more money? At his elementary school, all 5th graders are supposed to take a math field test in early June. When private school students are enjoying their first days of summer break, do my son and his friends really need to be reckoning again with faulty trapezoids? Across the nation, there is a groundswell of protest rising against high stakes testing, and in New York State public school parents are calling for a boycott of the NYS June field tests. [Link to Parent Voices NY.]

Isn't it high time for private school students and their parents to share in the experience? I have often heard it suggested that, if America had instituted a universal draft, we never would have gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. High-powered parents never would have tolerated sending their sons and daughters to Kabul instead of to college. Similarly, if New York State drafted private school children into statewide standardized testing, their high-powered parents would not stand for it. Then New York's headlong race toward ever longer, ever more high-stakes, and ever more flawed testing, would end quicker than a hare can beat a pineapple to the finish line.

From the New York Times Schoolbook: From a May 23, 2012 story and a May 24 update: By Hiten Samtani, "More Parents Are Saying No to Pearson's Field Tests"

Last month’s mandated standardized tests drew widespread criticism from many parents, who complained the tests were now dominating the curriculum and that too much weight is being put on the results to evaluate their children and teachers. Yet, despite the complaints over “high-stakes testing,” only a small group of parents decided to opt their children out of them, as many parents said they worried about the ramifications to their child and their schools if they did so. But as city students have begun a new round of standardized tests — this time so-called “field tests,” which are experimental tests that the state-contracted test-maker, Pearson, is using to try out questions on city students for future use — more parents are talking about opting out.

And test resistance appears to becoming more widespread, with substantial numbers of parents at several city schools deciding their children would not participate. Resistance also appears to be growing more organized. Groups like Change the Stakes are helping to spread information about opt-out procedures and have created a spreadsheet to help parents navigate the field testing landscape. ParentVoicesNY has created a boycott form letter that parents can download, sign and then submit to their school. The group also has direct connections with more than 20 schools, according to Kevin Jacobs, a public school teacher who is one of its active members.

 City officials said they will not have the final figures on how many parents chose to have their children opt out last month of the federally mandated standardized math and English tests for third through eighth graders. Results from these tests play a major role in grade promotion, middle and high school applications, and placement into gifted and talented programs. Test scores are also used in teacher and school evaluations . . . .

 An official at the city’s Department of Education said that unlike with last month’s standardized tests, the city does not monitor and analyze data from the field tests. The field tests are handled directly by Pearson, the official said, and the city’s approach to them is hands-off. The field tests are being given to help Pearson, the company who received a $32 million contract to design New York’s state tests, align its questions with the new Common Core learning standards. But it is doing so in an increasingly critical atmosphere, after multiple problems with last month’s tests, including errors in the multiple choice answers and complaints about a farcical passage related to a race between a pineapple and a hare. About 488,000 students will be involved in this year’s field tests, a spokesman for the New York State Education Department said. But last month’s standardized tests also had embedded field questions that will be used by Pearson purely for research purposes. As a result, the tests were 30 percent longer, another source of frustration for children and their parents. So why the need for the standalone field tests? The state Education Department spokesman said the validity and reliability of the state exams requires brief standalone pilot testing of questions, typically during a single 40 minute session . . . .

 Ms. Foote said she had feared that keeping her son out of last month’s tests would harm his school. Under No Child Left Behind, schools must have a 95 percent participation rate to satisfy their Adequate Yearly Progress, she said. “We wouldn’t do anything to hurt our schools.” But with the field tests she had no such qualms. “There were no consequences,” Ms. Foote said. “They’ve had a good gig going with this data department.” Jane Hirschmann, co-founder of Time Out from Testing, said that there were no known ramifications of boycotting the field tests. “Since they have no grade, they can’t be used for promotion, teacher evaluations, principal bonuses or a school grade,” she said. She added that a borough assessment implementation director from Brooklyn had said that as long as intent was expressed in writing, parents would be allowed to opt their children out. . . .

Chicago Teachers' Strike Vote Countdown to Wednesday

The Chicago Teachers Union is coming, on June 6, this coming Wednesday.
Its issues are issues for the teacher members of the New York City counterpart, the United Federation of Teachers. (Not so fast, their complaints involve a move to lengthen the school day. Actually, yes so fast, this is an issue in New York also, as the 2005 contract give-back to get a pay increase was the 37 and a half minute lengthening of the school day.)

(Photo is from overflow indoor rally of thousands of teacher in pre-strike mobilization last week)
Here's the CTU's public statement on their blog:

CTU sets strike authorization vote date.
by Stephanie Gadlin | June 01, 2012
CHICAGO – Today, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) announced it has set a strike authorization vote for Wednesday, June 6th, which will be conducted in all Chicago Public Schools (CPS) with CTU members. State law requires 75 percent of Union members to vote in the affirmative in order to authorize a strike. More than 90 percent of teachers, clinicians and paraprofessionals have already rejected the Board of Education’s current contract proposals.
CTU President Karen GJ Lewis, NBCT, said a strike authorization vote was “an important step in ensuring the voices of over 25,000 public school educators will be heard at the bargaining table.” Teachers have criticized the Board’s proposals saying they are harmful to students. If the Board has its way it will:
Eliminate any real enforcement of class size limits: In their proposal to the CTU, CPS uses the same argument that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently made in Philadelphia. The CPS proposal claims, contrary to common sense and teacher experience, that class size does not matter. Their language in quotes says that “the board shall establish a class size policy and notify the union of that policy.” Not only will they impose whatever class size they think is appropriate, after they have said class size doesn’t matter, they have cut any funding in our contract to lower over-sized classes and have eliminated any real limits on ballooning class sizes next year. Ignore staffing levels in all schools: The Board has rejected all of the CTU's proposals on appropriate staffing levels for our students. Including art, music, physical education, library and world language teachers -- counselors, social workers, nurses and school psychologists -- despite woefully inadequate staffing levels throughout the district and a longer day that will require additional staff if it is to be a better day.
Reject ‘better school day’ proposals: CPS refuses to accept any of our recommendations regarding full day kindergarten, playground facilities and air conditioning for all schools -- despite just last week many of our schools reaching temperatures of over 90 degrees, when learning becomes nearly impossible and classroom conditions inhumane. They have already cut the facilities budget by 85 percent next year even as they propose 60 new non-union charters and plan to close nearly 100 schools next year.
Refuse to adequately compensate teachers: CPS continues to disrespect teachers with a 2 percent raise offer for the first year of a five year contract even though working at CPS is getting much harder next year.
Refuse to offer job security to qualified teachers: The Board plans to remove protections for experienced and qualified educators who lose their positions through no fault of their own which will exacerbate the current 50 percent teacher turnover rate every five years -- something that interferes with continuity and quality instruction.
“A strike authorization vote is not a vote to go on strike,” Lewis said. “…We want to avoid a strike. Strikes aren’t good for anyone—not our members, not our parents and certainly not our students. As a matter of practicality, it is important that we conduct this vote now while our members are still in schools and not while they are on vacation. We certainly hope to have a contract in place before school starts in the fall and we look forward to everyone—including our members—returning to the classroom.”

Karen Lewis and the CTU are taking a brave stand by considering a strike to defend on crucial issues. The crucial issues for New York teachers, class size, seniority protection and tenure rights, are central among the CTU's concerns.
They are standing up to Rahm Emanuel and his continuation of Richard Daley and Arne Duncan's disastrous public school deform policies. (For instance read Substance News' historical review of Chicago schools on those "refomers"' Hit List.) They are standing up to the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten who always seems to vigorously argue against striking --the same AFT president that is floating programs such as how to get rid of teachers and is promoting teacher evaluation programs. (-A president that contradicts herself: witness her valid point that "The states that actually have lots of teachers in teacher unions tend to be the states that have done the best in terms of academic success in this country.") A vote in favor of a strike would be a big embarrassment for Weingarten with the AFT convention coming at the end of July in Detroit, Michigan.
If the CTU indeed does go on strike, they will need support. Teachers' unions and other public sector workers should show solidarity with the Chicago teachers. Additionally, strike solidarity work would be good for sharing with other teachers the parallels between the CTU teachers' issues and those of teachers in other cities.

Fred Klonsky: Chicago Shows What a Teachers' Union Really Looks Like

(March to Chicago Public Schools [CPS] headquarters after 5,000 strong mass rally)
[The protest rally was in preparation for a coming strike authorization vote.] Fred Klonsky reports today:

(Photo of latest mass rally)

“It’s not like the old days,” IEA President Cinda Klickna said to me in explanation of why the IEA wasn’t doing a very good job of mobilizing members earlier this year, canceling a mass rally in Springfield with the bogus excuse of Capitol construction. Recent attempts to take credit for the local demonstrations at many legislators offices are pretty smelly. Yesterday, the young dynamic leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took a page from the old days and turned out over 5,000 teachers to a mass rally at the old Auditorium Theater. Then they poured out on to Michigan Avenue and marched on the board of education offices on Clark Street. In a pathetic last minute attempt to undermine the rally, the little Mayor of Chicago whispered at a press conference that, sure, teachers should get a raise. But anyone could see through his sorry ass words. The lesson is one that both the Mayor and other teacher unions must learn. Chicago teachers have become a beacon to teachers everywhere. Watch out! The red shirts are coming.

Principal in Sex Harass of Women; Walcott Stood By Him

Two standards of justice exist in the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE). For staff there are few rights. For principals and other supervisors there is tremendous leniency and forgiveness.
A Regents test cheating scandal or a sex harass case, the accused stays on the job. Demoted maybe, but usually not fired.
Now a clarification, I say for such cases, staff or supervisors, that the claims, the charges must be recognized as allegations, and there should be stronger cases than rumor. There should be due process, and trials outside of the news media. Accused should be innocent until proven guilty.
However, we must also say that there should be a consistent standard. Staff are guilty until they can prove their innocence. We do not find consistent application of standards with the higher-ups in the education field, particularly in the NYC DOE.
Last month, the South Bronx blogger raised this point and he brought renewed attention to the case of "Dr." (from a diploma mill) Mychael Willon, someone with the equivalent of a guilty plea to the charge of lewd acts in a Wichita bookstore. South Bronx reminds us that the DOE eventually let him go from his "LIS" [local instructional superintendent] position supervising principals in the Bronx. "Dr." Willon did get to move to a plum executive position at a private Texas education firm. Now, South Bronx raised this case in the context of publicizing the case of the accused principal John Chase, Jr. It is alleged that he made vulgar comments to female staff about a copy machine's ability to do things for his private areas. Click here for the quotes too vulgar for this blog, from the police report.
Lost amidst other "education news" over the past week was the news that the DOE demoted principal Chase. NY1.com reported on May 15 that the DOE has moved Chase over to the position of assistant principal at a location yet to be determined.

Take an inventory, there was a police report. The allegations against accused the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president did not reach the level of a police report. However, his case garnered two days of front page coverage from the New York Post.
More of an inventory of the DOE kid gloves treatment of the accused principal, compared with accused teachers removed from the classroom:

DOE officials say there was no formal disciplinary hearing.

and:

After the report came out in November, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott let Chase keep his job. The accused principal received a letter of reprimand and was forced to undergo sensitivity training.

Oh, and the Gothamist site reported, May 16, the additional news that

Could this [decision to move Chase over to an AP position some place] have anything to do with the fact the DOE is now investigating NEW claims by a 15-year-old girl that Chase made comments that made her uncomfortable?

Actually, very creepy comments. See the details at Chaz's post, comments that spurred to child to contact the police. For comparable sub-administrator educators, the outcomes are routinely, four-digit fines or suspensions of pay, and feeding of stories to the Post that would make rabid wolves blush.
Remember, when Walcott or another big, or the media speaks, accused teachers are guilty when charged. Chaz gave us Walcott's latest standy-by-your-man. Principles of fair treatment apply to principals:

On the new allegation, he said, “Just because an accusation is made doesn’t mean a person is guilty.”

The allegations against Chase involved non-consensuality, harassment by a superior over subordinates, features of a hostile work environment, and plenty of salaciousness. Where was the public media execution of Chase as there has been for countless accused New York City teachers?
Additionally, disturbing, disgusting was Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott's statement that amounts to an instance of "Stand by Your Man," albeit in January. "'We're going to make sure he goes for the appropriate training, but at the same time we have an investment to make as far as leadership is concerned,' Walcott said in January," NY1.com reported last week. Interesting. Walcott is overlooking the alleged abuse and trauma of women workers, with the justification of standing by "an investment" of leadership.
Let's be clear, there should not be public media trials. We have just noted how the DOE has double standards when it comes to allegations and justice. Yet, the media practices the same double standards. We are not calling for public trial; but we are calling out the outrageous, classist inconsistency in the media treatment of the accused.

Why Post-Scooped Mulgrew Sex Story has Political Relevance --UPDATED

(Go to the bottom of this post for UPDATES; these updates also deal with the political ramifications.) This New York Post salacious story, "UFT ‘sex coverup’: Union chief caught in act at school: lawsuit", is just another media outlet's union-bashing attack on a powerful union official who helps the less fortunate. Not so fast.
The Post's story this morning of United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew does indeed have great significance.  It moves beyond the level of a salacious tee-hee story to one of great importance.  For the first half of the article it justs reads as sour grapes gloating over an embarrassing story of improper behavior.
However, the story matters a great deal for the integrity of UFT president Mulgrew.  If the facts are indeed true, they raise highly disturbing concerns for the membership.
First the details: an aggrieved teacher at the Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens alleges that Mulgrew engaged in a sexual act on a shop table in a wood shop of the school campus of William E. Grady Vocational High School --Mulgrew's last teaching assignment, and that he was caught "in flagrante delicto" [Latin, "in blazing offence"] by a school janitor. His alleged partner in the act was a school guidance counselor. So far, just a sleazy story of misconduct and more than a little bad judgment.
Then come the political details. The article reveals that his act partner received a nice union office job on the side. (For the uninitiated, the union office jobs generally come with a second pension and a token appearance at the school.)
One former staffer at Grady High School made comments that cut to the core of the issue:

“The sex thing, it’s between them and nobody’s business,” one said. “The thing that upset me is the patronage job to Mendez — rewarding her with a high-paying job with my union dues.”

Coincidentally, soon after the alleged encounter, Mulgrew ascended to the position of UFT Vice President of Vocational Schools.

In 2005, soon after the alleged incident, Mulgrew became UFT vice president for career and technical high schools. Around the same time, Camacho-Mendez transferred to the HS of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn, but got a part-time job in Mulgrew’s union office.
She was later given the full-time position of UFT liaison for special education. She gets two paychecks — $22,000 in UFT compensation on top of her $85,000 city salary, although she’s no longer a guidance counselor. In 2010, Mulgrew presented Camacho-Mendez with a UFT award.
“No one ever heard of this woman until Mulgrew brought her on board,” said a longtime UFT rep. “She had no union credentials.”

WHY THIS MATTERS POLITICALLY
This article alleges that the school's administration, the principal, participated in the hush-hush. Here's where the story gets political. You cannot be a strong union advocate of teachers when the principal, and now, by extension, the Department of Education (DOE) higher-ups, "have the goods on you." This is why Mulgrew is caught literally, in a compromised position. Compromised positions affect integrity and the ability to fully serve out duties. This is why military and security agencies are expected to treat this issue with vigilance.
Mulgrew demonstrates a profound weakness with his handling of several high-profile matters. First, he has sold out the union by agreeing to the tying of teacher performance evaluations to student test scores. He himself has conceded that the tests are statistically inconsistent. The New York State Department of Education's Meryl Tisch publicly upbraided the makers of the latest test, Pearson, publishers of several tests recently administered to elementary school aged children, for rampant test errors. Yet, scholars have often cited poverty as a greater factor in the appearance of low test scores. For example, see former principal Mel Riddile's "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid."
Second, there is the Absent Teacher Reserve matter. ATR teachers are senior teachers. The city Department of Education, under mayoral control --which Mulgrew and Weingarten in principle agree with, only allots so much to particular schools. Thus, the city encourages principals to hire down the pay scale. So, while the media excoriates Last In, First Out, the reality is that principals hire new or relatively new teachers over experienced ones. Where does this leave excessed teachers? The ATR pool. The DOE will create hundreds of ATRs in June with the shuttering and the immediate reopening of the schools with new names and new budget numbers. The UFT's mantra was that it would protect ATRs. Now, some teachers will question this with talk of a buy-out.
We wonder why the lack of real strength on cutting edge issues? Could it be that the DOE had the goods on Mulgrew and this restrained him from going further on some of the most pressing issues for teachers? Could it be that Mulgrew is now of the two percent with his "$250,400 a year [salary], plus benefits," rather than the 98 percent?
Interesting: both the evaluations cave in announcement in February and the ATR cave in this Thursday, came in 24 hours after the Delegate Assemblies, where trouble could brew, in the absence of rehearsed, scripted opponents of statements by those representatives truly defending members' interests.
THE REAL MYTH OF MULGREW
Many UFT members are snow-under by Mulgrew's scowl when interviewed and by his grandiose acts such as dissing New York Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to his face with his D rating of the Department of Education's performance. They and UFT-friendly outsiders are saying that "Mulgrew is better than Randi" [Weingarten, Mulgrew's successor]. This Post article furthers the myth, giving Mulgrew the "fiery" label.
But these gestures by Mulgrew are comparatively tame. He needs to go beyond the nyeh-nyeh-ing to Walcott and show the real potency of the union, and have mass rallies.
All of this is why many union members are viewing the union leadership as a royal fiefdom insulated from the mass of the membership, why some members are looking for a UFT caucus with MORE action, real defense of members, rather than empty bluster, to give deeper analysis of the issues, not the Mulgrew clique's brief soundbytes.
Read more of Susan Edelman's story at the Post: UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused of sex-scandal cover-up in federal suit - NYPOST.com
UPDATE
See Betsy Combier's Parents Advocate blog for 2005 principal lawsuit query: http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=8300
She closes her contribution with the clincher,

So, what's the truth, Mike? Why did the Principal of Grady sue you and Ellie Engler in 2005? What was the settlement? The public does need to know.
And why are you on the payroll of the DOE through 2010?
Did you hide your affair and other actions at William Grady, then decide you would not help members put into the same situation? If so, perhaps you should resign.

We go now to the 2005 lawsuit, by a principal against Mulgrew for defamation.
It appears to be retaliation against Mulgrew and other union officials for complaints over alleged principal misconduct in asbestos removal. Mulgrew and company complained of the principal's asking teachers and students to work on the site: [he] "directed students and a teacher to tear down library walls and shelves even though he knew the room contained asbestos, then tried to cover up the incident".Here is the substance of the case between Mulgrew and Grady HS principal Ivor Neuschotz. This lawsuit? It was settled out of court the next year. Was there an I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine quid pro quo, agreement between Mulgrew and Neuschotz to keep hushed about each other's scandals?
2005 a special year for Mulgrew. As we noted before, he had the on-campus fling with his colleague. And in the same year UFT president Randi Weingarten chose him as vice-president of the vocational school division of the union.
So, Mulgrew had the goods on the principal, who kept hush-hush. Again, this cuts to the core of how this is a valid political story. Just how can you go toe-to-toe with opponents when the opponents have you in mutual agreements to keep hush-hush?
Back in 1993 president Bill Clinton was searching for an attorney general. His first two appointees had minor legal problems stalling his appointment for the office.
That episode should be an object lesson that you thoroughly vet candidates for high or sensitive positions. We wonder, why did Randi Weingarten fast-track Mulgrew to the Presidency when he had the Camacho-Mendez affair in his closet? Were there not any Janet Reno-clean candidates that she could have considered?
[This story reeks of double standards. The alleged classroom tryst of two language teachers at James Madison High School, like Mulgrew were caught by a member of the custodial staff. These teachers, in 2009, the year of Mulgrew's moving to the UFT presidency, got assigned to a "rubber room." Mulgrew, when he was supposedly caught in an improper intimate act was on his way to Vice President. The end of their story: termination. The end for Mulgrew: the insulated presidency. The question some teachers might at this point ask: do we have a rubber room president?]
* * *
Finally, the Rubber Room Reporter has linked Gotham Schools' page on Grady H.S. It got a D rating for 2009-2010. It is a mostly male school; yet the top graduates are female. The graduation rate is 49 percent. That is not exactly the model of success in the DOE's eyes. It is the kind of school that might head soon for transformation. Mulgrew's old peers at Grady HS could soon be out of their positions and find themselves ATRs. Don't you think that Mulgrew is relieved that he is a mere mortal teacher?
His track record as a union leader, looking out for his fellow teachers shows a failure of compassion and understanding. The settling for a test score-based evaluation program. The abandonment of teachers whose school becomes a turnaround or transformation school to excessed status. Does he ever imagine if his fate was more like the hapless teachers at James Madison or dozens at Grady?
As Combier asks, "What was the settlement? The public does need to know."
* * *
Our brotherly blogger at Ed Notes added these observations about the story:

For those of us who are challenging his leadership for NOT battling the ed deformers and protecting teachers, this story is meaningless other than it exposes the level of Unity Caucus corruption and how they protect their own while leaving most teachers to hang.
--------UPDATED with comment from Michael Fiorillo
I agree with Norm that UFT collaboration with Bloomberg predates Mulgrew, and is predicated on much deeper corruption and deception, which also includes the self-deception of the leadership and its patronage recipients.
If the UFT/AFT didn't already accept or agree with the outlines of the neoliberal project on education, would this (alleged) tawdry episode be enough to maintain it? Not likely.
On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbreath said that all revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door, and we all know the UFT structure is rotten, despite the presence of decent, hard working people in the union. That's the destiny of every entrenched, single party state, and that's the potential significance of this story: at a certain point, the superstructure is so internally compromised that it can no longer support itself, and crumbles before a gust of wind.
If this is that gust of wind (doubtful in my mind, but you never know), the question then becomes, who will benefit from the resulting crisis: an invigorated rank and file fed up with years of lies and abuse, or the Overclass, which seeks to use it for its own avaricious ends?

Assailed Teacher: NYC Teachers Want MORE

The blog "Assailed Teacher," has written a powerful piece, accompanying a new United Federation of Teachers caucus' mission statement. (The Movement of Rank and File Educators, "M.O.R.E.," has formed as an alternative to the Unity caucus which has total dominance over the UFT.)

"New York City and its Teachers Want MORE" The blogger has written some incisive comments accompanying each of the agenda points appearing in the MORE caucus mission statement, challenging a different course from that which the dominating Unity caucus has pursued.

The new caucus mission statement and Assailed Teacher's critique, too valuable to edit down, appears thusly:

New York City’s teacher union, the United Federation of Teachers, has been dominated by a caucus known as Unity. This was the caucus formed by Albert Shanker that rolled all of the old, independent teacher unions in NYC into one (hence the name, “Unity”).

And Unity has had a stranglehold on the UFT since Shanker. The UFT is the largest single chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and, it is commonly assumed, as the UFT goes, so does the AFT.

Randi Weingarten’s tenure as UFT president reflects what Unity’s strategy has been for the past 30 years. She took the lead when the teacher-bashing campaign started kicking into high gear. Bloomberg and Klein were floating the meme that teachers were overpaid union bums whose bloated pensions were burdening government coffers. They had fresh ideas for “reform” and bums like Randi were barriers to “progress”.

Instead of fighting Bloom-Klein head-on, she decided to compromise with them on the 2005 contract, giving them much of what they wanted. It is this contract that created the Absent Teacher Reserve crisis and denuded the tenure rights that Shanker had helped institute decades earlier. In short, Unity in 2005 backpedaled on what Unity throughout the 1970s had gained.

Randi is not stupid. She did this because the atmosphere in 2005 was toxic for teachers, much like it is now. The union she led was the bad guy in the public’s mind. Giving back many of the hard-fought rights of teachers might help rehabilitate the reputation of the union, Randi must have thought. At the very least, it would cause the reformers to call off their attack dogs in the media.

Well, none of that happened. Randi gave back those rights and the attacks merely intensified. Meanwhile, Randi catapulted to the leadership of the AFT. I believe she now has her eyes on national office, maybe Secretary of Education. If Obama is inclined to dump Arne Duncan in his second term, who better to mollify the teachers’ unions than Randi? After all, they will not be able to criticize his Race to the Top program if one of their own is on the inside. Although, it is not like the AFT or the NEA have been overly critical of RTTT as it is.

This explains why Randi was recently quoted praising Joel Klein as a man of “integrity”. She seems to feel bad that Joel Klein’s parent company is embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal. “It can’t be fun for him” she explained in a Clinton-esque display of feeling other people’s pain.

Can she feel the pain of all the teachers who are suffering under a contract she negotiated seven years ago?

So, while I recognize that it was the UFT and Unity that had earned the few rights we have left as NYC teachers, I also recognize that it was Unity who gave most of them back. As symbolized by Randi, Unity will do what is good for Unity.

I have been in contact with teachers in urban school districts across the country and they all sing the same song about their unions: they are collaborators in education deform. Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark and all points in between have produced teachers who feel sold out by their unions.

We might not mind so much if there was some give-and-take. Randi collaborated to improve the union’s image, not to mention her own, but it has not stopped the screws from being put to us in the court of public opinion. Randi still comes off as a shrill union hack on the television screen and teachers are still lazy bums living high on the hog.

Then the Chicago teachers made their move. They deposed their collaborator caucus and replace it with the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. They got rid of all the bloated union salaries at the top; the sinecures occupied by burnouts who have not taught since the Reagan Era. Maybe this is why they are now able to stockpile money to prepare to sustain their members in the case of a strike?

More importantly, they have drawn a line in the sand against their dictator mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, and his Bloomberg-esque plans for ed reform. They have learned that collaboration gets teachers nowhere. Now is the time for resistance.

It is time for teachers in America’s first city to take cues from the second city.

That is why the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators has been formed. Caucus elections are coming up within the next year. There will be a new box to check, next to which will be the acronym MORE.

NYC teachers, when the new evaluation system gets put into place by the start of 2014, the one that will determine your career and the future of your students by value-added, high-stakes testing; the one that will force you out of the system with virtually no due process if the results of those tests are found lacking; the one that will have principals check little boxes on observation reports which judge you on your bulletin boards and the way you dress; never forget who negotiated that system: Unity.

It was Unity whose brass sat in a smoke-filled room with ed deform officials for days hammering out that system. It was Unity who then turned to us and promoted it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Their line was, “if you think this is bad, you should see what they’re doing in Tennessee.” In other words, this is the best we could hope for in the age of ed deform. In other words, we collaborated so as not to look like barriers to “progress”. In other words, it was Unity business as usual, the same business that saw Randi sell us out in 2005.

Contrast this to MORE. MORE represents that era, hopefully not too far in the future, when people’s patience with “compromise” comes to an end. Compromise has been the Trojan Horse that has destroyed public education over the past 10 years.

No more Trojan Horses. It is time for us to launch a thousand ships against education reform instead.

Or, for now, we will settle for 9:

MISSION STATEMENT (as adopted April 21, 2012)

A – Who we are and why we are forming

1. We are members of the UFT and members of school communities and their allies.

In other words, this is MORE than a caucus. It is a movement in which everyone who has a stake in public education is welcome.

2. We insist on receiving professional dignity and respect, and we insist on a strong, democratic union emerging from an educated and active rank and file. We oppose the lack of democracy and one-party state that has governed our union for half a century. It has conceded to our adversaries’ agendas and has collaborated with their attacks on us, leading to the terrible situation we find ourselves in.

Unity domination means collaboration. This collaboration has been carried out by Unity in an undemocratic way in order to achieve undemocratic ends. It is perfectly in step with the corporate coup that has seized this country over the past three decades. MORE is perfectly in step with the coming backlash against this corporate coup.

3. We insist on a better educational environment for ourselves and for the students whose lives we touch. Because of this resolve, we have established the MORE Caucus, which will educate, organize and mobilize the UFT membership.

Teachers, through the denuding of tenure and the exaltation of high-stakes testing, have been silenced. This has hampered our ability to speak up for the children, mostly poor and minority, who we teach. In an era when third world poverty is becoming the norm in America’s inner-cities, this is a scary prospect, one that must be resisted at all costs.

B – For an improved contract

4. It is time to end the UFT’s concession to the language and assumptions of the so-called reformers and the wave of concessions and givebacks that result from conceding these assumptions. We must be prepared to take collective action, if necessary, in defense of our interests, and to achieve a decent contract.

No more Randi Weingartens who, because she has an eye on national office, shares in the data-driven discourse that frames all the discussion around education. Instead of self-aggrandizers who use the union platform to enrich their prospects for power, we need a union that believes that what happens to one of us happens to all of us. Instead of corporate unionism that celebrates individual gain, we want MORE social justice unionism that celebrates solidarity,

5. We seek a contract with retroactive pay, that is not obtained by selling off what few protections remain. We insist on defending tenure, due process rights, pensions, and an immediate end to the arbitrary denial of tenure to probationary teachers. We oppose any teacher evaluations based on standardized tests.

When Randi gave away many of our rights in 2005, she tried to soften the blow by saying that we had received raises. Yet, these were merely cost of living increases that we had been forgoing for years. There was a time when COLA was just part of the deal and did not have to be bought by giving up something of ours. It was an abandonment of one of the hallmarks of public-sector unionism.

And these give-backs put us under the thumb of administrators, from principals on up to the mayor, so that they could lay the ground work for corporate ed deform: ending tenure, perpetual probation for new teachers and high-stakes testing.

C – For quality curricula

6. We stand for a union that recognizes that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions and that, after parents, teachers are best situated to understand the needs of young people.

In the world of education reform, non-educators like Andrew Rotherham and Salman Khan are looked to as experts. People from elite universities who have never taught a day in their lives or spent an hour in an inner-city area have set the standard for what poor children should be learning.

Teaching is a profession to which people dedicate their lives, at least this is how it should be. Just like you would not take medicine that an economist prescribes for you, children should not have to attend schools where the major policies are determined by educrats with no education experience at all.

7. We insist that high stakes tests no longer deprive New York City’s children of exposure to foreign language, science, social studies and the arts. We insist that curricula taught in our schools be mindful and respectful of the needs and backgrounds of our students, that they nurture in them the potential for active, reflective citizenship, and is committed to racial and gender equity, democracy and economic justice.

High-stakes testing is for public school students. Those are the students that just so happen to be disproportionately poor and minority. Staking everything on exams for a limited number of subjects limits the curriculum. Art, history and English are fading away because math and science are seen as the subjects that will “prepare kids for the 21st century”.

The result of this is that the poorest students will never be exposed to the subjects that would cause them to think critically about the world around them, especially the world of oppression and poverty in which they remain mired. Narrowing the curriculum narrows the horizons of children and is a perfect recipe for the perpetuation of what can be deemed a lumpenproletariat.

D – Our communities, our schools

8. We reject the corporate takeover of the public schools, and the wave of school closures in the city, which have particularly affected poor communities with high proportions of people of color. We insist on a moratorium on the opening of new charter schools. We seek to end the cuts to education which have led to increasing class sizes as well as inadequate social, health, guidance personnel and services.

Most of the school closings past, present and future have been accompanied by more charter school co-locations. This means that buildings that were once totally dedicated to public schooling are being eroded away to make room for corporate charters. At the same time that public schools are seeing their budgets slashed and vital programs jettisoned, more and more public funding has been made available to charter schools. When you consider that charters skim the best public school students of a community and are able to expel the ones that give them the most problems, it means that more resources are going to kids that do not need it as much as the kids from whom they are being taken.

This is the latest form of segregation. Charters segregate based on family background and ability within communities that are already segregated by race. It is hyper-segregation.

9. The schools should be the people’s schools. We stand for democratic governance and popular control of our school system that fully reflects the needs, aspirations and diversity of those who make up its parent and student body. Mayoral control, which is inherently undemocratic, must be abolished, and be replaced by an elected people’s board of education which represents the interests of teachers, students, parents, and community.

The people who sing the praises of school “choice” are the same people who applaud big city mayors around the country who dissolve popularly elected school boards in favor of corporate-style, CEO management from the top. It is telling how the whole movement for “choice” has seen a new generation of educational leaders who exercise more power over public education now than at any other point in our history. When is the last time any Secretary of Education exercised as much power as Arne Duncan?

The term “choice” is a subterfuge that masks the fascistic manner in which education reform has been instituted.

MORE is where the real education reform is.

If it’s not valid, reliability doesn’t matter so much! More on VAM-ing & SGP-ing Teacher Dismissal

Here is one powerful critique, skewering the logic of the VAM reasoning in teacher "assessment" from School Finance 101: Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S. Because of its workman/woman virtues I have included the entire post.

If it’s not valid, reliability doesn’t matter so much! More on VAM-ing & SGP-ing Teacher Dismissal [note: VAM: value-added measurement; SGP: student growth percentile] Posted on April 28, 2012
This post includes a few more preliminary musings regarding the use of value-added measures and student growth percentiles for teacher evaluation, specifically for making high-stakes decisions, and especially in those cases where new statutes and regulations mandate rigid use/heavy emphasis on these measures, as I discussed in the previous post.
========
The recent release of New York City teacher value-added estimates to several media outlets stimulated much discussion about standard errors and statistical noise found in estimates of teacher effectiveness derived from the city’s value-added model. But lost in that discussion was any emphasis on whether the predicted value-added measures were valid estimates of teacher effects to begin with. That is, did they actually represent what they were intended to represent – the teacher’s influence on a true measure of student achievement, or learning growth while under that teacher’s tutelage. As framed in teacher evaluation legislation, that measure is typically characterized as “student achievement growth,” and it is assumed that one can measure the influence of the teacher on “student achievement growth” in a particular content domain.

A brief note on the semantics versus the statistics and measurement in evaluation and accountability is in order.

At issue are policies involving teacher “evaluation” and more specifically evaluation of teacher effectiveness, where in cases of dismissal the evaluation objective is to identify particularly ineffective teachers.

In order to “evaluate” (assess, appraise, estimate) a teacher’s effectiveness with respect to student growth, one must be able to “infer” (deduce, conjecture, surmise…) that the teacher affected or could have affected that student growth. That is, for example, given one year’s bad rating, the teacher had sufficient information to understand how to improve her rating in the following year. Further, one must choose measures that provide some basis for such inference.

Inference and attribution (ascription, credit, designation) are not separable when evaluating teacher effectiveness. To make an inference about teacher effectiveness based on student achievement growth, one must attribute responsibility for that growth to the teacher.

In some cases, proponents of student growth percentiles alter their wording [in a truly annoying & dreadfully superficial way] for general public appeal to argue that:

SGPs are a measure of student achievement growth. Student achievement growth is a primary objective of schooling. Therefore, teachers and schools should obviously be held accountable for student achievement growth.

Where accountable is a synonym for responsible, to the extent that SGPs were designed to separate the measurement of student growth from attribution of responsibility for it, then SGPs are also invalid on their face for holding teachers accountable. For a teacher to be accountable for that growth it must be attributable to them and one must be using a method which permits such inference.

Allow me to reiterate this quote from the authors of SGP:

“The development of the Student Growth Percentile methodology was guided by Rubin et al’s (2004) admonition that VAM quantities are, at best, descriptive measures.” (Betebenner, Wenning & Briggs, 2011)

I will save for another day a discussion of the nuanced differences between statistical causation and inference and causation and inference as might be evaluated more broadly in the context of litigation over determination of teacher effectiveness. The big problem in the current context, as I have explained in my previous post, is created by legislative attempts to attach strict timelines, absolute weights and precise classifications to data that simply cannot be applied in this way.

Major Validity Concerns
We identify [at least] 3 categories of significant compromises to inference and attribution and therefore accountability for student achievement growth:

The value-added estimate (or SGP) was influenced by something other than the teacher alone The value-added (or SGP) estimate given one assessment of the teacher’s content domain produces a different rating than the value-added estimate given a different assessment tool The value-added estimate (or SGP) is compromised by missing data and/or student mobility, disrupting the link between teacher and students. [the actual data link required for attribution]

The first major issue compromising attribution of responsibility for or inference regarding teacher effectiveness based on student growth is that some other factor or set of factors actually caused the student achievement growth or lack thereof. A particularly bothersome feature of many value-added models is that they rely on annual testing data. That is, student achievement growth is measured from April or May in one year to April or May in the next, where the school year runs from September to mid or late June. As such, for example, the 4th grade teacher is assigned a rating based on children who attended her class from September to April (testing time), or about 7 months, where 2.5 months were spent doing any variety of other things, and another 2.5 months were spent with their prior grade teacher. Let alone the different access to resources each child has during their after school and weekend hours during the 7 months over which they have contact with their teacher of record.

Students with different access to summer and out-of-school time resources may not be randomly assigned across teachers within a given school or across schools within a district. And students who had prior year teachers who may have checked out versus the teacher who delved into the subsequent year’s curriculum during the post-testing month of the prior year may also not be randomly distributed. All of these factors go unobserved and unmeasured in the calculation of a teacher’s effectiveness, potentially severely compromising the validity of a teacher’s effectiveness estimate. Summer learning varies widely across students by economic backgrounds (Alexander, Entwisle & Olsen, 2001) Further, in the recent Gates MET Studies (2010), the authors found: “The norm sample results imply that students improve their reading comprehension scores just as much (or more) between April and October as between October and April in the following grade. Scores may be rising as kids mature and get more practice outside of school.” (p. )

Numerous authors have conducted analyses revealing the problems of omitted variables bias and the non-random sorting of students across classrooms (Rothstein, 2011, 2010, 2009, Briggs & Domingue, 2011, Ballou et al., 2012). In short, some value-added models are better than others, in that by including additional explanatory measures, the models seem to correct for at least some biases. Omitted variables bias is where any given teacher’s predicted value is influenced partly by factors other than the teacher herself. That is, the estimate is higher or lower than it should be, because some other factor has influenced the estimate. Unfortunately, one can never really know if there are still additional factors that might be used to correct for that bias. Many such factors are simply unobservable. Others may be measurable and observable but are simply unavailable, or poorly measured in the data. While there are some methods which can substantially reduce the influence of unobservables on teacher effect estimates, those methods can typically only be applied to a very small subset of teachers within very large data sets.[2] In a recent conference paper, Ballou and colleagues evaluated the role of omitted variables bias in value-added models and the potential effects on personnel decisions. They concluded:

“In this paper, we consider the impact of omitted variables on teachers’ value-added estimates, and whether commonly used single-equation or two-stage estimates are preferable when possibly important covariates are not available for inclusion in the value-added model. The findings indicate that these modeling choices can significantly influence outcomes for individual teachers, particularly those in the tails of the performance distribution who are most likely to be targeted by high-stakes policies.” (Ballou et al., 2012)

A related problem is the extent to which such biases may appear to be a wash, on the whole, across large data sets, but where specific circumstances or omitted variables may have rather severe effects on predicted values for specific teachers. To reiterate, these are not merely issues of instability or error. These are issues of whether the models are estimating the teacher’s effect on student outcomes, or the effect of something else on student outcomes. Teachers should not be dismissed for factors beyond their control. Further, statutes and regulations should not require that principals dismiss teachers or revoke their tenure in those cases where the principal understands intuitively that the teacher’s rating was compromised by some other cause. [as would be the case under the TEACHNJ Act]

Other factors which severely compromise inference and attribution, and thus validity, include the fact that the measured value-added gains of a teacher’s peers – or team members working with the same students – may be correlated, either because of unmeasured attributes of the students or because of spillover effects of working alongside more effective colleagues (one may never know) (Koedel, 2009, Jackson & Bruegmann, 2009). Further, there may simply be differences across classrooms or school settings that remain correlated with effectiveness ratings that simply were not fully captured by the statistical models.

Significant evidence of bias plagued the value-added model estimated for the Los Angeles Times in 2010, including significant patterns of racial disparities in teacher ratings both by the race of the student served and by the race of the teachers (see Green, Baker and Oluwole, 2012). These model biases raise the possibility that Title VII disparate impact claims might also be filed by teachers dismissed on the basis of their value-added estimates. Additional analyses of the data, including richer models using additional variables mitigated substantial portions of the bias in the LA Times models (Briggs & Domingue, 2010).

A handful of studies have also found that teacher ratings vary significantly, even for the same subject area, if different assessments of that subject are used. If a teacher is broadly responsible for effectively teaching in their subject area, and not the specific content of any one test, different results from different tests raise additional validity concerns. Which test better represents the teacher’s responsibilities? [must we specify which test counts/matters/represents those responsibilities in teacher contracts?] If more than one, in what proportions? If results from different tests completely counterbalance, how is one to determine the teacher’s true effectiveness in their subject area? Using data on two different assessments used in Houston Independent School District, Corcoran and Jennings (2010) find:

[A]mong those who ranked in the top category (5) on the TAKS reading test, more than 17 percent ranked among the lowest two categories on the Stanford test. Similarly, more than 15 percent of the lowest value-added teachers on the TAKS were in the highest two categories on the Stanford.

The Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project also evaluated consistency of teacher ratings produced on different assessments of mathematics achievement. In a review of the Gates findings, Rothstein (2010) explained:

The data suggest that more than 20% of teachers in the bottom quarter of the state test math distribution (and more than 30% of those in the bottom quarter for ELA) are in the top half of the alternative assessment distribution.(p. 5)

And:
In other words, teacher evaluations based on observed state test outcomes are only slightly better than coin tosses at identifying teachers whose students perform unusually well or badly on assessments of conceptual understanding.(p. 5)

Finally, student mobility, missing data, and algorithms for accounting for that missing data can severely compromise inferences regarding teacher effectiveness. Corcoran (2010) explains that the extent of missing data can be quite large and can vary by student type:

Because of high rates of student mobility in this [Houston] population (in addition to test exemption and absenteeism), the percentage of students who have both a current and prior year test score – a prerequisite for value-added – is even lower (see Figure 6). Among all grade four to six students in HISD, only 66 percent had both of these scores, a fraction that falls to 62 percent for Black students, 47 percent for ESL students, and 41 percent for recent immigrants.” (Corcoran, 2010, p.20- 21)

Thus, many teacher effectiveness ratings would be based on significantly incomplete information, and further, the extent to which that information is incomplete would be highly dependent on the types of students served by the teacher.

One statistical resolution to this problem is imputation. In effect, imputation creates pre-test or post-test scores for those students who weren’t there. One approach is to use the average score for students who were there, or more precisely for otherwise similar students who were there. On its face imputation is problematic when it comes to attribution of responsibility for student outcomes to the teacher, if some of those outcomes are statistically generated for students who were not even there. But not using imputation may lead to estimates of effectiveness that are severely biased, especially when there is so much missing data. Howard Wainer (2011) esteemed statistician and measurement expert formerly with Educational Testing Service (ETS) explains somewhat mockingly how teachers might game imputation of missing data by sending all of their best students on a field trip during fall testing days, and then, in the name of fairness, sending the weakest students on a field trip during spring testing days.[3] Clearly, in such a case of gaming, the predicted value-added assigned to the teacher as a function of the average scores of low performing students at the beginning of the year (while their high performing classmates were on their trip), and high performing ones at the end of the year (while their low performing classmates were on their trip), would not be correctly attributed to the teacher’s actual teaching effectiveness, though it might be attributable to the teacher’s ability to game the system.

In short, validity concerns are at least as great as reliability concerns, if not greater. If a measure is simply not valid, it really doesn’t matter whether it is reliable or not.

If a measure cannot be used to validly infer teacher effectiveness, cannot be used to attribute responsibility for student achievement growth to the teacher, then that measure is highly suspect as a basis for high stakes decisions making when evaluating teacher (or teaching) effectiveness or for teacher and school accountability systems more generally.

References & Additional Readings

Alexander, K.L, Entwisle, D.R., Olsen, L.S. (2001) Schools, Achievement and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23 (2) 171-191 Ballou, D., Mokher, C.G., Cavaluzzo, L. (2012) Using Value-Added Assessment for Personnel Decisions: How Omitted Variables and Model Specification Influence Teachers’ Outcomes. Annual Meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy. Boston, MA. http://aefpweb.org/sites/default/files/webform/AEFP-Using%20VAM%20for%20personnel%20decisions_02-29-12.docx Ballou, D. (2012). Review of “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-long-term-impacts Baker, E.L., Barton, P.E., Darling-Hammong, L., Haertel, E., Ladd, H.F., Linn, R.L., Ravitch, D., Rothstein, R., Shavelson, R.J., Shepard, L.A. (2010) Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. http://epi.3cdn.net/724cd9a1eb91c40ff0_hwm6iij90.pdf Betebenner, D., Wenning, R.J., Briggs, D.C. (2011) Student Growth Percentiles and Shoe Leather. http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/09/13/24400-student-growth-percentiles-and-shoe-leather Boyd, D.J., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J.H. (July, 2010). Teacher layoffs: An empirical illustration of seniority vs. measures of effectiveness. Brief 12. National Center for Evaluation of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Briggs, D., Betebenner, D., (2009) Is student achievement scale dependent? Paper presented at the invited symposium Measuring and Evaluating Changes in Student Achievement: A Conversation about Technical and Conceptual Issues at the annual meeting of the National Council for Measurement in Education, San Diego, CA, April 14, 2009. http://dirwww.colorado.edu/education/faculty/derekbriggs/Docs/Briggs_Weeks_Is%20Growth%20in%20Student%20Achievement%20Scale%20Dependent.pdf Briggs, D. & Domingue, B. (2011). Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers: A review of the value-added analysis underlying the effectiveness rankings of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers by the Los Angeles Times. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/due-diligence. Budden, R. (2010) How Effective Are Los Angeles Elementary Teachers and Schools?, Aug. 2010, available at http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2010-08/55538493.pdf. Braun, H, Chudowsky, N, & Koenig, J (eds). (2010) Getting value out of value-added. Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: National Research Council, National Academies Press. Braun, H. I. (2005). Using student progress to evaluate teachers: A primer on value-added models. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Retrieved February, 27, 2008. Chetty, R., Friedman, J., Rockoff, J. (2011) The Long Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value Added and Student outcomes in Adulthood. NBER Working Paper # 17699 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17699 Clotfelter, C., Ladd, H.F., Vigdor, J. (2005) Who Teaches Whom? Race and the distribution of Novice Teachers. Economics of Education Review 24 (4) 377-392 Clotfelter, C., Glennie, E. Ladd, H., & Vigdor, J. (2008). Would higher salaries keep teachers in high-poverty schools? Evidence from a policy intervention in North Carolina. Journal of Public Economics 92, 1352-70. Corcoran, S.P. (2010) Can Teachers Be Evaluated by their Students’ Test Scores? Should they Be? The Use of Value Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice. Annenberg Institute for School Reform. http://annenberginstitute.org/pdf/valueaddedreport.pdf Corcoran, S.P. (2011) Presentation at the Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Workshop: Teacher Effectiveness on High- and Low-Stakes Tests (Apr. 10, 2011), available at https://files.nyu.edu/sc129/public/papers/corcoran_jennings_beveridge_2011_wkg_teacher_effects.pdf. Corcoran, Sean P., Jennifer L. Jennings, and Andrew A. Beveridge. 2010. “Teacher Effectiveness on High- and Low-Stakes Tests.” Paper presented at the Institute for Research on Poverty summer workshop, Madison, WI. D.C. Pub. Sch., IMPACT Guidebooks (2011), available at http://dcps.dc.gov/portal/site/DCPS/menuitem.06de50edb2b17a932c69621014f62010/?vgnextoid=b00b64505ddc3210VgnVCM1000007e6f0201RCRD. Education Trust (2011) Fact Sheet- Teacher Quality. Washington, DC. http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/Ed%20Trust%20Facts%20on%20Teacher%20Equity_0.pdf Hanushek, E.A., Rivkin, S.G., (2010) Presentation for the American Economic Association: Generalizations about Using Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality 8 (Jan. 3-5, 2010), available at http://www.utdallas.edu/research/tsp-erc/pdf/jrnl_hanushek_rivkin_2010_teacher_quality.pdf Working with Teachers to Develop Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching. MET Project White Paper. Seattle, Washington: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 1. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from http://www.metproject.org/downloads/met-framing-paper.pdf. Learning about Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. MET Project Research Paper. Seattle, Washington: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from http://www.metproject.org/downloads/Preliminary_Findings-Research_Paper.pdf. Jackson, C.K., Bruegmann, E. (2009) Teaching Students and Teaching Each Other: The Importance of Peer Learning for Teachers. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1(4): 85–108 Kane, T., Staiger, D., (2008) Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper #16407 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607 Koedel, C. (2009) An Empirical Analysis of Teacher Spillover Effects in Secondary School. 28 (6 ) 682-692 Koedel, C., & Betts, J. R. (2009). Does student sorting invalidate value-added models of teacher effectiveness? An extended analysis of the Rothstein critique. Working Paper. Jacob, B. & Lefgren, L. (2008). Can principals identify effective teachers? Evidence on subjective performance evaluation in education. Journal of Labor Economics. 26(1), 101-36. Sass, T.R., (2008) The Stability of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality and Implications for Teacher Compensation Policy. National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research. Policy Brief #4. http://eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED508273.pdf McCaffrey, D. F., Lockwood, J. R, Koretz, & Hamilton, L. (2003). Evaluating value-added models for teacher accountability. RAND Research Report prepared for the Carnegie Corporation. McCaffrey, D. F., Lockwood, J. R., Koretz, D., Louis, T. A., & Hamilton, L. (2004). Models for value-added modeling of teacher effects. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 29(1), 67. Rothstein, J. (2011). Review of “Learning About Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching. Rothstein, J. (2009). Student sorting and bias in value-added estimation: Selection on observables and unobservables. Education Finance and Policy, 4(4), 537–571. Rothstein, J. (2010). Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(1), 175–214. Sanders, W. L., Saxton, A. M., & Horn, S. P. (1997). The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System: A quantitative outcomes-based approach to educational assessment. In J. Millman (Ed.), Grading teachers, grading schools: Is student achievement a valid measure? (pp. 137-162). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Sanders, William L., Rivers, June C., 1996. Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Value- Added Research and Assessment Center. Sass, T.R. (2008) The Stability of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality and Implications for Teacher Compensation Policy. Urban Institute http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/1001266_stabilityofvalue.pdf McCaffrey, D.F., Sass, T.R., Lockwood, J.R., Mihaly, K. (2009) The Intertemporal Variability of Teacher Effect Estimates. Education Finance and Policy 4 (4) 572-606 McCaffrey, D.F., Lockwood, J.R. (2011) Missing Data in Value Added Modeling of Teacher Effects. Annals of Applied Statistics 5 (2A) 773-797 Reardon, S. F. & Raudenbush, S. W. (2009). Assumptions of value-added models for estimating school effects. Education Finance and Policy, 4(4), 492–519. Rubin, D. B., Stuart, E. A., and Zanutto, E. L. (2004). A potential outcomes view of value-added assessment in education. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 29(1):103–116. Schochet, P.Z., Chiang, H.S. (2010) Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains. Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/pdf/20104004.pdf.