Diane Ravitch at PBS Site, on Occasion of Frontline Rhee Report and "How Do You Measure Success in School Reform?"

Diane Ravitch: Why Focusing on Student Test Scores Is No Panacea

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

I watched John Merrow’s documentary on The Education of Michelle Rhee with high anticipation. I wanted to see what she had learned from her experience, and what lessons there might be for the nation.

The documentary emphasizes her steely determination to do whatever she thought necessary to turn around the Washington, D.C. school system. She fired principals; she fired teachers; she closed schools. She told every principal that he or she must set a target for raising test scores. If they met it, their schools would win thousands of dollars; if they didn’t, they risked termination. She tied teachers’ evaluation to student test scores.

Rhee assumes that better test scores equal better education. She never once mentions literature or history or science or civics or foreign languages; she doesn’t talk about curriculum or instruction. She never calls out a teacher for poor instruction or a principal for a weak curriculum; she is interested only in the bottom line, and that is the scores.

The problem, of course, is that focusing obsessively on test scores has predictable results: narrowing the curriculum (some districts and schools have dropped the arts and other subjects to make more time for testing); cheating; teaching to the tests; and distorting the whole education system for the sake of scores. Our best public and private schools would never dream of making test scores their goal. They know that a real education includes the arts, history, science, literature, foreign languages and physical education. Their parents expect nothing less.

“Our best public and private schools would never dream of making test scores their goal. They know that a real education includes the arts, history, science, literature, foreign languages and physical education.”

Unfortunately, Rhee cared only about test scores, not a balanced curriculum. By the end of the documentary we learn that the public schools in D.C. improved “slightly” on national tests but “are still among the worst in the nation,” and its high school graduation rate is dead last. We learn that her relentless focus on test scores produced allegations of widespread cheating, not better education. Her policy of firing teachers and principals did not turn around the schools; it created turmoil and led many teachers and principals (including those she hired) to leave.

The only logical conclusion from this documentary is that states and districts should not do what Michelle Rhee did. It didn’t work. It failed. Rhee, however, remains unfazed. She’s taken her reform agenda to the national stage and is now urging states to follow her lead.

True educational leadership involves a commitment to children and to education (not just test scores), a dedication to improving curriculum and instruction, and the ability to recruit and develop a strong staff. That is the kind of leadership I saw when I visited Finland, a nation whose students never take standardized tests yet do very well on international assessments.

Thankfully, such leadership is hardly absent in the U.S. In schools all across the nation, I have come across countless unsung educators who build teamwork and a culture of professionalism. They create a climate of respect built on wisdom and judgment, not carrots and sticks.

UPDATES: Stressful Teaching Climate Driving Away Teacher Applicants

No surprise:

The news is replete with stories of worsening stresses on teachers and intimidating working conditions: for example, the increasing focus on teaching as test prep, and reading through the lines that standardized test cheating scandals could reflect wide patterns of administrators' creating conditions that foster cheating out of desperation. From Atlanta came a story that a teacher had to crawl under a table at a faculty meeting because her test scores were low: " . . . at Fain Elementary School, the principal forced a teacher to crawl under a table in a faculty meeting because that teacher’s students’ test scores were low."
Add the media trend of teacher-blaming, and more college students will recognize that teaching is a low-status profession, whose instability does not make it a reliable career path.
(Thanks to Chaz for the above cartoon.)

So no surprise that we see these stories:
From Murfreesboro [Tennessee] Post, January 3, 2012: "Teacher evaluation system to be evaluated"

The evaluations are adding to teachers' already high stress level, [George] Fitzhugh [a member of the Tennessee House Education Committee] said, causing early retirement of some valued educators and possibly even turning away potential excellent teachers.

"I know from talking to administrators at colleges that they've had sort of a dip in their enrollment," he said. "One particular president indicated to me that he thought it had to do with some of those folks who wanted to go into the education field and were having second thoughts."

From the Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011:

National University, a nonprofit, multi-campus school that offers mainly online credential classes, reports that enrollment in its teacher training courses has dropped about 30% since 2006. The school's monthlong class terms make it vulnerable to headlines; education dean Carl Beyer said he noticed a small uptick in enrollment in the fall, followed by a decline as word spread of state budget cutbacks.

UPDATE:
John Rosales in NEA Today, "How Bad Education Policies Demoralize Teachers", February 7, 2012
--with reference to Doris Santoro academic article abstracted below.
This added piece from Ed in the Apple blog, January 27, 2012:
Teacher Evaluation is Wack! We Will Be Driving Dedicated, Caring Teachers Away from the Schools and Kids That Need Them the Most
And on May 31, 2011 the New York Times published this composition by veteran elementary school teacher, Francesca Burns:

Driving Away the Best Teachers

My View: When did teacher bashing become the new national pastime?
By Sam Chaltain, Special to CNN

NEAToday's Rosales cited Doris Santoro's (Bowdoin College) article which distinguished regular stress and the realization of increasing-"reform"-driven changes in the profession:
American Journal of Education, Vol. 118, No. 1., 1, November 2011, Good Teaching in Difficult Times: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work

The abstract of Santoro's article follows:
In these difficult times of reform/bashing, teachers find it difficult to find moral worth in the work that they do.

What happens when experienced teachers who are fueled by the moral dimension of teaching find that they can no longer access the moral rewards of the work? Consistent and persistent frustrations in accessing the moral rewards of teaching requires a new concept to describe teachers who feel they no longer can do good work or teach “right.” Too often, this phenomenon of frustration in the pursuit of good teaching is described as burnout. Although the terms “burnout” and “demoralization” have been used synonymously, it is better to consider the two phenomena as related but conceptually distinct. Burnout may be an appropriate diagnosis in some cases where individual teachers’ personal resources cannot meet the challenge of the difficulties presented by the work. However, the burnout explanation fails to account for situations where the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards, previously available in ever-challenging work, are now inaccessible. In this instance, the phenomenon is better termed demoralization. Through an empirical case study and philosophical analysis, this article shows that accessing the moral dimension of teaching is not only about cultivating individual teachers’ dispositions toward good work but structuring the work to enable practitioners to do good within its domain. In this model, teacher attrition does not necessarily reflect a lack of commitment, preparedness, competence, or hardiness on the part of the practitioner. Rather, teacher attrition is analyzed from the perspective of whether teachers find moral value in the kind of work they are asked to perform.

Teaching is an intellectual and moral practice fraught with contradictions, impediments, and challenges both quotidian and extraordinary. Despite the long-standing challenges inherent in teachers’ work, current federal policies in the United States have affected public school teachers and their classrooms in ways previously unimaginable (Kukla-Acevedo 2009, 450–51). This federal oversight affects high-poverty schools most significantly where policies are tied to essential funding and sanctions that include possible reorganization and school closure (Valli and Buese 2007; Valli et al. 2008). Recently, the Los Angeles Times published an investigative report that included the names of individual teachers and their “valued-added” ratings based on the newspaper’s analysis of standardized tests results (“Los Angeles Teacher Ratings” 2010). The New York City Department of Education is currently in a court battle with the city’s teachers’ union as to whether it can release teacher ratings to the press (Otterman 2010). Federal funding mandates require adoption of “scientifically based” instructional strategies that frequently involve curricular materials with scripted lessons that teachers must follow (No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB] 2001). “Fidelity” to the mandated scope and sequence of commercially produced curriculum is often accompanied by school-based administrative oversight that can be as picayune as ensuring uniform standards of bulletin board design. All professions periodically go through periods of crisis, or difficult times, and teaching is in the midst of one now. This article provides new vocabulary to describe a phenomenon made visible in this crisis that is too frequently attributed to the weakness of individual teachers or is accepted fatalistically as a symptom of teaching in high-poverty schools. It renders a conceptual distinction between “burnout” and what the author terms “demoralization.”

Through analysis of research on the moral dimension of teaching and its relation to teacher recruitment, retention, and attrition, a case of one teacher, and philosophical inquiry into the concepts of burnout and demoralization, this article addresses the question: What happens when experienced teachers who are fueled by the moral dimension of teaching find that they can no longer access the moral rewards embedded in the work? The moral rewards of teaching are activated when educators feel that they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves.1 The moral rewards discussed here encompass the moral and ethical dimensions of teaching. The ethical dimension involves teachers pursuing the good life in their professional and personal endeavors. In relation to the ethical, teachers might ask, “How is what I am doing bettering the world or my self?” The moral dimension harnesses sanctioned and prohibited activities. For instance, teachers might wonder, “Is this approach a good method for teaching my class given what I know about best practices?” The ethical and the moral are often intertwined. For instance, violating moral principles (engaging in practices that seem wrong to the practitioner) may affect one’s ethical life (the practitioner may sense a diminishment of his or her goodness as a teacher and a person).2 Although it is impossible to enumerate the goods that could be counted as moral rewards, when teachers find that they can answer in the affirmative to the questions—Is this work worthwhile? Am I engaging in good teaching?—they are reaping the moral rewards of the practice of teaching. How teachers elaborate on why the work is worthwhile and why they are engaging in good teaching may be inflected by personal factors, but the work itself is what makes these rewards available. These rewards are internal to the practice of teaching rather than the possession of individual teachers.3 This article puts forth an argument that the moral rewards embedded in the teaching profession are endangered in these difficult times.

Too often, the inability to access the moral rewards of teaching is misdiagnosed as burnout. This article shows that it is better to conceive of the foreclosure of the moral rewards as demoralization. Although Farber (1984) has used burnout and demoralization synonymously, it is necessary to consider the two phenomena as related but conceptually distinct. As will be examined below, burnout may be an appropriate diagnosis in some cases where individual teachers’ personal resources cannot meet the challenge of the difficulties presented by the work. However, the “burnout” explanation fails to account for situations where the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that the moral rewards, previously available in ever-challenging work, are now inaccessible. In this case, the phenomenon is better termed “demoralization.” Consistent and persistent frustrations in accessing the moral rewards of teaching requires a new concept to describe teachers who feel they no longer can do good work or teach “right.”

Difficult times in a profession provide an opportunity to articulate what is fundamental to the work. Although many researchers have focused on the individual attributes that contribute to teachers’ ability to tolerate the challenges of the profession, fewer have examined how the quality of the work itself—the practice of teaching—affects teacher attrition. Shifting the analysis of teacher attrition from individual teachers’ characteristics (burnout) to the practice of teaching (demoralization) provides a new perspective on teacher retention that relies less on individual teacher psychology and more on an analysis of the state of the profession. It shows that accessing the moral dimension of teaching is not only about cultivating individual teachers’ dispositions toward good work but also structuring the work to enable practitioners to do good within its domain. In this model, teacher attrition does not necessarily reflect a lack of commitment, preparedness, competence, or hardiness on the part of the practitioner. Rather, teacher attrition is analyzed from the perspective of whether teachers find moral value in the actual work they are asked to perform.

NYS Education Department Database on Test Cheating Cases --Surprise, Surprise!

Gawwwwlllly, Mr. Condon!

New York State has had hundreds of test cheating cases, yet only a handful are determined "substantiated."

On October 31, 2011, "The New York Times" uploaded a database that contained the status of allegations of test cheating or tampering, in connection with a story referring to "ballooning" allegations of test tampering under the tenure of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

As the Times and the Daily News reported this summer, the Bloomberg administration was hardly interesting in finding or uncovering instances of reporting, as noted, when it discontinued the use of erasure analysis on city-administered tests.

Click here to access New York State's database on alleged dhearship.

Quite a large number of cases are still open. A roughly even proportion of the high school (Regents exams) cases from the 2006-2007 school-year remain open.

Update:NYS Regents Ponders Sending Tests Away From Teachers' Own Schools/ NYT: Files: 14 Suspected Cheating

New York State Regents Considering Sending Regents Tests Away for Schools for Scoring
Cheating in New York City Schools: 14 Cases
UPDATE: 10/17 NY1 contribution on this topic --link at bottom of this post.

Regents to Vote on Change to Cut Risk of Teachers’ Test-Tampering
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: October 15, 2011

The New York State Board of Regents will decide Monday whether to bar teachers from grading their own students’ standardized tests, a longstanding practice that state officials say creates a temptation for educators to cheat in an era of high-stakes exams.
The ban, which would start in the 2012-13 school year, would require districts to score tests in other schools, on computers or in regional centers. The change would most likely cause Regents exams, now held just before graduation, to be held earlier in the spring and could lead to additional costs for districts.

The state is in the process of introducing a new evaluation system that judges teachers in part on how well their students do on standardized tests. These rising stakes are behind the state’s push for better test security, as is an acknowledgment by state officials that they have not done enough to detect or prevent cheating.

. . . Remainder of NYT article.

The best route would be to send the tests outside of New York City. If they were examined in the city there would still remain the taint of intimidation from superiors in the New York City Department of Education.

(Condon only substantiated a handful of the accused test-cheating cases in New York City schools: NY Times. Sharon Otterman, from the September 24, 2011 Times, "State Says It Analyzed Test Erasures for Cheating; 62 Schools Proved Suspect." --The page tab gets more to the point: "In Reversal, New York State Says It Used Erasure Analyses to Detect Cheating."

Published: October 15, 2011
Cheating in New York City Schools: 14 Cases
A collection of reports by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City school system describing substantiated cases of test tampering and grade changing by educators. Most of the documents were obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information request and were redacted to protect the identities of witnesses and minors.

Click to above link for the 14 cited cases.

NY1, 10/17/11: "State DOE To Consider Measures To Prevent Regents Cheating."

State education officials knew about scrubbing for years but did nothing: e-mail - NYPOST.com

State education officials knew about scrubbing for years but did nothing: e-mail - NYPOST.com
Duh!!!!

Curious that cheating is substantiated at a New York City school, yet the city feels compelled to study the matter more, yet, all claims against teacher mis-conduct are always substantiated.

Same problem appears in the powers-that-be being unmoved, unfazed over teacher allegations of New York State Regents and other state tests.

In this example from this summer, investigators dismiss the allegations that teachers make. See this story from this summer:

Sharon Otterman, "New York Times", "Under Bloomberg, a Sharp Rise in Accusations of Cheating by Educators", August 22, 2011.

REVERSAL: STUDY OF ERASURE ANALYSIS AND NY TEST CHEATING ALLEGATIONS

Sharon Otterman, "New York Times," "State Says It Analyzed Test Erasures for Cheating; 62 Schools Proved Suspect" September 23, 2011.

In New York State, however, education officials have said the spark that set off most of the investigations in those places, a procedure called erasure analysis of standardized tests, was something they could not afford and did not do.

Yet officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidents of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx.

And after an audit by the state comptroller raised concerns about cheating in 2010, the State Board of Regents voted, to little notice, to expand such analysis to six additional tests last school year, and to all Regents exams in 2011-12, though the necessary funds were never authorized.

NYT: test cheating charges vs. Rhee in DCPS amid test cheating charges from Georgia to New Jersey

The New York Times this week ran a story (Michael Winerip), "Eager for Spotlight, but Not if It Is on a Testing Scandal") with this shamed-looking Rhee photo on how Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools has been generous with her access to a range of news interviewers, yet she has refused to speak to reporters at USA Today. As the Times noted, the test erasure charges swirling around Rhee come at the same time as allegations of cheating in Atlanta, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Rhee's whole self-promotion campaign has come from her argument that her get tough methods of attacking teachers and stressing tests over everything were successful. Yet, erasure analysis raises plenty of suspicious red flags. Translation: Rhee's success is illusory, contrived:

At some schools, they found the odds that so many answers had been changed from wrong to right randomly were 1 in 100 billion. In a fourth-grade class at Stanton Elementary, 97 percent of the erasures were from wrong to right. Districtwide, the average number of erasures for seventh graders was fewer than one per child, but for a seventh-grade class at Noyes Elementary, it was 12.7 per student. At Noyes Elementary in 2008, 84 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, up from 22 percent in 2007.

Ms. Rhee’s reputation has rested on her schools’ test scores. Suddenly, a USA Today headline was asking, “were the gains real?” In this era of high-pressure testing, Washington has become another in a growing list of cheating scandals that has included Atlanta, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas.

It took the USA Today reporters a year to finish their three-part series. So many people were afraid to speak that Ms. Bello had to interview dozens to find one willing to be quoted. She knocked on teachers’ doors at 9:30 at night and hunted parents at PTA meetings. She met people in coffee shops where they would not be recognized, and never called or e-mailed sources at their schools.

Big Stories on Test Cheating in NY Times and Daily News -in Middle of Summer when Fewer are Noticing; Similar Cheating Concerns Across Nation

(SCROLL DOWN FOR STATE SURVEY OF TEACHERS ON CHEATING)
Convenient for administrators, and city executives, embarrassing stories about schools and test cheating encouraged by administrators are hitting the news, when more people are at summer get-aways.

Sharon Otterman, Review Aims to Avert Cheating on State Tests

New York State education officials announced Monday that they had begun to review the way they detect and prevent cheating on standardized tests, taking a step to avoid the cheating scandals that have engulfed school systems in other states.

New York does not conduct statistical analyses of its high-stakes third- through eighth-grade tests to scour for suspicious results that could signal cheating, like unusual spikes in a school’s scores or predictable erasures on multiple-choice questions, officials said.

Analyses in Atlanta and Philadelphia, among other cities, have produced evidence of tampering on a scale that calls into question those cities’ educational achievements.

The State Education Department released a brief statement on Monday saying that the education commissioner, John B. King Jr., had convened a high-level working group in mid-July to begin an immediate review of “all aspects of the state’s testing system.” Officials said details would be available soon.

All aspects? I'm not holding my breath.

New York state should send a Michigan-type survey of teachers on cheating pressures. See "About the school cheating survey" (Detroit Free Press, July 27, 2011) on the Michigan Educator Survey. Nearly 30% of the surveyed teachers reported pressure to cheat.


And another quite interesting tidbit, broadcasted about nine years too late: Prince Michael I (Mr. Bloomberg) cut the funds for investigations of test cheating in 2002, immediately after assuming mayor control of the schools:

Rachel Monahan, yesterday in the New York Daily News: "NYC drops controls to ferret out cheating on high-stakes standardized tests."

34 NJ Schools Investigated For Possible Cheating:
Officials: Some Schools Showed Especially High Deviations Of Corrected Answers

In Michigan, teachers feel compelled to cheat

Alas, in many western and southern states the school year is starting in a week or two. In these states the scandals or "probes" are getting attention at an inconvenient time for policy bigs.
Pa. Joins States Facing a School Cheating Scandal Actually, this covers the Georgia scandal as well.

And Education Week gives us a thumbnail of cheating scandals in the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): "Cheating Scandals Intensify Focus on Test Pressures"

Consider that the policy maker/ media pundit beating up of teachers does not consider the role of administrators. A common thread of these stories is that administrators, not teachers, are the source of the pressure to cheat.

Will all of these scandals prompt education "reformers", media pundits and politicians to rethink their mania for tests and data emphasis? Let's hope so.

USA Today: Feds sought for Rhee Erasuregate

USA Today for the past month has been giving attention to the ballooning test scandal of Erasuregate: very high numbers of answer choices on tests erased and changed to the correct answer, during Michelle Rhee's years as schools chancellor for Washington, District of Columbia (DC).
Thursday, May 5, 2011 "USA Today" gave front page attention, in Marisol Bello and Jack Gillum, "Inquiry sought into D.C. test scores." You know that things are bad for Michelle "Taped Lips" Rhee when school-killer comrade in chief Arne Duncan endorses a deeper investigation. (Rhee, power-protecting and defensive, refused to speak to USA Today reporters live; although she did deign to respond to a written set of questions.)
Meanwhile, the number of parent or teacher signatures demanding a federal probe into test scores during Rhee the First's tenure, or should we say reign. (See the fun Rhee-focused site, RheeFirst!, on Erasuregate and skewering Rhee's overall apple polishing.)



And you know things are bad for her when even conservative institutions and one of their staff publicly skewers Rhee.

Rhee's comments have shifted because she is trying to protect her national reputation, says Mike Paul, a crisis management consultant.

According to Rick Hess, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, activists such as Rhee say they have all the answers and when one flaw is found in their approach, it can call into question their entire program.

"Your critics have good reason to try to re-examine your evidence — and if they find problems with it, then your case is dramatically weakened," Hess says.