Food for Thought

I don't know about you, but I've had enough holiday feasting to last me through the end of December, easy. (Oh, wait, there are more holidays between now and then?)

So, rather than food for the body, some food for thought: a reform-minded principal's advice to pre-service teachers.

Audiences (Or, That spotlight in my face is blinding me)

Despite my best intentions to keep blogging once school(s) started, it's now been almost a month since I wrote anything here.

The reasons are two-fold:

1. Between student teaching and taking many classes and trying to take some occasional down-time with my husband / friends / family there have been very few free, waking minutes. (The observant may notice that the time stamp as I started this post was 1:20 a.m. and I'm not yet done with the paper I'm supposed to be finishing tonight.)
2. Moving into the student teaching environment has made me think more about audiences, paranoia, and transparency.

I think I could get over #1 at least occasionally (the procrastination is strong with this one, I hear Yoda say in the background) if I worked my way through #2 a bit more.

This summer, it was fairly clear who I was writing for: myself, my classmates, a few professors, maybe a few edu-bloggers or edu-twitterers, and any of my friends from my prior lives who saw me post the new url on facebook or twitter.

Now, I'm student teaching at an awesome school with awesome students, parents, teachers, and administrators, and they've all made me start thinking about how not-very-anonymous this blog is (by design) and whether and how being open about my thoughts and experiences might impact any of those parties at my student teaching school or during future job searches and (hopefully) working at future schools.

A more forward-thinking person might have sorted this out a bit sooner, but it all seemed a lot more abstract in mid-August before any of those people had faces and names.

So, things that are self-evidently clear to me (axioms, as we would say in the geometry class I'm taking):

1. My students, their parents, and the staff at my student-teaching school have some fairly strong and reasonable expectation of privacy. No real names or identifying descriptors of people or events should be used.
2. I should assume that any of those people can (and may already have -- hi!) find this blog and read it in its entirety at any time.

Things that are less clear to me:

1. What is okay to discuss here? Presumably things I'm learning about in class at the university. Presumably thoughts and reactions to public events (education policy and news).
2. What about carefully anonymized and abstracted dilemmas that occur in student teaching? For example, a hypothetical parent who hypothetically sends my mentor teacher some very polite questions about whether our Earth Science class is pushing a social agenda as we teach our students about early environmental science or the history of the earth. Presumably not the details of the resulting exchanges between the teacher and the parent. But maybe my thoughts on how I might want to address such situations in my own classroom in the future?
3. How much of a filter should I have in anticipation of future hiring committees? I can easily imagine finding myself ideologically out of step with just about anyone, if for no other reason than the fact that my internal drummer has some very complex, not easily categorized rhythms going on. Also, I'm still working out who might be offended by what in this strange new world of education. Does that mean I should take the cautious path, and shy away from anything that could be controversial? Like say the whole teacher assessment debate in LA that I wrote several entries on in August? Or should I try to get comfortable with the fact that as long as I'm polite and respectful of other opinions, I might as well be honest and transparent on my thinking here and assume that if a future hiring committee is scared away then we'll just have saved each other a lot of time?

Your thoughts are welcome on any of these questions. I'll keep thinking about them too and report back when I come to any internal consensus on any of them. In the meantime, back to that paper!

Lake Wobegon vs. Gold stars

From the LA Times story about the most effective teachers in their value-added analysis (here):

"No one is ever really singled out, neither good nor bad," said Pinto. "The culture of the union is: Everyone is the same. You can't single out anyone for doing badly. So as a result, we don't point out the good either."

"When I worked at a bank, I was employee of the month," he added. "For LAUSD, for some reason, it's not a good thing to do."

What do y'all think: is this a fair portrayal of teacher union culture? If so, would you rather live and work in Lake Wobegon, where all the teachers are above average, or in a world where it's possible for a really excellent teacher's work to be pointed out (with the logical corollary that some of the teachers are not as excellent)?

My previous life as a business consultant biases me away from the traditional union philosophy that all workers are interchangeable and should only be distinguished based on seniority -- I've seen it sap any incentive to be creative or original or excel. On the other hand, unions exist for very real and legitimate reasons -- if that business consulting company had unionized, we might have had a livable work-life balance instead of barn-burner hours because the drive (internal and external) to excel was always greater than the drive to sleep.

(Also interesting in that story -- the teachers who get the best standardized test score improvements do NOT see themselves as teaching to the test; it's a byproduct not a goal.)

Let's give them something to talk about...

(Thanks to my friend who lives in LA and keeps pointing out interesting follow-up articles to me.)

First, the LA Times extended the value added analysis to schools rather than just teachers, finding that schools serving similar demographics can have pretty different value-added results on their tests based partially on school leadership and focus on helping individual teachers improve and partially on curricular and instructional focuses. Here.

Then the Times printed opinions on value-added analysis from a variety of education leaders and professionals: Here. I maybe cynical, but the responses seem exactly what you'd expect. (All responses paraphrased by me.)

• The USC professor: "this just encourages teaching how to take tests, we need to address poverty instead."
• The charter boosting philanthropic rep: "we should use the data we have and make it better, and make it public to increase transparency."
• The first LA Board of Ed member: "we don't want to drive teachers to teach to the test, and we support transparency, but how dare the LA Times go airing our dirty laundry."
• The CEO of a charter management organization: "student test scores should be one part of measuring teacher effectiveness, and should be used to help teachers improve and (after context-setting) with families and communities; value-added measures work better for elementary than high school where you might take a single subject for only one year."
• The UCLA professor: "value-added methods have a lot of problems and the LA Times shouldn't go ranking every teacher in LA with a single number next to their name -- it's too complicated for that to be fair or helpful."
• The second Board member: "we were working on teacher effectiveness, incorporating all the stakeholders, and we need more cooperation from the unions and the legislature to make any changes happen."
• The educational nonprofit exec director and parent: "The great teachers will be fine and something needs to be done to get rid of the really inferior teachers that have been hiding behind the union; maybe this will shame them into going."
• The president of the teacher's union: "All the Times has is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail -- we need more tools (better administrator observations, less paperwork, more funding), a better definition of student learning and metrics of it, and more guidance for teachers on how to improve their practice"
• CA Secretary of Education: "Bravo to the Times for forcing this conversation on what metrics to use to measure effective teaching, the union should stop complaining and start working on a better alternative."
• Parent representative: "standardized tests are not everything, but this data should be public unless they're going to be used by the district for private personnel processes"
• Third Board member: "We've been making a lot of progress on getting rid of bad teachers in the past two years, really!"

What I'm still missing is the dialogue -- not just, "this is what I believe" but "I hear what you believe and this is why I disagree." I'd love to get all these people in a room (and also the key LA Times reporters and editor) and see if a constructive conversation could be fostered. Wouldn't it be great to find out what they might come up with?

Fortune favors the bold (Or, the best defense is a good offense)

So, Randi Weingarten (president of the American Federation of Teachers) thinks parents should have access to individual teacher's performance evaluations, and maybe those performance evaluations should take into account value-added test score data, but should not entirely be comprised of such data. Therefore the LA Times is being a big, scary, sledgehammer-wielding meanie by threatening to publish individual teacher's "primitive" and "rudimentary" value-added scores.

I actually think she's mostly right -- it would be better to (a) give parents transparency on teacher's performance evaluations and (b) have those performance evaluations include both standardized test score impacts and other metrics such as classroom observations (ideally unannounced) and student portfolio assessments. Ideally, this would include through a controlled, well understood process whereby the district calculated each teacher's value-added score, and discussed it with teacher so they knew what it meant, and how to use it to make improvements.

I also still think that Ms. Weingarten, the district, and the teachers would be in a lot better position if they were proposing this first rather than using it as a reactive defense to the Times. There are interesting questions in here for any administrator, teacher, parent, or local journalist:

1. What are your local public school districts currently doing with their standardized test score data? What more could they be doing to really understand your students' learning and your teachers' effectiveness?
2. What level of transparency does your local district currently offer on teacher performance? Is that sufficient for you and your community?

If the answer to the first question is "not nearly as much as they could be" and the answer to the second question is "not much", then it seems like there is a big, gaping opportunity in your local community, and whoever takes the initiative to come up with a proposed answer first is going to have the most leverage in controlling that debate going forward. The lesson here is that districts and teacher's unions can't just bury their head in the sand and hope the standardized test scores will go away because we don't like them -- fortune favors the bold. Figure out how to use the data in a way that makes sense, then broadcast your answer to heavens. If the LA Unified School District and teachers' union had taken the initiative here, the LA Times would be using the teacher-approved, school-district controlled approach to evaluating teacher effectiveness to write their stories.

What story do you want your local paper to publish?

Value added

This is a fascinating article -- I recommend reading it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

To sum up, the LA Times took data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on year-to-year test score changes for each student and hired an outside consultant to calulate teacher effectiveness by the "value add" of each teacher, averaged over all their students, over several years.

How this works: if Jane Doe was a 60th percentile student last year and after being in your class for a year she tested at the 65th percentile, you're given credit for helping her raise her scores, and if she drops to the 55th percentile, your effectiveness is questioned. But of course, other things could have been going on in Jane's world that year, you weren't the only factor. Therefore, the change in relative scores of individual students is averaged over a whole class (or several classes) of students, over several years, and the resulting trends are probably a valid reflection of your academic effectiveness as a teacher relative to your peers.

The Times found several interesting things:

1. Fairly large variations in the effectiveness of teachers within each school, much larger than the variation between schools.
2. Very little correlation between teacher experience, education, training, and effectiveness.
3. Very little correlation between student race, wealth, English proficiency, or previous performance and teacher effectiveness.
4. A disconnect between perception of effectiveness based on dedication and professional accomplishments and demonstrated academic ineffectiveness based on the data analysis.

In some ways the most interesting aspect of all this is that the LAUSD had the data to do this, but despite urging by their internal experts chose not to apply the data this way. This has left them open to a story like this LA Times piece, which is now the loudest voice on how this data can and could be used -- the teacher's union and the school district have lost control of the dialogue by holding back on this. This has also led to situations where individual principals are trying to estimate the results using "back of the envelope" calculations. Those principals have found that addressing the low effectiveness teachers is challenging -- coaching helps, sometimes. Figuring out what to do with this data is going to be challenging, but ignoring it isn't going to fix the problems.

For the record, this is a measure of teaching effectiveness I, as a teacher, think I can live with. It focuses on my individual impact without penalizing me for whatever experience my students had in prior years.

The article ends by bemoaning the lack of transparency on individual teacher effectiveness for parents. I do find it strange that in a world where I can get 15 reviews on a vet, a restaurant, or a dentist before choosing to use their services, this kind of data shouldn't be available to parents. What do you think?

(I found this article from a post on Eduwonk, which has a generally similar take to mine, but thinks the story should have left the teachers anonymous and questions the finding that high-poverty schools do not have a higher concentration of low-effectiveness teachers.)

Amazing Schools

Via Practical Theory, who is principal of the Science Leadership Academy, one of the amazing schools, the Ladies Home Journal put together profiles of ten pretty inspiring schools.

I think the diversity of the models here is fantastic. In no particular order:

• An inclusion-focused elementary school in Boston
• A recycling and conservation-focused high school in California
• A KIPP elementary school in Houston
• A Brooklyn high school turning around urban education with small classes and career seminars
• A marine-focused high school in Florida
• An expeditionary learning K-8 school in Denver
• A grades 6-12 boarding school in DC
• A grades 6-12 self-directed learning environment in Minnesota
• A high tech, inquiry-based science-focused high school in Philadelphia
• A public Montessori junior & senior high (grades 7-12) in Cincinnati

It would probably be an amazingly creative and challenging opportunity to teach at any of those schools. However, none of them is in Michigan. So, two questions -- what are the Michigan schools that are experimenting those kinds of learning models? And if we were going to start a school, which of those would be the most exciting models to emulate?