OSPI Wants Your Input

The purpose of the Educator Working Conditions Survey is to gather input from educators, administrators, parents, and community members on the various factors that affect working conditions in schools. This includes parent and community involvement, leadership, professional learning, classroom support, and safety.
You have until July 11th to take it.

Keep in mind that you are being asked to consider working conditions for teachers that would aid in better student learning.  You are asked to rank various items that influence student learning, twice.  I think this is to view the items from a teacher's POV and a student's POV. 

There's something just a bit odd about this survey but I can't put my finger on it.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The survey seemed to indicate that there was no correlation between time in the workday, student discipline and conduct, school leadership, and class size, or interruption for other reasons... such as testing, or reporting. Another one of those context free, we make of the jargon what we want sort of surveys.

West
6/23/16, 11:36 AM
Anonymous said…
Another survey that will yield hard-to-interpret results, and for which the results will probably misapplied. Sigh.

For example, take this question: In your opinion, which teaching conditions most affects a teacher’s willingness to continue teaching at a school? Rank order which is of most importance to you. Uhhh, so which do they want--what I think is most important to teachers, or to me? Not that same thing.

HF
6/23/16, 11:42 AM
NO 1240 said…
I wouldn't trust Dorn for a moment. He sits on the board of Council of Chief State Schools Officers; an organization that is heavily influenced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We all know that Dorn bent over backwards to help charter schools after the court found I 1240 unconstitutional.

http://www.ccsso.org/Who_We_Are/Board_of_Directors.html



6/23/16, 4:04 PM
Anonymous said…
On the teacher survey, there were a lot of questions referring to "this school" but they don't ask what school the teacher works in. So if a lot of teachers from Awesome School in Mediocre District take the survey, but no teachers from Awful School take the survey, OSPI will have very skewed results for Mediocre District.
Chip
6/23/16, 6:08 PM
seattle citizen said…
I wonder why this came out just as educators are finishing the year or already gone. June is not a good time; too busy.
6/23/16, 6:15 PM
n said…
Doesn't OSPI have the ability to send this to all teachers so they get a chance to weigh in? Also, it does ask for which district you work. Even though it didn't ask school by school, it does differentiate between districts and between parents and teachers. I think this survey if taken by enough teachers will show trends between districts which will reflect on district leadership. No, not perfect but perhaps a place to start?
6/23/16, 6:54 PM
Anonymous said…
n,
But I think that the school/district thing points towards the survey maybe not being well-written. I actually didn't finish it, partially because it didn't feel well-done. There was one that I'm fairly sure repeated the question directly previous. And from my (not-vast) experience writing surveys, I know that it's really easy to write a bad survey.
Chip
6/23/16, 10:04 PM
Outsider said…
I looked at the parent version, and it looks like the typical junk survey written to confirm the pre-existing biases of bureaucrats who lack the intelligence and self-awareness to even recognize their biases. For example, teacher autonomy was not even mentioned as a possible priority among working conditions. Because none of the higher-up bureaucrats could ever accept the idea of teacher autonomy.

If you choose "school leadership" as a priority, they will interpret that as meaning that you crave a domineering principal controlling teachers' every move, even though you possibly didn't mean that.
6/24/16, 10:10 AM
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