Seattle Schools Community Forum

Over at Diane Ravitch's blog, she has more evidence of corporate ed reform crack-up.   I'll just let her tell you: At a panel discussion in New York City, Bridgeport Superintendent Paul Vallas made a startling admission. He said that the efforts to develop a teacher evaluation metric was a huge mess and that no one understands it. He said: “The Bridgeport, Conn. superintendent — who has served stints in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and earned a reputation as a turnaround consultant for struggling districts with big budget gaps — said reforms he backed were at risk of collapsing “under the weight of how complicated we’re making it.” “We’re working on the evaluation system right now,” Vallas said of Bridgeport. “And I’ll tell you, it is a nightmare.” Vallas went further and said: ““We’re losing the communications game because we don’t have a good message to communicate,” he said. In separate comments, Vallas criticized evaluations as a “testing ind...

The NY Times has had several articles on teacher evaluation. One was "Formula to Grade Teachers' Skill Gains Acceptance, and Critics" about using value-added data. The letters to the editor on this story were quite interesting and I thought I'd put some snips in and see what you think. (All italics and bold mine.) First a few quotes from the story. Arne Duncan on the LA Times teacher assessment project: Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in to support the newspaper’s work, calling it an exercise in healthy transparency. In a speech last week, though, he qualified that support, noting that he had never released to news media similar information on teachers when he was the Chicago schools superintendent. On The Los Angeles Times’s publication of the teacher data, he added, “I don’t advocate that approach for other districts.” Arne? Yes or no? About value-added itself: William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, t...

I have read some genuinely stupid things in the Seattle Times, most of them on the Editorial page, but this editorial takes the cake. The Times writes: Sounding the alarm on consistently low test scores should result in more attention paid to struggling students. Contrary to what wary teachers unions believe, the issue is less about getting rid of teachers and more about catching flailing students before they drown. How thick are they? How thick do they think we are? If the use of value-added analysis were primarily to identify struggling students then why hasn't the District been using it for that purpose? More to the point, if the use of value-added data were about students' education instead of teachers' jobs, then why is it in the teachers' contract? Why does it only appear in this context and no other? Finally, what will the District do with these "flailing" students after they catch them? Just when you think the Seattle Times cannot write a...

Major news about a major study from an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper on the study (italics/bold mine): If new laws or policies specifically require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might well be terminated than is now the case . But there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains . I have only skimmed the briefing paper but it looks like good, sober reading. I plan on sending this to the Board, the Times editorial board, my legislators, etc. Please consider doing the same. From the Daily Kos which has links galore: This document has been in the works for several ...