Rhee, Teaching

Self-Serving v. Service: Teaching in a Celebrity Culture

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I taught high school English for eighteen years in rural upstate South Carolina, and two students remain with me.

One student on his year-end final exam his junior year proceeded to ignore the exam and write a profanity-laced criticism of me and my course. He turned it in and calmly returned to his seat to wait out the exam period. Once I realized what he had written, I asked him to step across the hall with me where I asked him for an explanation. His anger soon rose up in his throat and he began to cry as he explained how he had felt ignored and unfairly criticized to the point that he gave up during the year.

I told him I wished he had come to me earlier with those feelings, but also said I was sorry. I then met with my principal and arranged for that student to have a little more time to make up some work so he could pass that year. Instead of failing junior English, he was able to enter his senior year, where he joined my soccer team, graduated, and eventually entered college.

Another student in his junior year essentially skirted by all year, barely completing work and rarely fully engaging in class. While we were studying Thoreau, however, he approached me and asked if I could let him borrow a full copy of “Civil Disobedience,” which I did. At the end of the year, despite his grades falling below passing, I awarded him a D and asked if he would enroll in my Advanced Placement Literature course his senior year. After some negotiation with the principal, he was allowed in AP once his parents acknowledged they understood the risk based on his grade in junior English.

This student earned a B in AP Literature, graduated high school, completed college, and eventually earned a Masters in Philosophy.

I think of these students and many, many moments like these every time I see Michelle Rhee.

With each of the above situations, I did not put on a suit and hold a press conference. Despite being a writer and writing numerous books, I have yet to pen a volume with a picture of me on the front cataloguing my success with students.

With the most recent and renewed flurry of Rhee media blitzes, I feel compelled to note that Rhee’s pursuit of her own celebrity is a disturbing example of the plight of teaching in a celebrity culture.

Self-Serving v. Service: Teaching in a Celebrity Culture

Rhee’s Students First has released an evaluation of states’ education policies. With each media report, a photo of Rhee is sure to grace the article. Concurrent with the release is news of yet another book by Rhee, her stern pose on the cover of course, and a Frontline special on Rhee with the tagline: “FRONTLINE examines the legacy of one of America’s most admired & reviled school reformers.”

The great irony is that Rhee is self-serving, tracing back to her Teach for America roots, and there is no such thing as bad publicity for a self-promoter. The Frontline tagline is a great example of framing Rhee as both credible (“most admired”) and challenged—although no one ever makes a clear case of just who supports Rhee other than Rhee and the people paid by Rhee and the organizations and people who benefit from Rhee’s celebrity (absent that list, I believe the number of people who “admire” Rhee is relatively close to zero).

Other than Rhee’s new book of self-promotion, the SF grading of education quality accomplishes not proving an accurate analysis of education in the U.S. but solid evidence that Rhee and everything Rhee is about “self.” The SF report measures state education policies against SF agenda points. How much more self-serving can an organization be? (In fact, this is the ideological think tank playbook designed to mask agenda-driven policy as credible scholarship.)

SF’s ranking is so ridiculous, the list of challenges are nearly impossible to catalog: Ravitch and Jersey Jazzman provide a good start.

The corporate reform hucksters and self-promoters like Rhee envision a world where self rules, where life is a competition, and where incentives produce outcomes. This world believes in merit pay and measurement because those things have feed their own over-sized egos.

But teachers are primarily about service, not self-serving.

We don’t want merit pay, and we don’t want to fight among ourselves or with others for the essentials of life.

For teachers, the idealized vision of the Invisible Hand ignores the very real world where children cannot wait on the whims of the market.

The bad news is, in the U.S. self-promoters tend to win because they are the ones creating the battles.

And with this blog of mine, Rhee has won again since I have used her name and indirectly promoted her work.

I regret that deeply, just as I regret her newest move to claim a word I hold dear, “radical.”

Equity, Meritocracy

Unmasking the Meritocracy Myth

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Political leadership, corporate leaders, and the media share a fascination with the meritocracy myth, primarily in the perpetuation of the claim that meritocracy already exists. Somehow the U.S. has risen above racism, sexism, and classism, resulting in a society where all success is a reflection of high character and all failure is the result of laziness and flawed character.

As long as the claim of a meritocracy remains, “no excuses” rhetoric continues to be both effective and corrosive. Ironically, those most enamored with the meritocracy myth are also those most resistent to any policies or actions that would in fact produce a level playing field for children. “No excuses” ideologies are the environment within which children from disadvantage are told to work harder to catch up with their privileged peers.

In reality, however, the U.S. is not a meritocracy, and as long as we claim that it is and resist taking action that could make it a reality, inequity will not only exist but also thrive and widen.

Choice advocates are comfortable with an invisible hand somehow creating that equity of opportunity, ignoring that the market allows privilege to beget privilege and inequity to beget inequity. A true meritocracy would not come about by the invisible hand, but by taking steps that the privileged will never embrace because it would end generational privilege. A true meritocracy would put to the test who deserves what, instead of the accident of any child’s birth determining that child’s life.

The market fetish of the U.S.—resistent as we are to taking any real action toward equity of opportunity because of our lingering deficit views of people in poverty, people of color, and women—has produced one fact that cannot be denied:

Destiny is determined by the coincidences of any child’s birth.

“Demography & Destiny: College Readiness in New York,” Norm Fruchter

“AISR’s findings were grim. The city’s high school graduates’ college readiness rates were overwhelmingly correlated with their neighborhoods’ racial composition, income and related socio-economic factors. For example, the higher the mothers’ level of education in any city neighborhood, the higher the college readiness rates of the students residing in that neighborhood. Unemployment and single motherhood, conversely, were negatively correlated—the higher the rates of unemployment and single motherhood in any city neighborhood, the lower the college readiness rates of the students residing in that neighborhood. Moreover, the mean income in each neighborhood was very highly correlated with students’ college readiness scores – the lower any neighborhood’s mean income, the lower the college readiness scores of the students living in that neighborhood.”

“Studies Suggest Economic Inequity Is Built Into, and Worsened by, School Systems,” P. L. Thomas

“Is Poverty Destiny?: Ideology v. Evidence in Education Reform,” P. L. Thomas

Equity, GPA, SAT

GPA trumps SAT

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The SAT has persistently been more strongly correlated with students’ out-of-school factors (parental income and parental level of education, notably) than with the test’s primary purpose: predicting college success.

GPA has historically been marginalized by claims of “grade inflation” for decades, yet GPA remains a more powerful predictor of student college success than the SAT.

So why has the SAT remained a powerful tool for determining college entrance, scholarships, and athletic eligibility?

The SAT benefits the affluent and the privileged while “as an admissions criterion, HSGPA has less adverse impact than standardized tests on disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students” (Geiser & Santelices, 2007).

It is past time to debate revising the SAT, and time to stop allowing the SAT to gate-keep access to college, scholarships, and athletic participation.

Geiser, S., & Santelices, M. V. (2007). Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.6.07. University of California, Berkeley: Center for studies in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROPS.GEISER._SAT_6.12.07.pdf

ABSTRACT

High-school grades are often viewed as an unreliable criterion for college admissions, owing to differences in grading standards across high schools, while standardized tests are seen as methodologically rigorous, providing a more uniform and valid yardstick for assessing student ability and achievement. The present study challenges that conventional view. The study finds that high-school grade point average (HSGPA) is consistently the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college, the outcome indicator most often employed in predictive-validity studies, but of four-year college outcomes as well. A previous study, UC and the SAT (Geiser with Studley, 2003),demonstrated that HSGPA in college-preparatory courses was the best predictor of freshman grades for a sample of almost 80,000 students admitted to the University of California. Because freshman grades provide only a short-term indicator of college performance, the present study tracked four-year college outcomes, including cumulative college grades and graduation, for the same sample in order to examine the relative contribution of high-school record and standardized tests in predicting longer-term college performance. Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample; (2) surprisingly, the predictive weight associated with HSGPA increases after the freshman year, accounting for a greater proportion of variance in cumulative fourth-year than first-year college grades; and (3) as an admissions criterion, HSGPA has less adverse impact than standardized tests on disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for admissions policy and argues for greater emphasis on the high-school record, and a corresponding de-emphasis on standardized tests, in college admissions.

Poverty, This Week in Poverty

This Week in Poverty: Responses to the ‘Cliff’ Deal | The Nation

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This Week in Poverty: Responses to the ‘Cliff’ Deal | The Nation

‘fiscal cliff debate has once again [ignored] the poor’

Paul Krugman recently explained about the political and public understanding of the fiscal cliff: “It speaks to the state of confusion that all the deficit fearmongering has created. And if headline writers at a major newspaper can’t get it straight, how can you expect ordinary voters to get it?”

Little has been said, however, about how the fiscal cliff debate has maintained the public gaze in the US on the middle class and the wealthy, once again ignoring the poor, the working poor, and the working class. Your focus, then, is a valuable contribution now that a deal has been struck: “But I’m troubled by the lack of attention being paid to how this deal benefits the more than one in three Americans living below twice the poverty line.”

Political and popular discourse in the US tends either to ignore the poor, the working poor, and the working class or to characterize those at the bottom of the economic ladder as lazy or simply feeding off the wealthy—as perpetuated by Romney’s 47 percent comment.

Claiming equity of opportunity, the great American meritocracy, exists—which it doesn’t—is quite different than seeking that meritocracy. Public policy and the discourse around that policy need to keep a central focus on the marginalized poor, at least along with concern about the middle class and affluent, as a harbinger for achieving the equity and opportunity Americans claim to honor.

Paul Thomas, EdD

Furman University

Education

CCSS, Coleman, Schools Matter

SCAM ALERT: Coleman as Perpetual Huckster

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Schools Matter: SCAM ALERT: Coleman as Perpetual Huckster

There’s an allegory that is popular among lawyers called the allegory of the river. [1]

In this allegory, people find themselves near a river and confronted with a stream of babies floating helplessly by in the current. Many begin frantically to wade into the rushing water, saving as many babies as possible.

Then one walks away. The others are stunned and ask why this one person is abandoning the mission to rescue the babies floating down the river.

The one walking away says, “I am going upstream to find who is throwing the babies in and stop them.”

•

If David Coleman found himself among these people, he would be the one crafting (and selling) a strategy to retrieve the babies from the water, and his work would keep everyone so frantic on how to save the babies (Common Core Standards for Saving Babies in the River, anyone?) that no one would pause to look at the bigger problem: Someone was tossing the babies in the river upstream.

Coleman is a perpetual huckster, skilled at his selling without having to have any expertise behind his showmanship. Since he has successfully sold the U.S. on the CCSS, a magnificent scam, he now is poised to revamp the College Board, making headlines by speaking about problems with the SAT.

Coleman seems concerned the writing section and vocabulary on the SAT are problematic. To that I say, “Welcome to my world, about 30 years too late.”

If I were willing to take Coleman’s bait (like the endless list of states, departments of education, professional organizations, and unions who are scrambling to trump each other with their plans to implement CCSS), I could provide a detailed examination of all that is wrong with the writing portion of the SAT (students spend more time bubbling than drafting, one-draft sample, prompted writing, etc.).

BUT that is exactly what Coleman is seeking—not a better SAT, but a flurry of how to revise the SAT!

The SAT and the standards movement have one fact in common: A perpetual state of revision insures that some people make a great deal of money and the “new” and “better” paradigm allow them to capitalize on reform.

If we wrangle over how to reform the SAT, we are distracted from asking the essential question: What is the SAT good for? (absolutely nothing)

Arguments over how to implement CCSS or whether or not the CCSS marginalizes fiction for the new frontier of non-fiction, arguments over how to revise the writing section of the SAT or whether or not the SAT should test practical or esoteric vocabulary—these are acts of futility, these are wading into the river to retrieve the babies while ignoring the need to walk up stream and stop the real horror to begin with.

Let’s pause for a history lesson.

The state university system in California took a swipe at the SAT some years ago, remember? The SAT was revised!

The ACT surpasses the SAT, and bingo! Coleman makes controversial (media grabbing) comments about revising the SAT.

See a pattern?

U.S. public education does not need new standards, new high-stakes tests, or a new SAT.

But we do need to walk upstream and stop the corporate hucksters throwing babies in the river.

[1] Apologies to David Coleman for starting with fiction.

LWV, Teacher Evaluation, VAM

Review [UPDATED]: “How to Evaluate and Retain Effective Teachers” (League of Women Voters of SC)

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The League of Women Voters of South Carolina has released a report entitled “How to Evaluate and Retain Effective Teachers” (2011-2013) with the identified purpose “to examine the growing movement toward ‘results based’ evaluation nationally and in South Carolina.”

Before examining the substance of the report, several problems with the larger context of teacher evaluation and retention as they intersect with important challenges facing SC need to be identified:

• The report fails to clarify and provide evidence that teacher quality and retention are primary problems facing SC. Without a clear and evidence-based problem, solutions are rendered less credible. However, SC, like most of the US, has a teacher assignment problem that has been clearly documented: students of color, students from poverty, English language learners (ELL), and special needs students are disproportionately assigned to un-/under-certified and inexperienced teachers (Peskey & Haycock, 2006). As well, the implied problem of the report marginalizes the greatest obstacles facing SC schools, poverty and the concentration of poverty (notably the Corridor of Shame along I-95).

• The report compiles and bases claims on a selection of references that are not representative of the body of research on teacher quality and value-added methods (VAM) or performance-based systems of identifying teacher quality. As detailed below, the claims and research included in this report misrepresent the reports themselves as well as the current knowledge-base on teacher quality and retention.

In that context, the report fails the larger education reform needs facing SC as well as the stated purpose of the study.

Do Teachers Matter?

The opening claim of the report asserts “the most important school-based factor is an effective teacher,” and then cites Hanushek, among others. While the report is careful to note teacher quality is an important in-school factor, it repeatedly overstates teacher quality’s impact with terms such as “overwhelmingly” and fails to clarify that in-school factors are dwarfed by out-of-school factors. Matthew Di Carlo offers a balanced picture of the proportional impact of teacher quality, including an accurate interpretation of many of the same references (such as Hanushek):

“But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).” [1]

Along with misrepresenting the impact of teacher quality on measurable student outcomes, the report lends credibility to a misrepresented and flawed study by Chetty, Friendam and Rockoff  (2011):

“[T]hose using the results of this paper to argue forcefully for specific policies are drawing unsupported conclusions from otherwise very important empirical findings.” (Di Carlo)

“These are interesting findings. It’s a really cool academic study. It’s a freakin’ amazing data set! But these findings cannot be immediately translated into what the headlines have suggested – that immediate use of value-added metrics to reshape the teacher workforce can lift the economy, and increase wages across the board! The headlines and media spin have been dreadfully overstated and deceptive. Other headlines and editorial commentary has been simply ignorant and irresponsible. (No Mr. Moran, this one study did not, does not, cannot negate  the vast array of concerns that have been raised about using value-added estimates as blunt, heavily weighted instruments in personnel policy in school systems.)” (Baker)

The teacher quality impact is misrepresented in this report and perpetuates popular and agenda-driven research myths such as the need for consecutive years of high-quality teachers; the claim is inaccurate and should not drive policy:

“This is important, because the ‘X consecutive teachers’ argument only carries concrete policy implications if we can accurately identify the ‘top’ teachers. In reality, though, the ability to do so is still extremely limited [emphasis added].

“So, in the context of policy debates, the argument proves almost nothing. All it really does – in a rather overblown, misleading fashion – is illustrate that teacher quality is important and should be improved, not that policies like merit pay, higher salaries, or charter schools will improve it.

“This represents a fundamental problem that I have discussed before: The conflation of the important finding that teachers matter – that they vary in their effectiveness – with the assumption that teacher effects can be measured accurately at the level of the individual teacher (see here for a quick analogy explaining this dichotomy)….

“But the ‘X consecutive teachers’ argument doesn’t help us evaluate whether this or anything else is a good idea. Using it in this fashion is both misleading and counterproductive. It makes huge promises that cannot be fulfilled, while also serving as justification for policies that it cannot justify. Teacher quality is a target, not an arrow.” (Di Carlo)

Has Traditional Teacher Evaluation Failed?

One of the implied and cited reasons for addressing teacher quality and retention rests on wide-spread criticism of traditional teacher evaluation policies and practices. This report lends a great deal of credibility to those criticisms while relying on The Widget Effect from The New Teacher Project (TNTP). [2] However, a review of this report calls into question, again, the credibility of the study’s claims as well as using it as a basis for policy decisions:

“Overall, the report portrays current practices in teacher evaluation as a broken system perpetuated by a culture that refuses to recognize and deal with incompetence and that fails to reward excellence. However, omissions in the report’s description of its methodology (e.g., sampling strategy, survey response rates) and its sample lead to questions about the generalizability of the report’s findings.”

Di Carlo has also documented that TNTP continues to misrepresent and overstate the impact of teacher quality and the effectiveness of identifying high-quality teachers:

“I just want to make one quick (and, in many respects, semantic) point about the manner in which TNTP identifies high-performing teachers, as I think it illustrates larger issues. In my view, the term ‘irreplaceable’ doesn’t apply, and I think it would have been a better analysis without it….

“Based on single-year estimates in math and reading, a full 43 percent of the NYC teachers classified as ‘irreplaceable’ in 2009 were not classified as such in 2010. (In fairness, the year-to-year stability may be a bit higher using the other district-specific definitions.)

“Such instability and misclassification are inevitable no matter how the term is defined and how much data are available – it’s all a matter of degree – but, in general, one must be cautious when interpreting single-year estimates (see here, here and here for related analyses).

“Perhaps more importantly, if you look at how they actually sorted teachers into categories, the label irreplaceable,’ at least as I interpret it, seems inappropriate no matter how much data are available.”

Performance-Based Teacher Evaluations: Is VAM Credible?

A significant portion of the report makes claims about value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluations in the context of performance-based approaches to identifying teacher quality. Nationally, VAM and other performance-based policies are being implemented quickly, but with little regard to the current understanding of the effectiveness and limitations of those policies; this report fails to represent the current state of research on VAM accurately and depends on research and think tank advocacy (National Council on Teacher Quality [NCTQ]) that distorts the importance of teacher quality and the effectiveness of identifying teacher quality based on measurable student outcomes.

The report remains supportive of performance-based policy recommendations, but does identify cautions about test-based teacher evaluations while also encouraging teacher evaluations include multiple measures and include teachers in the creation of a new evaluation system.

Two failures, however, of this report’s endorsement of VAM and/or performance-based teacher evaluations systems include couching that endorsement in the distorted claims about teacher quality’s impact on measurable student outcomes and depending on reports and claims made by NCTQ and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. [3]

What, then, are the current patterns from the research on VAM and performance-based models and how should those patterns shape policy? [4]

• VAM and test-based evaluations for teachers remain both misleading about teacher quality and misrepresented by research, the media, and political leadership. Numerous researchers have detailed that teachers identified as high-quality or weak one year are identified differently in subsequent years: Numerous factors beyond the control of teachers remain reflected in test scores more powerfully than the individual impact of any specified teacher. The debate over teacher quality and measuring that quality, then, is highly distorted, as Di Carlo explains: “Whether or not we use these measures in teacher evaluations is an important decision, but the attention it gets seems way overblown.” This report makes that mistake.

• VAM and performance-based teacher evaluations in high-stakes settings distort teaching and learning by narrowing the focus of both teaching and learning to teaching to the test and test scores. VAM and test-based data  are likely valuable for big picture patterns and in-school or in-district decision making regarding teacher assignment, but VAM and performance-based evaluations of individual teachers remain inaccurate and inappropriate for evaluation, pay, or retention.

Particularly in a state such as SC where poverty and state budget concerns burden the state and the public school system, VAM and performance-based systems that rely on extensive retooling of standards, testing, and teacher evaluation systems are simply not cost effective (Bausell, 2013): “VAM is not reliable or valid, and VAM-based polices are not cost-effective for the purpose of raising student achievement and increasing earnings by terminating large numbers of low-performing teachers” (Yeh, 2014).

And further, rejecting VAM and using significant percentages of student test scores to evaluate and retain teachers is not rejecting teacher accountability, but confronting the misuse of data. Ewing (2011) clarifies that VAM is flawed math and thus invalid as a tool in teacher evaluation:

“Of course we should hold teachers accountable, but this does not mean we have to pretend that mathematical models can do something they cannot. Of course we should rid our schools of incompetent teachers, but value-added models are an exceedingly blunt tool for this purpose. In any case, we ought to expect more from our teachers than what value-added attempts to measure.”

If SC choses to reform teacher evaluation—which remains a project far less urgent than other problems being ignored—the state would be guided better by Gabriel and Allington (2012), who have analyzed and challenged the Gates Foundations MET Project, which has prompted misguided and hasty implementation of VAM-style teacher evaluation reform:

“Although we don’t question the utility of using evidence of student learning to inform teacher development, we suggest that a better question would not assume that value-added scores are the only existing knowledge about effectiveness in teaching. Rather, a good question would build on existing research and investigate how to increase the amount and intensity of effective instruction.”

Gabriel and Allington (2012) recommend five questions to guide teacher evaluation reform, instead of VAM or other student-outcome-based initiatives:

“Do evaluation tools inspire responsive teaching or defensive conformity?…

“Do evaluation tools reflect our goals for public education?…

“Do evaluation tools encourage teachers to use text in meaningful ways?…

“Do evaluation tools spark meaningful conversations with teachers?…

“Do evaluation tools promote valuable education experiences?”

Again, these guidelines are evidence-based alternatives to discredited and experimental commitments to the misrepresented evidence in the report from LWV SC, but SC remains overburdened by issues related to equity and opportunity that outweigh the need to reform teacher evaluation at this time.

How Should SC Proceed with Teacher Quality and Retention?

On balance, this report misrepresents teacher quality and overstates the need and ability to identify high-quality teachers using VAM and other performance-based policies. The flaws in this report grow from an over-reliance on misguided and misrepresented research and advocacy while ignoring the rich and detailed evidence from the full body of research on teacher quality. Finally, the report concludes by discrediting SC’s current teacher evaluation system (ADEPT) in the context of the inaccurate and distorted claims in the report.

Ultimately, the report encourages SC to spend valuable time and resources on policies that are dwarfed by more pressing needs facing the state and its public schools—a failure of state leadership replicated in the perpetual retooling of state education standards (Common Core State Standards adoption) and high-stakes testing based on revised standards. In short, SC has a number of social and educational challenges that need addressing before the state experiments with revising teacher evaluation and retention policies, including the following:

• Identify how better to allocate state resources to address childhood and family poverty, childhood food security, children and family access to high-quality health care, and stable, well paying work for families.

• Replace current education policies based on accountability, standards, and testing with policies that address equity and opportunity for all students.

• Address immediately the greatest teacher quality issue facing SC’s public schools—inequitable distribution of teacher quality among students in greatest need (high-poverty children, children of color, ELL, and special needs students).

• Address immediately the conditions of teaching and learning in the state’s schools, including issues of student/teacher ratios, building conditions and material availability, administrative and community support of teachers, equitable school funding and teacher salaries, teacher job security and academic freedom in a right-to-work state, and school safety.

Any policy changes that further entrench the culture of testing in SC as a mechanism for evaluating students, teachers, and schools perpetuate the burden of inequity in the state and schools.

SC does not need new standards, new tests, or a new teacher evaluation system. All of these practices have been implemented in different versions with high-stakes attached for the past thirty years—with the current result being the same identified failures with public schools that were the basis of these policies.

SC, like much of the US, needs to come to terms with identifying problems first before seeking solutions. The problems are ones of equity and opportunity, and no current teacher evaluation plan is facing those realities, including this report.

[1] For additional examinations of out-of-school factors compared to teacher quality and in-school factors see Berliner, 2009, 2014; Hirsch, 2007; Rothstein, 2010; Traub, 2000.

[2] Also see Di Carlo, 2011, on TNTP.

[3] For evaluations of NCTQ and Gates see the following: (a) NCTQ: Benner, 2012; Merrill & Ingersoll, 2010; Baker, 2010, January 29; Baker, 2010, October 8; Baker, 2010, December 4, and (b) Gates: Baker, 2010, December 13; Baker, 2011, March 2; Libby, 2012; [Gates MET Project] Gabriel & Allington, 2012; Rubinstein, 2013, January 13; Rubinstein, 2013, January 9; Baker, 2013, January 9; Glass, 2013, January 14; Rothstein & Mathis, 2013

[4] For comprehensive examinations of research on VAM, see Di Carlo, 2012, November 13*; Di Carlo, 2012, April 12 (reliability); Di Carlo, 2012, April 18 (validity); Baker, 2012, May 28 (misrepresentations of VAM); Baker, et al., 2010, August 27; Ewing, 2011, May. For recent concerns about legal action and VAM-based teacher evaluation, see Baker, Oluwole, & Green, 2013; Pullin, 2013

* Di Carlo remains a proponent of including VAM in teacher evaluations.

References

Berliner, D. C. (2014). Effects of inequality and poverty vs. teachers and schooling on America’s youth. Teachers College Record, 116(1). Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16889

Berliner, D. C. (2009). Poverty and potential: Out-of-school factors and school success. Boulder, CO and Tempe, AZ: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/poverty-and-potential

Gabriel, R., & Allington, R. (2012, November). The MET Project: The wrong 45 Million dollar question. Educational Leadership, 70(3), 44-49. Retrieved from http://216.78.200.159/Documents/RandD/Teacher%20Evaluation/MET%20Project%20-%20Wrong%2045%20Millon%20Question%20-%20Gabriel.pdf

Hirsch, D. (2007, September). Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage. York, North Yorkshire, UK: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/2123.asp

Peske, H. G., & Haycock, K. (2006, June). Teaching inequality: How poor and minority students are shortchanged on teacher quality. Washington DC: The Education Trust, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/TQReportJune2006.pdf

Rothstein, R. (2010, October 14). How to fix our schools. Issue Brief 286. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286

Thomas, P. L. (2011, December). Teacher quality and accountability: A failed debate. Daily Censored. Retrieved from http://www.dailycensored.com/teacher-quality-and-accountability-a-failed-debate/

Traub, J. (2000, January 16). What no school can do. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from http://local.provplan.org/pp170/materials/what%20no%20school%20can%20do.htm

CCSS, Crisis, Daily Kos

Daily Kos: Living and Learning in Perpetual Crisis

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Daily Kos: Living and Learning in Perpetual Crisis

What do the fiscal cliff and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have in common?

For the answer consider this scenario: An arsonist sets a home on fire, and then risks his life fighting the blaze—but the house eventually succumbs to the flames. The media and the public praise the arsonist a hero, choosing to consider the heroic effort to fight the fire while ignoring that he caused the disaster.

This scenario is not far-fetched and captures exactly the “manufactured crisis” (Berliner & Biddle, 1996) in both the fiscal cliff discourse and CCSS advocacy.

America is trapped in a state of perpetual crisis, and that crisis mentality maintains the public gaze on the self-proclaimed heroic acts of corporate and political leaders without allowing time to consider that the conditions under which Americans live and learn are the result of the decisions of those in power.

continue reading at The Daily Kos

Gun Control, Truthout

Protecting Guns, Sacrificing (Some) Children

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Protecting Guns, Sacrificing (Some) Children

“In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740,” details Protect Children Not Guns 2012 (Children’s Defense Fund), “—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years” (p. 2).

Tragedy is often reserved for single catastrophic events, but cumulative loss is no less tragic, particularly when the lives of innocent children and teens are placed in the context of daily violence.

continue reading at Truthout

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