Read at link for hyperlinks to various reports cited...
http://www.danagoldstein.net/dana_golds ... genda.html
June 06, 2011
A Glut of New Reports Raise Doubts About Obama's Teacher Agenda
Although much of the Obama administration's education reform agenda promotes test score-based teacher evaluation and pay, the tide seems to be significantly turning against such policies, at least among wonks and academics.
Last week the National Academies of Science published a synthesis of 10 years worth of research on 15 American test-based incentive programs, finding they demonstrated few good results and a lot of negative unintended consequences.
Meanwhile, the National Center on Education and the Economy reported that high-achieving nations have focused on reforming their teacher education and professional development pipelines, not on efforts to measure student "growth" and tie such numbers to individual teachers.
Today, a paper coauthored by the Asia Society and the Department of Education itself calls Singapore a model for teacher evaluation. That nation's teachers are assessed on four "holistic" qualities, including the "character development of their students" and "their relationship to community organizations and to parents." There is no attempt to create a mathematical formula to tie student test scores to teacher evaluation or pay.
Excerpt from that report, at http://asiasociety.org/files/lwtw-teach ... report.pdf
Over time, Singapore has created one
of the top-performing education systems in the world by 1) recruiting prospective
teachers from the top 30 percent of academic performance; 2) providing financial
support during training; 3) benchmarking the entry-level salary to those of other
colleges graduates; 4) providing 100 hours of extensive professional development
per year to every teacher; and 5) providing a systematic set of career paths (master
teacher, curriculum specialist, and principal). Evaluation and compensation
are part and parcel of this broader framework, and professional development and
advancement are tied to performance evaluations.
Singapore’s Advanced Performance Management System is not intended to
calibrate teacher ability digitally or to rank teachers. It is intended as a holistic
appraisal, devised at the national level but implemented and customized at the
school level. It assesses key competencies, including 1) the role of teachers in
the academic and character development of their students; 2) the pedagogic
initiatives and innovations teachers have developed; 3) the professional development
they have undertaken; 4) their contribution to their colleagues and the
school; and 5) their relationship to community organizations and to parents.
Learning outcomes are defined broadly, not just by examination results. The evaluation is conducted
by several professionals in the school, including
department heads and the principal. The standards
for the evaluation were developed as a pilot ten
years ago, with cooperation and input from teachers,
and have been refined over time as new issues
and conditions develop.
The purpose of the evaluation process is to create
a regular dialogue between teacher and supervisor
that is frequent, clear, and detailed regarding
ways the teacher can improve. Teachers create a
plan at the beginning of a year, which is reviewed
and followed by mid-year and end-of-year reviews.
The evaluation process is intended primarily as a
development tool. Areas of weakness become the
focus of the teacher’s professional-development
plan for the following year. It is also intended to
help teachers keep up with change. High-quality
implementation and open dialogue are key to the
evaluation system. The process is time-consuming,
but it takes a lot of effort to get people into the
profession, and developing a competent teacher is
seen as a lifelong undertaking.
What does it mean when Singapore is less simplistic and authoritarian and less reliant on meaningless bean-counting formulas than the USA? Call it rhetoric, but the above rhetoric differs radically on pretty much every point from the US "school reform" rhetoric of Obama-Duncan, NCLB and the Billionaire Boys Club. There are clear acknowledgements that teachers should be respected, given educational aid, paid very well, retained for decades, and evaluated by other educators including teachers. A numerical ranking based on year-to-year student test scores is by implication understood as a disastrous short-cut.
Back to Dana Goldstein wrote:
Lastly, even the free-market American Enterprise Institute has a new paper, by Fairfax County, Virginia Superintendent Jack Dale, arguing that the path forward should be differentiated pay based on teams of teachers taking on additional mentoring, curriculum development, and planning responsibilities. Test-based merit pay plans "miss a crucial point: teaching must be a collaborative team effort, and incentivizing individual teachers will not accomplish our ambitious goal," Dale writes.
Yes, there's a lot there to digest. The good news is, there are also some exciting policy alternatives.
After The American Prospect published, "The Test Generation," my feature story about different models for teacher evaluation in Colorado, a number of readers challenged my suggestion that policy makers have more to learn from Denver's Math and Science Leadership Academy, which practices teacher peer-review, than from Harrison District 2 in Colorado Springs, which runs a merit pay program tied to student test scores.
MSLA, they said, is a small school in which it's easy to build trust among peers. It can practice extreme disretion in hiring, so it's less likely there will be bad teachers to weed out later on.
All that is true in the case of MSLA, although we also know peer-review has also worked in some large American school districts, most notably Columbus and Toledo Ohio, both of which weeded out a significant number of poor-performing teachers using such systems. Now the New York Times' Michael Winerip profiles PAR, the teacher peer-review plan in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has fired 200 poor-performing teachers and encouraged another 300 to quit since its inception 11 years ago.Unfortunately, federal dollars from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program are not going where Dr. Weast and the PAR program need to go. Montgomery County schools were entitled to $12 million from Race to the Top, but Dr. Weast said he would not take the money because the grant required districts to include students’ state test results as a measure of teacher quality. “We don’t believe the tests are reliable,” he said. “You don’t want to turn your system into a test factory.”
Weast, Montgomery's superintendent, is a visionary guy who speaks frequently about the need to build relationships of trust between communities, school administrators, and teachers--and actually follows up on the rhetoric with great policy-making. I'll give him the last word, from an April interview with the Washington Post:You have close relations with labor.
I have close relations with people who work in the school business. They happen to be unionized, and I find that good, because it’s easier to actually visit with them because they have an organized structure. We have 22,000 employees. It’s just hard to have a sit-down conversation with all 22,000 of them.
Is there a downside to working with unions?
None.
From the comments:
The NCEE paper accused the US of just dumping too much money aimlessly. Given that many of the top education 'reformers' have gone through programs sponsored by Broad and Gates, does it seem like this emphasis on incentivizing teachers is just the work of well-intentioned private money forcing policy makers to abandon more targeted and collaborative education improvement models you've outlined?
And also, while it's encouraging to see a superintendent like Dr. Weast turndown education dollars that will force him to grade his teachers by a highly volatile system of measurement, Montgomery County is wealthy. Do poorer districts have that option?
Posted by: Mikhail Zinshteyn | June 06, 2011 at 04:53 PM
Well isn't that the point?
.