I’ve been trying to wait until the spin dust from the State
of the Union message settled, before I did my own end-of-the-year
evaluation of the Administration’s work thus far on education issues.

In all fairness, the President has had quite a few major
issues to juggle in his freshman year, and I, for one, did not expect education
to race to the top of that list. I did hope to see signs that groundwork for
some meaningful and significant change would be forthcoming.

Craig A. Cunningham at the Education
Policy Blog approached this assessment with a thoughtful and open
reflection on his Dec. 2008 predictions on then Education Secretary-in-Waiting,
Arne Duncan. Sort of a pre-and post-test. 
In it, Cunningham reaches a somber conclusion about the person charged
with leading change public education: “The primary group that Arne does not
appear to be listening to (much) are education professionals.”  Sounds distressingly like most of Duncan’s
recent predecessors.  Craig also notes,
as I have, that “Duncan’s closest advisors are also not education professionals.” 
Not spelling
relief, so far (pun absolutely intended). 
Some of my teacher colleagues distress over this continuing
marginalization of teacher voice at the federal level led to a public letter
writing campaign to the President spearheaded by  fellow TLN member Anthony Cody.

So far, the most noticeable change in education policy has
been to remove Bush’s NCLB nameplate from ESEA, and to distill some of the
worst aspects of it into a high-profiled sprint for desperately needed funding,
Race-to-the Top.  One of the concerns
here, is that RttT gives budget-axe wielding state authorities more incentive
to close struggling schools, than to do the work of correcting why they were
low-performing in the first place. This poses a special threat to poor
rural students for whom multiple school options do not exist. But this
Administration has a decidedly urban tilt. Still, it’s curious why Duncan
appears to be putting more stock in the policies that produced only
questionable results in Chicago’s public schools, as opposed to pushing for a
wider range of options, including one of the few truly effective turnaround
strategies in the country also found in Chicago, the Strategic
Learning Initiative.  In this interview with Public School Insights, John Simmons shares this tasty bit of
advice:

[School improvement] is like baking a cake. If you include
all of the essential supports, you get a great cake. But if you leave out one
ingredient, like the salt or the eggs, you are not going to get anything that
tastes like a cake. That is what we found as we put together the best
strategies from education research and the best strategies from high-performance
systems research. So now we have a systemic approach to school improvement. But
it is not a silver bullet.

Unfortunately, silver bullets still appear to be Washington’s tool of choice for school reform. There is growing concern that NCLB reliance on flawed standardized testing and weak data systems
will become even more entrenched through RttT criteria and incentives.  Among those wondering about the potential for
misuse of test data is Chester
Finn of the Fordham Institute who recently told EdWeek:

He worries that the Obama administration’s ambitious goals
for the assessment funding—which include generating information about both
school and student performance as well as data about teacher
effectiveness—could prove to be irreconcilable. “If all the glitterati…remains
in the grant competition, anyone that wants to win the competition is going to
have to pretend they can do all those things….but since we know that they can’t
all be done by the same assessment, in the same period of time at a finite
price, something will get left in the dust.

That same Edweek article also revisits the ongoing concerns
about the inaccuracies and inadequacies of current standardized tests,
especially the flawed attempts to make them more authentic raised by people
like former testing industry insider, Todd Farley, which he also shared via Edutopia. Farley
supports, as I do, that assessment, particularly high-stakes, is better handled
by classroom teachers. I also agree with 
CyberEnglish
teacher, Ted Nellen, that “fixing"
the tests is the very least we could do if we are going to continue to use them
or expand their use for high stakes decisions. Better, as Nellen and others
suggest, is to reduce our dependence on them in favor of more comprehensive
evaluations of student growth and performance. But both these options presume
we actually care more about the students than those who are profiting from the
tests.

Of course, there are
those, like Andy Rotherham, who think NCLB deserves credit for “making
school performance more transparent.” 
More transparent, I suppose, to those who actually didn’t know that
minority students have consistently received an inferior quality of education.
Those would be the same people who for years have refused to listen to the
parents or teachers of poor and minority students as we have complained loud
and long trying to get Federal policymakers to end inequities in allocation of
resources, assignment of teachers, and application of policies by state and
local officials (and that’s not just here in Mississippi).  Incredibly, Rotherham wants to see NCLB
strengthened by among other things “giving [more] political cover to state and
local elected officials…”

Still, the optimist
in me would like to think that there is yet time for the President and his
team to rethink some of these issues, and to engage us all in more thoughtful
discussion before and during the reauthorization of ESEA (formerly known as
NCLB).  I thank another TLN friend, Mary Tedrow, for reminding us that so often learning is a messy and recursive
process, not a linear one.  She suggests
that the raucous and revealing debate around healthcare reform may be a preview
and a omen of what the ESEA process may hold. When a healthcare bill finally
arrives on Mr. Obama’s desk, I’m waiting to see how closely he will hold the
lawmakers and himself to the promises he made about what such a bill would and
would not contain. Yet, I respect him for allowing the democratic process to
run its course (unseemly as it may have been along the way).

If he and the
Secretary do as much with ESEA and other education issues, then I’ll be ready
to pull out my own scoring criteria from just before the election and give them
a passing grade.

I've been following the growing discussion of assessment among teachers in the virtual world.  Starting with a fascinating #edchat thread on Twitter a few weeks ago.  That led to a thoughtful post by Greg Thompson. In his blog, Thompson revisits the importance of formative assessments in ensuring that students leave a topic, subject, or class with a thorough and applicable understanding.

I love this quote from his article, "Assessment is not a necessary evil, it is rightfully necessary..."

Also, part of that exchange was a post from Steven Aderson.

Most recently, my TLN colleague, Anthony Cody shares this insightful report from Dr. J Myron Atkin of Stanford on how formative assessment has been "hijacked" by the testing companies and through the smoke and mirrors of marketing, twisted away from its proven usefulness in real classrooms with real students.

Constantly, analyzing what my students are learning, where they are needing additional support, where they need more challenge, what teaching adjustments I need to make are the core professional decisions that determine the ebb and flow of my teaching life. Make no mistake, these are professional judgments. Formative assessment is not giving a series of mini-standardized tests to see how close we are to being ready for the BIG test. But sadly, this is what it has been reduced to in too many classrooms and schools. Even the best standardized data requires the expertise of the classroom teacher to be of any real use in helping children, and frankly, most of the standardized data currently available is of fairly low quality and little practical use to students or their teachers.

By contrast, a steady flow of meaningful information throughout the semester or school year on each student's learning along with timely and appropriate teacher feedback provides not only irreplaceable support for individual student growth, but richer data for use by the larger school community (teams, faculty, districts) to use in accurately assessing curriculum and instruction.

How can teachers reclaim assessment as the critical tool and learning experience that it should be for our students?

It's time to give thanks, and I am extremely grateful for some people who are doing wonderful things in education today.  I realize I'm often guilty, as are many others, of focusing attention on problems and failures.Contrary to myth, there are many successful educators among us, some of whom are pointing us toward a promising future. Here are some I'd like to thank this season:

Reflections of a Techie (aka Marsha Ratzel) for sharing her fascinating work with middle school science students using the web tool Diigo to follow a real time research expedition.

The ever-amazing Bill Ferriter (aka The Tempered Radical), put together his own classroom tested instructions for using a plethora of web applications with students on the wiki page, Digitally Speaking. 

Anthony Cody, at Living In Dialogue, for organizing teachers to write open letters to President Obama and Secretary Duncan, reminding them of promises made to educators during the election that need to be kept, and reminding us of our professional-civic responsibilities.

English teacher and prolific author, Jim Burke, for nurturing one of the most vibrant virtual learning communities around today, The English Companion Ning.

Teacher's College professor, Celia Oyler, for expressing most succinctly the false logic of judging either student achievement or teacher performance on our current state testing systems.

Claus von Zastrow at Public School Insights for constantly reminding us that there are many places in America today where education is done well and that's where our education policy making should start.

These is just my short list; feel free to add your own.

Thanks to the Forum for Education and Democracy for inviting me to speak at their Oct. 22nd Capitol Hill briefing on "Effective Teachers, High Achievers: How Strengthening the Teaching Profession Can Improve Student Learning." I was part of a panel that included: Angela Valenzuela, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Kati Haycock.

My comments focused on what I believe are two closely related reasons why we do not have quality teachers for all students, particularly for those in high needs, high poverty areas: ineffective teacher evaluation and weak professional development/support.

I am, by whatever measure you might want to use, a highly effective teacher. And, I've done that while teaching in high needs schools. High needs schools are chronically understaffed in quantity and quality. In Mississippi, for example, we will annually have 1,000 more openings for teachers than all of our teacher education programs combined can fill with graduates. A constant turnover of new, underprepared teachers, most of whom will leave the classroom in three years or less, is damaging to the students, who often take these staff departures as a reinforcing sign of their own lack of worth. Meanwhile, those of us who stay, including those who have proven ourselves effective in these difficult settings, are pressured to do more with less and less support, little respect, and no additional time.

I have know from the results of my own work and from the research that highly effective teachers make tremendous difference for all students, but effective teachers are not just energetic missionaries. We are reflective, accomplished practitioners who know our subjects, know our students, and know how to teach those subjects to our students (yes, I just quoted from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards). We're not superheroes from another planet; we're hardworking professionals, who have honed our craft. The really good news is: There are more of us than most people realize, and we could be the rule rather than the exception in public education.

To get to that point, we need to bust at least two myths.

Myth #1: Teachers are the problem. In its multiple variations, this myth asserts that the current teaching force of over 3 million is composed mostly of incompetents who should be replaced with younger, brighter, more dedicated persons. Truth: Even in the most dysfunctional schools or systems, quality teachers (of varying ranges) can be found. They are routinely ignored, their expertise wasted by administrators and education reformers alike. The largest percentage of teachers are mediocre; these include the defensive, the cynical, the frustrated, or as one recent survey called them the "disinheartened." They need either better professional development and/or to be disentangled from noxious learning environments that stifle them as well as their students.

Myth #2: We could get rid of all these incompetent teachers if it weren't for tenure and union contracts. This is a particularly urban myth behind which some administrators and politicians hide to avoid doing the work necessary to remove truly incompetent teachers. I work in an open-shop state where teachers have neither tenure nor collective bargaining. State law says a teacher may be fired by a school district for incompetence, and the procedure for removing them and striping their teaching certifications is relatively straightforward as compared to places like NYC or LA. Yet, in over six years on our state licensure commission, I have yet to see a case of incompetence brought before us for action. Either Mississippi (a) does not have any incompetent teachers, or (b) it's not tenure or union contracts that keeps incompetent teachers in classrooms.

The true culprit appears to be the what passes for teacher evaluation in most places. Apparently, we do not have systems that accurately identify teacher effectiveness or the degree of that effectiveness. Rigorous evaluation systems would not only identify quality teaching, but give each teacher a realistic, timely assessment of his/her work, identifying areas or strength and weakness; thereby, guiding professional development and support needs.

Teacher evaluation in most places, however, is a checklist filled out by a harried administrator during a drive-by walk-through visit of a classroom. In the districts where I've worked, the annual procedure was supposed to go like this: a pre-visit conference between myself and the principal to discuss my work since last year's evaluation, review any areas that were in need of improvement, note any changes or new conditions, and plan for the classroom visit. Next, would come the classroom visit itself; a full-period visit by the principal. The last step was a post-visit conference to review what the administrator saw, clarify areas of concern. Between the steps, the administrator would review my lesson plans (something that s/he should do throughout the school year) and other classroom evidence (student work, test data, etc.) that might shed light on the quality of my work. In over 15 years of high school teaching, I got that full procedure only twice, one of those being my rookie year. I have taught under five principals, one of whom has never seen me teach; three others saw me teach for half of one period. Most years, they simply filled out the paperwork and sent me a copy of my "perfect" evaluation.

The desire for a true and accurate evaluation of my professional work was my primary motivation for seeking National Board Certification in my 10th year of teaching. As my TLN colleagues who reviewed the numerous research studies on the National Board commented in their findings: "Teaching is difficult and important work, it deserves equally complex and thoughtful assessment."

National Board Certification stands out as a model upon which we can build truly rigorous but adaptable approaches to teacher evaluation. The NBPTS process contains the key elements of comprehensive and accurate assessment of what teachers should know and do:

1. It is an advanced certification for examining experienced teachers (not the same as what we might use for novices)
2. It examines both teachers' knowledge of their subject matter AND their skill in teaching that subject matter
3. It is peer evaluated
4. It is based on well-developed standards of teaching
5. It looks at student performance (test data, classroom work) 
6. It looks at teacher performance in context (school conditions, student characteristics, support systems)
7. It requires multiple forms of representation of teacher's work (visual, written, audio) as well as supporting evidence from the teachers' own classroom, students, and peers.
8. It looks at contributions and work the teacher may be performing outside the classroom (community, schoolwide, contributions to the profession, etc.)

These are elements upon which we could build more flexible and rigorous teacher evaluation processes that could take into account the wide variations in teaching styles and situations.

A little side note on item #5 above: Contrary to misperception, Board certification process does look at student's standardized test data if that data exists for the candidate. Remember, most teachers work with subject areas and grade levels that are not tested; and the certification is available to public and private educators. I submitted test data as part of my NB portfolio and so do most candidates for whom such data is available. I believe this is the best way to use test data in teacher evaluation--by combining it with other measures and setting those in the specific context of the teaching situation. This is in direct contrast to those who tout "value-added measures" alone as an accurate gauge of teacher performance.

I know there are some teacher (and administrator) evaluations that are more effective than the ones I've experienced. North Carolina, for example, has recently changed its teacher evaluation system, based in large part on ideas from NBPTS (love for some of you to share about that here).

Anybody working with an effective teacher evaluation model? Know of one? What about the administrators perspective?

Recently, I've been seeing more comments from people who argue that poverty causes people (specifically parents) not to value education. Some of this has been in response to the recent story of a young honor student being beaten to death (unfortunately, not the only such case, just one of the most dramatic and publicized). However, some of these comments are coming from frustrated educators and others who think we are wasting our time trying to improve poor performing schools in high-poverty communities because so many, if not most of the parents there just don't care.

After 20 years of teaching in one of the poorest regions of the country, I respectfully disagree. Parents who do not love their children or don't want the best for them, frightful as that is, are still the exception. Much more common are the assumptions and arguments about the lack of support for education among the poor and working-poor for education.

Perhaps more parents in poor communities appear to value education less because less value has clearly been placed on them and their children by the public education system. Feeling powerless to change that reality can lead to confrontation, resistance, or just plain indifference toward the closest representatives of the educational system—the principal and teachers at their children's school. These attitudes are not born out of poverty; they are a reaction to what these disenfranchised parents and students correctly perceive as a broken promise.

My high school students, here in the Delta, understood very well that the historically white high school across town had a science lab and we did not; they got new textbooks when we did not; they had new computers that actually worked, while we had older ones some of which had never worked; their school offered classes such as drama, dance, and creative writing which we could not, and on and on. They also realized this disparity did not start here in the new millennium; most of their parents had come through this same school system with many of the same issues. Nor is it lost on students or parents when their school gets the temporary teachers, the teachers hired at the last minute, or the extended substitutes in classes such as algebra and science.

Many schools in high-poverty areas are visually depressing, unsafe; some are falling apart around the students and staff. How does a teacher convince a kid (or a parent whose child is) sitting in a leaking trailer or dodging falling plaster that we REALLY believe all children deserve a high quality education? What do such disparities say about the level of expectations the nation or the state (upon whom these schools rely for funding) has for the students and teachers who are there?

Some of the parents try to improve the school with whatever limited resources they can raise. We used to have one grandmother who personally decorated every classroom door in the building just to make things brighter. One mother with a minimum wage job didn't have money to send to the school for various activities, but she brought me a sack of apples from her yard for helping her children after school. There are millions of hard-working parents in poor urban and rural communities who did not finish school themselves, but desperately want their child[ren] to have a better life. But let's not forget, many of the parents about whom some are complaining, were themselves poorly served by these same schools and systems.

In fact, in is more common, traditionally, that poor communities have pushed their youngsters to pursue education as the best way to not only achieve their individual goals, but more important to help uplift the entire community. Unfortunately, inequity is also a deeply-rooted tradition in American education. Waves of immigrant parents have had to fight for the education for their children, despite prejudicial efforts to limit them to menial training. The movement to end separate-and-unequal schools which led to the Brown decision, also resulted in the retaliatory termination and demotions of thousands of Black educators across the South. More recently, the collateral damages from frantic attempts to meet the provisions of NCLB have further exacerbated the underlying disparities that created the achievement gap in the first place.

It might surprise some to learn that are and have been teachers who have given extra hours, visited student homes, and had high expectations for students in poor communities long before TFA, KIPP, or Michelle Rhee. Some of those teachers have grown just plain tired of the unappreciated Herculean effort each school year requires, not to mention the irreplaceable toll that such on-going overexertion can take on their responsibilities to their own children and families.

My TLN colleague, Anthony Cody at Living in Dialogue, has addressed some of these same questions quite eloquently in his recent must-read blog posts {"NCLB—The Modern Face of the Civil Rights Movement" and "Rich Schools/Poor Schools: The Gap Grows"]

In their recent guest blog at ASCD InService, Budge and Parrot ask: "Why can't any high poverty school become high performing?" They, and others, point out quite accurately that there are schools in poor communities that are high performing (let's leave aside the discussion of how we measure that for right now). The unasked question is: Why do we make it so much harder for those who need education the most to get it? And why is that okay?