How to fire a teacher- Washington state style

Here is a wonderful post from storiesfromschool.org in the great state of Washington about the tedious and often problematic process of removing ineffective teachers from schools.  To be honest, this is not too far from what it's like to get rid of an ineffective teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland. Perhaps the only difference is that we add a whole year of peer evaluation and support, which makes principals even more leery of engaging the process.  From Tom in Washington:

I was standing in the faculty room one morning, waiting for the coffee to brew. Two colleagues were talking about principals they’d worked with, and one of them said to me, “Tom, you would be a great principal. I would love to work in your school.”


She should have waited until I had some of that coffee. I would have been a lot less blunt. “Really? because the first thing I’d do would be to fire you.”

Choosing to believe that I was speaking facetiously, she laughed nervously and hurried off.

(Fun fact: the word facetiously has every vowel, in order, including Y!)

Actually, I wasn’t kidding. If I really was a principal and she really was on my faculty, I really would fire her. She was a bad teacher. Ineffective. Weak.

But it would have been difficult.

Read the whole bit and you'll see why it is we're going the value-added testing route.   And unless alternatives arise, it's why we'll continue down that mountain.

Testing and Evaluation

An interesting and balanced article in the New York Times today about  the practice of using student test data to rank teacher quality.   It's a practice that I believe has potential in the field of education, but also serious limitations.   My biggest concern, is that it is now used simply as a proxy for honest and robust evaluation, most likley because it is easy to use.  I can hear it now, "I don't want to let you go, but I can't ignore the data."  True feedback about effective teaching will not come on a printout derived from an algorithm.  Make no mistake, I believe teachers should be accountable, and that there needs to be serious coversations about the role of seniority and tenure within the field of education.   We need to understand what makes a quality teacher, and how quality teachers are different from less effective teachers. Testing may be a part of how we come to that understanding.   But it should not be a replacement.  To a large extent, I feel the current emphasis on testing is the result of resistance by teacher unions to offer up more cost effective and robust solutions that are available.   Create that system, and the need for testing and the negative externalities associated with testing diminish if not disappear.

Here's a bit from the Times' article:

“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.

Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.

“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.”

More thoughtful conversation about VAM over at Stories from School.   A conversation that makes me that much more confident that if teacher-leaders made decisions about school reform, we'd be much better off than we are now.

Some common sense

The reform movement has focused so far on  student testing as a way to evaluate the quality of teaching.  Through the use of value-added methodology, teachers can be evaluated based on the "additional learning" they contribute to a students overall progress.   It controls for out of school factors such as family income and race in order to try and isolate the teacher effect on student learning.   While still imperfect, the process is able to "rank" teachers' effectiveness, albeit with a rather broad range of uncertainty.

This testing based approach has so far been received with a rather wide degree of skepeticism from many teachers and their unions who represent them.   And increased reliance on testing is indeed laced with problems.   States often don't have the quality of resources to make high quality tests.    Testing takes time- often at the expense of instruction.    And high-stakes testing also has the effect of narrowing the focus of instruction.

However, as I read this article from the value-added proponent LA Times, it struck me that if teachers and their unions were able to come up with their own system for determing teacher quality- this testing fetish would likely go just as fast as it came.   The fact of the matter, is that the public, as well as many teachers, are ready to consider the quality of teaching that is going on inside of school buildings.   Too many parents have had bad experiences with ineffective teachers.   Too many teachers know that not every teacher works as hard as the next.   And too many administrators know what teachers and parents know but are unable, or unwilling, to do anything about it.   Testing takes these stakeholders out of the equation.   Testing provides an "objective" approach for evaluatiing teachers.

If teachers want to avoid the testing wave, they must embrace their own systems of reform.   We must embrace evaluation systems that offer more than a dichotomous satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating system.   We must encourage and strive for excellence in the classroom- and reward those who are not only the highest quality, but who take on extra responsibilities.    We can no longer simply ignore teacher quality, unless that is, we want our quality to be determined by student performance on a test.   We do so at our own peril.

Quality teaching matters- much more so than new programs or initiatives.   So the question is, do we want to recognize this quality or have someone else, or something else, do this for us?  From the LA Times:

Since 2003, Markham has had dozens of the district's least effective instructors, as measured by the analysis of their students' progress on standardized tests. Seventy percent of the school's English and math teachers have ranked well below the Los Angeles Unified School District's average in effectiveness. Fewer than 10 Markham teachers have been in the district's top 20%, and most left the school within three years.

There are thousands of Markhams across the country, schools whose low test scores have triggered wave after wave of reform efforts over decades, mostly in vain.

"It's not a lack of new initiatives, it's too many initiatives, and no sense of what's working," said Robert Manwaring, a senior policy analyst at the Washington, D.C., think tank Education Sector who has studied turnaround efforts at Markham and other schools. "They don't use data to inform those decisions — they use a gut feeling or get marching orders from higher up."

 The LA Times, rightly or wrongly, can make claims about teacher quality in a way that teachers can't.   It is time for this to change.  It is time for teachers to decide what quality teaching is.   And when we do, not only will teachers be better off, but the public and the students we serve will be better off.   The choice is ours.

The value of Value-Added

Here's a study from the Brookings Institution you won't find on the MCEA blog.  Jay Mathews brought it to my attention and he does a good job summarizing the study which focuses on the reliability concerns associated with value-added modeling.   The main idea is that just because a teacher's "percentile rank" might fluctuate year to year- does not mean it is a worthless piece of information.   They compare a teacher's percentile value-added rank to a baseball player's batting average which has similar year to year fluctuations.   Would you make decisions about the current year based on the batting average from last year?   Well, you'd certainly keep it in mind.  From the executive summary:

We believe that whenever human resource actions are based on evaluations of teachers they will benefit from incorporating all the best available information, which includes value-added measures. Not only do teachers typically receive scant feedback on their past performance in raising test scores, the information they usually receive on the average test scores or proficiency of their students can be misleading or demoralizing. High test scores or a high proficiency rate may be more informative of who their students are than how they were taught. Low test scores might mask the incredible progress the teachers made. Teachers and their mentors and principals stand to gain vast new insight if they could see the teachers’ performance placed in context of other teachers with students just like their own, drawn from a much larger population than a single school. This is the promise of value-added analysis. It is not a perfect system of measurement, but it can complement observational measures, parent feedback, and personal reflections on teaching far better than any available alternative. It can be used to help guide resources to where they are needed most, to identify teachers’ strengths and weaknesses, and to put a spotlight on the critical role of teachers in learning.

VAM (Value Added Modeling)

I have alot of respect for the work that David Cohen does over at InterACT, a policy oriented group named the "Accomplished Teachers of California."   He recently made the virtual journey to the Answer Sheet- a blog by Valerie Struass at the Post, in which he argues against the use of Value Added measurement tools in California.   And while I respect him, if it has not already become clear, I could not disagree with him more on the use of VAM.    I recently came across a policy report from NYC that I found both interesting and readable.   I'm not sure it has been peer reviewed but it has a lengthy but readable discussion on the pitfalls and potential uses of VAM.   It's a good starting place for those who want to learn more.

Concensus?

Gordon Maciennes of Taking Note discusses the concensus that has been reached between reformers and unions. I'm not sure we've reached any concensus here in MCPS. We prefer avoidance to concensus.

With all the controversy around VAM, there is a growing consensus between hard-core pay-for-performance advocates and teacher union activists:

•the current teacher evaluation system is close to useless, since just about every teacher is judged to be at least “satisfactory” if not “excellent”;
•VAM is a potentially promising method that might improve teacher evaluation and development, but it requires additional research and refinement;
•even when fine-tuned and more reliable, VAM should never be the sole measure of teacher effectiveness (the disagreement focuses on whether VAM should count for 30 percent or 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation); and,
•the other factors that should be incorporated in an improved teacher evaluation system are much squishier as they rely on professional and personal judgments from classroom observations or analysis of student work that are not uniform and quantifiable like standardized tests.