By Tom
I was at a staff meeting once in which a colleague made a presentation. She wanted us to take on some new initiative. I can’t remember what it was, since we voted not to do it. She came to me afterwards and asked what she did wrong. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “You were clear and articulate. You explained what the program was about and told us why it was a good idea. Then we thought about it and decided not to do it. That happens sometimes.”
I tell this dull story because it sounds like what happened in Washington D.C. last weekend. Governor Inslee went out there and explained to Education Secretary Arne Duncan why our teacher evaluation system should be good enough to obtain the NCLB waiver, even though it clearly doesn’t require the use of state tests like the feds want. Governor Inslee, I’m sure, was every bit as clear and articulate as my colleague, yet in the end Duncan said no.
That happens sometimes.
So now what? So now Inslee is going to help the legislature pass a bill that will change TPEP in a way that the feds like. And then we’ll get our waiver, which will allow the state more freedom to spend $40 or so million dollars. And we also won’t have to send home letters to our parents telling them that our schools are bad.
And as for us? The teachers in the classroom? We get to use state tests to measure student growth. Of course by “we” I mean the 16% of us who actually teach in state tested grades and subjects. Everyone else gets to use meaningful assessments that reflect what they actually teach every day.
Personally, I’m trying really hard to get upset about this. Really hard. But all I can muster is a sense of disappointed resignation. Sure, our new evaluation system is damaged, but the damage is only to those of us who teach state-tested students, and since the student growth part of our evaluations are supposed to use “multiple measures,” state assessments will only matter to a slight degree to a small number of teachers. And there’s yet another caveat: we’re switching to a new student assessment system. This year is the field test. Next year is the first year; the year we gather base-line data. The year after that is the first year in which we could actually misuse the assessment for teacher evaluations, and since CCSS promises to be the essence of professional development for the foreseeable future, there’s every reason to expect student test scores to rise, at least in the short-term.
While I would like to see a way around using student test scores for teacher evaluation, what I would love to see is a reasonable, rational US Congress completely rewrite ESEA, better known as NCLB. Remember, all the nonsense we’re going through right now is an effort to secure a waiver from the onerous sanctions of that ridiculous law. ESEA, as it was originally conceived decades ago, was designed to provide support for our country’s high-needs students. If Congress could set aside their bickering long enough to write a law that actually did that, we wouldn’t have to worry about all this crap.
Dream on, Tom.
Both points are well taken, Mark and Pezz. And again, I certainly don’t like the direction in which this is going. TPEP has definitely been damaged by these developments.
I guess what I’m trying to communicate is that bad as it is, it isn’t the end of the world or the ruination of TPEP. The people in DC have a certain set of priorities that doesn’t exactly overlap with ours, and because they’re holding the checkbook, we really have no choice but to capitulate.
That’s reality.
My fear: in three years a bill will be passed tying 50% of an entire evaluation to state test scores. There is no state with direct state test attachments that hasn’t watched the overall percentage increase.
We’ll look back at this year and wonder “what if…” What if we had fought harder against this? What if we had used a statewide action? What if we had run our own initiative? What if every TPEP pilot district had marched at the Capitol? What if we had flooded our local legislators’s offices with opposition?
What if?
Ultimately, this all would be moot if ESEA would just disappear. I have worked formally and informally with few different districts around this corner of the state with their implementation of TPEP, and all are adhering to the law but are approaching their local implementation and decision-making very differently–which is the double-edged sword that mandates such as the “must” are trying to prevent. Like the Common Core, the rollout in some cases has been botched, which in some cases has soured people on the new evaluation model despite its strengths, and this sourness is the result of policy decisions at the local level that may or may not be wise.
My point: my concern is how effectively schools will read the “must.” Thankfully, the “must” doesn’t state a required proportion of our final evaluation that must be tied to test scores. Also, a wise reading of the law will reveal that even if state tests must be used, they will be but one of many data points from multiple measures by which a teacher monitors student growth. In that reading, you’re right, probably not a big deal. A bigger problem is when either a handful of districts OR one major district such as Seattle implement unwisely and ruin it for everyone else.
It is also a matter of principle, of course. Using test scores, particularly tests whose content and prompts have not really been explored, vetted, and refined (and there does not seem to be structures in place for the revision of the standards/test upon feedback from practitioners) is not particularly good practice.
We may be delaying the conversation, which will perhaps give logic more time to prevail.