Category Archives: Education

Growth, and then…

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

Rock and rollBy Mark

Two steps forward, one step back. Climbing a hill of sand. Sisyphus without the deceitfulness.

Or, January in my classroom.

For the three weeks prior to winter break, we all worked very hard in room 116. By the time the quiz rolled around, we'd practiced, reviewed, self-assessed, strategized, tried new approaches, and for the most part, achieved the goal. On my proficiency level scale for identification and analysis of figurative language, the data was finally–finally–showing not just growth, but mastery.

Interpreting abstract figurative language is difficult enough for grown ups, let alone for adolescents who struggle to even understand overtly stated concrete concepts. Add to that the fact that interpretation of figurative language hinges tremendously on a reader's prior schema and life experiences upon which to draw and adolescents are set up to struggle. Nonetheless, through practice, diverse examples, more practice, and trial and error, growth happened by December 20th.

And then it went away.

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Thirty Million Words

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Parent Involvment, Social Issues

LogoBy Tom

There’s a kid in my class who I’ll call Arthur. Although he’s in fourth grade, he started the year reading at about the first grade level and his math skills were even lower. He wrote nothing. When we discussed his situation during a September Child Study meeting we decided to “pull out all the stops.” And so we did. Arthur gets pulled out for one-on-one phonics lessons every day from 9:30 to 10:00. He goes directly from there to his small-group reading lesson with our special ed teacher. From 11:30 to noon he receives in-class support for writing and organization skills. At 2:15 he gets an hour of math support.

That’s pretty much “all the stops.” Fortunately, he has started to making progress; if you were to draw a line representing his academic growth since September, it would have an upwards trajectory. But if that line were a ski slope, you would not tremble at the top. And as far behind as he was four months ago, he is even farther behind now; his classmates, after all, have also made progress, but at a faster rate.

It didn’t have to come to this. A famous study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley resulted in the Thirty Million Words Initiative. Simply put, they found that parent-child communication has an enormous impact on a child’s development and academic success. The name of the initiative reflects the optimal number of words a child should hear from his parents before entering school.

I have never met Arthur’s dad, and apparently neither has he. I have met his mother, though, on several occasions. She is very quiet, somewhat sullen, with the air of a person who looked at the low hand she was dealt and folded pretty early in the game. Which was about when Arthur was born.

Arthur is exactly the kind of student that TMW wants to prevent. Had his mother known how important it was to simply talk to her child, perhaps he wouldn’t be in his current circumstances. Perhaps I’d feel a little more certain that he’ll be in fifth grade next year. Perhaps his ski slope would be a little scarier.

We’ll never know. But I do know this: The most important thing non-teaching education stakeholders can do to support education in this country is to help parents help their children. And Thirty Million Words is an example of how simple that support can be. Talk, after all, is cheap. But apparently it’s pretty important, especially early in a child’s life.

Because sadly, fourth grade is a little bit too late.

Washington Teachers Still Sacrificing COLA

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Education, Education Policy

20131230_153121By Kristin

Mr. Ungritch, my tenth grade geometry teacher, was a superstar.  He gave each of us nicknames, made us do push ups for goofing off, and allowed us to throw the whole year's work out the window in exchange for whatever score we earned on one final proof, drawn out of a hat and done on the board.  We loved him.  He was a superstar in another way, too – he never complained about being a teacher.  He didn't complain about the work load, the pay, or the parents.  He once said, "Teachers actually get paid really well, if you know how to live right." 

I have always remembered what a rare gift it was to have a teacher who was so content, and I've tried to follow his example.  I love my job.  I love my students and their parents.  I feel blessed to have great benefits, time off with my daughters, and a reliable paycheck.  I'm grateful to taxpayers, and I want to be worth my pay.

On the other hand, it has been a long time since voters approved a cost of living allowance, or COLA, for teachers with Initiative 732.  Over 60 percent of Washington voters said "yes" to giving educators in public k-12 schools, community colleges, and technical colleges a cost of living adjustment.  It was suspended in 2008 because there wasn't enough money.  Teachers didn't like that, but we are nothing if not public servants, so we accepted it.  We're still accepting it. 

 

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Student Growth Percentiles and Teacher Evaluation: More Questions than Answers

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

by Maren Johnson 

Just this month, OSPI released a new kind of data: Student Growth Percentiles (SGP).  What are student growth percentiles?  In short, SGPs describe a student’s growth in state test scores as compared to other students with similar prior test scores.  Here’s a five minute video:

  

You can find Student Growth Percentiles for your specific school or district here: http://data.k12.wa.us/PublicDWP/Web/WashingtonWeb/PublishedReports/PublishedReports.aspx 
or http://bit.ly/1lE2Pi9

What are student growth percentiles for?  Teacher evaluation is one potential use, and will be an issue in the upcoming legislative session.  Washington state recently received a high risk warning from the federal government regarding teacher evaluation.  The issue?  Whether state test scores “can” or “must” be used in teacher evaluation—the U.S. Department of Education is saying that state test scores must be used in order for Washington state to continue to receive a NCLB waiver.  We’ve written extensively about this waiver on our blog—see posts from Mark, Kristin, Tom, and myself.

One issue with including state test scores in teacher evaluations?  Very few teachers in Washington state even teach classes associated with a state test!  The number of teachers with state test data has been estimated at 16% at the most by OSPI—see the chart. Student growth measures

How do you evaluate teachers with state tests when these teachers don’t even teach courses that are tested?  In Tennessee, teachers without test scores were able to choose a test for their evaluation, leading to some unusual conversations, “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher. It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation.”   In Florida, teachers have been evaluated using school wide test averages, meaning that some teachers are evaluated based on test scores from students they have never taught.  North Carolina attempted to test students of all teachers in all subject areas with 52 different standardized tests.  All these approaches have proved problematic.

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Common Core: Irony, Commerce and the Clock

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Professional Development, Social Issues

File52a4a9f585e15By Mark

For English Language Arts 9-10, Common Core standard #8 for Informational Text is this:

Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

I thought of this when I read a rant recently about how Common Core required education about safe sex rather than abstinence. This was the same week I read two different assertions: one claiming that Common Core specifically outlawed the teaching of cursive, the other claiming that cursive was now required. A few weeks ago I was lectured by a parent about how Common Core was forcing kids to just memorize a list of facts and spit them back on a test. My school year this year started with a colleague upset at the required reading list identified by the Common Core State Standards for high school English.

A seven-second Google search enabled me to "evaluate the argument and specific claims… assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient" and "identify false statements." 

1. Common Core does not address issues of sex education…

2. Common Core does not address handwriting or cursive in the standards…

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Teacher of the Year is Dyslexic

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Assessment, Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Social Issues

Jeff Dunn 1

Our guest blogger, Jeffrey Dunn is 2014 Regional Teacher of the year from ESD 101. Jeffrey is an educator, cultural critic, & backwoods modernist currently teaching in Deer Park, Washington. He invites others to read bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Richard Brautigan.

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Try and imagine the impact this fact has on my students. No longer am I a model of all that is correct. No longer am I the authority on all that is academic. In this case, I am learning disabled as defined in Washington State law (WAC 392-172A-03055). This law reads that learning disabilities may include “conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.” In short, I am not the model of perfection students are led to believe all we teachers are.  

Researchers from the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity's Sally Shaywitz (Overcoming Dyslexia) and the College de France and  Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale'sStanislas Dehaene (Reading in the Brain) estimate that between 10-20% (call it the midpoint, 15%) of all human populations are dyslexic (variation  is a result of definition and assessment practice). Think of it, in any class of 25, we should expect 4 of our students to be dyslexic. My thirty-six years of teaching experience has proven this statistic to be true.

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Let’s Build a Waiver Loophole

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Elementary

LoopholeBy Tom

Twelve years ago, George Bush signed “No Child Left Behind” into law. Among other things, the law requires that by the end of this school year every student in America has to meet standard. That level of success will never happen, of course, not even in Finland, but no one has bothered to change that part of the law. Instead, the Obama Administration has used that law as leverage to advance their own educational agenda, which includes expanded school choice, adoption of the Common Core State Standards and tougher teacher evaluation laws. They’ve done this by granting waivers from the law's punitive aspects to states that adopt certain policies.

Washington State received one of those waivers, along with 31 other states. And for the most part, we’ve toed the line. We now allow charter schools, we’re transitioning to the CCSS, and we have a brand-new Teacher and Principal Evaluation Project. (TPEP)

But there’s a problem. As written, TPEP allows state assessment scores to be used for teacher evaluation. The feds want TPEP to require that they be used. The feds have recently notified our state, warning us that we risk losing our waiver unless TPEP is changed so that it mandates the use of state assessment data. 

As a teacher, I can see no possible way in which state test scores can be used as a valid basis for my evaluation. I teach fourth grade; my students took a state test last year and they’ll take another one this year. But it’s not the same test. Last year they took a third grade test and this year they’ll take a fourth grade test. The smart kids in my class passed their test last year and they’ll probably pass their test this year. The kids who are struggling this year didn’t pass their test last year and they’ll have a tough time passing this year’s test.

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More on Coverage vs. Learning: Student Growth

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Literacy

220px-Johann_Heinrich_Füssli_054By Mark

Last month I shared my thoughts about how "coverage pressure" nearly led me to move on before my students were ready. My decision to slow down and focus on my students' skills rather than simply plow forward resulted in far better student performance both on that essay as well as the next essay they are currently writing for me. I have had several students voluntarily tell me that they understand what to do far better now because we slowed down and spent more time digging deeper.

The new evaluation law requires that all teachers be able to demonstrate how their planning and implementation results in student growth toward an important content standard or goal. As I wrote that piece linked above, a minor epiphany occurred to me: coverage of content and student growth are not the same thing.

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Using Teacher Evaluations for Human Resource Decisions: Unintended Consequences?

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy
image from http://aviary.blob.core.windows.net/k-mr6i2hifk4wxt1dp-13120306/7bcaca66-dc03-4381-9172-01cd3fd5a88a.jpg

by Maren Johnson

Earlier this year, Washington state received a high risk warning from the federal government regarding its teacher evaluation system. One issue: whether state test results can be used in teacher evaluation, or whether they must be used. Randy Dorn has requested that the state legislature address this issue in the upcoming session.

The high risk warning letter concerns one of the "inputs" of teacher evaluation–the potential use of state tests. Yesterday, OSPI issued a report concerning one of the "outputs" of our evaluation system–human resource decisions. The report, "Using Teacher and Principal Evaluations to Inform Human Resource Decisions," was put together by OSPI and the education research organization American Institute for Research (AIR). They surveyed and conducted forums with Washington stake holders and looked at national trends. It includes interesting data about teacher and administrator views–see the graph up to the left.

Clearly, evaluation results can already be used in human resource decisions such as non-renewal. Recent changes to the law mean that by 2015-2016, evaluation results will also be included in human resource decisions such as layoffs, RIFs, transfers, and moving from provisional to continuing contract status. Some districts are using evaluation results for decisions on leadership opportunities and professional development. This affects a lot of people–we need to have a good system here. 

An interesting section of the report talks about some of the unintended consequences of using evaluations in human resource decisions. A few quotes:

"Teachers expressed a desire to use their focused evaluations as an opportunity to try new strategies that might not result in a Proficient rating. Some teachers would be deterred from trying new approaches if employment decisions would be based on those results."

"By using teacher evaluation data in HR decisions, particularly employment decisions, participants worried that teachers would begin to compete with each other rather than cooperate to improve student learning."

One striking trend that emerged in the report was time.  This is the first year that ALL school districts in the state of Washington are using TPEP evaluation.  Educators wanted time to ensure that both evaluators and those being evaluated received appropriate training, and also wanted time to test out the new system itself.

The report states (p. 13) that in the upcoming legislative session, OSPI is pursuing a change to current state law that would delay the use of evaluations in human resource decisions until the 2016-17 school year. A delay like this is a good idea: let's try our new system out before increasing the high stakes consequences attached to it! We need to get this right.

 

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Washington State Teacher Evaluation: At High Risk?

Beginning Educator Support

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Education, Education Policy, Mentoring, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership

By Rob

The top priority of the Quality Education Council Report is to “Make Progress Toward Ample Funding for Basic Education.”  The QEC recognizes many “non—basic education programs to be essential for providing critical services for students” – including funds for professional development.  A little further down the list of priorities is support for the recruitment, development, placement, and retention of educators who are culturally competent and possess skills and competencies in language acquisition.

That’s what I do.  I am part of a team of six Instructional Mentors who oversee the novice teacher induction program.  But funding for our position does not come from the state.  

 

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