By Kristin

Last February a Senator from Tennessee proposed legislation that would reduce welfare benefits-  "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families" (TANF) – by 30% if children weren't performing in school. 

"Performing" was defined by one journalist as “Advancing from one grade to the next and receiving a score of proficient or advanced on required state examinations in the subject areas of mathematics and reading/language arts."

The bill is dead, considered too punitive, misdirected, and begging for judicial action to make it out of the Senate debate, but it raises some interesting issues because I think we all saw this coming.  Everyone is desperate to find a way to help struggling students perform better, and various sticks and carrots are being designed to make that happen.

Continue reading →

By Kristin

Are any of us really surprised by the news that 35 Atlanta Schools district officials and employees, including the Superintendent, were indicted because of cheating on state tests?

Of course we are.  In Washington State we're not so whipped about scores that we can imagine going into a windowless, locked room, being called the "chosen ones," and replacing wrong answers with right. I think it should stay that way.  The line between honorable and desperate isn't so thick we can assume teachers in Washington will never be told to raise their scores no matter what it took – wink wink.  In fact it's already happened.

Continue reading →

By Tom White

Chad Aldeman, an analyst and blogger for the Education
Sector, recently wrote about Washington’s teacher evaluation system. It’s an
interesting read. You can cut to the chase by looking at his blog post here,
or if you’re feeling ambitious, you can tackle the whole article here.

His basic point is that Washington State judges an
overwhelming majority of its teacher as satisfactory, regardless of their
students’ achievement. He calls this the “Evergreen Effect” which is a
reference to “The Widget Effect,” a phenomenon in which education policy-makers
treat teachers as interchangeable “widgets,” ignoring their relative
effectiveness.

I have several reactions to his thoughtful piece.

Continue reading →

By Mark

It seems like a no-brainer. If you want to evaluate my effectiveness as a teacher, you need to look at what I do in my classroom. If you want to evaluate my impact on student learning, you need to look at the work I make my students do and see how that work reflects my students' growth over time.

This is the right way to judge my job performance. But doing it this way takes time, is complicated for my boss (who has to do the same for two-dozen other teachers in two-dozen other contexts), and requires physical and intellectual investment into practices that can sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging (read: it requires change).

Too often in education, doing the difficult, right thing is avoided in favor of doing the simpler, easier to administer thing. When our students do this, we chastise them for cutting corners and missing out on the real value of the work–by doing so they are only cheating themselves, we tell them. When we do this as a system, we are cheating society.

Continue reading →

By Kristin

I'm the short one in the photo.  That's my boat at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta in 1993, my last year of college at the University of Washington.  This picture wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't be a college graduate, if it hadn't been for someone at my high school who, without being asked by me or my parents to do so, put me in honors classes and on a college track.  

SB 5243 does what some mysterious educator did for me in 1984; it requires that schools automatically place a capable student in academically accelerated classes.  What a beautiful policy.

Continue reading →

By Mark

Like you probably have, I've read the books, sat through the professional development, and learned the theories. Each time I learn a little, but nothing like what I learn when I get to watch another teacher in action.

Whether it is through video or through actually getting to walk into a fellow teacher's room and just watch, those minutes invested to simply observe pay far greater dividends than the time or money I invest in reading about best practice or watching a fancy powerpoint click away.

OSPI and CSTP, through support from the Gates Foundation, and working on ways to use teacher video as a springboard for meaningful professional conversation in a variety of contexts. The tools being created are literally like being fly on the wall–or like looking through a two-way mirror–into the unmediated workings of a colleague's classroom, a real classroom with its real kids who sometimes aren't on task, sometimes say silly things, or sometimes take a brilliant question to an even more brilliant answer. Hopefully, these resources will be available later this year, but I've had the privilege to be part of designing and piloting some of the protocols that teachers can use to take advantage of the two-way mirror of peer observation.

Continue reading →

By Tom

As a people, we have a weird relationship with data. On the
one hand, we love to collect it; we love to measure every possible entity from
every conceivable angle so that we can arrange all those numbers in tables,
spreadsheets and graphs. On the other hand, we like to take all those numbers
and distill them down to a single digit. It’s as if we overwhelm ourselves with
numbers and respond by getting rid of most of them.

One of my fourth graders was able to put her finger on it. We
were learning how to find averages. One of the practice problems involved five
kids who went fishing. Each kid caught a different number of fish and my
students had to find the average. Like a good teacher, I started with the concrete.
I had each student build towers of interlocking cubes corresponding to the
fish. When they were done, they all had five towers of cubes standing on their
desks. “Finding the average,” I announced, “means finding the number of fish
each kid caught, if they all caught the same amount. That means we’ll have them
‘share’ the fish. We take some fish from the lucky kids and give them to the kids
who weren’t so lucky. We’ll ‘even out’ the towers until they’re all the same
height.” The answer was six. Then I showed them how to find the same number by
adding up all the fish and dividing the total by five. The answer was still
six.

That’s when Kiran spoke up. “I understand how to do this,
but I’m not sure why,” she said, “Why is the average number of fish more
important than knowing how many fish each kid caught?” Good question, Kiran.

It’s the same question I have about Senate Bill 5328, which
is moving its way through the Washington Legislature. It would require the
state to post a letter grade for each school based on how well their students
did on the state test. The bill's supporters think it will make it easier for parents to figure
out how well their local schools are doing, while holding educators more
accountable for their students’ achievement. I think it’s unnecessary,
simplistic and at odds with the last school-reform law out of Olympia: the teacher
evaluation system.

Continue reading →

By Tom White

When I was growing up my father was the city manager of
Mountlake Terrace. He was – and is – a cheap man, so when it came time to
purchase some additional police cars, he decided to buy a fleet of four used
checker cabs from a New York City taxi company. Expecting brand-new, top-shelf
Crown-Vics, the police force was not amused. In fact, they made an astonishing
prediction: within months, these cars – which they decided were dangerously
top-heavy – would all overturn. And sure enough, they all did. Oddly, no
civilian witnessed any of these “accidents,” all of which happened late at
night. Fortunately no one was injured.

In the end it was a win-win. The cops got their Crown-Vics
and my father got a great story to tell at his annual city manager conferences.
And at every Thanksgiving for the past forty years. The citizens of Mountlake
Terrace, of course, didn’t win; they had to pay for eight cars instead of four,
but such is life.

I share this story in light of what’s happening concerning
education funding. As we all know, the past few years have been bleak. Class
sizes have gone up and para-educator support levels have dropped. Teacher
salaries have also taken a 3% hit; absorbed and mitigated by many districts with
furlough days, resulting in less instruction time.

Like the cops in my father’s city, teachers predicted that
student learning would pay a price. However, this is what actually happened: 

What you’re looking at is math achievement in Washington
State over the last three years. Reading and science scores have also gone up.
This is not what we predicted or feared. This is definitely not a fleet of
police cars rolling around, upside-down in the streets of Mountlake Terrace.

So what happened?

Let me offer three possible explanations, presented in order
of increasing likelihood:

Continue reading →

By Kristin

That's a huge wave.  If you've ever carried a gallon of water you might have a better appreciation for what it feels like to have tens of thousands of gallons of water smashing into you.  

I have surfed, badly, and on waves that were maybe two feet high.  I grew up in San Diego and am a strong swimmer so I thought – before I ever tried surfing – that it would be easy.  It's not, and when you bury the nose of that board in a two foot wave and flip foot over head, it hurts.  When you add a child to a classroom, you're adding the whole range of needs that child brings.  It's like adding a foot to a wave – it's not just one foot of water, it's a foot of water that's 300 meters long.  That's a lot of weight added to that wave.

Some people – people who have never taught 32 children – think it's not a big deal to add a child or two to a classroom.  It is a big deal, and I would argue that just like surfing isn't about being a swimmer, teaching more children isn't a matter of being a teacher – it's an entirely different game, and not one that someone who wants what's best for children would support.

Continue reading →

I had a student walk into my 9th grade class five years ago, and after her first writing sample I knew that I was going to struggle.

What she wrote stymied me. It was fluid, articulate, focused, insightful…all of the things I wanted my students' writing to be. If my supervisor had walked in and glanced over her shoulder as she worked in my room, the level of quality he'd see there would be above-and-beyond–and probably make me look darn good at first blush.

Over the next four years, she was a student in my 9th, 10th, and 12th grade classrooms. By the time she graduated, I had shared with her many, many times how she had challenged me as a professional to find ways to push her to that "next level" as a writer and thinker. She had walked in my door from day one a high-achiever in that regard. Many times, I questioned whether I had been able to truly promote progress, but through the teacher-student relationship we developed, she helped me see the very small, subtle ways that I had in fact helped her progress as a writer–not so much in mechanics as in nuanced craft and internal disposition.

Continue reading →