‘You are so smart…why did you become a teacher?’
By Valerie Strauss
LINK

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by nearly 1,400 New York principals.

By Carol Corbett Burris
The best part of my day is before the first bell rings. I get to spend time in the halls and cafeteria with our students. I have spent over two decades of my professional life among teenagers, and I must confess each year I enjoy them more. They have a perspective that is insightful and clear, and they are always on the watch for what is fair and what is not, especially when it comes to rules.

This past week, I read “the evaluation deal” between NYSUT (the New York teachers union) and the State Education Department. I was surprised, and I was angry. I was particularly struck by the lack of logic and fairness in the rules of the deal. And so to gain some perspective (and to lower my blood pressure) I went to the cafeteria at lunchtime and sat with some kids.

I bought some bags of chips and put them on the table and told them I wanted input on grading, a subject near and dear to their hearts. The first scenario I gave them was this….
“Suppose this marking period you had three tests. Each of the tests was on different topics, and you passed all three. Would it be fair for your teache r to fail you?”
The kids were outraged at the thought, with some choosing adjectives I will not repeat. One thoughtful student asked, “Well, how did I do compared to the rest of the class?”
“Average” was my reply. The adjectives got a little stronger. Everyone agreed that would be outrageous and that I should overturn the grades of such a teacher.

I gave them a second scenario:
“Suppose you have three tests, and you bomb the first one. But on the second, you do well. And by the time the third one comes around, you are pretty much at the top of the class—and that is the test that has the most points of all. But because you did so badly on the first test, the teacher fails you for the quarter. What do you think?”

I think the reader can guess how they responded. Eyes narrowed as the kids became increasingly worried that their principal had lost her mind and was designing a plot to fail them all. I decided it was a good time to take my chips and head back to the halls.

Now take a look at the chart below, which will be used in New York to evaluate teachers. It is similar to a chart I explained here.This is what was decided as part of last week’s grand bargain; it’s what NY lawmakers will be asked this spring to put into law to sort and select public school teachers, with those deemed ineffective for two years to be fired.

Regulation/Student Growth/Local Measures/Other 60/Composite
Ineffective/..........0-2........../.........0-2........ .../.............../.......0-64
Developing/.........3-8........./..........3-8........../.locally..../.......65-74
Effective/.............9-17......./..........9-17......./developed/.......75-90
Highly Effective/.18-20...../..........18-20.... /................/.......91-100
Now let’s go back to my first cafeteria scenario, applying it to the chart.

Ms. Alvarez is a second-year teacher. Her diverse third-grade class, which includes English language learners, takes the state tests. In the first category, ‘student growth,’ the teacher’s students show average growth. She is rated effective and earns 9 points. In the second column, again she is rated effective based on student work and gets 9 points again. Her principal critiques her lessons and there is room to grow, so she assigns her 46 out of the possible 60 points in category three, ‘other 60’. Although the state does not p rovide ranges for the ‘other 60,’ we can see that a score of 46 based on the proportions in the first two columns, would be effective. Now let’s add the numbers up and look at the final column: 9+9+46=64. Overall, Ms. Alvarez is rated ineffective. She decides that maybe teaching is not for her.
Now to cafeteria scenario #2. Ms. Smith’s students have serious learning disabilities and before NCLB they would never have been required to take the state exam. Her students are frustrated by the test and show little growth. Her score in the first category is 1.

Nevertheless, because the district has chosen a more appropriate assessment for her students for the local measure, she gets 9 points, which is in the effective range. Ms. Smith has excellent teaching skills and so she nets 54 out of the possible 60 points, which is in the district’s highly effective range. In the three categories she garners ratings of ineffecti ve, effective and highly effective, but when the district adds up her points it will arrive at a total of 64, ineffective overall. Ms. Smith asks to teach resource room instead next year — she is a single mom and cannot lose her job. Her students lose the best teacher they ever had.

Let me add one more. Mr. Reed is a 28-year veteran whom students adore. He is the basketball coach, and he has turned around the lives of more troubled teens than his principal can count. He is a fine teacher of English who welcomes struggling students. His scores are 9, 10 and 55 — effective, effective and highly effective. That’s a total of 74 points: this 28-year veteran is labeled ‘developing’ and given a mandatory Teacher Improvement Plan. He retires in disgust.

With the above scenarios I am not creating fiction, I am describing the future — bone in which children lose great teachers. The reason the above “band” system is so flawed is because of the obsession of Albany with test scores.

Our state’s rule-makers wanted to design a system in which the teachers whose students’ scores are in the lowest ten percent could under no circumstances be anything other than ineffective. It created a ludicrous system where teachers who are effective across the board can be rated ineffective overall.
This was recognized by the August 2011 decision of Justice Michael Lynch, who wisely noted that the scoring ranges for the four categories were invalid, because the ranges did not allow the 60-point category to have meaningful impact in the final score. He noted also that these ranges would rate a teacher “ineffective” solely on the basis of student achievement. The judge understood what NYSUT and the State Education Department cannot — test scores should never trump all. Yet in the agreement, NYSUT caved, condemning our schools to become joyless, test-prep factories.
The legislature, which must now approve the agreement, can bring a modicum of sanity to this awful system. With amendments such as “a teacher who is rated effective in all three categories must be rated effective overall” and, “to be rated ineffective overall, a teacher must be rated ineffective in at least two of the three categories, and be rated less than highly effective in the third,” they can infuse the wisdom of a wise judge, thus mitigating a little bit of the damage that this bizarre system will cause.
Teachers and their spouses, family and friends will be watching the votes when this legislation is introduced in the budget process this spring. And a governor with an ambitious eye on his political future is wise to remember that the road to the White House is through the primary process. Teachers vote and they will remember.

One of my finest teachers was near tears the other day. Her student had asked her, “You are so smart…why did you become a teacher?” Within the context of this teacher-bashing climate, that remark was just too much to bear, and I hugged her as she cried. Less than a mile away, her Governor had thumped on a podium at Molloy College saying “if they want the money, perform” as though she and her colleagues were trained seals.

Words will soften as elections near. Fingers will wag as politicians admonish the public to “not bash teachers.” What educators and those who love them will remember, however, ar e not the words, but the actions. Those who doubt that should just ask the kids in my cafeteria. They will tell you that is so.

Posted at 05:00 AM ET, 12/07/2011
Are half of New York’s teachers really ‘not effective?’
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

By Carol Corbett Burris

You have to love New York City’s mayor. Michael Bloomberg speaks his mind, never holding back. While most self-proclaimed school reformers do the Dance of the Seven Veils, slowly revealing their agenda, the mayor jumps up on stage and gives you the ‘full monty.’ He’s sure he has the solution for all that ails New York’s schools, and he is not shy about sharing.

Last Thursday, he told an MIT conference audience how to quickly improve public schools. “I would, if I had the ability – which nobody does really – to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”

Now that’s an interesting proposal to promote college readiness: lecture halls for third graders.

The mayor never cites any research to support his claims about what’s a good deal for students. Nor does he explain a sensible way to determine the bottom half of teachers — the ones who would be sent packing. But he should be forgiven on this point since there is, in fact, no such research and no such sensible way.

Yet as astounding as his statement might be, the mayor’s solution is not pulled from thin air. In fact, his assumption is the foundational belief on which the State of New York has designed its teacher and principal evaluation system.

The evaluation system, APPR, actually assumes that half of all teachers are not effective (ineffective or developing), although there is no evidence that that is the case. In fact, the State Education Department has created a bell curve evaluative system on which to place teachers to make it so. Now that, Mayor Mike, is ex cathedra.

Below is a table that appears on page 31 of Guidance on New York State’s Annual Professional Performance Review Law and Regulations which can be found here:

TABLE 2

Table 2, p. 31 of Guidance on New York State’s Annual Professional Performance Review Law and Regulations. ( NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT )
The first two columns are clearly designed to produce a bell curve — 10 percent on the bottom in ineffective and 10% at the top.

In category 1, Student Growth on State Assessments, the state will give schools the points after it compares student growth on tests comparing teacher to teacher. The rest of the points are divided among ‘developing’ and ‘effective,’ with the majority in the category ‘developing’. Before a teacher can be considered effective, her students’ score growth must exceed the average for all teachers — that means based on scores, more than 50% of all teachers will not be effective.

For the second column, the learning assessment is chosen by the district, but teachers are sorted into the same four categories by points. The commissioner is in court on appeal to allow state test scores to be doubled, ostensibly for districts that do not have the money to buy tests for the local measure.

Although ranges for the ‘other 60 points’ (observations, professional obligations) are not provided by the state, Page 34 provides guidance which indicates that the four ranges should be created in a manner similar to the first two.

If there is any doubt that New York wants to put teachers on a bell curve, read Pages 38 and 39 from the revised Race to the Top application, which clearly explains that the intent is to create a system that resembles a ‘normal distribution’; the bell curve which compares educator to educator should continue even if performance goes up, and, that the target is set for 1 in 10 teachers to be rated ineffective and fewer than 15% to be rated highly effective.

The state Education Department actually shows their targets for schools based on student population on page 40. That is like a teacher insisting that 10% of her students must fail her test, regardless of what they know.

Bell curve evaluation, which requires that my success depends on your failure, harkens back to the time when the prevailing view of human potential was that it belonged on a curve.

In the early 20th century, this belief prompted psychologist G. Stanley Hall to denounce a sound curricula for all of our nation’s children because he thought that most high-school students were part of a “great army of incapables.” How different is that from Bloomberg’s assertion that teachers come from the bottom 20% of their class and not from the best schools? In the world of these self-proclaimed reformers, teachers are the new great army of incapables.

Let’s return once more to Table 2 to see how the evaluation system is further stacked against the teacher. Look at the point range in the final column on the right. To escape being rated ineffective, the teacher must have 65 of the possible 100 points. That means a teacher could be rated ‘effective’ in the first and second category with 24 points, be in what proportionally should be the effective range in the third category (40 out of 60 points), and yet still be rated ineffective overall with a total of 64 points.

Why are so many points needed? Because student scores must trump all. See page 32 #14 of the APPR guide for SED’s rationale, which says that the cut score for ‘developing’ was set at 65 points so that teachers who are ineffective on measures of student achievement must be rated ineffective overall. In other words, low student achievement measures (categories 1 and 2) will doom a teacher with even perfect teacher achievement (60/60) in category 3. And, by the way, perfect points on student achievement measures do not guarantee that a teacher or principal cannot be rated ineffective.

Because of the above as well as the awful implications APPR will have on students, over 75% of Long Island principals have signed a letter outlining our concerns. Overall, we now number nearly 4,000 principals, teachers, professors and citizens who have signed on to that letter at www.newyorkprincipals.org. One of our signatories, Dr. Thomas Sobol, is a former Educational Commissioner of New York State. Principals from all over New York are now signing on — nearly 800 and growing.

In a recent article in The New York Times, the commissioner chalked our thoughtful concerns up to ‘anxiety’. Read the letter and the Times article. See if you think this is something a Xanax will cure. Although we sent our letter over one month ago, we have yet to receive a response or inquiry from either Commissioner John B. King Jr. or Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch.

I have learned a lot of things in my life. I have learned to lead a wonderful school full of caring educators where all students are growing without genuflecting to the curve of a bell. I have learned that a child’s worth is far greater than any test could possibly measure. I have learned to hold my tongue even when it is difficult, and to speak up when I must.

But I have not learned how to stick a number on the back of a veteran teacher after 25 years of work with teenagers and call him ‘developing’ based on a bell-shaped curve. No principal should be required to learn that.