Talking points created by teachers for parents

WHY SEATTLE TEACHERS AND PARENTS ARE STANDING UP

Under the Superintendent's plan called SERVE:

* More time testing = less time learning. Precious class time would be spent “teaching to the test,” eliminating art, music, PE, project-based learning, and other instruction needed to ensure success in college and in life.
 
* Students would be dismissed from school every other Friday afternoon while teachers attend meetings. This is a loss of more than 2 weeks of class time.
 
* Libraries & computer labs would be closed to classes during the 9 weeks required to test students during the year. Yet, this test does not replace, or even prepare students for, the state-required proficiency exams required for graduation.
 
* Relationships between students and teachers would be undermined by high-stakes testing - increased stress threatens the personalization that makes for good teaching.
 
* Taxpayers would be asked to spend millions more on the MAP test which, according to its creators, was never meant to be used as a summative student evaluation (like the SAT), nor as a teacher evaluation tool.
 
Concerned parents and teachers believe:
 
Students are more than test scores. They are human beings, not “products” to be measured and calibrated to “the norm.”
 
21st century education requires developing critical thinking skills, effective communication skills, practice in collaboration and intrapersonal interaction in addition to “the three R’s”.
 
Teachers cannot treat students as individuals when the district treats them as "products" that determine employment and compensation.
 
Cooperation and collaboration among teachers disintegrates as colleagues become "competitors" fighting for the “best students” and “merit” pay determined by a test score.
 
Teachers want to be accountable for factors they control: planning & preparation, classroom environment, instructional practice and professional responsibility.
 
For more information see:
Department of Education Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/pdf/20104004.pdf
Diane Ravitch Obama's Race to the Top Will Not Improve Education
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obamas-race-to-the-top-wi_b_666598.html
Dora Taylor The MAP test has a few teensy problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut4bK2Z0cvs
Meg Diaz takes the School Board to task http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19vOVdpOh6M
Carl Bialik Putting Teachers to the Test http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/putting-teachers-to-the-test-982/

Aug 26th - Bargaining Teams continue into the evening

The teams were still bargaining at 8:00 p.m. They will continue into the evening. The SEA Bargaining Team continues to negotiate based on the values and priorities members have identified. The teams will schedule more sessions if needed. Their goal is to get a tentative agreement by or before August 31. We will continue to provide regular updates.


This morning, staff and parents from Salmon Bay and Olympic View showed their solidarity by greeting the SEA Team with posters, flowers and breakfast treats as they arrived at negotiations. The Team clearly felt the support.


On Tuesday, August 24, 90 Site Coordinators met to prepare for activities to support our bargaining team. Below is the information they are circulating at trainings and schools this week.

We Are Ready for Change.

On Tuesday, Aug. 31, wear blue for our brighter future, and as a united symbol of what we can achieve for our schools and students through collaboration and innovation. SEA members are ready!


As educators, we dedicate our careers to doing the best we can for our students …. and we bristle when outsiders to our district suggest teachers should be blamed for every problem that interferes with a child’s education today. That’s why our union, the Seattle Education Association, is seeking a new path. It’s a path that recognizes the most important factor in a child’s schooling is a great teacher in every classroom, but also recognizes that great teachers are not the only factor that shapes a child’s education.


As educators, we know learning is more than simply teaching the answers to a standardized test. We know that education is facts, figures and formulas, but it is so much more: It’s attitude, curiosity and a student’s internal drive to do better. It’s instilling a desire for lifelong learning, not merely the ability to skate through next week’s test. As educators, we understand that children are not treated equally by the world. Some have access to travel, books, performances and information. Some don’t. Some families face a multitude of challenges. Some don’t.


As educators, we are not afraid to own our role in teaching our students. And as a profession, we must stand against being the sole source of blame for every factor that influences the upbringing of every child.


That’s why Seattle’s educators worked jointly with the district to develop the Professional Growth and Evaluation model. It creates a framework to identify great teachers based on clear standards, not simply guesswork or favoritism. It provides the support to help struggling teachers improve, so that every Seattle educator truly is proficient or innovative. It reflects and helps educators address the cultural differences of our students. And it deals head-on with an isolated but incendiary issue that has risked the credibility of our entire profession: teacher quality.


That’s the historic change we seek: fighting for the professionalism we – and our students – deserve, but finding meaningful solutions that still ensure fairness to our members. If we are successful, SEA could provide a beacon to other districts struggling with these same difficult issues. If no contract agreement is reached, SEA could find itself in a protracted battle with those who don’t recognize the educational damage created by their simplistic mandate for test-driven teaching.


For now, let’s remain upbeat and positive in our hope that our district is ready to move forward with historic change.


It’s our future. We’re ready for change: That’s why we need your voice.

SEA members and community rally support for bargain

Does the Seattle School District truly want to move forward with historic change?

August 17, 2010

Reminder: Join us at a

SEA Rally
to support our bargaining team
5:30 p.m., August 18
JSCEE
prior to the School Board Meeting

Does the Seattle School District truly want to move forward with historic change, or is its strategy to block progress with an unyielding insistence on unproven, unacceptable testing schemes?

The SEA negotiating team extended a branch today that should make it clear whether the district’s true goal is to use test scores to improve student achievement and quality teaching, or whether it is merely a ruse for some other agenda.

Early in the day, the district’s negotiating team continued stonewalling on the issue of using test scores for teacher evaluations. Finally, when challenged by SEA to identify what parts of their SERVE proposal they were actually willing to negotiate over, their blocking strategy became clear.

The district was not willing to negotiate any proposal that didn’t base teacher evaluations on student test scores. It was their way or no way.

SEA supports moving forward with the historic progress already achieved through the jointly negotiated Professional Growth and Evaluation plan. So SEA’s bargaining team huddled privately to develop a creative solution that would meet the core values of SEA members and the interests of the district.

The result: A proposal from SEA that seeks to carve out middle ground by recognizing the district’s interest in using test data to help recognize teachers who may benefit from additional help, while not misusing test data to evaluate and fire teachers.

District negotiators said they would seriously consider the SEA proposal. We will know how seriously when we meet on Thursday morning for our next bargaining session.

Remember . . .

the Seattle Education Association

General Membership Meeting
Thursday, September 2, 2010, 4:30 p.m.
SPU's Royal Brougham Pavillion
3414 3rd Ave W (at W Nickerson)
Seattle

Are you communicating to your school community?

Here is another sample of what one teacher sent out to the community:

Hello,

I am both a teacher and parent of Seattle Public Schools.

You might be wondering if a strike is looming in Seattle schools... Well, my answer is NO! The only person talking about a strike is Dr. Goodloe-Johnson. Teachers are ready to go back into the classrooms, many already have.

SEA and SPS are much closer to hammering out a contract than Dr. G-J wants us to believe. The only sticking point is the evaluation system. And this is the REAL RUB: half of what Dr. G-J is calling "SERVE" was developed jointly with SEA!!

Let me back up. Over the past two years, a joint committee of SEA and SPS have worked together to develop a new evaluation system. They finished it, agreed to it, and both parties SIGNED OFF on it in April. As far as SEA understood, this part of the contract had been settled.

Then, out of the blue, Dr. G-J adds on the part about teachers' evaluations being linked to student test scores conveniently the week after the school year ended. Not getting anywhere at the bargaining table, she went public with her idea. However, Dr. G-J bundled what the joint SEA SPS committee created with her idea of tying test scores to evaluations and called it SERVE. When Dr. G-J went public at the start of August to gain public favor for her test score idea she failed to give credit for what SEA did. Instead, she's making it sound like SEA doesn't want to change the evaluation system at all. She deceived me, and I think many others have been fooled, too.

SEA wants everyone to understand that teachers support a new evaluation system, and the new eval system called "PG and E- professional growth and evaluation" is going to bring radical change to the district. No longer will a teacher's evaluation be pass/fail, it's going to be unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and innovative.... and it will not be acceptable to be either unsat or basic. Not to mention the detail and clarity of the PG and E system's rubric. I know from my experience, I want specific feedback that will help me grow as a professional. The PG and E system is a tool that will enable admin to have these constructive conversations with teachers.

Another thing SEA wants everyone to consider, where is the research that says student test scores correlates to teacher quality? We all know there are hundreds of variables teachers do not control that strongly effect students' test scores... so why would we want to stake who is fired based on how well Johnny slept the night before he took his MAP test?

If you have questions or just want to shoot the breeze about what I wrote, feel free to email or call me. And in the meanwhile, there is a school board meeting next week, Wednesday, August 18th. I plan on going to demonstrate my distaste for Dr. G-J's approach to negotiations. Specifically, I want Dr. G-J to honor what the joint SPS and SEA committee created. I hope you will spread the message, too.

Thanks,

A letter from a teacher to parents

Dear Parents of children I have taught,

There is a new system that is steamrolling into our school district,
into our classrooms, and into the relationships that I have with each
of my students. This system, driven by standardized tests, will
change the classroom environment dramatically. I am asking for you to
make your voices heard on this issue.

As you may already know, Seattle Public Schools is prioritizing its
focus and funding on ways to make teachers “more accountable” by
linking student test scores to teacher evaluation and compensation.
But the elephant in the room is: Are these high quality tests? Do we
want teachers to give them highest priority? Tests such as the
Measurement of Academic Progress (MAP) test finite skills, which can
be useful for a teacher in designing instruction, but let’s not be
misled: it does not test how an individual child is developing skills
of critical thinking, creativity and problem solving, or independent
and teamwork skills—cornerstone qualities of the most successful
members of our society.

As a successful lifelong learner myself, I naturally need feedback in
many forms to evaluate my teaching so I can continuously improve.
However, this move to emphasize test results to evaluate and
compensate teachers is setting students up to be shortchanged.
Teachers will be forced to teach a narrower set of skills, focusing on
test-measured forms of “success”. Class time for music, arts, social
studies, science, research, and physical education will continue to
dwindle as long as the focus on testing is largely in reading and
math. I have already seen this happen throughout the district at the
elementary level, especially in schools with higher poverty rates
where students tend to test poorly and the pressure to raise test
scores is intense.

Even testing logistics have a negative impact on learning. In
buildings throughout the
district, the entire school is denied access to precious library
resources for 9 weeks out of
the 36 weeks of the year to allow for MAP testing three times a year:
that’s 25% of the
year! On top of that, often teachers and principals decide that kids
need more practice with standardized test taking on the computers in
order to succeed on these high-stakes tests. Children will see
libraries as testing centers rather than as places to expand their
learning through research and be inspired by great books.

What about teacher evaluation?

All students deserve talented, effective, inspiring teachers. We need
an evaluation system that encourages teachers to engage children in
critical thinking and in creative problem solving, as opposed to a
system focused on multiple choice test taking. A new evaluation
system was developed collaboratively over the last few years by the
Seattle Education Association and Seattle Public Schools and piloted
in several Seattle schools, and was shown to be a useful and effective
evaluation system to judge the effectiveness of teachers. It also gave
principals the power to put those teachers who demonstrated
ineffective teaching skills on probation. This system is an exciting
new development for our teachers and administrators, something that
many saw as a very promising step forward to building successful
schools.

But then Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson acted unilaterally in adding
the test based evaluation system to this new collaboratively-developed
system

After 15 meetings of the contract negotiation teams, Seattle Public
Schools introduced a new addition to the collaboratively developed
evaluation system, reducing the new system to 50% of a teacher’s
evaluation, and announcing 35-45% of the teacher’s evaluation would be
tied to student performance on standardized tests, most significantly
the new MAP test. This 11th hour addition to the contract negotiations
is called SERVE. These are just a few of my concerns:

* The MAP test was brought to the district in a no-bid contract.
Not having an alternate bid for many contracts is an embarrassing
critique outlined in the federal audit of SPS, recently published.
* Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson sits on the board of the
company that makes the MAP test, and did not disclose that before the
contract was approved.
* Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), the company that makes
the MAP test, states the test was never designed as a tool to evaluate
teachers.
* $4 million price tag to roll out this system includes money for
the test and for more administrators to oversee the program--- money
that won’t go to our children’s classrooms.
* Honest and thoughtful evaluations can’t be that easy! The SERVE
plan hands teacher evaluation over to a computer.

Do we want computerized tests at the core of what our teachers teach
and what our children learn?

What Can You Do?

Come to the Board Meeting at John Stanford Center for Educational
Excellence (JSCEE) on August 18.

Talk and write to everyone you know about your feelings. Write to The
Seattle Times and neighborhood papers. Email or call Superintendent
Goodloe-Johnson at superintendent@seattleschools.org or 206-252-0167

Contact the School Board members and tell them your concerns with the
SERVE proposal and the direction it would take our schools. Seattle
School Board email addresses:

superindendent@seattleschools.org; peter.maier@seattleschools.org

,
sherry.carr@seattleschools.org; harium.martin-
morris@seattleschools.org; michael.debell@seattleschools.org;
betty.patu@seattleschools.org; steve.sundquist@seattleschools.org;
kay.smith-blum@seattleschools.org; pjoakes@seattleschools.org;
mcrain@washingtonea.org

Thank you for participating in public education; it is the foundation
of our democratic society.

Focus on Growth or Focus on Punishment?

Make your voice heard!

Join Seattle Education Association peers and community
members at Wednesday’s Seattle School Board meeting. Meet at 5:20 p.m. Aug. 18 at the District’s John Stanford Center for
Educational Excellence, 2445 3rd Avenue S. in Seattle.

Attend the SEA general membership meeting, 4:30 p.m., Sept. 2

at Seattle Pacific University, Royal Brougham Pavillion

3414 Third Ave. West, Seattle

For the past two years, Seattle educators have worked hand in hand with top district administrators to create a new model for growth and evaluation that focuses on helping Seattle’s students succeed. Now our superintendent is attempting a last-minute end-run around that collaborative process by demanding that teacher evaluations be tied to student test scores. So what’s in the Professional Growth and Evaluation plan (PG&E) that was developed jointly by SEA and the district? Why is it a historic change, how does it benefit students and help close the achievement gap?

It makes student progress the foundation of teachers’ professional growth

· All certificated teachers will set annual student achievement goals which are specific and measurable.

· Using the Professional Practice Standards as a guide, teachers will set professional growth goals to help obtain student achievement goals.

· Recognizes clearly that "Student growth data shall be relevant to the teacher and subject matter, and must be based on multiple measures that may include classroom based, district based, and state based assessments as well as, attendance, discipline data, mobility and completion (course or year) rates of students. Student growth means the change in student achievement between two points in time."

· The joint PG&E plan focuses on student achievement goals AND linking Professional goals that enhance our professional teaching practice. SERVE sets student achievement goals without accountability for enhancing professional practice.

It helps take the guesswork and bias out of educators’ evaluations

· Uses clear standards based on four domains from the research of Charlotte Danielson that have been tried and tested in other districts where improvement has been documented. The four domains are: Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Instructional Skill and Professional Responsibility.

· Sets clear indicators of acceptable performance based on standards within each domain.

· Culturally relevant practices are integrated in all four domains.

· Establishes a four-level rating system: Innovative, Proficient, Basic and Unsatisfactory.

It increases the level of accountability for educators with a focus on great teachers in every classroom

· For newer educators, it increases the number of required observations and conferences by administrators.

· Requires any teachers not in the top two levels in any domain – Proficient or Innovative – to be on a Plan of Support.

· Improvement plans are clearly defined for administrators and educators.

· Establishes a support system in the form of Human Resource Consulting Teachers to assist educators who are on Performance Improvement Plans.

· Maintains probationary process for either improvement or dismissal for those deemed Unsatisfactory in any of the four domains.

· PG & E would be phased in beginning this year to replace the current evaluation system while ensuring that it is implemented with fidelity. It would be fully implemented by 2013-2014.

· All teachers will participate in collaborative groups called Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s).

· Enhances collaborative work amongst educators focused on the academic achievement of students with an emphasis on culturally relevant practice.

It uses student test data for teacher growth, not punishment

· Educators are professionals and believe in accountability. The joint plan negotiated with the district mirrors the state’s goals to use test data correctly to improve teaching, and it has the support of Seattle’s educators.

· The big difference? The state plan means teachers will be evaluated on their ability to use the student data to modify their instruction (which happens every day in the classroom) and, unlike SERVE, would not misuse student assessment results to deem teachers “good or bad.”

· In addition to test data, SERVE would also rely on student surveys at the high school level. This ignores that some students may lack the sophistication to provide detailed qualitative feedback on instructional techniques. For instance, is a teacher “mean” or does that teacher simply set high standards and hold students accountable? In an era of instant communications, students could easily organize a negative evaluation for even great teachers whom they simply don’t like. The likely outcome of SERVE is skewed data that would not be reliable for high-stakes personnel decisions.

Learn more at www.SeattleWEA.org