Seattle teachers says, "Students are so much more than test scores..."

More Progress, but still no Tentative Agreement

Much progress has been made at the negotiation table this week. As you know, Monday was added this week and the teams met for a half of a day. Both Tuesday and Wednesday, the teams met for full days and intense discussions.

The teams will again meet on Thursday for another full day that may even extend into the evening. There has even been talk of adding more days if tomorrow does not provide enough time.

Despite the continued progress, there is still significant tension on some key issues that have great importance to the members. The Seattle EA team continues to follow the guidance that members have shared through surveys, focus groups, building meetings and individual emails.

Another communication will be sent out Thursday evening with an update on bargaining and upcoming activities.

In the meantime, start spreading the word that Seattle EA members will be wearing blue on Tuesday, August 31 as a united symbol of what we can achieve for our schools and students through collaboration and innovation. SEA members are ready!

General Membership Meeting

Thursday, September 2

4:30 p.m.

SPU’s Royal Brougham Pavilion

3414 3rd Ave W (at W. Nickerson)

For more information about basis for the jointly recommended proposal that has been discussed, please follow this link: http://www.seattlewea.org/index.php/component/content/article/252-the-basis-for-the-joint-proposal

NEA, CTA, and UTLA jointly write a letter to the LA Times

August 20, 2010

Mr. Russ Stanton, Editor

Mr. Davan Maharaj, Managing Editor

Los Angeles Times

202 W. 1st St.

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Dear Mr. Stanton and Mr. Maharaj,

In a reckless and destructive move, which ignores the prevailing consensus that value-added measures are too unreliable and unstable to draw valid conclusions about a teacher’s ability to teach to a standardized test, much less to teach students, the LA Times has decided to publish a database naming 6,000 teachers and purporting to rate their effectiveness. Reasonable people understand a single test

score does not define student learning and can never solely measure the effectiveness of a teacher. We would think a reasonable and respectable institution such as the LA Times would as well. So, we are only left to assume, the purpose of the publication was to sell newspapers. Otherwise, we’d have to believe

that you felt it was ethical to publicly label teachers as “effective” or “ineffective” based on data, and a methodology, that even your own paper admits are “controversial” and knows are an incomplete and inaccurate measure of the quality of a teacher.

There is significant and widespread consensus that the type of value-added methodology the LA Times is using generates significantly unstable measures of a teacher’s effectiveness at teaching standardized test subjects. A recent report, released just this past month by the U.S. Department of Education’s

Institute of Education Sciences (”Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains,” July 2010), concluded that there is a 20 percent likelihood that a teacher’s rating under such a system will radically shift from year to year. Other researchers have concluded that the instability of such measures may be significantly higher, generating swings of up to 35 percent of

teachers moving from the most highly effective group of teachers in one year to the least effective group of teachers in the next.1 In other words, the teachers that the LA Times has seen fit to publicly shame as “ineffective” under its value-added measure would be labeled “effective” if the value-added measure were rerun for a different set of years. Or, to put the point bluntly, the LA Times rating of

these teachers as “ineffective” is false.

The radical instability in value-added measures of a teacher’s ability to teach standardized test subjects reflects what we all know to be true: a student’s performance on a standardized test reflects multiple factors, many of which are entirely independent of the teacher who administered the test. A student’s

performance on a standardized test reflects what they learned in prior years under other teachers, reflects what they learned or retained over summer break, and reflects their personal circumstances (did they come to school hungry the day of the test, do they come to school hungry every day, were they distracted that day due to personal hardships, such as a divorce, a lost job, a lost home, a lost

family member).

A teacher’s performance on a value-added measure also reflects the fact that student assignment is not random. Teachers do not all teach equally gifted or equally challenged students, and the teaching required to boost one student’s score on a standardized test by five points is not equivalent to the teaching required to boost another student’s score by the same increment. Student attendance

throughout the year also plays a significant role. The analysis the LA Times has done accounts only in part for a few of these variants. Indeed, the consensus in the literature is that such external factors are exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to capture effectively in value-added measures of an individual

teacher’s effectiveness. In addition, the California Standards Test (CST), on which the LA Times value added measure is based, is not designed for that purpose. The CST is designed to measure standards at each grade level, not continuous student growth from year to year. Indeed, the CST is not even vertically aligned, meaning that it is nonsense for the LA Times to assume, as it has, that a student’s performance on the CST should be stable from one year to the next.

Equally to the point, even if the value-added measure used by the LA Times were accurate, the information it would yield is at best partial, measuring only a fraction of an elementary school teacher’s work. Our children go to elementary school to learn how to read and write and share and work together and express themselves and understand cause and effect and learn about our society and world.

To be sure, the LA Times could say that it recognizes all of the above and has made the decision to go ahead and publish its data because it provides the public with some glimpse into the ability of teachers, based on a single notoriously inaccurate measure, to teach to standardized tests, which would still be irresponsible. But that is not what the LA Times has done. In the article that the paper saw fit to run this past Sunday, teachers were labeled as “ineffective” without any qualification and blamed for years of supposed failures without any sound factual basis for such public shaming. The LA Times decision to run the article and name those teachers damaged both the reputations of those teachers and those of

their students. The LA Times proposal to expand its public shaming to the 6,000 teachers in its “database” will exponentially compound the damage. If the collective goal is to have highly qualified teachers in every classroom, how does exposing teachers to this public scrutiny entice anyone into the profession? The proposed publication of the data purporting to rate teachers publicly is not supported by the underlying data, which is limited, according to the sparse technical information that the LA Times has made available to date, to “identifying what factors improve student outcomes over time” and to providing insights into how a district may “align” its resources, not as a measure of the effectiveness of

individual teachers. Even the researcher who did this work for the LA Times says that he made “no attempt to link the scrambled identifier [he used for the analysis] with teacher names.”

The LA Times is the second-largest newspaper in the country. Its readers across the country expect and deserve better than the loose journalism ethics and integrity that led to this simplistic approach to measuring teacher effectiveness and the decision to publish the names of local teachers as if they are public officials.

As the elected leaders of NEA, CTA, and UTLA, we call on the LA Times to act responsibly and cease the publication of data that is materially false and misleading about the dedicated teachers who serve in our schools. Rather than publishing data that is false and misleading, and will distract from, rather than

advance, the efforts to improve our public schools and the evaluation systems used in those schools, we invite the LA Times to engage in an honest discussion about what is really needed to provide a quality education to all students and to create a fair and comprehensive teacher evaluation system that uses multiple measures of teacher performance and student outcomes, gives reliable and actionable feedback to teachers about their strengths and weaknesses, and offers quality professional

development and intervention to help teachers improve their practice. Only through a meaningful and comprehensive system such as this can a teacher’s quality and effectiveness be accurately measured, teacher practice improved and all of our students be ensured great public schools.

Sincerely,

Dennis Van Roekel

President, National Education Association

David A. Sanchez

President, California Teachers Association

A.J. Duffy

President, United Teachers Los Angeles

1 The current state of the research on value-added measures is captured by the National Academy of Science’s Report, “Getting Value Out of Value-Added,” released earlier this year. The report, based on papers commissioned from sixteen leading scholars in the field and a review of over fifty studies, concluded that “the year-to-year stability of estimated teacher effects can be characterized as being quite low from one year to the next”(p. 46). For that reason, there is widespread consensus that value-added measures should not be used for high stakes decisions regarding teachers and must be used with care and precision so as not to generate results that are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

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

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