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

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

Bargaining Teams are Far Apart

Seattle Education Association Bargaining Update July 23, 2010
SEA and District Far Apart in Negotiations

Your SEA Negotiations Team met with the District team on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. We continue to be far apart on issues that you have told us matter most to you. The district is holding fast to their major proposals on:
tying student growth based on MAP scores, MSP scores, and end-of-course assessments to certificated employees evaluations;
use of evaluations as the lead factor in reduction in force, as opposed to strict seniority.

There has been very little to no movement on what you have told us are your two most important issues:
class size/staff ratios/caseloads to give students the attention they need and deserve;
compensation to attract and retain high quality educators to Seattle Public Schools.

The SEA has made proposals on these priorities and many others that you told us need to be addressed.

The District has proposed an evaluation system that includes tying evaluations to student growth based on MAP, MSP, and end-of-course assessments. We will be holding Focus Groups at SEA this coming week to share the details of the District’s proposal and to get feedback from our members about what they think about it. Our goal is to have up to 5% of each school/program’s certificated staff involved. Please contact SEA to attend a focus group to give us your feedback. Focus groups are at 10 a.m. on Monday, July 26 and Wednesday, July 28; 3 p.m. on Tuesday, July 27 and Thursday, July 29. We have one evening session on Wednesday, July 28 at 7 p.m. Call us to sign up for the session of your choice. 206-283-8443 x100.

Here are some of our other thoughts about the bargain:
Fact: SEA is willing to problem solve solutions to help raise student academic achievement and to help close the achievement gap. SEA has offered research backed solutions that are actually working in other school districts in the country.
Myth: The SEA does not want to be accountable for student academic achievement. Many years ago, the SEA was the first local in Washington State to negotiate student academic achievement goals as part of our evaluations. There are very few contracts that include it even today. It was the SEA who went to the district with a proposal in 2004 about closing the achievement gap and developing the flight schools. This year, the SEA proposed working with the district to do a study over the coming years regarding the correlation between evaluations and student academic growth.

Fact: SEA believes that the work of the collaborative SEA and SPS Professional Growth and Evaluation joint task force should be honored. A joint task force of SEA and District staff collaboratively developed a four level evaluation system. A new law in place requires that the system be fully in place by 2013-14. The philosophy of the task force is to promote professional growth in employees and create a culture in the District of being life-long learners and improving instructional practice. We do not believe the evaluation system should be used primarily to weed out “low performing” teachers. There is a process already in place to address performance issues.
Myth: SEA is afraid to try innovative ideas that may help raise student academic achievement. After a lengthy debate, the SEA Association Representatives voted to authorize a memorandum of understanding that would allow for three of our schools to waive some contractual rights in order to receive a federal School Improvement Grant. The grant is designed to help raise student academic achievement.

Fact: SEA understands that the economy is not the best right now. SEA was willing to look at giving up the Learning Improvement Day that the state took away this past legislative session (loss of funds to the district and to your pockets). In turn, we reminded the district that it has taken many years to be competitive with other districts in the Puget Sound Region regarding compensation and we do not want to lose ground in the future.
Myth: The state is to blame for all of the district’s money woes. While Seattle delivered RIF notices, almost all other districts in the Puget Sound area did not have lay-offs this year. While the district continues to tell us that there is no money at all in the budget for increased compensation in the future, eight of our eleven comparable districts will get raises this coming school year, two will at least make the same amount of money as this year, and only one will lose the learning improvement day and have a cut in salary.

Fact: Since 2005-06, the district has begun each school year with more in their fund balance than budgeted. For 2009-10, the District began the year with $6.4 million more than they anticipated. SPS ended the 2008-09 school year with more than double the amount they anticipated in their ending fund balance ($55.8 million instead of the budgeted $22.4 million).

What’s next? ---------------
The SEA will be negotiating again on Tuesday, August 3, 2010. The District has promised to bring a comprehensive proposal to the bargaining table that will be in response to our comprehensive proposal that we put on the table for our Paraprofessional, SAEOP, and Certificated members

Daniel Pink's speech re: Motivation animated