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.

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