Three Separate Stories

By Tom

I love irony. I live for it. In fact, one of my favorite moments was during the end of the year assembly a few years ago, when the principal was giving out awards for Everything You Can Imagine, including perfect attendance. All the perfect attendees proudly strode to the stage, except one. He was absent. 

So when these three stories came to my attention, all on the same day, I couldn't resist.

The first story is a report from the National Board showing the positive impact National Board Certified Teachers have had on student achievement in Chicago. And it's been huge.

The second story was about Washington Governor Christine Gregoire. Gregoire recently received an award from the National Board for her contributions to education. Specifically, she was able to increase support for National Board Certification even during tough economic times. For all intents and purposes, Gregoire's support for National Board Certification consists of merit pay for those teachers who demonstrate that they've reached the profession's highest standards. For more on the award, check out Mark's post.

The third story was about a series of grants given out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grants don't go directly to schools. They're to be used to help states apply for the Race to the Top money. The money that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is giving to states that promote charter schools and merit pay based on student test scores. Gregoire has all but written off Washington's chances for claiming any of this money, since charter schools have been rejected three times by the voters and test-based merit pay is a non-starter with the WEA.

What a weird irony. A Washington governor gets an award for promoting National Board Certification, a process with proven results, recently and specifically in Chicago. That's where Arne Duncan's from. The guy who authored Race to the Top. But his idea of merit pay is based on the use of test scores. An idea that is strongly promoted by the Gate's Foundation, which is based in Washington State.

So Gregoire's state gets none of the money from the guy from Chicago, a place where her idea of merit pay has made a huge impact.

Hmm. 

Comments

[Natalie Schwartz]

The education reform plan President Obama outlined in his speech last week has the following basic flaws: it turns education into a political football, advocates performance pay for teacher, renews the inappropriate focus on testing, and neglects to incorporate parental involvement. Please take a look at my blog post today at http://parentteacherpartnerships.blogspot.com/

Natalie Schwartz
Author, "The Teacher Chronicles: Confronting the Demands of Students, Parents, Administrators and Society"

[Tom]

Anthony's right. And another problem with VAMs is that there are a lot of teachers who work with students or in programs which yield little, if any, hard data. Think of developmental preschool teachers, dance, drama, CTE, world language, etc. At this point, we barely have decent, standards-based assessments for language arts and math.

[Anthony Cody]

I think it is possible to have a solid evaluation system that incorporates the examination of student achievement data, and helps teachers reflect and learn from the data. But most performance pay systems do not do this, which is why NEA and many teachers are concerned. Some of the biggest performance pay systems ship student achievement data off to a wizard (named Bill Sanders) who uses secret proprietary methods to figure out how much value they added that year. Then their reward is based on this result. The trouble with this is that the best research on VAM (Value Added Model) shows that with the small sample sizes involved at the individual teacher level, your results are very unreliable. If you have a couple of kids have an off day when the tests are given, or worse yet, have several dysfunctional students all year long, your results could be very poor that year. Do you really want a major part of your salary to be based on that one test?

By the way, we are gathering Teacher Letters to Obama expressing our views on Race to the Top and the ongoing disaster of NCLB here on this Facebook page: http://bit.ly/2dnaZB

[Luann]

I, too, wish there were a way to document accomplished teaching using student achievement as at least a component. Sometimes, though, student achievement is not academic. What about the child who failed every single class during his 9th grade year, but showed up enough by the end of the year to change his behavior and get a great start on his 10th grade school year? His teachers did an amazing job in making him successful. How would this be measured?

[Brian]

I like irony too. I even have the same story about the perfect attendance award.
But I have to say, there you go again. Duncan's idea of merit pay includes the use of student test scores, it isn’t based on it. “Test scores” is just the straw man that the NEA is using to not discuss using student achievement with regard to merit pay. I believe that we can come up with a rational way to determine if an individual teacher is actually being effective by including an analysis of how much progress their students make in a year. That’s accountability, and I’m willing to give it a try.

[Bob Heiny]

Great insights. Let us know how you develop them into an article for broader distribution.