To fail or not to fail, that is the question

A particularly disturbing meme making the rounds in social media boldly states:  "In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer.  This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life."


When something is repeated widely, it can take on a truth of its own.  People accept it without question because of the ubiquitous nature of the quote without thinking through the underlying meaning.  I maintain that giving students the time and support they need to actually LEARN something is far more helpful than failing them the first time and moving on.  Let me explain.

In the real world, I have multiple chances to pass the bar exam, take a drivers' license test, master proficiency on the Praxis exam.  I have used this metaphor before, but before a pilot is entrusted with landing a plane on his own, he must be given repeated attempts to demonstrate that he has acquired the skill.  Some will take fewer attempts, but ALL must learn to land the plane safely.  I don't show the pilot how to land one time and give him a test.  No, I provide much practice and multiple attempts to reach proficiency.  On the job, if I am being trained to do a new task, my employer makes sure that I get the training I need to do the task correctly. It may take some of us longer to learn, but certainly multiple attempts to grasp the necessary knowledge are afforded so that all employees, in the end, can do the expected task.  Even after an employee is trained, if a job is botched, it will likely be sent back to be redone so that the final result is acceptable.  It is the rule, rather than the exception in life that we have more than one chance to master skills that we are learning.

Why do we accept this notion that all children must achieve the same standard at the same time?  Historically, grades were used to sort and rank students.  Rather than serving as communication about student achievement relative to clear learning standards, grades were intended to put children into tracks.  These students would go to college, these would enter a trade, and these would be relegated to working on the farm or in an entry-level position in industry.  This sort and rank strategy worked in an industrial society where children could make productive livings on farms or in factories with little formal training.  College was not intended to be for all students.  Education was set up to be like the assembly line - all children moved along at the same pace and were sorted at the end of the line by grades, the quality control of the system.  

While this process functioned as intended in an industrialized economy,  it is disastrous in the twenty-first century.  Today, we know that all children can and do learn.  We understand that high expectations are possible.  Teachers strive to challenge each student at his or her own level, so that all children move forward toward clear learning targets.  It is vitally important that all children acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful adults.  This means that ALL children should be given the opportunity to learn.  Assembly-line education is obsolete.  Grades should inform us of student achievement relative to learning goals.  While the goals may be the same for all children in a classroom, the time it takes each child to reach the goal is the variable.  

In the past, the TIME was the constant and the learning outcome was the variable.  All children didn't learn the same high standards.  Today, TIME is the variable and the learning outcome is the constant.  Quite simply, it takes some of us longer to learn than it does others, but that doesn't mean we all can't learn.  Students who fail a summative assessment initially are given extra time and support to reach the same level of mastery as students who grasp the material the first time presented.  Failing grades are not a mark of rigor.  They are a sign that someone has given up.

Sample Superintendent Letter for Ohio

Here is a letter Ohio superintendents concerned about common core implementation and PARRC assessments can use as a template or model to send to Ohio legislators as they contemplate HB 237.

Dear (state legislator)

We are a group of superintendents from districts in Ohio who would like to express our concern over recent developments and requirements in K-12 education in our state.  You are examining a bill to halt implementation of the common core standards, as well as the PARCC assessments that are due next school year.  We believe that it is important for you to hear our voices and concerns as you debate this legislation.

There is much good in the common core standards, adopted in Ohio as the New Learning Standards in English/Language Arts and Math.  Our teachers are using Close Reading strategies and taking students more deeply into complex text.  We are using more focused math standards and solving rich problems.  We are purchasing materials to help with the instructional shifts required. However, we also have grave concerns about the common core standards and the assessments that accompany them.

First of all, child development specialists, early childhood experts, and teachers of young children are concerned about the cognitive level and developmental readiness required in the new standards.  The standards were developed by selecting the SAT score that would be required to achieve a B in a 4-year college program, and then back-mapping the skills and knowledge to preschool.  This is unrealistic and certainly not research-based.  If we are to implement these standards, early childhood experts MUST be involved in developing the benchmarks for young children.  

We are also concerned that these standards are totally untried.  They may lead to children being more prepared for college and career, and they may not.  They may also lead to higher dropout rates, frustration, and discouragement; we simply don’t know.  With the extreme accountability measures in place for teachers and schools, undue emphasis is placed on English and Math standards that may or may not work.  Not only that, but with budget cuts and such high stakes on standardized tests, subjects that are untested are falling by the wayside.    

Another question concerns the purpose of the new standards.  We have heard that they are intended to prepare students for college and career, however research suggests that there is no correlation between student achievement and rigor of standards. We posit that the standards were developed for the purpose of creating a national market for companies that sell educational tests, textbooks, and test-prep materials. Bill Gates, at the 2009 National Conference of State Legislators, stated, “ When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.”  Our children deserve better.

Next Generation Assessments will be piloted this spring and enforced upon our schools next year, carrying high stakes with them, as well, even though there is grave concern that we do not have the number of computers nor sufficient band width to accommodate so many students taking online assessments at once. Again, the tests are untried, hurriedly prepared, and are designed to fail 70% of the students taking it. There is no reliability or validity to these assessments.  Using them to notify 9-year old children that they are not on track for college and career is ludicrous, and to use them to evaluate teachers is equally as absurd.  In addition, our children will be spending literally days of instructional time in lengthy assessments.  Children in grades 4-8 will spend 9.5 hours in standardized testing for the ELA and math assessments, and those who are most needy and require extended time, even longer.  Science and social studies assessments for Ohio are expected to mirror the format of PARCC assessments, which is an additional four hours, minimum. In addition, children will be required to take an assessment in “Speaking and Listening,” with no projected time specified yet.  When children are in the computer labs or classrooms for extended testing time, the operation of the entire school is disrupted.  The PARCC assessments alone take 40 days of assessment (20 for performance assessments and 20 for end of year assessments) to rotate all children through the limited computers we have.  If even half that number of days is required for science, social studies, and speaking and listening, our schools will be disrupted for 60 days of the school year.  This is a conservative estimate.

With these concerns in mind, we urge you to support HB 237 to halt the implementation of the common core and PARCC assessments.  Review the standards with child developmental readiness in mind.  Pause high-stakes testing until we can transition properly to new standards that are good for all of Ohio’s students.

On Coddling Kids and Common Core

I don't know of any parent who would give a 6-month old child a sharp object.  Nor would anyone allow a 3-year-old to cross the street alone.  I also don't expect my bright 5-year-old to write a 500-word essay.  I doubt that anyone would consider these precautions as "coddling" children.  A recent op ed by Frank Bruni in the New York Times  poses the question, "Are Kids Too Coddled?"  By implication, those of us who are leery of the common core state [sic] standards are trying to preserve student self-esteem (God forbid!) at the expense of expecting them to buckle down and master these rigorous expectations.  School, after all, shouldn't be too full of mirth, now, should it?  



Like Arne Duncan, Bruni is supporting the common core by attacking its opponents, implying that those against implementation of the common core must be coddling children.  " What’s not warranted is the welling hysteria: from right-wing alarmists, who hallucinate a federal takeover of education and the indoctrination of a next generation of government-loving liberals; from left-wing paranoiacs, who imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats."  So those of us with legitimate criticisms are labeled as right wing alarmists or government-loving liberals.  How convenient.  Instead of offering a logical, well-reasoned defense of the common core, we have ad hominem attacks against opponents or platitudes and sound bites assuring us that the common core is necessary for our children to "compete on the world stage."

As an educator of over 35 years, I have some concerns over the common core and some additional concerns over this notion that we are "coddling" children if we don't walk lockstep in line behind Arne Duncan and his common core corporate buddies.  

First of all, the idea of the common core feels a little too market-driven to me.  Do we REALLY want to help children succeed, or do we want to provide maximum profit to companies producing tests, textbooks, and test prep materials?  Bill Gates, at the 2009 National  Conference of State Legislators said that 

"When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. " 

 In fact, the common core standards for English/Language Arts speak of writing to text, citing evidence from text, answering text-dependent questions repeatedly. Why this emphasis on text? Could it be that text-dependent questions and writing can be scored more easily by machines? The architect of the common core, David Coleman, is the president of the College Board which designs the SAT and AP tests. Coincidence?  The standards were intended from their very beginning to be assessed with standardized tests.


Who really wrote the common core, anyway? I'm being told that the standards were developed by teachers, but the fact is that only one teacher was on one of the committees charged with actually writing the standards. Five of the 29 members of the validation committee refused to sign off, but their objections were never made public. A larger concern is how the standards were developed and expectations established. The committee started with the achievement required to get a 1630 on the SAT, and then backmapped to preschool. There is no evidence anywhere that this is a good idea or workable in any way. Children are not little shrunken down adults. Not one child development expert or early childhood professional was consulted in developing these standards. In fact, several organizations concerned with early childhood development have come out in opposition to the standards.

Mr. Bruni implies that we are coddling our kids by caring about their self esteem.  Those who work with children, however, know that school should be a place where learning is fun, where students develop confidence in their abilities, and where tasks are developmentally appropriate.  Why?  Because a) that's what responsible adults do and b) that's how children learn best.  Anything else is educational malpractice.

Welcome to SLO World

I guess I have to come to the conclusion that I am not a blogger.  I had good intentions and high hopes when I first started this blog, but, although the spirit was willing, the flesh
was weak.  Along with that, I have entered an alternate reality that I call "SLO world."

In Ohio, we have been frantically trying to implement this process known as Student Learning Objectives (SLOs).  Ironically, the process is not really about students or learning or even objectives.  It's about measuring teachers because, apparently, we need to quantify teachers by some number that is supposed to magically inform us on whether the teacher is Most Effective or, God forbid, Least Effective.  The way we do this is to have the teacher select or create an assessment with other "content experts," decide what score our students will attain on the assessment at the end of the year (note:  we have no idea), and then give the test in April to see the percentage of students who hit our arbitrary target.  I'm not kidding.  That's how we tell if a teacher is "most effective" in Ohio.  This randomly chosen target becomes 50% of a teacher's evaluation and so the stakes are pretty high to guess correctly.

All along the path for this process, we have become accustomed to receiving the training to do the work well after the work is expected to be done.  Last year, all teachers were advised to write at least one SLO, but the training to even have an idea what an SLO was didn't start until January (train the trainer) with training for general staff running in February through May.  Kind of hard to write an SLO when you aren't told what one is until it's due.  For another example, common assessments had to be administered early this fall so that we could develop the targets and have them approved by November.  And yet the training for how to build good assessments is just now rolling out.  All SLOs should have been completed by now because the date they are all supposed to be written and approved is November 30 and yet the training for how to actually write an SLO for special education teachers is next month.

The internet has several satirical sites that used to be funny.  Remember Mad Magazine back in the day?  Today on the internet, we have the Onion, Call the Cops, and the Duffle Blog - sites that humorously lampoon real news events with satirical pieces.  The trouble today is that one legitimately can't tell the difference between satire and reality. Welcome to "SLO world."

Setting the Record Straight

Many comments on a plethora of web sites have addressed the issues of education and specifically teachers lately.  In my observation, most of the comments are favorable toward public education and educators, but it seems a vocal minority repeats some common misconceptions that I would like to address. If you encounter any of these misguided statements, here are some factual counterarguments.

Misconception 1: Public schools are  government schools controlled by union thugs.  

Have you heard this one?  I chuckle when I hear brainwashed individuals making this comment.  First of all, the "government" schools are run by your locally elected Board members.  These are the "government" powers behind your local public school - the people you see at the grocery store and the bank.  The people you live beside and that you voted for from your own communities.  True, state and federal government keep intruding with ridiculous mandates, and I'm right behind you if you want to protest that kind of government control. But to call public schools "government" schools is a stretch.  Public schools are YOUR schools.

The next fallacy in this statement is the idea that teachers are somehow "union thugs."  Most teachers do belong to a professional association, true, but these "thugs" are the people to whom you entrust your children each and every day.  If you think teachers are union thugs, would you send your first grade child into their classrooms?  Do thugs routinely bake cookies, dry tears, tie shoes, provide encouragement, and look out for the well-being of children?  Because that's what I observe these "union thugs" doing.   In my 35-year career in public education,  I have had the opportunity to work with thousands of teachers in dozens of school districts.   I have never seen a school district that was controlled by the teachers.  In the better districts, teachers have more of a say than some others, but teachers are not the ones controlling your schools.  In short, your public school is not a "government school," not controlled by the teachers, and teachers are not union thugs.  How out of touch do you have to be to believe this misconception?

Misconception 2:  Teachers get paid for summer vacation and holidays.

Nope. Wrong again.  It's hard to take people seriously when they say things like this.  Teachers are paid for 184 days of work.  The salary is divided into equal payments for 12 months and so they take a reduced amount during the school year in order to receive a pay check during the summer.  In addition to this 184 days, teachers in Ohio must spend at least 180 hours every five years in order to renew their licenses.  That is equivalent to another week of work each year, and so let's say a teacher works an average of about 190 days per year.  If you hold a typical job, you work about 230 days a year, an additional 6-8 weeks more than teachers.  During that 8 weeks, they are expected to pay for licensing every 5 years, pay for fingerprinting and background checks, plan instruction, develop assessments, review curriculum, collect/purchase materials to use in their classrooms, stay current on all of the mandates and requirements for their job, and stay revived enough to inspire a passion for learning in students.  

This is not to say that we complain about the number of days we work.  Certainly not.  But please know that we are NOT being paid for summers and holiday....and that just because we have time off without pay doesn't mean we aren't working. 

Misconception 3:  Teachers are overpaid.

A four-year degree required to go into teaching costs about $160,000 (tuition, fees, room and board, books and supplies).  If we teach 30 years, we need to make over $5,000 more a year just to pay for the education.  The reality is that teachers make significantly less than those in professions that require a similar level of education.  Starting teachers in our district make $27,000 per year (median starting teaching salary in Ohio is $30,000) and have college loan payments of nearly $1000 per month to start with.  Current pay freezes have created situations where teachers have had to move back home with their parents or, if they have a family, some have had to resort to food stamp to make ends meet.  Try paying for college loans, rent, utilities, child care, groceries, car payment, insurance  when you take home $1800 per month.  

After 15-20 years, teachers are making $40,000-$50,000 a year - about the same as a college graduate or a manager at McDonald's would make.  By the end of their career, teachers top out at $60,000-$70,000, still significantly less than other professionals, even when we look at simply per diem rates.    Of course there are parts of the country and wealthy school districts that pay more, but these numbers are from my county, and the numbers I have quoted are in line with Ohio median teacher salaries.  Legislators across the country are trying to take away the automatic pay raises for years experience that are common in current teacher pay systems.  The effect of this ruling would leave most teachers at the $30,000 salary mark, or $2000 a month with $1000 of that going to college loan payments.  Difficult to attract talented individuals into the teaching profession when you can make substantially more as a manager at a WalMart (starting pay $40,000 with potential to make over $100,000).

Again, we are not complaining about our pay.  None of us went into the profession because of the money.  We just want to set the record straight for those of you who think we're raking in big money.

Misconception 4:  Teachers only work 6 hours a day.

Ha!  Show me a teacher who is only working 6-hour days and I'll show you a teacher who hasn't helped a student, coached a team, graded a paper, handed in required lesson plans or grade reports, attended required meetings, etc. etc.  In other words, a teacher who isn't teaching.  There may be some out there - every profession has it's duds - but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of teachers put in well over 8 hours per day.  

You see, teaching isn't a job.  It's a way of life.  I'm not a teacher by vocation - I am a teacher by nature.  

Misconception 5:  Merit pay and competition work in the marketplace and they will work to make teachers better.

Anyone who thinks this has never been a teacher.  Even in the free market, there are product-delivery systems and service systems.  The way to make product delivery better is not necessarily the way to make service better.  In fact, the idea of competition and monetary rewards improving business isn't even a good business model.  It has been shown time and again that the "TQM" method of empowering workers and using teamwork and collaboration improves production better than top-down behavior modification and competition.  It doesn't work effectively in business.  Why would anyone think it would work for a service industry?  And it certainly will NOT work in education.  We teach because we care.  If money were our motivation, we wouldn't have gone into teaching for the very reasons addressed in misconception 3. Do you think nurses will keep more patients alive if we pay them more?  Or dentists will help more kids avoid cavities if we give them more money?  The whole idea is ludicrous and insulting.  

Teachers are trying their best  to instill a love of learning in your children and to provide them with the knowledge and skills they will need to be successful in life.  We do this in spite of declining resources, larger class sizes, standardized curriculum that is stifling creativity, and less and less appreciation and support from political and societal institutions.  We have been blamed for the debt crisis and national security concerns.  News reports and data have been skewed to make us look bad at all costs.  Our profession is under attack and we feel like we are personally under attack at times.  In spite of all of this, we are here, loving your kids. The heroism of teachers you witnessed in Newtown and in Moore, OK was above and beyond anything we evaluate on a rubric of teacher effectiveness, but it demonstrates a common commitment, a common passion that I see in educators every day.  We are not thugs.  We are not overpaid government bureaucrats.  We are teachers.  And that's a pretty special thing.

Where is Our Outrage?

I'm a child of the 60's.  We were protesting injustice, intolerance, and bigotry before we left the playground.  I can remember a cluster of us congregated out by the swing sets, vociferously indignant about the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  College in the 70's, the protests were more organized, more well-attended.  Black armbands marching through the city to protest the voting age.  Sit-ins on campus to protest the war.  Burning bras for women's rights.  Things mattered to us.  And you know what?  I think we made a difference.  We eventually did become voting age and our activism helped end racial segregation, the Viet Nam war, and gender inequity.

My background contributes to my frustration now with events in American public education.  Right now across the country, we all see what is happening to education as corporate reformers suck more and more public money into the private sector via an unjustifiable excess of testing and through for-profit charter schools.  States are turning public money earmarked for our children's education into vouchers for unaccountable private schools.  In Ohio and several other states, third graders must pass a test in order to be promoted to fourth grade, in spite of the evidence that children who are retained have a much higher risk of dropping out.  Mandate after mandate requires enormous amounts of money to comply, with no additional funding.  We used to protest at unfunded mandates, but we have lost our ability for outrage.

Policymakers have silently usurped local control from our schools, creating a generation of children who can't think or solve a problem unless they are presented with four bubble-in choices.  Creativity has been stamped out of public schools by standardized testing.  Art, music, and phys ed have taken trivial roles in elementary schools if they are present at all.  A superintendent friend of mine recently lamented, "I was in Afghanistan and I helped in their schools.  They're a third world country.  They have art and music.  This is America and some of our schools can't afford art and music."  We have money to fight unnecessary wars and pay Pearson millions and millions of dollars for testing, but we lack the will to provide funding for our children's education? Something is drastically wrong, but where is our outrage?

When the new PARCC assessments roll out in 2014-15, schools will need to have updated computers and infrastructure to the tune of thousands of dollars for every district.  Teachers will be evaluated based on tests that have never been administered, and their careers will be affected by whether or not they can get students to pass a computerized test that they have never seen.  Students' futures will hang on a curriculum and a burdensome series of  assessments that are untried.  Interventions will be required from private agencies at public expense, sending more money from public coffers into private pockets.  Legislators sit in their comfy offices with their personal assistants and mandate the provision of interventions to help students learn but don't provide a dime for the resources to do it.  We should be outraged!

The new testing regimen demands many more days and hours of mind-numbing testing for our children and there are plans to begin testing children in pre-school.  Do we really want to quantify and measure three-year olds?  Can we measure the things that really count?  Is there a standardized test to illustrate love of learning, curiosity, passion?  Isn't that what we want for our students?  I maintain that excessive standardized testing creates an environment exactly opposite of what all of us hope for children.  What about our teachers?  Do children's standardized test scores tell me that a teacher cares and treats my child with respect?  That the teacher is supportive, a positive role model?  How about the teachers in Moore, OK or Newtown, CT?  How do you evaluate whether a teacher would take a bullet for my child?  A tired maxim enjoins that "not all that counts can be measured and not all that can be measured counts."  Who has decided what should be measured and how?

We are on the wrong path with our children's education and we must figure out a way to escape it.  It's time to do something for our children and support our public schools before it's too late.  It's time to write legislators, march on state capitols, picket, opt out, vote, do something!  It's time for a return of outrage.



 

Educators: We Have a Problem

Truly, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.  I like things to make sense and am skeptical of claims until I check them out.  (Do you sense the "but" coming?)  BUT, there's something seriously wrong with a system that is as out of whack as we have rolling out across the country for teacher evaluations.  If Ohio were the only state completely taking leave of their senses, I wouldn't think so much of it, but it's many states.  Almost makes you think there Someone or Something behind all of this.

The most recent craziness that is causing me to reflect is this business of using student test scores to evaluate teachers.  In Ohio, we have value added measures for teachers of reading and math grades 4-8.  I have already addressed the errors of this methodology in a previous blog.   After passing a law that required all teachers to be evaluated using student growth measures, it finally sank in to legislators that over half of our teachers don't have these magical numbers.  Obviously, we can't leave something as important as evaluating teachers in the hands of principals and observations, and so another law was passed creating what we now know as Student Learning Objectives (SLOs).

Naive as I am, I thought these measures would be learning objectives for students.  Ha!  Silly me!  Instead, the SLO process is a lengthy document detailing a process of collecting baseline data, setting targets for where we want students to be by April, and then measuring and tracking to find the number of students who met the targets we set for them.  Beautiful plan.  Nothing wrong with professionals providing evidence of their impact on student learning, collecting data, setting goals.  In fact, that is valuable work.  So where's the problem?

The reality is that we don't have the assessments to use for such a process.  Teachers create assessments to use for their own classrooms, but there is no such thing as assessments to use for measuring growth for the vast majority of classes we teach.  So, step one, we need to create common assessments that can be used for every teacher across multiple classrooms.  Of course this is complicated by the fact that teachers are not trained to develop tests that measure growth.  And the fact that testing companies that do this for a living need about three years to create such an assessment.  And the fact that, even after creation, these tests need to be piloted and examined to ascertain that they are reliable and valid.

Another consideration is that perhaps some things aren't meant to be quantified.  This same process is being used for preschool teachers.  What am I measuring, why and how for a three-year-old?  How about physical education?  I don't know about you, but I want kids to be MOVING in that class and not tied to paper and pencil tests.  And if we base teacher evaluation on movement - how much control over student growth in fitness does an elementary teacher have when he/she sees the students 35 minutes per week and the rest of the time they're sitting on a couch eating potato chips?  I'm seriously going to tie that teacher's evaluation on fitness goals???  Have you considered art?  I can just see us rating Pablo Picasso as not achieving growth on the art rubric because he doesn't conform to traditional views.  Isn't art about creativity?

The next glitch in the system is that we have to take these tests - which are not created - and set growth targets.  Since the tests don't even exist yet, we have no way of knowing what "ambitious yet attainable" goals might look like.  None.  How do I know what is a reasonable score for students by April on a test that has never been administered?  And so we are setting growth targets for students that we are basically pulling out of a hat.  Not a huge problem except that these arbitrarily set goals are going to be used as 50% of  a teacher's evaluation.  The tests are given in April so that growth measures can be computed and entered into a state database prior to the May 1 evaluation due date established in law.  That means that the tests will not reflect the learning of the last quarter of the year and that teachers can't use the assessments as an end-of-course exam.  How will we get students - already weary of multiple days of testing on statewide assessments - to take these tests seriously and do their best?  Maybe some of the best teachers are great motivators and can manage it, but to base half of a teacher's evaluation on something this nebulous doesn't seem to be advisable....or fair.

Another crazy fact is this:  the state and the national consortia are creating end-of-course exams for high school courses that will be ready in 2014-15.  Tests will be administered in Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry, English 9, 10, and 11, Physical Science, Biology, American History and American Government.   Teachers of these subjects are spending an enormous amount of time training for SLOs, creating assessments, analyzing data, setting targets and doing a LOT of paperwork for assessments that will be used for two years.  That's it.  Two years.  They won't really have the data to create good SLOs for at least 2 years and by then, they will be subject to statewide assessments that will flow into the value added measures used for teacher evaluation.

Why have teachers go through all of this work to create random assessments with questionable targets for two years?  Beats me.  Nothing about this procedure makes sense.  The timeline is extremely rushed for one thing - as I mentioned it takes testing companies three years to develop and test assessments and teachers are being expected to do it in three months - and the timeline makes no sense.  We are switching to a new curriculum effective 14-15.  FIRST we should teach the curriculum and train teachers in how to develop assessments designed for student growth.  Next, after a 3 year process of teaching and testing, we can establish trend data and set good learning targets.  And finally, if that system proves to be valid and reliable, THEN we can talk about whether it is an effective way to measure teacher effectiveness.  Which it isn't.

Educators, we have a problem.  But it's not the one the media is trumpeting.  We are being subjected to an unfair, inequitable, unreasonable evaluation system that will surely be litigated.  As it should be.  My job is to support teachers do the work to improve teaching and learning and I think there are elements in this process that can be helpful.  I love facilitating educators from across multiple districts as they work together to prepare common assessments.  Collecting data and setting goals is the right work.  BUT (there's that word again), there is no educational, moral, reasonable way this process should be used as part of a teacher evaluation system. Ever.