You may be a bad teacher if....

One thing I have come to realize as I evaluate and mentor teachers is that the "bad" ones seldom recognize the fact that they're bad.  You can walk into any school building in America and ask students and staff to identify the rotten teachers and I'll bet you they'd basically agree.  It seems like the only ones who don't know what teacher isn't doing the job is the teacher who is ineffective.  With this in mind, I have developed this checklist for how to tell if your teaching skills lie on the wrong side of the bell curve:

1.  You may be a bad teacher if you still use the same lesson plans you laminated 20 years ago.

2.  You may be a bad teacher if you don't really check to see if students are learning until the summative assessment.

3.  You may be a bad teacher if you think students doing poorly on the test is a sign of rigor.

4.  You may be a bad teacher if students are sitting in rows in your room NEVER talking to each other.

5.  You may be a bad teacher if you publicly make fun of student errors and encourage students to do the same.

6. You may be a bad teacher if your idea of differentiation and "using data" means to re-teach a concept to the entire class when there are several low grades.

7.  You may be a bad teacher if you think assigning huge ditto packets of worksheets = effective use of supplemental resources.

8.  You may be a bad teacher if you think sharing clear learning targets is "spoon feeding" the students.

9.  You may be a bad teacher if students can master all of the summative assessments in your class but still fail because they didn't comply with your busy work paper requirements.

And finally, 10.  You may be a bad teacher if you recognized yourself in any of these statements and prefer to make excuses rather than change what you're doing.

5 Truths about Teaching

1. 

   
   Truth #1 - Kids don't acquire confidence to try new things and succeed in life by being told that they are failures on a daily basis.
   
   Truth #2 - People learn at different rates.  Doesn't matter how many times it takes you to learn something, as long as you really LEARN it.  You DO get multiple attempts to pass the bar exam, take the Praxis assessment, demonstrate mastery to get your driver's license.
   
   Truth #3 - Even in business in the "real world," if you don't master something on your first attempt in training, they're generally not going to fire you.
   
   Truth #4 - It is more rigorous to expect students to LEARN, no matter how many attempts it takes, rather than assigning them a D and moving on.
   
   Truth #5 -It's NOT OK to allow children NOT to learn.  Expect mastery, even if it takes longer.
   
   As part of my job, I get to go around and do fun things like presentations on formative instructional practices or differentiated instruction or best practices in math.  Sometimes, I get a little pushback from participants who are quite comfortable doing things the way they've always done them.  
   
   I find some of the reluctance to engage in new practices is tied to a basic philosophical difference in what the role of a teacher should be and what a grade is.  The traditional approach has teachers as dispensers of knowledge, responsible for preparing students for college, or, better yet, "the REAL world."   (as in "What's this nonsense about formative assessment and retaking tests?  They can't do that in the REAL world.")  
   
   I'm not sure what world you live in, but in the one I inhabit, it is IMPORTANT to make sure people are learning when they're being trained.  I'm not putting a pilot in the air with a plane alone until he has demonstrated many times that he can land.  I may allow him to use a flight simulator.  I have a veteran pilot with him as he is learning.  I allow him to take his test to be a licensed pilot repeatedly because he MUST master the material.  AFTER he is licensed, a mistake may be fatal and so I can't give him multiple attempts to land the plane on the job, but during his learning phase, I make sure he gets the skill.  When students are in school, it is IMPERATIVE that they master the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life. (what that set of skills and knowledge might be is a different topic for another time)  Giving a summative assessment before students are ready and then moving on is not good practice, nor is it more rigorous than expecting mastery, no matter how many times it takes.   
   
   A bigger conversation needs to occur around what a grade is...what is the purpose of grading students?  What does a grade mean?  The prevailing view of grades in the 50's was a mechanism whereby students were ranked, and indeed, today, we still use grades to rank students.  Valedictorian  Salutatorian.  Honor student.   5th in the class.  Those titles are important to many people, and they want quantifiable evidence of where they stand.
   
   Of course today, we know that ALL children can learn and the standardization movement has forced us to consider that all children need to learn at higher levels.  Our global economy has pressured us to push students towards "College and Career Readiness" (as if those mean the same thing for every child!).  Today, a grade needs to provide us with information.  Instead of ranking children with respect to others in their classes, we look to grades to tell us where students are with respect to a given standard of education.  In other words, grades should reflect actual learning.  If a student takes 3 attempts to demonstrate mastery, he/she has learned the same material and should receive the same grade.
   
   If I were the goddess of education, I would not have letter grades at all, which would end the debate entirely. Until then, let's simply concentrate on good education and concern ourselves with making sure we are teaching ALL students well.
   

   
   

Kasich Through the Looking Glass

You remember the Lewis Carroll story of Alice and her adventures through the looking glass.  She entered a world in which reality was strangely distorted.  This is kind of the feeling here in Ohio as our governor continues to defend his highly inequitable school funding plan.  (Cleveland City Club, April 3)  Poor districts will receive more money under this plan while wealthy districts get less, according to Kasich.

Let's look at the facts.  These are not opinion, but cold, hard data which is easily accessible to the public:

When Ohio districts are arranged by per pupil expenditure:
Of the top quartile of  districts, that is the districts who already spend the most per pupil to educate their students, 47% receive an increased amount.  This includes Orange in Cuyahoga County with a current per pupil expenditure of over $21,000.
Of the bottom quartile of districts, 32% receive an increased amount.

When Ohio districts are arranged by median income of residents, Kasich fares better:
Of the top quartile of most affluent districts, 34% receive an increased amount.
For the bottom quartile of districts, 53% receive an increased amount.
Significantly more districts with poorer residents do get more money.  However, this also means that 47% of the poorest districts in the state receive NO new money while over a third of the very wealthiest districts DO receive more, and some considerably more.  In fact, Olentangy, the district with the highest median income in the entire state, receives 330% more state funding under this formula.

When Ohio districts are arranged by % of poverty:
Of the quartile of schools with the highest rates of poverty in the state, 54% receive additional funds.  This means 46% of the districts with the neediest learners get no new funds, and many will see severe reductions when the guarantee money disappears in two years if this budget passes.
Of the quartile of schools with the lowest rates of poverty, 30% receive additional funds.

Depending on what you mean by "poor districts," none of these scenarios provides the poorest quartile of districts with additional funds.  The best the plan does is provide a little over half of the poorest districts with money, leaving the others to flounder over the deep cuts from the past Kasich budget that cut $1.8 billion from schools.  And no matter how you slice it, whether by per pupil expenditure, median income, or percent of poverty, many of the wealthy districts get more while 64% of the districts in Ohio receive NO additional funds at all.

Kasich is either lying....or he has gone through Alice's looking glass and has a distorted view of reality.

What About the Students?

Ok, first of all, get ready, because this has just a teeny bit of math geekiness in it.  But hold on until the end, because I promise there is a point coming.

We have been notified that the new common core assessments through the PARCC consortium are going to be "more rigorous" and that we need to prepare for a dramatic drop in the number of students deemed to be proficient on the new tests.  To what purpose, I'm not sure, but it's important for us all to realize that these scores on the current assessments are DERIVED SCORES.  For the math novices among you, this means that the scores are set by looking at a normal curve and determining where on the curve to draw the line for acceptable performance.  In other words, here in Ohio, 400 is the magic number that separates "proficient" from "basic."  But the actual accuracy that a student must score to achieve the 400 changes every year based on what score is at a given level on the bell curve.  You see, psychometricians love the bell curve.  In fact, if a test does not yield results that form a bell curve, the test is not used.  Period.  That means that for ANY test that is used in this way, about 68% of the student scores will always cluster in the middle of the distribution.

In case the lightbulb hasn't gone on for you yet, understand that the only way all of a sudden 40% more students will fall below proficiency is if the Policy Makers decide to move the score for "proficient" to a higher level on the bell curve so that a higher percentage of scores fall below the magic number to pass.  On the current tests, students have been consistently scoring higher and higher and yet a similar percent of students will always be below proficient because the score for proficient is set by a point on the bell curve and NOT on a percent of accuracy.  If every single student in the entire testing population all of a sudden achieved a score 40 points higher in accuracy, the bell curve would simply move and the percentage of students below proficient would remain the same.  We are aiming at a moving target.

Not only have Policy Makers determined for some reason to cause more students to fail by changing the cut score for the passage rate, but the content of the tests appears to be wildly inappropriate developmentally.  What third grader can sit and type out a coherent paragraph on a QWERTY keyboard?  ELA standards tested at the fifth grade level appear to be several years beyond what any group of normal fifth graders has ever been able to perform.  The technology required to take the math assessments raises serious concerns about whether we are testing math ability or technological literacy.  We are being set up for failure, folks.

There are corporate reformers bent on making public schools look bad.  Public school teachers are being portrayed as greedy union slugs, only in it for the money (yes, we're all getting rich on our barely median income).  The new assessments will open the door for more third party vendors to hawk their wares and suck more money out of the floundering public school coffers, promising to increase our scores on poorly designed tests.  Charter schools will siphon off more and more money into the pockets of management companies who then spend millions on lobbyists, political campaigns, and advertising.  This may be inevitable, but my question is this:  What about the students?

Does anyone think it makes one iota of sense to treat children like this?  Not proficient.  Below average. Not as smart as you should be.  Failures at the age of 9.  Try as you might, students, you're not going to rise to the level of our expectations.  Work as hard as you can, but most of you will never be good enough to pass these tests.  What kind of perversion is this?  Who does this to children?  And why?

Kasich Budget Increases Inequities

HB 59 is Ohio's budget bill.  I will be providing testimony during the public hearings on March 14.  Here is the text of my testimony:

To the Honorable Representatives of the Ohio General Assembly:

I have been involved in public education for over 34 years in one capacity or another, and I believe that public education is absolutely vital for economic prosperity.  With that in mind, I would like to make two points involving the governor’s proposed school funding plan:

1)  The proposal exacerbates the inequities in the current system that have been ruled inappropriate for over 15 years and

2) The legislature has placed many demands on public schools that cannot be accomplished without the educational service center system as it currently exists.

First, the proposed funding plan exacerbates the inequities in the current system.   Suburban and urban districts have the potential to raise much more local revenue than small rural districts because of the existence within their borders of business and industry that support schools through property taxes, as well as through local income taxes collected within those municipalities.  I would like to point out to you that rural districts derive NONE of the financial benefit of those businesses and industries, and yet our citizens work, pay taxes, and spend money in those same places.  The businesses and industries within suburban and urban areas thrive and pay taxes BECAUSE of money invested there by people living in rural areas.  It is the responsibility of state legislature to equalize this investment, and so, of necessity, more state money should be allocated to property-poor rural districts.

Small rural districts do not have the ability to raise the revenue locally.  We have no business and industry to tax. Our people are mostly middle class with property values much lower than those in suburban and urban areas.  The median income of our residents is much lower than those in suburban schools.  The governor talks of “weaning” our rural schools away from state support, but the effect of this drastic reduction in revenue once the guarantees are gone is that local schools in rural areas will collapse.  Already, we have class sizes of over 30.  Already, some of our districts have eliminated art, music, and physical education in elementary and middle schools.  Already, our teachers have taken pay freezes.  Already, we have cut the number of administrators and teachers.  Already, our schools have stopped offering programs and field trips and enrichment activities.  What more can we cut?  In the meantime, the average suburban districts, many of whom receive additional state dollars in this plan, already are offering Advanced Placement courses, already have sculpture, orchestra, computer programming, and other electives.  Affluent suburban districts already have the means to provide students with adequate, updated technology.  Over half of the districts receiving additional funds are already healthy schools providing their students with supports and opportunities that the rural districts are doing without.  Do not our rural students deserve an equal chance at a quality education?

I don’t believe you understand the effect this funding plan will have on schools.   Rural schools ARE the communities they represent.  The school is frequently the largest employer in the area.  Our schools are the hub of community life.  If rural schools are forced to close or consolidate, entire communities will be devastated.  Not only that, but with school closings in the rural areas, we would be placing our primary aged children on school buses for 2-3 hours per day, or more, to take them to the next district.  This is not acceptable. 

I have taken the time to prepare a spreadsheet (attached) of all 603 districts in Ohio showing  median income, percent poverty, per pupil expenditure, and the percent of increase the first year of the Kasich funding for each district.  Please note that of the top 10% affluent districts in the state based on median income, the very richest districts where there is plenty of potential to raise local funds, 44% receive additional state dollars in this plan.  Of the entire bottom 90%, only 34% receive additional funds.  This plan increases the inequities in state funding and seriously compromises the ability of local districts to provide even a basic education to our children.  This plan takes money away from financially unhealthy, struggling districts and gives more to healthy, financially solvent districts, which amounts to fiscal malpractice.

Another way to analyze the data is to look at the per pupil expenditure.  The average child care center in Ohio charges $250 per week, multiplied by 36 weeks of school, and we find that over half of the districts in the state are trying to educate children for no more than one would pay a babysitter to watch them.  Of those districts, over 66%  receive no additional funding from the state, and will  lose even more when the guarantees are phased out.  Orange School District in Cuyahoga County currently spends over $21,000 per student, and they receive additional state funds under this plan, while the schools in my county educate children for less than half of that and get no help. 

Next point, the legislature has placed many demands on public schools that cannot be accomplished without the educational service center system as it currently exists.  There have been many, many unfunded mandates and changes brought about by laws that the state legislature has passed.  Changes in the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System and Ohio Principal Evaluation System necessitate much training and much more time to implement, which will require more expenditure for administrative staff.  The Resident Educator program, Student Learning Objectives, the transition to the common core state standards and the instructional changes necessary to implement them, the additional interventions and assessments necessary for the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, the new assessment systems, the Instructional Improvement System, Formative Instructional Practices, the new meetings and supports necessary under the ESEA waiver, interpreting and using value added data, all require a great deal of training and time.  The Ohio Department of Education cannot possibly provide the training and support necessary to roll out these initiatives and support district implementation.  With the minimal investment to Educational Service Centers in Ohio, the department of education has a cadre of capable, trained staff to do this work so that school districts can comply and actually do the work well.  The state is receiving an excellent return on their investment when they maintain support for ESCs.

Another valuable service of educational service centers is direct service to students.   When the money flows directly to ESCs, then we can provide direct services to preschools and low incidence populations more cost effectively. The governor was right two years ago when he emphasized that shared services would save districts money.  The ESCs provide these shared services, but will be severely compromised in our ability to do so if the money flows directly to the schools. 

In summary, I urge you to consider the long term effects of this proposed budget on the children of Ohio.  Fund our rural schools adequately and protect the educational service centers.  Thank you.

Respectfully submitted,

Bonny Buffington

The Rape of Public Education

Since 2001, David Brennan and William Lager, both  for-profit charter school operators, have contributed over $4,00,000 to Ohio Republicans. (Plunderbund, January 28, 2013) Looking at Kasich's new proposed funding plan for Ohio, Brennan and Lager have received a nice return for their investment.  The proposal provides an additional $11.9 million, according to the Akron Beacon-Journal's projections, by virtue of allowing an additional $100 per pupil for "facilities."  (Media Matters, February 1, 2013)  In the past twenty years, literally BILLIONS of public school dollars have been funneled into charter schools in Ohio, all in the name of "school choice."

Along with this assault on funding, the Ohio General Assembly, under Kasich's leadership, have passed more and more onerous unfunded mandates that apply to traditional public schools, but not to charter schools.  For example, the new Ohio Teachers Evaluation System requires that administrators evaluate every teacher every year in a mandated process that requires many hours and meetings for each teacher.  With cuts in funding, schools have eliminated administrator positions, and do not have the resources to accomplish this requirement. There are simply not enough hours in the day.  In addition, there is no REASON to evaluate every teacher every year.  Educators don't become much better or much worse suddenly from year to year. In order to comply with the mandates of this law, schools will be forced to hire outside evaluators, emptying an already depleted general fund, and further driving up class sizes.  In contrast, charter schools are exempt from this requirement, which is ironic because, on average, charter schools spend roughly twice the amount per pupil on administration as traditional public schools do.  In fact, White Hat Management, owned by David Brennan, has a per pupil administration cost nearly 4 times that of traditional schools.  (OEA, A Brief Update on Charters)

The long anticipated school funding plan rolled out by Kasich this month adds insult to injury.  No matter the rhetoric, the actual data proves that only 36% of public districts get ANY increase at all, and yet 44% of the schools ranking in the top 10% of median income get an increase. (See my blog, A geek digs the data) Yes, you heard that right.  Of the top 10% most affluent district in the state, 44% get an increase, and many of them sizable increases, leaving the most of the bottom 90% of the schools receiving nothing.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.

None of this would be quite so alarming, but while 92% of our traditional public schools produce excellent results as measured by performance index on state testing, only 26% of the charter schools reach this level of achievement. (Public record, ODE web site)  Charter school average achievement falls in the bottom 8% of the state and literally every single school in the bottom 5% of the state is a charter school.  The charters just aren't cutting it.  The concept of a "for profit school" is an oxymoron.  Schools either exist to fill the pockets of their CEO/operator OR they exist for the benefit of student learning.

Not only that, but Kasich is boasting of his increase in education funding.  The $1.6 billion additional dollars are temporary - the "guarantee funds" disappear after two yeas - and don't restore our education budget to where it was 2 years ago when Kasich slashed $1.8 billion from the budget.  The intent, to me, seems clear.  Force the property-poor districts to close down and funnel more money into the pockets of David Brennan and William Lager and their ilk who, in turn, send several million back into the pockets of Kasich and other leading Republicans.  Do this while protecting the school districts of the wealthiest among us.  Decrease the property tax of the wealthy and increase it for the poor districts, many of them rural where the owners of property are American farmers.

The net result is that those who have the most need receive the least benefit.  Schools educating children for under $10,000 per pupil, the cost of basic child care, are eliminating art, music, phys ed.  They are working with few administrators, inadequate technology, and large class sizes.  Parents are paying money for school athletics, depriving many of the opportunity to compete. High school students have little choice beyond basic English, math, science, and social studies courses.   Teachers are discouraged and feeling the stress of being blamed for everything from the state's economic woes to national security issues.  All this in stark contrast to wealthy suburban districts where students have access to natoriums, libraries, updated technology, field trips, and courses in computer programming, sculpture, orchestra, the arts, adanced placement, etc, etc, etc.... and more state funding in the new budget.  Something's gotta give. But as long as charters and testing companies are paying millions to politicians to enrich their campaign coffers, I fear that the rape of the American public school will continue.

Kasich's Proposed Funding: A Geek Digs the Data

I admit to being a bit of a geek.  Maybe more than a little.  At any rate, numbers fascinate me and I love data.  With that in mind, I created a spreadsheet using information from the percent of increases for each school district in Ohio under Kasich's new proposed funding formula, and then entered the median income for each district, the percent of students living in poverty, and average per pupil expenditure from the most recent Cupp Report (ODE official report).  I knew that, at least for districts I know around here, the funding simply makes no sense.  Rich districts appeared to be receiving huge increases while those struggling to offer even basic education received nothing.  Coincidence? Maybe.  I wanted to find out, and here are some of my results:

Of the districts in the top half of the state for median income, 24% are receiving a significant (greater than 10%) increase under Kasich's new funding formula while only 14% of the districts in the bottom half for median income receive a significant increase.  Looking further, I found that about a fourth of the districts in the top quartile for per pupil expenditure get an increase while only slightly higher, 28% of the bottom quartile for per pupil expenditure receive a significant increase.  Eighteen percent of the districts with the lowest poverty rates, many of them affluent districts,  receive a significant increase.

To make it more personal, look at some examples:
Olentangy Local has 7% poverty rate and over $71,000 median income and is slated to receive a 331% increase.  New Albany Local has 7% poverty and $68,000 median income with an increase of 181%.
Avon Local has 7% poverty and median income of over $55,000 with an increase of   about 100%.
The Orange School District in Cuyahoga County has the highest per pupil expenditure in the state with over $21,000 to spend for each pupil with relatively low poverty (14%), but they will receive an additional 25% from the state.

In the meantime, Fairport Harbor has a median income of $27,000, spends just over $9000 per student and gets nothing. Clay Local, $29,000 median income, $8600 per pupil expenditure, zero increase. East Holmes, $24,600 median income, 36% poverty, $9555 per pupil, no increase. Tuslaw spends only $7400 per pupil with 26% poverty, $32000 median income, no increase.

Four hundred forty districts receive zero increases, or increase less than 5%, which doesn't even make up for the 8% cut  in funding from Governor Kasich's first budget.  Unfortunately, I could go on with these statistics and examples for the over 600 school districts in the state.  Over 2/3 of them get no help, and of the ones that do, more of them are affluent districts already spending more per pupil than those that are left behind.

To put these numbers into perspective:  The average child care provider in Ohio charges $250-$275 per week for one child.  Multiply times 36 weeks school is in session, and $9,000-$10,000 per year is about what one would pay for a babysitter.  Three hundred eight-six districts in the state of Ohio educate your child for about the cost of a babysitter or less. Sixty of them (about 15%) get an increase of 10% or more in Kasich's budget.  Fify-four get a minimal increase of .06% to 9.6%.  Two hundred seventy-two districts in the state of Ohio educate your children for no more than you would pay a babysitter and yet get zero funding increase.  These districts are still reeling  from an 8% cut and an unbelievable number of unfunded mandates in the past two years.

I'm not sure on what planet this resolves constitutional funding issues, but Kasich is still touting that "Our new schools plan gives the lowest wealth schools 400% more than the highest wealth ones."  I'm going to have to see the data on that one.  You know me.  I'm a geek.