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"The accountability provisions in Virginia's original application for "ESEA flexibility" (or "waiver") have received a great deal of criticism (see here, here, here and here). Most of this criticism focused on the Commonwealth's expectation levels, as described in "annual measurable objectives" (AMOs) - i.e., the statewide proficiency rates that its students are expected to achieve at the completion of each of the next five years, with separate targets established for subgroups such as those defined by race (black, Hispanic, Asian, white), income (subsidized lunch eligibility), limited English proficiency (LEP), and special education. Last week, in response to the criticism, Virginia agreed to amend its application, and it's not yet clear how specifically they will calculate the new rates (only that lower-performing subgroups will be expected to make faster progress). In the meantime, I think it's useful to review a few of the main criticisms that have been made over the past week or two and what they mean."

"Congratulations to Carol Burris, co-author of the principal letter critiquing the APPR, the new NY state teacher evaluation system. Her school, South Side HS in Rockville Center, was just named the second best high school in the state, according to US News and World Report, and it is one of few non-selective relatively diverse schools on the list. Here is her explanation: "We do great things by challenging all kids, supporting them and not sorting them." It also can't hurt that her school has average class sizes of 17 (in math) to 23 (in social studies), according to its NYS report card. Carol adds: The typical class sizes for math, science and English are a bit higher than shown because we have every other day support classes in those subjects for kids who need them and those are twelve or fewer. We also keep our repeater classes (kids who failed Regents) under 12. You will never find an academic class in my school over 29 and 29 is rare. Last year we were 16% free and reduced price lunch, and when kids have small class sizes, lots of support and high expectations they do very well. Below, see her recent letter to the NY Board of Regents, regarding their new proposal to create three different kinds of diplomas: CTE (vocational), regular and STEM. Carol explains: "No matter how you cut it, it is tracking and we have a history of segregated classrooms that resulted from that practice. This is not an argument against CTE programs or STEM programs. This is an argument for preparing all of our children for college and career, and not watering down expectations and hope by forcing kids prematurely down different paths""

In what should be the biggest story of the week, the city of Philadelphia's school system announced Tuesday that it expects to close 40 public schools next year and 64 by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of current enrollment to charter schools, the streets or wherever, and put thousands of experienced, well qualified teachers, often grounded in the communities where they teach, on the street. Ominously, the shredding of Philadelphia's public schools isn't even news outside Philly.

Alert readers (as Dave Barry likes to say) will have noted that I haven't blogged in a while. The reasons are multiple: heavy travel schedule, writing for the newest book, and full days of work on two large projects. But the key reason is anger. I have been so angry about the head-long rush into untested and poorly-thought-out value-added accountability models of schools and teachers in various states all around the country that I haven't found a calm mental space in which to get words on paper. Let me now try. Forgive me if I sputter. Here's the problem in a nutshell. Value-added Models (VAM) of accountability are now the rage. And it is understandable why this is so. They involve predictions about "appropriate" student gains of performance. If results - almost always measured via state standardized test scores - fall within or above the "expected" gains, then you are a "good" school or teacher. If the gains fall below the expected gains that you are a "bad" school or teacher. Such a system has been in place in Tennessee for over a decade. You may be aware that from that test interesting claims have been made about effective vs. ineffective teachers adding a whole extra year of gain. So, in the last few years, as accountability pressures have been ratcheted up in all states, more and more of such systems have been put in place, most recently in New York State where a truly byzantine formula is being used starting next year to hold principals and teachers accountable. It will surely fail (and be litigated). Let me try to explain why.

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we'd expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we'd certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?  So, I went back and did a little browsing through recent, and less recent issues of Independent School Magazine and collected the following few words of wisdom

According to Wikipedia, cost-benefit analysis "is a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project, decision or government policy (hereafter, 'project'). CBA has two purposes: 1.To determine if it is a sound investment/decision (justification/feasibility), 2.To provide a basis for comparing projects. It involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much." I believe that it would be prudent to apply this process to the current accountability movement now being administered in public education, primarily in the form of testing mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top.

It's a lot more satisfying showing that a 'failing' school is being unfairly closed than showing that a 'miracle' school is getting accolades it doesn't deserve. I applied the same analysis I recently did for Jamaica High School to the just announced closure of a New York City school since 1913, Washington Irving High School.  I learned that they had very respectable Regents 'progress' scores compared to the rest of the New York City High Schools.  A weighted Regents pass rate of 1 means that the students did just as expected on the Regents.  Higher than 1 means they outperformed expectations. 

On the 10th anniversary of "the lost decade," produced by No Child Left Behind, we will read plenty of explanations of why the law did little good, and often did great harm to poor children of color. Ironically, the rationale for NCLB was that educators had long used poverty as an "excuse" for "low expectations." I am struck, however, by the low expectations that policy wonks had for themselves, how many excuses they are now making for the failure of NCLB, and how they minimized its unintended negative effects, as they blame others.

"In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."

Today, the day of the release of the New York City data, I received an email that I did not expect to come for at least a year.  In D.C. the evaluation process is called IMPACT.  About 500 teachers in D.C. belong to something called 'group one' which means that they teach something that can be measured with their value-added formula.  50% of their evaluation is based on their IVA (individual value-added), 35% is on their principal evaluation called their TLF (teaching and learning framework).  5% is on their SVA (school value added) and the remaining 10% on their CSC (commitment to school and community).  I wanted to test my theory that the value-added scores would not correlate with the principal evaluations so I had applied under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) to D.C. schools requesting the principal evaluation scores and the value-added scores for all group one teachers (without their names.)  I fully expected to wait about a year or two and then be denied.  To my surprise, it only took a few months and they did provide a 500 row spreadsheet.

"Since the standards were first introduced, Common Core supporters have created amorphous platitudes and spin to market it. Even as more Americans like me "wise up," do not expect the Common Core-ites to give up. Think tanks have received millions from Gates to support it and education companies are making millions on new Core-aligned materials. There is big money being spent - and big money to be made - in the Common Core. So, expect that when the happy bus pulls into your town, you will hear the same old arguments. These arguments, which I call the Four Flimflams of the Common Core, go like this:"

Thousands of educators and supporters are expected to be marching, rallying and talking in Washington this week in support of public schools. If I were at the "Save Our Schools" march around the White House, my sign would say "Bring Us Together." Too many of us who care about schools are picking at each other, but maybe I am expecting too much.

I have discussed before how most testing data released to the public are cross-sectional, and how comparing them between years entails the comparison of two different groups of students. One way to address these issues is to calculate and release school- and district-level value-added scores. Value added estimates are not only longitudinal (i.e., they follow students over time), but the models go a long way toward for differences in the characteristics of students between schools and districts. Put simply, these models calculate "expectations" for student test score gains based on student (and sometimes school) characteristics, which are then used to gauge whether schools' students did better or worse than expected.

"In the most simplistic portrayal of the education policy landscape, one of the "sides" is a group of people who are referred to as "reformers." Though far from monolithic, these people tend to advocate for test-based accountability, charters/choice, overhauling teacher personnel rules, and other related policies, with a particular focus on high expectations, competition and measurement. They also frequently see themselves as in opposition to teachers' unions. Most of the "reformers" I have met and spoken with are not quite so easy to categorize. They are also thoughtful and open to dialogue, even when we disagree. And, at least in my experience, there is far more common ground than one might expect. Nevertheless, I believe that this "movement" (to whatever degree you can characterize it in those terms) may be doomed to stall out in the long run, not because their ideas are all bad, and certainly not because they lack the political skills and resources to get their policies enacted. Rather, they risk failure for a simple reason: They too often make promises that they cannot keep."

Recent research has indicated that teacher coaching and high expectations for student behavior are characteristics of the most effective charter schools. In "Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching," researchers from the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education and New Jersey-based research firm Mathematica probe into exactly what those polices look like.

...In other words, you can't really interpret the meaning of any one piece of evidence if you don't have a handle on what to expect. And you can't really have a productive discussion if everyone is operating on different, unstated premises as to how it should be interpreted. This goes for not only test scores, but any other metric.

The state expects to sign off on Mayor Bloomberg's dramatic new plan to ax half the teachers at 33 struggling schools, the Daily News has learned.

Often teachers have low expectations for some students, especially those who had a history of struggling, living in poverty or are transient. Those students are often separated into smaller ability groups for more direct instruction. Separating students by ability is often done in K-12 settings. It happens in schools when students take electives and advanced placement classes, but it also happens within elementary classrooms when teachers do ability grouping. Tomlinson and Javius say, "The logic behind separating students by what educators perceive to be their ability is that it enables teachers to provide students with the kind of instruction they need." So what is wrong with that? Shouldn't educators work with groups by ability so they can help students close the gap? Tomlinson and Javius are concerned that ability grouping may further widen the gap between struggling learners and those who excel.

"It seems to me that our expectations for both teachers and artists are sometimes unrealistic and unproductive, if not detrimental."

I pay a lot of attention to teacher evaluation in this country, and it seems that the issue grows in urgency every day. Yet I have to stop and ask: How much can we expect teacher evaluation to accomplish?