Group items tagged

I am a teacher at ...... one of the PLA schools. .... has been a "Transformation School" since September 2010. I have been a Social Studies teacher at this school since September 1990. Yesterday, we were summoned to the auditorium for a special faculty meeting. Our very well-liked principal, . . . conveyed the information he'd received from his superiors: the City intended to change our school to a Turnaround Model. The implications were not completely clear, but it almost certainly meant that we teachers and our supervisors would have to re-apply for our positions to come back in September 2012, and around half of us would not be re-employed.

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

Negotiations between New York City's Education Department and union officials over a new evaluation system for teachers and principals broke down on Friday, jeopardizing roughly $60 million in federal grants designated to help 33 struggling schools across the city.

In today's New York Times there was a story about a research study which supposedly proved that students who had teachers with good value-added scores were more successful in life. This inspired me to complete something I have been working on for several months, off-and-on, a detailed analysis of the raw data supplied in the most quoted value-added study there is, a paper written in Dallas in 1997. This is the paper which 'proved' that students who had three effective teachers in a row got dramatically higher test scores than their unlucky peers who had three ineffective teachers in a row.  I've written about it previously much less formally here and here. The New York Times story frustrated me since I know that value-added does not correlate with future student income. Value-added does not correlate with teacher quality. Value-added doesn't correlate with principal evaluations. It doesn't correlate with anything including, as I'll demonstrate in this post, with itself.

I should be a cheerleader for the New York evaluation system for educators known as the Annual Professional Performance Review system, or A.P.P.R. I am the principal of a very successful high school where students get great test scores. I have a wonderfully supportive superintendent. My personal "score," in all probability, will be high. The right question to ask, however, is not whether this evaluation system is good or bad for adults, but rather whether it is good or bad for students.

An Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization has crafted a sweeping plan for reworking the 33,000-student Indianapolis school system that would place the district under the control of the city's mayor, pare down the money spent in central administration, and give principals broad authority to hire and fire teachers. The reform plan created by the Mind Trust organization would transform the district's schools into what the report calls "Opportunity Schools," which would be given "unprecedented freedom over staffing, budgets, curriculum, and culture," as long as they continued to meet high standards. Those schools would compete for students who live within the district's boundaries.

Can you blame them? After last week's study showing that student achievement is higher in the city's new, small high schools - and city officials reiterated their commitment to a policy of creating more of the smaller schools - some of the principals and staff members of some of the city's largest high schools are feeling a bit worried these days.

The main source of funding for public education is property taxes, which explains to a large extent the inequities between and within states. State governments also spend differing amounts on their school systems, and the federal government offers differing amounts of money depending on a range of criteria. This isn't, incidentally, the way other nations with successful public education systems fund their schools. It is very nice that there are people like DeGeneres and Bieber who are willing to write out big checks to needy public schools. Good for them. Yet there is something sad and scary when a check from an entertainer or private company is seen, in history's wealthiest country, as a godsend to a school principal who herself has spent her own money trying to help her students, or to a school where teachers agreed to work for free for free because of budget cuts, bad management, and other factors.

What I'm not for… and I'm not yet sure what's going on here… is pretending that we can simply shut down schools in high poverty neighborhoods, blaming teachers and principals for their failure, and then either a) replacing the school management and staff with individuals likely to be even less qualified and less well equipped to handle the circumstances,  or b) initiating an inevitably continuous pattern of displacement from school to school to school for children already disadvantaged.

At the very least, I have to rethink my views of Darling-Hammond and the ill-considered labels thrown around in school policy battles, because I know the Hillsdale story is real. I attended Hillsdale and have visited often since graduating. Former Hillsdale principal Don Leydig, one of the most influential participants in its changes, has been my friend since third grade.

If ever proof were needed for the notion that it's a good idea to look before you leap, it's the implementation of Race to the Top in Tennessee. "I don't know why they felt they had to rush," said Tim Tackett, a member of the school board here who was a teacher and principal for 32 years. "Clearly this wasn't well thought out."

Before union leaders blasted off an angry letter to the Department of Education to complain about teacher evaluation abuse last month, they had to confirm that their complaints were warranted. To do that, they went straight to the woman who designed the evaluation model the city favors: Charlotte Danielson. Danielson's "Framework for Teaching" has been adopted for evaluation purposes at 33 struggling schools. But the union was receiving reports from chapter leaders that principals in at least one other network of schools were using a checklist based on the model to evaluate teachers. When the UFT obtained a copy of one of the checklists, it shared it with Danielson herself to get her thoughts.

This was written by George Wood, superintendent and secondary school principal at the Federal Hocking Local School District in Stewart, Ohio.  He is also the executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools.

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

Apparently it's not enough for the Obama administration that standardized test scores are now used to evaluate students, schools, teachers and principals. In a new display of its obsession with test scores, the Education Department is embarking on a study to determine which parts of clinical teacher training lead to higher average test scores among the teachers' students.

New York State's educational community has come together in an unprecedented show of support for the broad education reforms detailed in the State's Race to the Top application.  Thanks to the leadership of the Governor, the State legislature, and the Board of Regents, New York State passed new legislation in May 2010 that will usher in a new era of educational excellence in the State and ensure that we are able to fully execute the innovative, coherent reform agenda outlined in our Race to the Top application. The new laws: (1) establish a new teacher and principal evaluation system that makes student achievement data a substantial component of how educators are assessed and supported; (2) raise our charter school cap from 200 to 460; (3) enable school districts to enter contracts with Educational Partnership Organizations for the management of their persistently lowest‐achieving schools and schools under registration review; and (4) appropriate more than $20 million to the State Education Department to implement its P‐20 longitudinal data system.

There are some questions every school leader should be able to answer: Are my teachers helping their students learn? Who are the outstanding teachers I need to fight hard to keep? Which teachers aren't meeting my expectations? How can I help my good teachers become great? As the superintendent of one of the nation's largest school districts, I believe helping our campus leaders answer these questions is the most important part of my job. After all, decades of research show that nothing we can do to accelerate student learning matters more than ensuring a great teacher leads every classroom. Unfortunately, the teacher-evaluation systems that should help principals answer such questions are often useless. Most evaluation systems rate nearly all teachers "satisfactory," based on infrequent and cursory classroom observations, and they rarely consider how much students are actually learning.

The signature Bloomberg administration reform of shutting down failing schools and replacing them with new schools has - itself - failed thousands of city students, a Daily News analysis finds. The new schools opened under the mayor were supposed to have better teachers, better principals, and, ultimately, better test scores than the dysfunctional failure mills they were replacing. But when The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

A cooperative effort of the New York City Department of Education, the Chancellor's office, and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resulted in a specially designed educational program under which all elementary and middle schools in the Chancellor's District would operate. The program included five components: a research-based curriculum focused heavily on literacy and mathematics; a staffing model designed to ensure a qualified teacher in every classroom; a strong principal for every school; high quality professional development for teachers and administrators; and smaller classes with added dollars for materials and supplies.

While the fight over closing schools may be hotter than the weather this summer, the evidence shows that this is not a strategy that works to help all New York City kids get the education they deserve. Yet Mayor Bloomberg has adopted it with a single-mindedness that makes no sense. He has closed more than 140 schools since he took control of the city's school system in 2002. Bloomberg's agenda has disrupted school communities, alienated parents and destabilized neighborhoods. College-readiness rates in the new schools created to replace closing schools are abysmally low, and overall grad rates in these new schools have actually been falling, even as overall grad rates remained flat. Instead of closing schools, there is a better and more effective intervention to turn them around. The Chancellor's District was an innovative program involving nearly 60 schools that flourished from 1996 to 2003 under a joint agreement between then-Chancellor Rudy Crew and the UFT. It's an approach we can use in the 24 schools that are now the subject of litigation between the Department of Education and the principals' and teachers' unions over how they will be staffed.