Portelos Strikes Again: The Three R's - Rubber Room is Retaliation

Walcott/Bloomberg aren't interested in quality and effective teachers. Is there any better proof than the Portelos case?

Good morning,

Please see this clip I put together during lunch at the Rubber Room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKxgS8_HwyU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This is just one of the issues I uncovered that lead me to the Rubber Room. Countless taxpayer funds. That's the story. I made these allegations to investigators on January 26, 2012. At that point I had no allegations against me and my record was stellar. Just 4 days later 18 allegations against me started. Coincidence. The fact that DOE officials took part in covering it up takes this untold story to new heights.

The three R's -
Rubber Room is Retaliation
-Francesco Portelos
mrportelos@gmail.com
protectportelos.org
Parent
Educator
UFT Chapter Leader
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

 ==============
The opinions expressed on EdNotesOnline are solely those of Norm Scott and are not to be taken as official positions (though Unity Caucus/New Action slugs will try to paint them that way) of any of the groups or organizations Norm works with: ICE, GEM, MORE, Change the Stakes, NYCORE, FIRST Lego League NYC, Rockaway Theatre Co., Active Aging, The Wave, Aliens on Earth, etc.

Ernie Silva Show an Allegory for Why Achievement Gap and Teacher Quality Are Phony Issues, Updated

UPDATE: Sunday, April 18, 2010, 11pm

I updated this post today. I saw the show for the 2nd time on Thursday the 15th and it got better and better and I got a few more insights. My wife and Lisa Donlan were with me and we all got to vote for Ernie as the best in the show. There were more "kids" from the old neighborhood there and it was a pleasure meeting Sam C. who wasn't in my class because he moved into the area in the 5th grade. He told me his daughter just graduated from PS 147 last year and he has another kid in the school. Lucky Klein didn't close them down yet and open up a charter. I also ran into a familiar face - one of our robotics coaches who grew up with Ernie. The connections astound me.

It was Ernie's final performance in NYC. He is heading to Chicago and I will let the gang there know he is coming

Ernie called yesterday and he is heading back to LA Monday. He will be back this summer and I hope we can hang out a bit. Last night he and a bunch of the old gang got together for dinner - 3 girls I haven't seen in 25 years. I would have love to see them. Ernie would like to do Fringe NYC and since I volunteer there I hope to get him noticed. They are wrapping up this years' shows for the August festival, but maybe next year I can get all you guys out to see him.

Ernie just sent out a message on Facebook:

Heavy Wins NYC's "The ONE" Solo Festival!!!!!

R. Ernie Silva

Heavy Like the Weight of a Flame has WON N.Y's 2010 "The ONE" solo show Festival!!!!!!!!!!!!

GO ERNIE!

REVISED FOR THE WAVE - April 16, 2010 edition
April 14

I had to cut words for the print edition and this version reinforces the concept that less is more. See info at the end for Ernie's final 2 shows. A bunch of us are going Thursday night. The show is part of a contest and Ernie is in the running to win, so if you go don't forget to vote.




I never write about former students by name because of privacy issues unless they give me permission. But when they are out there performing an autobiographical show about their lives...

So I watched my former 4th grade student Ernie Silva perform his powerful one-man show, "Heavy Like the Weight of a Flame," with a different eye. As his former teacher and a member of the education deform resistance movement, I saw things that a casual viewer might not see. The show reinforced what every experienced teacher knows: it is not the so-called achievement gap or "teacher quality is the most important element" - blah, blah, blah - but the street gap faced by most Black and Latino kids compared to the daily life experience faced by middle class kids.

Ernie's story may be unique but it is also in many ways typical of kids growing up in the projects and on the streets of Williamsburg in the 1980's. There was lots of danger all around. Ernie faced it all. Shots fired at a party with one slicing a hole through his shirt. Being stopped by cops pointing guns in his face. Drugs, drugs, drugs - everywhere - in his own house where he was the youngest of 13 children and his brother, destined to die young, was a heavy user. And the other brother in prison who also died. He ended up riding freight trains across the country.

Ernie became a street performer doing break dancing when he was 12 and still a 6th grader. One thing led to another over the next few years and he started doing stand up. His bio states he became an obscene hooky player and started using his train passes to travel around the city looking for comedy clubs instead of going to school (he attended Murray Bergtraum HS). I won't get into the rest of his journey that led to a scholarship to a graduate acting program at USC. He lives in LA now.

Ernie did not face the so-called achievement gap in reading. He was in one of the two best classes I ever had in terms of academic skills (either 1982 or 1983) in terms of achievement and 75% of the children in that class (which I only got because of a threatened grievance) were reading on or above grade level. They wouldn't have been in that class otherwise since classes were grouped strictly by reading scores. Their math was probably not as good but generally they were at a pretty high level. What needs to be pointed out is that most of these kids walked into school as 4 year olds (the top level neighborhood kids usually attended pre-k) with some level of skills and the teachers nurtured these skills.

Ernie talks about how he was a voracious reader. Shakespeare and he was the only one in his house who watched Masterpiece Theater. Friends and family told him: "You can't change things with all that garbage you read" and "knowledge is dangerous and raises questions." Mostly these questions took the form of "What the f!"

Ernie's teachers through elementary school were experienced teachers who were at the top of their game. That class was pretty much together from pre-k through 6th grade. The bottom classes also had the same teachers and the academic results were very different.

There were only 2 classes on the grade in those years at my school as we had lost lots of population due to tenements being torn down - which by the way automatically raised our scores as the project families were more stable than the tenement kids. Ernie was a project kid. The difference in reading ability between the top and bottom classes was very wide. One of the best teachers in my school had the other (bottom) class and she told me she had a tough time that school year. Thank goodness for the UFT contract or my principal would never have given me that class without my threat to grieve it. The next year we reversed positions as the contract demanded. My principal generally violated the contract and I was one of the only teachers who demanded my rights be honored.

I attended the show with Dina, another student from the same class, who I hadn't seen in 25 years. We caught up during intermission. He taught in NYC high schools for years and keeps track of his former students. He was the best math student I ever had and one of the brightest students. He and his sisters' journeys are also interesting and instructive and illustrate how very bright kids in places like Williamsburg have to take routes - like through the military - that middle class kids don't have to face.

I know that anecdotal stories are not considered "data" but the follow-up stories teachers who spend many years in one community hear inform their knowledge and understanding of what it will take to make real changes and why so many of us are ed deform resisters. Joel Klein and Teach for America tell their minions there are no excuses and they often end up discounting trying to address the "street." This is misleading to young teachers who must have an understanding of the "street" and how it transcends the question of reading and math score data. Having such an understanding - which only comes to white middle class teachers through years of experience and involvement in the lives of their children - is a building block toward becoming a more effective teacher.

I want to stress that I also do not believe in making excuses. Teachers have to believe in every student's potential and do their best to help them fulfill that potential. But there are bigger issues that must be addressed that are way beyond the teacher. Indeed, it was that understanding that pushed me into political activism by my 4th year of teaching. It was the first time I became active – the 60's passed me by – and my activism was driven by the kids.

During our reminiscences with Dino, he had lots of memories of my classroom (my giant room) and the trips - the time I loaded him and 5 other kids into my car and took then to my house after school as a reward for good behavior, how he was car sick and barfed in my driveway – sure ways to get a SCI investigation today - I hope the statute of limitations have expired.

Contrary to the Ed Deformers, I do not take the position that teachers are the major influences in these kids' lives, but are small pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle.

Seeing Ernie perform was special for me. He managed to work my name into the show ("Mom, my teacher Mr. Scott, gave me an A on my science exam today").

I didn't go out with Ernie and his crew after the show, though invited. The other former student joked that he was waiting for me to leave before lighting up because he didn't me to see him smoking. I thought I was a pretty casual teacher and things like that wouldn't matter. But teachers have an impact in ways that are beyond our imagination.


Ernie has two more shows left (Weds Apr. 14 and Thurs Apr 15 at 8pm) before he heads back to LA and I may see it again on Thurs). His show is part of the 5th annual The One Festival at La Tea theater at 107 Suffolk St. The cost is $20. If Joel Klein and any other ed deformers want to go it is my treat.


Add-Ons:
I just got this email from Lisa Donlan that touches on the issues raised here discussing the
"soft bigotry of low expectations and the belief that the condition of poverty compromises human development is what we need to reform since we see this belief manifest in schools where teachers believe they can not teach kids who are not ready."

My response is that poverty determines where you grow up and that has more of an impact than schools or teacher expectations.


*I will add the story later of why I had to grieve for that class and all the manipulations my principal went through to screw me.

Pallas Responds to Tisch on Teacher Quality Issues, Value-Added ---and more

When data rating teachers based on student outcomes comes up in conversation and on blogs, the first thing I hear teachers say is, "How can I be compared to teachers who teach at schools like Stuyvesant?" When I raise the value-added concept, most pretty much have no idea what I am talking about and I blame the UFT which does not do education, but propaganda.

Value-added attempts to remove the difference between kids' poverty levels and other issues by trying to compare performances by similar students - apples to apples. At some point teachers can even be compared to each other based on how the same kids performed in their particular classes. Supposedly. But all issues point to flawed models.

An excellent essay by Aaron Pallas at Gotham addresses many of these issues. (For those not aware, Pallas was a Jennifer Jennings (Eduwonkette) mentor at Columbia and blogged under the Skoolboy mantle.) There's so much meat here, that I pretty much took a few excerpts at random. Read it all.

"I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child’s achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that’s simply not true. Family background continues to be the dominant factor. But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it’s a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line.
----
it’s striking that the recommendations single out value-added student assessment data as components of both the portfolios of candidates for professional certification and of the profiles of certifying institutions. Simply put, the technology for using value-added student assessment data for these purposes is not ready for prime time, and likely will not be for many years to come. One major obstacle is the lack of reliable and valid measures of student performance that can serve as the basis for value-added assessments of teacher effectiveness.
----
I’m saying to Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch, “Clean up the state assessment system — and take the time to do it right. Then we can talk about value-added assessment.”

But beyond the many questions about value-added effects on students’ test scores, we should be asking, how do we assess a teacher’s contributions to other learning outcomes? Surely we care about more than test scores. What are good measures of a teacher’s contributions to preparing students to be competent citizens in our democracy? How much are the Board of Regents and the State Education Department willing to invest in creating measures that will capture how well teachers teach students to think, question and act?

A brief vignette may reveal the challenge. It’s January, and Ms. Bilsky, a fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx, is teaching a math lesson. The subject is geometry, and the lesson is about how to classify angles as either acute or obtuse. The topic is a standard from the state’s math core curriculum. In the middle of the lesson, Rashid, a boy in the class, audibly aims a racial slur at his classmate Javier. Ms. Bilsky hears it, but she chooses to ignore it, instead plowing ahead with the lesson. At the end of the year, the students in Ms. Bilsky’s class did a bit better on the state math assessment than the students in other fourth-grade classrooms in the Bronx.

Now, is that good teaching?

The value-added assessment will tell us that it is good teaching.

Now this essay is what I call good teaching by Professor Pallas. I hope Regent leader Meryl Tisch and new State Ed commish Steiner learned something, but somehow I doubt it.

I might also add this question: How come college professors like Pallas and parent activists like Leonie Haimson can do so much effective defenses of teachers than the UFT and AFT?

Teachers are the best indicator.....blah, blah, blah

I just heard it again on NPR in a Beth Fertig report:

Someone she was interviewing said, "Teachers are the best indicator of whether a child will succeed or fail." No follow-up or questioning of whether there is any basis to this claim, other than the usual, "research shows." What research shows? I bet my pension that whatever research that shows Teachers are the best indicator of whether a child will succeed or fail can be countered by just as much research that shows that socio-economics is the best indicator of whether a child will succeed or fail. I guess I wasted my 15 minute conversation with Fertig last week trying to point out just how ridiculous this statement is.

Should we measure the success or the failure of the current state of investigative education reporting based on the quality of the individual reporters? I've heard plenty of excuses from reporters that there are staff cuts and the papers don't support investigative reporting.

Try this one out and fill in the blanks:

[Policemen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, add your own] are the best indicators of whether a [crime victim, war, patient, defendant, add your own] will succeed or fail.

By the way, have you seen the stories on the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was, aside from everything else, considered an incompetent doctor. He supposedly saw an average of one patient a week and his supervisors discussed how to get rid of him but did nothing because, as one supposedly said, "You know how hard it is to get rid of a doctor."

So where's the race to the top in the health care debate about removing bad doctors? It all goes to show that the blame the teacher mentality is all part of THE PLAN also [Obama Supports Demise of Public Option in Education] to undermine public education.

If you clicked on the link above to my posting on THE PLAN, make sure to go to Perimeter Primate's great post.

Slugging it Out Over ATRs at Gotham, Part 1

Ariel Sacks, a 4th year middle school teacher in Brooklyn, has written a piece on ATRs at Gotham that has ignited a fire storm. See ATRs in the Teachers Lounge.

There are 60 c0mments and counting, with all sides chipping in. The Fiorillo comments are always worth tracking, as are Mr. Talk and Michael M. Of course, I agree with their sentiments. Sacks is undergoing quite a thrashing, while being defended by the usual anti-teacher crowd. She seems to really resent having people around her school who she feels don't work as hard as her but get paid more. It seems logical to some people that she is right. Naturally, I don't agree.

More interesting is the hysteria over the possibility that there are some potentially bad teachers out there. HELLO!

Believe me, I had my share of bad teachers as a kid and saw a few as a teacher. But the overwhelming majority of teachers were competent, though I think the number of great/bad teachers would come out to about the same numbers. In fact, most teachers are pretty good but few are great. Yet the ed deformers predicate their program on having all teachers be great. That's like saying you cannot have a good baseball game unless all players are a the level of Willie Mays.

No matter how hard people huff and puff to get rid of bad teachers - for instance, measure them by test scores and I bet you lose as many good ones as bad ones. In fact I surmise more honest teachers who understand and try to teach realistically will go down the drain, while the free loaders will figure out the easy ways to get better scores and never worry about really trying to teach in the best manner that meets the needs of the kids.

Look at the numbers of teachers and how many leave the job in droves within 5 years - both good and bad. The replacement factor automatically brings in a new crop of bad (and good) teachers with every round. These people get to experiment on the kids for a few years until they are denied tenure. Think of the effort - and hot air - spewing forth about removing teachers. I would rather have a 10 year bad teacher than a 2 year bad teacher. Either way, you're going to get them anyway.

My answer it to figure out a way to make the best use of whatever talents they have. There is really a lot of useful work to do in a school and some would rather do any work other than teach.

Not to say that there are impossible cases that bug their colleagues even more than the outside "experts" like Kristof and Brooks. I always believed if teachers ran the schools - even hiring the principal (along with parents) - their fellow teachers who were goof-offs would shape up or ship out. And there are certainly a bunch of people who are actually competent but don't want to work very hard or don't think much of the kids.

By the way, there are teachers who don't like kids all that much but actually teach pretty well and there are teachers who love the kids but can't teach their way out of a paper bag. There are teachers who put in a tremendous amount of time and those who don't, but don't judge them by that factor. I had to put in time because I was not organized. We should factor in the organized factor in talking about good teachers. I could get in front of a class on a dime and teach my ass off with almost no prep. Creativity sometimes seemed to flow out of me. Other times not. Getting the stuff ready drove me crazy, as did marking papers. So if you saw me in my various roles I played as a teacher, you could find many levels of competency from bad to sometimes great. (I do think today I would be a very different teacher than I was. But certainly not in the world of BloomKlein.)

Want to think about bad and good teachers? Think back to the ones you had as a kid and rate them on a 1-5 scale. Now if your kids had to rate you as a teacher, how do you think you would do? What about parents rating you? What about the principal? And your colleagues like Ariel Sacks? Better not go there. I bet the numbers might vary considerably depending on the audience rating you. Then factor in the scores your kids get on tests as your rating. How would that change the way you teach? Not for the better, I bet, though the lower level, non creative types would do better.

And by creative, I do not mean drawing pretty pictures, but creativity in reaching deep into the minds of kids and coming up with ways to hold their interest and stimulate them, a skill great teachers have, but a skill not values in the world of ed deform.


Part 2 will address the hysteria over bad teachers compared to other professions that can harm kids much worse than a bad teacher: police harassing black kids, lower quality doctors and other health professionals in the poorer neighborhoods, less competent military leaders when poor kids get to Afghanistan? Lousy court appointed lawyers to defend the overwhelmingly high numbers of Black kids than white kids - no one want to talk about that gap. Oh yeah, and when they have passed through the school to prison pipeline, they meet a few prison guards that just may be more harmful than the bad teachers.

A Message From Uncle Joel on Gates Teacher Quality Study

... and the wonderfully collaborative UFT. I can save them the money and predict the outcome. Just measure teacher quality based on test scores. And salary: lower = higher quality teaching. Joel uses his favorite expression, "research shows" without showing what the research is. Leonie Haimson asks:
"How much you want to bet that class size will be systematically excluded in this study, just as it was in the small schools evaluations funded by Gates?"

Dear Fools Who Sign Up For This Sham,

As you know, many factors contribute to student achievement. But research shows that teachers can influence student learning more than anything else in a school. We know this, but we still do not have a full range of reliable and consistent methods for assessing effective teaching to use in our classrooms. That is why the Department of Education is collaborating with the United Federation of Teachers on a two-year research project called the Measures of Effective Teaching study. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the study seeks to develop fair, accurate, and useful tools to determine what really contributes to effective teaching and learning. Participation in the study is voluntary, but if you are eligible, I strongly encourage you to sign up.

Over the next two years, independent researchers will be studying classroom practices here and across the country using a broad array of measures including video observations, surveys, and student growth. The goal is to capture the full range of what teachers do, and how they affect student outcomes, in order to create multiple measures of effective teaching.

You can learn more about the study and find out if you’re eligible to participate by clicking here. If you are eligible, you should complete the Principal Interest Form. You need to fill out this form to ensure that your school will be considered. Later this week, teachers will be invited to complete a similar form. The deadline to submit forms is October 22. If you are selected to participate, your school will receive $1,500 over the two years of the study, and each participating teacher will also receive $1,500.

We know that teachers teach best when they understand what’s expected of them, know how best to reach their goals, and feel assured that no single, snapshot measure will determine the course of their careers. That, and improving the likelihood of success for our students, is what this project is all about.

Joel I. Klein

On Teacher Quality: Damn That Fiorillo Fellow

Will I ever get to write something in depth for this blog ? Every time I sit down to write something brilliant - which 99% of the time doesn't get from my mind to my fingertips - someone like Michael Fiorillo goes ahead and breaks into my brain and steals it. I've often touched on the issue of why teacher quality is so stressed as the key factor in our profession while other jobs like medical, legal, political, police, corporate, etc. are ignored. Now along comes Michael Fiorillo who puts it all into such a neat package in this comment at Gotham Schools, which I would categorize as, "I wish I had written it."

There is a new comment on:

More than 500 extra teachers rated "unsatisfactory" this year

Author: Michael Fiorillo

As a teacher, I'd be the last one to minimize our (potential) importance in the lives of students, but as others have pointed out, "Why the obsessive focus on incompetent teachers, to the complete exclusion of other professions and fields?"

The US has a shamefully high infant and maternal death rate: why aren't OB-GYNs being targeted with the same passion?

The US has lower life expectancy than other developed nations: where are the witchhunts against primary care doctors and other health care professionals (let alone the real "death panels," the insurers)?

The US incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, most of them minority, and many of them warehoused in private, for-profit prisons, providing a structural incentive for continuing incarceration: where are the corporate think tanks, foundations and PR firms making noise about this "Civil Rights Issue of Our Time?"

The reason those debates have so little "juice" is because these fields have already been privatized, with free reign given to those who would count, measure, control and commodify and market everything. Public education, along with Social Security, is the last major universal, public good left to be taken over by the hedge funds, private equity parasites and venture capitalists. Thus, this unending campaign against teachers and their unions, and this absurd debate about teacher quality.

I'm not proposing witchhunts. My point is that this very discussion proves the success of corporate ed deform in framing the issue of education solely as one of teacher quality. Even the unions have allowed themselves to be suckered into this twisted, unfair discourse, which they can only lose.

Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers.

Until we open up that debate, teachers will be shouted into a corner by arrogant know-nothings with thick wallets, pursuing their own interests in the name of "The Underprivileged."

As for edu-scientist (now that's a hot one), I'd like to quote Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and early computer scientist, and coiner of the term "cyber:"

"The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and became the mode in the social sciences... so the economists (MF: and "psychometricians" as well the
overwhelming majority of ideologically-subsidized "education researchers") have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus."

Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc."

I know this dates me, but every time I hear a DOE/Ed Deform mouthpiece say "Research shows that...", while pulling some self-serving nonsense out of their butt, I think of the old Trident gum ad: "Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum."

Yeah, that's the ticket.

See all comments at Gotham on this post:
http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/20/more-teachers-rated-unsatisfactory-last-year-tenured-and-not/#comments

TQ and Class SIze

John Thompson has made some great comments at this debate at Gotham:

"I written about the mess four years ago when we became The Wire. How did we
solve it? We just hired more teachers the next year. All of a sudden, problems
that seemed impossible seemed manageable. Then when we we back to the normal
allotment, problems increased again."

I responded:
Just hire more teachers to solve basic problems, the notorious "throwing cash at the problem" we see debunked by the ed deformers. I wonder where you guys got these teachers from? Were they vetted for quality? This is what the deformers say- teacher quality is more important than class size. But what you did was raise the quality of all teachers because TQ does not exist in a vacuum.

When I raised this issue at a forum with Rotherham and Russo, Jennifer Medina from the NY Times, and Richard Colvin of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University. Colvin was incensed when I compared class size in urban areas to suburban schools, saying how the cost was astronomical. "Some people drive Mercedes but not everyone needs to drive a Mercedes," he said. "You can still get around in a Toyota."

Of course, when the financial crisis hit and Bear Sterns and AIG needed enormous funding, all the money that would have enable urban kids to sit in a Mercedes magically appeared.

In NYC they supposedly cut crime by putting lots more police on the streets. They were not vetted for quality first. Some were good and some were bad, but their very presence as a resource had an impact. I say instead of using that stimulus money to reward school systems that kill tenure or expand charter schools, try a few experiments by inundating the very worst schools with masses of teachers, social workers and other services - sort of an expansion of the Harlem Children's Zone. But no one wants to try that. Better to target teachers and unions by using the "it's so hard to get rid of bad teachers" sob story as an excuse not to reduce class size.

Ed Notes Foundation to Fund Microsoft Reform

The Ed Notes multi-billion dollar foundation has announced a software reform movement with the aim of getting Bill Gates' Microsoft corporation to produce software that won't cause your computer to want to pack its bags and head off to Australia.


"Since Microsoft resists the expansion of competitive operating systems, browsers and other software that would lead to higher quality products and Microsoft monopolists resist measuring and rewarding effectiveness, this is a long overdue reform effort," said Ed Notes spokes animal Pinky, the cat.


Ed Notes spokes animal, Pinky

"In fact evidence shows no connection between the quality of Microsoft software and most of the measures used to determine the pay of its employees, who appear to be compensated by the length of computer code they write, rather than how well it works. The quality and superiority of software from companies like Apple -- these all are mostly irrelevant to the market place, with Microsoft using ruthless tactics like sending blue screens of death that have been one of the leading causes of computer suicides."

New measures of measuring the effectiveness of Microsoft's software engineers will be implemented. One purpose of measurement would be to deploy the best software writers to the neediest departments of Microsoft, and pay them accordingly; another, to fire the worst. "But the main point," Pinky said, "is that effective software engineering can be taught: The biggest part is taking the people who want to be good -- and helping them."

See Norms Notes Bill Gates is as Ignorant as Bill Maher

Related: The Bill Gates Joke Page

Teacher Quality and Class Size

I have to go back to the Leonie Haimson well for this post. It's like I have all these thoughts incoherently wrestling with themselves. The price of aging brain cells. And then Leonie, like a cowboy with a rope, writes something that corals them into semi-rationality. I've been meaning to write about the heroic teacher concept you see plastered all over subway cars.

All you need is a quality teacher with proven high test score to handle this crowd.

Hey, I was one of these heroic teachers in my early years, devoting my entire life to the classroom. Then came the realization that there was a lot of socio-economic stuff going on - which led to the idea that becoming politically active was as important as the work I was doing in the classroom. But that's a story for another time.

In The myth of the great teacher, hopefully euthanized once and for all on the NYC Public School Parent blog, Leonie credits recent writings by Diane Ravitch and Skoolboy (Aaron Pallas) for taking apart those ridiculous Nicholas Kristof education columns.

Leonie sums up with

In fact, one study from San Diego cited by the report shows that “35 percent of teachers initially ranked in the top quintile remain there in the second year while 30 percent fall into the first or second quintiles of the quality distribution in year two. Apparently, even using different tests can affect the stability of estimated teacher effects.

Of course all the phony ed reform crowd cares about what can be measured like test scores. Read any teacher blog and you will see the ability to deal with kids' behavior effectively – and I mean going beyond simply controlling a class (some teachers I saw used to do it brutally) but with some level of humanity – is often considered by other teachers one of the highest levels of skills and probably a key indicator of teacher quality. But there is no way to measure this skill, so out the window it goes.

Now, this high level teaching skill is most affected by class size.

In the fall of 1979 we had three 6th grade classes, all with fairly low class sizes. As usual, they were grouped homogeneously. In my school traditionally, the administration (old hand teachers who rose through the ranks) made a conscious effort to keep class size in the more difficult classes to a lower number, enough of an incentive for some people to volunteer to take the position every year just for the low class size.

This policy changed in 1979 with a new test-driven politically appointed administrator with no teaching experience who ignored these finer points. But this was her first full year and she hadn't gotten total control yet.

Of course 30 years of fog clogs the brain but the numbers were from around 20 in the 6-3 class to about 27 in the 6-1. I had the 6-2 with around 22. The bottom class with the neediest kids was below 20. For all of us the situation was a unique opportunity and I would guess by any measure of Teacher Quality we were better than ever.

But being a doom and gloom guy, from the first day, I expected them to not allow this to continue and that they would cut one class. I had the lowest seniority, so I knew it would be mine.

The district made the decision to cut a position in December, of all times. The 3 classes were cut to 2 with each class having 35-37. (I had one student who 15 years later when she was a parent herself, used to complain about what happened - why did you get rid of me she used to cry?)

They took the top half reading scores and folded them into the top class, which turned heaven to purgatory. But for the teacher with the more difficult class, going from 19 kids to 35 was hell. But both of the teachers were extremely skilled in dealing with kids and they persevered.

I was placed in a special ed cluster position teaching 4 emotionally handicapped and one CRMD (mentally retarded class) a day. The class sizes were 10 with a para. It was my first experience with kids who could be so irrational or such slow learners, that someone like me with no training didn't have a clue how to teach. In the interest of full disclosure, I ended up there because the teacher with least seniority was bumped. (I know, I know, the attacks on union rules will be forthcoming but that I was an experienced teacher vs. a newbie even with training - I call it more than a wash.)

If someone checked my TQ factor they would have seen a serious drop from just a few weeks before. But being a prep coverage position, I was able to recoup after each class without too much damage and began to figure things out. The experience taught me that many of the techniques I had learned in over a decade of teaching needed modification.

Which goes to show that Teacher Quality is not an absolute, but a moving target that can change by the year, the month, the day, the hour. And in the 1979-80 school year, for me, by the minute.

I went racing back to regular ed the next year. It wasn't until the crack babies started filtering into regular ed a few years later that we all began to see that same irrationality of the kids. My 79-80 experience did make a difference.

Resources:
Skoolboy

Why Are People So Gullible About Miracle Cures in Education?The Miracle Teacher, Revisited

Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times.

My last post NY Times Ends Black Out on Class Size - Sort Of
David Pakter left a comment with a list of private school tuition in NYC where parents pay all that money for low class sizes. He also sent it to the NY Times.

TFA, TQ and NTP

Teach for America Trolls Pay A Visit

Ever wonder how people who work Teach for America spend their days?

Their trolls search the web for negative publicity.

Thus, not long after posting Studies Show Teach for America Teachers Are... , Ed Notes got these visits from TFA offices in 2 cities:

Organization TEACH FOR AMERICA/ MCGRAW COMM , Washington
Organization TEACH FOR AMERICA, Chicago

Must be a light week at TFA.


Teacher Quality and the New Teacher Project

There are other trolls out there who tell us about "studies" and "research" with vague references. often by biased self-interest groups. Joel Klein and his minions do this all the time. As does the press. Eduwonkette and Skoolboy have pretty well demolished the "teacher quality studies show" line of bullshit.

This post Skoolboy Savages Kristof was visited by "Jacob" a Socrates-like clone (Socrates posts responses to attacks on the phony ed reformers all over the web under various aliases and pretenses and clearly shows signs of being a paid responder) who disingenuously wrote:

There is actually ample evidence, see any report by the new teacher project, the national counsel on teacher quality, or the national governors association. For information regarding the effects of effective teachers see the work of Sanders or Goldhaber among others.

To use research by the New Teachers Project is akin to accepting a North Korean study showing the high level of democracy in that nation.

Rebecca responded:

The "teacher quality" debate is about classism-pure and simple.
Have you ever noticed that the debate rarely centers around middle class suburban students and their relationship to their teachers? Why do you suppose that is?

It's because most middle class suburban children arrive at school with their needs already met. Their teachers simply teach and miraculously the children learn.

The debate is an attempt to draw attention away from the vast inequities in lifestyle, health care, nutrition and wages which exist in high-needs schools.
It is an abomination that private interests push the teacher debate as a way to avoid the horrendous class divisions which they have helped to create.

It is laughable that the above comment directs attention to the New Teacher Project for evidence.

The same organization that consistently short changes high-need children by sending in poorly trained teachers?

When the truth comes out about what these private interests have been doing, the public will be outraged.

Make no mistake about it-it will come out.
More importantly, however, how do these individuals live with themselves?

NYC Educator followed up:

The New Teacher Project takes millions from NYC, then writes reports suggesting we fire TPD teachers, twisting and manipulating statistics so outrageously that a layman like myself can detect it on one cursory reading. I wouldn't trust Tim Daly as far as I could throw him.

Incredible he can take all that money from Klein and have the audacity to present himself as an objective observer.

The Broads Breed

ENN is reporting the Eli and Edyth Broad (pronounced Brood) Foundation, the source of so much funding in undermining the urban public school systems (BloomKlein won the Broad prize for education "improvement" last year), has just given a whopping $400 million to a genetic institute, a joint venture by Harvard and MIT.

The money will be used to study the type of genetics that would produce teachers capable of eliminating the achievement gap.

"This is the cutting area of research. There is no more important issue the world faces than finding quality teachers and that will never happen without some genetic intervention," said a spokesperson.

Genetic manipulation of pre-determined embryos is expected to produce teachers who will:

• work 14 hour days without interruption
• teach class sizes of 40 and up without complaining
• never join a union

All candidates will be sterilized to assure they never have their own children who might interfere with the primary mission- to create millions of super human quality teachers.

Read the NY Times article here.

BloomKlein Model in the Land of Oz

I received an email from Trevor Cobbold, a parent activist, who is based in Canberra, Australia's capital and is involved with Save Our Schools Canberra.

He wrote an article for the Canberra Times addressing the situation in New York in terms of school reporting:

Ideology win in school reporting

The Rudd Government's ''education revolution'' is looking more and more like an extension of the Howard government's school policies. All the same elements are there choice and competition, reliance on markets, and now public reporting of school results.

The model for the new school reporting scheme comes direct from New York. Julia Gillard has been enthusing about the New York system ever since her audience with the New York schools chancellor, Joe Klein. She says she is ''inspired'' and ''impressed'' by Klein's model.

If Gillard had looked more closely, she would have seen major flaws.

The New York system produces unreliable and misleading comparisons of school performance and student progress. It is incoherent, can be used to produce league table,fails to compare like with like and is statistically flawed.

He goes on to cite Diane Ravitch and Jennifer Jennings (Eduwonkette) and concludes with:

Australia and Finland are two of the highest-achieving countries in the world in school outcomes according to the PISA surveys conducted by the OECD. Neither country got there by reporting school results.

Why the Rudd Government is choosing to emulate the reporting policies of much lower-performing countries such as the United States and United Kingdom can be explained only as a triumph of ideology over evidence.

Read the entire piece here.

Trevor also sent this blog site for reference.

http://www.futuredforum.blogspot.com/

I have disagreements on an article he wrote on class size at Save Our Schools where he talks about cost effectiveness and teacher quality as excuses not to jump into class size reduction across the board. While praising the STAR project, he also cites research on teacher quality, which no one seems to be able to define:

There is evidence that improving teacher quality contributes more to increasing student outcomes than class size reductions. Recent studies by Doug Harris and David Plank at Michigan State University and by Dylan Wiliam, Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, show larger improvements from increasing teacher ability and skills than by class size reductions.

Too many researchers have agendas based on where their funding is coming from and the TQ people have a lot more money than advocates for class size. I find it interesting that the "quality" issue is not raised when it comes to putting more police on the street to reduce crime or firemen on the job to cut down fires or doctors in emergency rooms.

I have to ask him what he thinks about all those Aussies Klein hired (at up to $1000 a day) to run around schools in NYC as consultants.


Personal Aussie Note
We visited Canberra in the early 90's to attend the Scherr scion's Bar Mitzvah. We had to smuggle in the yarmulkes - apparently it's tough to get them engraved in Canberra but I did manage to get them through customs despite the yarmulke sniffing dogs. The Scherrs, now living in Perth/Freemantle, stayed with us for 3 weeks last summer (and we're still talking.) Their son Sam is now 30 and a founding member of Capital City, a rock band in Australia. Dan Scherr, a native of the TenEyk housing project in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, keeps me informed of ed events in Western Australia.

Teacher Quality in Denver and New Orleans

As a corollary to the Teacher Quality, now being morphed into Teacher Effectiveness, post below this one, check out these stories:

From Denver, where the much lauded agreement by the union to agree to all sorts of incentives, seems to be in trouble. Now even before an extensive evaluation, the district wants to reopen negotiations.

John Hereford, a co-chairman of a committee on ProComp set up by A-Plus Denver, a nonprofit citizens’ group, said changes are necessary because the system does not appear to be operating as it should. “We know it is not affecting behavior as we had expected it to, and every year that goes by makes it that much harder to reform,” he said. “....letting ProComp drift into a base-pay-type system doesn’t have that surgically precise ability to affect and motivate teachers in an important and direct manner.”
teachers who opted into ProComp raised student test scores only slightly compared with their peers who did not take part in the pay plan.

This stuff is priceless. Gee whiz, you have to cough up a lot more money to get people to cheat enough to get those scores where the politicians want them.

And then comes the blame the union (which should be blamed by the teachers for agreeing to this stuff in the first place:

Brad Jupp, a senior policy adviser on ProComp to Superintendent Bennet, said he is disappointed that the union has sought conflict over the proposed changes.

Like the union is supposed to agree to something and when management is not happy with their own proposal, is supposed to lie down and give them what they want.

And finally,
“It is fair to say that, across the country, there are not many good, rigorous studies that show performance pay improves student performance,” said Paul Teske, the dean of the school of public affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver, who is conducting the independent study of ProComp that is due out next year.

Bet there never will be good rigorous studies that will give them what they want- if they take various forms of cheating into account.


New Orleans has only quality teachers
Teacher union watchdog/critic Mike Antonucci from EIA, who finds the holes in union press releases, seems willing to swallow a Paul Vallas report on progress in New Orleans without criticism or analysis. In this Intercepts post, Antonucci declares More good news from New Orleans.

After years of scrambling to find good teachers, many public schools in New Orleans have more aspiring teachers than they know what to do with as the new school year approaches. The explosion of interest in teaching here can also be attributed to the marketing techniques of programs like teachNOLA and Teach For America, which have used the Internet to spread the message among 20-somethings, in particular, that New Orleans is the place to be for young educators bent on change. The city’s growing reputation in education reform circles has fueled that message.

Where did all the bad Vallas news he left in previous posts in Chicago and Philadelphia go?

Here's the "good" news to Antonucci and the bogus ed reformers.

There's basically no more union in New Orleans and the public school system is being privatized. So there are no more excuses as the phony ed reformers have their perfect laboratory to try out all their schemes.

Here's the bad news. Nothing will change in the long-term for poor kids, many of whom never came back as the city is being gentrified.

We've always maintained that their "progress" means changing the kids or cheating. Follow the path of kids as they enter the job market to track real results. We have already begun to see complaints that these overly test-prepped kids are extremely limited once out of school. But the ed reformers and their corporate supporters don't seem to want much more.

If you missed it, see Michael Fiorillo's post a few days ago on the recent David Brooks NY Times column on education.

Nancy Flanagan's comment on the piece before this about teacher effectiveness is worth sharing if you missed it.

Nancy Flanagan said... Hey, thanks for the mention--and do check out the Center for Teaching Quality, which is as good as it gets.

Here's a story:
I am sitting on the dias with a researcher from Famous Research Org and a honcho from the US Department of Education at a conference convened around the issue of teacher quality. Of course, there are 200 people in the audience and perhaps 4 of them are actually classroom practitioners. But we're having a nice conference to discuss how to fix the, ummm, problems with teachers.

Person from USDOE says: We have now achieved a very high percentage of "highly qualified" teachers, through the impact of NCLB. We are turning now to "highly effective" teachers as our next goal. What's a highly effective teacher? One who leverages gains in test scores, of course. Soon, we will have data analysis systems in place in every state and will be able to identify teacher effectiveness such that we can lop off the bottom quartile of ineffective teachers (and replace them, no doubt, with novices who had high SAT scores, and thus are more promising).

I ask her: What is the USDOE doing to strengthen actual teaching--you know, the things teachers do that cause these gains?

Her response: We're agnostic about that. We don't care what teachers do--only about the measurable results that they get.

--
So there you have it. It's about quality teachers--not about quality teaching.

Teacher Quality and Working Conditions

I have issues with the very expression "Teacher Quality" because people all too often view TQ as digital - either you are or you aren't a QT – while I view it as analog - on a scale of say 1-10 that can vary depending on school conditions, the year, the time of day, a particular kid that bugs the hell out of you, a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, and who knows what else?

I also object that the phony ed reformers only want to look at TQ in terms of results on narrow high stakes tests. They have recently changed the vocabulary to "teacher effectiveness."

In the great debates with Teach for America teachers that we had here and at Chancellor's New Clothes, I noticed how so many of these newly minted current and already gone TFA teachers use the "teacher effectiveness" expression. TFA's certainly have all the jargon down.

I've been reading comments on various blogs from Nancy Flanagan, a long-time teacher, now retired, who thinks out of the box. She works with teachers on teacher quality issues and I promise to take a closer look at some of the work she is doing with the Center for Teacher Quality. Take a look at the link to working conditions.

Nancy recently left a comment at this Ed Notes post "Teacher Quality in Context".

Thanks for your acknowledgment of the excellent work done by the Center for TEACHING Quality, in North Carolina. CTQ is an organization dedicated to the idea of putting the teachers' voice into the policy-making process. That concept is played out in their sponsorship of the Teacher Leaders Network (see TEACHER magazine and EdWeek for lots of TLN teachers' essays and blogs)--as well as some great research (like the working conditions studies). One of their crown jewels is Teacher Solutions, a policy creation model where diverse groups of actual teachers come together to study key issues and issue reports and recommendations.

I emphasize "Teaching" because a lot of the issues you're discussing in this post turn on the distinction between selecting presumably good teachers vs. improving practice--teaching--in the teachers who are already in place in high needs schools. Making working conditions and professional learning better might go a lot further in fixing schools than sorting and selecting in the teacher pool. [my emphasis]

Nancy blogs at Teacher in a Strange Land.

I am interested in the focus on working conditions in many inner city schools. Some of my colleagues in buildings where charter schools have been put in place have pointed to a difference in working conditions. The teachers at Jamaica HS in Queens called it "educational apartheid" when 100 people showed up at the monthly meeting of what passes for a joke of a NYC Board of Ed (known as the PEP, but is actually the PEPLESS) to protest the difference in resources being given to a college prep school being added to their building while they were being starved. (See Gates Foundation Supports Apartheid from our post in May.)

I saw this occur when I did computer support at JHS 126 in Greenpoint in Brooklyn in the 90's when Bard HS took over the 4th floor which underwent a million dollar plus renovation while the junior high school's grades 7-9 were squeezed into the rest of the building. After a few years, Bard wanted the 3rd floor too and when denied, they left to push into a struggling elementary school on the lower east side. JHS 126 was left with a 4th floor full of half classrooms that could not fit a full public school class into them. We told that story back in November.

Here are a some comments on working conditions from a few blogs of young NYC teachers.

A 2nd year NYC teacher comments on working conditions at Miss Brave Teaches NYC:

...while on vacation last week I met up with a friend of mine from graduate school who now teaches at a private school in a wealthy suburb. She teaches for only two and a half hours a day, so the rest of her day is free for planning and grading, which means she never takes work home with her. She has no more than fifteen students in each class. She has an office with a computer provided to her by her school, which also paid for her to fly cross-country to national educator conferences. Her last day of school was at the beginning of June and she doesn't go back until after Labor Day, which means she gets a full three months off. And, most jaw-dropping of all, there is a chef at her school who cooks a delicious lunch for the staff every day! And to think, the teachers at my school are practically foaming at the mouth when we get a bagel breakfast twice a year. I was nearly salivating just listening to her describe those working conditions. When I told her that I'd had 420 students on my roster this past year, she exclaimed, "That's a school, Miss Brave! You were in charge of a whole school!" At one point, I inquired as to whether her school had a security guard; in response, she laughed at me.

As a chapter leader, I often asked my principal to hire a chef.

Mildly Melancholy is leaving a public school for a charter in Brooklyn:

What I do know and love is that the school has adequate facilities, and it has excellent resources. The teachers' room has a free copy machine (at my previous school, teachers had to buy a copy code [cheaply, but still] AND provide paper) and shelves of books, just sitting there (not stashed away in a secret room in a secret stairwell, covered in asbestos dust). Plenty of money for classroom books and supplies. Plenty of schoolwide expectations and reinforcement systems. A longer school day and a longer school year (several mandatory weeks in summer for students and teachers), but also a 10k raise.

Jeez. A copy machine in the teachers room.

I'm sure these gals are high level teachers no matter where they teach. But a career of bad working conditions take a toll. I can't tell you how much time and effort it took to navigate the "system" to get resources. The road blocks take a toll over time. I found myself beginning to wear down sometime in my 17th-19th year, almost totally as a self-contained classroom teacher in grades 4-6, especially with an administrator who had only an interest in test scores and actually discouraged any creativity.

Probably why I took a sabbatical to get an MA in computer science around my 20th year.

When I came back, she maneuvered me out of the self-contained class and into a cluster, which I turned into a computer job. I loved building a computer program from scratch for the next 10 years.

But my best work as a teacher was behind me.

Teacher Quality in Context...

...at Eduwonkette's place.

I have so much to say about the teacher quality issue that I can never properly organize it into a coherent piece and end up putting bits and pieces in various comments. Some day ... when it's not beach weather. But thank goodness there are people who are coherent out there.

One of the things ya gotta love about 'Wonkette is that she gets it about teacher quality. You knew that on her first day of blogging back on Sept. 23, 2007 when she was still at Blogger. (Is it not even a year when she seems to have been around forever?)

Her first week's posts are worth rereading:

Tunnel vision syndrome - The teacher effectiveness debate focuses only on a narrow set of the goals of public education, which may endanger other important goals we have for our schools.

No teacher is an island - The teacher effectiveness debate ignores that teachers play many roles in a school. Experienced teachers often serve as anchoring forces in addition to teaching students in their own classrooms. If we don’t acknowledge this interdependence, we may destabilize schools altogether.

Ignoring the great sorting machine - If students were randomly assigned to classrooms and schools, measuring teacher effects would be a much more straightforward enterprise. But when Mrs. Jones is assigned the lowest achievers, and Mrs. Scott’s kids are in the gifted and talented program, matters are complicated immeasurably.

Overlooking the oops factor - Everything in the world is measured with error, and the best research on teacher effectiveness takes this very seriously. Yet many of those hailing teacher effectiveness proposals missed out on Statistics 101.

Disregarding labor market effects - The nature of evaluation affects not only current teachers, but who chooses to join the profession in the future and where they are willing to teach. If we don’t acknowledge that kids that are further behind are harder to pull up, we risk creating yet another incentive for teachers to avoid the toughest schools.

She followed up on Jan. 31 soon after moving over the Ed Week:

Today she adds a piece on Jim Spillane's research with this intro:

The current policy discourse about teachers and teaching in the U.S. emphasizes the recruitment and retention of “high-quality” teachers, defined either by the teachers’ credentials, or their value-added influence on students’ achievement, or both. It has not, in skoolboy’s view, paid sufficient attention to the ways in which the school serves as a context for teachers’ work, shaping the conditions under which a teacher might be more or less successful in advancing students’ learning. Teachers don’t teach in a vacuum; the ability of the leaders in a school to set a direction, secure resources, facilitate professional development, and build a culture for teachers to work in concert has a lot to do with whether a teacher can be successful.

Read it all here.

And check out some of the stuff at the center for teacher quality (though on a cursory look I probably have some issues with their positions. However, their work on working conditions and how they affect TQ looks interesting.

I'm looking for a grant to do some research on how teacher effectiveness dropped when Bloomberg forced every school to install Snapple machines. Would I have to drink the stuff myself?

On Good and Bad Teachers

As the "put a quality teacher in every pot" debate rages, some more thoughts:

Many good teachers - if not more - leave the system or are promoted out of the classroom each year. But poor teachers leave too, an awful lot of them becoming supervisors. The replacements will fall into the same bell curve, especially first year teachers. So focusing all the reforms on removing them from the system is a losing game and the right wing and Dems 08 and Ed Sector types are using the quality teacher issue as a diversion.

On good teachers, we are not saying they are not important - but the witch hunts and the use of barely trained newbies does nothing to improve the overall teaching core while we think lower class sizes and some kind of internship for newbies would lift all boats.

Teachers should take a good look at their school and all the schools they have been in and make a list: great, good, average, poor, horrible and I just can't tell.

When it comes to bad teachers, In fact fellow teachers don't really know all that much. You know who does? The kids and their parents probably have the best feel for a good teacher than anyone else.

Think back to the teachers you had and rate as many as you can remember on a scale from 1-5 in terms of overall quality. Would you give the highest ratings to the teachers of classes where you scored very high on regents? Maybe. If you do well in school, you feel better about the teacher.

But are there other factors?

Thinking of yourself as a student might give a much better insight into quality teaching than viewing it as a colleague. Or a supervisor. A supervisor's list of who are good and bad teachers might look very different.

If you are a parent, think about the teachers your children had and rate them? Based on what? How happy your child was? Grades? How they related to you?

We might get the better insights into teachers from students and parents than almost any other method. Yet they are totally left out of the equation.

Audio of Ed Sector Teacher Quality Event

I spoke to someone today who insisted that teacher quality is a separate entity from conditions. I argued that TQ is very variable and dependent on things like class size, the type of students, the general conditions in the school. Even time of day - like most any teacher will agree that under equal conditions, they are more effective in the AM than in the PM. It makes sense since everyone is more tired. This is not to say that if you get your best class at the end of the day you won't be energized.

Almost every teacher I talk to signs on to the quality teacher debate as if it's a digital concept: 0 if not a quality teacher, 1 if you are a quality teacher. I look at TQ as analog - it fluctuates on let's say a scale of 1-10. Now there may be some teachers who are in a range of say 5-7 generally and others might be a 3-5.
What we would hope for is some consistency. Would you want a 10 20% of the time who can float down to a 3 when he is depressed? (It does happen). Or a consistent 7?

Of course the big bugaboo in all this: what determines the quality of a teacher? The ed reformers have only one response: results on high stakes tests with the added bonus of value-added which tracks the growth of a child over time and attempts to find what part in that growth an individual teacher had.

They might as well rate teachers on the real growth of the child - how many inches taller they get the year you have them. "My class grew an aggregate total of 5 feet." BONUS!

Can't you just see schools slipping human growth hormone into the milk and cookies?

But let's go back to the TQ debate as if these factors didn't exist and we really had an effective ratign system that went beyond the test. The 5% that many people agree that are at the low end of TQ - say 1 or 2 all the time are the main focus of the so-called reform movement that includes assaults on seniority and the union contract. Call it the "put a Quality Teacher in every classroom" concept.

Like a chicken in every pot. (But it is a quality chicken?)

All this reform aimed at 5%. Like they are the ones responsible for an entire nation falling behind in the global economy. Give me a break. If principals could remove whoever they wanted tomorrow, these people would be replaced with a similar percentage of low quality teachers.

Start off with the idea that first year teachers are lower quality than they will be in their 2nd year and 2nd year teachers are lower quality than in their 3rd -- oops! (Half the TFA people are gone before they get to the 3rd year.) Also assume a % of new teachers no matter how hard they are trying are just not all that competent in their first year. Given the numbers that don't finish the year, I bet it is higher than 5%.

Thus, my theory that 5% of the entire teaching corps will fall into the lower end no matter what is done. As would a similar percentage of cops, doctors, lawyers, plumbers - you name it. I find it interesting that there's a witch hunt for teachers but not for bad doctors who have better than tenure - the AMA.

Check out the ednotes analysis of the biased Education Sector teacher survey which didn't ask about the impact of class size because the Ed Sector is totally on board with the usual suspects on this issue. Read the Ed Notes post exposing some of the biased questions here.

David B has broken the Ed Sector audio of the presentation of the survey on May 7 into 3 parts so you can listen to them in segments – if you can stand it. There were some teachers present, including one from a NYC middle school and the president of the Providence TU.

Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3

Rotherham Poses Teacher Quality vs, Class Size - Again

Andy is at it again over at Eduwonk.

Small classes are not a silver bullet and research pretty clearly indicates that it's a much weaker -- and more expensive -- strategy than some others, like improving teacher effectiveness. That's especially true where there are a dearth of qualified applicants for teaching jobs so reducing class size merely exacerbates quality problems. The research and evidence base here is pretty clear and it is what it is, so contra what a lot of the advocates it's not something that you get to agree or disagree with any more than you can agree or disagree with gravity. The bottom line is that teacher quality matters more.

I followed Andy's advice (when he called me crazy) and checked and rechecked that teacher survey looking for a question that would ask teachers how they viewed the teacher quality vs. class size reduction. Maybe I missed - it didn't seem to be asked. One would think, given the nature of this post, that question would be fundamental. But he is not really interested in what teachers think about this issue because the answer is obvious. That teacher quality across the board (except maybe the 5% edge) would improve across the board.

And it would be nice to see links to the research that "proves" teacher quality matters more than class size reduction.

It is also interesting that the cost argument is used when it comes to class size reduction, the real reason teacher quality is the hot new thing in rejecting calls for a serious investment in education equal to say, Bear Sterns bailouts or wars.

A recent presentation at Columbia U about the Tennessee study on class size impact also took some aspects of teacher quality into account and came up with the opposite conclusion.

The "research" on teacher quality - based on what factors, by the way - as is the teacher survey – it's about a political agenda, not education reform. How disappointing to the Education Sector that the onslaught going on against teachers due to the "reforms" being pushed by them has resulted in teachers feeling a greater need for a union.

We'll expound more on how the survey was designed to seek out making inroads into the teaching corps to push this agenda.

Teacher Quality at the Education Sector... a stacked deck?

UPDATE:
WARNING: Read at your own peril.

The following post has been declared as gibberish and unhinged at Rotherham's Eduwonk world of ed reform fantasyland and this blogger has received an official Eduwonk "crazy" designation, not the first time we have been so designated. Just ask former principal(s), District Superintendent(s), UFT District rep(s), etc.

While over there, make sure to read Edwonk's "unfair and unbalanced report" on the ATR situation in NYC. Then you make the call as to whether you have accidentally fallen into a science fiction blog.


This morning at 9 AM in Washington DC, the Education Sector will listen to the voice of teachers – at a time no working teacher can attend.

Teacher Voice: How Teachers See the Teacher Quality Debate
May 7, 2008 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Capital Hilton)

The announcement says:
As policymakers, teachers unions, and other stakeholders react to changing demands on the nation's public education system, there is considerable debate about what teachers think and what they want. Too often assumptions define this conversation rather than actual evidence of what teachers want and how teachers see their profession evolving.

A new survey from Education Sector by Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Andrew J. Rotherham, and Elena Silva examines teachers' opinions and attitudes toward teacher unions, teacher unionism, and a range of current district reforms, including those aimed specifically at improving teacher quality. Join Education Sector for a presentation and discussion of the survey's findings

Ed Notes has taken the position that this emphasis on teacher quality has nefarious purposes. There will always be a bell-curve of teacher quality, just as there is a curve for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, etc. Funny, but I don't see the Ed Sector running events trying to discern the quality of the physicians poor kids with asthma attacks might see in the emergency room in the middle of the night and then come into school too sleepy to pay attention and how that factor affects teacher quality.

I'm anxious to see where the surveyed teachers come from. I wonder how many are from places where the ed reform "the fault is on the lack of teacher quality" movement has hit, often in urban schools under some form of mayoral control.

Now there are actually a few teachers on the panel. One is from Denver. And the president of the Providence Teachers Union is also on the panel. In March, he led a protest and called for a vote on no-confidence in the current administration of the Providence schools. The last time they did that was against Diana Lam, who was hired by Joel Klein for a disastrous run as chief of instruction. (If a union protests against someone, that person must be good for him.)

And a NYC teacher too. I have faith than anyone who has taught in the NYC world of BloomKlein, so beloved by the Ed Sector, will have plenty of good stuff to say – if allowed to say much.

I would have loved to see people like NYC educator or Reality Based Educator or Chaz School Daze but they wouldn't take a day off for this stuff. Not like.....

......It is particularly gratifying to see controversial Wash. DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee, a Teach for America alum and former Joel Kleinite in NYC, will be able to take time away from running a large urban school system to attend. A few weeks ago, Rhee also found the time to come up to New York to attend a weekday Manhattan Institute breakfast to push the usual ed reform line. What would they say if scads of teachers took time off to attend some of these things? Bad, bad, go to the rubber room. But Rhee's attendance at these events is indicative of the real ed reform agenda - ideology and politics, not education.

I don' t even have to go. Let's see, bet they say a hundred times: research shows that teacher quality is the single most important factor in a child's education (I was disappointed to see Chaz School Daze say the same thing on his blog.) I don't agree.

We could just as easily proclaim that research shows that small class sizes are the single most important factor in a child's education. That seems to be what I heard at a recent symposium at Columbia about the famous Tennessee study, where all classes, with the good, the bad and the ugly teachers saw improvements when class size was lowered. But fuggedaboudit. Ed Sector, unabashed admirers of BloomKlein would rather talk about teacher quality in isolation of other factors like class size or the difficulty of some children to learn – watch out for the dreaded "we aren't talking about comparing apples and oranges - followed by claims of the unproven and as far as I'm concerned unfounded – value added approach where teachers are rated based on the growth of kids based on past performance (on highs takes tests only, not on things like "Johnny entered my class s serial killer and left a lamb.")

Good Norm Twin: But let's be fair here. You didn't even hear the results of the survey. Maybe it will bear you out on class size.

Evil Norm Twin: Will the teachers surveyed say colleagues they view as incompetent should be made to drink arsenic? And teacher unions are horrible because they protect these people? Anyone check in NYC lately to see how well the UFT has been protecting teachers?

The cast of characters
Featured Presenters:
Andrew J. Rotherham, Elena Silva

This event will feature:
Greg Ahrnsbrak, Teacher, Denver Public Schools
Ann Duffett, FDR Group
Steven Farkas, FDR Group
Ellen Halloran, Teacher, New York City Public Schools
Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools
Steven Smith, President, Providence Teachers Union
Elena Silva, Senior Policy Analyst, Education Sector (as moderator)
Andrew J. Rotherham, Co-director, Education Sector (introductory remarks)

Greg Ahrnsbrak is on the panel because he led a battle to modify the union contract in his school, a trend in Denver. Rotherham loves teachers who are willing to throw out contract rules. He throws out the line we hear form the likes of Kahlenberg [on Shanker] and Leo Casey about the New Unionism (how has that worked out for NYC teachers?]

"If (unions) see this as an opportunity to redefine their roles, they will thrive," Rotherham said. "If they don't get in the game, it will pass them by."

The UFT has always been in the game, so how come NYC teachers feel oh, so passed by?

To get a sense of why Greg Ahrnsbrak is on the panel, check out this excerpt from

The Denver Post reported back in January (edited):

A bid for autonomy at Denver's Bruce Ran dolph school faces another test today, when union leaders meet for the second time to vote on whether to accept a waiver from the teachers contract.

The union, so far, has balked at the request — The school board approved its part of the waiver last month, and a majority of teachers at the school voted for the proposal. Last week, Manual High School in Denver made a similar request.

State Senate President Peter Groff may introduce a bill to encourage other schools to do the same, and more than $100,000 from nonprofit organizations has been offered to Bruce Randolph if the move goes forward.

National education experts are watching the Bruce Randolph proposal that would give the school control over its budget, teacher time, calendar, incentives and hiring decisions.

"It is going to be fascinating," said Andrew Rotherham of Virginia, co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank. "This is what progress looks like, messy and contentious."

The union wanted Bruce Randolph to clearly explain what parts of the contract should be waived. Last week, teachers submitted a five-page response, outlining each article and subsection they want waived or retained.

Union President Kim Ursetta said she discussed the proposal with representatives from the school Saturday.

"We want to be able to look at what contract provisions, if any, impede student achievement at Bruce Randolph," Ursetta said.

The union should be flexible, said Rotherham.

"If (unions) see this as an opportunity to redefine their roles, they will thrive," Rotherham said. "If they don't get in the game, it will pass them by."

"We took the worst middle school in the state and brought it to a low ranking," said Greg Ahrnsbrak, a teacher at Bruce Randolph and the school's union representative, who helped craft the waiver plan.

Now Greg Ahrnsbrak is at a school that had lots of problems and the staff has bought into the idea the way to fix these problems is to show a willingness to waive the contract, obviously pegged as the main culprit. The central union has been balking and teachers at Ahrnsbak's school are talking going charter.

Ahrnsbrak said some have encouraged the staff to go ahead and implement the proposal anyway, regardless of the union's stance.

Private foundations love the controversy and are leaping in. The Denver Post reported on Jan. 24:

....the Piton Foundation, ... offered the school $100,000 if the autonomy bid were approved...

"If somebody there says they'd like to do a charter," [said a Piton rep] "we'll give them the $100,000 and I'll go back and try and raise more money."

Ahhh. Bribery from the world of foundations. Check back with the teachers in a few years and see where the money has gone once the union is broken.

Looks like Ellen Halloran, our poor lone NYC teacher, will be seriously outnumbered.