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“Kids Relate to ‘Hunger Games’ because they play them in Texas schools” (AA-S) 4-5-12
By Sara, April 7, 2012 7:00 pm
My latest essay in the Austin American-Statesman, April 5, 2012
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/stevenson-kids-relate-to-hunger-games-because-they-2283766.html
Value-Added Measurement and Teachers (submitted to the Austin American-Statesman)
By Sara, March 19, 2012 7:47 pm
Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution grabbed headlines recently by declaring that if we could only fire the bottom 5 – 10 % of all teachers, the quality of our schools would improve dramatically. The value-added measurement or VAM attempts to rank teachers “scientifically” by showing the rate of growth a teacher adds to a child’s learning during a given school year.
If it were true that a one- to- one correspondence exists between what the teacher does and what every child learns, then a value-added measurement might make sense. If a snapshot test on a single day gave a full and complete picture of every child’s knowledge and abilities, then maybe value-added measurements would be fair. But we all know that student outcomes are multi-determined. So many factors come into play, including socio-economic status, family dynamics, home and school environments, health, aptitudes, behavior, attendance, effort, background knowledge, and free will. With VAM, it’s as if we’re conducting an experiment without removing any variables. The experiment becomes meaningless. It can also be destructive.
Last year, after The Los Angeles Times published the city’s teachers’ VAM scores, one low-performing teacher took his life. In what other profession is your job evaluation published for public consumption? True, our salaries are paid by tax dollars, but where is the line between public obligation and privacy? Last month, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, released the TDRs (Teacher Data Reports) of 18,000 public school teachers. The New York Post went after the “worst teacher in the city,” publishing her photo under that headline. However, when you look at the circumstances surrounding the “worst teacher in the city,” a different picture emerges.
New York City’s “worst teacher,” Pascale Mauclair, teaches at an elementary school that ranks in the 94th percentile among the city’s schools. Her principal believes she is an excellent teacher. Mauclair teaches ESL. Many of her students are recent immigrants struggling to learn English. Their families are highly mobile, and so she has a great deal of turnover in her classes. Because her classes are small, a poor test performance by one student can greatly skew her VAM. Another teacher, who scored in the bottom quartile, teaches talented and gifted students. Because his students already scored high on standardized tests, the percentage of growth was smaller for them than for more average students. Therefore, his value-added measurement was low, and he was shamed as well.
One of the most destructive outcomes of the latest craze to measure teacher effectiveness is that the practice discourages the very behavior we are seeking to promote: attracting highly qualified and talented people into the profession of teaching. If the teacher is the most important factor in determining student success, why enact reforms that unfairly shame teachers?
If we want to improve the quality of teaching in our schools and get rid of any bad apples, there are many more effective ways to do this than through value-added assessments. The National Board certification program is a nationally recognized teacher development program with a proven track record. Strong principals need to spend more time observing and critiquing their teachers in the classroom. We would also do well to emulate Finland, a country that consistently scores at the top of International Student Assessment (PISA). In Finland, schools of education are competitive and rigorous. In Finnish public schools, classes are small, teachers are trusted and respected, and children are rarely tested. They also have recess daily through the ninth grade. Let’s follow the Finns and use tests as formative assessments, tools for identifying gaps in student learning rather than as blunt instruments for punishing students, teachers, and schools.
Response to Bill Hammond’s “Don’t Discount Value of Ongoing High-Stakes Student Assessment” 3/18/12
By Sara, March 17, 2012 7:51 pm
Bill Hammond cites that Hispanic math scores have gone up three grade levels since 1992. High-stakes testing, as in No Child Left Behind, didn’t take effect until 2002. In fact, more growth in reading and math scores occurred in the ten years before NCLB and high-stakes testing than in the decade after. And although test scores have risen for our minority students, they have also risen for white students, leaving the gap as stubborn and persistent as ever. No one, and certainly not Carolyn Heinrich in her excellent opinion piece, is against meaningful, formative assessment, but when you have a testing culture so rampant that even Texas Education Commissioner, Robert Scott, refers to the testing mania as a “perversion,” and parents are rising up to resist end-of-year STAAR tests counting towards class rank, the pendulum is swinging, thankfully, in the other direction. Let’s use tests as assessments to help students improve and not to punish schools, students, their teachers, and administrators. Let’s return to the true goal of educating our children for 21st century skills: collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication. None of these skills can be adequately measured in a standardized test.
Response to Cathy Rose’s “Limbaugh and the Phoney Contraception Debate” Wall Street Journal 3-6-12
By Sara, March 7, 2012 4:40 am
Cathy Cleaver Rose uses up 563 words of her opinion piece before she even mentions Rush Limbaugh’s role in this incendiary issue. What strikes me most in the ugliness of Limbaugh’s attacks against Fluke is this: imagine if Fluke were a married woman going to law school and needing birth control in order to postpone pregnancy until after her degree, so that she and her husband could start a family at a more opportune time? Would Limbaugh have still railed against her as a “slut?” Would he have insisted she owed us porn videos? Isn’t it interesting that the very weekend the Fluke/Limbaugh story breaks is the first week in years that Obama’s approval rating rises to 50%? George W. Bush won re-election with a 50% approval rating. Could be that Limbaugh just handed Obama the independent women’s vote.
Response to Juan Williams (Will Business Boost School Reform? 2-28-12) Wall Street Journal
By Sara, February 27, 2012 5:58 pm
Juan Williams focuses his opinion piece on Governor Bobby Jindal taking on the teachers unions in Louisiana. Louisiana is a right-to-work state. Therefore, teacher union bashing is futile. The unions in Louisiana are really no more than “associations” with no collective bargaining rights and certainly no tenure. Excessive teacher bashing and the vaunted practice of tying teacher evaluations and salaries to test scores will have three effects: 1) good teachers will leave the profession 2) the teachers who remain will be even more motivated to teach to the test 3) teachers will avoid serving in tough, high poverty schools or in classrooms where students struggle. Student success cannot be measured by one test on one day in a year. Student achievement is multi-determined. Teachers are not omnipotent. If we were, we’d certainly garner more respect. So much for school reform.
My letter shares the same page as my professor hero Stephen Krashen’s (Austin American-Statesman 2-27-12)
By Sara, February 26, 2012 5:50 pm
Letter sent to Wall Street Journal on importance of school library programs (2-1-12)
By Sara, February 1, 2012 5:05 am
David Deming (What I Learned from a Brainiac–2-1-12) is right in challenging parents to encourage their children to read more. According to Stephen Krashen’s The Power of Reading, children need three conditions, and they will read. Students need to be given time to read in school and at home, the freedom to self select their reading material, and access to the books they want to read. This free voluntary reading increases not only reading comprehension skills but spelling, grammar, and writing skills as well. Unfortunately, the third plank has been seriously eroded due to education budget cuts throughout the states. Library materials and librarians themselves are on the front lines of state education budget cuts because librarians, although teachers with Masters degrees, are not considered “teachers of record” as we don’t assign grades. Budget cuts to school libraries harm children, especially poor ones, by limiting their access to books, and reductions of librarians and library support staff decrease the guidance and expertise essential to advising readers and developing literacy programs that encourage more reading. Please write to your school boards to save the librarians and school library programs. In a closing note, six of the top ten hardcover fiction titles last week, according to Nielson, were books written for young adults or children. Who says kids don’t read?
Good letters from today’s New York Times on the wealth gap
By Sara, November 27, 2011 6:36 am
My letter in today’s Austin American-Statesman
By Sara, November 25, 2011 11:55 am
Understanding Obama
Re: Nov. 21 letter, “Obama’s character.”
The letter writer says that Obama blames lazy Americans. He’s been listening to Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry, who took one of Obama’s statements completely out of context.
What Obama said was that “we,” as in the American government and policymakers, had been lazy in promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
In fact, Obama often praises the American workforce for being “the most productive in the world.” It is his cynical Republican rivals who took his statement out of context and twisted it into a slur on the American people.
Shame on the Republican demagogues. Please, let’s be better informed.
Sara Stevenson
Austin
Themocracy