The Treasure Hunter

Today’s post is old stuff, but worth re-considering.  In 2012 I was invited by the New York Times to write a letter about evaluating teachers.  How could I turn that invitation down?  Below is the letter I wrote, the responses from readers, and my response to them. (I removed the responders’ names because I do not have their permission.) I think all these opinions are worth looking at four years later because of what has happened since then with so many states using student test scores as part of teachers’ evaluations.  I’d like to hear what readers think about the current situation where they live and what changes should be made.

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 Sunday Dialogue: How to Rate Teachers

To the Editor:

Over the past year states have scrambled to rewrite their teacher evaluation procedures to satisfy federal demands. Because the main thrust of the new procedures is to remove ineffective teachers and, perhaps, reward superior ones, their key element is “value added” test scores — measuring how much students’ scores have improved.

But they are also stuffed with multiple observations, often by different observers, long lists of criteria and lengthy written reviews. So freighted, they are not only unfair but also unworkable. There must be a better way.

What schools need are not only simpler and more flexible plans, but also evaluators with enough time and the expertise to do the job. At the elementary level, finding them should be relatively easy: appoint good principals and free them from bus duty and never-ending out-of-school meetings. In high schools, where principals have large numbers of teachers and numerous subject areas under their supervision, the evaluators should be department heads.

As for the evaluation process itself, it needs to be yearlong, with evaluators working alongside teachers and observing many different lessons. Thus, they will see what good teachers do: grading papers at lunchtime, coming in early to tutor a struggling student, staying late to meet with a worried parent, inspiring students to learn more than required.

Primarily, however, states would do well to abandon their obsession with student test scores. As many critics have observed, too many factors beyond a teacher’s control influence those numbers. But an even bigger problem is teaching to the test. With so much weight given to the scores in new evaluations, only a few brave teachers will be able to resist concentrating on tests. As a result, real student learning will decline sharply, along with good teaching.

JOANNE YATVIN
 Portland, Ore., March 13, 2012

The writer is a retired teacher an elementary school principal and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Readers React

I suppose I’m one of the “brave” teachers Ms. Yatvin described, those who aren’t swayed to teach to a standardized test. My goal has always been to challenge my students, no matter their level, and I have been rewarded with the best reading scores in my school for the past three years. So it should probably not come as a surprise that I think testing or some other sort of independent measure of the students’ abilities should be a component of teacher evaluations, an opinion that puts me in the minority of my profession.

However, should test scores be a majority of the evaluation? Absolutely not. There are too many factors outside of the teacher’s skills that contribute to a child’s performance on that one test on that one day. There should be multiple observations, as Ms. Yatvin advocated, but I have another idea: What about the opinion of next year’s teacher? Were the students adequately prepared for his or her class? Did they come in with the base of knowledge that was expected of them?

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Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation. The point is not to stamp a teacher with a number. You can never bully a teacher into caring for children.

We need to promote collaboration, not competition. Teachers should be constantly given feedback by their colleagues, students and administrators.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers,” explains the “10,000-hour rule,” claiming that the key to success in any field is a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Likewise, teachers don’t reach their peak until several years on the job.

Parents are putting their greatest treasure in the hands of teachers for 180 days a year. Let’s start treating teachers as nation-builders.

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Oh pshaw, here we go again, another educator decrying objective student testing in favor of subjective “evaluations” by school leaders and peers. And then these educators lament the imprecise and subjective nature of the evaluations.

The only way to properly measure teacher success is by student progress. Don’t we measure the success of car salesmen by how many cars they sell? Or physicians by the number of correct diagnoses and successful procedures? Why should teachers be any different?

And let’s label the criticism of “teaching to the test” as the smokescreen that it is. After all, how better to measure math skills than by doing math problems and having them reviewed by teachers? And how better to measure reading comprehension than by reading and asking students to explain what they have read?

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Like so many other observers of the problem, Ms. Yatvin ignores the best source of information about teacher effectiveness — students. In all my years of teaching English and writing I have never seen better judges of teachers.

My experience with student evaluations — most, admittedly, poorly designed — defies the reflexive charge that teachers can buy good reports by being entertaining or easy graders. Young people can see through such ruses and are, as a group, embarrassingly honest.

In my opinion, hacking into the hallway grapevine would be more effective than “value added” testing plus administrator visits.

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While there is much discussion about whether and how to evaluate teachers, perhaps we need to broaden the discussion to evaluating parents. I’m sure there are many teachers who would like to comment on whether the parents are fulfilling their responsibility to get the kids to school on time, well rested and ready to learn; to teach their children to be respectful of the teachers and other students; to ensure that their children are doing their homework to the best of their ability; to take an active interest in their child’s performance and behavior at school; and accept their share of the responsibility to educate their children and prepare them to be contributing members of society.

We expect so much from our teachers and too often underreward the good ones who put their heart and soul into their jobs against difficult odds. It’s time that the parental role becomes more prominent in our discussions about improving education.

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I agree with much of Ms. Yatvin’s premise, but would add that the evaluators have to know what they are looking for. I have worked with school systems to help bring a modified corporate approach to teacher performance management and evaluation. This starts with a consistently applied and clearly defined set of standards for a “good” teacher. This will lessen the reliance on test scores, which are acknowledged to be a flawed indicator of a teacher’s expertise. It will also reduce the likelihood that evaluators will judge a teacher by “gut feeling” when they can point to an accepted and vetted set of parameters.

Lewis Carroll wrote, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” We need to provide evaluators with a roadmap to evaluate teacher performance accurately. Only then can we undertake the important job of improving teacher performance.

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It takes a skilled and intelligent administrator to perceive that a variety of teaching styles can be effective. To rate teachers in a cookie-cutter way removes the joy and excitement of creativity from a teacher’s approach.

No student has ever thanked me for helping him or her to achieve good standardized test scores. Instead, students say I made learning fun, or taught them to love learning.

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Ms. Yatvin’s suggestions for teacher evaluation are excellent. But why are The Times and many others, including federal bureaucrats, suddenly so interested in teacher evaluation?

It is because of the belief that poor teaching is the reason that American schools are failing. The perception that our schools are failing, however, is based on American students’ international test scores. Rarely mentioned is the finding that middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on these tests. Our overall scores are unspectacular because we have one of the highest percentages of children living in poverty among all industrialized countries. The problem is thus not teacher quality. The problem is poverty — poor diet, poor health care and little access to books. Quality teaching has little effect when students are hungry, sick and have nothing to read.

Let’s improve teacher evaluation, but there is no evidence that there is a teaching crisis in the United States.

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.Politicians and the public would do well to heed the warning that concludes Ms. Yatvin’s insightful letter. The more we rely on test scores to evaluate teachers, the less students will actually learn.

Teachers who are creative feel stultified by test prep. The inordinate time teachers must spend to make sure their students do well on the all-important test takes away from a rich, balanced curriculum.

Students who are poor test-takers but have the potential to succeed in higher education and job training are demoralized by the emphasis on standardized tests. Our brightest students get the message that if you can write in a formulaic manner and ace a test, you have fulfilled an important goal.

I can’t tell you how many times my students have asked, “Is this going to be on the test?”

As a longtime high school English teacher, I lament that the profession I love and have devoted my life to has come to this. If I must be judged on scores, and not on my ability to inspire students to love learning, to love literature and learn about life from it, and to find their writer’s voice, it’s a sad day for all of us.

The Writer Responds

In reading these letters from across the country, I appreciate the differences in the writers’ views on teacher evaluation. Yet I suspect that we are all influenced by our own experiences. Perhaps in some cases the writers’ students come from strong home backgrounds while in others they are handicapped by poverty.

As a principal I worked first at a school in a wealthy community with highly educated families, and later at one in a rural area where many students lived in rundown houses or a trailer park. Because test scores for the first school had always been high and remained so, the teachers and I were reluctant to take credit. But in the second, where we saw strong gains from lower to higher grades, we felt that our teaching made the difference.

At both schools I evaluated teachers by working closely with them throughout the year and seeing their strengths and weaknesses. Neither they nor I panicked when an occasional lesson fell flat. I hesitate to support the preset standards for evaluation that *****advocates. Like ******, the high school student, I believe, “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.”

Since retiring, I have been supervising student teachers and doing observational research in a number of schools. Although I still see much excellent teaching and students who are lapping up learning, I also notice deterioration in teacher confidence and student enthusiasm, which I attribute to too much testing and teachers’ feeling that they are no longer in charge of their classrooms.

Joanne Yatvin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s post was written by Dr. Sam Bommarito who, over a 43 year career as a teacher, taught every grade from kindergarten to graduate school.  Now retired,  he is involved in a volunteer reading project at a private school in which he tutors students from grades 3-5.

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 Teach More:

Over my career I’ve found that following a Reading/Writing workshop format helps me to maximize my use of teaching time. I am using mini lessons that are short and focused. In my project I also use strategies from two commercial programs that help me to teach and keep track of students’ progress

 Test Less:

One way to test less is to build ongoing assessment into your teaching, expanding the time between sumative assessments. The leveled books in the on-line library I use include well-written fiction and non-fiction. Each book comes with questions based on the Common Core Standards, which are automatically scored by the program I use and are accessible to the teacher.

My students’ time is spent reading books not answering questions. They pick their own books at the levels determined by their scores. Later, I get detailed information that allows me to discern student performance patterns in comprehension. I can also access recordings that my students make of their oral reading

Empower Teachers and Students!:

My belief that teachers should be empowered is research based. That classic research found that no one method of teaching beginning reading works best, and that teachers accounted for more of the variance in reading performance than methods. That is why I shy away from “teacher proof” methods and materials and look for resources that serve as tools for teachers. Such resources give teachers a choice in how to use them in the most effective way. For my project I’ve looked for materials that empower me as a teacher to help my students become better readers.

As students read within my project, one of the things I’ll ask them to do is to pick a favorite book from the on-line library. They will record and re-record their reading of that book (or selected pages from it) until they are satisfied that they are reading like a story teller. Only then will they send their recordings to me.

I am also doing weekly face-to-face workshop conferences with each child. One unique thing is that in addition to the regular weekly conferences, I am able to do cyber conferences. The recorded messages I send are especially useful in promoting prosody and helping students with sound/symbol difficulties. Parents at home often listen in to my comments and over time learn to help their children become problem solvers in both word recognition and comprehension. My simple advice to parents is: don’t give your children answers; help them work out the answers for themselves.

Musings:

Mark Twain once said: “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.” I’m trying to help my students want to read by allowing for self-selection, placing them at their instructional level, having them move up as soon as they are ready, helping them problem solve their own comprehension questions, and encouraging their classroom teachers to promote wide reading outside of the cyber books. My practices encourage and facilitate their reading.

In sum, I hope I am teaching students how to read by focusing on how to think and problem solve for themselves. That is what I’ve always thought reading teachers should be doing. That is what I hope I am doing in my retirement years.

 

 

 

 

Today I am writing about the science of reading—a subject in which I have little formal traing. This topic came to mind a few days ago while I was listening to the radio in my car. Since then I have not been able to get it out of my mind. But the main reason I am writing about it  is to stir the opinions of my readers, many of whom know more about reading science than I do. Here goes.

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The radio station I ordinarily listen to plays “popular” music, which   means music that was played a lot 20, 30, or even more years ago. Much of it I listened to at the time and still associate with events in my life. The first song that caught my attention that day was “Both Sides Now,” written and sung by Joni Mitchell. I remember hearing it and liking it when it was popular, but I never learned the words and I am certain I never tried to sing it. Yet after Joni was finished, I began humming the melody, and it felt just right all the way through. Suddenly, the questioning part of me took over. How was I able to do that?  Music was not a strength of mine. I did not take any music classes past elementary school, never sang publically or played an instrument. Yet I’m pretty sure I got the pattern of that song’s music right. And I have had similar experiences with other songs. Why? How?

My limited knowledge of music and its science has taught me this. Music has deliberate patterns from the simplest children’s songs to symphonies, and human beings who like to listen to music can remember the patterns of many pieces they’ve heard and hum or sing them without any practice. So, even though I know that oral and visual memory are controlled by different parts of the brain, I believe that natural human development has included progress in both areas over time. In short, I believe that basic reading and writing are naturally developed abilities just like musical replication and speech. Although interest and practice of any skill improves its performance, those things are not crucial to basic development. As we have all observed, babies learn to speak without any instruction, and young children sing songs and scribble images they call writing.  Moreover, many 3 and 4 year olds mimic the process of reading the books that have been read to them with some accuracy. Why should the next step in human development not be learning to read without instruction?

As I mentioned in my introduction to this piece, I am not  familiar with any research that would support or my beliefs.  It was my own learning and teaching experiences that persuaded me. I learned to recognize some words by sight before any schooling and learned to read in first grade through recognition of words the teacher had introduced–plus being able to guess which word would come next–without any instruction in phonics. Early in my career I taught reading in the primary grades with materials that did not include  phonics, and, as I remember, all my students learned to read. Finally, my much later experience as a member of the National Reading Panel persuaded me that the inclusion of phonemic awareness and phonics as core components of successful reading instruction was based on weak statistics and other panel members’ biases.  Please, readers, tell me if and why I’m wrong.

I regularly read the online feature “Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo,” and when a topic interests me I submit a response.  A few weeks ago the topic was “What to do about terrible textbooks,” and I replied.  But, apparently, my response was too late since it did not get published.  Although some of the published responses were similar to mine, I feel that they did not go far enough in explaining the problems with textbooks.  So, today I will post what I submitted and expand it by recounting my experiences over time that convinced me to avoid buying textbooks.

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My immediate reaction to this week’s question, “How can you handle an awful textbook?” was: Throw it in the trash!  It will do more harm than good to your students by being used as directed.  However, it took me only a few seconds to realize that neither a teacher nor a principal could get away with such an action in today’s top-down run schools.  Somebody in the school district office chose that textbook believing it was of high quality and appropriate for your grade level, and other officials approved that decision.  Even though you, as an experienced teacher, are more qualified to judge the quality and appropriateness of a textbook for your students, it is better not to go into open revolt against your superiors. You will surely lose the battle and, perhaps, endanger your job. Instead, go over the purchased textbook with your fellow teachers and see what the group can extract from it that would be meaningful for your students. Then use only those portions for teaching and supplement them with other sources—maybe, even, and older textbook of better quality.  If little or nothing appears appropriate, shelve the new textbooks and allow them to collect dust while you improvise from your past experience and the materials you have created or found elsewhere.  In addition, it might be worthwhile to campaign for having a teacher committee select textbooks the next time around.

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I have never been a fan of textbooks.  As a student I resented carrying several of them back and forth to school, reading long, dull chapters and searching for the answers to meaningless questions. Inside the covers of many of my textbooks were written things like, “In case of fire, throw this in.”   Although those were jokes, I believe they reflected the feelings of most students at the time.

Later, as a beginning teacher, I was asked to substitute for a teacher who was ill.  When, it became clear that she would not be able to return to her job, I was invited to stay for the rest of the year.  Almost the first thing I did was to collect all the textbooks crammed into  students’ desks and store them in a classroom cabinet. No students complained, and a few cheered.

Several years and jobs later, I was appointed the chair of the English department of a new high school.  When the school district decided to buy new English textbooks, none of my staff was much interested.  The old ones were still serviceable, and they wanted to get single pieces of literature that would give them more freedom to decide what and when to teach a particular unit.  Besides, textbooks were getting more and more expensive. As a group we rejected the new textbooks and requested funds to buy a variety of paperbacks instead.  The only hardback books we needed to teach were the poetry collections we already had.

In both the elementary schools where I was principal we also opted for paperbacks instead of textbooks and workbooks.  Teachers felt  they could teach English, history, and, maybe, science using those books and the other materials accumulated over time.

In all those actions our purpose was not defiance, but a firm conviction that the materials teachers chose and the less expensive – or free—things collected over time are better for teaching than textbooks. In all the schools I have mentioned we were able to amass large numbers and a variety of paperbacks to serve our teaching preferences and students needs.  We also found that paperbacks— their covers strengthened with Scotch tape lasted just as long, if not longer– than far more expensive textbooks.

 

 

Today’s post was written by Doug Garnett, a fellow member of the Oregon Save Our Schools organization. He is a business owner with more than 20 years experience with metric based marketing programs. He also taught for 12 years in the School of Business Administration at Portland State University.

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Underlying the US obsession with testing is a misapplication of specific business management programs called a “continual improvement process.” Business schools and corporations are rife with these programs – and in the right controllable situation they are excellent. Within business these programs are successful, but also quite often they are mis-used or used in the wrong situations.

The theory is that the best way to manage is to establish goals for every unit and establish “objective” metrics to determine the effectiveness of those goals. Then employees, departments, divisions, and executives are all rewarded or punished according to how well they achieve their metrics.

However, as Edwards Deming noted, metric driven management leads to situations where every one meets their metrics yet the company fails. It happens over and over because only rarely do metrics truly lead to company success. And in many cases, managers manipulate the metrics to ensure that they get bonuses regardless of the outcome.

And while metric management may work well in, say, a factory, it is a horrible way to manage areas where the needed results can’t be measured well. In these cases, continual improvement leads to a narrow focus on what can be measured rather than what matters. Hence, again, it leads to failure.

Much of the testing mania in education is driven by businessmen or business backed foundations. Those entities have misapplied in education the same systems they misapply in their businesses. But their businesses aren’t as sensitive to error as education is.

Testing arrived because in order to apply a system of continual improvement to education, business leaders needed numbers. So standardized testing became their metric-despite the fact that as a global measure of education success the tests are worthless. Any amount of data can only summarize a small portion of educational results. As an advertising guy who uses data extensively, I have learned that data is a fickle friend.

Over the past decade the do-gooder business foundations and philanthropists, along with the national Chamber of Commerce, have lobbied to impose laws that mandate testing to impose a continual improvement process on education. With the help of Congress they’ve succeeded, despite clear evidence that it’s a huge waste of money and effort.

It is key to remember that business is not always a human oriented endeavor. This means businessmen, like Bill Gates and Walton, aren’t at all aware of how metric based programs affect human beings. So it’s not really a surprise that they don’t understand their errors in trying to improve education.