Are teachers under too much pressure from “war rooms” and constant scrutiny?
Many teachers have commented on the increased push in their schools to raise test scores, saying that unrelenting and often unreasonable expectations were causing them to reconsider the profession.
AJC reporter Heather Vogell talked to teachers about the pressure, including “war rooms” where student scores are posted as a constant prod to teachers. (I would like to personally thank the teachers from this blog who talked to Heather for her story.)
According to the story:
In a room in Atlanta’s East Lake Elementary, students’ testing stats are on display like baseball players’ batting averages. The “data room, ” or “war room, ” lays out district goals for the school. Staff can see at a glance how many students can fail state tests — and how many must score in the top tier — to make the numbers. Other Atlanta schools use variations of the setup.
The displays are a product of the data-driven approach pushed by Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall. But for teachers such as Julie Rogers-Martin, the rooms serve a second, more ominous function.
“It’s a visual pressure all the time, ” she said. “It’s always in your face. It’s always a cause for concern.”
The pressure Atlanta educators such as Rogers-Martin face is rooted in a complex set of district testing goals that are harder to reach than those set by the state.
The system has rewarded school staff who were successful with nearly $17 million in bonuses since 2001. Hitting testing targets carried career and social benefits, too.
But now, the state is asking whether some schools took shortcuts to net those impressive scores.
A state probe last month identified suspicious erasures on state tests in more than two-thirds of Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools. Far more schools were flagged in Atlanta — 58 — than in any other district.
Who erased wrong answers and whether they did so to cheat is under investigation. But experts say pressure from hard-to-reach work goals and financial incentives can be a trigger for fraud.
The district-imposed testing goals are the greatest source of educators’ angst, some teachers say. In some schools, they say, making the numbers has upstaged the teaching and learning they are supposed to represent.
“You are under scrutiny every minute, ” said Rogers-Martin, a fourth-grade teacher at Burgess-Peterson Elementary.
District Deputy Superintendent Kathy Augustine said the district’s data-focused approach is crucial for helping students learn. The targets aim to help educators zero in on students’ academic needs.
“Using data to drive instruction is a best practice. Data is something our parents ask for, it’s something the majority of our teachers want, ” Augustine said. “I think we expect our teachers to be high performers.”
Thirteen of 22 elementary and middle schools that received bonuses for meeting testing targets last year also showed up on the state’s “severe” list of schools with high numbers of suspicious erasures.
On the issue of pressure, I wanted to share a conversation I had with a longtime teacher. She said she got into teaching because she liked working with children more than adults. She liked closing her classroom door and controlling her own little universe with rare interference from administrators.
That, she told me, has changed completely. Now, administrators are in her classroom. They are talking to her about student progress. They are suggesting new ways of doing things. She admits that part of the pressure she feels comes from the drastic changes in the profession and in education overall. She became accustomed to calling the shots and having very little interaction with her bosses.
She does not think the pressure is as great on younger teachers who entered the field under the new accountability rules and expect to have weekly meetings where they review each child’s progress with their principals.
Does the pressure on teachers stem in part from a changing world order where student data rather than teachers drive the classroom?
And is that always bad?
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59 comments Add your comment
doh
March 30th, 2010
2:14 pm
The problem with data driven instruction:
1. Each curriculum has a pacing guide. A where you should be at any point in the year. The guide is inflexible in my district. If I am off my a day or so on a unit I get called in for it. So here is the problem: I give an assessment at the end of a unit. My data tells me that most of the students did not understand the concept, a good teacher would go back and reteach. But NO, because of the pacing guide you CAN’T. The next day I MUST move on to the next unit, whether the kids “got it” or not. So what happens, at the end of the year I play a month of catch up with the kids who didn’t “get it.” Horrible instructional practice.
2. Same scenario as above, except you have special ed kids who are on IEP’s that mandate they need more time and less material to cover, which is FEDERAL law. What do you do when your special ed kids need an extra week to cover the same material as regular kids?
3. Data driven instruction does NOT change instruction.
4. I have plenty of parents who dont know when progress reports and report cards go home, they dont care. and someone is telling me they want this data?
Again because of the horrible Georgia curriculum and the terrible pacing guides, Student Data DOES NOT drive instruction.
Fericita
March 30th, 2010
3:50 pm
I am a teacher, and we have one of these data walls in our school. In theory, I don’t have a problem with analyzing data and using it to guide instruction. However, the real purpose of the data wall is to blame teachers for not getting their kids to a certain level. Regardless of what the students come into your class knowing, whether or not they are several grade levels behind already, they must pass the CRCT at the end of the year. What’s so sad is that passing the CRCT doesn’t even mean the students are proficient – I believe the cutoff to pass the reading portion it 50% correct, and for math it is 45% correct.
In the article, Superintendent Kathy Augustine calls the data wall a “best practice.” As a teacher, I hear that a lot – use “best practices,” use “research-based strategies.” Great idea! However, Georgia chooses NOT to use several high-yield teaching practices that have proven to be very effective in other states, and that are research-based. For example, students who do not speak English as a first language are much more successful if they learn to read in their native language first. Unfortunately for those students, Georgia is an “English-only” state, and as far as I know, we don’t have any bilingual, or even transitionally bilingual programs. So, we have a lot of English language learners who struggle with literacy because they can’t read in their native language. Changing how we teach English language learners to read would have a much more positive outcome than data walls…but I don’t see it actually happening.
Philosopher
March 30th, 2010
5:30 pm
Ole Guy- That may be true…but if the teacher’s not up to snuff…the kid’ll never get there. If it’s true that all the probelms are the fault of the kids and their parents, as it would appear to be from reading these blogs, it ought to become crystal clear to the whole world when teachers and their performances are scrutinized. If you have nothing to hide…you have nothing to be afraid of.
Anonymous Jones
March 30th, 2010
11:11 pm
I think most of this new age education stuff is thought up by Kathy Cox and her staff. My teacher friends in Virginia and Florida shake their heads in pity and despair at the things I tell them in Georgia. It mainly serves to demoralize teachers. I’d bet the farm that things will improve as soon as Kathy Cox leaves office, including test scores. Soldiers will follow a good leader into Hell and back. Most teachers wouldn’t follow Kathy Cox to the outhouse even if they had diarrhea. And, she makes the diarrhea worse all the time. Leave teachers alone; let them teach the way teaching works best for them, and you will have happier teachers and happier students. Happier means more productive, winning teachers. She’s worse than Roy Barnes for the teaching profession.
Ole Guy
March 31st, 2010
2:24 am
Philo, have you ever flown Tree Top Airlines through some rough weather? The aircraft bounces around, maybe makes a few funny noises, and a few passengers may express a modicum of apprehension. Yet a previous flight, on Tree Top’s competitor, was smooth from launch to recovery. Does this experience indicate that Tree Top’s pilot was not up to snuff? Certainly not…the operating environment was the determining factor.
While there are good teachers, perhaps mediocre teachers, and resoundingly superb teachers, the operating environment is the determining factor. Personaly, I do not feel that there are BAD teachers. To label a teacher thusly would be tantamount to labeling the pilot on Tree Top Air as bad, simply because the aircraft hit some weather and a passenger puked.
Unfortunately, kids, for the most part, feel they have to be entertained. If a skilled teacher is able to present the material in an entertaining format…great! If a perfectly capable teacher, however, does not employ the same method of instruction, is that a bad teacher? The kid, accostomed to being regaled, will resort to classroom antics while more-disciplined students, attempting to “get on board”, “miss the plane”. Then, when the class scores poorly, the teach is labeled thusly.
During one of those “scrutinizing” sessions, I laid the lash (not physically, of course) to a few kids who, by previous warning, were made to sit in a classroom of much younger students, overlooking the recess area, while their classmates enjoyed their freedom. Lauded at first, administrative attention turned to scorn when the little darlings complained to mom and dad who, in turn, complained to mr principal.
The pc gods have created an educational environment where, despite executive gnashing of teeth, the kids, in the end, run the show. The teacher has been relegated to the role of traffic cop where no one follows the rules.
Margarita
April 1st, 2010
9:52 pm
And apparently, we still lag behind the rest of the world in education.
ladybug41
April 15th, 2010
6:03 am
I think the good teachers should be rewarded for their hard work ,however there are a lot of green teachers that just cannot teach the work in a diverse manner and expect the parents to do it all at home ,teaching school is not the parents career, the kids are not learning these days a parent job is to attend school enough to see whats going on with your child and keep a open line of communication with the teacher,help with homework,make sure your child gets enough sleep,goood meal etc; but these days teachers think you can just drop work and leave your job anytime as for the test scores I have personally encountered a teacher that just could not teach the material in a manner her students could understand her whole class was confused this our kids education teachers have theirs and most of them seem to not care where did the old days go georgia is so messed up.teachers giving candy as treats for good work then when the kids misbehave you punish them is just insane.
England Teacher
April 15th, 2010
5:25 pm
Gosh. I didn’t know it was so bad in the states. It’s like that here too. A few things haven’t come our way yet, such as ‘the wall’. That sounds awful. We put the pupils in ability groups and then put these groups on the wall so that they can all see if they are in a lower attainment group. I struggled in one school to avoid them having to actually carry the group assignation around with then on a card! I won that battle (and was then pushed out of the school). I’m now sitting at home waiting for a nurse to bring me sleeping tablets. I’m only allowed one at a time! Ten years in teaching and what do you get? Ten years older and deeper in debt.
Grades are your data file? Come on.
September 7th, 2010
7:41 am
The comment “Next time I’ll turn my gradebook in for my data folder and call it good” is ridiculous. So a kid misses an assignment and gets a zero…the F in the gradebook indicates he does not know how to add? No, it indicates he’s tired of being bored in your classroom because you didn’t look at the data and realize he already knows how to multiply 3 digit by 3 digit numbers and you’re still having him add 5 + 5. Maybe you should retire.