New evaluation system finds less than 1 percent of teachers are ineffective

The blind evaluating the blind. Only in education.

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I wonder what Socrates would get under the evaluation system? Yet 200 years from now, we will still recognize Socrates and the Socratic method. 200 years from now, will we recognize anyone who came up with this newest, latest, greatest evaluation system?

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You have our children for most of their waking hours, far more than we have them.
Grobbbbbbbbb

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What’s so hard about reading a script? Who really gets to teach anymore?

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maybe the problem is that the people doing the evaluation are being too lenient on the bad teachers…..which makes perfect sense, as the incentive to be hard on teachers just isn’t there. Once again, proof that an objective, Value Added measurement using standardized test results, may be the best approach. Again, not a fool proof approach, but the best one.

Clearly, given the results from this “new” system, it isn’t working either….. Since those of you who teach know very well how many ineffective teachers there are in your department alone.

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This teacher eval system is looking for teacher compliance with a desired behavioral model. It is designed to coerce compliance with Charlotte Danielson and others outcome based education classroom practices and prevent the old “close the door and teach the content” dynamic that impeded the 1960s and 90s efforts.

So guess what? When teachers are being observed they perform consistent with the desired behaviors. You can be quite ignorant of the subject and still perform adequately and proficiently based on the model. In fact that is one of the primary benefits of performance assessments for both students and teachers, being stupid or ignorant is no barrier to performance.

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/coercing-teachers-to-be-social-and-political-saboteurs-what-can-be-done/ is a story I did several weeks ago on this compliance system and why it is so crucial to the Social Reconstruction efforts for education envisioned by Dewey and all his 21st century acolytes.

It gives the links to both the CCSSO’s Model Teaching Standards and Linda Darling-Hammond’s recent report on what behaviors will be deemed effective teaching.

I classify the whole “we are not telling teachers how to teach” PR campaign of Common Core as totally bogus. Along with the new forms of measurements that are not tests of knowledge, changing classroom behaviors is the whole point of Common Core.

The rather talkative Hewlett Foundation had admitted precisely that. Not about standardizing content at all unless very low levels counts.

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On December 28, 2012, I had the following dialogue exchange with “Redweather” on this blog regarding “blaming teachers”:
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Redweather: “And if we are going ‘to stop blaming students,’ we should also stop blaming teachers.”

Mary Elizabeth: “Amen to that! ‘We’ should simply change the instructional design of our schools to accommodate a realistic, continuous progress, mastery of curriculum, model for every student in grades k – 12 (or more), in the ways that I have tried to explain, and then ‘we’ should educate teachers, administrators, parents, and students as to how that effective design would operate, in practice, for each student.”

For more on this Continuous Progress Educational Design Model, k -12+, see the following link: http://maryelizabethsings.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/the-case-for-continuous-progress-for-students-in-grades-k-12/
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NOTE of information for readers: State Sen. Fran Millar is a member of ALEC, and he has been – and perhaps remains – a member of ALEC’s Educational Task Force, as well as functioning as Chair of Georgia’s Senate Educational Committee.

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A half century after test scores headed south … education reform still remains a joke, and the teachers’ unions (and their media shills) still treat parents and taxpayers like fools.

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particularly the finding that less than 1 percent of teachers are unsatisfactory — raise serious questions.

FAIL.

Any system that evaluates 99% of teachers as effective has failed. Can anyone look at student achievement and, with a straight face, say that 99% of teachers are effective?

But now I will play devil’s advocate: if 99% of teachers are effective, then it is the classroom structure (tossing kids of all abilities into the same classroom, expecting the smarter kids to help the weaker kids, new math, etc, etc) that is failing. And if that is the case, then schools have been wandering down the wrong path for the better part of the last 25 years.

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I found this statement most interesting:

One of the main impediments to comprehensive teacher evaluations in the past has been a lack of adequate observation. Principals did not have time to go into classrooms to watch teachers in action.

Aside from the metrics that exist on an evaluation form, I would think the greatest weight of a teacher evaluation would be the observation. This also assumes the person doing the evaluation knows what good instruction is along with how to help with a remediation plan if they believe a teacher needs assistance.

Given the demands placed on many principals these days, would it make sense to have certified retired educators perform the evaluations, in conjunction with a school based staff member? IMO, factoring that some principals have not been in the classroom very long before moving up the ladder, there is reason to question the quality of the observations.

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My kids have teachers in high school who do not teach. Period. They hand the kids a textbook and a sheet of paper and tell them to take notes. No hands on, no discussion. One of the teachers has the title of “Dr.” but has classes in which the average grade is failing. I find that completely unacceptable.

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Why should taxpayers and parents be surprised if the system is unable to recognize ineffective teachers. In the education world where everyone gets a trophy of course there are no ineffective teachers. They just need more money and less pesky questions about accountability. Oh…and legal protection of their monopoly from alternatives to the monolithic public school system.

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It is important to report on the entire Quality Counts document from Education Week. Saying that Georgia is ranked 7th is not giving readers a clear understanding of what the report shows. For example, while the teaching profession gets a B- grade, student achievement gets a C- grade. In addition, only 58% of GA high school students graduate. Teachers inspire students to learn and achievement. How can only 1% of GA teachers be evaluated as unsatisfactory, when 42% don’t graduate from high school and our student achievement results give the state a C- grade. While the full responsibility for student achievement does not rest with schools and teachers, schools and teachers need to take full responsibility for students not learning or being inspired to learn. Parents and society need to also take their fair share of responsibility. Nevertheless, there have to be more than 1% of GA who are not satisfactory. The data tells us so.

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Why are teacher ratings skewed? This is the real question. It has nothing to do with the evaluation tool but rather WHO is doing the evalution.

I am sure that tons of money was spent for this Race-to-the-Top mess to transform the evaluation tool. But the bottom line is that the same people will be doing the evalution.

So then, the question becomes – Why are these people that do the evaluations skewing the results? The answer to this question highlights the same problem that I feel is the core evil in Georgia education.

Because the people doing the evaluation:
1. are related to the worst performers. They are the cousins, the nephews, and so on.
2. are close friends to the worst perfomers. They have known these people for years. Sometimes in a professional setting and sometimes not.
3. need these faculty members that are the worst performers. These are the coaches, the club sponsors, the people that donate their time in many ways to keep the school functioning in non-academic areas.
4. don’t want to cause trouble. They won’t give low performers poor ratings because these are the people that will lawyer up. It is easier to simply say that they are satisfactory and let sleeping dogs lay.

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Maureen, if you’re looking for op-ed writers here’s one who could shed some actual light on what’s ailing public education: http://tinyurl.com/bp879×7

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@Mary Elizabeth, I think Attentive asks some fair and legitimate questions in the 10:32 post.

As a passionate advocate of Continuous Progress I hope you will comment on the comments, particularly the following:

***And the mastery of curriculum is the ability to apply what is provided, not necessarily know it within the privacy of your own mind. The emphasis of application keeps the focus on the concrete and in context. The idea is not to provide a body of facts that bolsters the abstract mind.***

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So let me get this straight. It is statistically impossible for there only to be 1% of teachers failing…. but there is supposed to be 0% of students failing. How is this possible?

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why is it hard to think high-educated people can’t “game” a test(evaluation)?? Teachers have 4-7 years of college and can do the dog-and-pony show for 30-50 mins when you schedule a visit. I taught last year in Henry and they tell you when they are coming and what key phrases to say to pass all 21 objectives!

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Since they spend so much money every 2 to 4 years coming up with new eval. systems then we must assume the old eval. system were bad. Otherwise why spent so much money to change. That being the case they should go back and change every teacher that got a bad evaluation on the old system to a good evaluation. They were eval. on a faulty system.

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@Beverly Fraud, 11:08 am

I think that Attentive Parent has set up a false dichotomy in his/her statement. Yes, mastery of the curriculum is “outcome-based,” but that simply means that assessment will prove whether or not the student has mastered certain specific concepts, within the curriculum, over time. First, there is an introductory level to concept learning, and at that introductory level, concepts can be fleeting in the student’s mind. Once reinforced, however, concepts are mastered and assessment will determine if mastery has been achieved by the student (which means that the concepts will be sustained in the student’s mind).

Now, consider the range of the reading continuum of concepts, which begin with basic word attack skills, all the way up to higher level comprehension skills. Thus, the beginning “outcome” of mastery learning might be whether or not the student can correctly identify prefixes and roots words which are contained within certain vocabulary words. These rudimentary reading concepts of word etymology are assessed in concrete ways. Mastery outcome is determined easily with these basic reading concepts. However, the top of the reading concept continuum will contain more abstract comprehension reasoning, and of course that reasoning will start “within the student’s mind.” The student may be asked, upon assessment, of the concepts learned to compare and contrast the literary work of Tolstoy with that of Dostoyevsky, or to explain the influence of Freud on Dostoyevsky’s body of work. Of course, the student will hold these abstract thoughts in his or her mind before he or she is able to present his or her thoughts on an assessment test which will determine if the student has achieved mastery of higher level ideas. Assessments of basic reading skills, on a continuum through higher reading comprehension skills, will give concrete results as to mastery learning.

The higher level of any curriculum’s continuum will call for more abstract thinking on the student’s part, but that thinking can be tested in outcome for mastery, just as the more basic concrete concepts are tested for mastery. That is why I believe that Attentive Parent has presented a false dichotomy.

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While there is a need to review the results and the underlying teacher evaluation program, I think what is really going on here is that the NEW system is flawed and not really identifying ineffective teachers. With our graduation rates near the bottom of the nation, it’s clear that we’re not really making the appropriate changes to align funding towards innovation as well as improving accountability systems. Teacher evaluation is one part of a comprehensive set of reforms that needs to happen, and the results of the pilot study raise serious questions on whether we’ve really changed anything.

I’d say the DOE who are in charge of RTTT will be very disappointed in this outcome and it should put some of our $400M award at risk.

I’d also say that Dr. Henson may be correct in her initial suspicions and they deserve further investigation.

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leg puller, you have an outstanding point: 100% by 2014

BRILLIANT

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@Maureen, I would like to think that most commenters on here would find George’s post to be worthy of removal for its hostility as well as poor grammar.

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@ george,

kinda early in the day for hitting the bottle, isn’t it? I know its 5 o’clock somewhere, but really…..
consider the comments of dean Wormer about the pitfalls of life

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on serious business:

I find the whole situation flawed. there is no way less than 1% of faculty are ineffective. just not possible in any arena of life. not even the SEALS.

that said, it seems really curious this report gives ole red meat Fran exactly the sort of pulpit he might want considering the new stick and whip approach by the legislature towards education.

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My child had approximately 40 teachers during his time in public schools. Though there were some I didn’t care for from a “bedside manner” aspect, they all did their jobs adequately (and in some cases, exceptionally).

Let’s suppose for a moment that only 1% of the teachers are truly ineffective by the Danielson standards. Where do we place the blame next?

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“Ten percent of teachers scoring at the extremes of exemplary and unsatisfactory likely would be more accurate, [Martha Ann] Todd and [Avis] King said.”

Why would Todd and King say such a thing? Especially given that King is the state’s deputy school superintendent for school improvement, and Todd is associate state superintendent for teacher and leader effectiveness.

Could it be because they have been mis-educated to believe that a population must, by any measure, exhibit a normal distribution? Or, did they say it out of malice? Or perhaps out of allegiance to Fran Miller and company?

In any case it should be obvious that Todd and King express the predetermined outcome Fran Miller and company want: If ever any application of the teacher evaluation system does not yield a normal distribution of teachers, then the system must be tampered with until it is made to produce the desired normal distribution. That way, Miller and company can be lazy and slothful in identifying “bad” teachers.

The moral and ethical decadence, if not just plain rot, of the Fran Miller sort of legislators renders them untrustworthy at the personal level when it comes to public education and upholding and promoting democratic ideals in service to the public good. It really isn’t hard to see the damage Miller et al.’s decadence will reap for Georgia and, by extension, the nation.

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Bootney, I agree wholeheartedly! When money enters any endeavor, the corruption and difficulties follow. It’s only about looking good so taxpayers will keep the money flowing without complaining.

The industry that is now education reminds me of all of those Medicare/Medicaid companies that developed when unlimited money began flowing for medical equipment. While there are some honest people out there, most of them are looking to sell taxpayers a $9000 hammer that will address all of the problems of education, but really aren’t doing anything except making people rich. If they went after education fraud like they do Medicare/Medicaid fraud, we might be able to educate our kids, pay our teachers better, and get better results if you get the “snake oil salesmen” out of the way.

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When ANY evaluation tool finds that less than one percent of the employees are ineffective — the evaluation tool is ineffective.
Teachers are human and we well know that many in Atlanta stole, cheated and lied for a couple of thousand dollars of bonus money. We also know that many paid others to illegally and immorally take their ridiculously easy certification exams.
We also know that many are simply poorly educated.
If less than one percent were found to be ineffective by this evaluation tool, the tool itself is at fault.

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This just demonstrates the hubris of the current Public Education environment. It’s this false sense of perfection that has caused our Educational System at all levels to slowly and steadily erode.

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RJ @ 9:48 nails part of the problem…too much time taken away from teaching to complete reams of paperwork submitted ad nauseum to ‘prove’ we are doing our jobs.

Private Citizen at 10:17 am hits another nail squarely on the head: “Why the over-emphasis on evaluating teachers? Because it is a cover for dysfunctional system;” as do Old Physics Teacher at 11:40: “When I have no control over what I’m being evaluated on, and my boss tells me to do stupid things that aren’t effective, I’ll do exactly what the boss says; even if it is stupid!;” and pull my other leg at 11:28: “So let me get this straight. It is statistically impossible for there only to be 1% of teachers failing…. but there is supposed to be 0% of students failing. How is this possible?”

And I don’t know what evaluations are like in the K-12 system, but the evaluation experience at my state technical college goes like this: supervising Deans visit our classes once per year, for approximately 5 minutes, to observe. A few weeks later, each instructor meets with his/her respective Dean to discuss the evaluation which consists of a checklist of various areas where we are scored from 0-5. Three is the magic number because any score of more or less than a 3 requires additional documentation justifying the low- or high-performance, so everyone gets mostly threes, with an occasional 1, 2, 4, or 5 thrown in for good measure. (Fortunately for the students, most of my colleagues are committed to teaching and do their jobs well).

I have been teaching for close to 10 years now. I love teaching but I hate what ‘education’ has become. I’m seriously planning an exit strategy, just in case I finally hit the wall where I can’t take it any more. Based on comments I regularly read on the Get Schooled blog, I feel fairly certain that if I were teaching in the K-12 system I would have hit that wall a long, long time ago.

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Beverly & Mary Elizabeth–I actually enjoyed ME’s response myself. This will be briefer than I would like as I am about to do dance car pool. ME’s response seems to see reading as a matter of skills and strategies. I also think she is using abstract thought in the way I would use conceptual. Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is wanting conceptual thinking to still be concrete.

That’s not really abstract in the traditional sense of creating your own mental scenarios based on facts.

In the Common Core materials, both ELA and math, we hear the terms pathways, learning progressions, and trajectory a lot. The idea is that everyone has certain specified skills and familiarity with certain specified concepts that they can apply to “real world problems.” It has a real programmed feel to it.

ME-correct me if I am wrong but you also seem to be interested in sight reading as an acceptable technique. I think that’s horribly inefficient. No need to guess if taught properly. I actually have a copy of the reading progression which was hiding on a New Zealand server where I should not have gotten it.

It makes me sad to see years spent doling out words to know by sight that could all be known by 2nd grade and move on to knowledge if reading were taught phonetically and efficiently. And I do not mean phonics.

I have taught teachers how to do it because they had honestly never seen kids learn to read so fast. But my logic is letters do not have sounds sounds have letters and there are about 42 sounds.

Got to run. More later,.

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I obviously meant incompetent with an “i.”

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We desperately need better teachers. Some of the teachers we have, and a lot more than 1% would be incapable of working a window at McDonalds. Raising their pay won’t help a bit.

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“My spouse has read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian. We both have doctorates.”

I drank some Black Russian Cocktails while watching Doctor Zhivago. Does that count for a doctorate?
(Actually it might if one was a favored member of The Four Horsemen of the Incompetence LOL)

So Home-Tutoring Parent, do you also get the sense of anti-intellectualism that (correct me if I’m wrong Invisible) Serf’s Collar seems to think permeates the “reform” movement in education?

I hope ME and Serf will exchange more…

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I’m not familiar with the new evaluation system, but I can tell you something that many of you have overlooked: there aren’t very many people in the world who would put up with nonsense that K-12 teachers take every day. Don’t you think that might have something to do with the results? If a lot of teachers were deemed ineffective, where would you find people to replace them? I know, for instance, that I am considered a veteran teacher among my peers. I have no doubt that I could be replaced, but how many times would the school board have to go through the hiring process in the course of the 20 years I have been in the classroom? The average career span in my particular subject area was 7 years before the great recession. Who knows what it is now?

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Basing any accountyable system on Georgia’s awful testing regimen will not yeild meaningful results whether skewed or not. By the time our legislature gets through destroying the teaching profession through salary freezes over years, removal of education incentives to attain advanced degrees, removal of National Certification incentives, furloughs, decreased benefits, threats to retirement, removal of a required certificate, and an endless parade of canned ideas from ALEC designed more to privatize than improve education little will be left to attract the teachers of the future. Guess it woul be too much to ask to actually look at a model that works like Finland’s or Canada’s?

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@Attentive Parent, 8:34 pm

“I think you would like equitable results which is not a bad passion per se.”

“What a lovely world books are.”
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As a teacher to my core, I simply want to see each child able to reach his, or her, full potential, whatever his/her unique potential might be.

And, I agree wholeheartedly with you that “books are a lovely world.” Through the printed word, we are not only able to communicate with one another, presently, regarding teaching and the education of our young, but we are able to “communicate” with those great minds of the past who have left their perceptions for posterity, through their written words.

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“What a lovely world books are. And print let’s all of us with our varying perspectives and experience carry on a conversation to try to honestly arrive at a discussion of what is best for the students and the teachers trying to do right by them.”

Yes Invisible, that would be nice. I’d say Mary Elizabeth has done her fair share. But it does seem too many people shy away from tough, legitimate, questions.

How many educators, for example, are willing to admit when they first heard the Teddy Stoddard story, they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker? No, believing the Teddy Stoddard story isn’t damning in and of itself, but a mindset that routinely accepts what is presented in education training as “gospel” is damning. It’s how things like the Whole Language movement got foisted on education in the first place.

But when we can’t even question why Herb Garrett continues to honor Beverly Hall; when we can’t even question why Fulton pays consultants who praise Chairman Mao as an “effective leader” what does that say about the mindset of educators who seemingly can’t comprehend why these are important questions to ask?

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Teaching is an art, not a science. It cannot be quantified, calculated, or repeated in a controlled experiment. Keep spending money on this, Georgia. The destruction of public education is the goal. We are unfortunately on our way.

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I dare make some summary notes as I think there is some misinformation here.

1. I would not trust one of these teacher evaluations or reports for as far as I could pick up and throw a Range Rover. It is utter garbage, political to the max, and in my opinion, completely worthless. Basically I am referring to a 100% lack of trust of this entire proxy system.

2. Before I get going, here’s a middle finger – screw you! – to the clown who keeps harping about teacher unions. There are none in Georgia, or if there are they have had their testes chopped off like a goat on the ranch. If I saw you in person I’d give you a good tussle you’d never forget for harping about teachers unions in Georgia, as if you think there is good clean oxygen in the bottom of a coal mine, you jerk! I’ve had to put up with so much poser corrupt garbage from these highly paid corrupted managers and I’ve gone to seek union protections from harassment and found that there is none. So when you want to right a check for a private lawyer just so I can work in peace without harassment, then you can harp about that. And when you see how corrupt are the network administrator crowd, that just heats up the fire – once you see what they are doing and they know it. They ran off the only two good principals I liked working for and harassed me like I was Ben Stein in a concentration camp. They are corrupt corrupt corrupt corrupt and their Arne Duncan evaluation instruments belongs in the sewer with the rest of his yesterday’s dinner. We need a revolution but if anyone ever tries one, at least they can read all your email. We need to stop respecting and responding to these initiatives as if they have an legitimacy. They do not. And I don’t want to hear any more harping about unions in Georgia, like someone is having fun at the pinball machine. Georgia teachers have no protections from harassment except for using a private attorney. They should teach this doctrine in teacher training and give new teachers a lawyer directory and 10% discount card.

2. Evaluations – d$%@ right it is the good teachers who get run off.

3. Who volunteered for the new evaluation system? You have got to be kidding. No one even wants anything to do with this garbage. Senior proven and politically reliable (in other words, they would go along with it) teachers were volunteered for this exercise in time-suck. No one volunteered and those who were co-opted did not like it and considered it to be a burden additional to their work.

4. So that’s the message. No one volunteered. There are no unions or teacher protections in Georgia. And none of this garbage is relevant or trustworthy and no one should even give it legitimacy or fall for the con. And whoever said Georgia “was awarded” “Race to the Top” money is just a sucker in a bad poker game. ‘Award for $500M” and cost you $1B will making you destroy yourself. That’s no award.

5. And whoever used the term “adversary” is exactly correct. Teachers are treated as adversaries by the managers. Well then, teachers should fight back. Somebody should. How many days until the former professional basketball player Arne Duncan stops authority role playing? What happens when he is gone? Another czar and another cartoon-named theme? There nerve of these jerks. Like that Michele Rhee chick. Somebody has given her a script and she is expecting a pay-off. Arne Duncan is on video saying schools should be open 18 hours a days and serve as community medical clinics at night. The man is a flim-flam artist idiot and you can be assured he does not go to the after hours clinic for his medical care. He’s a con man with a sales pitch. Again and again and again and again. And he’s in your classroom in Georgia because you fell for the “award.”

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Oh now this is rich. Reading Arne Duncan’s biography, His father was a psychology professor

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@Dr. Monica Henderson, you are spot on!
Using the TKES and LKES could be one of the most effective ways for administrators to change the culture of learning in their building. It first requires that the administrator not only know the 10 dimensions of the evaluation instrument thoroughly , but to have a grasp of what quality instruction looks like in the classroom. The latter takes hours and hours of study. A great administrator will spend time observing in the classroom those that do it well and view videos of great teaching practices online . Teaching is an art and a craft that teachers learn from practice and observing others do it right.
Developing a system where teachers spend time observing each other to ensure that instruction, practice, assessment, reteaching, extending and reassessment can produce excellent results.
This evaluation system coupled with coaching and direction by an administrator who has learned the craft well can transform the culture of learning in a school.
Evaluation was not meant to be an “I got you” system. It is meant to be a measure of a quality end product produced by teachers and administrators. Much like a conductor and his/her orchestra. The product is evident to all.
But it has to be done correctly

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“Evaluation was not meant to be an “I got you” system.”

I’m not so sure I believe that Negotiator and here’s why:

If true, why has there been zero talk about protecting teachers from the arbitrary and capricious misuse of the evaluation instrument?

Surely anybody who knows anything about education in Georgia knows that’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed, not only for teachers, but for students as it was one of the “tools in the toolkit” that help keep the cheating going for close to one full decade.

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Negotiator says: view videos of great teaching practices online

source? You’re saying evaluators should see such “videos” and you do not even mention teachers, as if the teachers are some unrelated thing, like a tomato in a field, instead of a human? If you are going to use “videos of great teaching practices,” this is shared resource for teachers and administrators alike? This type video sounds like a great idea,. Dear Mr. Barge even has a website about it that is so nice and beautiful is looks someone made an FAO Schwarz marketing site using an Apple computer. Here, let me dial it up for you.

Can someone explain this to me? You wonder why I act like I want to jump off a bridge? Okay, Here’s the trailer for the videos you mention: http://gafuturenow.org/modern-teacher/

Here’s the testimonial videos telling how great “the movement” is http://gafuturenow.org/video-testimonials/

Now where are the videos? Did they just formally promote a snipe hunt? (an elaborate practical joke in which the unsuspecting victim hunts a snipe and is typically left in the dark holding a bag and waiting for the snipe to run into it). What’s going on here? It’s like a bad acid trip. Didn’t this guy’s mama teach him that you don’t sell something that you do not have? I’ve really appreciate if someone could explain these “videos of great teaching practices online” because I don’t see them, but I see them being promoted. How can the bosses practice such incomplete action will putting the point of a drill onto the teachers? Who’s the leader? Are you the leader? Am I the leader?

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(post continued)

Here’s the testimonial videos telling how great “the movement” is http://gafuturenow.org/video-testimonials/

Now where are the videos? Did they just formally promote a snipe hunt? (an elaborate practical joke in which the unsuspecting victim hunts a snipe and is typically left in the dark holding a bag and waiting for the snipe to run into it). What’s going on here? It’s like a bad acid trip. Didn’t this guy’s mama teach him that you don’t sell something that you do not have? I’ve really appreciate if someone could explain these “videos of great teaching practices online” because I don’t see them, but I see them being promoted. How can the bosses practice such incomplete action will putting the point of a drill onto the teachers? Who’s the leader? Are you the leader? Am I the leader?

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@redweather … Indeed it would! And that is why it will never be implemented.

Because it’s a good idea….one that didn’t come from some “central” authority.

If I sound bitter, well, it’s because I am. After 23 years of good-to-excellent “evaluations,” my last two were “unsatisfactory” and I was railroaded into retirement…by a principal who (I just learned) doesn’t even have a leadership certificate, but would do what *someone* in the central office wanted done – get rid of some payroll. (23 years and an Ed.S. degree … you do the money math. I cost the system too much money.)

Keep this in mind as we evaluate the evaluation system…if there’s someone in the central office who wants a teacher gone, no evaluation system will prevent an administrator from getting rid of that teacher. It matters not if that teacher is good, great, or SuperTeacher. If someone wants that teacher gone, it’s just a matter of time until they are gone.

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it make sense to have certified retired educators perform the evaluations

Oh, who are you kidding? Evaluations are used to promote or railroad whoever is chosen for “the treatment.” I do not know what is the answer to this outside of 100% voucher and a market-based school environment. In a government school district, it might be the black / white / purple / male / female people getting either promoted or railroaded. There is a very short chain of command of who tells the “evaluator” what to do. You might get railroaded because you actually taught content. Or – my favorite – you were firm with some jerk kid whose mama got the last teacher fired – and informs you as much – and mama has “friends on the board.” There is so much of this rotted networking in these bottled up “districts,” there must definitely be answers for teachers. For one thing, currently, teachers have no power and avenues or ability to stand up to abuse from management. Or what about the teacher who bats their eyes and flatters the principal mercilessly and gets promoted etc., meanwhile the hard-nosed content teacher who is actually preparing students for professional work gets the bad review from a principal who says “You’re asking too much from the students.” Sounds like a comic book? I’ve had it happen to me. Same bunch when I delivered the high test scores from students, gave me Zero mention of it and basically informed me that I needed re-training. Oh yes, well guess what. I stepped back. And now that person, the principal, is themselves currently getting THE TREATMENT from the corrupted upper political squad. It is a nasty thing. Principals have it no better than teachers, maybe worse, when it comes to this Peyton Place local politics. And yes, they do intrude on schools and micro-manage and politic and busy body. Some days I think there are local power people who DO NOT WANT the underclass to learn anything. Otherwise, why would they destroy good / able / performing teachers?

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and (the teacher) is also spending their own money on materials to get the job done, something an administrator does not do.

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Thanks Beverly. I wasn’t asking to make a rhetorical point–I don’t know if you are yourself a teacher or administrator, so that’s why I was inquiring whether you’d had the training.

M

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The new teacher evaluation system is very comprehensive. If you have not seen it, it was folders of criteria where teachers had to prove professionalism, continuous education, customer satisfactions(their students), design/develop/and assessements involving extenesive lessons. Then stand on stage unannounced and deliver. Why is it we expect “exemplary” grades from our kids, but it is impossible for those teaching them to be exemplary? Do we actually question your child’s grades? Do we give students a survey to find out how they feel when they come to school? Do they feel secure at home? Do they feel loved, cared for? Do they feel supported? How many parents would even get a “sufficient” rating? When did it happen that people looked down on the people that really do care the most? Be happy that people are doing this. Soon it may be that all students learn at home, on computers, with no interaction or life skills. From my experience, it is those that are so negative about the successes of others are the ones who could never pass an evaluation in their own company or business.

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@Beverly Fraud,

Sorry for not being clear. I merely meant to express that my spouse and I have experienced the gamut of education, and based on this experience, ME’s “compare and contrast Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky” exercise on state tests would be inappropriate , if not inconceivable. But I would go beyond this and opine that it would be “a an escaped-zoo elephant hunt,” i.e. an extremely rare undertaking in American public schools, excepting perhaps Stuyvesant HS (Manhattan), which offers beyond-AP 2nd-year-college-level classes.

To present this as something that could or perhaps will be tested (good luck finding it on PISA!) in Georgia or any other state’s learning-assessment program, would be preposterous. So why did ME propose this scenario to the AJC blog readers?

To clarify on Freud’s non- influence on Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky died in Feb. 1881. The Brothers Karamazov was completed in 1880, at which point Freud was an unpublished 24 y/o medical student. Freud’s first book was published in 1895, 14 years after Dostoevsky’s passing, and his ideas did not achieve international attention until after the turn of the century.

It initially struck me that ME’s Freud-Dostoevsky statement was “suspect”, because it was a vague apprehension in the cobwebs of my memory, that Dostoevsky was a mid-19th century figure, and Freud was an early 20th century figure. (Thank you, my now mostly deceased pre-”modern” teachers, who believed in teaching historical facts, as underpinnings of ideas’ evolutions.)

Suppose that ME meant to say, “Dostoyevsky’s influence on Freud,” which would be valid, as Freud indeed read Dostoevsky and analyzed his work.

But even this would be a ludicrous proposition as subject matter in a high school class, much less as a state (or federal) test item.

ME may “impress” people, or even “intellectually intimidate” parents who read this blog (”We never read War and Peace or Crime and Punishment in high school, and certainly not The Interpretation of Dreams, gosh these are some hard things she is saying our children will be tested on.”)

Dear parents, ME’s test-subject-matter propositions are as sensible as science-standards tests challenging students to “compare and contrast Wolfgang Pauli’s and Werner Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics solutions”.

Attentive Parent makes interesting points in his own blog. He says that public education in America is a social-emotional “behavioral training” enterprise. I think it has been so for a long time. John Taylor Gatto ( 3 x NYC Teacher of the Year, and 1991 NY State Teacher of the Year), a retired master teacher and educational historian wrote extensively on this.

As Gatto explains, mass-compulsory education was invented to condition children for lives in an industrial society. Most students were intended to do manual industrial work, many to do routines-based administrative work, a few to be professionals. Societal leadership roles would be reserved for privately-educated men, chiefly scions of leaders.

Interestingly, the largest national “supplier” of PUBLIC normal schools’ deans from 1900 to 1950 was PRIVATE Columbia University’s Teachers College. To have a glimpse at TC’s influence, every normal school in America retitled itself “Teachers College” in emulation of the mother school by 1940, and Columbia TC invented the yellow school bus (what color are your district’s buses?). Meanwhile private Stanford was made the largest supplier of deans for Western states’ public teacher-training schools.

Dewey and his West Coast counterpart David Starr Jordan didn’t hire themselves or fund their teacher-education schools’ construction or operations. They were empowered by the money and influence of John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and other titans of industry and finance (let’s not call them Robber Barons, please.) Meanwhile, their busybody wives mounted campaigns to “protect” children from the horrors of child labor by putting them in schools. The poor working-stiff parents’ protests (they needed their children’s household-support contributions) were overruled by the elites.

In short, mass public compulsory education was an industrialist-capitalist-led “planned society” plot. (Which ultimately led to the workers, which is to say faculty, in public schools, and subsequently in teacher-training ((normal schools cum teachers colleges cum)) regional state universities, reactively becoming unionized.

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@Home Tutoring Parent, 4:09 pm

I believe you were referring to my post to Attentive Parent which I posted on the late morning of January 7th. The purpose of my post was to explain that Mastery Learning can be applied to outcomes as varied as the range of reading skills which extend from the most basic word attack skills (prefixes, roots, suffixes) to the highest level of comprehension skills. I deliberately chose very advanced comprehension skills to demonstrate that full range. However, at no point did I refer to state assessment tests for high school students – to which you refer.

In our reading program in the large suburban high school in which I had taught for 16 years, we had students who tested in reading vocabulary and comprehension skills in 9th grade in a range from grade level 3 to grade level 16+, each year for over a decade. That was the range of reading skills for approximately 500 9th grade students each year. I personally taught Advanced Reading to high school jurniors and seniors. I have given the link to Cyndie’s story on this blog. Cyndie was a student of mine who topped out of my reading post test at grade level 16+ (senior year in college) on the Nelson Reading Test, which I administered to all of my advanced reading students. Cyndie was a junior in high school at that time. I disagree with you that, in general, high school students are not capable of understanding the correlation between Freud’s work and Dostoyevsky’s work. I have taught high school students who have had very perceptive minds, and who had done extensive reading-for-pleasure from reading lists outside of the mandated grade level curriculum in reading.

You are correct, however, that Freud would not have influenced Dostoyevsky’s work, directly, because of the dates of their separate publications indicate that to be true. I wrote my January 7th post without considering those dates as carefullly as I should have. Dostoyevsky’s work, however, might have influenced Freud’s work, as you suggest. I was thinking of Freud’s ground breaking exploration of, and writings of, the Id, Ego, and Superego and that Dostoyevsky’s fictional characters of Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei (the three brothers’ Karamazov) somewhat symbolized Freud’s psychological demarcations, especially Dmitri of the Id, and Alexei of the Superego.

I could have phrased my question better and more accurately. However, my focus was upon demonstrating that Mastery Learning can be tested from the most concrete basic skills to the most advanced comprehension skills. I was thinking in terms of assessing my own Advanced Reading students in my own class, not of a state-mandated curriculum test, which you address.

As you know, ideas are current over decades in history and ferment for decades before finding full expression – such as happened in the American Revolution, and soon thereafter in the French Revolution. Sigmund Freud lived from 1856 to 1939 and Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived from 1821 – 1881. Thus, they shared a quarter of a century of the same time period on this planet. The ideas related to the human soul and of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit were being explored in great depth, especially at that time. That same theme, of course, is found in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy lived from 1828 to 1910 – roughly in the same period of the world’s history as did Freud and Dostoyevsky. Of course, Carl Jung, a protege of Freud, broke away from his mentor because he felt Freud was placing more emphasis on the sexual nature of human beings in influencing their psychological development than he (Jung) wished to explore. Jung’s body of work concerned the effect of the spiritual nature of human beings on their psychological development. That same Sexual vs. Spiritual pull (as depicted in Dostoyevsky’s fiction) can be found within the pull between the psychological work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Jung lived from 1875 to 1961.

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Something to consider is the old GTEP tool had the option of satisfactory or unsatisfactory only. TKES enables admins to pick one of four categories for ten dimensions. Ts can score along the way with lower scores and then moving up as they show improvement. Also, know that the pilot last year was done over 4 months, not an entire year of study. Most admin were learning how to use the new tool with the new rubrics while using it at the same time while also having to so their regular evaluation tool for legal reasons. Tough to give teachers the lowest marks possible when they have had less than two or three days of training on the expectations and its rolled out in the middle of the school year. It was not a greatly designed pilot and that timeline was pressured by the TKES timeline in the RT3 grant. The GADOE folks, Todd etc., have wisely worked to make this year long pilot a better window into the tool. I think these are very preliminary data on a tool attempting to change a culture in schools.
The GaDOE folks have been working hard to make this a good tool with good training behind it for the teachers and admin. It is a challenge to do good evaluations that are honest because all teachers think they work hard, but that doesn’t ean they are effective and that’s the challenge.

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@Mary Elizabeth, I hope you are able to engage Invisible Serf in more dialogue. Sincerely mean that.
You both have views that are obviously well researched, though seem to have opposite conclusions as to their implications for education. Would like to see what would come of further discussion.

While Beverly Fraud could be accurately characterized as an insufferable provocateur (although somebody has to ask questions that don’t get asked enough) you two bring a wealth of knowledge to your point of view.

Maureen, you should show your appreciation to what they bring!

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@ME,

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I would strongly suspect that your advanced-ability students relish having you as a teacher, and will remember you fondly for the rest of their lives.

@Prof,

Most of my teaching was at the graduate and postdoctoral level, as an adjunct.

I chose to home-tutor, because our kids were “falling through the cracks”, in Episcopal schools (the putative “best schools” in our community). Our oldest son was a straight-A student in humanities (including fine art), and social studies, but a perennial B student in math and science. I accepted this with reservation. When he scored highly on the PSAT V, but ca. 66th percentile on the M in 10th grade (private schools administered the PSAT in 10th grade as a “practice run”), I had a summer off, and decided to see if we could improve my son’s math score.

Fortunately, as luck would have it, my son had retained his textbooks, to which he had pasted chapter and section schedules. To my consternation, I doscovered that his prior alg II and geo teacher, had not assigned more than 70% of either subject’s textbook. Furthermore, he skipped chapters, which undermined the textbook authors’ carefully designed progression of concepts to be mastered.

I assigned my son a small selection of exercises in topics he had ostensibly learned, according to his book-pasted schedule.

I was flabbergasted. This was a student who wrote excellent essays and term papers, and one of his teachers even submitted an article for publication. For his math exercises, however, he scribbled calculations, did mental calculations without writing, and wrote incorrect answers to a number of questions.

So, I set out a new regimen: 1. Write down each question (starting proposition), and the information given. 2. Write your first solution step, showing your primary “problem-attack” idea. 3. Write subsequent solution steps. 4. Write your final answer.

I gave him demonstrations. He quickly absorbed the methodology, and self-corrected most of his initial erroneous answers. We worked on translating word problems to equations.

In summary, by Nov. the next year, he was “head and shoulders above everyone else” [sic] according to his honors precalc teacher. (10’s on homework and quizzes, a 100% +5% for an extra credit problem on his mid-term exam.) Our son was deeply “engaged” and assumed a “class leader” role. The teacher asked us if we would allow our son to evening-tutor two of her struggling algebra students. We assented and the two students’ algebra performance improved from failure to comfortably passing.

This precalc teacher was amazed because she had asked the prior teacher at the beginning of the year, who his best students were, and he hadn’t mentioned our son.

Our 4th grader was deeply anquished, specifically about “math”. I tried to help him with homework, but the teacher gave a hodgepodge of problems, there was absolutely no sign that principles were being taught in logical, progressive manner.

We had to hit the “restart” button going to 2nd grade addition and subtraction. He could not complete a 10 x 10 multiplication table.

In summary, with intensive home-education, including 3 hours of morning math Mon-Sat, he was tackling elementary algebra within 18 months. He tutored other students in calculus during college, and is now teaching physics, “Physics First” to 9th graders, through AP Physics C Mechanics, and Electricity and Magnetism, to 11th and 12th graders, in an overseas private school. If your children’s school is teaching biology to 9th graders, and saving physics for the few “science geeks”
late in their high school experience, the school is doing things backwards (early 20th century course-sequence). Read Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, who invented and has tirelessly promoted the new sequence. “Conversion” is well underway in private schools here.

Our younger home-educated children learned how to write “mathematical essays”–mathematics isn’t just solving “real world” problems, it is a language, whose symbols and and “grammar” and “syntax” rules are a “foreign language” to most people.

Finally, I was given a wonderful opportunity to teach a gifted student (with ADHD) a one-on-one two-hour daily math course, thanks to a “pushy parent” and an accommodating private middle school principal. He had scored at the 99th percentile on the MAT-6(?), but was struggling in 6th grade “honors” pre-algebra. His teacher informed the parents that either repeating pre-algebra in 7th, or taking regular algebra, would be in order.

I tried tutoring him after school, but encountered the old “hodgepodge” issue on his work sheets. Horribly, there were several Area of Triangle = 1/2 base x height problems. There is a reason this formula is mathematically valid. It rests on certain arbitrary principles, called postulates (axioms), but giving 6th-grade students “Memorize the formula, and apply” is WRONG.

With his worn-off-meds, late-afternoon fatigue, and an awful homework worksheet regimen, I proposed giving him a morning class. His mother got him out of math class, and next-period Spanish, so we had an extended period.

Initial testing revealed that HE couldn’t do a 10 x 10 multiplication table, much less 2-digit x 2-digit column multiplication, nor 1 digit into 2 digit division. I asked him, is 5/8 more than 1 or less than 1?
“Less than 1″. Okay. Is 8/7 less than 1, more than 1 but less than 2, or more than 2. “Less than 1″.
What is 1/2 + 1/2? “One”. What is 1/2 + 1/4? “I don’t know”.

We started with basics, he mastered those, and within a few months we were doing elementary number theory, because it was fun. However, his Mom wanted him to take the ACT for a gifted-students summer program (after 7th grade). I gave him an old ACT-M, and he scored a 13 (3 points above random-guessing mean). The following winter, after some 9 months of tutoring, he scored a 27, missing Duke’s TIP “Grand Recognition” by a single point (cutoff 28). He nevertheless earned state TIP honors.

We obviously didn’t do pure test-prep. We did a lot of math. Learning how to envision algebra equations using a two-pan balance and masses, studying the metric and English measuring systems, measuring volumes and showing how oil is not only “lighter” than water by pouring them together into a vessel, but then calculating respective densities. We studied maps, seeing how their coordinates derives from Cartesian algebra.

In 8th grade, we eventually returned to the old 1/2 = h x b matter by taking area as the height x width of a square, creating rectangles with square blocks, counting the assembled squares, and adding their areas, then finding the same results by multiplying their heights x widths, creating paper non-rectangular parallelograms from rectangles, showing height and area remained constant (We didn’t add or take anything away, did we, we just cut out a right triangle and moved it from one side to the other, ergo area isn’t changing). Then we weighed whole parallelograms (oh, we learned how to draw them using a compass and straight-edge) with an electronic scale, we cut parallelograms diagonally, and weighed the pieces with an electronic scale. Ah, parallelogram (Area = h x b) has this weight. Identical triangles having same h and b, weigh half as much! Ergo, their area is 1/2 h x b. Of course we studied geometry formally (old Houghton-Mifflin textbook). My student’s longest proof was 14 steps. This is what a smart 13 year old can do, irrespective of whether a 6th grade teacher with an Elementary Ed degree/teaching certificate, who had to take “college algebra”, which is a euphemism for accelerated-pace high school algebra, judged this boy to have little ability in math, based on materials provided to her prepared by “experts” who assumed that “anyone can teach math,” if given the right materials, which the “experts” were not providing, including awful xeroxable worksheets.

In my opinion, girls may do better completing Area Triangle = 1/2 h x b, than boys, and completing 4 of them (with differing h’s and b’s) than boys. As well as other repetitive, alter the numbers, same method needed problems. Even when boys “get it”, they often feel, “Okay, I got it, why do I have to do five of the exact same kind of problem? It’s wasting my time (really my brain)”?

In our oldest son’s case, it turned out that the top alg II/geo student was a girl. Interesting. It can happen with good math teaching. But two out of the three top students were girls. Four of the top five students were girls. (This in the “First/ Honors” track.) This is not statistically plausible. Mathematics is not “gender neutral”. (See College Board’s AP Calc AB & BC scores-by-gender distributions.)

Our sons, of note, all scored 800 on the Mathematics Achievement Test Level II (SAT subject tests), which our oldest son was the only student in his class to do. For our second, I don’t know, but I do know this: a young bright mathematical mind felt tortured to feel, “I just can’t do math!” in 4th grade, which was due to wholly improper instruction (the teacher BTW was a state-licensed public school veteran, as was my later tutee’s 6th grade teacher, as was our oldest son’s alg II/geo teacher.)

Our kids also scored 700-760 on SAT Achievement Test Writing and History exams, as well, which is to say, they studied humanities/social sciences, and learned subjects other than math. We travelled to Europe, the tropics, museums and art galleries. Our kids took art classes at an art school, they took summer enrichment courses in respected universities, which generated rec letters that carried much more weight than something penned by an unknown (and decidedly biased) parent.

But math is an important language study, it instills analytical and logical thinking, it requires discipline. For example, most high school subjects can be assimilated by bright students with one or two focused readings of assigned materials. Math is the only subject for which a bright, accomplished math student, can read a passage and feel, “I don’t get what they are saying.” Read it over, then again. Still no comprehension. Sleep on it, then the next day, “Oh, wait a minute, I see what they are saying.” “Eureka!” Math is hard. It requires an “unnatural” amount of effort, and unconscious processes. When I was tutoring in the private school, I spent hours studying the material, writing lessons and my own “textbook” for my tutee to study. I dreamed math at night. It’s a strange, wonderful subject.

Finally, our son’s pre-calc teacher lent me the Teacher’s Edition of her class’s textbook. It contained a wealth of helpful margin notes that were absent from the Student Edition. (Parents wonder why their kids don’t take to reading math textbooks. The problem is math-knowledgeable authors write them, math-expert reviewers read them, things make perfect sense to them all, but they aren’t looking at the material “with naive eyes”. These books aren’t really designed to enlighten students. If teachers benefit from more-in-depth explanations, than the main-body text provides, why is this benefit denied to students?)

Public schools, and private schools for that matter, need to hire mathematics-degree-holding specialists for elementary education, or short of that, generalists whose first college math course was calculus, or short of that, demonstration of a 650 GRE-Quant score minimum.

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@ Home-tutoring Parent, 12:17 pm

Thank you for your compliment to me. I am a retired teacher. I do hope that my students will remember me “fondly for the rest of their lives.” All of my students were certainly a blessing in my life, and none more so than Robert.

For any readers who are interested, I will share, again, Robert’s story, in the link, below:

http://maryelizabethsings.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/roberts-story-love-never-fails/

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