Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Throughout most of my career as an educator, I decried the number of tasks delegated to public schools. Legislatures mandated dental hygiene, animal husbandry, specific history units, and countless “safety” programs while adding tougher graduation requirements. I felt that schools should stick-to-the-knitting and be limited to preparing kids for college or preparing kids for work… period…. end of report. Sometime in the early 2000s, though, I had a change of heart on this whole issue. I felt that schools HAD to assume responsibility for assuring that students entering Kindergarten were ready to learn instead of complaining about that reality. I felt that schools needed to have a way to work with parents who were overwhelmed by the demands of their children or the demands they faced at home instead of complaining about “those parents”. I wrote an article for Education Week entitled “A Homeland Security Bill or Education” that addressed this topic (see Published Articles), suggesting that schools work in a more coordinated fashion with agencies serving children in the same way the various law-enforcement agencies were supposedly going to work collaboratively in Homeland Security.

The ASCD On-Line Jounrnal is linking to a series of articles on Social and Emotional Skills by Randy Tarin in Edutopia. Ms. Tarin is the founder of Project Happiness, “a non-profit that empowers youth to create greater happiness in their lives and in the world”. As a Buddhist practitioner I see several parallels between the skills needed to manage anger recommended by Ms. Tarin and those recommended by Thich Nhat Hahn, but I also see parallels between her teachings and those of theologians who focus on the teachings in the New Testament. I can imagine some politicians (Rick Santorum comes to mind) recommending that schools inculcate students with spiritual values while most advocate staying as far away as possible from teaching ANY values in schools. The conundrum for schools is this: it is impossible to give students social skills without imposing some kind of values. The values schools teach and embrace now are competition, consumerism, and compliance…. and increasingly competition is Darwinian, consumerism is welcomed (see earlier posts on “naming rights”), and compliance is imposed from all levels of government. These implicit values led to the economic and cultural divide, to the degradation of the environment, and the rabid dogmatism that pervades our political discourse today. Ultimately, a conversation about whether schools should take on social and emotional skills will force a conversation about the values we have in place now. I believe it is time to begin that dialogue soon.

An article from a day earlier could have been titled “Big Oops”… it seems that the methodology for calculating “value added” was  “too sensitive” among teachers whose students did either very well or very poorly. As a result there were “73 cases in which teachers whose students produced consistently outstanding test scores — at or above the 84th percentile citywide — were nonetheless tagged as below average”… as the Naked Capitalism blogger would say “Quelle Surprise!”. Despite the well known fact among education statisticians that scores on either end of the bell curve would be distorted by value added analyses, parents of high performing students were surprised:

For parents, seeing the rankings of the teachers they know well can be shocking. Vicki Kahn, a parent at Public School 333, the Manhattan School for Children on the Upper West Side, was surprised to see that some of the teachers whom she considers outstanding had poor ratings, including one who routinely sends many of her students to a highly selective middle school.

“It seems completely wrong,” Ms. Kahn said, adding that one of the co-teachers in the sixth grade did not even get a rating, in an apparent mistake.

Anna Rachmansky, whose son is a fifth grader at P.S. 89 in TriBeCa, was visibly stunned upon discovering that a teacher she held in high regard scored in the 10th percentile in math.

“I’m very surprised she would get poor in anything,” Ms. Rachmansky said. “She’s a very strong educator.”

At least one parent was not surprised:

Sandra Blackwood, the co-president of the parent teacher association at Public School 41 in Greenwich Village, said she had little confidence that the data would be meaningful, though she felt it was important to look.

“If it is anything like the school grading system,” she said, “it will probably be highly arbitrary.”

Though parents can get a peek inside school buildings for the first time to see differences among teachers, it does not help if the underlying information is incorrect, Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of P.S. 321, said.

“What people don’t understand is that they are just not accurate,” she said. “We are talking about minute differences in test scores that cause a teacher to score in the lowest percentiles,” like a teacher whom she finds great and who scored in the sixth percentile because her students went to a 3.92 average test score from a 3.97, out of a possible 4.

And that is not to mention one teacher who had test scores listed for a year she was out on child care leave, Ms. Phillips said.

“The only way this will have any kind of a positive impact,” she said, “would be if people see how ridiculous this is and it gives New York State pause about how they are going about teacher evaluation.”

I would be VERY surprised if it had any such effect since so many political players from Arne Duncan on down who have so much invested in this method working. Alas, no matter which party takes the White House we are stuck with four years of value-added blather. As one who once believed in the promise of this kind of methodology, I am especially disappointed in how this is all playing out. Data driven decision making CAN make a difference if the data driving the decision making is valid. But when bad data is used to make decisions it can lead to bad results… just ask the people who believed in the data coming from Arthur Anderson on Enron’s financial stability!

As noted in earlier posts, at the behest of Mayor Bloomberg the NY BOE posted ratings of teachers based on a complex “value-added” calculation using test data that was discredited several months ago. The direct and indirect results of this decision came through in several articles in today’s NYTimes.

One consequence of the release was to hand the union president a “rallying cry” to dig in his heels in the ongoing negotiations with the mayor over teacher evaluation. Mike Mulgrew, the UFT President, was inundated with emails from teachers. The NYTimes analysis of the court’s decision to release the ratings was summarized in this one paragraph:

But the legal defeat a court dealt the union, by green-lighting the release, may yet be a political victory for the union — by galvanizing members and mobilizing allies on the left, including the Occupy movement andChange.org, through which scores of people signed petitions and sent letters to news organizations last week protesting the publication of the ratings.

My sense is that people understand that the ultimate purpose of any evaluation is to improve performance and that the data gathered for the purpose of evaluations should be kept confidential.

An article profiling the top performing teachers found some degree of consistency among the group— all were hard working and focussed on improving the scores. But none of the group advocated for the publication of “winners” and “losers”…

A third article in today’s paper profiling Michele Rhee intimated the dark side of motivating by fear: cheating to get higher test scores. It seems that every time an urban district gets a success story, there is a cheating scandal lurking in the wings… especially when the urban superintendent wants to fashion themselves after a private sector CEO. It seems that both Rhee and the Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall hired the same firm Caveon to conduct an internal review of their cheating scandals. In both cases Caveon found the claims to be “unsubstantiated”…. findings that were later undercut by independent investigations done by government officials. Sound familiar? When public officials are asked to make their organizations mirror private sector “success stories” don’t be surprised when they mirror the behavior of Enron…