The education secretary tackles teacher pay, student performance, and principal training
By Kim Clark | U.S. News & World Report
December 15, 2009
With billions in stimulus funding, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has more power to create change in the nation's schools than any of his predecessors. Before taking his current post, Duncan was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. During his tenure there, reading and math scores set new records, and the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses more than tripled. Now he faces the challenge of prodding school districts around the country to improve student performance while local school budgets are tanking. U.S. News Senior Writer Kim Clark asked Duncan how leadership will help him reform American education in the midst of a recession. Listen to a podcast of this interview.
Excerpts:
You're spending $5 billion on educational innovations at a time when states are slashing their budgets and firing teachers. How are you going to make sure that money isn't used just to maintain the status quo?
Rahm Emanuel, the president's chief of staff, has this great line: "Never waste a good crisis." We actually have two different crises here. One is educational, and the other, the toughest economy since the Depression. Sometimes the nexus of crisis and opportunity leads to the kind of dramatic reforms that we need, that frankly are more difficult to accomplish when times aren't so tough. So yes, it presents us with some real challenges. But what we are going to see is that this is a huge test of leadership. Some folks will be paralyzed by the challenges they are facing, and others will see this as a chance to fundamentally break through and challenge the status quo. And those are the type of leaders that we are going to invest in.
The great ideas always come locally, from great teachers and great principals. We want to take those good ideas to scale.
There's an argument that principals are the key to education reform: Better principals would hire better teachers and make teachers better. What are you doing to make principals better?
There are no high-performing schools without great principals. As a country we have absolutely underinvested in developing the next generation of great principals and really thinking about principal preparation and pipeline programs. We have to focus and put more resources behind principal leadership and development.
What qualities do you seek in principals that make them effective leaders? Principals today are CEOs. We have to treat them as such, and we have to train them as such. Principals have to be first and foremost instructional leaders. They have to be able to manage multimillion-dollar budgets. They have to be great in terms of HR. They have to work with the community. They have to be savvy with the media. We have to find those principals, and they are out there, those potential and future principals, and give them the range of skills and the range of training so that they can drive the kinds of dramatic change that we want.
The issue of merit pay for teachers is very controversial. A lot of people complain that basing merit pay on the scores of students just rewards teachers who happen to teach in rich districts. How can schools really measure student growth?
I am not a big believer in looking at absolute test scores. I think they tell you some things. There is a lot they don't tell you. I am a much bigger believer in looking at growth and gain and how much a student is improving each year. So, the more we can identify not just the teachers but the schools and the entire school districts that are accelerating student achievement and are accelerating student progress, those are the individuals and the teams and the schools and districts that we need to reward and shine a spotlight on, and most importantly learn from and replicate that success.
What techniques work to improve student performance in high school?
A couple things are of huge importance. First, making sure you have high expectations, that the work is very, very rigorous. We have to raise the bar. In far too many high schools, we've really dummied down expectations, and that actually increases student apathy. It doesn't increase success. It increases dropout rates.
Secondly, we have to build a culture in which every student, every teenager in high school, has an adult who they can go to in good times and bad who will be there for them. Having meaningful adult relationships is desperately important. Our high school students are looking for mentors.
Third, they want to understand what the relevance of their schoolwork to the world of work and the world of higher education. How we make those connections—from what we teach in the classroom to how the students understand how it will benefit them as they move on—is hugely important. When you see those things happen collectively and comprehensively, you see great outcomes for high school students.
We need to get the country into the business of turning around chronically underperforming schools. We are challenging everybody: states, and districts, and nonprofits, and unions and universities to think about turning around schools. We have some extraordinary examples of that around the country. But we don't begin to do it at scale or with the sense of urgency that we as a country need.
Some folks predict that you're going to have a hard time sticking to your guns about giving out only a few federal grants, and you'll have to give money to every single state to make friends. How you are going to be the leader who sticks to your guns on this?
Don't just listen to my words, watch my actions. I'm here for only one reason, and that is to help the country get dramatically better, and that is what we are going to do.
Showing posts with label growth models. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth models. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Superintendent spreads the gospel of 'value-added' teacher evaluations
Interesting sidenote mentioned in this article: "FOR THE RECORD:
Teacher evaluations: An article in some editions of the Oct. 18 Section A about evaluating teacher performance reported that the San Diego teachers unions spent nearly $400,000 in this fall's school board elections. The elections were held in 2008"
What needs to really be critically examined with value-added assessments is how they serve schools, sometimes at the expense of students meeting their goals (ideally for being college ready).
-Patricia
In Tenn. and N.C., Terry Grier adopted and expanded a statistical method of tracking student progress. Union resistance scuttled more modest efforts in San Diego, mirroring a brewing national debate.
By Jason Felch and Jason Song | LA Times
October 18, 2009
When Terry Grier was hired to run the San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this novel number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
Rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and the worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all of them a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the district's poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.
Still, it proved radioactive to San Diego's teachers union. Like many unions across the country, it saw the approach as a flawed instrument, a Trojan horse for introducing merit pay and a threat to hard-won employment protections.
After nearly two years of grinding battles with the union and school board on this and other issues, Grier recently left for Houston, where the district uses value-added results as a basis for teacher bonuses.
The opposition in San Diego, Grier said mildly, was "more entrenched than I thought it would be."
His fight there offers a preview of a debate that is about to engulf the nation's schools.
The Obama administration has made value-added a pillar of its school-reform efforts, including the $4.35-billion federal grant program known as Race to the Top, which requires states to link student scores to teachers.
The administration's endorsement thrust to the fore a 20-year-old idea that has long been confined to academic circles and a handful of states and school districts, including Chicago's, where it was championed by now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month signed into law two measures that put California on the path to measuring student growth with the value-added method.
But most districts thus far have just begun to talk about using the method in teacher evaluations.
Value-added analysis promises to address one of public education's central conundrums: On one hand, research shows that effective teachers are the single most important factor in improving student performance. On the other, most states use subjective evaluation systems -- based on occasional classroom visits by administrators -- that give nearly all teachers a satisfactory rating.
"Zero percent [of teacher evaluation] is based on student achievement," Duncan said in a recent interview. "That's a problem."
Protection of tenure
With no objective measure of success, firing a tenured teacher for incompetence is nearly impossible in many districts.
Earlier this year, a Times investigation found that jettisoning a tenured teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of terminations upheld by the state in the last 15 years, classroom performance was not even a factor.
"Allowing ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom is literally dragging down the nation," said education researcher Eric Hanushek of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
In a forthcoming paper, Hanushek estimates that replacing the nation's worst 6% to 10% of instructors with merely average teachers would propel the United States from its below-average level into the ranks of the world's top five educational systems.
So far, nobody is proposing even that. Most proponents hope to use value-added scores as one of several measures to identify teachers who need help.
Still, the potential of the value-added method has caught the eye of policy wonks, educational reformers and billionaire philanthropists such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and brothers Lowell and Michael Milken.
But value-added has met with staunch opposition from teachers unions, which often argue that standardized tests are not a good measure of students' performance, let alone teachers'.
They also cite some experts' concerns that the statistical methods of the value-added approach may rest on ill-founded assumptions.
For example, some research shows it's easier to achieve gains with certain types of students. The result could be the unfair rewarding or punishing of teachers based on the students they are assigned.
"The danger is that too much weight will be put on this," said Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor, who urges more study. "I think the policymakers are ahead of the statisticians here."
But cracks in union opposition are beginning to show. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, once fought efforts to use the value-added approach in New York, and in August cautioned the Obama administration against "over-reliance on an unproven idea."
But this month, her union announced innovation awards for several local unions that plan to adopt value-added measures as part of a new teacher evaluation system even though Weingarten said she still has reservations.
"What we've realized is, if we don't do it by ourselves, no one is going to listen to us," she said.
An early skeptic
Grier was skeptical when he first encountered value-added results in the early 1990s as superintendent of schools in Williamson County, Tenn., just south of Nashville.
Though it's one of the wealthiest districts in the country, many students in its highest-achieving schools were not making much annual progress. Students in some of the poorer schools, meanwhile, were making remarkable gains, learning two years' worth of material in a single grade.
Then, at an academic conference, Grier was won over after seeing a presentation by William Sanders, then a University of Tennessee statistician.
Sanders described how he had developed a statistical tool that, in essence, took into account three years of a student's test scores to estimate the child's academic trajectory. Then he compared it with the student's actual performance in the fourth year. The difference between the expected growth and actual growth became known as "the teacher effect."
The approach overcame the Achilles' heel of traditional achievement tests, which critics say reflect socioeconomic status more than learning. They judge this year's students against last year's, ignoring potential differences between the two groups.
With the value-added method, students are compared to themselves from year to year, so the results are not skewed by income levels, parental involvement, race or gender.
"A teacher or principal has no responsibility for what's happened to the kids in the past," Sanders said. "What they do have responsibility for is the student's rate of progress. This is what was different about what we did."
Sanders' research found that there is a huge disparity in the effectiveness of teachers, and that good teachers could make an enormous difference in a student's learning, regardless of the child's background.
Subsequent research largely confirmed his findings, and in the process many orthodoxies of education policy were called into question. In particular, studies indicated that the traditional measures of a teacher's quality -- such as years of experience, credentials and education -- have little bearing on his or her effectiveness.
Grier was convinced. "I thought it could be a game-changer," he said.
To challenge students at his wealthy schools, Grier pushed principals to focus on growth rather than hitting fixed scores. He used the data to assign teachers to students who matched their strengths. He denied tenure to at least four teachers whose students did not show growth for several years, and reassigned some low-performing principals while encouraging others to retire.
At his next job in Guilford County, N.C., Grier hired Sanders to improve on the district's existing value-added program.
The goal of the program, dubbed Mission Possible, was to attract effective teachers to low-performing schools. To do this, Grier offered highly effective teachers up to $10,000 to relocate. They got up to $4,000 more if students' test scores rose.
Many educators protested the plan, but, with no collective bargaining in North Carolina, the board approved Mission Possible in 2006.
By 2007, teacher turnover at some of the area's lowest-performing schools had been cut by almost half, according to a recent independent study. But the program hasn't significantly changed student achievement -- at least, not yet.
"It's a mixed bag," said board member Alan Duncan. The real test, he said, will be a few years from now, when the board expects the changes to show up in test scores.
North Carolina has since adopted value-added statewide.
Teacher resistance
Grier said he knew that Mission Possible wasn't possible in San Diego. "The board made it clear they were not interested in a merit-pay program," he said.
Instead, Grier wanted to find out how the district's high-performing teachers were distributed. He suspected that many were clustered north of Interstate 8, in the wealthier part of the city.
He lured Sanders, now with a for-profit data analysis company, to visit San Diego with the promise of golf at Torrey Pines. The statistician's presentation persuaded the school board to approve a one-year, $80,000 contract with Sanders' company -- but limited its use to identifying students in need of extra help.
Union officials decried the move, saying the money would have been better spent hiring another teacher. They suspected Grier was trying to move the district toward merit pay. "We knew his history," said union President Camille Zombro.
She and other union members interrupted a school board meeting in June to present the board with a petition complaining about Grier's top-down management style and calling for his removal.
"He looked good in a suit, but he wasn't willing to collaborate," Zombro said.
Relations with the administrators union also soured when Grier tried to use value-added scores as a component of principal evaluation, a plan that was eventually rejected.
The board did not renew Sanders' contract this fall and never made public the results of his analysis.
Grier took over as Houston's superintendent in September. Reached by telephone recently, he seemed invigorated.
"They do things differently out here," he said. "It's a breath of fresh air."
Teacher evaluations: An article in some editions of the Oct. 18 Section A about evaluating teacher performance reported that the San Diego teachers unions spent nearly $400,000 in this fall's school board elections. The elections were held in 2008"
What needs to really be critically examined with value-added assessments is how they serve schools, sometimes at the expense of students meeting their goals (ideally for being college ready).
-Patricia
In Tenn. and N.C., Terry Grier adopted and expanded a statistical method of tracking student progress. Union resistance scuttled more modest efforts in San Diego, mirroring a brewing national debate.
By Jason Felch and Jason Song | LA Times
October 18, 2009
When Terry Grier was hired to run the San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this novel number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
Rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and the worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all of them a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the district's poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.
Still, it proved radioactive to San Diego's teachers union. Like many unions across the country, it saw the approach as a flawed instrument, a Trojan horse for introducing merit pay and a threat to hard-won employment protections.
After nearly two years of grinding battles with the union and school board on this and other issues, Grier recently left for Houston, where the district uses value-added results as a basis for teacher bonuses.
The opposition in San Diego, Grier said mildly, was "more entrenched than I thought it would be."
His fight there offers a preview of a debate that is about to engulf the nation's schools.
The Obama administration has made value-added a pillar of its school-reform efforts, including the $4.35-billion federal grant program known as Race to the Top, which requires states to link student scores to teachers.
The administration's endorsement thrust to the fore a 20-year-old idea that has long been confined to academic circles and a handful of states and school districts, including Chicago's, where it was championed by now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month signed into law two measures that put California on the path to measuring student growth with the value-added method.
But most districts thus far have just begun to talk about using the method in teacher evaluations.
Value-added analysis promises to address one of public education's central conundrums: On one hand, research shows that effective teachers are the single most important factor in improving student performance. On the other, most states use subjective evaluation systems -- based on occasional classroom visits by administrators -- that give nearly all teachers a satisfactory rating.
"Zero percent [of teacher evaluation] is based on student achievement," Duncan said in a recent interview. "That's a problem."
Protection of tenure
With no objective measure of success, firing a tenured teacher for incompetence is nearly impossible in many districts.
Earlier this year, a Times investigation found that jettisoning a tenured teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of terminations upheld by the state in the last 15 years, classroom performance was not even a factor.
"Allowing ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom is literally dragging down the nation," said education researcher Eric Hanushek of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
In a forthcoming paper, Hanushek estimates that replacing the nation's worst 6% to 10% of instructors with merely average teachers would propel the United States from its below-average level into the ranks of the world's top five educational systems.
So far, nobody is proposing even that. Most proponents hope to use value-added scores as one of several measures to identify teachers who need help.
Still, the potential of the value-added method has caught the eye of policy wonks, educational reformers and billionaire philanthropists such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and brothers Lowell and Michael Milken.
But value-added has met with staunch opposition from teachers unions, which often argue that standardized tests are not a good measure of students' performance, let alone teachers'.
They also cite some experts' concerns that the statistical methods of the value-added approach may rest on ill-founded assumptions.
For example, some research shows it's easier to achieve gains with certain types of students. The result could be the unfair rewarding or punishing of teachers based on the students they are assigned.
"The danger is that too much weight will be put on this," said Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor, who urges more study. "I think the policymakers are ahead of the statisticians here."
But cracks in union opposition are beginning to show. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, once fought efforts to use the value-added approach in New York, and in August cautioned the Obama administration against "over-reliance on an unproven idea."
But this month, her union announced innovation awards for several local unions that plan to adopt value-added measures as part of a new teacher evaluation system even though Weingarten said she still has reservations.
"What we've realized is, if we don't do it by ourselves, no one is going to listen to us," she said.
An early skeptic
Grier was skeptical when he first encountered value-added results in the early 1990s as superintendent of schools in Williamson County, Tenn., just south of Nashville.
Though it's one of the wealthiest districts in the country, many students in its highest-achieving schools were not making much annual progress. Students in some of the poorer schools, meanwhile, were making remarkable gains, learning two years' worth of material in a single grade.
Then, at an academic conference, Grier was won over after seeing a presentation by William Sanders, then a University of Tennessee statistician.
Sanders described how he had developed a statistical tool that, in essence, took into account three years of a student's test scores to estimate the child's academic trajectory. Then he compared it with the student's actual performance in the fourth year. The difference between the expected growth and actual growth became known as "the teacher effect."
The approach overcame the Achilles' heel of traditional achievement tests, which critics say reflect socioeconomic status more than learning. They judge this year's students against last year's, ignoring potential differences between the two groups.
With the value-added method, students are compared to themselves from year to year, so the results are not skewed by income levels, parental involvement, race or gender.
"A teacher or principal has no responsibility for what's happened to the kids in the past," Sanders said. "What they do have responsibility for is the student's rate of progress. This is what was different about what we did."
Sanders' research found that there is a huge disparity in the effectiveness of teachers, and that good teachers could make an enormous difference in a student's learning, regardless of the child's background.
Subsequent research largely confirmed his findings, and in the process many orthodoxies of education policy were called into question. In particular, studies indicated that the traditional measures of a teacher's quality -- such as years of experience, credentials and education -- have little bearing on his or her effectiveness.
Grier was convinced. "I thought it could be a game-changer," he said.
To challenge students at his wealthy schools, Grier pushed principals to focus on growth rather than hitting fixed scores. He used the data to assign teachers to students who matched their strengths. He denied tenure to at least four teachers whose students did not show growth for several years, and reassigned some low-performing principals while encouraging others to retire.
At his next job in Guilford County, N.C., Grier hired Sanders to improve on the district's existing value-added program.
The goal of the program, dubbed Mission Possible, was to attract effective teachers to low-performing schools. To do this, Grier offered highly effective teachers up to $10,000 to relocate. They got up to $4,000 more if students' test scores rose.
Many educators protested the plan, but, with no collective bargaining in North Carolina, the board approved Mission Possible in 2006.
By 2007, teacher turnover at some of the area's lowest-performing schools had been cut by almost half, according to a recent independent study. But the program hasn't significantly changed student achievement -- at least, not yet.
"It's a mixed bag," said board member Alan Duncan. The real test, he said, will be a few years from now, when the board expects the changes to show up in test scores.
North Carolina has since adopted value-added statewide.
Teacher resistance
Grier said he knew that Mission Possible wasn't possible in San Diego. "The board made it clear they were not interested in a merit-pay program," he said.
Instead, Grier wanted to find out how the district's high-performing teachers were distributed. He suspected that many were clustered north of Interstate 8, in the wealthier part of the city.
He lured Sanders, now with a for-profit data analysis company, to visit San Diego with the promise of golf at Torrey Pines. The statistician's presentation persuaded the school board to approve a one-year, $80,000 contract with Sanders' company -- but limited its use to identifying students in need of extra help.
Union officials decried the move, saying the money would have been better spent hiring another teacher. They suspected Grier was trying to move the district toward merit pay. "We knew his history," said union President Camille Zombro.
She and other union members interrupted a school board meeting in June to present the board with a petition complaining about Grier's top-down management style and calling for his removal.
"He looked good in a suit, but he wasn't willing to collaborate," Zombro said.
Relations with the administrators union also soured when Grier tried to use value-added scores as a component of principal evaluation, a plan that was eventually rejected.
The board did not renew Sanders' contract this fall and never made public the results of his analysis.
Grier took over as Houston's superintendent in September. Reached by telephone recently, he seemed invigorated.
"They do things differently out here," he said. "It's a breath of fresh air."
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Schools get credit for kids predicted to pass TAKS
By HOLLY K. HACKER and JEFFREY WEISS / The Dallas Morning News
Sunday, July 5, 2009
When the state announces school ratings this month, hundreds of schools are expected to claim higher marks – and part of the credit goes to new state rules that count some students as passing the TAKS test when they actually failed.
The state created school accountability ratings in 1993 to help parents gauge the successes and shortfalls of individual schools. But over the years, the state has made so many changes that it is a test in itself to figure out if a school is doing better, doing worse or holding even.
A new adjustment kicks in this year: the Texas Projection Measure. It allows schools to count students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills as passing, as long as a complex formula shows that those kids are predicted to pass in a future year.
So many schools are likely to benefit from this latest academic "get out of jail free" card that it raises the question: At what point do the ratings become meaningless?
"We know that when the rules change every year and there are exemptions on top of conditions on top of projections, that really begins to water down the meaning of any of these labels," said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy for the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for poor and minority students. Hall served on a federal panel that reviewed Texas' new model.
Here's how the new projection measure works:
Say a seventh-grader failed the math TAKS. The Texas Education Agency developed a statistical formula that predicts whether that student will pass the math test in eighth grade. The formula considers the student's math and reading TAKS scores, plus the average math TAKS score at his school.
If the student is predicted to pass, the school gets to count him as actually passing – even though he really failed.
School ratings are based on the test scores of all students, plus the performance of certain groups of students, including those who are black, Hispanic or poor. If just one group falls short academically, the whole school's rating can suffer.
An evolving tool
The projection formula was originally developed for the federal accountability system, called No Child Left Behind. Schools must show students are making "adequate yearly progress" as measured on standardized tests.
TEA officials note that a national panel of testing experts approved the model. They say it is not a perfect predictor but very accurate.
"We're looking for a way to recognize those schools where they've done a phenomenal job of increasing student performance, but they just haven't quite gotten every student over that last bar," said Criss Cloudt, a TEA associate commissioner.
But Hall, speaking for Education Trust, said one problem with Texas' model is that it gives schools credit based on future performance and doesn't go back and compare that to actual performance.
Case in point: A sixth- or seventh-grader who fails the TAKS could be projected to pass in eighth grade. The school receives credit for that. But suppose the student reaches eighth grade and does not pass as predicted. The school is not penalized. Instead, the Texas model looks ahead again – this time, determining whether the eighth-grader will pass the 11th-grade TAKS.
"From a school perspective, a student never has to actually be proficient. It's always projected into future grades," she said.
TEA officials say they will review the new model to see if students who were expected to pass did, in fact, pass.
"We see this very much as an evolving measurement tool," Cloudt said.
Local schools to benefit
Many North Texas schools expect higher ratings because of the new projection measure. But many other schools will show genuine student improvement, without the help of loopholes or fine print.
•Richardson ISD expects 16 of its 53 schools to benefit from the new projection measure.
•Dallas ISD expects 71 of its more than 200 campuses to benefit.
•Irving ISD expects two of its 20 elementary schools to jump from acceptable to exemplary, and a third campus to move up from recognized to exemplary. Irving hasn't had an exemplary campus in years.
•Of the 34 schools in Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, officials estimate that 17 will have higher ratings than last year. Nine of those schools will be aided by the new projection measure.
Cecilia Oakeley, Dallas ISD's evaluation and accountability director, said the new rule is fair to districts that serve students who struggle with poverty or language barriers.
"We're giving credit to students who are showing some growth but have not quite made the standard," she said. "They're on that trajectory."
That's the whole reason for using the model, TEA officials said. They also note that other changes in policy have made ratings harder on schools. For instance, the state has gradually phased in a stricter definition of dropouts that, for the first time this year, could lower some ratings.
Texas reports the percentage of students scoring at the higher "commended" level on the TAKS, but those rates do not affect the bottom-line school rating. The growth model changes also won't affect those rates, which can be useful for parents to see how many students at a given school are surpassing the basic passing standard.
State education officials say that school rating reports will make it clear what the pure TAKS passing rates are, compared to those boosted by the new projection model.
Changes not over yet
Major changes to the state's accountability system will continue, as the Legislature voted this spring to create a new rating system for 2013. Details are being worked out, but the new system won't rely so much on TAKS passing rates. Other measures, such as college readiness, will be included.
But it's unlikely the core of the debate will change: Ongoing tensions will remain between fairness and transparency, between stability and sophistication.
The TEA's Cloudt said there's a difficult balancing act: making the system understandable while recognizing that not all students come to school equally prepared.
While the promise was for clarity, the current system is based on formulas that few understand.
"It's so complex that very often parents are not fully informed on exactly what an individual rating means," said David Simmons, Richardson school superintendent.
But he said that confusion may be unavoidable.
"Any state-mandated, state-created accountability system is going to struggle to capture how individual campuses and districts perform on multiple measures," he said. "That may, to a great extent, be unattainable."
Donna Kent will be PTA president for the second straight year at Lake Highlands High School, which preliminary test scores indicate will need several exemptions to be ranked as recognized. Last year, the school was rated as academically acceptable.
She readily admitted that she was unaware of the various formulas behind the ratings, but said that the details were less important than the idea that her school was improving. She said the broad labels mean less than the information TAKS data provides, which helps schools target groups and students who need help in certain areas.
She said the situation is a lot like the Bowl Championship Series, used to select the top college football team. People complain about that system, too.
"We know we're going to have something, and we need to learn what we have and how to deal with it."
Staff writer Matt Peterson contributed to this report.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
When the state announces school ratings this month, hundreds of schools are expected to claim higher marks – and part of the credit goes to new state rules that count some students as passing the TAKS test when they actually failed.
The state created school accountability ratings in 1993 to help parents gauge the successes and shortfalls of individual schools. But over the years, the state has made so many changes that it is a test in itself to figure out if a school is doing better, doing worse or holding even.
A new adjustment kicks in this year: the Texas Projection Measure. It allows schools to count students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills as passing, as long as a complex formula shows that those kids are predicted to pass in a future year.
So many schools are likely to benefit from this latest academic "get out of jail free" card that it raises the question: At what point do the ratings become meaningless?
"We know that when the rules change every year and there are exemptions on top of conditions on top of projections, that really begins to water down the meaning of any of these labels," said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy for the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for poor and minority students. Hall served on a federal panel that reviewed Texas' new model.
Here's how the new projection measure works:
Say a seventh-grader failed the math TAKS. The Texas Education Agency developed a statistical formula that predicts whether that student will pass the math test in eighth grade. The formula considers the student's math and reading TAKS scores, plus the average math TAKS score at his school.
If the student is predicted to pass, the school gets to count him as actually passing – even though he really failed.
School ratings are based on the test scores of all students, plus the performance of certain groups of students, including those who are black, Hispanic or poor. If just one group falls short academically, the whole school's rating can suffer.
An evolving tool
The projection formula was originally developed for the federal accountability system, called No Child Left Behind. Schools must show students are making "adequate yearly progress" as measured on standardized tests.
TEA officials note that a national panel of testing experts approved the model. They say it is not a perfect predictor but very accurate.
"We're looking for a way to recognize those schools where they've done a phenomenal job of increasing student performance, but they just haven't quite gotten every student over that last bar," said Criss Cloudt, a TEA associate commissioner.
But Hall, speaking for Education Trust, said one problem with Texas' model is that it gives schools credit based on future performance and doesn't go back and compare that to actual performance.
Case in point: A sixth- or seventh-grader who fails the TAKS could be projected to pass in eighth grade. The school receives credit for that. But suppose the student reaches eighth grade and does not pass as predicted. The school is not penalized. Instead, the Texas model looks ahead again – this time, determining whether the eighth-grader will pass the 11th-grade TAKS.
"From a school perspective, a student never has to actually be proficient. It's always projected into future grades," she said.
TEA officials say they will review the new model to see if students who were expected to pass did, in fact, pass.
"We see this very much as an evolving measurement tool," Cloudt said.
Local schools to benefit
Many North Texas schools expect higher ratings because of the new projection measure. But many other schools will show genuine student improvement, without the help of loopholes or fine print.
•Richardson ISD expects 16 of its 53 schools to benefit from the new projection measure.
•Dallas ISD expects 71 of its more than 200 campuses to benefit.
•Irving ISD expects two of its 20 elementary schools to jump from acceptable to exemplary, and a third campus to move up from recognized to exemplary. Irving hasn't had an exemplary campus in years.
•Of the 34 schools in Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, officials estimate that 17 will have higher ratings than last year. Nine of those schools will be aided by the new projection measure.
Cecilia Oakeley, Dallas ISD's evaluation and accountability director, said the new rule is fair to districts that serve students who struggle with poverty or language barriers.
"We're giving credit to students who are showing some growth but have not quite made the standard," she said. "They're on that trajectory."
That's the whole reason for using the model, TEA officials said. They also note that other changes in policy have made ratings harder on schools. For instance, the state has gradually phased in a stricter definition of dropouts that, for the first time this year, could lower some ratings.
Texas reports the percentage of students scoring at the higher "commended" level on the TAKS, but those rates do not affect the bottom-line school rating. The growth model changes also won't affect those rates, which can be useful for parents to see how many students at a given school are surpassing the basic passing standard.
State education officials say that school rating reports will make it clear what the pure TAKS passing rates are, compared to those boosted by the new projection model.
Changes not over yet
Major changes to the state's accountability system will continue, as the Legislature voted this spring to create a new rating system for 2013. Details are being worked out, but the new system won't rely so much on TAKS passing rates. Other measures, such as college readiness, will be included.
But it's unlikely the core of the debate will change: Ongoing tensions will remain between fairness and transparency, between stability and sophistication.
The TEA's Cloudt said there's a difficult balancing act: making the system understandable while recognizing that not all students come to school equally prepared.
While the promise was for clarity, the current system is based on formulas that few understand.
"It's so complex that very often parents are not fully informed on exactly what an individual rating means," said David Simmons, Richardson school superintendent.
But he said that confusion may be unavoidable.
"Any state-mandated, state-created accountability system is going to struggle to capture how individual campuses and districts perform on multiple measures," he said. "That may, to a great extent, be unattainable."
Donna Kent will be PTA president for the second straight year at Lake Highlands High School, which preliminary test scores indicate will need several exemptions to be ranked as recognized. Last year, the school was rated as academically acceptable.
She readily admitted that she was unaware of the various formulas behind the ratings, but said that the details were less important than the idea that her school was improving. She said the broad labels mean less than the information TAKS data provides, which helps schools target groups and students who need help in certain areas.
She said the situation is a lot like the Bowl Championship Series, used to select the top college football team. People complain about that system, too.
"We know we're going to have something, and we need to learn what we have and how to deal with it."
Staff writer Matt Peterson contributed to this report.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
HISD schools set for jump in top ratings
By ERICKA MELLON HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 2, 2009
More than 70 percent of campuses in the Houston school district are expected to earn the state’s top two academic ratings this year thanks to higher test scores and a more forgiving Texas accountability system.
HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra predicted Tuesday that roughly 200 of the district’s 275 schools will earn a coveted “exemplary” or “recognized” rating. That’s up from 157 last year. Student test scores in HISD rose this year in nearly every grade level and subject.
The Texas Education Agency won’t release the official 2009 ratings until July 31, but more schools across the state are expected to earn top marks. That’s in part because the TEA changed its rating system this year to give schools credit for students who failed state exams — if they are on pace to pass in coming years.
For example, a middle school would not be penalized for a sixth-grader who failed the reading test if that student is projected, based on a statistical formula, to pass the eighth-grade reading exam in two years.
Texas not alone
Supporters of this new system, called the Texas Projection Measure, say it gives schools credit for making progress with students who are behind academically, but others argue the state is giving districts a free pass and is lowering standards.
Texas is not alone in its new approach.
The U.S. Department of Education recently started allowing some states to count student improvement in the federal No Child Left Behind ratings.
“Students come to school with varying levels of preparation,” said Criss Cloudt, the TEA associate commissioner over testing. “It’s important to recognize where school districts have made significant differences in the performance of students, but they haven’t quite gotten them over that last hurdle.”
As in past years, Texas schools will get one of four ratings — unacceptable, acceptable, recognized or exemplary.
School districts don’t have to announce to parents if a campus earns a higher rating because of the new state rules, but the data will be posted on the TEA’s public Web site.
Test scores rose
Houston school board President Larry Marshall said he worries parents will see the new rules as a trend toward lowering standards. The TEA already cuts schools other breaks in the rating system, such as boosting a school’s rating if it made significant improvement since last year.
“I would just be an advocate for kids meeting the standards,” he said. “If parents perceive it as a watering down of standards, I don’t think it’s going to make the school systems very attractive.”
Saavedra acknowledged that some HISD schools will benefit from the new rating system, but he emphasized that test scores rose significantly in the district on their own.
The persistent gap between white and minority students also is continuing to close.
For example, the percentage of Hispanic 11th-graders who passed all the state tests this year grew to 69 percent, from 65 percent in 2008 and 55 percent two years ago.
More ‘commended’
The passing rate for Anglos in 11th grade was 90 percent this year, dropping one point from last year.
“This gap has been closing,” Saavedra said, “and I do think it will eventually close if we can continue in the same direction of paying attention to the growth of every child.”
More students in HISD also reached the “commended” level on the TAKS, which means they answered most of the questions correctly and didn’t just barely pass the minimum-skills exams.
Mike Walker, principal of HISD’s Fondren Elementary, said he expects his school to shed its unacceptable rating this year, even without the flexibility from the state.
To boost scores, he said, teachers gave students common practice tests more often and met with the children and their parents about the results.
“Our focus was you teach it, then you test it,” he said.
Austin attorney Sandy Kress, an education adviser to former President George W. Bush, said the success of the state’s new rating system will depend on whether students who failed state tests end up passing them in a couple of years, as projected.
June 2, 2009
More than 70 percent of campuses in the Houston school district are expected to earn the state’s top two academic ratings this year thanks to higher test scores and a more forgiving Texas accountability system.
HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra predicted Tuesday that roughly 200 of the district’s 275 schools will earn a coveted “exemplary” or “recognized” rating. That’s up from 157 last year. Student test scores in HISD rose this year in nearly every grade level and subject.
The Texas Education Agency won’t release the official 2009 ratings until July 31, but more schools across the state are expected to earn top marks. That’s in part because the TEA changed its rating system this year to give schools credit for students who failed state exams — if they are on pace to pass in coming years.
For example, a middle school would not be penalized for a sixth-grader who failed the reading test if that student is projected, based on a statistical formula, to pass the eighth-grade reading exam in two years.
Texas not alone
Supporters of this new system, called the Texas Projection Measure, say it gives schools credit for making progress with students who are behind academically, but others argue the state is giving districts a free pass and is lowering standards.
Texas is not alone in its new approach.
The U.S. Department of Education recently started allowing some states to count student improvement in the federal No Child Left Behind ratings.
“Students come to school with varying levels of preparation,” said Criss Cloudt, the TEA associate commissioner over testing. “It’s important to recognize where school districts have made significant differences in the performance of students, but they haven’t quite gotten them over that last hurdle.”
As in past years, Texas schools will get one of four ratings — unacceptable, acceptable, recognized or exemplary.
School districts don’t have to announce to parents if a campus earns a higher rating because of the new state rules, but the data will be posted on the TEA’s public Web site.
Test scores rose
Houston school board President Larry Marshall said he worries parents will see the new rules as a trend toward lowering standards. The TEA already cuts schools other breaks in the rating system, such as boosting a school’s rating if it made significant improvement since last year.
“I would just be an advocate for kids meeting the standards,” he said. “If parents perceive it as a watering down of standards, I don’t think it’s going to make the school systems very attractive.”
Saavedra acknowledged that some HISD schools will benefit from the new rating system, but he emphasized that test scores rose significantly in the district on their own.
The persistent gap between white and minority students also is continuing to close.
For example, the percentage of Hispanic 11th-graders who passed all the state tests this year grew to 69 percent, from 65 percent in 2008 and 55 percent two years ago.
More ‘commended’
The passing rate for Anglos in 11th grade was 90 percent this year, dropping one point from last year.
“This gap has been closing,” Saavedra said, “and I do think it will eventually close if we can continue in the same direction of paying attention to the growth of every child.”
More students in HISD also reached the “commended” level on the TAKS, which means they answered most of the questions correctly and didn’t just barely pass the minimum-skills exams.
Mike Walker, principal of HISD’s Fondren Elementary, said he expects his school to shed its unacceptable rating this year, even without the flexibility from the state.
To boost scores, he said, teachers gave students common practice tests more often and met with the children and their parents about the results.
“Our focus was you teach it, then you test it,” he said.
Austin attorney Sandy Kress, an education adviser to former President George W. Bush, said the success of the state’s new rating system will depend on whether students who failed state tests end up passing them in a couple of years, as projected.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
State schools' success to be measured by growth
By Lindsay Kastner - Express-News
In one of the Bush administration's final education decisions, the U.S. Department of Education agreed to allow Texas to use a new method to assess public schools and districts.
Often pointed to as the administration's signature domestic policy, the No Child Left Behind Act calls for all students to reach proficiency in all subject areas by the 2013-2014 school year.
But under what is known as a “growth model” Texas will begin monitoring student progress over time, rather than determining whether a set percentage of students has passed state tests each year.
The U.S. DOE granted conditional approval of the Texas model last week, pending final approval of the TAKS-Alternate, a test for students with severe cognitive disabilities.
The federal government began a pilot of growth models in 2005, allowing all states to apply beginning in December 2007.
Including Texas, 15 states now have permission to use a growth model. The 2014 proficiency goal remains in place for those states.
Educators tend to favor growth models, but they require tracking individual student progress over time, and not all states have the capability to tackle the more complex measurements.
Texas had the technical ability to follow individual students over several years before many other states.
North East Independent School District Superintendent Richard Middleton sat on a committee that recommended Texas begin using a growth model.
“We still want accountability. We still want the tests to be rigorous and challenging,” Middleton said. “But we want to gauge how students are doing over time, to give schools credit for growth.”
He said the current system provides educators with little useful information, taking a snapshot of student performance each year without tracking progress.
“You really weren't watching the growth of those same students. So it really wasn't a fair or legitimate measure of anything,” he said.
Texas' growth model uses test scores from one year to predict performance in future years and will allow schools and districts to receive credit for students who failed state tests but are projected to pass in the future.
Called the Texas Projection Measure, it is modeled in part on a system used by the Dallas Independent School District.
If Texas had been using a growth model last year, an additional 136 school districts (11 percent) and 411 schools (5 percent) would have met federal standards, according to Texas Education Agency estimates.
David Francis, director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics at the University of Houston, favors the differentiated approach despite the possibility that they could be perceived as an easier route toward meeting federal standards.
“That's always a concern,” Francis said, adding, “If our real goal is to have students graduate from high school proficient ... then schools should get credit for moving students toward that goal, rather than meeting standards along the way.”
The state also plans to incorporate the Texas Projection Measure into the state accountability system, said Criss Cloudt, an associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency.
The growth model will begin to be applied this year with the TAKS, or Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, and TAKS-Accommodated reading and math tests.
It will be added in 2010 to newer tests for students with special needs, because the state lacks sufficient data to begin earlier with those tests.
In one of the Bush administration's final education decisions, the U.S. Department of Education agreed to allow Texas to use a new method to assess public schools and districts.
Often pointed to as the administration's signature domestic policy, the No Child Left Behind Act calls for all students to reach proficiency in all subject areas by the 2013-2014 school year.
But under what is known as a “growth model” Texas will begin monitoring student progress over time, rather than determining whether a set percentage of students has passed state tests each year.
The U.S. DOE granted conditional approval of the Texas model last week, pending final approval of the TAKS-Alternate, a test for students with severe cognitive disabilities.
The federal government began a pilot of growth models in 2005, allowing all states to apply beginning in December 2007.
Including Texas, 15 states now have permission to use a growth model. The 2014 proficiency goal remains in place for those states.
Educators tend to favor growth models, but they require tracking individual student progress over time, and not all states have the capability to tackle the more complex measurements.
Texas had the technical ability to follow individual students over several years before many other states.
North East Independent School District Superintendent Richard Middleton sat on a committee that recommended Texas begin using a growth model.
“We still want accountability. We still want the tests to be rigorous and challenging,” Middleton said. “But we want to gauge how students are doing over time, to give schools credit for growth.”
He said the current system provides educators with little useful information, taking a snapshot of student performance each year without tracking progress.
“You really weren't watching the growth of those same students. So it really wasn't a fair or legitimate measure of anything,” he said.
Texas' growth model uses test scores from one year to predict performance in future years and will allow schools and districts to receive credit for students who failed state tests but are projected to pass in the future.
Called the Texas Projection Measure, it is modeled in part on a system used by the Dallas Independent School District.
If Texas had been using a growth model last year, an additional 136 school districts (11 percent) and 411 schools (5 percent) would have met federal standards, according to Texas Education Agency estimates.
David Francis, director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics at the University of Houston, favors the differentiated approach despite the possibility that they could be perceived as an easier route toward meeting federal standards.
“That's always a concern,” Francis said, adding, “If our real goal is to have students graduate from high school proficient ... then schools should get credit for moving students toward that goal, rather than meeting standards along the way.”
The state also plans to incorporate the Texas Projection Measure into the state accountability system, said Criss Cloudt, an associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency.
The growth model will begin to be applied this year with the TAKS, or Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, and TAKS-Accommodated reading and math tests.
It will be added in 2010 to newer tests for students with special needs, because the state lacks sufficient data to begin earlier with those tests.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Not Everyone Wants to Move Toward Rating Educators by Student Progress
By Jay Mathews | Washington Post
Monday, November 17, 2008
For a while, the fight over how to improve public schools seemed to be quieting down. During the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic education advisers happily finished each other's sentences on such issues as expanding charter schools, recruiting better teachers and, in particular, rating schools by how much students improve.
Moving to the growth model for school assessment, by measuring each student's progress, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration. Up till now, we have measured schools by comparing the average student score one year with the average for the previous year's students. It was like rating pumpkin farmers by comparing this year's crop with last year's rather than by how much growth they managed to coax out of each pumpkin.
The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child. It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not. Officials throughout the Washington area have joined the growth model (sometimes called "value-added") fan club. The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year.
Of course, as often happens in education, that lovely consensus is proving too good to be true, mostly because of the teacher issue. The bad news was delivered recently by Education Week reporter Stephen Sawchuk, who has been checking how the growth model was actually being received by state politicians. It turns out some legislators have been building trapdoors under the welcome mats. California banned in 2006 any use of student growth data in teacher evaluations or compensation decisions. New York last year prohibited the use of such data for tenure decisions for at least two years. Other states are staying away from anything that ties student success to a teacher's pay or job security.
Go ahead. Blame the teacher unions. They make no apology for their opposition to this approach. But they have good arguments. Congress will have to revise the No Child Left Behind law to install the growth model, and most support for the idea there extends only to rating schools, not teachers. Assessing instructors by how much their students improve seems reasonable to people like me who have never taken a psychometrics course, but nobody has sufficiently tested the statistical devices for doing that, and they might prove to be expensive.
I asked two National Education Association officials, Joel Packer, director of education policy and practice, and Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, why we couldn't test students in September and May, calculate how much they improved and use that information in deciding whether to keep particular teachers and how much to pay them. Raabe said that would only work if the distribution of students in classes was randomized. I understood his point but did not see why good teachers couldn't show some progress no matter what sort of students they have. Raabe and Packer sent me more quotes from experts who weren't any clearer.
People who have studied the public schools that have significantly raised the achievement levels of impoverished students tend to accept the idea that teachers' salaries and jobs must eventually be tied to classroom results. "Of course," said Andrew Rotherham, an education think tank founder, blogger and Virginia Board of Education member who, at 37, is likely to be a major player on this issue for years to come.
But Rotherham hastened to add that his state is going to take it slow. A poorly planned system to fire teachers based on growth data could bring lawsuits. "We are never going to get to where we need to go without more research," he said. Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools, agreed. "The decisions we make to strengthen schools should not be made by speculation or unproven theory, but on data." President-elect Barack Obama is likely to nod when he hears that.
I asked Raabe and Packer about an alternative approach -- rating schools, not teachers, and replacing the principal if students do not improve. The NEA is not comfortable with that, either. Making the principal responsible for creating the conditions for student growth works only if the principal has the power to hire and fire staff, and that is a no-no for the association.
Could Obama broker a compromise? Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me that she wanted teachers to learn how to use growth data "and then see where we go from there." Would the unions agree to giving principals firing power in exchange for using not just tests but also the student work portfolios and public presentations that Raabe and Packer endorsed as authentic ways to judge how well kids have been taught?
Many Republican and Democratic policy experts want to try something like that. The growth model in some form will have its day, sooner or later.
But about those pumpkin farmers: It seems to me that the best measure of their work is not how much their big, orange vegetables grow but how well they stand up to my inexpert carving for Halloween and how many extra slices of pumpkin pie I eat on Thanksgiving.
The human equivalent to that kind of quality assessment is how well each school's students do in college, in jobs and in life. I don't think we have a growth model that measures that, but people are working on it.
Email: mathewsj@washpost.com
Monday, November 17, 2008
For a while, the fight over how to improve public schools seemed to be quieting down. During the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic education advisers happily finished each other's sentences on such issues as expanding charter schools, recruiting better teachers and, in particular, rating schools by how much students improve.
Moving to the growth model for school assessment, by measuring each student's progress, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration. Up till now, we have measured schools by comparing the average student score one year with the average for the previous year's students. It was like rating pumpkin farmers by comparing this year's crop with last year's rather than by how much growth they managed to coax out of each pumpkin.
The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child. It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not. Officials throughout the Washington area have joined the growth model (sometimes called "value-added") fan club. The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year.
Of course, as often happens in education, that lovely consensus is proving too good to be true, mostly because of the teacher issue. The bad news was delivered recently by Education Week reporter Stephen Sawchuk, who has been checking how the growth model was actually being received by state politicians. It turns out some legislators have been building trapdoors under the welcome mats. California banned in 2006 any use of student growth data in teacher evaluations or compensation decisions. New York last year prohibited the use of such data for tenure decisions for at least two years. Other states are staying away from anything that ties student success to a teacher's pay or job security.
Go ahead. Blame the teacher unions. They make no apology for their opposition to this approach. But they have good arguments. Congress will have to revise the No Child Left Behind law to install the growth model, and most support for the idea there extends only to rating schools, not teachers. Assessing instructors by how much their students improve seems reasonable to people like me who have never taken a psychometrics course, but nobody has sufficiently tested the statistical devices for doing that, and they might prove to be expensive.
I asked two National Education Association officials, Joel Packer, director of education policy and practice, and Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, why we couldn't test students in September and May, calculate how much they improved and use that information in deciding whether to keep particular teachers and how much to pay them. Raabe said that would only work if the distribution of students in classes was randomized. I understood his point but did not see why good teachers couldn't show some progress no matter what sort of students they have. Raabe and Packer sent me more quotes from experts who weren't any clearer.
People who have studied the public schools that have significantly raised the achievement levels of impoverished students tend to accept the idea that teachers' salaries and jobs must eventually be tied to classroom results. "Of course," said Andrew Rotherham, an education think tank founder, blogger and Virginia Board of Education member who, at 37, is likely to be a major player on this issue for years to come.
But Rotherham hastened to add that his state is going to take it slow. A poorly planned system to fire teachers based on growth data could bring lawsuits. "We are never going to get to where we need to go without more research," he said. Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools, agreed. "The decisions we make to strengthen schools should not be made by speculation or unproven theory, but on data." President-elect Barack Obama is likely to nod when he hears that.
I asked Raabe and Packer about an alternative approach -- rating schools, not teachers, and replacing the principal if students do not improve. The NEA is not comfortable with that, either. Making the principal responsible for creating the conditions for student growth works only if the principal has the power to hire and fire staff, and that is a no-no for the association.
Could Obama broker a compromise? Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me that she wanted teachers to learn how to use growth data "and then see where we go from there." Would the unions agree to giving principals firing power in exchange for using not just tests but also the student work portfolios and public presentations that Raabe and Packer endorsed as authentic ways to judge how well kids have been taught?
Many Republican and Democratic policy experts want to try something like that. The growth model in some form will have its day, sooner or later.
But about those pumpkin farmers: It seems to me that the best measure of their work is not how much their big, orange vegetables grow but how well they stand up to my inexpert carving for Halloween and how many extra slices of pumpkin pie I eat on Thanksgiving.
The human equivalent to that kind of quality assessment is how well each school's students do in college, in jobs and in life. I don't think we have a growth model that measures that, but people are working on it.
Email: mathewsj@washpost.com
Saturday, July 14, 2007
U.S. OKs Pilot ‘Growth Models’ for Last 2 States
I'm glad to see that growth models are being taken seriously. -Angela
Published Online: July 3, 2007
U.S. OKs Pilot ‘Growth Models’ for Last 2 States
By Alyson Klein
The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it will permit two more states—Arizona and Alaska—to use so-called growth models to measure student progress for the 2006-07 school year.
Six other states—Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Tennessee— have already been fully approved to participate in the department’s growth model pilot project. Beyond Ohio, which has received conditional approval, no additional states will be considered for approval to participate in the pilot project, said Rebecca Neale, a spokeswoman for the department.
Growth models allow states to receive credit under the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind Act for improving individual students’ academic performance over time.
By contrast, states adhering to the standard accountability requirements under the federal law compare test scores of groups of students against those of students in the same grade during the previous year, to gauge whether they are making progress toward bringing all students to proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.
‘Many Different Routes’
The department announced in 2005 that as many as 10 states could be permitted to participate in the pilot project, which U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings initiated to gauge whether growth models can be reliable indicators of student progress.
If lawmakers are satisfied with the results of the project, they could choose to expand the use of growth models during the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, scheduled for this year. The department will also evaluate the results of the project and consider next steps, Ms. Neale said.
Ms. Spellings outlined a set of “bright line” principles that all states interested in participating in the pilot project must meet.
For instance, the accountability plans must adhere to the 2013-14 target for having all students achieving at the proficiency level on state tests. Like standard state accountability plans approved under the NCLB law, acceptable growth models also must hold schools accountable for the performance of student subgroups, such as racial minorities.
“There are many different routes for states to take, but they all must begin with a commitment to annual assessment and disaggregation of data,” said Secretary Spellings in a statement. “And, they all must lead to closing the achievement gap and every student reaching grade level by 2014. We are open to new ideas, but when it comes to accountability, we are not taking our eye off the ball.”
Vol. 26, Issue 43
Published Online: July 3, 2007
U.S. OKs Pilot ‘Growth Models’ for Last 2 States
By Alyson Klein
The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it will permit two more states—Arizona and Alaska—to use so-called growth models to measure student progress for the 2006-07 school year.
Six other states—Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Tennessee— have already been fully approved to participate in the department’s growth model pilot project. Beyond Ohio, which has received conditional approval, no additional states will be considered for approval to participate in the pilot project, said Rebecca Neale, a spokeswoman for the department.
Growth models allow states to receive credit under the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind Act for improving individual students’ academic performance over time.
By contrast, states adhering to the standard accountability requirements under the federal law compare test scores of groups of students against those of students in the same grade during the previous year, to gauge whether they are making progress toward bringing all students to proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.
‘Many Different Routes’
The department announced in 2005 that as many as 10 states could be permitted to participate in the pilot project, which U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings initiated to gauge whether growth models can be reliable indicators of student progress.
If lawmakers are satisfied with the results of the project, they could choose to expand the use of growth models during the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, scheduled for this year. The department will also evaluate the results of the project and consider next steps, Ms. Neale said.
Ms. Spellings outlined a set of “bright line” principles that all states interested in participating in the pilot project must meet.
For instance, the accountability plans must adhere to the 2013-14 target for having all students achieving at the proficiency level on state tests. Like standard state accountability plans approved under the NCLB law, acceptable growth models also must hold schools accountable for the performance of student subgroups, such as racial minorities.
“There are many different routes for states to take, but they all must begin with a commitment to annual assessment and disaggregation of data,” said Secretary Spellings in a statement. “And, they all must lead to closing the achievement gap and every student reaching grade level by 2014. We are open to new ideas, but when it comes to accountability, we are not taking our eye off the ball.”
Vol. 26, Issue 43
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