A sterling example of community-driven reform

Editor's note: Jeanne Kaplan is a member of the Denver school board. Since I was first elected to the Denver Public Schools Board of Education in November 2005, improving our middle school programs has been a top priority. As noted in Jeremy P. Meyer’s Denver Post story of Thursday, August 19, 2010, some of our middle schools are making academic and enrollment gains of which we can be proud. However, Mr. Meyer’s story about Hill Middle School does not tell the whole story, so I would like to elaborate on its success. In 2003, Denver taxpayers voted for a mill levy specifically to revitalize neighborhood schools in areas where schools were underperforming, under enrolled and not meeting neighborhood needs.

From the publisher: Shine a light

Over the past many years, we have been inundated with articles, columns, essays and rants about the widening red-blue divide in this country. People on one side of the divide can no longer even fathom the perspective of people across the way. We are a long way from reconciliation. I’m afraid a similar chasm has opened in the world of public education. On one side are people who favor data-driven accountability, school choice, autonomy and pay-for-performance (to name a few issues). I’ll call them (somewhat inaccurately) “outsiders.” On the other are “insiders,” those who feel that market-based reforms and an over-emphasis on testing constitute an assault on public education and specifically on teachers. Rhetoric on both sides is tilting toward invective. Name-calling is crowding out dialogue. The pitched battle earlier this year over Colorado’s Senate Bill 191 - now the educator effectiveness law - exemplifies the tenor of the debate. An ongoing Los Angeles Times series, “Grading the Teachers,” provides the latest flashpoint in this escalating rhetorical war. The newspaper hired a researcher and crunched seven years of data from standardized tests to create “value-added” scores for 6,000 third- through fifth-grade Los Angeles Unified School District teachers.

The shortcomings of value-added modeling

Hello EdNews readers. I’ll be checking in occasionally with blog entries here focused on new and worthwhile research. For this first blog, I want to point you to a research brief published on Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute. The piece, with the dry but informative title of “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers,” is authored by an extremely impressive collection of accomplished researchers. If you read nothing else about education this week, please read the three-page executive summary (then continue on and read the rest!). Before discussing this research brief, I want to re-introduce myself. I teach school policy and law at the CU Boulder School of Education, where I also direct the Education and the Public Interest Center. In my blog entries here, I will try to point readers to useful resources on the EPIC website in addition to resources – like the new Economic Policy Institute brief – from other places. The main point of the EPI research brief is straightforward: while value-added modeling (VAM) is a technical advancement that highlights student growth, the numbers generated are nevertheless too inaccurate to be used as a primary factor in making high-stakes decisions about teachers. That is, if someone tells you that a teacher is good or bad based on a VAM calculation, you are wise to take the judgment with a sizeable grain of salt. This is the same warning that I -- with far less impressive credentials -- issued a couple years ago, as did the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year.

A teachable moment?

Complaints about some evaluators not fully understanding our true value … a sense that points were taken away unfairly, despite reviewer training in the appropriate rubrics …. evaluators not understanding, and not crediting us, for the things we do well… a sense that someone in a higher position should reverse the injustice. It all feels unfair. Yes, but, most of these Colorado complaints about the round two R2T scoring could also be applied to premature teacher evaluation based upon the inappropriate use of faulty test score data. Isn’t there some irony in the fact that some of the folks complaining about unfair R2T scoring of Colorado’s application are also among the ones who turned a deaf ear to, or brushed aside, some of the legitimate concerns about using current test scores to evaluate teachers? My colleague Robert Reichardt made a similar point in April, after Colorado lost round 1 of R2T. Now we feel twice the pain.

Information, evaluation and accountability

Get ready to see a cheer from those who oppose any type of student data used to evaluate teachers after a report by the Economic Policy Institute is released late Sunday. The report titled, “Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers,” is already being heralded by anti-test groups like Fair Test. The report is actually a nod to policies like SB191 which state that student data should only play a part in teacher evaluation. This is something that I and other supporters emphasized in our support of the bill. The report says:

"A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation."

" What is now necessary is a comprehensive system that gives teachers the guidance and feedback, supportive leadership, and working conditions to improve their performance, and that permits schools to remove persistently ineffective teachers without distorting the entire instructional program by imposing a flawed system of standardized quantification of teacher quality."