About Jack Hassard

Jack Hassard is Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. He is author of The Whole Cosmos Catalog of Science, Science Experiences, Adventures in Geology, The Art of Teaching Science (2009), Second Edition, Routledge, and most recently, Science As Inquiry (2011), 2nd Edition, Good Year Books. Specialities include science teaching & learning, global thinking & education, geology, web publishing, blogging, writing, and antiquing.

by on February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

A Perfect Storm Hits Public Schools

Guest Post by Steven Sellers Lapham

Note: Steven Sellers Lapham and Jack Hassard worked together on this post.

Public schools in America are under attack from many directions, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems bent on delivering a lethal one-two-three punch. This decade will likely witness more neighborhood schools shutting down, crowded classrooms, excellent teachers fired, and children fobbed off to “online learning programs.” Let’s recall that Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its schools 1959-64, creating a “lost generation” of children who were hobbled, as adults, by years of missed education. Today, a school district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, cash strapped and unable to pay its teachers, is being kept open only by a federal court order.

We now face the prospect of a school closing because the local tax base has withered, the state government is under water, and the federal government has deemed the school to be unworthy of aid due to lackluster scores on high-stakes student tests. ED, which should be the strongest defender of public schools, is making the problem worse.

Punch #1: Punish the Poor.

The slogan “Race to the Top” is social Darwinism at its most ugly: Reward those who are doing well (inevitably, schools in wealthier neighborhoods) and punish those who are struggling (predictably, schools in America’s poorer neighborhoods). A child in Oklahoma, Mississippi, or North Dakota should not have to rely on a state administrator’s clever grant-writing skills in order to receive a good education. Certainly, some grant monies should be available for innovation and experimentation in schools. But to make “success” the guiding star of educational policy is wrong.

Punch #2: Death by Paperwork.

States might avoid the draconian punishments of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) by applying to ED for a “waiver.” The mad rush is on. To date, eleven states have submitted a “flexibility report.” Georgia’s is 249 pages. California estimates that enacting all of the waiver requirements (unfunded mandates) would cost at least $2 billion and has declined to apply. ED could make the waiver process useful by placing a 1,000-word limit on applications (a bit longer than this essay) and asking only for a brief description of a state’s educational goals. This would free up teachers and administrators to do real work.

Punch #3: Absurd Metrics.

Teacher evaluations will be based on “student growth.” There is, however, no scientific basis for doing this. The practice contradicts a 2011 National Academy of Science report, “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.”

Using test scores to measure the efforts of teachers is a pseudoscience akin to phrenology of the 1800s, which purported to measure one’s intelligence according to the shape of one’s skull. It also brings to mind journalists and social scientists of the 1920-60s who misued prison statistics to “prove” that black people are genetically inclined toward criminal behavior.  In his Harvard University Press book, Khalil Gibran Muhammad established how a racial and racist, ‘scientific’ discourse promoted this idea.  Today, we use high-stakes test scores to “prove” that embattled schools are “failures,” and that hard-working professionals aren’t working hard enough.

There are many reasons why student test scores might not mount endlessly upward, such as an influx of non-English speaking immigrants; a rise in divorces; the town’s factory closes; family transience; a rise in home foreclosures; a sad absence of parents, who are serving in Afghanistan; etc. Or maybe the for-profit company that created the test got a little sloppy when it wrote the test questions, skewing the results. These powerful influences cannot be adequately controlled in a statistical analysis on the small scale of a single school district, a single school, and least of all, a single teacher.

Pushing Back

We must ban the use of standardized tests to make high-stakes decisions of any kind. Standardized test scores might be used ethically as a diagnostic tool (“Apply first aid here!”), but never as an excuse for punishment (“Bleed the patient dry!”). As a study by Fairtest has revealed, the system has placed an inhumane burden on teachers and administrators on the ground, resulting in cheating scandals in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Valerie Strauss reports that the “misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines.”

Of course, teachers, like any professional group, should be evaluated and held to high standards. Experienced teachers and administrators in the school itself have personal knowledge of the teacher, students, local community and curriculum. Peer observation and evaluation have been a part of healthy educational settings for centuries. There are rigorous protocols for teacher evaluation provided by professional and subject-discipline associations. Let’s use those.

In New York State, 1,200 principals (and even more teachers) have signed a letter protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate their job performance. California, with more public school students than any other state, has jumped ship. So has Pennsylvania, apparently. “The emphasis on testing under the waiver plan is as heavy-handed as it has been under NCLB,” said educational historian Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education.

Replacing NCLB with a new law could propel our nation’s educational standing. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s most cherished goal is to return the United States to first place in the percentage of the population who graduate from college. To do that, let’s provide every child who could benefit from daycare with free admission to Head Start, which is the most powerful predictor of success for children born into poverty. Then we can strive to make every school in every neighborhood in America a center of excitement and excellence, not just the chosen few.

Until Congress passes a new federal education law, ED can write its rules and marshal its resources to assist students, teachers, and schools – and stop punishing them. And it can adopt a new slogan to match this new ethic. How about “Raise All Boats!”

Have the Federal Government’s education acts (No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top) created conditions that have led to the “perfect storm” hitting American education?  What do you think?

————————————-

– Steven Sellers Lapham is an editor at a nonprofit educational association. The opinions expressed are his own.

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by on February 19, 2012 1 Comment

Phil Kovacs Responds to the Latest Research on Teach For America

Guest Post by Dr. Philip Kovacs

This post was published on Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue blog on Education Week as a response to guest post  that I wrote entitled  Cobb County, Georgia, Rejects Teach For America.

One cogent comment came from Stuart (EdOutsider), who wrote the following:

Listen, all this slapping our own backs might be fun and good, but of all the states where TFA places its teachers, three (Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana) conducted a study to determine which certification path produced the greatest collective student gains.??What did it find? TFA teachers (teaching in the poorest 20% of schools) outperformed all other certification routes, including residency master’s programs.??Yes, on 5 weeks of training. So, on the whole, would you say we are recruiting the right applicants to the profession?

Here are the studies:

Teach for America’s Contribution to Student Achievement in Louisiana 

The Impact of Teacher Preparation on Student Test Scores in North Carolina

2010 Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs in Tennessee

The fact that the most recent evidence was not included in this discussion, I am sure, has nothing to do with the author coming from a school of education.

Anthony Cody asked his prior guest, Phil Kovacs, to respond, since he had posted the reviews of research cited by me in the post. Here is Dr. Kovacs’ response:

From Phil Kovacs:

Stuart (EdOutsider) argues that the three studies show some sort of clear evidence that TFA is solving problems that traditional programs can’t. Let’s take a look…

Study #1. 

Teach For America Teachers’ Contribution to Student Achievement in Louisiana in Grades 4-9, 2004-2005 to 2006-2007

This study was published by an organization (the National Council on Teacher Quality) funded by neoliberal reform organizations out to replace colleges of education. This organization is so bad that when they offered to evaluate colleges in our state, for free, ALABAMA turned them down. You can read more about issues with their work here, and here. This study is not peer-reviewed, and given that it is now three years old, it should have been. So it has not been scrutinized, but the abstract tells us what we already knew, that TFA recruits are better than new teachers on these particular indicators. They are not statistically significantly better than veteran teachers mind you, and this is important when we look at the next study.

Study #2. 

The Impact of Teacher Preparation on Student Test Scores in North Carolina: Teacher Portals

I critiqued this on one of my earlier posts for Mr. Cody. The authors note that the rate of TFA turnover ultimately has a NEGATIVE impact on student performance because of how much better teachers with more than 4 years of experience do than new teachers of any certification. Perhaps that is true on both the Louisiana and Tennessee study, but we can’t know because no one looked.

Study #3. 

2010 Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs (Tennessee)

Finally, the Tennessee report card might be worth something, but it is based on a value added assessment that has been questioned by the scientific community, as I pointed out in an earlier post for Mr. Cody. It is also important to note that the Tennessee data linked to on that “research” page shows that only 8% of TFA recruits are still teaching after 4 years (compare that to UT Knoxville’s 50%.) Just to remind the reader, this is taken from the report’s summary: “The analysis contained within this report is not based on a comprehensive set of measures upon which the quality of teacher training programs should be ranked.”

That statement is insightful is it not?

Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that the findings on all three reports are valid and significantly so. I would still be hesitant to accept them as the “be-all-end-all” of teacher evaluation because they rely on a very limited definition, using Stuart’s words here, of “student gains.”

Anyone who has taught children of any age also know students make gains in areas outside of the subjects being tested. Social, personal, familial gains are just as important, if not more important, than academic gains when discussing the growth and development of human beings. They are not important, ostensibly, when discussing the proficiency of future workers. How fast can a child churn out math problems has become primary to how well she wrestles with the human condition.

In the TFA summer camp, the second question is ignored because it can’t be measured, and, the logical positivists supporting TFA and the education revolution we’re currently enduring don’t care about what can’t be measured. Because TFA members are trained to have a myopic focus on standardized testing, they may in fact produce small gains on standardized tests, but those gains are, at present, the only possible positive from the program. For example, are their students ending the school year more interested in science? More resilient? More likely to graduate? We can’t know. All we can know is that a) TFA members have been taught to worship data and b) that data worship may be producing some small gains in some subjects in some cities but we can’t know for sure because of the admitted noise in the instruments being used to measure what they are doing.

Maybe, in the English classroom, the TFAers are not teaching writing because it is not on the test, as has been reported in a number of classrooms. Maybe they are simply working from the state provided workbook to raise scores and ignoring everything else that might be worth teaching…i.e. inquiry based science (not testable) or autobiographical history, which is not immediately testable, but has been suggested by scholars such as Nieto and Bode to improve student development and growth robustly defined.

Maybe, in these math, science, history, and reading classes, the teachers don’t have students who are ELL or SPED, as has been reported across the country. Maybe, as has already been rumored in my city, the students with the worst behavior are being moved out of TFA classrooms because the TFA recruits have no classroom management.

In short, are principals putting the weakest students with their best teachers, which would make a lot of sense? My hunch is yes, though we need a study with principals who aren’t afraid of losing their jobs, to determine if that was true. If the answer is yes, gains on short term tests seem logical.

Maybe the reason TFA members burn out so quickly (data showing the retention rate is declining will be forthcoming) is that they put in 16 hour days, work through weekends, skip meals, etc., and can do so because they don’t have children of their own. And the burnout is a genuine problem because, as noted by the portal report that Stuart is parading, the children who have teachers with more than four years of experience do better on standardized tests than those who do not. (Again, I hate to use these tests as barometers of human performance…)

We need to be asking a) why the gains are there, b) if they are meaningful, and if so, we should look at c) what is going on. We need a cadre of scholars doing a, b, and c and then we need careful action, rather than uncritical parroting.

Update:

I received a note from Dr. Kovacs’ after receiving his permission to republish his article here.  He wrote  that Hunstville, AL, the superintendent has been authorized to pay Teach for America $1.9 million dollars for 5 years to “simply recruit and train people who didn’t want be teachers enough to receive training on their own (Geek Palaver Blog).  According to Dr. Kovacs, all Huntsville teachers will have to attend TFA training.  After hearing this I did some searching on the net, and came a cross the Geek Palaver blog, written by a teacher in the Huntville, AL school district.  This is a link to his powerful article entitled “Entirely Unacceptable: Morale Matters.”  This is one of the best analyses I have read revealing the details of TFA in schools.  Could your school district be next?

What do you think of the research shared by Stuart, and the response from Phil Kovacs? Is there important evidence here that should be considered???

Philip Kovacs is an assistant, tenure tracked professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

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by on February 16, 2012 Leave a Comment

Test-Based Reform: What Values are we Adding?

Post 2.  Read Post 1 here.

This post  was published on Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialogue.

Practicing teachers, clinical professors, and researchers who work in the field know that assessing teachers or students requires much more than simply looking at test scores.  And indeed, researchers who have examined the value-added assessment system which purports to measure the “teacher effect” on student achievement test scores, question it’s validity and more important reliability.

The Data Used to Make High-Stakes Decisions on Teachers and Students

Value Added Effect

For example, Terry Hibpshman, of the  Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board, did an in-depth review of value-added models and concludes that even though VAM has been implemented in some locations (Tennessee, and Dallas), the methodologies “should not be considered mature or well-formed at this point in its history.”  Dr. Hibpshman goes on to explain that VAM models, by their very nature, are extremely complex, and unless one understands the statistical nature of these models, people are quick to make policy decisions without understanding the limitations of these models.

That said, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has figured out a way to mandate linking student achievement test scores to teacher assessment using VAM.  If one reads the details of the NCLB Waivers, states must implement teacher and administrator evaluation that is tied in some way to student progress on high-stakes achievement tests.  This was initially a requirement for states receiving Race to the Top funds.  The Secretary of Education figured out a way to hold all states accountable to using VAM, because since he knew most states were chomping at the bit to reduce the hold the U.S. Department of Education because of the nutty No Child Left Behind act.  Now, any state getting a NCLB Waiver will have to use VAM as part of their assessment of teachers and administrators.

Now we have created a situation where states will use a system that has not been shown to be scientifically valid or reliable (VAM) by using high-stakes test scores which assume that the results on these tests tell us what students have learned in the course being tested, but also how much the teacher contributed (value added) to student progress.

Willis D. Hawley and Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, explain why students’ cultural identities are integral to “measuring” teacher effectiveness.

Drs. Hawley and Irvine  believe that the practices that teachers use should be part of any teacher assessment system.  Teaching practices, to be used in teacher assessment, need to be observed, or need to be described by teachers themselves.  In particular, the authors suggest that there are teaching practices that are called “culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), and that these need to be included in any “high-stakes teaching evaluation.”

As Hawley and Irvine point out, culturally response teachers,

  • understand that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, bring their culturally influenced cognition, behavior, and dispositions to school.
  • understand how semantics, accents, dialect, and discussion modes affect face-to-face interactions.
  • know how to adapt and employ multiple representations of subject-matter knowledge using students’ everyday lived experiences.

Hawley and Irvine identify six examples of CRP that taken individually can make a huge difference in embodying the racial and ethnical effects on student learning.  These practices are not new, but they reflect a more indirect approach to teaching and learning, and in all cases, the nature of the students is seen as fundamental in teaching.  Highly effective teachers use practices such as these, and they should be an integral part of the assessment of teachers.

  • Learning from family and community engagement
  • Developing caring relationships with students
  • Engaging and motivating students
  • Assessing student performance
  • Grouping students for instruction
  • Selecting and effectively using learning resources

Finally, we should add that the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) of The National Academies issued a letter to the Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT).  The essence of the letter was a critique of the RTTT Fund’s insistence on linking student test scores to teacher effectiveness.  In the letter, the BOTA had this to say:

The initiative should support research based on data that links student test scores with their teachers, but should not prematurely promote the use of value-added approaches, which evaluate teachers based on gains in their students’ performance, to reward or punish teachers.

Achievement Test Scores

Do they measure what students have learned in a course of study?

Are achievement tests that are used as high-stakes assessments at the end of the school year a valid  measure of the curriculum standards specific to each teacher’s classroom, or are they estimates of what the curriculum should be, and estimates of what students should learn?

High-stakes test scores that are reported for students, schools, and districts are far from the reality of what students do and should learn.  We’ve been fooled into believing that test scores are valid measures of student performance.  Let’s look into this claim.

Let’s say we want to design a high-stakes test for mathematics for 8th graders in the state of Georgia.  The first item of business is to check the Georgia mathematics standards for grade 8.   According to the Georgia Department of Education , 8th graders:

will  understand various numerical representations, including square roots, exponents and scientific notation; use and apply geometric properties of plane figures, including congruence and the Pythagorean theorem; use symbolic algebra to represent situations and solve problems, especially those that involve linear relationships; solve linear equations, systems of linear equations and inequalities; use equations, tables and graphs to analyze and interpret linear functions; use and understand set theory and simple counting techniques; determine the theoretical probability of simple events; and make inferences from statistical data, particularly data that can be modeled by linear functions.

Please note this is only a summary of the 8th grade math standards!

There are 98 standards for 8th grade.  You can only create a test that a student can take in 1.5 – 3 hours.  We have to worry about student test stamina.  How long can an 8th grader sit for goodness sake.  Let’s say that we design a test with 75 items for the 98 standards.  First we note that not all of the curriculum can be “covered” in a single test, so the test makers must make a decision about which standards not to test.  We then realize if we are going to “test’ all of the standards, we only allocate one test item per standard, and then use the results on the test to claim that we have measured what a student has learned in 8th grade mathematics.  All done in one day, when in fact the student was enrolled in course that was at least 170 days of instruction.

The Long and Short of It All

We’ve created a standards-based testing system that is remarkably short on telling us what students have learned. We have also learned that the statistical model (Value Added Model) that has been shown to be inconsistent, and of questionable reliability.

How can we possibly use data from a complex system, the education of American students, to determine what the contribution of a teacher has on student learning?

What is the “tell” that creates this information on a teacher?  None.

There is more to teaching than simply preparing students for the test. There is attitude and effort, collaboration and teamwork, and the development of character.  There is inquiry, problem solving, creativity and innovation.

There is also more to preparing people to become teachers than dropping them into classroom with little or no preparation.  Why do we have it in our head that teaching requires little to no preparation.  Why do we entrust children with teachers who not licensed, when in the state of Georgia, a manicurist must take 9 months of intense training and pass two tests?

Do you think that a teacher’s effectiveness can be measured by using a complicated mathematical model that is based on student test scores?

 

 

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by on February 16, 2012 3 Comments

Test-Based Reform: Where is the Common Core Leading Us?

Part 1

Posted on Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue blog.

In a post last week, I reported that Georgia’s Cobb County School System rejected the superintendent’s proposal to hire 50 Teacher for America teachers for schools located in South Cobb.  Many of the South Cobb schools are underperforming schools.  I suggested that this was a good decision, but also indicated that it was done by default.  The default is, that the proposal never made it to agenda of the board and thus was withdrawn for the time being.  Is this another avoidance tactic?

Today, we expand our thinking to explore the nature of the achievement data that is used to make decisions about student progress and teacher effectiveness.  Our over obsession with test data has led to the narrowing of curriculum, and led to the goal of education to single a outcome—the improvement of test scores.  Period.

In the next post the challenge of teacher education is investigated, and the data is to show that high quality teaching results from teacher preparation programs that are clinically and experientially based.  Recommendations are then made for how alternative teacher education programs (including Teach for America) can be improved.

The Simple Mindedness of Test-Based Reform 

One of the serious issues plaguing education is that so many of us want a simplistic solutions to such a complex and diverse system.  We’ve been convinced that test score is a valid measure of student achievement, so much so that we willing to use the test scores to reward or punish students, teachers and schools.

Does One Size Fits All?

Have we made producing workers as the purpose of schooling? Is schools performance the basic tasks of creating enough workers with “adequate” abilities and the right attitude to become an employee?  (M. Peterson, 2009, http://www.wholeschooling.net/, extracted February 15, 2012).

The approach is, test- and standards-based reform seems to mean that school improvement is only based on a minimum set of core standards.

Achieve, Inc., has already developed the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Reading/Language Arts, and now in the writing phase of creating the Next Generation of Science Standards.  And right behind the common standards are the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a state consortium led again by Achieve, Inc. to develop the next generation K-12 assessments in English and math.  Does this work? Does one size fitsall?

This model is rooted in the myth that the United States is not competitive in the global market place because our students don’t perform at high enough levels on guess what: achievement tests.  The truth is that the U.S. is very competitive, and has been for decades.  With basing their thinking on test scores, politicians and think tank types have convinced the public that American schools are a failure, and the one kind of reform that will help us “race to the top” is driven by just one fact: we must raise test scores, and they must be raised every year.  Get a grip.

Competitiveness of U.S. Citizens. The United States is economically competitive as reported in the World Economic Forum’s 2010-2011 Global-Competitiveness report, and as reported by Iris Rotberg in her book Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform.  According to the World Economic Forum report, the U.S. is one of only 35 countries in the world that are at the highest stage of development—the innovation-driven economy.

The United States now ranks fifth in the world in global competitiveness.  This ranking has fallen one position, from a higher 4th to a lower 5th in the last year.  At this time, the U.S. economy is the largest in the world.  However, the World Economic Forum researchers have concluded that the U.S. economic competitiveness has weaknesses.  The report reads that the weaknesses include the business communities’ criticism of the public and private institutions, that there is a great lack of trust in politicians, and a lack of a strong relationships between government and business.   And the U.S. debt continues to grow. (World Economic Forum Report, 2011 – 2012. www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GCR_Report_2011-12.pdf, p. 14, extracted February 15, 2012). 

According to the World Economic Forum, student test scores on international tests in reading, mathematics and science were not related to the weakening of the U.S.’s ability to compete. Period.

In Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform, Iris C. Rotberg, Research Professor of Education Policy at The George Washington University, concluded that continuing to use student test scores is not a valid argument to understand a nation’s competitiveness.  According to Rotberg, a nation’s competitiveness is too complicated, and is impacted by other variables as identified in the World Economic Report.  She puts it this way:

Other variables, such as outsourcing to gain access to lower-wage employees, the climate and incentives for innovation, tax rates, health-care and retirement costs, the extent of government subsidies or partnerships, protectionism, intellectual-property enforcement, natural resources, and exchange rates overwhelm mathematics and science scores in predicting economic competitiveness.

There is ample evidence that student test scores are not a barometer of U.S. economic growth, or depression.  U.S. test scores did not cause or contribute to the Great Recession, any more than they caused the Economic Boom of the 1990s.

For example, I have included a graph below which shows the United States GDP growth rate from 1957 (the year of Sputnik) to 2012.  If you scroll down to Table 2, which shows the NAEP trends in 13 year old math scores, you’ll note that student math scores rose during the last 39 years, while the GDP rose and fell during the same period of time.  What caused the GDP fluctuations?  Student test scores?  I don’t think so.

Table 1. U.S. GDP 1957 – 2012.  Source: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth, extracted February 15, 2012.

Rising Test Scores. We’ve been raising test scores ever since the National Assessment of Education Progress  (NAEP) began administering low-stakes tests in 1969 to a nationally representative sample of American students at grades 4, 8, and 12 for main assessments, and ages 9, 13, and 17 for long term assessments. For example, the trend in mathematics scores for 13-year old students has shown an overall increase in scores since 1973, when testing began by NAEP.  The data for 9 year-olds follows the same trend, while the for 17 year olds there is not a significant difference from 1973 – 2008, although it is higher now.   Long term trends in reading slowly rose from 1971 – 2008, in the same manner as mathematics scores.  The same can be said about science scores.

Table 2. Trend in 13 year old math scores 1973 – 20008.  SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973–2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.

Achievement Gaps. The achievement gap that exists between students by race/ethnicity is shown in Table 3 and by family income as shown in Table 4.  The NAEP data shows that compared to 2004, there was no significant change in the average scores of White, Black, or Hispanic students at age 17.  This is significant because this was the period during which the No Child Left Behind Act was implemented.  One of the underlying premises of the act was to decrease the gap among white, Black and Hispanic students.  The data shows that this did not happen.

Family income also has a powerful impact on achievement scores.  As shown in Table 4, there are significant differences the achievement scores on NAEP tests from 203 – 2011 based on family income.  Family income is determined by eligibility for free or reduced lunches.  As shown in the graph, the differences are quite apparent.  Abbott and Joireman have shown that family income level may contribute more to the disparity among students scores than race/ethnicity. Gerald Coles reports on Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue blog that the achievement gap between the rich and the poor has grown, especially in the last decade.

It isn’t enough to simply acknowledge the gap that exists among groups by race/ethnicity or family income.  We must go deeper and ask why and how the present form of educational reform, which purported to help solve the problem, has actually contributed to preventing any progress.

Lisa Delpit, Eminent Scholar and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University, and author of Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, and the forthcoming book, Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, suggests that the “programmed, mechanistic strategies designed to achieve the programmed, mechanistic goal of raising test scores” strips away the humanity that should be the basis for education (Delpit, Other People’s Children, 2005).  The present obsession with standards and test scores has driven us further away from realistic goals that she calls for.  She puts it this way:

Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching.  The reductionism spawned has created settings in which teachers and students are treated as nonthinking objects to be manipulated and “managed.”

Dr. Delpit explains that she is more concerned now with the development of the character of students than she was years before.  The reductionist goals of the present reform movement are not serving most children in American schools.  She speaks about Hyde Schools as an exemplar of schools that focus on the character of students, not on their test scores.  In her first book, Other People’s Children she quotes the founder of the Hyde Schools, Joe Gauld explaining that the message to students is:

  • that they have an important purpose on this earth and the unique potential to fulfill it.
  • that their true worth is measured not by their social status, intellect, or talents, but by the strength of their character
  • that we admire their attitude and effort, and care less about their actual achievements, because these will come with time if they develop character traits like those emblazoned  on the Hyde School shield: courage, integrity, concern, curiosity, and leadership.

Schools, like the Hyde Schools, base their work and curriculum of a set of goals that are very different than the narrow interpretation of our test- and standards-based school culture.  As Hyde Schools director and founder Joseph A. Gauld explains:

Over the years, making academic proficiency the purpose of American education has shifted the benefits of learning away from students and families, onto schools, colleges, businesses, and the education industry itself.

In her new book, Dr. Delpit reminds us that there is no achievement gap at birth, and is concerned that the conversation about student’s education has become limited and restricted.  She asks:

  • What happened to the societal desire to instill character?
  • To develop creativity?
  • To cultivate courage and kindness?
  • How can we look at a small bundle of profound potential and see only a number describing inadequacy?

Dr. Delpit believes that classrooms can be created that speak to “children’s strengths rather than hammering them with their weakness, and about building connections to cultures and communities.” (Delpit, 2012, p. XXI).

Dr. Coles suggests that family income or wealth can make significant differences in ending the achievement gap.  Work that provides a family with a decent income, work with reasonable hours, health care for all citizens, housing, and college education—these would help children in ways that Dr. Delpit documents so well in her research.

 

Table 3. Trend in NAEP Mathematics Average Scores for 17-year-old students, by race/ethnicity. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973–2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.  Click on the graph to go to the NAEP site where you can explore the data.

Table 4. Average 2003 – 2011 Mathematics Scores for 8th Graders by Family Income as Determined by Eligibility for Free or Reduced Lunches. Click on the graph to go to the NAEP site where you can explore the data.

What do you think about test- and standards-based reform?  Should we continue using high-stakes tests?

 

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by on February 12, 2012 4 Comments

Teach for America Rejected in Georgia’s Cobb School System

Cobb County, Georgia’s second largest school decided not to consider the superintendant’s request to hire 50 Teach for America (TFA) non certified college graduates to work in under-performing schools in South Cobb.  According to an editorial in the Marietta Daily Journal,  Dr. Michael Hinojosa, the county’s new superintendent (formerly superintendent of the Dallas ISD) had worked with the Atlanta office of the Teach for America program behind the scenes to bring the new teachers to the school district.

Teach for America recruits and then trains the teachers in 4 – 5 week summer sessions before they assume their teaching responsibilities, which are usually in low-income neighborhoods, initially in urban schools, but now in school districts that will agree to sign contracts to pay for the TFA training.

The Deal

According to an Open Records Request, Dr. Hinojosa and Shyam Kumar, executive director of Teach for America Metro Atlanta had worked together to bring 50 TFA teachers to South Cobb, and discussed ways of raising the $8,000 per TFA for summer training.  It was revealed that Kumar met with three influential Cobb citizens, including Shan Cooper (general manager of Lockheed Martin Marietta), Barry Teague (executive developer Walton Communities), and Sam Olens (Georgia’s State Attorney General), all of whom agreed to find ways of funding the effort.

It was assumed by TFA and the superintendent that the deal would be approved by the school board, but the board was unaware of any of the negotiations, or how the contract would be funded.  Before a recent board meeting, the chairman of the school committee removed the item from the agenda.  It was also revealed that the three women school board members were against the idea, while four male members of the b0ard were in favor of it.  One school board member changed his mind, and as result the chairman pulled the item.

The School District

Cobb County is located west and north west of Atlanta and includes cities and towns including Marietta, Powder Springs, Acworth, Smyrna, Kennesaw, Austell, and Mableton.  The county serves 106,000 students in 114 schools.  The ethnic breakdown of students in Cobb is as follows: White (44.5%), Black (31.2%) Hispanic (16.5%), Asian (4.8%) Native American (<0.1%)  The county employees 5,894 classroom teachers.

The 50 TFA teachers would have been place in the Pebblebrook and South High School feeder patterns, located in South Cobb.  According to system and state records, schools in South Cobb have been “under performers” based on state achievement test scores (Criterion Referenced Competency Tests–CRCT).  But many of these schools are also located in the poorest neighborhoods in Cobb County.

State testing results for 8th grade science were compared between  6 middle schools in South Cobb and  6 schools in North Cobb.  I also looked at the data available at the state DOE website to determine the percentage of students receiving free and/or reduced lunches.  In Cobb County, 43 percent (46,192) of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunches in 2011.

As seen in Table 1, there is a great disparity between North Cobb and South Cobb Schools.  CRCT scores are higher in schools with low free or reduced lunches than schools with very high percentages of free or reduced lunches.

This pattern of low performing schools in poor neighborhoods  is one that TFA uses to place non-certified teachers into schools in which students have significant learning, and social problems.   Research, which is discussed below indicates that students in low performing schools perform better when placed with more experienced teachers, or beginning teachers who have gone through a teacher education program.

Table 1. Comparison of North Cobb and South Schools on the 8th Grade science CRCT and % of free and reduced lunches.

TFA Rejected: Is this a good decision?

There are many reasons to support the decision that the school board made.

However, I am not sure that TFA was rejected for reasons that help us understand the real problems that should be explored and discussed by the school board about teaching and learning in low performing schools.

That said, the fact that Cobb will not be hiring 50 un-certified teachers is a good thing. The research on exploring the effectiveness of TFA and other non-certified teachers generally shows shows that TFA teachers’ students do not out-perform other students of teachers’ that were non-certified in mathematics, reading and language arts (Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002).  Laczko-Kerr and Berliner also found students of certified teachers out-performed students of teachers who were under-certified.  In fact, they found that students of under-certified teachers make about 20% less academic growth per year than do students of teachers with regular certification.

This is an important finding.  What it is saying is that “traditional” teacher education programs are much more effective than “alternative” programs, especially TFA.  And for Cobb County, there is really no need to recruit TFA teachers when in the metro-Atlanta area there are at least 10 universities and colleges that have vibrant teacher education programs, and provide a source of certified teachers who have gone through experienced- and field-based teacher education programs.  Indeed, many of these graduates would have completed internships in South Cobb Schools.

The decision not to hire TFA teachers is common sense.

Why would Cobb County board members think that placing inexperienced and non-certified teachers in its most difficult schools is good idea.  As one teacher said, because of budget shortfalls, the county is going to lay-off personnel.  If there are 50 teaching positions available in South Cobb, why not staff these positions with teachers who have served Cobb County for years, are experienced and certified, rather than by college graduates who have no teaching experience, and are not certified in the State of Georgia?

The research on the effectiveness of TFA teachers does not support the claims that TFA makes on its website, nor does it make any sense to educators and parents that teachers in schools with students who have not done well should be staffed with inexperienced and rookie teachers.  Would we do this in any other profession?

Teacher Education Counts

In a recent research paper entitled Teacher Education and the American future, noted education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that:

For teacher education, this is perhaps the best of times and the worst of times. It may be the best of times because so much hard work has been done by many teacher educators over the past two decades to develop more successful program models and because voters have just elected a president of the United States who has a strong commitment to the improvement of teaching. It may be the worst of times because there are so many forces in the environment that conspire to undermine these efforts.

As Darling-Hammond points out, many schools of education have made significant progress and changes in the way teachers are prepared.  She identifies schools of education in Boston, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Portland, Maine, and San Antonio.  In the cases that she examined, effective teacher education programs all had a clinical curriculum which was focused on working in local schools to help candidates not only learn about the local school district curriculum, but to become immersed in diverse cultural settings.  These programs struck a balance between the practical and theoretical, and prepared teachers who were skilled professionals who knew how to make decisions about pedagogy and child development, and were prepared to assume the responsibilities of a professional teacher.

As reported in this study, “it is possible to prepare teachers effectively, even for teaching in high-need communities.”  Teacher education programs not only provide the tools for success, but as one first year teacher said about her first year of teaching:

“I’m miles ahead of the other first year teachers.  There are five other first year teachers here this year.  I am more confident.  I had a plan for where I was try to go.  The other spent more time filling days…I knew what I was doing and why—from the beginning (teacher who graduated from Mills College, CA, quote from Darling-Hammond, p. 41).

To hire un-certified teachers in high needs communities simply contributes to a national problem in which poorer communities have unequal access to quality education.  And according to today’s politicians, the most important factor in influencing student learning is the quality of the teacher.  So why does a district like Cobb county want to hire uncertified teachers and place them in the poorest schools in the county?

In the U.S., the evidence is that there is unequal access to qualified teachers, and the Cobb decision not to hire TFA non-certified teachers is not only good for experienced teachers looking for a teaching position, but good for parents and students who live in South Cobb.  For example, the graph below should the distribution of un-certified teachers by poverty (determined by free or reduced lunches), race and achievement results.  Data shows that more un-certified teachers are placed in schools which are poorer, include high percentages of minority students, and in schools in which the students perform in the lowest achievement quartile.

Source: http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/am09_Darling-Hammond.pdf, Accessed February 12, 2012

 

TFA—Be Wary of their Slogans

One of the slogans on the TFA website is:

We can turn things around.  We can put our country back on track. Let’s start today.

It appears from the graph above that TFA is contributing to the problem of America’s poorest communities being staffed by uncertified teachers. Yet TFA claims that its un-certified teachers actually have as much an impact on student performance as veteran teachers do.

Over on Anthony Cody’s website on Education Week, you will find discussion that shows just the opposite of TFA claims.  Professor Philip Kovacs wrote several posts exploring the research on the Teach for America program.  Dr. Kovacs is a professor of education at the University of Alabama, Huntsville who not only reviewed the research on TFA, but vocally opposed Huntsville School District’s hiring of TFA teachers and signing a 1.6 million contract with TFA which will provide 170 un-certified teachers over the next four years.

Dr. Kovacs wrote three articles for Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialog.  I listed them here for you to read.

Dr. Kovacs cites some of the research as referenced earlier (Laczko-Kerr and Berliner and Darling-Hammond) in this post but delves deeper into research, especially in the legal domain. Here is what he said about a recent study which looked at the placement of teachers in Title I schools:

The most recent peer-reviewed study is Vasquez Heilig, J., Cole, H. & Springel, M. (2011). Alternative certification and Teach For America: The search for high quality teachers. Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, in press. I requested and received the page proofs as part of my research into Teach for America.

This study focuses more on the legal ramifications of changing the definition of “highly qualified” teachers so that programs such as TFA can operate under No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to make sure poor, minority students received the same high quality education by middle and upper class students.

This peer-reviewed piece appeals to me and to my city in particular because Huntsville, Alabama, is under a federal desegregation order and one of the Department of Justice’s specific complaints is inequitable distribution of teachers. Given that TFA members are only going to Title I schools, it seems to me that this particular inequity is going to increase, especially in light of the peer-reviewed pieces cited above

And Kovacs reports that the researchers of this study concluded that

This inequitable distribution of effective teachers further compounds the disadvantage that high-poverty and high-minority students are faced with in school. Children most in need of strong teachers are being denied what arguably might be their most invaluable resource–teachers, which is reinforcing the inequalities.

Dr. Kovacs was interviewed by 48 NEWS, Huntsville, Alabama by Karla Redditte.  The interview is extremely information, as are the comments that you can read at the end of the article.  Here is the interview:

My view is that Cobb County inadvertently made the right decision not to approve the superintendent’s desire to hire 50 TFA teachers.  TFA has a regional office in Atlanta, and although the superintendent said the issue will not come up again this year, he wants to improve communication with the board, and concluded that he would try again.  As superintendent of the Dallas ISD, Dr. Hinojasa was an advocate for TFA, and indeed, TFA has a big presence in Dallas.

So, if the research reported here has any bearing on future decision making on the part of the Cobb County School District board of education, then they need to educate themselves on the research not only related to TFA, but on the value of hiring teacher education graduates with full certification.

 

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