Teacher turnover – the continuous cycling of new teachers through a district, with very few or even none staying beyond a year or few – is a big problem. It affects the state of education overall, and while it may not seem like it at first glance, it also impacts you as a prospective or freshly certified teacher. But how? Why should you care about teacher turnover?
1. It impacts the budget that school districts have to spend on you.
High teacher turnover has resulted in astronomical costs to the nation. According to Barnes, Crowe, and Schaefer, who completed a study for the NCTAF in 2007 about the cost of teacher turnover in America, the average cost for each teacher leaving in Chicago was $17,872, and the total cost nationally is estimated to be over $86 million per year.
In 2000, a study in Texas indicated that the state’s overall teacher turnover rate of 15.5% costs around $329 million a year. Schools with high turnover rates spend money recruiting and training new teachers who are unprepared to start.
2. It stresses the teachers who would serve as your mentors.
A few senior teachers are expected to mentor a large number of new teachers, and they feel unable to meet these expectations. Under these circumstances, it’s the children who suffer most. Therefore, it’s imperative that not only to recruit and train new teachers, but also to retain and reward the best teachers who currently serve in public schools all over the nation.
3. The long-term consequences will affect your entire career experience.
Quick-fix solutions will not serve the purpose and are likely to do more harm than good in the long run. Although some of these quick-fix solutions may increase the supply of new teachers, they provide no guarantee that new teachers in the profession will stay in the profession. As mentioned previously, the best solution to significantly reduce teacher turnover is to devise new ways to retain existing teachers.
So, what to do about the problem of teacher turnover? Some of the ways to attract new teachers include revamping the public education system in a manner that provides opportunities for teachers to voice their opinion on policy matters, recognizing teachers for their professional achievements, and providing adequate and competitive financial compensation.
If you’re a new teacher, ask your district what their plan is to reduce teacher turnover, and how you can help. Don’t just sit by and watch the problem keep happening – become a part of the solution. In the long run, it will help you, too!
If your classroom has students with special needs, modern technology can be a massive blessing. Digital devices and screen capability have helped countless students overcome communication hurdles and obstacles to class participation. While technologies from across the field have been coopted to help students with special needs and disabilities succeed in school, specially designed technology, or “assistive technology,” has proved particularly useful.
Assistive technology in K–12 classrooms is designed to improve the functional capabilities of a child with a disability. While the word technology automatically conjures up images of cutting-edge electronics, some assistive technology is possible with just simple accommodations. Whether high tech or simple in design, assistive technology has the ability to transform the learning experiences for the children who benefit.
With so much talk about mobile devices at K–12 desks and teaching technology for the majority of students, it can be easy to overlook the strides also being made for students with disabilities in assistive technology. Here’s a look at strides being made in some common assistive technology areas:
Alternative Input Devices
These tools are designed to allow students with disabilities to use computers and related technology easily. Some alternative input devices include touch screens, modified keyboards and joysticks that direct a cursor through use of body parts like chins, hands, or feet. Some up-and-coming technology in this area is sip-and-puff systems, developed by companies like Microsoft, to perform computer functions through the simple process of inhaling and exhaling. On-screen keyboards are another area of input technology that is providing K–12 learners with disabilities better use of computers and mobile devices for learning.
Text-to-Speech Options
This technology is making mainstream waves through its use in popular cell phones like the Android-platform Razr M. While it is a convenience tool for people without disabilities, text-to-speech provides a learning advantage for students who have mobility or dexterity problems, or those who are blind. It allows students to speak their thoughts without typing and even navigate the Internet. Text-to-speech options can also “talk back” to students and let them know about potential mistakes or errors in their work.
Sensory Enhancers
Depending on the disability, children may need to learn differently than their peers. Instead of ABCs and numbers first, a child with language hindrances may benefit from bright pictures or colors to learn new concepts. Sensory enhancers may include voice analyzers, augmentative communication tools, or speech synthesizers. With the rapid growth of technology in the classroom, these basic tools of assistive technology are seeing great strides.
Screen Readers
This technology is slightly different from text-to-speech because it simply informs students of what is on a screen. A student who is blind or struggling to see what is on the screen can benefit from the audio interface screen readers provide. Students who struggle to do what so many other Americans accomplish so easily—glean information from a computer screen in a matter of seconds—can learn more easily through technology meant to inform them.
Assistive technology in simple and complex platforms has the ability to lift the entire educational experience and provide a better life foundation for K–12 students with disabilities.
If you have students an Individual Education Plan or any kind of learning disability, consider contacting your district’s special education coordinator to see what kinds of assistive technologies are available to you.
Since the 1980s, there has been robust real-world evidence of a preference for hiring women for entry-level professorships in science, engineering, technology and math (STEM). This evidence comes from hiring audits at universities. For instance,in one audit of 89 US research universities in the 1990s, women were far less likely to apply for professorships – only 11%-26% of applicants were women. But once they applied, women were more likely to be invited to interview and offered the job than men were.
But what went on behind the scenes with these hiring decisions? Did women applicants give better job talks than men, publish more or in better journals, or have stronger letters of recommendation? Were hiring committees trying to address the faculty gender balance that typically skews more male than female?
To find out why academic faculty preferred women, an experiment was needed, and we recently conducted one.
Collecting hypothetical hiring data
Previously, in five national experiments, we asked 873 faculty from 371 colleges and universities in all 50 US states to rank three hypothetical applicants for entry-level professorships, based on narrative vignettes about the candidates and their qualifications. We told participants our goal was to collect information about what faculty looked for in job applicants when hiring, so we could advise our own graduate students.
We asked them to imagine that colleagues in their department had already met these hypothetical applicants, evaluated their CVs, attended their job talks, read their letters of recommendation – and rated the applicants as 9.5 out of 10 (very impressive) or 9.3 (still impressive, but just less so).
One of the applicants was an outstanding woman, pitted against an identically outstanding man. Because men and women were depicted as equally talented, any hiring preference had to be due to factors other than candidate quality. We included a third, male, foil candidate as one of the many ploys we employed to mask the gendered purpose of the experiment. In this previously published research, we found that both female and male faculty strongly prefer (by a 2-to-1 margin) to hire an outstanding woman over an identically outstanding man. The sole exception to this finding was that male economists had no gender preference.
Faculty of both genders exhibit 2-to-1 preference for hiring women applicants with identically outstanding qualifications, with the exception of male economists.
Even when we gave faculty only a single applicant to evaluate, those given the woman rated her more hireable than did those given the identical applicant depicted as a man. Not surprisingly, this finding caused a media frenzy, as it contradicted what many believe to be sexist hiring in academia.
Note that these experiments were not designed to mimic actual academic hiring, which entails multi-day visits, job talks and so on. The purpose of our experiments was not to determine if women are favored in actual hiring but rather to determine why data suggest they are in real-world conditions. To answer this question, one needs a controlled experiment to equate applicants.
Remember that our experiment looked at typical short-listed candidates – who are extremely qualified – at the point of hiring, and did not address advantages or disadvantages potentially experienced by women, girls, men and boys throughout their development. It is worth acknowledging, though, that a 2-to-1 advantage enjoyed at the point of tenure-track hiring is substantial and represents a pathway into the professoriate that is far more favorable for women than men.
Finding the limit to a preference for women
We wondered how deeply the faculty preference for women that we’d previously identified ran. Do faculty prefer a woman over a slightly more qualified man? How about a much more qualified man?
Ourmost recent experiment, just published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, examined this question.
Using the same methods from our earlier study, we presented 158 STEM faculty with two male applicants and one female applicant for a tenure-track assistant professorship in their specific field. We presented another 94 faculty with two female applicants and one male applicant. In one contest, the female applicant was slightly less outstanding than her two male competitors, although still impressive; in the other, the male applicant was slightly less outstanding than his two female competitors.
It turned out that faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the applicant rated the most outstanding, regardless of gender. Specifically, faculty preferred to hire slightly more outstanding men over slightly less outstanding women, and they also preferred to hire slightly more outstanding women over slightly less outstanding men.
Reconciling with other STEM sex bias research
These results show that the preference for women over equally outstanding men in our earlier experiments does not extend to women who are less accomplished than their male counterparts. Apparently, when female and male candidates are not equally accomplished, faculty view quality as the most important determinant of hiring rankings.
This finding suggests that when women scientists are hired in the academy, it is because they are viewed as equal or superior to males. These results should help dispel concerns that affirmative hiring practices result in inferior women being hired over superior men.
The absence of preference for a less outstanding man does not necessarily imply that academic hiring is meritocratic under all conditions. It is possible that with different levels of candidate information (or if the candidates were somewhat less competent, as opposed to being stellar), results might differ. Discrimination may be a concern when candidate qualifications are ambiguous, but, based on our study, not when candidates are exceptionally strong. Thus, our interpretation of our results is that women who are equal to or more accomplished than men enjoy a substantial hiring advantage.
These findings may provoke concerns. If affirmative action is intended to not merely give a preference to hiring women over identically qualified men, but also to tilt the odds toward hiring women who are slightly less accomplished but still rated as impressive, gender diversity advocates may be disheartened. Those who’ve lobbied for more women to be hired in fields in which they are underrepresented, such as engineering and economics, may find the present findings dismaying and argue that extremely well-qualified female candidates should be given preference over males rated a notch higher.
One claim finds no support in our new findings: the allegation that the dearth of women in some fields is the result of superior female applicants being bypassed in favor of less accomplished men. If excellent women applicants were given short shrift, the slightly less qualified man would have been chosen frequently over more qualified women. But this scenario occurred only 1.2% of the time – similar to the number of times a slightly less accomplished woman was chosen over a more accomplished man.
None of this means women no longer face unique hurdles in navigating academic science careers.
Nor do the present findings deny that historic sexism prevented many deserving women from being hired, or that current implicit stereotypes associating science with menare not related to lower science course-taking.
All of these studies suggest areas in need of further work to ensure equality of opportunity for women.
On the other hand, based on hundreds of analyses of national data on the lives of actual faculty women and men across the United States, we and economists Donna Ginther and Shulamit Kahn found that the overwhelming picture of the academy since 2000 is one of gender fairness. Our analyses examined hiring, remuneration, promotion, tenure, persistence, productivity, citations, effort and job satisfaction in every STEM field. The experiences of women and men professors today are largely comparable, as is their job satisfaction.
Our new experimental findings call into question unqualified claims of biased tenure-track hiring. Sex biases and stereotypes might reduce the number of women beginning training for the professorial pipeline, but when a woman emerges from her training as an excellent candidate, she is advantaged during the hiring process.
This past weekend, it seemed that every social media newsfeed was full of people cheering on their alma maters or sending shout outs to their favorite college mascots. The football season on the professional level and every tier below it has become an iconic fall tradition of American culture. This glorification of a sport, particularly in the case of college athletes, put priorities in the wrong spot though.
Does our collective obsession with college football and other collegiate sports give K-12 kids the wrong idea about the purpose of higher education?
Let’s face it; athleticism is at least partially genetic. People love to mention the story of Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team as an example of motivation for anyone who faces adversity. No disrespect to Mike, but his raw athletic ability had to be apparent during his high school years. The fact that he was cut from the varsity team was likely more a result of relying on that talent, and not putting in the effort to hone it. Once he realized what a lot of practice and persistence, paired with unmatched talent, could mean in his life he was able to excel at what he was already good at doing.
Call me cynical, but not every kid who is cut from a sports team has the ability to be like Mike by just putting his nose to the grindstone.
The same goes for college athletes, many of whom are put on a pedestal by peers, coaches and parents. Yes the feats of the human body are admirable but should a young adult with athletic ability be treated better by an institution of higher learning than one whose strengths are in engineering or the life sciences? The promise of fame and fortune (achieved after a college career if NCAA rules are followed) make a “career” as a college athlete look glamorous. But what is lost from an academic standpoint?
Colleges and universities do not elevate athletes in principle, of course. There is no bylaw that mandates the best athletes be given advantages or treated better than everyone else on campus. But money talks. The highest grossing college football program is at the University of Texas and it brings in an astonishing $90 million annually to the school. You can add the Ohio State University, the University of Florida and the University of Notre Dame to the short list of college football programs that consistently bring in revenue in the tens of millions to their schools.
The direct financial impact is not the only way football, and other popular athletic programs, aid in a school’s bottom line. A strong athletic program brings in more future students and rallies boosters under a common cause. To call college football a cash cow is an understatement; these programs are more like the blue whales of university revenue outside of actual tuition.
So students athletes like Aaron Hernandez are allowed to act suspiciously, getting into violent bar fights, as long as they are part of an epic college team headlined by Tim Tebow. Years later when Hernandez is accused of involvement in multiple murders, and no longer a college football player, people claim that there was always something “odd” about him. So why did he get a pass?
Of course most college athletes walk the line. They hone their athletic abilities while showing respect to academics and the reputation of their schools. They should be applauded for their accomplishments but not to the point that academics take on a role of secondary importance on campus. It’s not the fault of the athletes, most of whom are just young adults. It is the fault of the school officials and supporters that send the message from grade school that sports culture is greater than academics.
What do you say? Does the cultural obsession with college sports send younger students the wrong message about the purpose of higher education?
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
Students today more than ever before need to be empowered to go on to live effective, successful lives. It is important students of all ages have good examples of learning and education in their lives. They also need constructive feedback from teachers that can help them to mature as learners and as people. As a teacher, you are privileged to be able to give them both.
Begin with a Passion For Teaching
Your love for teaching will be the first thing students notice about you as a teacher. It doesn’t matter if you particularly like an individual subject you may have to teach, although that certainly helps. What students need to see in you is a passion for the art of teaching that will tell them that it is important for them to learn.
If you have a passion to teach, it will be translated to your students in thousands of non-verbal ways throughout your classes. They will see it in your eyes, in the invigorating way you talk about your subjects, and even in your tone of voice. The payback for translating your passion to your students will be that some of them will emulate your example and become teachers themselves. If you can demonstrate the best parts of learning it can inspire others to be lifelong learners themselves.
Personal Interest in Your Students Is Vitally Important
The teachers that make the most significant impression on students are those who take a personal interest in their lives. You may be teaching a very large class of students, where it is difficult to get to know each child individually. Nevertheless, in any class there are those students who stand out to you as either being very talented or very needy. You should invest the time to reach out to both of them, because they both need your help in different ways.
Exceptional students need to be spurred on to greater growth. Take college students aside and encourage them to perhaps pursue and online Master’s in higher education. Talk to younger middle school and elementary school students about honing their talents and finding what they are good at. Help them to find out how they can use their personal talents to pursue the career they were meant for.
Needy students can need a challenge for any number of reasons. You will need to take the time out of your schedule to find out why. Perhaps they have a troubling home situation, or may have cognitive challenges. Unfortunately, many students today have chemical addictions as well. Whatever the reason, attempt to help them and put them on the right path. Even a kind note on an essay can be a good personal notice for more shy students.
Share Your Constructive Criticism When Needed
Constructive criticism always has a positive edge to it. Though it may be initially perceived by the student as being negative, it is intended to correct for greater positive growth. It does not beat down or demoralize. In any class of students, it is sometimes needed.
Constructive criticism is something that should always be shared in private. Begin by telling the student the good things you see about him or her. This will get you started off on the right track. Then tell them what you think is holding them back, and how they can make a positive change. After this is done, reaffirm your confidence in them as an individual. If you share your concerns in the right way, it’s possible that the student will heed your advice. Learning from mistakes and error is one of the most important parts of teaching and learning.
Being a teacher is not an easy job, but the reward is that you are allowed to help students to reach their individual potential as human beings, and see them succeed. With positive feedback and constructive criticism you can help student succeed. It’s up to them as much as you to see where the future can take them.
Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most her time hiking, biking and gardening. For more information contact Brooke via Twitter @BrookeChaplan.
Children in today’s classrooms will most likely be digital natives, people who were born in the digital era and have used technology all their lives. These students may be more receptive to instruction involving technologies. Technology can be used successfully if a teacher has the tools and knows how to use them. For example, cell phones are often disruptive elements in the classroom. A savvy teacher might take advantage of cell phones as instructional tools, rather than allow them to be an intrusive element in the classroom. The Internet, computers, and communication devices are things that today’s children live with. Using them successfully will increase student enthusiasm about knowledge, and teachers will have the opportunity to lead richer classes.
You’ll be required to find ways to introduce technology into your classroom, not only to make your life easier, but also to ensure that your students are exposed to technology. The modern working world will require even the most unskilled of laborers to be technologically literate, which makes it important for this exposure to begin within the classroom. This will not necessarily require you to make every aspect of the learning process dependent on technology. You could simply use technology to deliver standards-based lessons, or to change some activities to make them more interesting for students. Linking Web-based activities with standards-based curricula will keep students’ attention on what you need to teach them, but it will also help them to think and develop their own understanding of the topic.
The field of technology is advancing rapidly, and you’ll need to remain in touch with ongoing developments to avoid missing opportunities to leverage technology in your teaching practice. Professional development is an essential investment; attending technology expositions or conventions assists pre-service and in-service teachers in learning about available new advances in technology. The staff on hand at these events can explain practical instructional applications. Increasing your understanding will enhance your confidence when introducing technology to your class.
The Internet allows access to nearly limitless information. It’s estimated that the information contained in a week’s worth of the New York Times is more than the information a person in the 18th century would have in a lifetime. Students now have access to online information inside and outside school. And although this information is easy to access and relatively easy to find, you’ll guide students to determine whether it’s reliable and guide them to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the enormous amount of online information.
Consider all the resources, whether in hardware or software, that you have at hand to bring into play in your classroom. Figure out how each can be used as an effective teaching tool. As a teacher, you have little enough time and space already; use technology to make your curriculum bigger and stronger, not just more cluttered.
According to a new study produced by Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College, Sesame Street teaches children just as well as preschool.
Well, kind of.
The Washington Post reports that “kids can learn as much from ‘Sesame Street’ as from preschool” because of the show’s focus on “academic curriculum.”
Levine and Kearney’s study found that kids received the same benefits from Sesame Street as they did with Head Start. While other studieshave explored the notion of if preschool was needed at all, this one adds another layer to that argument by maybe proving that educational television may be just as vital to a child’s development.
Kearney told the Postthat due to the benefits of the study that it may open more doors to alternative forms of education down the road. With the cost of college rising, student loan debt exploding, and educators searching for new and innovative ways to educate students, having something similar to Sesame Street on TV or via the internet may serve a new population of students.
Free and sustainable forms of education are readily available via Massive Open Online Courses and this study further proves the viability of alternative forms of free education. It seems to me that the focus should be more on open access to high standards of education, and less on what price tag we can put on these items. There is a reason that Sesame Street has such a lasting appeal — and I think it can teach all educators some lessons in the best way to reach students.
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest post by Kristi Meeuwse, ADE
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. -Martin Luther King
Thinking critically and intensively is not reserved for older students. We work diligently to create learning experiences in kindergarten that allow our young students to think deeply about various topics. Having iPads allows us to enrich learning experiences in a way that wasn’t possible before. One of the iPad tools that is often overlooked is iTunes U. Why iTunes U?
It is a free repository of classes and educational content
Students have access to content anytime and anywhere
Content is easily updated and changed
Discussion feature allows rich conversation between students
While there are a large number of free classes available on iTunes U, perhaps you should consider creating your own. With the end of the school year only a few weeks away, it seems odd to be thinking of adding new things to your teaching bag of tricks, but this is the perfect time to do so. You can use some of your summer to create your own courses. It is easy to do. Simply log into the iTunes U course managerusing your Apple ID and add your content. What are the benefits to creating your own course?
Content is more meaningful to students
Content can be customized
Easy to create, easy to update
All resources are in one place: books, documents, videos, images, web links and apps
Here is the link to a Spiders course I created for my kindergarten students as well as one for teachers on Personalized Learningand another coursecreated by a 4th grade colleague about my school and how we innovate instruction using iPads.
iTunes U allows you to customize the learning experience for your students, even the youngest ones. It is also a great way to create a learning portfolio for students. Up to 5 people can collaborate on a course so you and your colleagues can work together and share the wealth. If you aren’t comfortable creating a full course initially, create a chapter and keep adding. It is easy to update any time.
If you aren’t already using iTunes U, consider giving it a try. It will open a whole new world to your students for learning and engaging in content.
Today we will do exciting new things. Let’s get to it.
This post originally appeared on iteachwithipads.net and has been republished with permission.
Kristi Meeuwse teaches kindergarten in Charleston, South Carolina. In January, 2011, her kindergarten class started a 1:1 iPad pilot for the school district and the results so far have been very successful. You can read more about it on her blog iteachwithipads.net.
Should homeschool parents have complete control over the content and outcomes of their children’s education, with no external assessment or evaluation from the state?
The Texas Supreme Court is exploring this very question as they consider the case of the McIntyre family versus the El Paso school district, which involves allegations that the homeschooled McIntyre children did little or no academic work and that their parents refused to provide any evidence of such work.
After having studied homeschooling practices and policies for more than a decade, I contend that states need to find a middle ground – a modest set of expectations for homeschoolers that protects children’s basic educational interests while still leaving plenty of room for curricular flexibility.
What does the law say?
The fact is that homeschooling regulations vary widely from state to state.
In a 1994 decision in Texas Education Agency v Leeper, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that “homes in which children are taught in a bona fide manner from a curriculum designed to meet basic education goals” would qualify as private or parochial schools under the Texas compulsory education law.
However, there is no regulatory mechanism that exists in the state to assess whether basic education goals are being met by homeschoolers. In fact, Texas is one of 11 states that do not require families even to notify educational authorities that they homeschool their children.
A few states, such as North Dakota, require homeschool parents to meet certain educational requirements. Other states, such as California, stipulate that homeschoolers must study subjects similar to public schools. And some states, such as New York, require parents to submit curricular plans each year.
In my view, most of these requirements are neither appropriate nor effective. Authorities can approve curricular plans, but such documents may have little to do with what actually occurs during the year.
Indeed, much of the value of the homeschooling approach rests in its inherent flexibility to customize learning experiences in ways that work best for individual children. While portfolios of student work at the end of the year might be revealing, they are also difficult to evaluate consistently and efficiently.
With this in mind, standardized basic skills tests hold the most potential for protecting children’s basic educational interests while leaving room for curricular flexibility.
Few of us would deny that children need basic skills of literacy and numeracy in order to function independently as adults. Certainly all the homeschool parents I’ve spoken with over the years would share this view.
I suspect that the vast majority of homeschoolers would have no trouble passing basic skills tests. And even for students who struggle with basic skills assessment, the next step would be a closer look by the state to understand the context, rather than an automatic assumption of educational neglect.
It’s also worth pointing out that basic skills requirements need not dictate the shape or method of homeschool curricula; there are countless ways to cultivate such basic skills in children – from highly structured curricula to student-directed projects to experiential learning.
But is a good education only about the development of basic skills?
While the answer to this question should be obvious, there is plenty of reasonable disagreement about what other skills, knowledge and dispositions children should develop – and whether such expectations should be standardized for each child.
The plain truth is that no such evidence exists. Wide-scale studies of homeschooler test performance have been based on volunteer samples, often with testing conditions far different from those of public school students.
And even if we knew that the “average homeschooler” compared favorably with public school students, that would say nothing about the experience of children whose parents use homeschooling as a cover for educational neglect or worse.
Homeschool advocates will also point to data showing no correlation between the amount of regulation in a particular state and the test scores reported by homeschoolers in those states.
But here again we run into the problem with volunteer samples – it seems highly unlikely that homeschool parents who neglect their responsibilities would even have their children take such tests, much less report the results.
Finding middle ground
Plenty of reasonable disagreement exists about what constitutes a great education. But we should all be able to agree that all children have a vital interest in gaining basic skills of literacy and numeracy.
Protecting those interests, while also honoring the role of parents in shaping their child’s educational experience, means finding a middle ground between intrusive regulations and having no oversight at all.
I agree that homeschool parents should be given wide latitude in the shape of their curricula and the experiences they provide for their children. But a complete lack of external accountability leaves too much room for neglect and abuse to go undetected.
A modest set of expectations such as annual reporting of enrollment and basic skills testing would go a long way toward protecting children’s interests while preserving homeschool freedoms.
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest post by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley
The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) is soon to vote on yet another dramatic new educational policy that, as described in an email/letter to all members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by AFT President Randi Weingarten, “would make it impossible for educators, parents and the general public to judge whether some of DCPS’ core instructional strategies and policies are really helping District children succeed.”
As per Weingarten: “Over a year ago, the Washington [DC] Teachers’ Union filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the data from the school district’s IMPACT [teacher] evaluation system—a system that’s used for big choices, like the firing of 563 teachers in just the past four years, curriculum decisions, school closures and more [see prior posts about this as related to the IMPACT program here]. The FOIA request was filed because DCPS refused to provide the data….[data that are]…essential to understanding and addressing the DCPS policies and practices that impact” teachers and education in general.
Not only are such data crucial to build understandings, as noted, but they are also crucial in support of a functioning democracy, to allow others within a population concerned with a public institution test the mandates and policies they collectively support, in theory or concept (perhaps) but also via public taxes.
Regardless, soon after the DC union filed the FOIA, DCPS (retaliated, perhaps, and) began looking to override FOIA laws through “a radical new secrecy provision to hide the information that’s being used to make big decisions” like those associated with the aforementioned IMPACT teacher evaluation system.
Sound familiar? See prior posts about other extreme governmental moves in the name of secrecy, or rather educational policies at all costs, namely in New Mexico here and here.
You can send a letter to those in D.C. to vote NO on their “Educator Evaluation Data Protection” provisions by clicking here.
As per another post on this topic, in GFBrandenburg’s Blog — that is “Just a blog by a guy who’s a retired math teacher” — Brandenburg did leak some of the data now deemed “secret.” Namely, he “was leaked,” by an undisclosed source, “the 2009-10 IMPACT sub-scores from the Value-Added Monstrosity (VAM) nonsense and the Teaching and Learning Framework (TLF), with the names removed. [He] plotted the two [sets of] scores and showed that the correlation was very, very low, in fact about 0.33 [r-squared=0.13], or nearly random, as you [can] see here:”
In the world of correlation, this is atrocious, IF high-stakes (e.g., teacher termination, tenure, merit pay) are to be attached to such output. No wonder DCPS does not want people checking in to see if that which they are selling is true to what is being sold.
In Brandenburg’s words: “Value-Added scores for any given teacher jumped around like crazy from year to year. For all practical purposes, there is no reliability or consistency to VAM whatsoever. Not even for elementary teachers who teach both English and math to the same group of children and are ‘awarded’ a VAM score in both subjects. Nor for teachers who taught, say, both 7th and 8th grade students in, say, math, and were ‘awarded’ VAM scores for both grade levels: it’s as if someone was to throw darts at a large chart, blindfolded, and wherever the dart lands, that’s your score.”
