More complicated than it appears

I suppose it's easier for news reports and partisans to latch on to something like 'teachers want to protect seniority' and skip over the complications of such a situation.  


Today, news reports said the Tacoma district was willing to retain seniority.  I hear it as the district agreed to retain seniority in layoffs.  But there's more to it.  One of the other aspects of  seniority has to do with who gets to decide which teachers can have which assignments.  And this part the district wants to eliminate, I'm told.  This could create a situation in which principals can freely (and therefore sometimes arbitrarily) move people where s/he wants.


Consider this scenario.  The district seems to want to end seniority completely in cases of school to school transfer/displacement.  It then becomes possible that a principal could move to another building and entice a few of his/her favorite teachers to come along, promising them choice assignments, and displacing those who already hold those jobs.  If such 'flexibility' (as the district calls it) were in place you could end with something like this:
  
A veteran teacher retires from a long-held spot.   The principal brings in a teacher from another school, enticing him with a promise to make him department chair and give him a plum class assignment, jumping him over longer serving teachers in the department.  The department meets and collectively decides that they prefer not to have the new member get thusly ushered in to the choice assignment, without any experience.


Seniority rights are part of the support for the teachers' claim.  But let's not get hung up on the notion of seniority or flexibility.


The real issue is about governance of the school and its programs.  Let's face it, teachers are not always completely confident in principals' decision-making and judgment.  And such authority is a lot to vest in one person.  


So seniority may be somewhat rigid and mechanistic (so let's talk about adjustment to that), but it has been designed to safeguard against scenarios like the one above--which did happen.


Construing 'seniority' as a nothing more than a scam to protect teachers, and therein substantiating demands for 'flexibility' is unhelpful in that it swings the pendulum just as far in the opposite direction.  


Let's not scrap one institutional arrangement in favor of another equally problematic institutional arrangement.  Let's make sensible choices about adjustments....Let's create systems that actually work.

Getting worse?

The rumor mill in Tacoma has it that the district administration is pushing for significant change (I've heard the word "elimination") of the seniority clauses in the contract with teachers.

Rumors being what they are (and mills being what they are), I want to take care not to be too brazen with this.  I do think it's safe to say that if the district is in fact standing on something so significant, this would have serious ramifications for schools and education.

The apparent logic behind such a change is to make evaluation and removal of "bad teachers" easier, and perhaps, to ultimately maneuver out older, more expensive teachers.

There are forces (read, local advocacy groups) in motion that seem favorable, at least implicitly, to both of these circumstances.

Just what sort of evaluation process would be implemented?  (And, by the way, such a change would make every year a free for all.  Evaluations that lead to removal could be delivered at the end of any and every school year.)

And who would execute the process?  Would it be simply deterministic?   (Test score performance increases of a certain size guarantee a teacher's spot next year?  Some other mechanistic measure?)

Or would a person or panel give input?  Who?  Based on what?  Such input could be really effective...in a high trust environment.  Tacoma, unfortunately, is becoming a lower trust environment every day.

The seniority system (like tenure for university professors) is ripe for review and adjustment, no doubt.  Swinging hard to the other side, 'blowing up' the current institutional arrangements without a robust replacement that all the stakeholders have bought into (sorry for the Ed-speak), isn't a good plan, though.

I'm sure somehow this is what's best for kids...I just haven't figured it out yet.

Some Achievement Gap Data

Alan Krueger, a labor economist and president Obama's nominee to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, really is an education expert...he's done some significant studies of various issues, like class size differentials and their affects on the achievement gap.

I know it's a difficult budget climate, but that doesn't change findings like these:

Smaller classes (13-17, instead of 22-25), from K to 3, improved black student test scores 7 to 10 percentile points, which was far better than white student improvement.


Smaller K to 3 classes ended up in more black students taking college entrance exams.  The black-white college exam gap decreased by 60 percent following the smaller class size experience.

I'm not making a policy suggestion...I'm just presenting the data.

Some Issues in Tacoma Schools OTHER THAN the Contract Negotiations

During the recent school board primary campaign, one candidate spoke of courage, the need for a school board member with the courage to lead.  If it’s courage we need, I hope the current board, the next board, the union, advocacy groups...all of us will have enough to confront the issues before us.  But not with a well-oiled agenda sharpened merely on conviction and preference.   Rather, I hope we all consider questions like these below, first by examining our own thinking as we evaluate our reasoning and the evidence we use to support it, then by entering a discussion in which we listen as generously as we talk.

Achievement Gap

• How do we prioritize all the suggestions the consultant’s report makes?  What evidence suggests that cultural training supports student achievement?  The district has undertaken several cultural awareness initiatives before, why haven’t those generated more success?

• What is the best evidence about causes of and solutions to the achievement gap?  The consultant’s report contains the following two sentences--about a page apart.  

The Advisory Committee found that the achievement gap for African American students is caused primarily by: 

     Inequitable distribution of skilled and experienced teachers (p. 13)

and

The degree to which quality teachers are available to African American students in Tacoma schools could not be determined with the available information (p. 15)

How do we make sense of the “primary cause” of the achievement gap?

• Why has there been so much less mention of the Hispanic achievement gap?

• How does adopting the Common Core affect our pursuit of closing the achievement gap?  How does cultural competency square with the Common Core?

• How does ‘innovation’ in school arrangements--for the sake of closing the achievement gap--affect our commitment to the comprehensive high school?  Do speciality schools like SAMI and SOTA concentrate effective students in one place by drawing them away from their ‘regular’ high school, thereby depleting that school community’s breadth of students?

Balancing Objectives

• The Tacoma schools have the responsibility to get students to standard, and get them college ready, and close the achievement gap.  Sometimes these objectives are at odds.  Getting a nearly-at-standard student to standard is much different from making them college ready.  How shall we reconcile these sometimes competing responsibilities?

Teacher Evaluation

• What are the components of a robust and supple teacher evaluation method?  Are there any ‘predictive’ measures of a teacher’s quality?  Should the district use such measures?  

• What connection can we verify between student test scores and teacher effectiveness?  How confidently can we use test scores to evaluate teachers?

By way of summarizing these points, Vibrant Schools Tacoma’s agenda reflects the general trends animating the current discussion. The advocacy group calls for a teacher evaluation protocol (student test scores constituting a significant portion) and increased cultural competency training to close the achievement gap.

But proponents of such programs offer little evidence that either cultural training or more elaborate teacher evaluations generate higher student achievement.  Indeed, VST’s web site calls the reforms “common sense,” and offers up the BERC report, whose only discussion of any research is the listing of various effective teaching characteristics (the STAR protocol, etc.).

VST also provides the inaptly named “Will Seniority-Based Layoffs Undermine School Improvement Efforts in Washington State?”  This document is merely a description of how many teachers would be affected by the different School Improvement Grant programs--transformation, turnaround and closure.  It contains no analysis or projection of educational effects from the programs.

By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute has presented a thoroughly researched briefing paper on the concerns over test-based teacher evaluations.  They point out various technical and statistical difficulties of such programs, to be sure.  The more serious problem, however, is the slew of unintended negative consequences, like a narrowed curriculum, decreased teacher collaboration and disincentive to work with needier students that follow.  The authors counsel caution when using score-based evaluations.

In short, there is no magic bullet out there to fix education.  It takes steady and consistent building of trusting relationships among the community, families, school administration, school staff and students.  This relationship-building could follow from a serious conversation addressing the kinds of questions above.  

Those kinds of conversations seem less likely every day.

Better summary than I can give

Here you go...don't bother with this whole blog.  This article pretty well summarizes a decent portion of what I've been trying to say....

Working relationships?

School Board members fight in Everett.

The article author wonders, "With tempers flaring and emotions on overdrive, just being in the same room again will be uncomfortable. How can five people, forced to spend hours together by the happenstance of being elected, rebuild a working relationship that devolved into an act of violence?"


Good question.  


The TEA-Superintendent interaction in Tacoma isn't a model, that's for sure.

Follow the incentives....

Value-Added Models (VAM) of teacher evaluation are touted, by some, as a great instrument for assessing teachers and how they contribute to growth in student performance.  Michelle Rhee instituted such a program in Washington, DC during her tenure as chancellor/superintendent/whatever-it-was.  A political organization has formed in Tacoma and is now pushing Tacoma schools to adopt some sort of VAM.

There are many great things about such models.  We've used these kinds of tests for years in my school district.  We test students (in our case, math and reading only) in September, January and May.  We can look at beginning-of-year performance and compare it to end-of-year in order to see how much students 'grew' in that area.  I like getting the instant (well, overnight) feedback, and showing students a chart of their growth patterns over several years.

Proponents assure us they can isolate the teacher's contribution to this growth (as opposed to other factors beyond school), and maybe they can.

What isn't clear is just how we ought to compile the scores.  Will a teacher's class average growth determine the value added, or will the raw number of gainers and decliners be tallied, irrespective of the quantities of movement in either direction?  Or something else?

More importantly, nobody seems to have asked how this affects high-achieving schools and their teachers.  The VAM guidelines linked above suggest that teachers who generate higher than expected growth be assessed higher than those who generate expected or below expected growth.  That makes sense.

Problem is the growth expectation patterns are based upon where you are initially.  If a student starts in the 98th percentile, expected growth will be very small, especially compared to a student in the 25th percentile.

Ostensibly, this difference is corrected when you say 'achieves higher than expected' growth.  But every teacher knows that really good and capable students (say, those with percentile ranks above 90) often "wobble"--successive test scores bounce around a high mark, but from one test to the next may not show improvement.  I don't know if I'd count it as less than expected performance when a student tests at 98th percentile in fall and slips to 96th in spring.  That student is operating at a very high level, and those few points drop would consist of a substantial element of predictable statistical variation.

On the other hand, students who start low have a lot of room for rapid growth.  Of course, the expected growth is higher, and so is the risk that the student might remain disengaged from schooling and the testing, and thereby show (much) lower than expected growth.

My point is that a different set of prospects (and risks) attend the VAM programs in the different settings.

In my school, the 8th graders typically come in reading--as a group--somewhere in the 9th grade level, maybe early 10th grade.  We typically send them on a little bit more than a year ahead of where they came in.

But what would happen if we got only 8 months equivalent of growth in our 9 months in school?  Would we be deemed 'less than expected'?  I would suppose so, even though 8/9ths of expected growth when they're already nearly 2 years ahead may not be such a bad thing.

Well, in any case, I do know this...under a VAM I want students to come in lower than their actual ability on their fall test.  Lots of 'easier' growth for spring that way.

I'm just sayin'...follow the incentives.