The Star had a worthwhile idea for an education story. Two writers decided to look at how districts in the Tucson area handle teacher evaluations. The interactive map on the website and the chart in the newsprint version show that some districts are more generous than others in awarding high ratings to their teachers. Interesting. Definitely worth analyzing and discussing. Unfortunately, the article loses credibility with its opening which implies that you can correlate teachers’ effectiveness with their students’ achievement scores. Later in the story, a more nuanced picture is presented, but the damage done in the opening paragraphs can’t be undone.

And the article quotes one out-of-state “expert” to corroborate its basic thesis, Sandi Jacobs of the National Council for Teacher Quality. In the article, she’s portrayed as an objective observer who is commenting from on high. And a group whose title says it’s all about Teacher Quality — who can argue with that? Apparently not the authors of the article who, I’m guessing, didn’t look very far into the history and conservative biases of Jacobs or the NCTQ.

Look at the opening paragraph of the article:

Nine in 10 Pima County teachers are rated good or great — but that is not always evident in their students’ achievement scores.

That’s a real grabber. It pulls you right into the story. But it also perpetuates a dangerous misconception: that teachers can’t be effective if their students have low scores on state tests. I guess that means the ability of teachers at schools with students from low income households, sometimes households where English isn’t the primary language, should be suspect since their students don’t do well on state tests. How can they possibly be as good as teachers up in the Foothills and Marana and Oro Valley where the students do so well on the same tests? Unfortunately, that’s an attitude that our anti-public education Republican legislators and their compatriots in the “education reform”/privatization movement would like to perpetuate, and the Star article helps them in their mission.

In the next paragraph, the point is hammered home.

Some districts reported nearly unanimous high ratings for teachers even though their schools received low grades for student achievement and other standards.

I guess that means, logically, that a district with with an A grade from the state would have more reason to rate its teachers highly than a district with a low grade.

Didn’t get the point? Then read the next paragraph.

Tucson’s two largest school districts — Tucson Unified School District and Sunnyside — rated almost all their teachers good or great despite being among Pima County’s lowest-scoring districts on the state’s math, reading and writing assessments.

In the newsprint edition, those opening paragraphs, along with a quote from Sandi Jacobs of the National Council for Teacher Quality, are front page news. The rest of the article, which has a more subtle analysis of the relationship between student scores and teacher quality, is continued inside the paper. As anyone in journalism knows, most readers don’t get much farther than the first few paragraphs of a story, and if they do, their reading of the rest is influenced by the way the beginning presents the issue. The misleading tone of the article is set in the first few paragraphs.

Journalists also know the way readers perceive the opening paragraphs is shaped by the story’s headline. Here’s the head in the newsprint edition:

In ratings, teachers pass even if kids don’t

Ouch! How can you “pass” a teacher whose students “fail”? If the students “fail,” doesn’t that mean the teacher is a “failure” too? The online headline is just as bad.

Rankings for local teachers, students out of whack

The authors of the article most likely didn’t write the headlines, but they deserve the credit and the blame regardless, since the heads accurately reflect the tone of the article’s opening. By framing the beginning of the article with a false correlation between student achievement and teacher effectiveness, they’ve done a serious disservice to teachers who work in schools where student achievement is low, teachers who deserve our utmost respect and admiration for the hard work they do, not disparagement and scorn.

I don’t know how the authors of the story landed on the National Council for Teacher Quality as its one and only out-of-state, “objective” source of commentary. Maybe they did some googling and found that the organization talks about teacher evaluations, or maybe they got a news release or a phone call from the organization or one of its supporters suggesting that teacher evaluations would be a good topic for an article. Either way, there’s no indication in the article that the authors did any digging into the nature of the organization. If they did, they should have included a paragraph like this after they first quoted the NCTQ’s vice president, Sandi Jacobs: “The NCTQ is an organization that advocates for merit pay for teachers and alternative forms of teacher certification that don’t involve lengthy college work or training, and it speaks out against teacher tenure.” In other words, the NCTQ has a conservative-learning agenda. Knowing that, readers have the information they need to decide whether to accept Sandi Jacobs’ pronouncements as truth or opinion based on her organization’s biases.

And Sandi Jacobs? She’s got reasonably solid conservative credentials, like the NCTQ. Her highest ranking position was when she worked for the U.S. Department of Education during the George W. Bush administration as Senior Education Program Specialist for the Reading First and Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration programs. Reading First? Sounds like a great idea, putting federal funds into programs to improve students’ reading. The problem was, the $6 billion program was rife with favoritism, a virtual giveaway to publishers who were friendly with the Bush administration and pushed reading programs that were considered “scientifically-based,” which meant that they were the phonics-heavy, drill-and-kill programs that went along with the Bush administration’s view of what worked, even though there was no scientific evidence that they were the most effective approach. After the program had been in effect for years, a study done by the same U.S. Department of Education concluded that it didn’t work. The Reading First materials didn’t improve students’ reading skills any more than non-approved materials used in other classrooms.

For me, Jocobs’ tenure in and defense of the Reading First program puts her expertise and objectivity in question.

One of the most important fights against teacher tenure happened in California recently in the Vergara v. California lawsuit. One of the two “expert witnesses” that spoke against California’s tenure laws was Sandi Jacobs. Whether she’s right or wrong on the tenure issue is a matter of opinion. The important thing is that she’s a strong partisan on the issue, as is the NCTQ which she represents, something the article doesn’t make clear.

One more quote from the end of the Star article shows the extent to which the writers absorbed the pro-merit pay, anti-tenure bias of Jacobs and the NCTQ. Here’s one of the last paragraphs in the article which vaguely refers back to an earlier paragraph about the Arizona Board of Education’s task force working on teacher evaluation.

If teacher evaluations are to be taken seriously, they must become a factor in issues like compensation, layoffs and other areas. While a 2013 National Council on Teacher Quality report found that no state had developed those kinds of comprehensive policies, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Rhode Island, Tennessee and District of Columbia public schools were said to be close.

In the paragraph, the authors assume that it makes sense to tie salaries to evaluations — in other words, to promote merit pay, which rewards “good teachers” with higher pay — even though there’s no evidence that merit pay improves teacher performance and a fair amount of evidence that it doesn’t. Though tying evaluations to layoffs isn’t necessarily against tenure, it’s close, especially when the next paragraph praised Louisiana because it “connected teacher effectiveness to decisions on tenure.”

This is a deeply flawed article that furthers the mission of Arizona’s conservative “education reform”/privatization agenda pushed by Governor Ducey, Republican legislators and the state Board of Education. If that was the purpose of the article, then the authors did a creditable job. But if the article was meant to point out some of the problems with teacher evaluations in the Tucson area without promoting a specific agenda, it failed badly.

This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.

23 replies on “Should Teachers With High Achieving Students Get Better Teacher Evaluations? (And What Is the National Council on Teacher Quality?)”

  1. Rankings for local teachers, students out of whack
    Arizona Daily Sun

    Thank you….Alexis Huicochea and Yoohyun Jung!!!

    Great Article!! One that will find little or no support in TUSD, particularly with “Educator” Superintendent Sanchez and the Tucson “Education” Association. The essence of the Article can be summarized as follows:

    “…..In TUSD, only half of the students passed the state’s math assessment, and fewer passed writing — but nearly 100 percent of the teachers were rated good or great.

    “It’s not that a certain number of teachers need to be identified as underperforming,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It’s that we want to see our student results and teacher results make sense together. If we have a lot of students underperforming, then it doesn’t make sense that all of our teachers are just fine.”…”

    If we are concerned about the generally dismal state of our System of Public Education, we would not hesitate to supports efforts at improvement. We cannot continue with our “heads in the sand”, and, under the shibboleth, “local control of Education/States Rights” watch passively as our System of Public Education becomes, internationally, at best, Second Rate!! The viability of our Democracy and National Security are in jeopardy.

    Given the wide classroom instructional heterogeneity within Public Schools/Districts/States, it is necessary to have some National objective measure so as to determine if Students are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the requited body of information per Subject Area. This is the sole purpose of Standardized Assessment Examinations. Common Core is such an Assessment Examination and will indicate the effectiveness of the Schools/Districts/States Academic Program, so that, if necessary, remedial action can be taken.

    “…At the time, Louisiana was the front-runner. It connected teacher effectiveness to decisions on tenure, professional development, teacher improvement plans, public reporting of aggregate teacher ratings, compensation, dismissal, layoffs and licensure advancement. Also, the state linked students’ performance to their teachers’ — and to the institutions where their teachers were trained….”

    Arizona, TUSD, should follow the lead of Louisiana!!

  2. It was encouraging that many of the commenters in the Star seemed to understand what was wrong with the premises behind the shallow ADS article you refer to, for which – I agree – the two journalists involved did not present a balanced perspective properly informed by valid research in the field of education.

    Unfortunately one of the TUSD Board members (Mark Stegeman) who commented on the article did not show anything resembling enlightenment on this topic. In reply to one of the commenters who asked, “What other profession has been parsed so fully, using faulty research and bad journalism?” he quipped, “Bankers, priests, and politicians. But the journalists are often correct.”

    It’s disturbing that someone occupying an elected governance position in a district serving tens of thousands of students could be so flippant and disrespectful to teachers, but I have to say that the quality of this response does fall in line with what I know of Stegeman’s attitudes and perspectives. He seems to be one of those who thinks that, in that he has a PhD from a prestigious university, he knows everything that needs to be known about schools. At the same time, his conversation and public pronouncements frequently demonstrate that he is tremendously uninformed about research and policy in the field of education and he has been known (as in the above quip) to show little respect for professional educators in the K-12 system.

  4. I just read the comments on the Star article, and I’m encouraged that so many of them take the article to task in an intelligent, informed way. I hope the authors pay attention and realize how poorly they handled their material.

  6. There is so much more to student achievement than teachers. I guess it is easy to blame teachers for everything. Yes, we get the students up in the morning, dress them, give a good breakfast, send them off to school from a nice home life, where all the utilities are paid on time, and give words of encouragement every day. We make sure they have their lunches and snacks and a place to play with their friends that is safe and we can watch over them. We make sure their homework is done and checked over, feed them a good healthy dinner, and have family time and conversation with them. We make sure that if they use the Internet safely and of course their Facebook is only with friends (did anyone check to make sure what the legal age for use is). We make sure they are clean and happy before we put them in bed at a correct time. Also if they do not feel well we are sure to keep them home the next day. Of course we are sending them to schools with certified teachers in the state of Arizona because we have so many teachers that like what we pay them and show respect for them. Oh, excuse me , I forgive me, we are only the teachers. I retired after 40 years and now can spend the $660-1,000 (some years even more), I spent on teaching supplies and other items children need, Schools do not provide everything. Some of you would be surprised. Well off to sub another day. Forgot I have duty for students that are picked up by parents. Guess I will be late as some parents forget to pick their students up on time and I have to disinfect the classroom as a student got sick and the parent did not come in or we were not able to reach the parent( no telephone for the number they gave) and the student finally threw up. I do realize that we have parents that do this and some parents that work, but give the teachers a helping hand. REMEMBER WHEN YOU LEAVE A STUDENT OFF AT SCHOOL, the teaches your student, worries about them, makes sure they eat, takes care of their emotional problems from home, and most of all protects your child. Lets remember Oklahoma, Connecticut, and all the other places where they are their for your child and give them “thanks”

  7. To Francis Saitta who posted above:
    I was a middle school math teacher in TUSD back in the late 90’s when the focus on testing began to get more intense and schools began to develop curriculum based in standards. Students were tested in 3rd, and 8th grades. We were using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. I worked in a very unique environment with great parent support, but we had our share of students living in homes where economic survival was a trial or the family was dysfunctional in some way. Most families could support their children in their academic endeavors, but many had difficulty even though their hearts were in it.
    I paid close attention to standards and analyzed the scores of my 8th grade students very closely. I was able, on that test, to see where all of my students in a given year may have fallen down a bit on the same skill or maybe the same concept area. I would use that information to re-focus my curriculum the following year, to improve my instruction in that area. This is how testing should be used effectively.
    Because I only had 30, 8th graders, I was also able to see that I could predict whether student scores would go up or down, in general, at the beginning of the year, when I saw where my students were to begin with and how many students had difficulties at home, which usually translates into students who have difficulty controlling their behavior or focusing their attention. “My” test scores from year to year had more to do with the makeup of the students in my classroom than with how well I taught from year to year, though I could see the effect of my increased attention to a given standard or skill area because it was no longer lower than the rest of the scores for that year. In general, the scores would go up a little one year and down a little the next–I could not control that. All I could control is where I might be able to improve when all students fell down in a given area. If I could ensure that each child made a year’s progress in all areas, even if they came in lower than grade level, I believed I was doing a good job. In order to make more progress than that in a year, a student would have to go above and beyond. Occasionally, someone did, but by the same token, a student whose family went through a divorce, a depressed parent, or a job loss, would not be focused enough to put in that kind of effort.
    In just the period between 1990 and 2008, when I retired, there were 3 overhauls of the standards and the tests–one with Clinton, one with Bush, and another with Obama. With any given set of standards or tests, I would find some improvement as I became more familiar with the new “regime.” When the next overhaul came in, down went the scores while I became accustomed to the new requirements. In the end, schools became so focused on the test scores that I found myself preparing students for tests non-stop because now, the districts were requiring a “benchmark” test each quarter to make sure teachers were prepping for the test at the end of the year. Instead of being able to study skills and concepts in depth, we were forced to ” cover” topics quickly to make sure that students had “at least seen it” before the quarter’s test. Students felt rushed and stressed and it was evident in their behavior.
    If teacher’s pay and evaluations are based on testing, the curriculum becomes nothing but test prep because teacher’s are going to do everything they can, whether it’s good for kids or not, to try to get student scores up. They become stressed and frustrated because much of it is really beyond their control. It becomes a big circle of bored, stressed and frustrated students and teachers. No one experiences the joy of learning, which is the most effective means of becoming an educated individual.
    Yes, there need to be good, rigorous but reasonable standards. And, yes, there needs to be a way for teachers to hold themselves and their students accountable through assessment. But if that assessment is used to sanction instead of to instruct, it will not do the job of lifting either teacher or student achievement.

  8. I have more than 50 years in business, most as an executive and have always found that tying compensation to performance is a sound practice. For many of these years, I have used performance evaluations as a tool, a part of the process, not a defining document, but important, as I look beyond the evaluation. Many times I have let people go because of artificial or inflated evaluations. Results matter.

    Why is this not the case in education, where it would seem that at least a part of the staff continues to receive high ratings, yet are failing to produce results. To be sure the home environment plays a huge role, as does the tendency of some groups to form sub-cultures that contribute to poor results.

    Two of my children are school teachers, one in an Arizona public school and the other in a most prestigious private school in Virginia, near DC. The worlds they work in are quite different, largely because of parental involvement.

    As an interesting aside, neither view tenure as good for the schools or the kids. It is little more than a protection of the weak and unwilling.

  9. Francis Siatta: you must not have been fortunate enough to have been educated in the great state of Louisiana. > Arbitrary capitalization and incorrect use of quotations immediately invalidated your point for this teacher despite the occasional use of three and four syllable words. Interestingly, editing one’s work just happens to be a skill heavily focused upon in *this* state’s classrooms… well, mine anyway… so, by some arguments, you should pay me more for that. >

    Which leads me to Bisbee Boy’s business comment. The day education is officially construed as a business, I’m taking my 16 year teaching career and walking the hell away. I’ve seen the business approach in action in one growing Arizona based charter (which will remain unnamed) and it sickens me, because, hello… we’re talking about children here folks, not cars or produce.

    Education.
    Is.
    Not.
    A
    Business.

  10. Education must become a business because the last 30 years have proven to the taxpayer that the public school design on education is not working and there is no accountability.Unions, government and agenda activists have taken it over and created a mind altering process which has failed to improve and promote society.

    It’s time for real change. Drop out rates and gang problems could be layed at the feet of the schools that spent their time feeding and clothing and building self esteem.

    Please think that through and let us know where that went wrong.

  11. So, Rat t, say I’m a teacher at Thus and Such private school, where most students come from two parent homes with $100,000+ incomes. All students are reading on grade level because their parents read to them from a very early age and were able to intercede by hiring tutors if they were not. Parents are business people, doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. These parents understand what it takes to get their kids into colleges and some even push for Ivy Leagues. Students are involved in extracurricular activities and supported by parents to get where they need to go when they need to be there. Homework and grades are the most important thing in their children’s lives. Scores at this school are phenomenal. This school has all the money it needs to keep class sizes at a reasonable size, support sports, music and arts programs, and even though the pay is not great, it manages to keep a low level of teacher turnover because the working conditions are so good. Of course, not all of these families are perfect, but most have it pretty good.
    Then, say I change jobs because I want to work in a school that could use a good teacher. This school is made up of families who are struggling in every way imaginable. Some don’t have cars to get these students to school much less to soccer games and violin lessons, even if they were free. Both parents are working at minimum wage jobs and hope they’ll have enough money for rent or there is only one parent or income in the familiy and that’s from two different jobs. Some students are on their own when they are not in school, or they’re with a relative who doesn’t really want them around. Parents can’t afford daycare. Some kids come to school hungry because the one parent in the house came home from work at 3am and needs to sleep. Some kids were up all night because there was a lot of fighting in the home that night. Very few have done any homework because it’s not a priority at home. Many of them miss a lot of school for one reason or another and come late when they do. Teachers are lucky if half the students are already reading on grade level.Of course, it’s not bad for all of them, but most of them have pretty tough lives.
    Teaching at the private school is generally smooth sailing. Teaching at the second school, it doesn’t matter if it’s a charter school or a public school, is one of the toughest jobs anyone can have. It would be wonderful if teachers in the second school could depend on the students to just do their work as they can in the first school. But what they really have to do is coax a student who already feels like a failure to do something that is likely to make him or her continue to fail. Or, maybe the teacher has to break up a fight because two of the students don’t get enough parenting to learn how to deal appropriately with their anger. Or, maybe one of the student is hungry and the teacher needs to find something for him or her to eat. Then, maybe the teacher can get down to some teaching, but how does he or she push forward when there are some students in the classroom who can’t read at all, maybe a few who read well and all the time, and others that fall everywhere in-between.
    Who do you think really deserves more pay?

  12. I could support merit pay. If it could be tied to some meaningful measurement which it never has and in my opinion never will. Testing, as done today, is a poor measurement. Maybe some combination of success later in school. Drop out rates, etc.
    Also, teachers teaching at poor schools should get extra pay simply because their job is so much more difficult.

  13. Education cannot be a business. We cannot control who walks in the door and what they walk in with. We don’t get to choose the commodity that we need to improve upon. Our ‘finished product’ has a will of his or her own and makes choices as well as the families they come from. The ability to ‘improve’ varies from one person to another and again there is no control that can change this other than providing the most stimulating, thought-provoking environment and materials. See those who choose to look at students as ‘commodities’ don’t view them as people. Real people. Lumping all these students together and saying what percent achieved benchmark completely ignores where they were when they came in. Some could have come up a tremendous amount and probably did which the test scores do not demonstrate. THe only way to do that would be to take the same test and compare the results to the year before to show gains. Some go up each year but it takes a while to achieve ‘benchmark’ because of where they were. These article again, had one goal which was to tear down 2 school districts. Sounds like many were too smart to buy it. THank you for thinking for yourself. Propaganda is running the show in regard to many areas but especially in education (it must all be for profit you see).

  14. Betty Cooper Sanchez’ eloquent and deeply insightful comments are based in her experience as a teacher and need to be read and understood. As a teaching professional, she used the results of a nationally administered testing program to inform her planning each year. Decades ago.

    Francis Saitta might be excused for his use of bizarre punctuation – this is a blog comment. But while the odd use of capitalization is distracting, his points are made well enough. Well enough, but wrong.

    He argues that “Given the wide classroom instructional heterogeneity within Public Schools/Districts/States (sic), it is necessary to have some National (sic) objective measure so as to determine if Students (sic) are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the requited (sic) body of information per Subject Area (sic). This is the sole purpose of Standardized Assessment Examinations (sic).”

    This might be a point of contention if there was a national curriculum, But there is no national curriculum and because there is no national curriculum, a national assessment could not developed and administered with any degree of validity and reliability to assess teaching and learning at the national level, as he claims.

    Saitta goes on to claim ” Common Core is such an Assessment Examination.” Wrong. Common Core is a curriculum framework developed by a consortium of states, not an “Assessment Examination” (sic). PARCC is one assessment tool fostered by the Obama administration to determine student achievement in the Common Core curriculum. But the PARCC tests, like the Common Core Curriculum Standards, are designed to allow states the ability to make changes consistent with their own teaching and learning requirements (as Arizona has done with AZMerit). Again, no national curriculum and no possible “National (sic) objective measure.”

    Which takes us back to the ADS article and Safier’s commentary. What was left unmentioned, and in my reading the most important fact in the article, was that an A-Rated district (Catalina Foothills) evaluates its teachers much more stringently than lower performing districts as measured by the state. Only 60% of the teachers in CFSD were rated in the highest category of performance compared with the nearly universal highest rankings of teachers in TUSD and Sunnyside. It would appear that CFSD views professional teaching as a demanding developmental process, not a gift to be bestowed on all teachers who show up for work. For staff evaluations to be meaningful, there needs to be some level of discrimination between poor, average, good and great teaching. That discrimination needs to be grounded in something other than student performance on inherently invalid and unreliable testing as Saitta would have it.

  15. PARCC

    “The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) believes that assessments should work as tools for enhancing teaching and learning. Assessments that are aligned with the new, more rigorous Common Core State Standards help to ensure that every child is on a path to college and career readiness. “

    PARCC is, in fact, a Common Core Assessment Examination: a National Objective Measure so as to determine if Students are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the required body of information per Subject Area.

    Remove your “head from the sand” , Spanier!

  16. Please note that while increasing income levels is important, it won’t solve all the problems we see in education, and discrepancies between teaching ability and student test scores are not just something that is seen in poor schools. Though the overall point made by Betty Cooper Sanchez was very sound and some of those commenting definitely need to take “Problems of Poverty 101” and get a clue about why teachers working in schools serving low SES populations can be teaching very well while the students’ overall scores continue to be low, there is no such school as the hypothetical private Ms. Sanchez describes. I taught in a private school serving an affluent, well educated population. There wasn’t a single grade level cohort in the school where 100% of the kids were reading at grade level, and in this setting as in every other educational setting, the progress the kids I taught made during the course of the school year depended a lot on the variability of students’ natural abilities and the variability of home environment support they had available. Some kids are naturally “smarter” and learn more quickly than others, and there are many environmental circumstances, even in affluent homes, that affect academic performance.

    My students had good test scores overall and my students’ scores compared well with those of others teaching at the same grade level in the same school. For this and for other reasons (administrators’ observations, amount of writing I assigned and the quality of feedback I provided, number of interdisciplinary projects I organized for them during any given school year) I was regarded as a highly “effective” teacher by the administration. However, I never regarded test scores as the measure of my competence, because it was very clear to me that they were unrelated to the effectiveness of my teaching. I had one kid in 4th grade one year who tested across the board at the 12th grade level in every area, and probably would have done so no matter what I did in the classroom. Did his test scores demonstrate that I was a good teacher? No. In the same class I had kids who had ADD or dyslexia. Was the fact that they were testing low in reading my fault or an indication that my reading instruction was sub-standard? No. One year I had a kid whose parents went through a nasty divorce. Was the fact that he couldn’t concentrate well and his test scores dropped my fault? No. We had kids where one parent was at home, but didn’t know how to provide quality in home support for education and / or couldn’t be bothered to do so. We had kids whose parents were both highly educated professionals earning high incomes, but they had hired in-home care that didn’t have the education and / or language facility needed to provide effective homework support. Even in this affluent setting, I ended up staying after school for an hour every day to provide the kind of support some kids needed to get their “home”work done and their questions answered. Parents in families whose average household income was at least 5x what I made as a teacher couldn’t find a way of providing that hour of support. If I wanted all of my students to have a chance to succeed, I had to find the time to extend that “home”work support to my students, after I had spent all day teaching 20-30 students lessons in all the subject areas. Then I had to go home and grade work and plan instruction. I worked 70 hours a week and earned under $20K a year, because the (inaccurate) idea we have is that teaching in a private school is such an “easy” job you have to be prepared to earn less if you want to enjoy the privilege. (Just as an aside: anyone who thinks that parents who want to get their kids into the Ivies are a nice group to deal with needs to think again. Some of them are great. Some are demanding, time consuming and inappropriate, e.g. attempting to do favors for teachers or develop relationships with teachers that they hope will influence how their students’ work is graded.)

    So I guess the root problem seems to me to be that as a society we don’t value education, we don’t understand how people learn, we don’t require our population to know anything about pedagogy and child development. Having inaccurate ideas about what education is and how it takes place, we structure our schools and our teachers’ roles in a way that doesn’t support excellence and professionalism, i.e. we don’t add in the sorts of supports kids actually need and allow time in the schedule for teachers to have continuing education, peer mentoring, observations of master teachers, etc. All this of course translates into under-valuing teachers (in terms of $$$ compensation and in other ways) and — the most unfortunate part of the picture, playing them off against one another, with those in public schools thinking the private school crowd has it easy and those in private schools talking themselves into accepting unbelievably and inappropriately low salaries because “at least I don’t have to deal with XYZ that public schools teachers have to deal with.” Policy makers in the U.S. continue to be completely clueless about what can and cannot be accomplished in the classroom — in affluent settings, middle class settings, and poor settings. Across the board, we blame the teacher and don’t understand the actual conditions and support that would be needed to keep people in the profession or to do a better job meeting the diverse educational needs of our population.

    And there’s one big, dirty secret underlying the whole thing: the only reason we get away with treating our education work force this way is because there is a sector of our population that can’t afford not to work but wants to be available to their own kids on weekday afternoons and during the summers, and there are very few “professional level” jobs available to college educated workers that provide that kind of flexibility.

  17. Francis, you were the one who referred to the Common Core as an “Assessment Examination”. I corrected you with the citation of PARCC as one of the assessment components of the Common Core. I am familiar with PARCC and noted it cannot be used as a national assessment tool because it the Common Core curriculum is not a national curriculum.

    The fact that states are dropping out of the Common Core movement in favor of their own assessments and grading rubrics (like Arizona) coupled with “opt out” movements like New York State’s where 20% of parents kept their kids home on testing days, further derails Common Core and PARCC as viable indicators of national achievement as you argue.

    If keeping one’s head in the sand means holding on to false beliefs in the presence of facts, let the shoe fit.

  18. Public education is not a corporation and it is not a private business. Students are not part of an assembly line and comparisons between private business and pubic education is wrong on many levels. Schools are not “for profit” organizations and never will be, if they are to reform themselves to success.

    Betty Cooper Sanchez has it absolutely right. She is a master practitioner and she likely increased academic achievement for most of the students who were fortunate enough to have her as a teacher. It is almost as though she was describing a school such as Fruchthendler (as the first school described) and Holladay (as the second school described). Yes, I know Fruchthendler is not private, though it certainly has many of the characteristics of an elitist private school (they are not all elitist). I am a retired TUSD teacher who worked with students who should not have succeeded based on the stereo-type judgments made both by David Safier and by many of the commenters here. My students came from poverty level homes. Many homes could be described as dysfunctional. Try living on a poverty level income for a few months and then judge what is dysfunctional and functional in our society. Many do it throughout a lifetime- NOT out of choice as many assume.

    I assessed my students formally and informally and I formulated an educational plan for every one of my 35- 40 students each and every year. My expectations were high and eventually each student’s expectations also reached all time heights. Every one of my students improved at least one grade level by the end of the school year. None of them stagnated; none of them fell. Some improved 2-3 grade levels. Those who improved 2-3 grade levels were students whose teachers prior to me had already given up on them.

    I would have been fine with being assessed on my students’ performance. I would have welcomed anyone in my classroom to observe me. My principals always identified me as a “master teacher,” which I thought was ridiculous. I was doing what every teacher should do. Many of my peers hated teaching and they said so. Many had the same stereo-type casting that Safier and commenters have expressed. Some were blatantly racist. Teachers are NOT held accountable. Plain and simple. Teacher evaluation instruments that are of real value must become part of the reform and civil rights movement in public education.

    Poverty has become the new excuse to not teach and perhaps not to hold teachers accountable. Don’t buy it!

  19. Tax credits could put more children in private schools. It’s a fallacy to think that all parents earn $100,000+ per year. Some get by with one car to try to afford a better education for their children.

    That’s how bad the public schools have become. You still haven’t come up with solutions. I’m just the messenger.

  20. As a general response to some of the excellent comments in this thread: Kudos to hard working, effective teachers wherever they ply their trade — district school, charter school or private school, whether the children come from high income or low income households, or both. Every kid deserves the best possible chance at a good education, and that’s what dedicated, professional educators provide. I tip my hat to all of you.

  22. In the school where the teacher who wrote under “Poverty has become the new excuse not to teach” worked, I am curious to know what was accepted as evidence of “improving one grade level” or “improving 2-3 grade levels” or “stagnating” or “falling”? The students’ results on standardized tests? If so, the classroom practice she is describing probably involved some degree of “teaching to the test.”

    Instead of labeling schools that serve other kinds of student populations “elitist,” it might be better to acknowledge what is in fact true in the field of education more broadly: though inappropriate federal policies have forced many public school teachers to focus too much of their classroom praxis on producing the right test score “outcomes,” not everyone accepts that standardized tests are the sine qua non of the quality of student and / or teacher performance.

    Betty Cooper Sanchez sounds like an excellent teacher to me, but not because of the way the context in which she taught forced her to scrutinize test results (and rescrutinize them and re-adjust her teaching every time there was “regime change” at the federal level). She sounds like an excellent teacher because, in spite of the increasingly distorted standards and practices in the context in which she taught, she concludes her first comment this way:

    “If teacher’s pay and evaluations are based on testing, the curriculum becomes nothing but test prep because teachers are going to do everything they can, whether it’s good for kids or not, to try to get student scores up. They become stressed and frustrated because much of it is really beyond their control. It becomes a big circle of bored, stressed and frustrated students and teachers. No one experiences the joy of learning, which is the most effective means of becoming an educated individual.”

  23. Good teaching doesn’t always result in high achievement, it just doesn’t. I don’t care where or what or who you teach. Having sick patients doesn’t make you a bad doctor. You can’t force a kid to learn, you can only provide the opportunity for learnng.

    Don’t tell me that the kids in my city fail because all the teachers are poor, but all the kids in the wealthy town just up the road are doing well because they have good teachers. That’s crap. I know from experience, as a kid having moved from one town to the next, that that’s not true. The teachers were on par in terms of quality, but the kids were not and the families were not. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just saying good teachers doesn’t equal high achievement.

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