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Friday, May 30, 2014

If you want to dig a little deeper into Common Core, here you go............

One Size Does Not Fit All: Fighting the Common Core Curriculum Thursday, 29 May 2014 09:32 By Eleanor J Bader                         
2014 529 com fwCommon Core State Standards. (Image: amerigus / Flickr)
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Nearly 60 years ago, long before Common Core State Standards (CCSS) became part of the political lexicon, conservative economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) wowed right-wing libertarians with his notion of social transformation. The key, he explained, involved privatizing public education. "Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured," he wrote." Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system - i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools."
It took decades, but the seeds sown by Friedman in 1955 have slowly taken root. The result is common core state standards, a system that imposes a rigid curriculum on school districts throughout the country and ties teachers' job security and pay raises to student achievement. The question is whether these roots will take, or will ultimately be upended by CCSS opponents.
Unlike most initiatives, people on both the progressive and Tea Party ends of the political spectrum hate Common Core. So do countless people whose politics fall somewhere in the middle. What virtually everyone concedes, however, is that education is a high-stakes enterprise. Indeed, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 50 million children were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in the fall of 2013. The budget? A whopping $591 billion.
But where did the idea for Common Core come from, and what exactly does it mean for students and educators?
The genesis of Common Core - earlier attempts at educational standardization like George W. Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind effort were abandoned by the Obama administration - harkens back to a 2009 meeting between the National Governor's Association, The Council of State School Officers and an 18-year-old group called ACHIEVE Inc. Although ostensibly a nonprofit, ACHIEVE is supported by some of the world's largest corporations: Chevron, Cisco Systems, ExxonMobil, IBM, Intel, General Electric, JP Morgan Chase and Travelers' Insurance, among them. Its board is made up of both Democratic and Republican governors and business bigwigs from the aforementioned companies.
Their argument in support of Common Core - and the federal Race to the Top money that requires states to impose Common Core's rigid English and math tests at designated intervals throughout the academic year - is that periodic assessments will guarantee that students are intellectually competent by the time they finish high school and are ready to enter the workforce, a university or the military.

They've also expressed indignation over the corporate profiteering that standardized tests and test prep promote.

Although this sounds good, Common Core rests on the assumption that today's students lack intellectual rigor because of shoddy, dumbed-down instruction. This argument is predicated on an international test that evaluated students from 34 countries. Indeed, US results were startlingly low: American students placed 26th in math, 21st in science and 17th in reading. This, coupled with the studies showing that nearly one-third of entering college students need remedial instruction, has pushed school administrators, the media and the business world into panic mode. The focus of blame, not surprisingly, is teachers, men and women who allegedly refuse to impose measurable outcomes on the children and teens in their charge. For their part, teachers have offered a consistent rebuttal: Class size is too large; instructional materials are in short supply, and students often enter classrooms with limited English proficiency and a host of social problems ranging from living on the streets, to hunger, to parental joblessness - but their lament - and teacher strikes in Chicago and elsewhere - have gone unheeded. Instead, mainstream media have consistently projected teachers as a unified cadre, unconcerned that their students are graduating without being able to read or do basic calculations. This smear campaign has been effective: By painting teachers as overpaid and lazy, critics of public education have made it seem reasonable to demand a workforce that is harder-working and more goal-oriented.
Gates Money Fans the Flames of CCSS
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been at the helm of this effort and has poured more than $160 million into getting Common Core off the ground. It has also forged a tight public - private partnership between the feds, the Gates Foundation, and Pearson international booksellers. Thanks to Gates, a K-12 curriculum that is tightly aligned to CCSS has been created and is being marketed to schools throughout the country.
That said, it is worth noting that although the goal is standardization, states are phasing in Common Core fairly slowly.
In fact, despite the fact that the final standards for testing were set in 2010 and were accepted by 45 states – Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia initially refused to participate - some states have done little to introduce the program. Still, the idea of uniform standards has garnered widespread support; in addition to the Chamber of Commerce and the business world, the American Federation of Teachers, the College Board, the National Education Association, the National PTA and the US Army have championed the assessment strategy. Since its launch, however, Indiana, Louisiana and Tennessee have taken a second look and have either rescinded their support or delayed implementation of the testing. In addition, a groundswell of opposition has emerged at the grassroots, and parents, students and teachers have begun fighting the one-size-fits-all ethos at the heart of Common Core. They've also expressed indignation over the corporate profiteering that standardized tests and test prep promote.
According to Seattle teacher-activist Jesse Hagopian, "Common Core is an effort to say that every state in the nation will have the same standards. This means that you can sell one set of products - curriculum, test prep materials or textbooks geared to Common Core. The prize is the test itself. Pearson landed many of the contracts and sells a multitude of products that go with the CCSS program. This has turned teachers into technicians rather than people who empower students. People who support the idea of Common Core think education is about eliminating wrong answers. It's not. Education is about teaching students how to tackle the problems they'll face in life."
Equally insidious, Hagopian adds, is the antiunion bent of CCSS proponents. "Teachers unions are the last stronghold of organized labor in the US," he continues. "Testing is all about eliminating seniority. Tying a teacher's job security to the outcome of test results - results that will vary from year to year depending on the students - is simply wrong."
Louisiana teacher-activist Mercedes Schneider agrees with Hagopian and notes that the two testing consortia that oversee Common Core - the Partnership for Assessment and Readiness in College and Careers (PARCC), and Smarter Balanced - are funded by multimillion dollar grants from the Department of Education. PARCC, however, is managed by ACHIEVE, the corporate-sponsored group that advocated for CCSS. Both entities, says Schneider, "are tied to Pearson." In fact, in January 2012, Smarter Balanced and PARCC awarded a contract to Pearson - for an undisclosed amount of money - to develop a technology readiness program billed as helping states "make the transition to Common Core State Standards."
The intertwined relationships form a huge tangled knot for parents, teachers and students to unravel.
"Right now, Pearson charges $29.50 per test, per child," Schneider continues. "This can bankrupt school systems; it can amount to fiscal rape. I fear CCSS supporters will use this as a pretext for privatization, with private enterprise coming in to 'save' school systems that have no money."
Students, of course, stand to be the biggest losers in this equation. "Common Core assumes that you learn in a straight line," Schneider adds. "But real learning is messy. It's not an easy process. And by the way, schools and teachers have always had standards, but we recognized that not all students learn the same way or benefit from forced sameness." An individualized approach that deals with the actual student - a recent immigrant, for example, or someone in the throes of family dysfunction, addiction, or homelessness - is imperative in keeping each student engaged, something the CCSS completely ignores.

But those not bogged down by Common Core are fighting for schools that teach critical thinking and promote creativity.

Brooklyn, NY, parent and former teacher Rachel Leinweber calls the CCSS approach "a one-way highway into education." Although her 11-year-old son seems unfazed by the tests, she notes that CCSS "force teachers to level something that can't be leveled. Learning should always be about exploration and discovery. But now, even art and music classes are geared to assessment - which has ruined art, theater and music for many kids."
Social and emotional learning also suffer when standardization is imposed, says Washington Post education blogger Marion Brady. Brady taught for 41 years, beginning in 1952, and concludes that "every important concept, idea, and characteristic of human experience manifests itself in schools. There is a richness of the here-and-now in schoolhouses, but when the focus is exclusively on standardization and testing, neither students nor teachers even notice what's there."
 Resistance to CCSS is Growing Fast
But those not bogged down by Common Core do notice - and are fighting for schools that teach critical thinking and promote creativity. While right-wingers like Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck have assailed CCSS as "a stealthy testing racket" and socialist conspiracy, for the most part conservatives who oppose Common Core are motivated by a desire to curtail the excessive testing their kids are subjected to. Some progressives see this as an opening for coalition work; others are dubious.
Mark Naison, a founder of the Badass Teachers Association, a national alliance of approximately 50,000 educators, says that he began working with conservative pro-education folks in March and April 2013. "They resented decisions coming from Albany and Washington, which they felt were undermining their children's public school experience," he wrote in an email. "It was out of this, working with people who were conservative but pro-public education, that we decided to create BATS as a non-partisan activist organization to defend teachers and public education from attacks. We reasoned that if the attacks on public education were coming from both Democrats and Republicans, our resistance had to be at least as inclusive." Although Naison explains that some people are leery of the liaison, he believes that it is a mistake to "paint people in the Tea Party with too broad a brush when it comes to their views about public education."
Not everyone is convinced. Amy Mizialko, teaching and learning coordinator of the Milwaukee Teacher's Association, tells Truthout that several months back, she attempted to forge common ground with conservatives using social media. "I tried for several months to connect with rightwing Republicans and Tea Party members who oppose Common Core. When their stances around race, English-only instruction, women's issues and the separation of church and state started to emerge, I realized that the common ground was so narrow I couldn't continue."
Resistance to Common Core, however, is burgeoning from left, right and center, and opponents have seen a massive increase in the number of parents who are refusing to subject their sons and daughters to the tests. In April, for example, more than 30,000 New York kids opted-out of the English Language Arts exam, a number that is expected to grow and inspire revolt throughout the country.
Seattle teacher-activist Jesse Hagopian is cheered by the resistance and says that "opposition to standardized testing has never been higher." At the same time, he argues that overturning CCSS and ending the drive to privatize public education will require a bold civil rights movement. "We need to put forward a vision of what education can and should be," he said. "This starts with adequate funding for schools and reducing inequality more generally so that parents can earn a decent wage, can have time to spend with their families, and can send their kids to school well-fed and nurtured."
Many groups are working to end Common Core State Standards and education they feel fails to respect local challenges and realities. Among them are:
classsizematters.org
badassteachers.org
reclaimourschools.org
changethestakes.wordpress.com
teachersofconscience.wordpress.com
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3......

Here is a wealth of information regarding resistance to high stakes testing from around the country... Let's get educated!

FairTest: Update on Resistance to High-Stakes Testing

by dianeravitch

The 2013-2014 school year may be winding down but Testing Resistance & Reform Spring actions activity continues to accelerate. Remember that back issues of these weekly news summaries are archived at http://fairtest.org/news
Local Delaware School Board Pursues Opt-Out Policy
Florida Kindergarten and First Grade Teachers Question Standardized Testing Plan
Graduation Test Trips Up Most Florida English Language Learners
Teaching and Learning Corrupted by Georgia End of Course Tests
Kansas Investigates Test Score Validity After Computer Administration Problems
"Test Score Gate" in Louisiana
One-Shot Tests Fail Maine Students
Massachusetts School Rankings Beget Fuzzy Math
Minnesota Parents Resist Test Misuse and Overuse
Missouri Uses Flawed Test Data to Punish Poor, Minority Students
Local New Jersey School Board Joins National Testing Protest
Some New Mexico Teachers Burn Their Test-Based Evaluations
Many New York State School Districts Boycott Pearson Field Tests
New Yorkers Rally Against Test-Driven Privatization
North Carolina Warns Schools About Problems With Online Tests
Families Launch North Carolina Opt-Out Movement
Oklahoma Legislators Override Governor's Veto to Allow Alternatives to Third Grade Promotion Test
Limits on Testing Will Save Pennsylvania Schools Millions
Providence School Board Supports Waivers to Rhode Island Grad-Test Requirement
Unlikely Tennessee Allies Unite to Fight Test-Driven School Changes
Texas Superintendents Push Back Against Test-Driven Education
Time to Dump Texas' Testing System and Find a Better Way to Assess
Roanoke, Virginia Parents Rally Against State-Mandated Exams
New Documentary Chronicles Teacher Boycott of Washington State Tests

Require Parents to "Opt In" Before Their Children Can Be Tested
Way Past Time to Overhaul NCLB, "One of the Most Poorly Constructed Laws of Its Time"
Let's Stop Measuring Fish By How Well They Climb Trees
Test-Based Grade Retention Does Not Help Kids
Common Core Testing Landscape Fragments
Portfolios Are Next Wave of Student Assessment
Lawyers Run the Legal Profession, Doctors Run Medicine, Why Don't Teachers Run Education?
The Lighter Side of Teacher Evaluation

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
office- (239) 395-6773 fax- (239) 395-6779
mobile- (239) 696-0468
web- http://www.fairtest.org

VAM tops the list, and other nasty stuff......

 

Another pithy tome from Curmudgucation explaining, among other things, why Common Core must go..........
 
It's a fun thought experiment. If you could erase one aspect of the Reformy test-driven high-stakes privatizing Core-loving status quo, which would it be. If you had the political power to eliminate one head of the public-education-crushing hydra, which decapitation would lead your list?

Yes, this is like playing "What would you do if you won the lottery," and yes, the various parts of the beast are interdependent. But the debate about priorities often erupts in the Resistance, so it's a thought experiment worth having. So how would I rate the hydra heads on the Evil Bloodsucking Monsters That Must Be KilledScale.

VAM

It would be less destructive to teachers if we simply divined evaluations with tea leaves. And when your entire labor force is in a state of fear and uncertainty and general beaten-downness because of an evaluation system that is unscientific, invalid, irrational, and just plain crap, that cannot be good for your institution. Sam Walton, of all people, famously said that the way you treat you employees is the way they will treat your customers (Sam is dead now). Public education is seriously damaged by this assault on its own front line troops; public education can't function when every employee and every building always live under the threat or imminent disaster.

EBMTMBK= 10

CHARTERS

It's not that charters as currently practiced don't deserve to die. They do, and they can be relied on, for the most part, to kill themselves. When hedge fund managers and investment dilettantes rushed to this market because they thought they could produce some ROI, they forgot that they would also have to produce some results. I am truly sad that a whole boatload of students have to be chewed up by these fraud factories for the public to figure things out, but sometimes things have to break before they can be put right. I know it's harsh, but better tens of thousand of students today than millions tomorrow. But charters will mostly die on their own, sooner or later, depending on how much political capital their bought-and-paid for legislators are willing to invest in them.

EBMTMBK= 5

TFA

I look for the day when reality penetrates college campuses fully on this issue. There's a lot of good work being done to help idealistic young college students that if they want to be teachers, they should, you know, become teachers, and not under trained temp shock troops in the battle against having to pay professional wages in schools. But time and mission drift are starting to catch up with this decades old group, and people are even getting smart enough to ask "Is that real teaching on your CV, or just some Teach for America bullshit."

Still, they're a blot on the profession, a destabilizing influence in the schools they descend upon, and a work force that unnecessarily prolongs the life of deserve-to-die charter schools.

EBMTMBK= 7

DATA MINING 

This goes beyond being a simple education issue and challenges what we want and what we will accept as a society. It has yielded the odd spectacle of adults trying to protect a generation that, when it comes to data, are making no effort to protect themselves. Its specific threat to education is that it has shaped too much of what we do. Policy and curriculum decisions are made not on educational merit, not even on "hey this is easy to do, anyway," but because we want to structure things for best data generation and collection. But its specific threat to society is that it's horrifyingly invasive and just plain wrong.

EBMTMBK= 9

COMMON CORE STANDARDS

They're the face of the reformy status quo, the name that everyone uses as shorthand for the grand complex of all these other things. But how bad are they really? The answer is pretty damn bad, and the earn a "pretty damn bad" both for content and for the package its in. I swear I will go ballistic on the next CCSS apologist who says, "Well, yeah, it's a work in progress," because it's not a work in progress any more than the Washington Monument is a work in progress. If your claim is that you like them just fine except for a few things that need to be tweaked, then you don't like them just fine, because they will never be tweaked. And the content reads, particularly on the ELA side, as if they were written by overly self-confident amateurs (and we know why).

They are used as an excuse for testing and to bolster the idea that school is just vocational training and teaching is just content delivery. However, we do know how to deal with standards. We did it under NCLB. Close the door, keep an eye on the test, ignore the standards and teach as you know best. But other people learned, too, and they've set this game up so that CCSS and tests cannot be decoupled.

EBMTMBK = 8

THE BIG HIGH STAKES TESTS

Badly designed, badly implemented, poorly executed, and given power way beyond anything that remotely makes educational sense. The Test provides the bad data to be crunched badly for VAM. As with NCLB, The Test is also the true delivery system for dictating curriculum; your curriculum is whatever is on the test.

There is no Test Prep without The Test. There is no loss of weeks of instruction without The Test. And The Test is not so much the teeth of CCSS; it's more like the balls. Cut them off, and the standards become manageable, docile, trainable, less likely to hump your furniture. Okay, maybe not that one, but you get the idea. CCSS apologists like to say that the Standards would be fine if not for the test. No, the standards would still suck. But it would be way easier to ignore them or simply pay paper lip service to them while doing our actual jobs. And there is no arguing simply for a better test. As long as your job is to come up with a standardized test to test the educational status of every single student in the US so that they and their schools can be compared, your result is going to be an educational abomination, every time.

The other factor here is that the Test is vulnerable, now that every parent in the country is seeing what a ridiculous fiasco it is. It is the factor in the reformy status quo that is most vulnerable, and on which so much of the rest of the worst rests.

EBMTMBK = 11

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Charters are just not that good for education.


More Damning information on Charter Schools

News: Florida League of Women Voters Releases Bombshell Charter Study
The Florida League of Women Voters just released a bombshell study of charters across the state. The study shows that charter schools do not perform better than public schools; that charters are more segregated than public schools; that many charters funnel money to religious organizations; that a significant number of charters operate for profit; and that the charter industry has captured control of key seats in the legislature.
Here is the press release. Open the links and read the study. At the end of the press release is a list of state legislators identified by the LWV with “Conflict of Interest Concerns.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 27, 2014
Contact:
Deirdre Macnab
LWVF President
Email: floridaleague@earthlink.net
Phone: (407) 415-4559
League of Women Voters Releases
State-Wide Study on School Choice
Tallahassee, Fla — Twenty percent of the state’s charter schools close because of financial mismanagement or poor academic standards, according to the League of Women Voters of Florida after a year-long study of charter schools in 28 Florida counties.
“Charter schools could fill a niche in Florida’s educational spectrum, but for many, their biggest contribution may be to corporate bottom lines,” said Deirdre Macnab, President of the League of Women Voters of Florida.
With over 576 charter schools in the state, the League of Women Voters of Florida conducted a study in order to better understand the oversight, management, accountability and transparency of charter and private schools in Florida.
The study found that:
Approximately one-third of charters are run by for-profit management companies. Many screen students, then drop those who are not successful, which public schools are prohibited from doing. Charters also serve particular socio-economic groups, increasing segregation in schools.
Although charters tend to be smaller than traditional schools, there is no consistent difference in achievement for charter school and public school students.
Many charters blur the distinction between religious and non-secular schools. Some churches receive as much as a million dollars in lease payments annually for their facilities from charter schools.
In areas with declining enrollments, neither the charters nor regular public schools are large enough to adequately provide support for staff like nurses or counselors. Retaining teachers is also a problem; most charters offer lower salaries and benefits than public schools.
The League’s study produced several recommendations:
Charters should be limited to those that fill unmet needs in identified local school districts.
Stronger local management oversight and disclosure policies are needed.
Financial mismanagement issues must be addressed, as too often the privatization of schools leads to financial abuse.
For more information, including further findings and recommendations, please see the state-wide study, along with the individual studies conducted by eighteen local Leagues across Florida.
###
The League of Women Voters of Florida, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy. For more information, please visit the League’s website at: http://www.TheFloridaVoter.org.
FLORIDA LEGISLATORS WITH A DIRECT INTEREST IN CHARTER SCHOOLS:
Conflict of Interest Concerns
 Senator John Legg Chair of Senate Education Committee is co-founder and business administrator of Daysprings Academy in Port Richey.
 Senator Kelli Stargel from Orange County is on board of McKeel Academies. She is on the Education Committee and sponsored the Parent Trigger Bill.
http://www.theledger.com/article/20130429/EDIT02/130429282
 House Budget Chairman Seth McKeel is on the board of McKeel Academy Schools in Polk
County.
 Anne Corcoran, wife of future House Speaker Richard Corcoran has a charter school in
Pasco County. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/pascos-classical-prep- charter-school-delays-opening-for-a-year/1276912. Richard Corcoran is Chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
 Senator Anitere Flores of Miami is president of an Academica managed charter school in Doral.
 Florida Representative Erik Fresen is Chair of the House Education subcommittee on appropriations. Representative Fresen’s sister is the Vice President of Academica and is married to the president. http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida- politics/content/ethics-commission-clears-miami-rep-erik-fresen-alleged-voting-conflict.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/14/2545708_p2/company-cultivates-links-to-
lawmakers.html
 George Levesque, Florida House lawyer cleared Erik Fresen of conflict of interest
concerns over charter schools. He is the husband of Patricia Levesque, former Jeb Bush Deputy Chief of Staff and currently Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education which promotes school choice. http://www.truthabouteducation.org/1/archives/01-2010/1.html.
 Representative Manny Diaz is Dean of Doral Academy, an Academica managed school. He is the leader for the new statewide contract bill in the Florida House. Doral College was cited by the Florida Auditor General for a $400,000 loan from Doral Charter High School. Conflict of Interest and procurement for Charters with federal grants: http://floridacharterschools.org/schools/taps/conflictinterest_att.pdf

Interesting read.....more VAM information from Education Opportunity Network.


From http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/education-accountability-we-can-believe-in/
Michelle Obama is very upset.
According to reports from CNN, the First Lady finds it’s “unacceptable” that Republicans lawmakers in the House are pushing to allow schools to opt out of nutrition regulations that were part of a 2010 law that established new requirements for the country’s free or reduced-price lunch program. The new regulations call for these midday meals to have less sodium laced junk food and more healthful fare like fresh fruit and vegetables.
Apparently, the First Lady considers the new standards as a “hallmark” of her campaign against childhood obesity. Her logic is hard to deny. For sure, unhealthy weight gains in children are linked to what they eat, and federal tax dollars should not promote unhealthy eating. Noting that one in three kids are obese, the first lady emphasized that, the report quotes, “folks in Washington should be on our side.”
Surely, here is a fight Democrats can understand: Upholding a federal effort to make sure the nation’s money is spent on positive inputs for our children, so there will eventually be positive effects on their lives down the road. The program is a taxpayer-funded endeavor that feeds “more than 30 million children,” according to the reporter. Eligibility is based on household income.
Of course, government policy can’t make students eat the more nutritious food, can’t control what students eat outside of school, and won’t ensure parents reinforce healthful eating in the home. But at least everyone should agree it’s foolish to wring our hands over children’s rising obesity levels, and then do nothing to address the actual causes.
If that logic seems sensible to you then ask yourself why it isn’t being applied to the rest of our education policy.
For years, education policy at nearly every level has been obsessed with an outcomes-only focus – namely, scores on standardized tests – with less and less emphasis placed on the inputs into our children’s schooling. As the fallacious goals of No Child Left Behind – with its impossible target of 100% proficiency by 2014 – morphed into Race to the Top’s insistence on tying student tests scores to, well, just about everything, governments cut back education funding, narrowed curricula, and constricted the autonomy of schools and teachers to take bold initiatives due to the risks of lowering test scores.
The results have been not only detrimental to children and schools, they haven’t produced much in the way of better outcomes, as the most recent showing on the National Assessment of Education Progress have shown.
Nevertheless, state governments, at the federal government’s urging, are rolling out more new and unproven outcome-based accountability systems – including new teacher evaluation systems tied significantly to student test scores – while continuing to neglect what we feed into our children’s education livelihoods.
Surely it’s time for alternatives to this mindless direction, and fortunately, such alternatives are being proposed from multiple sources. But are leaders paying attention?
Metric Absurdities In Teacher Evaluations
Without doubt, the most nonsensical output-obsession consuming the nation’s schools is the insistence on basing teacher evaluations on student scores on standardized tests – even basing teachers’ performance ratings on students who they do not teach.
Education reporter for The Washington Post Lindsay Layton recently reviewed new research studies on the practice of evaluating teachers based partly on student test scores and found that these studies generally “cast doubt on whether it is possible for states to use empirical data in identifying good and bad teachers.”
Highlighting a recent study published in a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association as well as a much-publicized finding from the American Statistical Association, Layton noted, “Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia require student achievement to be a ‘significant’ or the ‘most significant’ factor in teacher evaluations,” yet “teachers account for a maximum of about 14 percent of a student’s test score, with other factors responsible for the rest.”
Further, “Researchers found that some teachers who were well-regarded based on student surveys, classroom observances by principals and other indicators of quality had students who scored poorly on tests. The opposite also was true.”
Layton quoted one of the researchers, Morgan S. Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, who said, “These state tests and these measures of evaluating teachers don’t really seem to be associated with the things we think of as defining good teaching,”
Amplifying Layton’s reporting at her blog for The Washington Post, Valerie Strauss noted, “while  there are economists” who still insist a test-based algorithm can measure teacher effectiveness adequately, “testing experts, academics, and other economists say that more than abundant evidence shows that it doesn’t, and that reformers should stop trying to evaluate teachers and principals with unreliable and invalid measurement tools.” Strauss directed our attention to a list of 70 articles and reports compiled by education professor Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and published on her blog, VAMboozled!, that call into question this approach.
Despite the misgivings about test-based teacher evaluations, school governance at all levels is ramping up their implementations, and states are moving to cement these assessments deeper into their systems by linking them to teachers’ job security. As reported by NBC News, “A growing number of states are using controversial teacher evaluations to determine which teachers earn and hold onto tenure … Sixteen states have now mandated that the results of the evaluations be used in making tenure decisions, a jump from 10 states in 2011.”
Making matters even worse, states are applying this faulty way of judging teacher performance to principals too. As Education Week recently reported, perhaps as many as 36 states have revised school leader assessments to “require that a percentage of a principal’s evaluation include student performance or growth. The amount ranges, for example, from 20 percent in Delaware to 50 percent of the overall score in states such as Georgia and Ohio.”
Again, the push for this has come from the federal Race to the Top grant competition that required student growth to be considered as a “significant” factor in evaluating principals, even though there was “a dearth of valid and reliable evaluation methods, and little emphasis on training for the evaluators.”
When The Post’s Strauss asked the Department of Education to comment on new research revealing the problems with test-based evaluations, she noted, in another blog post, that the Department’s response appears to be an unwavering support for the current approach.
The Outcome Fallacy
It doesn’t appear that any tinkering around the edges will fix the problems with test-based accountability systems, including teacher evaluations. That’s because the focus is wrong from the outset.
Just as it would be absurd for a federal policy aimed at addressing obesity levels in children to repeatedly weigh the kids and mandate they lose pounds, a focus on repeatedly testing students and coercing educators – through evaluations – to raise the scores is off base. At some point a regard for the actual inputs that cause the problem have to be considered.
Writing at his personal blog, classroom teacher and teacher coach Ben Spielberg explained why a focus on outcomes alone is not going to get the accountability we want.
Drawing from numerous examples from a range of activities – from playing poker to getting into college – Spielberg found, “The more factors in-between our actions and the desired outcome, the less predictive power the outcome can give us.” So obsessing over outcomes like student test scores overlooks all the mitigating factors in between what students bring to the classroom and how well they do on tests.
Spielberg noted, “Research on both student and teacher incentives suggests that rewards and consequences based on outcomes don’t work. When we use student outcome data to assign credit or blame to educators, we may close good schools, demoralize and dismiss good teachers, and ultimately undermine the likelihood of achieving the student outcomes we want.
He concluded, “Better policy would focus on school and teacher inputs,” including use of “best teaching practices.”
Education research and policy expert Matt DiCarlo came to a somewhat similar conclusion at the blog for the Albert Shanker Institute. DiCarlo compared valid assessment practices in healthcare to education and argued, “As is the case with student performance on tests, patients’ health outcomes vary widely, but not all of that variation can be attributed to differences in the performance of health care providers. Many factors that are largely outside of providers’ control, such as patients’ behavior and circumstances, also affect outcomes. So, in this kind of formal accountability system, we should not be setting expectations for patients’ health outcomes per se. Rather, we should be setting expectations for institutions’ contributions to those outcomes.”
Evaluating schools and teachers based on the varying inputs they bring to the education process, rather them holding accountable to rigid outcome measures, DiCarlo maintained, “is not ‘setting different expectations’ in the sense of tolerating low performance.” It’s really a more accurate way to look at “true performance.”
Time For A More Authentic Accountability
Most recently, writing at The Huffington Post, education professor Linda Darling-Hammond joined with the president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten to propose “a new accountability in American education.”
Although their argument was within the context of implementing new academic standards known as the Common Core, their conclusions were relevant to just about any proposal for a more positive way forward in education policy – namely, that any new innovation is going to fail as long as we adhere to the “old accountability system.”
They called for the current “test-and-punish approach” to be “replaced by a support-and-improve model.” (emphasis original)
Their preference is for accountability to pivot from test score outcomes to the inputs school and teachers can bring to our students’ lives, including “curriculum, teaching, and assessment focused on meaningful learning … adequate resources” and ensuring teachers and school leaders have the opportunity to “develop the knowledge and skills they need to teach much more challenging content in much more effective ways.”
They compared policies mandates in New York that are “stuck in a narrow test-based accountability system adopted under NCLB and reinforced by federal Race to the Top rules” to what’s being enacted in California “that directly addresses what parents and students want from their schools: Good teaching focused on productive learning that is supported with the right resources.”
They concluded the California approach is one that is “more likely to produce a truly accountable educational system – one that ensures all students experience engaging learning in supportive schools that help them pave a path to a productive future, not just another test.”
Politicians and policy makers fearful of proposing new directions for education accountability should understand that an approach similar to what Darling-Hammond and Weingarten propose makes sense to most people. Research shows that parents rarely rely on test scores and other types of outcome data to determine their school preferences. What they tend to rely on are “word of mouth” and what influential people tell them.
Unfortunately, most politicians and policy leaders today devote most of their rhetoric to saying bad things about public schools and calling for measures like “choice” and vouchers that actually eliminate layers of accountability rather then focus accountability on what matters.
Rather than perpetuating an “old system” increasingly taking schools down the wrong path, education accountability we can believe in would call for a healthier menu of inputs to nourish students’ learning.
You have to wonder, why aren’t the First Lady and the rest of the Obama administration fighting for that?

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

VAM is a sham is a scam......but don't they love it!

 

Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a dead horse with all this VAM related news because it all says the same thing: VAM is an exercise in futility, perpetrated by those who want to punish teachers and profit from their misery. Yet it still is being implemented and it is still making teachers' lives miserable. Teachers, teacher's unions, school systems and administrators need to wake up and stand up to the insanity. This is one area where we cannot just sit back and wait for it to go away on its own.

New Mexico: Another VAM Disaster
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Thus far, the concept of VAM–or value-added measurement–has an unbroken record of failure. Wherever it has been tried, it has proven to be inaccurate and unstable. Teacher and student records are erroneous. Teachers are judged based on students they never taught. VAM demoralizes teachers, who understand they are being judged for factors over which they have little or no control.
The major perpetrators of this great fraud are Bill Gates, who bet hundreds of millions of dollars on the proposition that test scores could be a major factor in identifying bad teachers and firing them, and Arne Duncan, who required states to use VAM if they wanted to be eligible to get a share of his $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund.
Yet a third perpetrator was Jeb Bush, whose love affair with data is unbounded. Bush went from state to state selling “the Florida miracle,” which supposedly proved that testing and accountability were the keys to solving America’s educational problems.
One of Jeb’s acolytes was Hannah Skandera, who was chosen as Secretary of Education in Néw Mexico but was never confirmed because of her lack of classroom credentials. As Secretary-designate, she sought to import the Florida model of testing and accountability.
When the state released its new teacher evaluation ratings, teachers and students showed up at the Albuquerque school board meeting to complain about errors. Teachers talked about missing and incomplete data. One student said he was part of a team that placed first in the state in civics, yet he failed his end-of-course government exam.
“James Phillips teaches calculus to Advanced Placement students at Albuquerque High School. He described how the previous week had seen him publicly praised by board member Marty Esquivel, who called him the best math teacher in New Mexico. Just days later, Phillips was notified that the PED had also ranked him “minimally effective.”
“Wendy Simms-Small, a parent of three APS students who’d helped organize the day’s rally, said she started getting active after hearing rumors that hundreds of teachers were planning on leaving the school system.
“I got curious and wanted to find out why,” she said. “As a member of this community over many years, I have never seen the demoralization of professional individuals like this ever before.” She said the pressure of testing had also taken a toll on her kids.
“Private corporations reap great rewards when school systems implement standardized testing,” said Simms-Small, “so it’s my belief that they’re motivated financially to turn our children into pawns for profit.”
At some point, the data-obsessed federal and state policy makers will have to concede that they were wrong or face a massive parent-teacher rebellion. They ate literally destroying the mation’s schools with their nad ideas. It is time for a revival of common sense or a public discussion of the true meaning of education.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Oh boy, they just don't know when to quit.

Not being satisfied with “improving” elementary and secondary education, the Bush/Obama education juggernaut rolls on, reforming everything in its path and making sure we’re all “accountable.” When the Obama presidency began, if someone had told me that the term “Bush/Obama” would be part of my vocabulary I would have thought them mad. Well, time wounds all heals, and here we are in the brave new world of NCLB/RTTT, and I’m going to tell you it sucks. But slowly, like all real societal shifts, a movement is emerging among teachers, parents, administrators, social justice activists, and union organizers that is making for some pretty strange bedfellows as the left, right, and center all realize, each for its own reasons, that this whole education reform thing is a steaming pile of crap and has implications way beyond the hallowed halls of academia. How long these not-quite-coalitions can hold together is anyone’s guess, but let’s hope it’s long enough to put the reform beast to sleep for good. One of the bright spots that may emerge from this witch’s brew is if the furor over things like Common Core,VAM, PARCC, testing, vouchers, and charters proves to herald the re-emergence of strong teacher’s unions that truly have a powerful voice in making education policy, are proactive, and that respond to the voices of their members. Another may be the beginning of a real conversation about the effects of poverty and wealth/opportunity inequality in this country. In the meantime, gird yourself for battle or get out of the way – it’s a struggle for the soul of public education.
http://dianeravitch.net/2014/05/26/obama-brings-nclb-think-to-higher-education/

Obama Brings NCLB-Think to Higher Education

by dianeravitch

The Obama administration wants to rate institutions of higher education, based on factors like cost,graduation rate, income of graduates.
 
Most college and university presidents are upset.
 
It didn't help that one administration official said that comparing the cost and quality of institutions of higher education should be no more difficult than comparing blenders. For some reason, the Obama administration thinks that it can play the role of Consumer Reports and thus improve the quality of higher education while lowering costs. How this will actually happen is anyone's guess.
 
Many of the university officials pointed out that the institutions that prepare graduates for relatively low-paid professions like social work and teaching would get low ratings, as would those that open their doors to risky low-income students. Those whose graduates go to Wall Street will look stellar.
 
Some said they would be penalized for focusing on the liberal arts and sciences, where the ultimate payoff is less than in fields like engineering.
 
The Obama administration, which is never in doubt about any of its ideas or policies, plans to push ahead, so that it can hold the nation's colleges and universities "accountable." There seems to be no tempering its love affair with data. Having no success to date with its policies for K-12, it now plans to bring the same failed ideas of NCLB-Race to the Top  to the nation's higher education sector.
 
Why doesn't the administration begin by regulating the for-profit sector, which has a historic record of poor performance and low graduation rates?
 
Well, no, it must apply its metrics of all institutions of higher education. This is NCLB style thinking. Leave these guys alone for a minute and they bring out their weights, measures, and scales.
 
Someone should tell them that the American system of higher education is generally considered the best, most diverse in the world, and it got that way without being controlled by the U.S . Department of Education.
 
 

Friday, May 23, 2014

Step by Step, Piece by Piece...

This from Plunderbund is a ray of hope, a glimmer of the change that is moving everywhere.

Athens School Board Member: Charter Schools Focus On Profit Not Students

By On May 16, 2014 · 1 Comment

Bruce Nottke, an Athens City School Board member, sent the following letter to nearly every public school superintendent in Ohio. We thought it was worth sharing!
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Fellow Educators,
My name is Bruce Nottke and I am a board member for the Athens City Schools. I am writing to you in regards to my growing concerns about charter schools. My concerns rest not only with the loss of dollars to public schools, but more importantly with the poor quality of education our students receive from many of the charter schools currently operating in Ohio. The businesses that operate most of the charter school programs clearly have little interest in student achievement, with their primary focus being to make a profit.
I strongly believe that while school administrators understand the dire situation, the typical Ohio taxpayer does not know about or does not fully understand how private businesses are operating charter schools for monetary gain while offering what is often a sub-par educational experience to our children. I believe we, as representatives of the children of Ohio, must make a greater effort to inform the citizens in each of our communities about the issue of charter schools, how their existence drains money from the local public schools, and the fact that charter schools are often less effective in educating our children.
The purpose of this letter is that I would like to encourage each Superintendent and Board Member to sign up for the Coalition for Equity and Adequacy mailing list by sending a request to the following e-mail address: ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net The E&A provides frequent, well written pieces that are intended to inform school personnel and local citizens about issues related to school funding, including the specific concerns with the charter school movement. After signing up for the E&A Listserv, please forward the e-mail notices to your respective local newspapers and members of your communities so that taxpayers can see how our tax money is being wasted on continuing to fund the failed experiment of charter schools. I strongly believe that if more taxpayers know the truth about charter schools in Ohio, they may be motivated to join together to change the conversation at the Statehouse as it relates to charter school legislation.
I am hopeful that every Superintendent and Board Member in Ohio will be willing to band together so we can make a change for the better for public education. Please accept my invitation to clearly communicate about this important issue to members of your community. Thank you in advance for considering my request.
Sincerely,
Bruce Nottke
Athens City School Board

Saturday, May 17, 2014

The Latest and Greatest from the Ohio General Assembly........


As most of you probably know, the Ohio Supreme Court has several times found Ohio’s school funding scheme to be unconstitutional on the grounds that a “thorough and efficient” means of funding education, as mandated in the Ohio Constitution, was not being provided equally to all Ohio students, and that Ohio’s method of funding education needed to change.

 “In DeRolph v. State (1997), 78 Ohio St.3d 193, 677 N.E.2d 733, syllabus, (“DeRolph I”), this court stated, ‘Ohio’s elementary and secondary public school financing system violates Section 2, Article VI of the Ohio Constitution, which mandates a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.’  In DeRolph I, this court admonished the General Assembly to create a new school-funding system…..”  

For years the General Assembly has alternately ignored or paid lip service to this and subsequent Supreme Court rulings and refused to do anything to truly remedy the situation….until now. After wrestling mightily with the problem, and through a stroke of true malignity, a solution has been found: the easiest way to address this constitutional conundrum is obvious: change the Constitution. Just remove the “thorough and efficient” language from the Constitution and all will be well! No longer will the General Assembly have to deal with those pesky Supreme Court rulings and be concerned whether the students in Cleveland Heights and those in Lower Salem were being given the same educational opportunities.  What could be simpler? Instead of checks and balances, we would be left with only checks…..big fat checks from the eduformers who want to destroy public education, sell it to the highest bidder, and pay to elect legislators who subscribe to their pseudo-Darwinian “Let them eat cake” approach to funding the poorer school districts in Ohio. It’s obviously their own fault if they’re poor, and besides, there’s money to be made! Why let a few words in the constitution stand in the way of unbridled capitalism and greed? Once all of the schools are privatized…..well, not all. There has to be somewhere for the riffraff to go.

Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe the situation, but when education becomes the latest “emerging market” and students are data points in an investment scheme, it all begins to make a certain kind of perverse sense. But hey, that’s just me……….

VAM for dummies...no, really, if you drink the VAM Koolade it all makes sense.......

This from Peter Greene, who obviously is not a dummy and tells it like it is.... In a word, VAM is total crap based on the kind of hubris that seems to be rampant these days, and that imagines people can be boiled down to a formula. How about this one? E(go) + VAM = BS. Maybe Pearson will hire me to write a Common Core math text......


If you don’t spend every day with your head stuck in the reform toilet, receiving the never-ending education swirly that is school reformy stuff, there are terms that may not be entirely clear to you. One is VAM — Value-Added Measure.
VAM is a concept borrowed from manufacturing. If I take one dollar’s worth of sheet metal and turn it into a lovely planter that I can sell for ten dollars, I’ve added nine dollars of value to the metal.
It’s a useful concept in manufacturing management. For instance, if my accounting tells me that it costs me ten dollars in labor to add five dollars of value to an object, I should plan my going-out-of-business sale today.
And a few years back, when we were all staring down the NCLB law requiring that 100 percent of our students be above average by this year, it struck many people as a good idea — let’s check instead to see if teachers are making students better. Let’s measure if teachers have added value to the individual student.
There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, starting with the idea that a student is like a piece of manufacturing material and continuing on through the reaffirmation of the school-is-a-factory model of education. But there are other problems as well.
1) Back in the manufacturing model, I knew how much value my piece of metal had before I started working my magic on it. We have no such information for students.
2) The piece of sheet metal, if it just sits there, will still be a piece of sheet metal. If anything, it will get rusty and less valuable. But a child, left to its own devices, will still get older, bigger, and smarter. A child will add value on its own, out of thin air. Almost like it was some living, breathing sentient being and not a piece of raw manufacturing material.
3) All piece of sheet metals are created equal. Any that are too not-equal get thrown in the hopper. On the assembly line, each piece of metal is as easy to add value to as the last. But here we have one more reformy idea predicated on the idea that children are pretty much identical.
How to solve these three big problems? Call the statisticians!
This is the point at which that horrifying formula that pops up in these discussion appears. Or actually, a version of it, because each state has its own special sauce when it comes to VAM. In Pennsylvania, our special VAM sauce is called PVAAS [i.e., the EVAAS in Pennsylvania]. I went to a state training session about PVAAS in 2009 and wrote about it for my regular newspaper gig. Here’s what I said about how the formula works at the time:
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me–”sophisticated prediction.” I tried again–was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work. The magic formula will factor in everything from your socio-economics through the trends over the past X years in your classroom, throw in your pre-testy thing if you like, and will spit out a prediction of how Johnny would have done on the test in some neutral universe where nothing special happened to Johnny. Your job as a teacher is to get your real Johnny to do better on The Test than Alternate Universe Johnny would.
See? All that’s required for VAM to work is believing that the state can accurately predict exactly how well your students would have done this year if you were an average teacher. How could anything possibly go wrong??
And it should be noted — all of these issues occur in the process before we add refinements such as giving VAM scores based on students that the teacher doesn’t even teach. There is no parallel for this in the original industrial VAM model, because nobody anywhere could imagine that it’s not insanely ridiculous.
If you want to know more, the interwebs are full of material debunking this model, because nobody — I mean nobody — believes in it except politicians and corporate privateers. So you can look at anything from this nifty three minute video to the awesome blog Vamboozled by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.
This is one more example of a feature of reformy stuff that is so top-to-bottom stupid that it’s hard to understand. But whether you skim the surface, look at the philosophical basis, or dive into the math, VAM does not hold up. You may be among the people who feel like you don’t quite get it, but let me reassure you — when I titled this “VAM for Dummies,” I wasn’t talking about you. VAM is always and only for dummies; it’s just that right now, those dummies are in charge.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

VAM is a scam, but that doesn't stop its implementation.....

It should be obvious by now to anyone paying attention that the value added model (VAM) of teacher evaluation is junk science, and that the only reason to use it in any evaluation system is to be punitive toward teachers. Apparently, however, neither the Department of Education nor the Ohio legislature (among others) has been paying attention as they are both hell-bent on implementing unreliable, punitive, immoral VAM systems that could lead to groundless teacher firings. Lawsuits are being filed and contemplated across the nation as a result. This is a topic with which everyone should be familiar. The following is from U.S. News and World Report.

 

Report Finds Weak Link Between Value-Added Measures and Teacher Instruction

States should have more time to examine the quality of the measures, the report says.


The value-added model of measuring teacher performance can have weak or nonexistent relationships with the content and quality of teachers' instruction, a new report finds.
By
 
A spreading method of teacher performance that places significant importance on student growth measures has a weak to nonexistent link with teacher performance, according to new research published Tuesday. 
Morgan Polikoff and Andrew Porter, two education experts, analyzed the relationships between "value-added model" (VAM) measures of teacher performance and the content or quality of teachers' instruction by evaluating data from 327 fourth and eighth grade math and English teachers in six school districts. The weak relationships made them question whether the data would be useful in evaluating teachers or improving classroom instruction, the report says.
[READ: Following Lawsuit, Florida Releases Teacher Evaluation Scores]
"Conceptually, folks think that measure of both content and quality should be predicting student achievement growth," says Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California. "In fact, value-added scores weren't really systematically related to either our content measure, or to the pedagogical quality measure." 

Porter, who co-authored the report with Polikoff, is the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.
The value-added model, which is in place in about 30 states, attempts to measure a teacher's contribution to student academic growth by comparing the test scores of an individual teacher's students to the same students' scores from past years, as well as to other students in the same grade, and can account for up to half of a teacher's entire evaluation score in some states, such as Ohio. 
Many states are implementing new teacher evaluation systems that place a greater emphasis on student growth measures because the Obama administration has required them to do so if they want to keep their waivers from No Child Left Behind. In fact, Education Secretary Arne Duncan in April revoked Washington's waiver because its legislature failed to implement a teacher evaluation system that met the federal requirements. The waiver requirements stipulate that states should have these systems in place for the 2014-15 school year and used to influence personnel decisions by the following year.
[RELATED: States Need to Connect Teacher Evaluations to Other Quality Measures, Report Says]
But the Department of Education on Friday sent updated guidance to state education chiefs, saying it would grant some states extensions on their waivers even if their teacher evaluation systems aren't yet acceptable, Education Week first reported.
That flexibility could give states more time to more intensely study the relationship between value-added measures and teacher performance, Polikoff says.
"If I had my druthers, I would say we need to slow way down the implementation of these teacher evaluation systems because we just don’t know enough about the quality of these measures," Polikoff says. "And we have reason to believe a lot of the measures actually aren't very good quality."
Some previous research has shown stronger correlations between value-added measures and teacher instruction, while others have shown almost no relationships, he says. 
"It's not clear to me what the reasons are for those differences, but as these systems are rolling out, states need to really study these relationships and think about in the cases where the correlations are really low, what can you do with those data?" Polikoff says.
[ALSO: Connecticut Cautiously Optimistic of Teacher Evaluation System]
It's particularly important as 44 states and the District of Columbia are implementing the Common Core State Standards, and new state assessments aligned to those standards. But the fact that student scores are expected to drop on the Common Core-aligned tests, combined with the fact that teacher evaluations can influence personnel decisions, has drawn sharp criticism from teachers unions and other organizations. 
In April, the American Statistical Association issued a statement criticizing the use of value-added model, saying teachers account for between 1 and 14 percent of the variability in student test scores. 
"Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality," the statement said. "This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences."
[MORE: States Improve Policies Tied to Teacher Effectiveness, Report Says]
Still, Polikoff says many states use a value-added model that does not take into account certain student characteristics. Rather than lumping several different dimensions of teacher quality into one index, Polikoff says each should be taken on its own to get a more holistic picture of teacher performance. 
"We have this kind of fetish of both for teachers and for schools putting everything into one index," Polikoff says. "Certainly there's some value to that – it makes things clear and if you want to make a policy decision you can just set a cut score. But I think actually you lose a lot of useful information when you do something like that."