Acceleration TSAs: Another Ill-Conceived Experiment to Be Performed Upon Oakland’s Youth

After significant questions and concerns were raised by members of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) and OEA leadership about “Mutual Matching,” OUSD administration dropped this ill-conceived plan and adopted the OEA blueprint for transfers and consolidations from closed schools. Now OUSD has initiated an even more poorly designed plan. Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds are all scheduled to be “transformed.” If Superintendent Tony Smith and the District have their way, the entire teaching staff will have to apply for new positions as “Acceleration Teachers-on-Special-Assignment (TSAs),” 11-month jobs for which teachers would have to reapply on a yearly basis. There was no consultation with most of the current teachers at these sites or with the OEA, no effort to bargain the effects of these changes in working conditions.

Tony Smith and Matt Duffy, from the OUSD “Office of Transformation,” have postponed their visit to meet with Castlemont teachers on Monday, March 5. Why? Well, they heard that teachers from across Oakland were coming to listen to what they had to say about their thus far poorly defined “Acceleration TSA” position. Oakland teachers understand that no school is an island. We understand that we are the OEA, we are the union, and that we are all in this together. We agree that reforms could be a positive force in the education of Oakland’s children. However, reforms should be implemented in collaboration and cooperation with the entire OUSD community: parents, students, teachers, and administrators. Reforms should be put in place considerately and thoughtfully, with what’s best for students always guiding our plans. OUSD decided that Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds would need to be reconstituted before the school year began, and they have had months to initiate and implement such collaboration and cooperation.

Instead, Superintendent Tony Smith, Matt Duffy, head of Labor Relations Troy Christmas, Human Resources consultant Brigitte Marshall, and other OUSD administration have made minimal efforts to work with teachers or parents at the affected schools. At Castlemont, for example, OUSD has frittered away two-thirds of the school year that could have been spent consulting with teachers and the community about the details of the restructuring plan for the school. Instead, OUSD meets with some small groups of teachers and not others. Instead, OUSD works behind closed doors with corporate-funded groups like Great Oakland Public Schools. Instead, once again, OUSD decides to perform an unproven experiment upon children of color in the flatlands of Oakland. The OUSD plan to staff high schools with year-to-year employees—hired and fired at the whim of a principal—will result in even more instability for Fremont, Castlemont, & McClymonds. Of course, whether or not the experiment succeeds, its designers will move on to six-figure jobs in other school districts, or for corporate contractors, like so many in OUSD administration before them. Meanwhile, Oakland’s students, parents, and teachers will be stuck with the mess they’ve left behind.

OEA leadership has given the District numerous opportunities to work with teachers on restructuring the flatlands high schools. In fact, twice this year at OEA Executive Board Meetings, Superintendent Smith has been a guest. At both these meetings, the first on September 21, Castlemont teacher and Executive Board member Rodney Brown brought it to Smith’s attention that the principal selection process for Castlemont was not being followed according to OUSD policy. Brown also pointed out that teachers and parents had—so far—been minimally involved in the high school reconstitution process, at least at the Castlemont Business & Information Technology (CBIT) campus. On both occasions Superintendent Tony Smith expressed his concern and promised to take action. Nothing was done.

Oakland teachers and the OEA are not against reform. We believe we should look at real solutions, at real reform. Let’s talk about class size reduction. Let’s talk about split reading for grades K-3, where half of a class is taught reading for an hour in the morning and the other half for an hour in the afternoon with smaller teacher:student ratios, because it’s one-on-one and small-group instructional time that will improve student achievement in Oakland. Let’s talk about expanding programs like Teach Tomorrow in Oakland that bring local candidates and people of color to teach in our city, so that students can be taught by young role models who look like them and are from their community, because the personal connection between student and teacher matters far more than whether the school year is 180 or 190 days long. Let’s talk about addressing truancy, because however long the school year is, students won’t learn if they’re not in the classroom. Let’s talk about funding and staffing academic counselors at all Oakland high schools, because if we really want Oakland students to go to college that’s what it will take. The OEA is fighting for real reform, not the latest corporate-inspired flavor of the month. The OEA is fighting for our students.

Rhee the Reformer!!

The Problems With Test-Driven Education Reform

The Problems With Test-Driven Education Reform   Huffington Post 

Educators from across the country will be meeting this week with Education Secretary Arne Duncan in Denver to discuss Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration at a conference cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the mounting nation's top education unions.

Ironically, our meeting to discuss paths to renewed cooperation will be taking place at a time when governors and municipal leaders throughout the nation are rolling back the rights and benefits of public employees. These politically charged campaigns have a lot in common with the assault on educators already underway by so-called business-model school reformers who impede the much-needed improvements in public service -- in our case, public schools.

In both the assault on public employee pensions and the blame-the-educators movement, the failures of elected officials and their corporate benefactors are projected onto the victims of these failures -- and public schools have certainly been among those victimized.

When federal experiments with school curricula fall short, the thrust of the attack on educators and students is to label them "failures" when the experiments themselves have failed largely as a result of excluding front-line educators from the design of reforms.

And when poorly designed data-driven tests are adopted by Democrats as well as Republicans as a panacea, it's difficult not to conclude that the same corporate interests that now dominate both parties are dominating the debate about the best way to educate our children.

Any question about how the corporate sector is dominating Washington policymakers was laid to rest recently when it was revealed the administration is enlisting the help of 30 major corporations in pushing the Education Department's reforms on Congress.

The data-driven business model "reformers" champion vouchers and charter schools, with the professed goal of restoring world-class performance among U.S. school children. In fact, there is growing evidence that their motivation is to ensure that 10 percent of school children perform to globally competitive standards, while the rest are dismissed as "failures" without much, if any, regard for the social consequences.

America is scouring the urban centers for what W.E.B. DuBois would refer to as its "yeast." In his essay, The Talented Tenth, he writes, "All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toll of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies."



The corporate reformers' singular focus on college readiness and obsession with STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), often to the exclusion of arts and humanities, raises serious questions about whose needs they seek to serve since these preoccupations are at odds with the jobs the federal government projects will grow most in the coming years.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the greatest number of new jobs in the U.S. labor market between now and 2018 will be food preparers and servicers (3.1 million), customer service representatives (2.7 million), long haul truck drivers (1.8 million), nursing aides and orderlies (1.7 million), receptionists (1.3 million), security guards (1.2 million), construction workers (1.18 million), landscapers and groundskeepers (1.12 million), and home health aides (1.05 million).

"Few of these jobs," writes political scientist Jacob Hacker, "will call for college credits, and their pay is unlikely to vary much from current medians." Political leaders and their corporate backers who insist on making STEM courses the centerpiece for curriculum appear to be advocating an untenable system of "natural selection" in which the survival of the academically fittest is advanced, while the rest of students are labeled "failures."

The last thing we want to do is to set up children for failure. We need to guide students in the disciplines of discovery and creativity that are the pathways to independent thinking, seldom an attitude cherished by corporate views of education. For children's sake -- and the nation's -- we can't afford to demand teaching to tests as if something has actually been "learned." And in the words of DuBois, "We cannot mistake the means of living for the object of life."

To be successful in reforming public education, we must teach with an expectation of learning, not with the presumption of achievement by some and remediation among the rest.

We need to be guided by the examples of our own experience as children and students. I don't know what my test scores were when I was in school or what my IQ was, but I know that my parents told me I could achieve whatever I wanted if I worked at it. Now you're told, "If you don't get these test scores, you're not going to be anything." You're labeled a failure. So, students accept what their leaders tell them. They sit back and say, "I guess we have failed."

For schools whose performance falls short, we must turn them around. And we need curricula that challenge students -- all students -- with rigor. But we need to do so by creating an expectation of achievement that addresses the disparate skills of students and the differing paces at which they learn.

Only when programs are designed to equip all children with the skills to exercise sound, independent judgment as workers and citizens will they be successfully educated, whether they're prepared to drive a long haul truck across country or drive a smart bargain with an investor halfway across the globe.

THE BLUEBERRY STORY : A Businessman Learns a Lesson

THE BLUEBERRY STORY : A Businessman Learns a Lesson

by Jamie Robert Vollmer

"If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I

wouldn't be in business very long!" I stood before an auditorium filled   with

outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech

had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of in-service. Their

initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the

hostility with a knife.

I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public

schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous

in the middle 1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the

"Best Ice Cream in America."

I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change;

they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the

industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging

"knowledge society." Second, educators were a major part of the   problem: they

resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by

tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly.

They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero

defects! TQM! Continuous improvement! In retrospect, the speech was

perfectly balanced -- equal parts ignorance and arrogance.

As soon as I finished, a woman's hand shot up. She appeared polite,

pleasant -- she was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school

English teacher who had been waiting to unload.

She began quietly, "We are told, sir, that you manage a company that

makes good ice cream." I smugly replied , "Best ice cream in   America, Ma'am."

"How nice," she said. "Is it rich and smooth?"    "Sixteen percent butterfat," I crowed.

"Premium ingredients?" she inquired. "Super-premium! Nothing   but triple A." I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.

"Mr. Vollmer," she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow   raised

to the sky, "when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an

inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?"

In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap. I was dead

meat, but I wasn't going to lie. "I send them back."

"That's right!" she barked, "and we can never send back our

blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional,   abused,

frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. 

We take them all: GT, ADHD, ADD, SLD, EI, MMR, OHI, TBI, DD, Autistic, junior   rheumatoid

arthritis, English as their second language, etc.

We take them all! Everyone! 

And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's school!"

In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides,

custodians and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, "Yeah!

Blueberries! Blueberries!"

And so began my long transformation. Since then, I have visited

hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools   are

unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon

the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are

constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups   that

would send the best CEO screaming into the night.

None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when,

and how we teach to give all chi ldren maximum opportunity to thrive in a

postindustrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these

changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active

support of the surrounding community.

For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect

the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and

therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools,   it

means changing America.

Please forward THE BLUEBERRY STORY to teachers, parents,   politicians and everyone interested in education.

Why Michelle Rhee's Education 'Brand' Failed in D.C.

Natalie Hopkinson - Natalie Hopkinson is a Washington writer and author of the forth

 coming Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. Follow her on Twitter. 

from The Atlantic

The urban education reform movement just got a much-needed reality check as D.C. Democratic primary voters fired Mayor Adrian Fenty, and effectively along with him one of the movement's biggest superstars, District schools chief Michelle Rhee. Chancellor Rhee was as a key, polarizing figure in Fenty's reelection campaign, which ended when he was defeated in the Tuesday primary by his challenger, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray.

Rhee brazenly politicized her job as Schools Chancellor in a way that may be unprecedented for education bureaucrats. Back in the spring, the charitable arm of Wal-Mart and other corporate foundations threatened to yank millions they had donated to break the teacher's union if Rhee was not retained. Then Rhee not so subtly hinted to a reporter that she would not work for Gray. Finally, the weekend before the election, Rhee hit the campaign trail along with Fenty to round up votes in the wealthiest ward in Washington.

D.C. voters responded with a resounding rejection of her, her boss and their education policies. (Gray, who has no Republican challenger in this overwhelmingly Democratic city, has not said if he would retain Rhee.)

Some are already blaming racial identity politics and the ghosts of Marion Barry for the resounding defeat of education's Great Hope at the polls. But if education reformers think the election is the problem, they are missing some major lessons in an often racially charged battle for urban school reform. A majority of black voters cited Rhee as a reason to fire her boss, while a majority of white voters cited Rhee as a reason to vote for Fenty. But the stink swirling around education reform in D.C. goes beyond race. The hundreds of millions of corporate dollars used to break the D.C. teachers' union have dangerous strings attached.

There is pushback against the movement to treat public institutions and the precious people in them like factories. And when the impacted public is treated as an obstacle and not a partner to urban reform, it gives the whole effort colonial and paternalistic smell.

Since Fenty appointed Rhee as schools chancellor in 2007, reformers have been closely watching the once-obscure Teach For America alumna's quick rise from educational entrepreneur to Time magazine covergirl and the adored subject of squabbling by Barack Obama and John McCain during the 2008 presidential debates.

This Spring, Rhee negotiated among the most revolutionary teacher's contracts in the country, which essentially broke the union, loosening tenure protections in exchange for the potential for teachers to make more money and earn performance bonuses. D.C. is being hailed as a model in urban education reform, and there are plans to replicate this model; The Obama Administration is putting more than a billion dollars behind a "performance-based" rewards system similar to the one being tested in D.C.

D.C.'s high-profile status as nation's capital means that for decades, our kids have been the subjects of virtually every passing education fad and experiment--like lab rats. But usually the meddling comes from Congress.  D.C. is the only city where Congress pays private school tuition. About 40 percent of public school kids go to charter schools, also thanks to Congress. All of this "experimentation" and "competition" has destabilized the system so badly that the most competent D.C. school administrators rarely know how many kids are enrolled in public or charter schools on a given day.

It is common for D.C. teachers to be fired in the middle of the school year to reflect shifting enrollment as families toggle across the D.C., suburban Maryland and Virginia borders "shopping" for the best educational deal. Public, private or charter schools are marketed like gym memberships. D.C. parents scout new educational opportunities with more angst than a pre-Miami LeBron James.

As a former DCPS PTA mom, I am among the many DC voters who had grown weary of the endless churning in the system. The D.C. public school my child won an out-of boundary "lottery" to attend in the early 2000s had passionate teachers and dedicated families, but inept administration and a dangerously neglected building forced us to leave after three years. We enrolled in a private school just as Rhee came into office in 2007 when the school board was abolished and the mayor was given control of the schools. But we've been shopping for a reason to come back into the system ever since.

So I'd backed Rhee--even when she shut down our neighborhood school. I supported her when she broke the local teacher's union that seemed to care more about saving jobs than saving kids. I balked, but ultimately swallowed and accepted it even when we learned that the private donations raised to fund the teacher's contract could be taken away if kids don't improve their test scores or Rhee left the job.

As many were still reeling from the multimillion dollar stakes of the testing kids and the people who teach them, Rhee infuriated the D.C. electorate by piling on to threats by the Walton Family Foundation (of Wal-Mart), the Robertson Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Broad Foundation, who vowed to snatch funding if she doesn't stay on the job. While Gray has not said if he would retain Rhee, Rhee has already made that decision for him by telling a Post reporter she would not work for Gray.

Days after tethering her fate to that of Adrian Fenty, Rhee gave a speech to the Aspen Ideas Festival donors that raised a lot of eyebrows among people I spoke to when I arrived there for the festival. In the video of the July 3 speech, Rhee notes that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty unflinchingly supported everything she did without exception. Then she explained her strategy for raising the money to approve the teacher's contract.

"These people are lined up to support this contract, but only if it is the most revolutionary contract in the country," she told the crowd. "If I only did what they did in Chicago or in New York, these people are not gonna pay for that...

"So if you look where the philanthropic dollars are going in this contract, you are looking at the pay-for-performance system."

Later, she explained how she planned to spend that money by applying business principles to the classroom, citing a study by an economist named Eric Hanushek. She said if the U.S. fired 6-10 percent of the worst teachers in the country and replaced them "not even with the best, but with average teachers," U.S. schools would move from 21, 25 and 26th in math to the top 5.

"Now let me just say, to all of you business people..." Rhee continued.

"Wait wait wait," the moderator, Harvard University's David Gergen, interrupted. "...Do you believe this?"

Rhee replied: "Yes, I actually do. If someone told you as a business, that if you removed the bottom 6 percent of your performers, that you would move from 25th in the market to top-5, you would do it in a heartbeat. You would not even think twice about it. But we have an incredibly hard time in this in this country. We like teachers. It is an incredibly noble position in this country.  But we have to look at the reality...

"That seems like an incredibly easy thing for us to begin to tackle," she said.

Right, easy--if you are selling computer operating systems! But can the teaching of human beings be reduced to 1s and 0s? Like in any other profession, more experience helps you get better at it, although the smartest academics studying the issue don't agree on how much.  But not three weeks after Rhee's Aspen speech, that is exactly what she did. She wrapped up testing of a controversial teaching assessment her office created, and fired 4 percent of the work force, and put another 737 of her 4,000 teachers on notice that their performance was "minimally effective."

Rhee's makeover of the D.C. teaching force is also racially fraught. Many of the young teachers Rhee is hiring, drawn from the ranks of Teach for America in many cases, bring a new energy and life into the schools. But TFA teachers and alumni tend to be mostly white, recruited from around the country, and rarely stay longer than three years. They get a now-trendy notch on their resume and move on. A recent study by a researcher at the University of Texas-Austin and California State University shows a mixed impact on vulnerable kids, many of whom have abandonment issues.

On the other hand, more of the veteran DC teachers are black. Many of them are dedicated educators who have held things together under unimaginable circumstances, earning them cultural capital in the communities they've served for generations. But other of the DC teaching vets, made cynical about the crushing challenges facing some DC communities, treat their jobs like babysitters punching a clock.

So at worst you have clock-punchers versus cultural tourists. Rhee is exchanging one mixed-bag for another mixed-bag, giving benefit of the doubt to inexperienced white teachers. This may be one reason why parental support for Rhee and Fenty falls along racial lines. Among white Democrats, 68 percent said Rhee is a reason to support Fenty. Fifty-four percent of black Democrats cite her as a reason to vote against the mayor, according to a Washington Post poll. In an earlier August poll by Clarus Research, Rhee got her most unfavorable ratings from black women, only 15 percent of whom viewed her favorably.

In a city whose large black middle class was built on a legacy of generations of black women public school educators reaching back to Anna J. Cooper at the turn of the 20th century, the perceived disrespect toward veteran teachers is not going over well. For many D.C. voters, if the choice is between the black veteran teachers with roots in the community and the Teach for America cultural tourists, they are going with the vets.

As the Obama administration moves forward with plans to replicate this corporate education model, it should take note. If you can't be bothered to include the indigenous public in your plans, you are essentially swooping into town to "fix" the "Other" like the Peace Corps, to which Teach for America has frequently compared itself.

Rhee's reforms are a gamble like all previous gambles in urban education reform. But the level of influence from "philanthrocapitalist" sources in her gamble--that may be new. As state, local and federal governments become increasingly strapped for cash (as D.C. is) this has serious consequences. How "public" is it when Wal-Mart can blackmail D.C. voters?

The real battle for urban education reform has never been about what happens in the classroom. Since the days when desegregation and the rise of the suburb led to a white, then black middle class abandonment of urban schools, it has mostly been about perception. So Rhee's MBA slogans that went over so well with the Aspen crowd are also good PR for parents of all races. As gentrification brings in more middle class families and bumps up the D.C. tax base, many parents see Rhee as a dramatic and compelling narrative to justify their reverse migration back into urban public schools. 

She's good for the D.C. Public School "brand." So far, D.C. voters just aren't buying it.

Education Week: The Problems With Value-Added Assessment

Education Week's blogs > Bridging Difference

October 05, 2010

15154

The Problems With Value-Added Assessment *

Dear Deborah,
You asked what keeps me running, which I assume means how I find the energy to stay on the road week after week, speaking to teachers, parents, school board members, and concerned citizens. These days, I am running because of an inner rage at the attacks on teachers and public education. I see one of our most important public institutions under siege by people who want to privatize it, turn it into profit centers, and treat children as data points on a chart. This is wrong, and it will end badly. Critics say I defend the status quo, but nothing could be further from the truth. The status quo is awful, but the demonizing of teachers and the vilification of public education are even worse.
Last week, I was in Los Angeles. I spoke to L.A. teachers, who were shamed by the Los Angeles Times' disgraceful release of test-score data and ratings of 6,000 elementary teachers as more or less effective. I had previously believed that such ratings (value-added assessment) might be used cautiously by supervisors as one of multiple measures to evaluate teacher performance. The L.A. Times persuaded me that the numerical scores—with all their caveats and flaws—would drown out every other measure. And, in fact, the L.A. Times database contained only one measure, based on test scores.
And so I concluded that value-added assessment should not be used at all. Never. It has a wide margin of error. It is unstable. A teacher who is highly effective one year may get a different rating the next year depending on which students are assigned to his or her class. Ratings may differ if the tests differ. To the extent it is used, it will narrow the curriculum and promote teaching to tests. Teachers will be mislabeled and stigmatized. Many factors that influence student scores will not be counted at all.
The latest review of value-added assessment was written by New York University economist Sean Corcoran. He examines value-added assessment in Houston and New York City. He describes a margin of error so large that a teacher at the 43rd percentile (average) might actually be at the 15th percentile (below average) or the 71st percentile (above average). What is the value of such a measure? Why should it be used at all? Please read this important and well-written study.
While I was in Los Angeles, a teacher committed suicide. Rigoberto Ruelas, 39, had taught 5th graders for 14 years. He was known as unusually dedicated and caring; he worked in a gang-ridden, impoverished neighborhood. Most students in his school were English-language learners. Friends and family said he was depressed by the poor rating he received in the L.A. Times. No one will ever know what caused him to despair and take his own life. Colleagues and former students wrote beautiful tributes to him. They thought he was a wonderful teacher.
It's worth noting, however, that Los Angeles Deputy Schools Superintendent John Deasy said that Mr. Ruelas had a "great performance review" from his supervisors, but Mr. Deasy couldn't release the personnel records because they are confidential. So only the test scores were released to the media, not the laudatory reviews by professionals who observed his work.
Now I hear that more districts, prodded on by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Race to the Top principles, want to release value-added rankings. More teachers will learn that they are subpar or superior when judged by flawed, dubious, inaccurate measures.
How many other ways can we discover to ruin teachers' reputations and encourage teachers to abandon their profession? Why isn't there a public outcry that such tactics undermine professionalism and the quality of education? When will we learn that we have turned education into a numbers racket, and we may lose the best teachers along with the worst?
In this week after NBC's one-sided slam against teachers, unions, and public education, I am furious. And it keeps me running.
Diane
*Editor's note: The headline on this blog has been changed at Diane Ravitch's request. Diane did not write the original headline.