Des Moines Register Gets It Wrong On Compensation

Written by DMEA President Melissa Spencer...

Like many of you, I groaned when I saw the title of the editorial in yesterday's Des Moines Register, "Ask school staff to share in sacrifice". My mood didn't improve as I read it. The Register gets several important facts wrong in their editorial, and we want to make sure our members are informed about the truth regarding our compensation.

The truth is we have sacrificed - especially the 44% of you who are on longevity and haven't seen a true salary increase in over two years. The truth is we did not see a "3% wage increase" last year - our total package was 3.11%, which includes insurance and retirement contributions. Our salary as a certified bargaining unit only increased 1.74% from the year before - and 44% of our certified staff only saw a $75 increase that was wiped out by mandated increases in employee retirement contributions. I urge you to write a letter to the editor to explain how you have sacrificed - talk about your increased class sizes, your lack of a salary increase if you are on longevity, your lack of time to adequately prepare and collaborate. (FYI - the Register seems to think that the early dismissal Wednesdays are "extra" time to plan & collaborate - let them know how the time is really used.) I will also be writing a letter to the editor on behalf of DMEA.

Also, the Register totally missed the point of the Citizens' Budget Advisory Committee's recommendations. (You can find them and other budget information at budget.dmschools.org.) They did not solely focus on employees' compensation; in fact, they are recommending, like last year, a three-pronged approach that includes the state, the community, and the district.

Know the facts about our compensation!

DMEA Members Speak Up at Ed Reform Public Hearing

On Monday night, March 5, several DMEA members took to the state capitol to testify at a public hearing on state education reform proposals being considered in the legislature. Read the testimony of these DMEA members who were speaking up for educators and the children of Iowa.

TIMM PILCHER - Hoover HS

To the Honorable Representative Greg Forristall, chairperson, and esteemed members of the Legislature,

My name is Timm Pilcher, and I am the journalism teacher at Des Moines Hoover High School. I have been teaching for 16 years in Des Moines Public Schools, having entered the profession at age 35 after a career in the private sector.

Thank you for inviting me here today to speak on the issues associated with online learning from the perspective of not only a classroom educator, but one who teaches online coursework in various capacities around the state.

Addressing the issue of online learning now is both prescient and pressing in light of Iowa’s commitment to educational reform that is not only contemporary, but viable, rigorous and relevant. Moving our students forward through the most advanced curriculum and methodologies is critical to our maintenance as the leading state in the U.S. in student achievement.

But, we must take caution that we are LEADING edge, not BLEEDING edge. In a rush to develop exclusionary online programs, we run the risk of eliminating some of the most valuable input and feedback a student can have for development: the human element.

While online content can provide rigor; it is essential that human interaction be maintained, one-on-one, in current attendance centers, in order for students to maintain a critical CONNECTION to content. It is only through direct human interaction, both with instructors and classmates, that higher order thinking skills can be cultivated, what Bloom would call “evaluating” and “creating”.

And, in John Hattie’s groundbreaking study on human learning, direct instruction and classroom environment were shown to have almost three times more impact than computer-assisted learning or programmed instruction.

Having taught online courses, I can confirm that without that essential interaction, you have students who can clearly “go through the motions” to pass the required coursework, but clearly have no understanding of how to transfer that knowledge to “real-world” situations, essential in today’s global economy.

Online learning IS the wave of the future: as an enrichment to traditional classroom instruction, NOT to the exclusion of it. The research is clear that online-only students are losing ground. Students who transfer to online programs from brick and mortar schools posted lower scores on annual state exams after entering virtual classrooms!

Other research verified that academic performance actually declined after students enrolled in an exclusive online program. Students who stayed in those programs for two years actually saw their test results decline.

Finally, double-digit gaps still persist in achievement on state exams between online students and their peers in traditional, comprehensive schools in nearly every grade and subject, and, are actually widest among affluent students!

There is most definitely a place for online learning, but not to the exclusion of social interaction, developing collaboration skills and teamwork and the very fundamental human process, especially at the younger ages and grade levels, of developing a concept of self-definition and human worth.

Thank you for your time.

DAVE O'CONNOR - MERRIL MS

My name is Dave O’Connor and I teach 8^th grade civics at Merrill Middle School in Des Moines. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening.

Two hallmarks of the School Reform movement in the nation today are:

(1)The necessity of “data driven”, “researched based” decision making and

(2)The notion that the United States is losing a “GLOBAL economic and educational COMPETITION” to the likes of Finland and Singapore

As an educator who makes a concerted effort to keep abreast of educational research, I find it interesting how advocates for corporate based education reform are able to conveniently look the other way on these two BENCHMARKS when it suits their purposes and specifically when it comes to the use of Value Added Models in the evaluation of teachers.

Value Added Modeling is hardly settled science. The prestigious Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.”

The Economic Policy Institute released a study written by a Blue Ribbon panel of experts. The study concluded that: “…there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians and economists that student test scores…are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value added modeling are employed.”

Yet onward we plow both here in Iowa and elsewhere around the nation in what Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy termed a “blind march” toward VAM and other corporate based reforms, “despite hard evidence to the contrary.”

Even more concerning is how little this “blind march” has to do with the successes being enjoyed by our international competitors like Finland. When it is in Michelle Rhee’s interests to bash American schools with data on Finland’s educational success, she and others are quick to do it. However, these critics ignore the fact that Finland has specifically rejected most of what passes for current educational reform in America and in Iowa.

Pasi Sahlberg, the Deputy General of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture was recently asked for his thoughts on the use of value-added data to measure teacher performance. He said: “It’s very difficult to use this data to say anything about the effectiveness of teachers. If you tried to do this in my country, Finnish teachers would probably go on strike and wouldn’t return until this crazy idea went away. Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning…The main lesson from Finland is that there is another way to transform current education systems than that based on standardization, testing, accountability and competition. Finland also shows that we don’t need to rely on corporate school reform models to achieve our goals.” He also added that “98% of teachers are unionized. And this is very important to the success of our system.”

I hope you will keep the real EVIDENCE in mind as you move forward with reform in Iowa.

JOSHUA WAGER - HARDING MS

Thank you Chairman Forristal and the Legislature for allowing me to speak.

My name is Joshua Wager. I am a middle school social studies teacher and have been in the classroom for seven years. I know a thing or two about the middle school brain and, thing or two about how the brain develops before middle school.

While the goals of literacy and early learning in the Governor’s education bill are laudable, the focus on third-grade retention is troubling. If a child is unable to read by third grade, we have already done something wrong. We must focus our concerted efforts on early child development. Early life experiences influence brain development and scientists tell us that a child’s vocabulary at age 4 is a good indicator of how he or she will be able to read in third grade. Doesn’t this tell us our focus needs to be on helping parents develop literacy skills in their children at the earliest point possible? Waiting until third grade to intervene seems arbitrary and punitive to an eight-year-old. Why don’t we put that money toward early childhood intervention so we can nip this issue in the bud and start our children off on the right foot?

Holding an eight-year-old back based on a test score determined at the state level completely undermines a decision which should be made at the local level in coordination with the parent, teacher, and administrator of the student. How can a test score possibly take the place of a determination by those most in-the-know at the local level? What does a reading test score determine if that child hasn’t had breakfast? What does a reading test score determine if a child is the victim of abuse? What does a reading test score determine if that child didn’t sleep the night before, or can’t concentrate because they are in pain? If that child is a math genius and needs help in reading are we going to hold him or her back and atrophy other skills? A test score is a snapshot of one moment in one space in time. It is a ridiculous and, again, a punitive blame game to hold a third grader back because we have failed him or her.

All research indicates that holding a child back at eight years old only harms them when they are older. Higher dropout rates, lower-life earnings, a lowered self-esteem —holding a student back follows them for life. What a tragedy to impose on a child for the sheer nonsense of trying to boost our fourth-grade test scores.

Those of us in the classroom and those of us with children know better. We know what it would do to our children to be held back and we know what our children need to learn. We know all children learn at an individual pace and they put their trust in us to help guide them—not punish them—to help them learn. Why are we punishing 8 year olds because teachers, parents, and the community have failed them? Let’s make sure their trust is well placed. Please oppose this draconian measure.

Thank you for your time.

ANDREW RASMUSSEN - CALLANAN MS

Good evening. My name is Andrew Rasmussen. For the past 17 years I have devoted my career to teaching social studies to students in Des Moines. I proud of my service to a community where many of my students are from disadvantaged backgrounds. I am equally proud to tell people I am a teacher. Looking through some of the proposals in the legislation you considering I am starting to doubt that some of our policy makers share the same pride in our state’s teachers.

Many of the reform proposals seem to be based on a premise that our state is stagnating educationally and it is because we are awash in a rising tide of mediocre and bad teachers. Many of the ideas in the legislation you are considering use this premise to propose solutions that will not make our students smarter but they will degrade the quality and morale of our teachers and create an education system where scoring well on standardized tests will become more important than actual student learning.

One of the proposals I find most troubling is the creation of “value added measures” to assess the performance of schools and teachers. Value added measures are supposed to be able to easily tie student achievement to school or teacher performance. Unfortunately, studies of value added measures have instead found them to be unreliable and thus unfair to use as a judgment of school or teacher performance.

The latest study of value added measures by New York University economist Sean Corcoran finds that value added systems used in Houston and New York had a margin of error so large that a teacher scoring at the 43^rd percentile (average) might actually be anywhere from the 15^th percentile (below average) to the 71^st percentile (above average). In his study Professor Corcoran states that “The promise that value-added systems can provide a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is much overblown.” He goes on to warn that “Teachers, policymakers, and school leaders should not be seduced by the elegant simplicity of value-added measures.”

I know better than to use any assessment in my classroom that is this inaccurate so why would we want to use it to pass judgment on our schools or teachers?

Besides being unreliable, value-added systems tend to promote unfair evaluations of our teachers. Standardized tests do not measure all students equally. Some students just don’t do well on standardized tests while performing better on other assessments, like projects. It is also dubious to tie a teacher’s evaluation and pay to the past background of a student. Am I as a teacher to blame for students whose parents do not provide proper support at home? I am unable to go back in a time machine and change a student’s past and family background. I am unable to right the gross injustices of childhood poverty, which the state has no proposals to fix even though the number of children in poverty is growing in this state. It seems like many of the proposals in this bill want to tie many flaws and problems of society to a teacher’s pay and career. That is patently unfair. How many social problems in this state are you willing to tie around the necks of our teachers?

If our pay and evaluations are tied to student test scores, then the state will be creating a lowest common denominator education system that forces teachers to teach to the test and avoid creative projects and other activities not directly tied to test scores. The last thing we need to help our students in the 21^st century is a narrow focus on bubble sheet testing skills.

I urge you and the members of this body to hesitate before adopting any proposals that create value added measures or tie teacher pay or evaluations to student test scores. If that is the system we end up with I am not sure I will be able to say I am proud to be a teacher when I am frantically doing test drills and worrying about getting too many “difficult kids” in my class.

CATHEY SAND

My name is Cathey Sand. I am a building representative for the local Teacher’s Union, and this will be my fourth year teaching in the Des Moines Public School District. I am here today to be a voice for my students.

If we don’t change the way our education system operates, it doesn’t matter how many great teachers we put into classrooms, it will be difficult to retain them. This is due to the many roadblocks, for both teachers and administrators that keep us from doing our jobs effectively on a daily basis. Teachers should be allowed to focus on planning for quality lessons. Administrators should have the tools they need to provide teacher support and frequent feedback.

This is where we need to begin in order to increase student achievement.

At the very least, a plan needs to be developed that will streamline the process for teacher evaluation and the frequency of quality feedback from qualified people.Patrick Lefler describes the importance of effective feedback by saying:

“Understanding what we do right and wrong through effective feedback is the cornerstone for improvement. It applies both to our own professional development as well as organizational success.”

(Show Stoplight)– This is what I use in my classroom to provide frequent feedback to my students. This feedback tells my students where they stand in meeting our classroom expectations. Feedback is constant. Students are rewarded for meeting or exceeding expectations, and there are consequences set up for when they don’t.

Adults are no different.

No child or parent wants to wait three years or even one year to know if they are doing well. Why would teachers want to wait three years to improve the instruction and leadership they deliver to our children?

Imagine hearing a teacher say, “I think that student has learned all he is going to learn.” I don’t have to imagine that, I was told that by a teacher.

We need to put more focus and attention on empowering the good teachers we have, instead of using costly resources to implement misguided mandates and initiatives that target teachers who shouldn’t be in a classroom. We are sacrificing “student achievement” and “teacher quality”.

Parents don’t want a report card mailed home with artifacts, they want a conversation ........they want interaction........ they want observations and suggestions...... they want it more than once every three years or even once a year. Teachers are no different.

CBAC Budget Forum

Melissa, Greg & Doug attended the DMPS Citizens' Budget Advisory Committee budget forum this morning at Lincoln HS. Melissa was interviewed by WHO, and the Register was also there covering the forum. There was great conversation among the attendees about the recommendations from the CBAC and the Employees' Budget Advisory Committee (EBAC). The biggest challenges are how to communicate best with the community and how to get stable & adequate funding from the Iowa Legislature.

Your DMEA president & staff communicated the concerns with the growing fund balance, especially since our employees have made sacrifices in the past few years to help the district's budget situation. While we understand that much of the reason the fund balance has been growing is due to the unstable funding situation in the state, as well as awkward timing of federal Edujobs stimulus funds, much - if not all - of the projected $2.8 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year should be able to be absorbed by a reduction in the fund balance. We also communicated the need for everyone to advocate for stable & adequate funding from the Legislature and gave background on how our employees have sacrificed salary increases in order to retain our health insurance coverage.

The budget will be released on March 27th at a special School Board meeting, and there will be opportunities for feedback at that meeting, the regularly scheduled Board meeting on April 3rd, and the special Board meeting on April 10th, where the Board will approve the budget.

My Letter to Iowa Senate Education Committee Members

Here is the letter I sent to the members of the Iowa Senate Education committee as they take up the Governor's education "reform" proposals. In this letter, I focused on the creation of "value added models" to our state education system. Make sure you are all advocating to your legislators early and often so they hear our voices! - A. Rasmussen, DMEA Executive Board

Dear Senator,

I am a veteran teacher of 17 years. I have devoted those years to teaching social studies to urban students in Des Moines, many of whom live in poverty. I am proud of my service to the community and I am proud to tell people I am a teacher. Recently, with the release of Governor Branstad’s education reform proposals I am feeling like policy makers do not have the same pride in our state’s teachers.

The premise of many of the reforms contained in Senate Study Bill 3009 seem to be that Iowa is awash in mediocre to terrible educators. The sense of crisis that the governor and his secretary of education have created in the state points at teachers as the cause of what the governor sees as stagnating student achievement. His solutions seem to lie mainly with making it easier to find all these mythical bad teachers (mainly by looking at student test scores) and then making it easier to get rid of them (mainly the experienced veteran teachers). I am very opposed to this mindset being the driver of improvements to our education system in Iowa.

In particular, I would like to point out that the development of a “value added system” to judge educators and schools is fundamentally flawed. Value added assessment of teachers has a wide margin of error and is unstable from year to year. Studies of VAM have shown that a teacher can be judged “valuable” one year and the very next year be judged as a failure. The key component that changes is the students that the teacher gets in their classroom and how adept at taking standardized tests those students are. The ratings of teachers can end up differing based on the test given. The VAM method leads to a narrow focus on tests and a scramble among teachers to get the “good kids” in their classes.

The latest study of VAM by New York University economist Sean Corcoran finds that value added assessments in Houston and New York had 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). “The promise that value-added systems can provide a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is much overblown,” argues Corcoran, “Teachers, policy-makers and school leaders should not be seduced by the elegant simplicity of value-added measures. Given their limitations, policy-makers should consider whether their minimal benefits outweigh their cost.” The study should be read by every member of your committee before they dash off and agree to Governor Branstad’s VAM proposal. The study can be found at the following link…

http://annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/files/product/211/files/valueAddedReport.pdf

Judging teachers on student test scores, which seems like an easy way to go about judging teacher performance, is fraught with unfairness. Standardized tests do not measure all students equally. Some students just don’t do well on standardized tests while performing better on other assessments, like projects. It is also dubious to tie a teacher’s evaluation and pay to the past background of a student. Am I as a teacher to blame for students whose parents due to circumstances I cannot control end up struggling in a school setting? I am unable to go back in a time machine and change a student’s past and family background. I am unable to right the gross injustices of childhood poverty, which the governor has no proposals to fix. It seems like the proposals in the Senate Study Bill want to tie many flaws of society and parenting to a teacher’s pay and career. That is patently unfair.

If our pay and evaluations are tied to student test scores, then the state will be creating a lowest common denominator education system that forces teachers to teach to the test and avoid creative projects and other activities not directly tied to test scores. The last thing we need to help our students in the 21^st century is a narrow focus on bubble sheet testing skills.

I urge you and the members of your committee to hesitate before adopting any proposals that create value added measures or tie teacher pay or evaluations to student test scores. If that is the system we end up with I am not sure I will be able to say I am proud to be a teacher when I am frantically doing test drills and worrying about getting too many “difficult kids” in my class. Please read the study I mentioned and find out the truth about these so called reforms that do not move our education system forward.

I hope to be able to talk with you and the members of your committee more about this topic. I am confident that you will make the right decisions for our state’s children and educators.

Thank you for your service,

Andrew Rasmussen

Summary of Governor's Education Reform Proposals

This summary of the education reform proposals was written by DMEA Executive Board member, Andrew Rasmussen:

- The governor has now released his final proposals for education reform to the state legislature who will now craft the legislation to put the reforms into effect. You can read the full proposal at the following link…

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/assets/pdf/D218358416.PDF

- Among the proposals there are several that will have a major impact on educators and our students including…

* LAYOFFS: A proposal to base layoff decisions primarily on performance based measures rather than by seniority. There is no clear explanation of how performance would be determined but it would be a subject of local bargaining.

* EVALUATIONS: A proposal for teachers to face yearly evaluations rather than every three years. Included is a proposal for creating new administrative assistants (School Adminstrative Managers) at schools that would then free up building principals to take on the increased evaluation load.

* TEACHING STANDARDS: Doing away with the Iowa Teaching Standards for the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium standards. Increasing the standardization of evaluations across the state.

* VALUE ADDED MEASURES: Creation of so called Value Added Measures for teachers and schools. These measures would try to tie student achievement to teachers in order to determine the “value” a teacher or school added to a student’s achievement.

* TERMINATION APPEALS: A proposal to take termination appeals out of the courts. School boards would make final decisions on terminations and after that educators would have one opportunity for an appeal to an outside arbitrator. That arbitrator decision would be final. Only cases involving civil rights or employee mistreatment would be allowed to go to court.

* RETAINING THIRD GRADERS: Third grade retention for students who do not pass broad based measures of reading. Requiring schools provided intensive reading assistance for those students. Also includes the funding of a new statewide literacy program with a $10 million price tag.

* TESTING OF PRESCHOOL STUDENTS: Kindergarten readiness assessment of literacy and numeracy skills given to all preschool students in the state preschool program.

* END OF COURSE EXAMS: End of course assessments for core classes in high school that would eventually be used in the student’s final grade or become a requirement for graduation.

* ACT/SAT REQUIRED: Requiring all students to take a college entrance exam in high school.

* PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: The Department of Education would determine state needs as far as professional development and set statewide professional development plans. If an AEA or district wanted to do something different they would need to get Department of Education approval.

* FUNDS FOR INNOVATIVE APPROACHES: Creation of an Innovation Acceleration Fund that would grant money to school districts or community based non-profits in a competitive bid process.

* CHARTER SCHOOLS: Opening up more room for charter schools run by school districts, universities, community colleges, or non-profits. Would require that all charter allow collective bargaining rights for employees and meet all state standards.

* COMPETANCY BASED EDUCATION: Support for school districts wanting to explore “competency based education” models.

* TEACHER SALARY SCHEDULES/LENGTH OF SCHOOL YEAR: Task forces created to study educator salary schedules and changes to the school day and year.

* PROBATIONARY PERIOD: Increasing the probationary period to 5 years.

* REQUIREMENTS FOR ENTERING EDUCATION PROGRAMS: Increased requirements for admission into education programs.

* ALTERNATIVE CERTIFICATIONS: Opening up alternative certification for people not in the education field interested in becoming an educator.

- The governor’s proposals seem to be heavy on increased “hoops” for educators and students while being rather light on supports. There also seems to be a “power grab” by the Department of Education taking over professional development and licensure. Finally, there are worrisome moves to tying student results (on tests) to teacher evaluations and decreased respect being given to experienced educators in these proposals. Overall, the devil is surely in the details of implementation of these proposals.

- It is important to remember that these proposals must go through both houses of the state legislature where we as involved education professionals and citizens can influence the final outcomes. We will need to have an intense lobbying effort from educators around the state on this so stay tuned and be prepared to contact your lawmakers!!!

A DMEA Executive Board Member's Initial Take on Iowa Education Reform Proposals

Our Executive Board Treasurer, Scott Rieker wrote down his initial thoughts on the education reform proposals to the Iowa Legislature from Governor Branstad. If you have not yet read the proposals in full you can read them at this LINK.

Here are Scott's thoughts....

"Hi all,

The big legislative “bomb” that we’ve been waiting for dropped this morning. On a first read, I swing between cautiously optimistic and AAARRGGHH!!!

Here’s my take, point by point.
· Create a centralized Iowa education jobs clearinghouse – could be a good idea – not sure why it costs half a million dollars.

· Make teacher-training programs (much) more selective in who they admit and credential – doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

· Expand the pathways to alternative certification…wait a minute…didn’t we just say we were going to make it harder to become a teacher, so that only the best candidates get certified? Why are we going to make it easier to bypass the newly “rigorized” path?

· Bring the BOEE (except for ethics complaints) into the DOE. I don’t know why this would be needed, but it feels like a power-grab. It’s being spun as a way to streamline government, and in my experience, when things are “streamlined,” it’s used to concentrate power and influence.

· Educator Evaluation – get evaluated every year (vs. every 3), have a scale (vs. meets/does not meet standards), and drop Iowa Teaching Standards in favor of InTASC standards; make evaluations uniform across the state. To me, this is something that could be very positive or go horribly wrong, depending on implementation.

· Extending probationary period to 5 years. I have never heard of this being needed (e.g. a teacher is successful during the three years of probation and then completely fails in the fourth or fifth year, but has due-process rights). To me, this seems like a way to concentrate more power in the administrative side of the equation.

· Losing Your Job – right now, if you are being dismissed, you can go to court to contest it. According to this brief (which is definitely brief on details), we would “still have due process,” but it would be taken out of the courts and given to ONE arbitrator, who would determine if due process was given. That arbitrator’s decision would be final, unless it were a civil rights complaint or employee mistreatment complaint, which could go to court. I just want to know who the arbitrator is…

· Seniority – goes away. RIFs would be based on performance, rather than seniority. Theoretically, this would be okay, but what is “performance” measured by? This is going to be one to watch. The reason we have seniority is to (theoretically) do what’s best for kids, by keeping teachers in the classroom who have a great deal of experience and expertise (but who are expensive to keep around).

· School Administration Managers (SAMs) – this is a position that will handle the paperwork side of the principalship, to free the principal to be an educational leader in classrooms. Could be a good idea; could create another level of bureaucracy.

· Strategic Alignment of Professional Development – This bears another read, but at first blush, it sounds like the DOE wants to work with the AEAs to create “officially sanctioned,” statewide PD, to meet statewide needs. A district would have to get approval from the DOE to do their own professional development. For educators in Des Moines, which has situations and needs that are very different from the rest of Iowa, this should be an item of real concern.

· The Salary Schedule – the Four-Tier system in the blueprint isn’t going away, but they want to create a task force to study it for a year. No word yet on who will be on this task force…

· The Iowa Core – gets expanded into all curricular areas (incl. music, art, PE, etc.), and is a set of standards, not curriculum. Curriculum will be a district-level decision, but the DOE will put together several model curricula, if districts want examples of how to implement the Iowa Core effectively. When the “Model Core Curriculum” came out, our biggest complaint was that it was only a curriculum, and not curricula – sounds like this is headed the way we wanted it to go seven years ago…

· Kindergarten Assessment – Every PreK student takes an assessment before going into Kindergarten to assess readiness. It seems to me that our PreK and Kindergarten teachers are competent enough to realize what our children have and lack within the first two weeks of school. To me, what seems more useful than another test to measure areas of deficiency would be funding to actually remediate them.

· End of Course Exams – no more proposed high-school exit exams, but we’ll have statewide end-of-course exams, now – standardized, I’d assume. They’re supposed to deal with applied knowledge and writing, rather than just memorizing facts, but it’s still more standardized testing. They are suggesting these take the place of teacher-designed summative assessments. Do you suppose Pearson would write them…?

· PISA test – this is the “best nation-to-nation indicator of educational progress in the world.” HAHAHAHA The best pile of crap is still a pile of crap, but we’re going to give this to 3,000 Iowa students every three years…great.

· ACT & SAT will be given to every student and the ITEDs will go away by 2015. A student will have the opportunity to take a vocational aptitude test instead of the ACT or SAT, if they don’t want to pursue college. It does shift a huge cost to the state from the local level…

· Value Added Measures. I hope your alarms are going off – this is a bad thing, no matter how it’s spun. It’s using student test scores to grade teachers and schools. People try to say “we’ve corrected for demographic and socio-economic factors, but it’s still be scientifically debunked (Dave, can you reply-all with that data?) This is not good.

· Third Grade Retention is still here. It does talk about early intervention, beginning in preschool, and additional (90 minute blocks) of intervention (hmmmm…suppose that will come out of music, art, and PE time…?), but if a student is still failing “across a broad set of measures would be retained.” It does provide more remediation alternatives during retention, but it’s still there. Research has shown that the only thing more detrimental to a student’s educational performance than retention is the death of a parent. And, retention has been shown to raise the drop-out rate later. C’mon! Oh yeah, and it costs $10,000,000.

· Project Lead The Way – this is a really create, project-based STEM program. I personally worry that it will push out anything that’s not STEM + reading, but it is a cool program, from what I’ve heard.

· Innovation Acceleration Fund – this is sort of like Race To The Top, the Iowa Version! – districts bid on extra grants to try innovative ways to solve the “toughest problems,” which could then be rolled out statewide. As long as this fund is not taking money away from the regular funding streams, it’s a great idea…

· Competency-Based Education. I’ll admit it – I love this. If a student can demonstrate mastery of the content of a given class, he/she can receive credit immediately, without sitting through a semester of “seat time.” This is anywhere, anytime education. We, as educators, must have clear standards, so that we can assess if our students have really attained them. But, if a student has mastered something, let’s not make him/her sit in a seat to “prove” they’ve got it, over and over again. This system rewards “go-getters” and those who may not thrive in a traditional setting, but are still hungry to learn. (If you want to know more of my opinions about this, just ask)

· Online Courses – districts can expand the use of online courses, but have to demonstrate that they actually provide valuable content and align with the Iowa Core – it would also create a statewide clearinghouse of pre-vetted courses that could be purchased by districts.

· Expanding Charter Schools – this portion seems to be the same clap-trap that that pro-privatization crowd has been spouting for two decades, and has proven to be slightly less effective at educating our students than the public schools. There seem to be some caveats written into it to ensure that they accept all students, teachers have their public-employee rights, and that ineffective charters will be closed, but – IF WE’VE JUST OPENED THE INNOVATION ACCELEARATION FUND, WHY DO WE NEED MORE CHARTERS? – Gimme to privatizers.

· DOE can waive requires of Iowa education law to allow districts to innovate (basically creating “Charter Districts” vs. charter schools). This might be interesting…

· Increased Parent Involvement – I’m not familiar with the program it references (sorry!), but it would provide tiered assistance in reaching parents for struggling schools. It still looks like it’s an outgrowth of test-scores…

· Extended Learning Time – this would create another task force to look at school calendars, school days, struggling students, etc., to see how we can more effectively structure school to meet student needs.


And now, some cynicism…Last year, though Iowa had almost $1 billion in reserves, Governor Branstad and the majority-lawmakers in the House insisted on 0% allowable growth for schools, claiming that we couldn’t afford 11 million dollars for 2% Allowable Growth. Now, we have these new proposals, which are costed at $25 million (more than twice what the greedy teachers asked for last year). When you are advocating, please don’t forget this fact. If you wanted proof that we and our students were being used as pieces in a political shell-game, it seems to me that this is it. Money vanishes. Money appears. Please pay careful attention to how lawmakers who voted against allowable growth are voting on these items (which are certainly not all bad – just expensive). This is a big deal." - Scott Rieker, DMEA Executive Board

Thoughts on Proposed Statewide Retention Policy

INTRODUCTION

We are on the brink of doing great harm to thousands of Iowa children by retaining them in 3rd grade based solely on their scores on a single state reading test. Before embarking on a massive retention spree, perhaps we should demand that the politicians calling for this radical change provide ONE SHRED of research to support its efficacy. The Governor and his education adviser Linda Fandel point to miraculous test score gains in Florida when this policy was implemented for 3rd graders. Ms. Fandel even admits that the Blueprint plan for 3rd graders is modeled almost entirely on the Florida plan. When I noted in a question to her that the "Florida Plan" was a comprehensive $20 billion+ commitment to everything from reduced class sizes in lower elementary to intensive reading assistance and reading coaches along with retention and asked her if there was ANY RESEARCH that was able to isolate the retention variable as responsible for any part of the test score gains, she very candidly said that there wasn't--that they are submitting the Florida model as a "package." That flies in the face of scientific reasoning. All of the other variables (class size reduction, intensive assistance, reading coaches, etc.) have research to support their efficacy. The one that doesn't; the one that has a century of research showing that you get a short term blip in test score gains followed by long term disaster and drop outs; the one that provides short term political gain for 'get tough' politicians but long-term harm to students, gets included just because it's part of the "Florida package." If Ford came out with a new model that included incredible new safety features that drastically reduced the death rate of passengers in head-on collisions and a brand new gas tank that somehow increased fuel efficiency by 50% for the first 3 years of the cars life but was shown to be 10 times more likely to blow up after 5 years of driving, would we jump to accept that "package" or suggest a hybrid: that the new safety features be retained and the new gas tank eliminated? That is the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION THAT SHOULD BE ASKED OF THE GOVERNOR AND HIS ADVISER: SINCE THERE IS NO RESEARCH SUPPORTING RETENTION AS A WAY TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING, WHY DON'T WE IMPLEMENT THE INTENSIVE ASSISTANCE AND CLASS SIZE REDUCTION FEATURES OF THE FLORIDA PLAN WHILE PROMOTING STUDENTS WITH THEIR PEERS? This approach would avoid the devastating social, academic and self-esteem consequences that go along with retention. Given that a survey asking elementary and middle school students to rate stressful experiences found that only the prospect of going blind and the death of a parent were more stressful to students than being retained in school, the more care we take in making these decisions the better. (Susan Ohanian, “The Effectiveness of Retention”, http://www.susanohanian.org/show_research.html?id=82)

What follows is a survey of research that I prepared a few years ago when retention and social promotion was an issue in a Des Moines school board campaign. It outlines the history of educational research on retention and social promotion. I've added a new section specific to the "Florida Model" as well.

If you have an interest in the quality of public education in Iowa, please take the time to read the research and share it freely.

Thank you—Dave O’Connor

LINK