Des Moines Education Association

My Letter to Iowa Senate Education Committee Members

2012-01-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-12T18:16:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-13T06:28:00.000-08:00

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