Who Will Reform the Reformers?

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from Dissent magazine:


[font size="1"]A Chicago student protests the expansion of high-stakes testing, April 2013 (sierraromeo/Flickr)[/font]


Who Will Reform the Reformers?
By Ilana Garon - December 17, 2013


A week ago, when I went to turn in my timecard in preparation to leave school for the day, I encountered one of my co-teachers—a fifteen-year veteran who is beloved by her students and the teachers whom she has mentored—standing outside the main office looking frazzled. She had just come from an “Initial Planning Conference” with one of our supervisors, in which teachers discuss with their higher-ups the ways in which they will be evaluated, per the new criteria set out by the New York City Department of Education. “It’s so convoluted,” she told me, holding her palms to her face in a gesture of exasperation. “These new evaluations—they take away time from doing things that actually help the students learn, by piling on so much paperwork and pressure on teachers to do things that don’t even make any sense. I feel like I’m running in a hamster wheel.”

She’s not alone. New York City teachers have balked this year at the institution of a new teacher evaluation program based on the Danielson Group’s Framework for Teaching, a twenty-two-point rubric formerly intended as a guide for teachers to better their instruction. Despite its original purpose (not to mention its impractical and ambiguously worded guidelines), the framework has been co-opted by the state DOE as a supposedly objective means to judge teachers’ classroom performance. They will be categorized “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective,” or “highly effective” based on how many rubric components the evaluator sees them actively fulfill, and how their students behave, in a series of fifteen-minutes observations. Many of the requirements cannot be fulfilled simultaneously, such as directing the students with “passion” and having them work collaboratively in groups. And the fulfillment of some behavioral requirements, such as having students running the discussion without outside guidance, are not in a teacher’s control. Three consecutive ratings of “developing” or lower can get a teacher dismissed.

Another portion of our evaluation is based on a new set of standardized tests called the Measures of Student Learning (MOSL), which supposedly align with the Common Core State Standards. These are to be given to students alongside their normal state tests, the New York State Regents exams. The sole purpose of the MOSL is to aggregate changes in student scores between the fall test (when neither teachers nor students had any idea what would be on the exam) and the spring test, in order to produce yet another set of numbers that in theory will quantify a teacher’s effectiveness.

The result of these initiatives is that teachers with years of experience perfecting the craft suddenly feel that the rules of the game have been changed. It used to be that the best teachers were known for inventing surprising, non-formulaic lessons that would push students to consider exciting new ideas and see the world in different ways; now it seems that what was once seen as creative pedagogy risks being evaluated as “ineffective.” Meanwhile, more and more tests are piled upon the students, taking up valuable learning time. All of these efforts, according to proponents of Race to the Top (the federal education program launched in 2009) and its various education reform initiatives, will promote a culture of “teacher accountability” and ensure that a “great teacher” is in every classroom, causing graduation rates to soar nationwide. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/who-will-reform-the-reformers