All of the important policy conversations about how to best evaluate teachers are getting lost in the arguments over whom to blame. And this blame game is clearly the wrong way to frame this discussion. The result is that educators become instantly defensive and it becomes impossible to collectively devise a better teacher evaluation tool than we have today (almost non-existent in most places).

This culture of blame and defense is evident in the brouhaha in Los Angeles over teacher ratings being shared with the public. Many are spending their time highlighting the teachers who received bad ratings or complaining about the rating system. While these cynics blame and complain, others are choosing a better route: many teachers are hitting the LA Times website to check their own ratings and consider ways to get even better. Wise observers are asking why the district didn’t do more with these data to highlight the best teachers and help all teachers get even better.

This is not … and should not be … about blame (despite what the normally right-on but in this case way-off Bill Maher says below). Of course children are far more influenced by their parents than they are by their teachers. If my kids fail, I am going to look in the mirror and blame myself rather than any teacher. However, unless I am mistaken (and I am not mistaken, this is just a rhetorical device), our lawmakers use our collective taxpayer dollars to provide education for all kids who enter our schools. It is most certainly the job of our policymakers to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of all civil servants, including teachers.

And the data are clear that quality teachers can make a real difference in student learning. Indeed, much of what we learn from teacher evaluations is how wonderfully effective many of our teachers are. As a result, our policymakers, as thoughtful stewards of our public funds, have an obligation to evaluate the effectiveness of our teachers and to make use of these evaluations to improve the education provided to our children. This is not blame; this is accountability.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said as much in Little Rock last week. However, after he received a tepid response when calling for accountability from educators, he pandered to the audience by saying: “”If it was up to me and the law allowed it, I would put out student attendance data and hold parents accountable.” This, sadly, received great applause.

Of course parents should be responsible, but it is not the duty of the schools to hold us accountable. Who’s footing the bill here? Who’s paying whom? As long as we citizens are paying the salaries of our civil servants, we have a right and a duty to hold our civil servants accountable … not the other way around!

In this case, I am sad to say, my always-entertaining friend Bill gets it wrong .. but have a listen and judge for yourself ….

On Saturday night, Little Rock’s Robinson Auditorium was filled with supporters of the so-called West Memphis Three  (if you are unfamiliar with their cause, see my previous posts here or here).  Attendees at the fundraiser were entertained by celebrity supporters, including Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, Patti Smith, Johnny Depp, Fistful of Mercy (which includes Ben Harper, Joseph Arthur, and Dhani Harrison (George’s son)).  John Brummett was there and has a good write-up of the evening here.

I was pretty dissapointed that I was travelling elsewhere and had to miss this event.  Luckily, some in attendance captured some great footage.  I posted a few clips below.  

The State Supreme Court will decide on September 30 whether or not Damien Echols will receive a new trial.

My headline is not intended to demean the LA Times. Indeed, many are praising the three reporters from the LA Times, who accessed student performance data (with a FOIA request) from the gigantic Los Angeles Unified School District and put together a comprehensive report on teacher effectiveness. While some of their conclusions may be obvious, the work the newspaper is doing so that average parent and taxpayer (and indeed teacher) can know more about teacher effectiveness is very important. In my view, this is an interesting story of enterprising reporting and the “publicness” of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Here is the first not-very-surprising takeaway message: When it comes to kids and learning, TEACHERS MATTER … A lot. (But, we all knew this anyway …)

And the second not-very-surprising takeaway message: Some teachers do a much better job, year-after-year, than others. And this matters a great deal for the students. (Most of us knew this also, but we are a bit more careful about saying this out loud …)

Back to the story … here is a quick overview:

In a new series in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Grading the Teachers: Who’s Teaching L.A.’s Kids?”, the authors evaluate the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers. The controversy is not focused around the concept of evaluating the performance of teachers. Many critics of the LA Times report are quick to share that they also support teacher evaluations, and that all teachers are evaluated annually. Unfortunately, however, most standard evaluations are criticized for being toothless. As US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated just yesterday in Arkansas, “In many districts, 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory, and most evaluations ignore the most important measure of a teacher’s success, which is how much their students have learned.”

With this as background, the three authors from the LA Times, Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, use a statistical measure called value-added analysis to rate the teacher’s performance based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. As the authors write, this strategy helps the authors get around some of the common complaints about using student test scores to evaluate teachers. They say: “Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.”

This story is interesting because researchers are just now beginning to use student test data more heavily in an attempt to rate the performance of schools and educators, but this report is likely the first in the country in which such ratings will be made public. While it is uncomfortable to imagine employee ratings being made public, it is even more uncomfortable to acknowledge that many of our students are in classes with teachers who are not enriching their learning. (Indeed, we at the UA understand that working in a public entity which appropriately demands that we be transparent and share our information and communication with the public can sometimes be uncomfortable!)

On the flip side, however, it is worth noting that the authors make no allegations that most teachers are not succeeding; in fact, they spend a great deal of time highlighting the work of the great teachers, according to the value-added analysis. They speak of Miguel Aguilar, who works with fifth-graders. On average, his students start the year in the 34th percentile in math in the district — when they leave his classroom at year-end, they walk out at the 61st percentile. The authors praised this teacher as nurturing outstanding learning gains. They walked through the classrooms of teachers throughout the district and claimed that teachers rated effective had a few common characteristics:

“On visits to the classrooms of more than 50 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles, Times reporters found that the most effective instructors differed widely in style and personality. Perhaps not surprisingly, they shared a tendency to be strict, maintain high standards and encourage critical thinking. But the surest sign of a teacher’s effectiveness was the engagement of his or her students — something that often was obvious from the expressions on their faces.”

In any event, it is certainly worth checking out this article. I also found an NPR interview by Robert Seigel with reporter Jason Felch to be quite interesting. The reporter very clearly describes the methods and ALSO very clearly describes its limitations. Among his interesting points were:

1. We all seem to know this, but it is worth reiterating — Individual teachers really matter; the differences between teachers can be enormous. differ in their effectiveness. It is obvious, but it still seems to make a huge and controversial splash each time it is documented! Perhaps we should stop brushing this fact under the rug and continuing to treat all teachers as if they were the same because they are doing the same job. Many teachers are really, really good and perhaps policymakers should be doing more to ensure we keep them.

2. Felch admitted they struggled with the decision to release individual teacher rankings. They decided, however, that the importance of sharing this information outweighed the negatives of the potential discomfort that would likely come along with the release. He said, and I paraphrase, “It would be difficult to have this information, on which teachers were effective and which were not and to not release it … ignoring the information is not the answer.”

3. Felch was VERY clear in stating that these ratings are not the sole measure of a teacher. That is, there are certainly other things that we would like our teachers to do (make children feel comfortable, help them learn to socialize with peers, enhance their self-esteem, etc.) and parents care about these as well. This measure only tells parents how effective teachers are at raising students’ performance on standardized assessments. Felch does reiterate, however, that this is an important part of a teacher’s job.

Finally, I think it is worth listening to this piece as Mr. Seigel and Mr. Felch do a nice job of exploring a controversial question, tackling complicated questions and discussing them in user-friendly ways, and they do so in only 5 minutes. Looks like this question of how to best measure teacher effectiveness is not going away ….

From the Arkansas Blog, here are two memos written by LRSD board member Baker Kurrus.  If you’ve been following the legal dispute between LRSD and the state, which has pitted  charter school supporters against charter opponents, then you know how contentious the debate has become.  Mr. Kurrus, however, makes a lot of sense in these memos.  I think students in LRSD would be better served if both sides took at what he has to say.  Thanks to Max Brantley for the memos.

MEMO FROM BAKER KURRUS TO SCHOOL BOARD

Thank you for this report [an earlier report by attorney Chris Heller on unsuccessful efforts by the district and state to settle legal differences]. I remain opposed to litigation as a way to address these issues.

There is no purpose served by recounting the reasons in detail. Suffice it to say that even winning such a long-shot, jackpot lawsuit, years down the road, will not correct the problems encountered by the thousands of our students who are presently failing to achieve at satisfactory levels.

If “cream skimming” is the issue, why did LRSD stand by silently for 35 years while upper income whites and blacks left our district in droves? Now we seek to blame the ADE for the things that have been happening steadily and unrelentingly for years. I am quite sure that the ADE did not properly approve and monitor a number of charter schools, but these acts have not been the cause of our problems. Our problems with cream skimming and flight have been around for three decades before charters existed. In order to win a lawsuit, the plaintiff must prove breach of duty or contract, and must prove that the breach caused the damages suffered by the plaintiff. If the allegations in the petition are all taken as true, these bad acts are unlikely to result in any recovery or remedy in favor of LRSD unless those acts caused damage to LRSD. This is a desegregation lawsuit. LRSD was, for all practical purposes, a one-race district with a declining white population before charter schools were conceived. Moreover, several of the local charter schools are desegregated or majority black. Our opponents in litigation will know this and will attempt to persuade the court that a unitary LRSD should simply receive the same funding as every other unitary school district in this state. Our argument is attenuated and vague. The state’s argument is simple and straight-forward.

LRSD simply does not want to face up to its problems squarely and address the root causes which have been around for so many years. There is no shortage of available white students in LRSD. They are not coming to our district because they don’t like what we offer. These people are willing to spend a lot of money in order to go elsewhere, and they were going elsewhere long before charters existed. Now some of them go to charter schools, too.

LRSD’s settlement proposal was doomed from the start, because it asked others to commit to vague obligations with no end date. If our litigation has taught the parties anything, it has taught them to promise only what can be delivered and measured. More “charter magnets,” more money, more lawyers and more wasted administrative time still miss the main point. We have poor kids who are failing. Bringing back kids who are not failing will not change the classroom experience for a single child marooned in a backwater school with poor instruction.

Every parent who put a child in a charter did so because they thought that charter was a better choice for their child. Every one of them will loathe this lawsuit. Every parent with a potential LRSD student will see the district as failing, because that is what LRSD must argue to get relief—LRSD will trumpet that it is failing because of charter schools. This is not true, but LRSD must argue this point to compel its case. If LRSD simply argues that charters are bad, but not damaging LRSD, there is no relief. Those who study our district will know that our failures, and our successes, are related to hard work, strong instruction, parental involvement and good leadership. The federal courts cannot provide any of these things, as districts all over this country have learned after years of litigation and billions of dollars wasted.

We asked to be unitary, and the court told us to move forward on our own, recognizing our constitutional obligations. Instead of going to work on the things it can change, LRSD launches another vague, complex, convoluted lawsuit which will divert it from our mission, and give those who seek excuses one more place to lay the blame.

This charter issue only got to be an issue when LRSD saw that its ability to continue to employ hundreds of non-productive people was imperiled.

I cry.

Baker

KURRUS MEMO IN RESPONSE TO HELLER’S NOTICE THAT HE’D FILE THE MOTION ON CHARTERS

The process which has resulted in the filing of this motion was, at best, unpredictable and flawed, and at worst, a dereliction of duty by the board.

The board voted by a narrow margin to authorize the filing of the suit if the attorney decided to do so, after negotiating with the state. The parameters of the negotiation were loose and undefined. The attorney then made a proposal to the state that had no chance of even drawing a counter-proposal. The negotiations never got started because LRSD made a completely unreasonable and incomprehensible demand at the outset. Now we are back in federal court, distracted from the pressing business of turning our district around. We are engrossed in another messy, expensive legal entanglement which quite well could result in the prompt and complete termination of the state assistance upon which we have come to depend. The court has already determined that LRSD is unitary. Prior to the initiation of any charter school, LRSD was by all practical measures either a one race district, or rapidly becoming one. For us to complain at this time, regardless of the state’s mistakes, is preposterous. It will become even more preposterous and damaging as droves of parents come forward and testify that the charter alternative has been the best thing that ever happened to their children. A very large number of these witnesses will be minorities. The rest will be parents who said they were leaving after the Brooks debacle, regardless of whether they went to a charter, to a private school, or to another central Arkansas community.

The other major problem with this distraction is that the financial impact of a lost high achiever is not crystal clear. Our state equalization aid is reduced slightly, but we also continue to receive all of the tax revenue generated by our large millage and large tax base. Even if the equalization is removed entirely, we still have, on a per pupil basis, a lot more money that is deemed necessary under Lakeview to provide an adequate education to an Arkansas student.

Our problems are of our own making. This is the point that must be addressed, both in the context of this losing lawsuit and in the overall context of making this school district attractive to people who have choices.

The motion is fatally flawed.

The Arkansas Blog is reporting that Gov. Beebe will make more money available for scholarships:

“After receiving previously unreleased figures from the Arkansas Lottery Commission about available scholarship monies, Governor Mike Beebe has asked the Arkansas Department of Higher Education to fund an additional $5.9 million in lottery scholarships….

The additional funding will provide scholarships for the approximately 400 students remaining on the two-year institution waiting list, and for nearly 1,000 students on the four-year institution waiting list.”

This is good news for some.  And Beebe should be commended for acting swiftly.

But thousands of people in the non-traditional category still won’t get scholarships.  And, unfortunately, it seems like the poorly constructed decision-rules for allocating scholarships had the effect of denying funds to thousands of students who were academically deserving.  Simply by looking at the numbers (30,000-ish non-traditional students denied for lack of funds in their category) anyone can discern that the bar had to be set extremely high for “non-traditional” students, while students in the other two categories were completely funded.

In the end, sitting out a semester, or simply taking classes part-time for a single semester, was enough to deny scholarships to A students while doling them out to C students.  Someone ought to be held accountable for that blunder.

The numbers are still unclear.  I think that, based upon the numbers cited in the original press release (see my earlier post here) and the numbers cited in the Dem-Gaz (article here), it sounds like around 30,000 students who qualified in the non-traditional category were not initially funded.   Max Brantley (informed by Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample) thinks this number is much lower, because many of the 30,000 weren’t eligible anyway.   He thinks only around 4,000 who qualified were left unfunded.

I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical.

You would think the ADHE could manage a straightforward press release.  If only 4,000 qualified applicants were denied (as opposed to 30,000!), doesn’t it seem like that’s a bit of information they would want to disseminate sooner than later?

Again, here is how they put it:

State Triples Academic Challenge Scholarships We had 54,533 applications

A total of 25,445 students will receive the Academic Challenge scholarships next year…

There are 4 types of student receiving funding:
4,906 are students who were awarded the Academic challenge in previous years.
12,389 traditional students have been offered the award

Of the 36,697 nontraditional students:
4,550 met the Current achiever definition and were offered the scholarship

3,600 will be offered the Nontraditional scholarship.

About 30,000 students will not be funded”

The Dem -Gaz said:

“The “nontraditional” category is for students who have not been in college continuously or are starting college some years after graduating from high school. About 36,000 applied in that category, but only 3,600 were offered scholarships.”

I expect someone will get it figured out eventually.

(Guest post by Jay Greene)

I intend to vote for the school millage increase in Fayetteville on September 21.  I know that my supporting a millage increase seems as likely as pigs flying, but both can happen — I support local taxes that are well-spent.  I also believe those Razorbacks will soar this year.

I opposed the previous millage effort, but I did so because it seemed extravagant and wasteful.  Much of the current high school is adequate and there was no need to demolish it entirely and replace it with a new Taj Mahal.  Besides, there is no evidence that fancy buildings improve education. Buildings don’t teach kids, people do.

But the voters soundly rejected the previous millage by almost 2 to 1 and the school board got the message.  They scaled back their plans, found clever ways to economize by keeping much of the current structure, and they took full advantage of federally subsidized loans.

Now the school board is asking for a more modest millage increase to take even more advantage of those federal loan plans and save $29 million in interest.  Voting for this millage is a no-brainer.  The only effect of rejecting it would be that we would pay$29 million more in interest payments on the same school construction loans we are going to take out anyway.  We’ll have to pay that $29 million someday with a larger millage increase or force $29 million in operational cuts, which could be done but certainly won’t be comfortable.

I have to confess that I hesitated for a few moments in supporting even this no-brainer.  The current school board has not earned my trust or confidence with their past bumbling on plans for the high school, their embrace of 21st Century Skills nonsense, and their phony public input cheer-leading events.  I don’t even like the name of the pro-millage group, Smart Fayetteville Committee since it is obviously manipulative and not-at-all smart to dub whatever you support “smart.”

I also have to confess that if I had my druthers we would have two, smaller high schools rather than remodeling one big one.  I would gladly pay an even higher new millage for that.  But that option is not on the table.  The school district has moved forward with its remodeling plan and now our only choice is whether to pay more or less in interest payments.  I prefer paying less in interest even if it means having a higher millage for a while.

Little news so far, but apparently 25,000 scholarships will be given out, though 54,000+ applied.  This whole thing continues to be a fiasco.  Now less than half of the applicants finally get notification, with the start of the semester only days away, and another 30,000 are left wondering what they did wrong.  I am hearing a lot of reports that most of those who did not get scholarships were non-traditional students.  Many of those I am hearing from are very good students with high GPAs.

Did all of the eligible fresh-out-of-high-school kids with measly 2.5 GPAs or those who scored a 19 on their ACT get a scholarship, while high achieving current students were left out in the cold?  I’ll say more when I manage to get all of the facts.  Right now contacting anyone at the ADHE is impossible (as it has been for months).

UPDATE: Here is a press release I got from Lawrence Graves (communications officer at the ADHE). I bolded the important parts.  Apparently, if a student currently in college was ever only a part-time student, then that student was categorized as a “non-traditional” student, even if they were full-time at the time of application.  ALL of the applicants who qualified for the scholarship got a scholarship, EXCEPT those in the non-traditional category.  I think the bottom line here is that Arkansas’ lawmakers screwed this up royally.  Students who have been part-time in the past probably need the scholarship more than those that have always been full-time.  Yet they are the ones getting short-changed.  It appears that around 33,600 applicants fell into the non-traditional category, and around 30,000 of them were denied. 

“Statement from the Director:
I’ll be working on a comprehensive overview of the lottery process including dollars and students awarded.  Here is some preliminary information:

We are glad to respond to specific questions and inquiries from the scholarship applicants if they have concerns.   If an error has been made, we will rectify the situation. There are a lot of “moving parts” within the lottery act and related scholarship policies.  We have not had time to quantify all of the reasons students were declined but many applicants who thought they would be “current achiever” students actually met the definition of “Nontraditional student” because they did not earn 12 hours or more for each of the semesters they were in college since high school.  Failing to be considered in the current achiever category is the biggest surprise and frustration.

We anticipated that there would be about 30,000 students who would not receive the scholarship.  There was never enough funds to fund all 53,000 applicants. The amount that are currently funded are relatively close to our budgeted numbers, although the number of students in the different categories are somewhat different than expected.   As far as when we could have made the determination of the scholarships, it could be earlier but not substantially earlier.  College students had to have their Spring semester grades sent in and from a logistical perspective they couldn’t arrive much earlier than they did (mid June).  Students attend multiple institutions and all of those transcripts must be reviewed based upon the criteria.  A College aggregate GPA had to be calculated and the number of college credits had to be counted.  A review of each semester’s attendance records had to done to determine if the student was consistently a full-time student.

Will we bring in more temporary workers earlier next year?  Yes.

Here are the good points:  There is no funding cap on traditional students (coming from high school).  EVERY STUDENT WHO MEETS THE CRITERIA WILL BE GIVEN A SCHOLARSHIP.  $41.3 million was budgeted for current achievers.  EVERY STUDENT WHO MEETS THE CRITERIA WILL BE GIVEN A SCHOLARSHIP.  $12 million was budgeted for nontraditional students.  APPROXIMATELY 3,600 STUDENTS WILL BE FUNDED.  Not all nontraditional students will be funded.  A priority/ranking system is in place:  70% closeness to degree, 20% GPA, 10% high demand field of study.

State Triples Academic Challenge Scholarships We had 54,533 applications

A total of 25,445 students will receive the Academic Challenge scholarships next year.

This will triple the amount of students receiving the academic challenge scholarship from 8,282 last year.

There are 4 types of student receiving funding:
4,906 are students who were awarded the Academic challenge in previous years.
12,389 traditional students have been offered the award

Of the 36,697 nontraditional students:
4,550 met the Current achiever definition and were offered the scholarship

3,600 will be offered the Nontraditional scholarship.

About 30,000 students will not be funded.”

Details here.  Apparently only 700 tickets will be sold.  Supporters will have first dibs.

Update: Brantley is still disgruntled, and he wrote an editorial that can be read here.  John Brummett, on the other hand, is making pretty good sense.   I am still wondering when board member Baker Kurrus is going to come clean and name which charter schools are counseling out poor and minority students.  I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to shed more light on this.

*****Beginning of Original Post*****

A new organization has formed for the purpose of expanding the debate about the future of public schooling in Little Rock.  The Dem-Gaz coverage is here.  Here’s the short version:

“A coalition that includes the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce/Associated Industries of Arkansas has organized in opposition to the Little Rock School District and its legal challenge to state-approved charter schools in Pulaski County.

Randy Zook, president and chief executive officer of the chamber, sent business and community leaders an invitation Tuesday afternoon to join the recently organized “Speak Up For Schools – Better Schools for a Better Little Rock.”

“Our mission is to join parents, business leaders and concerned citizens together to help create a better and more productive learning environment for our children in order to create a better, more equipped generation of leaders for Little Rock,” the website for the coalition states.”

The group’s website has some tough words for LRSD.  They also have some data to support their claims.

Alternative coverage is here and here, courtesy of Max Brantley’s blog.  To Brantley, the website’s launch is an “attack,” an “assault,” and a declaration of “war” on LRSD from the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce “on behalf” of the “Billionaire Boys Club,” by which he means anything that could be possibly linked to, as he puts it, “the Hussman/Walton/Stephens/Murphy money pot.”

For Brantley and his loyal band of tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorists, simply calling the opposition “billionaires” is enough to dismiss their claims.   If that doesn’t work, they’ll pile on by calling them the “establishment” and referring to them as “ideologues” (as LRSD board member Baker Kurrus did).  And they’re perfectly willing to assign all sorts of crazy motives to them…claims that they want to dismantle public education and re-segregate Little Rock’s schools.  They can’t believe for a second that people with money could possibly care about education.  To them, it’s all one grand conspiracy.

I’m comfortable believing that the LRSD board members genuinely care about educating children, just as much as I believe the so-called “the Hussman/Walton/Stephens/Murphy money pot” cares about educating children.  And anyway, it would be pointless to assume otherwise.  Both sides just genuinely disagree about  how to bring about improvements.  So I’m glad the “Speak Up for Schools” group is out there, making a case for their point of view.  It would be nice if their critics would address their claims, instead of acting offended and dismissing them as part of some evil conspiracy of wealth.  It would be far more productive to focus on the issue at hand.

Also, over on Brantley’s blog, board member Baker Kurrus said that “several of the Pu. Cty. charters have a practice of counseling poor Blacks out.” I hope Mr. Kurrus plans on naming names and providing the proper officials with all of the details.

Reacting to some criticism from civil rights groups, Obama defended his education policies during a speech to the Urban League yesterday.  He spoke at length about The Race to the Top initiative and addressed a number of concerns.  It’s also interesting that he acknowledged how much change has been created by simply tempting them with Race to the Top money, even though most states won’t see any.  Here are the most relevant video clips: