Laura Waters:

Education News looks at the first results of N.J.’s value-added teacher evaluations, which “found that overall, 23.4% of teachers received “highly effective ratings; 73.9% of teachers were rated “effective”; 2.5% were rated “partially effective”, a rating which can affect tenure; and .02%, about 200 total teachers in the state, were rated “ineffective.” Also see NJ Spotlight, the Record, Here’s the DOE report.

Jay Matthews:

I don’t spend much time debunking our most powerful educational fad: value-added assessments to rate teachers. My colleague Valerie Strauss eviscerates value-added several times a week on her Answer Sheet blog with the verve of a samurai, so who needs me?
Unfortunately, value-added is still growing in every corner of our nation, including D.C. schools, despite all that torn flesh and missing pieces. It’s like those monsters lumbering through this year’s action films. We’ve got to stop them! Let me fling my small, aged body in their way with the best argument against value-added I have seen in some time.
It comes from education analyst and teacher trainer Grant Wiggins and his “Granted, but . . .” blog. He starts with the reasons many people, including him and me, like the idea of value-added. Why not rate teachers by how much their students improve over time? In theory, this allows us to judge teachers in low- and high-income schools fairly, instead of declaring, as we tend to do, that the teachers in rich neighborhoods are better than those in poor neighborhoods because their students’ test scores are higher.

Much more on “value added assessment“, here.

Stephen Sawchuk:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has announced that she’ll call for the end of using “value added” measures as a component in teacher-evaluation systems.
Politico first reported that the AFT is beginning a campaign to discredit the measures, beginning with the catchy (if not totally original) slogan “VAM is a sham.” We don’t yet know exactly what this campaign will encompass, but it will apparently include an appeal to the U.S. Department of Education, generally a proponent of VAM.
Value-added methods use statistical algorithms to figure out how much each teacher contributes to his or her students’ learning, holding constant factors like student demographics.
In all, though, Weingarten’s announcement is less major policy news than it is something of a retreat to a former position.
When I first interviewed Weingarten about the use of test scores in evaluation systems, in 2008, she said that educators have “a moral, statistical, and educational reason not to use these things for teacher evaluation.”

Much more on “value added assessment”, here.

Matthew DiCarlo:

One can often hear opponents of value-added referring to these methods as “junk science.” The term is meant to express the argument that value-added is unreliable and/or invalid, and that its scientific “façade” is without merit.
Now, I personally am not opposed to using these estimates in evaluations and other personnel policies, but I certainly understand opponents’ skepticism. For one thing, there are some states and districts in which design and implementation has been somewhat careless, and, in these situations, I very much share the skepticism. Moreover, the common argument that evaluations, in order to be “meaningful,” must consist of value-added measures in a heavily-weighted role (e.g., 45-50 percent) is, in my view, unsupportable.
All that said, calling value-added “junk science” completely obscures the important issues. The real questions here are less about the merits of the models per se than how they’re being used.
If value-added is “junk science” regardless of how it’s employed, then a fairly large chunk of social scientific research is “junk science.” If that’s your opinion, then okay – you’re entitled to it – but it’s not very compelling, at least in my (admittedly biased) view.

Sarah Archibald & Mike Ford:

Past attempts to improve student assessment in Wisconsin provide reasons to view current efforts with caution. The promise of additional funds, the political cover of broad committees, and the satisfaction of setting less-than ambitious goals have too often led to student assessment policies that provide little meaningful information to parents, teachers, schools and taxpayers. A state assessment system should provide meaningful information to all of these groups.
Data on student progress can make the work of teachers, students, parents, administrators and policymakers more effective. It can ensure that during the course of the school year, students make progress toward their own growth targets and those who do not are flagged and interventions are done to get those students back on track. It should not come as a surprise that to have meaningful, timely data, one must administer meaningful, timely tests, and Wisconsin is falling short in this department in a number of ways.
School-level value-added analyses of student test scores are already being calculated for all schools with third- to eighth-graders statewide by a respected institution right here in Wisconsin. This information should be used by schools and districts to raise school and teacher productivity. We should continue to explore the use of value-added at the classroom level, a necessary step to implementing the new teacher-evaluation system proposed by the DPI that is statutorily required for implementation in 2014-’15.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Summer:

(When i wrote this, I had no idea just how deeply this would speak to people and how widely it would spread. So, I think a better title is I Dare You to Measure the Value WE Add, and I invite you to share below your value as you see it.)
Tell me how you determine the value I add to my class.
Tell me about the algorithms you applied when you took data from 16 students over a course of nearly five years of teaching and somehow used it to judge me as “below average” and “average”.
Tell me how you can examine my skills and talents and attribute worth to them without knowing me, my class, or my curriculum requirements.
Tell me how and I will tell you:

Much more on “value added assessment“, here.

Laura Waters:

Motoko Rich in the New York Times describes the federal lawsuit, initiated by seven Florida teachers with support from local NEA affiliates, which contends that the Florida DOE’s system of grading teachers based on student outcomes “violates teachers’ rights of due process and equal protection.”

Much more on “value added assessment, here“. Madison’s value added assessment scheme relies on the oft-criticized WKCE.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

Nearly 30,000 public school teachers and support staff went on strike in Chicago this past week in a move that left some 350,000 students without classes to attend.
And while this contentious battle between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union blew up due to a range of issues — including compensation, health care benefits and job security concerns — one of the key sticking points reportedly was over the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system.
That’s noteworthy locally because researchers with UW-Madison’s Value Added Research Center (VARC) have been collaborating with the Chicago Public Schools for more than five years now in an effort to develop a comprehensive program to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of schools and teachers in that district.
But Rob Meyer, the director of VARC, says his center has stayed above the fray in this showdown between the Chicago teachers and the district, which appears close to being resolved.
“The controversy isn’t really about the merits of value-added and what we do,” says Meyer. “So we’ve simply tried to provide all the stakeholders in this discussion the best scientific information we can so everybody knows what they’re talking about.”

Much more on “value added assessment”, here.

Lisa Fleisher:

New York City on Friday released internal rankings of about 18,000 public schoolteachers who were measured over three years on their ability to affect student test scores.
The release of teacher’s job-performance data follows a yearlong legal battle with the United Federation of Teachers, which sued to block the release and protect teachers’ privacy. News organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, had requested the data in 2010 under the state Freedom of Information Law.
Friday’s release covers math and English teachers active between 2007 and 2010 in fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms. It does not include charter school teachers in those grades.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who has pushed for accountability based on test scores, cautioned that the data were old and represented just one way to look at teacher performance.
“I don’t want our teachers disparaged in any way and I don’t want our teachers denigrated based on this information,” Mr. Walcott said Friday while briefing reporters on the Teacher Data Reports. “This is very rich data that has evolved over the years. … It’s old data and it’s just one piece of information.”

Related:

• Testing Teachers: Origins of NYC’s Evaluation System
• More States Tie Tenure, Bonuses to New Formulas for Measuring Test Scores
• Fernanda Santos & Sharon Otterman
• Notes and links on “Value Added Assessment“.
• Bloomberg prepares to hand out teacher evaluations.
• With Teacher Ratings Set to Be Released, Union Opens Campaign to Discredit Them

Education Consumers foundation:

Tennessee’s Value Added Assessment System has been in place since 1995. It enables users to estimate the success of teachers, schools, and districts in lifting student achievement and it does so in a way that permits statistically fair comparisons.

Since 2007, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission has published a report card that uses the TVAAS data to estimate success of Tennessee’s teacher preparation programs in graduating “highly effective” new teachers. Highly effective new teachers are ones who are able bring about as much student learning per year as top-performing veteran teachers. Highly ineffective teachers are ones who bring about the same learning gains per year as the State’s least effective veteran teachers. The teacher classification is based on the first 3 years of teaching.

Related: Foundations of Reading.

MTEL

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Will Flanders:

It’s an unfortunate reality that demographic factors historically play a large role in student performance; any honest assessment of how schools and school sectors are performing must take those factors into account. Much of the reporting on school performance, though, ignores this reality. This report endeavors to incorporate these factors through rigorous statistical modeling that controls for, and assesses the impact of, several student characteristics. This report has been updated to include data from the 2022-23 report cards.

Among the key findings:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were about 8.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 7.0% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public school peers. District charters saw 6.9% and 6.6% higher proficiency in ELA and math respectively than traditional public schools.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 5.4% higher in ELA for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 40.6% lower in ELA and 44.0% lower in math compared to a hypothetical school with zero low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 17.8% in ELA and 20.3% in math. Hispanic students have an achievement gap of approximately 6.3% in math, but no significant gap was found in ELA.
• Choice and charter schools are more efficient with taxpayer money. Once the demographics of students in the schools are taken into account, choice and charter schools earn more proficiency per $1,000 of spending than traditional public schools in both Milwaukee and the state as a whole.
• Choice schools offer more value added. 12 of the top 20 schools in the state where student performance exceeds expectations based on demographics are in the state’s choice programs.
• Rural schools perform worse than schools in any other type of geography. On average, proficiency in Wisconsin’s rural schools is significantly lower in both ELA and math than urban, suburban, or town schools.

Commentary.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Lucy Kellaway:

Life at my school is founded on the Gospel values which, I found after a spot of googling, involve the sort of thing even the most devout atheist should be able to sign up to: forgiveness, honesty, trust, family and, above all, love.

I listened with disbelief in the first staff meeting when we were told it was our job to love all our students — especially the ones who were hardest to love. This was a departure from the successful academy school in east London where I trained, when staff would gather together in the name of no excuses, exam results and value-added scores.

This emphasis on love seems to me oddly profound, because from it everything else flows. If you force yourself to care deeply for every one of your students, you work harder for them, you want the best for them. All the other stuff I learnt in teacher training after leaving my job as a columnist at the Financial Times — differentiation and assessment for learning — seems a bit by the by. 

It is not only the Gospel that is making me have a rethink. It is the experience of teaching and living 300 miles from the capital, my home for the past 63 years.

The stats bear this out. According to the University of Essex’s Understanding Society study, the North East is the least mobile place in the country, with 55 per cent of survey respondents living within 15 miles of their mother — more than three times as many as in the capital. And, if my students are any guide, this statistic is not about to change, as few of them plan to leave. They might go abroad for a bit (I tried to warn them that Brexit has made this harder), but after that they want to return home. No one has any interest in moving to London. They know they can’t afford it, and don’t fancy it anyway.

Blueprint Labs:

Parents increasingly rely on data-driven measures of school quality to choose schools, while districts use the same information to guide policy. School quality information often comes in the form of “school report cards” like New York City’s School Quality Snapshot and “school finder” websites, like GreatSchools.org. These school ratings are highly consequential, influencing family enrollment decisions and home prices around the country. State and district restructuring decisions, such as school closures or mergers, also turn on these measures. In short, school performance measures matter.

Our study examines the predictive validity of alternative school performance measures to show how they can be improved in districts that use centralized assignment to match students to schools. Using data from New York City and Denver, we show that a new approach that harnesses student data from centralized assignment, which we call a risk controlled value-added model (RC VAM), improves upon conventional methods. We also study a range of other value-added models. In practice, analysts may not have the data required to compute RC VAM and not all districts assign seats centrally. Our study sheds light on approaches that might best serve as performance measures in the absence of ideal data.

The validity of school ratings is important to both policymakers and parents, who rely on them for consequential decisions. Inaccurate measures of school quality can unfairly reward or punish schools erroneously deemed to be more or less effective. For organizations that engage in the provision of quality measures, the methods developed in our study offer a new tool that can provide fairer assessments of school effectiveness.

A look at how different NYC middle schools contribute to student math achievement, by sector https://t.co/N0Czx6F0v5 pic.twitter.com/aqDSot6RA3

— Matt Barnum (@matt_barnum) November 9, 2021

Richard P Phelps:

Ten years ago, I worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as Chancellor. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary.

My primary task was to design an expansion of that testing program that served the IMPACT teacher evaluation system to include all core subjects and all grade levels. Despite its fame (or infamy), the test score aspect of the IMPACT program affected only 13% of teachers, those teaching either reading or math in grades four through eight. Only those subjects and grade levels included the requisite pre- and post-tests required for teacher “value added” measurements (VAM). Not included were most subjects (e.g., science, social studies, art, music, physical education), grades kindergarten to two, and high school.

Chancellor Rhee wanted many more teachers included. So, I designed a system that would cover more than half the DCPS teacher force, from kindergarten through high school. You haven’t heard about it because it never happened. The newly elected Vincent Gray had promised during his mayoral campaign to reduce the amount of testing; the proposed expansion would have increased it fourfold.

VAM affected teachers’ jobs. A low value-added score could lead to termination; a high score, to promotion and a cash bonus. VAM as it was then structured was obviously, glaringly flawed,[1] as anyone with a strong background in educational testing could have seen. Unfortunately, among the many new central office hires from the elite of ed reform circles, none had such a background.

Heather Mac Donald:

American employers regard the nation’s educational system as an irrelevance, according to a Census Bureau survey released in February of this year. Businesses ignore a prospective employee’s educational credentials in favor of his work history and attitude. Although the census researchers did not venture any hypothesis for this strange behavior, anyone familiar with the current state of academia could have provided explanations aplenty.

One overlooked corner of the academic madhouse bears in particular on graduates’ job-readiness: the teaching of writing. In the field of writing, today’s education is not just an irrelevance, it is positively detrimental to a student’s development. For years, composition teachers have absorbed the worst strains in both popular and academic culture. The result is an indigestible stew of 1960s liberationist zeal, 1970s deconstructionist nihilism, and 1980s multicultural proselytizing. The only thing that composition teachers are not talking about these days is how to teach students to compose clear, logical prose.

Predictably, the corruption of writing pedagogy began in the sixties. In 1966, the Carnegie Endowment funded a conference of American and British writing teachers at Dartmouth College. The event was organized by the Modern Language Association and the National Conference of Teachers of English. The Dartmouth Conference was the Woodstock of the composition professions: It liberated teachers from the dull routine of teaching grammar and logic.

The Dartmouth Conference rejected what was called a “transmission model” of English in favor of a “growth model.” In a transmission mode, teachers pass along composition skills and literary knowledge. In a growth mode, according to Joseph Harris, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, they focus on students’ “experience of language in all forms”—including ungrammatical ones. A big problem with the transmission model of English, apparently, is that it implies that teachers actually know more than their students do. In the growth model, in contrast, the teacher is not an authority figure; rather, he is a supportive, nurturing friend, who works with, rather than challenges, what a student has to say. Dartmouth proponents claimed that improvement in students’ linguistic skills need not come through direct training in grammar and style but, rather, would flower incidentally as students experiment with personal and expressive forms of talk and writing.

The Dartmouth Conference and subsequent writing pedagogy reflected the political culture of the time. It was anti-authoritarian and liberationist; it celebrated inarticulateness and error as proof of authenticity. But it was also a response to the looming problem of race. City University of New York (CUNY) began the nation’s first academic affirmative-action program in 1966; other schools would soon follow suit. The movement to legitimate black English began at that time. Confronted with a barrage of students who had no experience in formal grammar or written language, it was highly convenient for professors to learn that students’ natural way of speaking and writing should be preserved, not corrected.

There is a final ideological strand in composition pedagogy that has its roots in the late 1960s: Marxism. Teachers on the radical left began arguing that the demand for literacy oppresses the masses. Writing in Radical Teacher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology humanities professor Wayne O’Neill explains that “it has become important for the ruling class to exclude the potentially radicalizing elements of higher education from the colleges. Thus everywhere along the scale of education there is a relentless march toward the basics.” James Sledd, professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in College English that standard English is “essentially an instrument of domination,” and that coercing students to speak properly conditions them to accept the coercion of capitalism. Richard Ohmann, humanities professor at Wesleyan, has pronounced the “decline of literacy…a fiction, if not a hoax.”

The political process

The Dartmouth Conference gave rise to what became known as the process school of composition. Peter Elbow of Evergreen State College is its most influential practitioner. Not all of Elbow’s ideas are bad. He emphasizes that writing is a continuous process, composed mostly of rewriting. He encourages students to think of their essays in terms of multiple drafts, rather than single-shot efforts. He had vigorously promoted “free writing,” a warm-up exercise in which the author writes continuously for a fixed period of time, uninhibited by grammar, punctuation, or logic.

But the drawbacks of the process school cancel its contributions. Elevating process has driven out standards. Rather than judging a piece of student writing by an objective measure of coherence and correctness, teachers are supposed to evaluate how much the student has grown over the course of a semester. The hottest trend in grading—portfolio assessment—grows out of the process school. Elbow created the method after he saw the “harmful effects of writing proficiency exams.”

Among the most harmful of those effects is apparently the assault on self-esteem that results from a poor grade. In portfolio assessment, students’ evaluations are based on drafts of papers, diary entries, letters, and other informal assignments compiled over the course of a semester, rather than on the freestanding merit of a paper or exam. Often the student “collaborates” with the teacher in assigning a grade to the portfolio. Portfolio assessment allows for the radical reduction of standards, imports greater subjectivity into grading, and is extremely time-consuming.

For the process school, politics undermines pedagogy. Elbow added an additional week of free writing to the start of his courses at Evergreen State College when he saw how useful the practice was in “building community” in the classroom. Elbow rails against grading because it interferes with his ability to connect meaningfully with his students. “Good writing teachers like student writing,” he explains, and “it’s hard to like something if we know we have to give it a D.”

In keeping with the anti-authoritarian commitment of process practitioners, students in a process classroom teach each other. Students form small groups to read aloud and comment on each other’s writing, while the teacher surveys the scene benignly. The students may be admonished to say two good, as well as two critical things about each other’s essay—a task that would tax the invention of Shakespeare. Many of the groups I have observed quickly turned their attention to more compelling matters, like last weekend’s parties or the newest sneakers. And no wonder, given the abysmal prose they are supposed to discuss. The following two paragraphs are from a student’s answer on CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam. The question was: “Do you think the personal life of a political candidate…should be considered a factor in determining his or her ability to do the job?”

“We are living in a world that’s getting worse everyday. And what we are doing nothing, just complaining about the other person’s life. We should stop because if we don’t stop by looking on every candidate lifestyle and focus more on how, we could make it better. We all gonna die of, hungry, because we wouldn’t have nothing to eat and no place to life.

“People tends to make mistake in life. We all are humans. That’s why we should never judge a person for the cover of a book. People change in life, most of them tends to learn from their mistake. We live in a world that we should learn to forgive and forget everyone mistake and move forward.”

While peer teaching may have value for more experienced student-writers, for the incompetent—which includes not just remedial students but increasing numbers of all incoming students—it is an egregious case of the blind leading the blind. It ignores the reason students are in remedial classes in the first place and violates the time-honored principle that one learns to write by reading good, not awful, writing.

The process school’s determination to break down hierarchy extends beyond the teacher-student divide. A pioneering freshman composition course at City College combines students who fail the CUNY writing exam with those who passed. Says Acting Provost Mike Aarons: “The idea behind the program [which is being replicated in other areas of the college] is that the more successful students help the less successful.”

Aarons might have added that another idea behind such programs is radical egalitarianism. Individual effort must go to raising the collectivity, not to raising oneself above the collectivity; individual success betrays the good of the whole. The course received a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education—apparently the federal government likes the idea of fighting elitism as well.

In a process classroom, content eclipses form. The college essay and an 18-year-old’s personality become one and the same. Effie Cochran, an English as a second language professor at Baruch College, gushes: “Here I am—teacher-confessor. All these [gay] people are coming out to me through autobiographical reports who wouldn’t come out to a priest.” One process professor recommends that the profession “pay more attention to the experiences of psychotherapists regarding role-modeling, sexual tension, and transference.”

Students who have been told in their writing classes to let their deepest selves loose on the page and not worry about syntax, logic, or form have trouble adjusting to their other classes. A student at St. Anselm’s College complained to her writing teacher that her humanities professor had prevented her from developing her ideas on Homer, Cicero and the Hebrew prophets. His sin? He had insisted on numerous references to the text and correct English prose. “In humanities,” she whined, “I have to remember a certain format and I have to back up every general statement with specific examples. Oh, and that word, ‘I,’ I just used. You would never see that word in one of my humanities papers.” In process-school jargon, the poor humanities student has been denied “access to a personal language.”

With its emphasis on personal experience and expression, the process school forgets that the ultimate task of college writing is to teach students how to think. In the personal essay, assertions need not be backed up by anything more than the author’s sincerity. According to Rolf Norgaard of the University of Colorado, evaluation then becomes a judgment upon students’ lives, their personalities, their souls. But how can you tell a student, he asks, that her experiences or family life were not terribly original or striking?

The process school of writing has spread well beyond college campuses. Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago introduced process methods six years ago in the hope of improving students’ catastrophic performance in reading and writing. Teachers tossed out their red pencils and workbooks; from then on, students would simply write, unfettered by such enthusiasm-crushing methods as rote learning. Students worked in groups, grades were out, cooperation was in.

The initial response, euphoria, was short-lived. Student groups rarely completed their assignments. They made little progress in mechanics. Some teachers started giving grades and teaching the basics again. But when they handed out incompletes and tried to hold students to higher standards, they caught heat from both parents and the principal, who told them that their expectations were too high. Lesson: Once out of the bottle, the process genie is hard to get back in.

Derrida’s writing lessons

In the early 1980s, a few process teachers started to sense that something was deeply wrong. While they had been unleashing an orgy of self-expression in their classes, across the hall in the literature department, the hippest teachers were preaching that the self was a fiction, a mere product of language. The process theorists, in other words, stumbled across deconstruction. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was not difficult to do, since just about every field in the humanities during that period scrambled to parrot the impenetrable prose of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault.

What an embarrassment for the poor process teachers! Deconstructionism declared the self dead, and they had been assiduously cultivating it. And what to do about their favorite genre, the personal essay, which seems to presuppose a writing subject, a concept anathema to deconstructionists?

The solution to this dilemma demonstrates the resourcefulness of college professors today. While some process advocates, such as Elbow, have continued their former ways unchanged, many others have simply grafted deconstructive rhetoric onto a process methodology. The result is pedagogical chaos. Students are writing personal essays, but they are deconstructing them at the same time. Such writing assignments are designed with one sole purpose: to make the professor feel that he is at the cutting-edge. They have nothing to do with teaching writing.

Witness the rhetorical sleight of hand of Joel Haefner, a professor at Illinois State University. Haefner manages to demonstrate disdain for process pedagogy, while nevertheless preserving it. “Calls to revive the personal essay,” he writes in College English,

“carry a hidden agenda and rest on the shibboleth of individualism, and concomitantly, the ideology of American democracy…As we interrogate our assumption about the essay genre and its role in a “democratic” and “individualistic” pedagogy, we will find, I think, that it makes more sense to see the essay as a cultural product, as a special kind of collective discourse. Hence there is still a place for the “personal” essay in a collaborative pedagogy.”

This tortured reasoning may preserve Haefner’s credibility with the post-structuralists, but its practical result must tie students up in knots. Here are some of Haefner’s deconstructive writing projects that are intended to “critique the fiction of a singular author”: writing groups create a personal essay that purports to be the work of a single author; individual students write a personal essay using “we”; teams rewrite a personal essay from other singular viewpoints; and (this is my favorite) students are encouraged not to create a unified and coherent first-person-singular voice, but, rather, a mix of “I” speakers.

This borders on pedagogical malpractice. Here are students who are unable to write coherent paragraphs, and they are being encouraged to cultivate an incoherent writing voice.

Multicultural writing

But academia can be cruel. No sooner did writing teachers master deconstructive jargon than a new, improved version came along. After years on the top of the charts, deconstructionism has been pushed aside by multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is both the direct offspring of deconstructionism and its nemesis. The current obsession with racial, sexual, and ethnic difference grew directly out of deconstructionism’s obsession with so-called linguistic difference. But, whereas deconstructionism was a mandarin pursuit that had only contempt for political engagement, multiculturalism asserts the centrality of politics to every human endeavor.

For would-be composition theorists, the most important consequence of multiculturalism has been the reemergence of the self as the central focus of concern. But the new multicultural self is defined exclusively by racial, sexual, and ethnic identity. The multicultural writing classroom is a workshop on racial and sexual oppression. Rather than studying possessive pronouns, students are learning how language silences women and blacks.

As New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described in his recent book, Dictatorship of Virtue, the University of Texas at Austin exploded in controversy in 1990 over a proposed writing course called “Writing about Difference.” The course text was Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, by Paula Rothenberg, a national leader in the movement to inject race and gender into every aspect of the curriculum. “One assumption of this book,” writes Rothenberg, “is that racism and sexism pervade American culture, that they are learned at an early age and reinforced throughout life by a variety of institutions that are part of growing up and living in the United States.” Students in the new writing course would use the text’s readings to explore their own role as oppressors or victims.

In a rare victory for common sense, the course was cancelled after a bitter fight. Most colleges have not been so lucky, however. Students in Muhlenberg College’s Third World Experience composition course, for example, study works by third-world authors to learn how colonialism and gender each have their unique system of oppression. According to two critics of the course at Muhlenberg, it primarily requires that students “wade through the material, applaud, and announce its authenticity.”

Effie Cochran of Baruch College assigns her remedial-writing students role-playing exercises so that women can vent their anger at the discrimination they suffer in and out of school. Whether these performances improve students’ writing skills is anyone’s guess.

The personal essay remains a cornerstone for the multicultural classroom; it is a special favorite of feminists. But it has been supplemented by “ethnography.” David Bleich’s students at the University of Rochester conduct personal ethnographies on social relations in the classroom, observing how their gender, race, and class allegedly determine their response to literary works. The most frequently assigned topic for student ethnographers, however, is popular culture—in other words, describe and respond to your favorite rock video.

Every writing theory of the past 30 years has come up with reasons why it’s not necessary to teach grammar and style. For the multiculturalists, the main reason is that grammatical errors signify that the author is politically engaged. According to Min-Zhan Lu of Drake University, the “individual consciousness is necessarily heterogeneous, contradictory, and in process. The writer writes at the site of conflict.”

It is the goal of current writing theory to accentuate that conflict. Today’s theorists berate former City College professor Mina Shaugnessy, whose book, Errors and Expectations, heralded the remedial-writing movement, for trying to introduce her students—however gently—to academic prose. Min-Zhan Lu write: “We need to contest teaching methods which offer to ‘cure’ all signs of conflict and struggle which the dominant conservative ideology of the 1990s seeks to contain.”

There is a basic law at work in current composition theory: As students’ writing gets worse, the critical vocabulary used to assess it grows ever more pompous. James Zebrowski of Syracuse University claims that doing ethnographies makes students “constructors of knowledge.” John Trimbur of Worcester Polytechnic Institute describes what he calls “post-process, post-cognitivist theory”: It “represents literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions.” According to Trimbur, “literacy crises result not from declining skills but from the contention of various interested representations of literacy.” In other words, students who can’t read and write are simply offering up another version of literacy, which the oppressive conservative ideology refuses to recognize. Such double-talk harks back to the 1960s, when open-admissions students were described as coming from a culture where “orality” was dominant.

Wanted: writers

The bottom line to all this nonsense is drastically lowered expectations of student skills. Marilyn Sternglass, a composition theorist at City College, argues that students should be able to pick up the topics for CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam before the test is administered because “responding to the questions cold makes too many demands on students. If they concentrate on content, their mechanics will suffer; if they concentrate on mechanics, they lose their train of thought.” It never occurs to her that such a zero-sum tradeoff indicates precisely what the test is supposed to measure: the inability to write.

Professors are expending vast amounts of energy making excuses for their students. At a 1994 composition conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, Geraldine de Luca, director of freshman English at Brooklyn College, railed against grammatical rules. Though teaching rules in response to individual students’ questions, she said, can be “empowering, the rules have a way of taking over. And some teachers think that’s fine: ‘It’s about time they learned some grammar,’ they say. ‘I knew this stuff when I was in the fifth grade.’ But in what time, in what community, in what country?” asked Luca melodramatically. “Even the concept of error,” she concluded, “is beginning to feel repugnant to me.”

Today, at CUNY and elsewhere, there is a growing movement to abolish the distinction between remedial writing and reading courses and regular freshman courses, on the grounds that placing students in remedial courses injures their self-esteem. Remedial-writing courses at Baruch College and elsewhere are now known as “English as a Second Dialect,” or ESD, courses. Proudly displaying their knowledge of Foucault, composition theorists argue that the category “remedial education” is merely an artificial construct imposed by the ruling class on the oppressed. Marilyn Sternglass of City College quickly corrected me when I asked about students who needed remedial work: “They are ‘judged’ to need remedial classes,” she retorted haughtily.

Professors who exempt students from the very standards that governed them when they were in school feel compassionate, noble, and powerful. But the professors’ power is limited to their world. Though they may be willing to overlook spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in favor of a “holistic” approach to student writing, employers are clearly not as generous, as the census survey suggests.

[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal] – Via Will Fitzhugh.

Madison School District PDF:

Data Sources
a) MMSD will sign NWEA’s release form allowing NWEA to transfer MMSD’s test data to Consultant.

b) In signing this contract, MMSD authorizes DPI to disclose student-level information to the Consultant for the purpose of linking demographic, enrollment, and other necessary data elements to student test scores during the analysis.

i. If data from DPI cannot be used to link student test scores to student demographic data as required by the value-added model, then Consultant will terminate the contract as outlined in the Termination section of the contract.

ii. NWEA student identifiers (full name, date of birth, and any other identifying information) will be sent to DPI with all test data removed to link the state and test IDs. No MAP test scores will be sent to DPI.

c) All data will be destroyed after 10 years or as required in disclosure forms.

d) The Consultant may add de-identified data to its national student growth reference
group database.

Much more on the “Measures of Academic Progress” (MAP), here.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

The Badger Exam lasted just one year, to be replaced this spring with the Wisconsin Forward Exam. Wisconsin contracted with Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) to develop the new test with input from Wisconsin teachers.

In addition to rolling out the new assessment, DPI must complete the important process of setting proficiency standards. We hope they will continue to set proficiency cut scores based on the NAEP standards. For many years, Wisconsin yielded to the temptation to set its standards low, making it appear that we had higher percentages of proficient students than was actually the case. As reported by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the required level for proficiency in 4th grade reading in Wisconsin was actually below the level that NAEP set for the basic performance category.

“In this report, which involved mapping state proficiency standards in reading and mathematics onto the appropriate NAEP scale (2004-05), Wisconsin was among the states at the lower levels.

At grade 4 in reading, Wisconsin proficiency levels rated well below the NAEP Basic cut score and considerably below the NAEP Proficient cut score. Wisconsin ranked 22cd out of 32 states, far behind the leading states of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Wyoming. “

DPI has also been asked by the U.S. Department of Education with finding a way to increase the number of students taking the statewide assessment. Wisconsin was one of 12 states that had a lower-than-required participation rate last year. A letter from the Department of Education spelled out the requirements as well as listing possible strategies to achieve compliance from districts.

Wisconsin’s long serving WKCE exam was often criticized for its low standards.

Matthew DiCarlo

In education today, data, particularly testing data, are everywhere. One of many potentially valuable uses of these data is helping teachers improve instruction – e.g., identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses, etc. Of course, this positive impact depends on the quality of the data and how it is presented to educators, among other factors. But there’s an even more basic requirement – teachers actually have to use it.
In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Education Finance and Policy, economist John Tyler takes a thorough look at teachers’ use of an online data system in a mid-sized urban district between 2008 and 2010. A few years prior, this district invested heavily in benchmark formative assessments (four per year) for students in grades 3-8, and an online “dashboard” system to go along with them. The assessments’ results are fed into the system in a timely manner. The basic idea is to give these teachers a continual stream of information, past and present, about their students’ performance.
Tyler uses weblogs from the district, as well as focus groups with teachers, to examine the extent and nature of teachers’ data usage (as well as a few other things, such as the relationship between usage and value-added). What he finds is not particularly heartening. In short, teachers didn’t really use the data.

Tennessee Department of Education:

In July 2011, Tennessee became one of the first states in the country to implement a comprehensive, student outcomes-based, statewide educator evaluation system. This implementation was a key tenet of Tennessee’s First to the Top Act, adopted by the General Assembly with bipartisan support during 2010’s extraordinary session under the backdrop of the federal Race to the Top competition. This landmark legislation established the parameters of a new teacher and principal evaluation system and committed to implementation during the 2011-12 school year. The act required 50 percent of the evaluation to be comprised of student achievement data–35 percent based on student growth as represented by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) or a comparable measure and the other 15 percent based on additional measures of student achievement adopted by the State Board of Education and chosen through mutual agreement by the educator and evaluator. The remaining 50 percent of the evaluation is determined through qualitative measures such as teacher observations, personal conferences and review of prior evaluations and work.
An important component of the First to the Top Act was the creation of the Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee (TEAC), a group of teachers, principals, superintendents, legislators, business leaders, and other community members, which met 21 times over the course of the following year to review and discuss various issues related to policy and implementation. The committee reviewed field tests of four different observation rubrics, which were conducted in the 2010-11 school year in approximately 125 schools across the state. The TEAC supported use of the TEAM (Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model) rubric as the state model and also voted on a number of key components of implementation, including the number and structure of observations for the year. By law, those recommendations were made to the State Board of Education, which was charged with adopting the final guidelines and criteria for the annual evaluation of all teachers and principals. The board ultimately unanimously adopted the TEAC endorsed TEAM model and, in addition, approved three alternative models – 1) Project Coach in Hamilton County; 2) TEM (Teacher Effectiveness Measure) in Memphis City; and 3) TIGER (Teacher Instructional Growth for Effectiveness and Results) in 12, mostly municipal, school systems statewide. The board also approved a menu of achievement measures that could be used as part of the 15 percent measure.
In the summer of 2011, the Tennessee Department of Education contracted with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) to provide a four-day training for all evaluators across the state. NIET trained more than 5,000 evaluators intensively in the state model (districts using alternative instruments delivered their own training). Evaluators were required to pass an inter-rater reliability exam, in which they viewed video recordings of teachers delivering lessons and rated them to ensure they understood the distinction between differing levels of performance.

Sarah Archibald & Michael Ford:

Wisconsin is about to get a wake-up call about the quality of its K-12 education system.
The Department of Public Instruction’s attempt to get a waiver from the federal government’s flawed No Child Left Behind law includes plans to increase testing standards for Wisconsin pupils.
According to the DPI, the effect of this change will be “dramatic” because while Wisconsin students will take the same test they do now, they’ll need much higher scores to be deemed proficient.
Currently, 83% of eighth-graders who take the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam are said to be proficient in reading, for example. Under the proposal to index scores to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, that percentage would plummet to just 35%.
In other words, state testing next year will show substantially fewer Wisconsin pupils proficient in core subjects.
More rigorous standards will demand smarter instruction. Fortunately, Wisconsin is well-positioned to use value-added analyses of standardized tests as a tool to improve instructional decisions in ways that benefit students.

Using Value-Added Analysis to Raise Student Achievement in Wisconsin.
www.wisconsin2.org

Valerie Strauss:

A new report from Stanford University researcher Linda Darling-Hammond details what the components of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system should look like at a time when such assessments have become one of the most contentious debates in education today.
Much of the controversy swirls around the growing trend of using students’ standardized test scores over time to help assess teacher effectiveness.
This “value-added” method of assessment — which involves the use of complicated formulas that supposedly evaluate how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s achievement — is considered unreliable and not valid by many experts, though school reformers have glommed onto it with great zeal.
Any reader of this blog will have seen numerous pieces from educators, mathematicians and others explaining why this method is unfair, as well as pieces on what does work in teacher evaluation.

Wendy Kopp:

When I dropped my kids off at school last week, I had a hard time looking their teachers in the eye. The New York City government had just posted their performance assessments online, and though I’m a strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness, I was baffled and embarrassed by the decision.
So-called value-added rankings–which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students’ test scores–are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn’t help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for.
The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that “fixing” teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

Tim Cavanaugh:

One of the many privileges of having kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District is the accelerated education they get in official corruption, the stupidity of grownups, union strong-arming and many other topics – any topics other than reading, writing and arithmetic, that is.
The recent sex-abuse arrests of two teachers at Miramonte Elementary have become a feature of playground scuttlebutt and official conniptions. The school my children attend (separated from Miramonte by more than 15 miles, though both schools score in the “Least Effective” category in the L.A. Times’ value-added assessment) is no exception.
Yesterday my daughters brought home copies of a flyer containing the principal’s thoughts on the scandal. I guess this page of skylarking was intended to reassure us or something. I wouldn’t take note of it at all except that one paragraph illustrates the pathology of public employees with stunning clarity:

Terry Stoops

Is it possible to measure teacher effectiveness? For decades, public school principals have subjected teachers to a battery of observations and evaluations purportedly designed to assess the quality of classroom instruction. Rather than yield appreciable information, however, these kinds of teacher assessments merely served as one of the few formal requirements needed to attain lifetime job security, also known as tenure.
On the other hand, the “value-added” method of teacher evaluation continues to show promise as an objective and reliable assessment of teacher quality. Value-added analysis uses standardized tests to estimate teacher effectiveness. This powerful evaluation method employs advanced statistical techniques to project the future performance of individual students based on their past performance. The difference between the projected and actual performance of students determines the value added or subtracted by the teacher.
Value-added analysis has upended the conventional wisdom on teacher quality. For years, public school advocacy groups complained that the most talented teachers snub minority and low-income schools by migrating to less challenging and higher paying schools in culturally and economically homogeneous suburbs.

Terry Stoops is director of education studies at The John Locke Foundation.

Susan Troller
The Capital Times
September 25, 2007

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On Friday, October 15, Madison School Board members received an e-mail from Superintendent Art Rainwater announcing that the district will withdraw from a federal program known as Reading First.
In subsequent interviews with local newspapers, Rainwater estimated that the decision means forgoing approximately $2M in funds for materials to help students in the primary grades learn to read. The Cap Times
Wisconsin State Journal
Whenever the district qualifies for such federal grants, the Board votes to increase the budget to reflect the new revenues. To the best of my knowledge, the superintendent has not discussed this decision with the Performance & Achievement Committee. He has certainly not included the full Board in the decision to withdraw from Reading First.
The memo follows (click on the link below to view it or click here to view a 200K PDF):

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