“If we are all proficient, it’s hard not to be self satisfied.”
Ninety-two percent of Boston teachers can’t be proficient or exemplary. They just can’t be. First, they are unionized. That means they check out long before they stop collecting a paycheck. Most of them didn’t come from an Ivy League school. And most of all, their students’ test scores are far below those of their peers in Wellesley and Wayland.
As the Globe’s James Vaznis opines writes:
“in a city where thousands of students struggle immensely and in many cases quit school, the large number of teachers receiving high ratings is raising questions about whether principals and other administrators are judging teachers too lightly.”
Gotta love that intransitive raising of questions. You know how questions arise like love on a warm spring day. It’s not like someone somewhere always has a question or a complaint. Even if you have to turn over a few rocks to find them, the questions are out there. And if the rock is big enough, if you’re a charter school founding, Harvard lecturish, Boston school committeeish, Barr Foundation fellowish, education reformyist like Meg Campbell, the teleophone number for your rock is probably on the rolodex where Globe reporters go to find educational questions raised.
“Do we kind of have the equivalent of grade inflation?” she wonders.“If we are all proficient, it’s hard not to be self-satisfied. . . . I do get worried the whole district is 92 percent [proficient or exemplary] when we have so many issues we are facing.”
Linda Noonan from the Massachusetts Business Education Alliance has her doubts too, though evidently those doubts weren’t particularly quotable. BPS administrators defend the process and the results. BTU President Richard Stutman’s response to Campbell’s “questions” comes later in the article, but by then, all those Globe readers get the point. Those sneaky,, last-in-first-out, unionized Boston teachers have somehow dodged the evaluation bullet.
My sources tell me that Gentleman Jim Vaznis ain’t a bad guy. But it’s a hard to be a saint in the city, especially as part of the Fourth Estate. From his article, we know questions were raised, we are told BPS officials “held up as evidence most students are receiving quality instruction.” But what were the circumstances? Evidently, the 5 W’s are following the Globe’s declining bottom line.
Employee Evaluations
Teacher or not, most of us have had an employee evaluation. Exemplary or not, most of us have had the experience of wondering whether our work could be effectively summed up by a list of standards and 4 or 5 levels of competence. All of us have been told that evaluations are supposed to help us improve our performance, not to pass judgment. Evaluations and performance reviews are tools to manage people, not to tell them how much they suck.
Unless you teach in the Boston Public Schools. Then you’re told all that stuff by your administration, and a school committee member, who happens to be a former teacher, published poet, charter school founder, and Harvard graduate and lecturer, very publicly doubts you’re as good as the the administrators say you are. You can’t possibly be that good with all those kids not doing as well as those at Codman Academy. You just can’t. The important people in Boston already know you can’t be that good.
But it makes sense that most BPS teachers are proficient or exemplary. It really does. For a couple of reasons: 1) they are that good 2) the measurement tool is more than likely has eliminated the possibility of a teacher being average. Teachers are either exemplary, proficient, needing improvement, or unsatisfactory. It’s a grading system without C’s. There are A and B teachers or D and E teachers, though most likely, your administrator will tell you that Needs Improvement isn’t a D. This rubric, as we call them in education, isn’t part of an evil plot by teacher unions to corrupt the evaluation system. This 4-level set up has its roots in the MCAS test, which uses the same format. Although teacher evaluation developers were probably just following the status quo on rubric development, the decision for MCAS tests was to eliminate the possibility of “average” because they wanted students to move students toward proficient.
MCAS developers didn’t want students hanging out in the mediocre middle. What message would be sent it the bulk of students were average? That’s how SATs are set up, incidentally. The tests are constructed so almost 70% of students fall in the middle of the bell-shaped curve, the most natural distribution of large numbers of people on things like tests, height, and weight. If MCAS and teacher evaluations were more interested in measurement, rather than passing judgement, they would have more categories. Instead, they are set up to pass judgment, I mean make an evaluation. The teacher evaluation format sacrifices precision to produce a rating.
Teaching quality, inasmuch as it can be measured, is like weight. Or height. Or test scores. The goal is measurement, but variation is nearly infinite. (The technical term is continuous variable). But no one can reliably use a scale of 100 to evaluate something, never mind a scale based on infinity. Polls use a Likert scale of 5 or 7 for a reason. So a scale must be chosen. Think of a ruler–an evaluation is supposed to be a measurement. Each line on a ruler represents a potential scale. You can measure down to 1/16″ if you so desire. The height of real people actually varies by smaller increments than that. So we only refer to inches when we measure height. I’m 5′ 8,” not 5′ 7 15/16.” With teacher evaluations, it’s like we’re measuring in 6″ increments, and I’m 6′ tall because I’m taller than 5′ 6″. For measurement purposes, it would be better to have an evaluation with more categories, but how would poor Meg Campbell feel if it turned out that 95% of Boston teachers were average?! What would we tell the Boston Globe?
No doubt Boston’s education reformers would complain if all of Boston’s public school teachers were merely average (even if, statistically speaking, most teachers are average). Sure, Boston’s kids deserve better than average teachers. All kids do. But if there were enough above average teachers to go around, they’d all be average teachers. That’s not just a rhetorical flourish, it’s a fact. For better or worse, it’s also one of the reasons being “average” has been abolished. Boston teachers deserve better too. They deserve respect for the job they do. They deserve articles that do justice to the work they do. They deserve school committee members who don’t presume them guilty.
columwhyte says
If Campbell’s school is so WONDERFUL, then why did a student commit suicide in the bathroom. Seems to be a cover up based on how it was reported. If you run a school where the social/emotional needs of students are not met, where attrition and suspension rates seem to compliment each other, where teachers lack experience, then your school should be listed as NEEDS IMPROVEMENT!
Once again, I challenge Campbell to teach a class in BPS. Maybe should would realize it’s a bit more difficult than “lecturing” and pontificating about how more teachers are crappy than the crappy ones whom have been identified. What’s her salary for her venerable work again?
jshore says
Then there is the Codman Academy Charter School attrition rate:
2010, Grade 9 = 53 students
2011, Grade 10 = 34 students
2012, Grade 11 = 33 students
2013, Grade 12 = 24 students
19 students vanish from Grade 10, an MCAS year! Somebody send out an AMBER Alert! Children who need to take MCAS are missing!
All kidding aside, I wonder what that did to the MCAS scores of the schools accepting the Codman Charter banished. Considering, even though “Social Justice is a major component of life at Codman Academy”, they didn’t fill those 19 empty seats! Where is the justice! Why keep a “wait list” if you are never going to use it! By 12th grade Codman Charter is down to 24 students! That’s not a graduating class, that’s a tutoring group!
columwhyte says
How many millions of dollars is given to this school to graduate an entire 12tg grade that is less than the class size maxima? Must be hard to get a date to the prom. Does Cambell rake down the big bucks to oversee this camp?
dottiehigh says
Codman should have to take in some of the students off its waiting list, or that of another charter school in order to “feel the social justice.”
If its all that great of a school, then it should keep its seats filled to help as many students as possible- not just become an exclusive tutoring group.
petr says
(did you mean to exclude a question mark there?)
… a rather thoughtful post from mark-bail, about criteria and evaluations needing to about more that one or two variables, about bigger pictures and wider scopes, is turned upon its head with angry condemnation based upon one variable only.
We get that you don’t like charter schools. It’s on the record. Been stipulated. Entered into the transcripts. Recorded. Noted. Re-entering it into the discussion adds nothing new and detracts, mightily, from the discussion Mark is trying to have. It’s an important discussion, too, so either add something new, or indeed relevant, or have the patience to refrain from rehashing your pet peeves.
columwhyte says
maybe you can anything new or old to the conversation aside from condemnation, critiquing, or judging of me. My post was in response to a school committee member who insinuates Boston teachers are not doing our job, and our evaluations are inflated. She suggests crappy teachers are to blame for “underperformance”, and the key to fixing “underperformance” is to get rid of all of these “crappy” teachers. This response has nothing to do with CHARTER schools on the whole, but Meg Campbell’s school in particular. I was pointing out, along with JSHORE, that Campbell’s own house needs some keeping before she further blames BPS teachers. I highlighted that her “miracle school” is far from the advertisements, despite the spin.
BTW, Rhetorical questions can be punctuated by a period. Grammatically speaking it is considered correct to write: …then why did a student commit suicide in the bathroom.”
Christopher says
…that on threads about charter schools, exchanges between petr and columwhyte so quickly degenerate into spitting contests? Any chance both of you can lose the edge to your tone?
columwhyte says
This is not a “thread” on charter schools. The article concerned BPS’s new evaluation system, and remarks that Meg Campbell, Boston School Committee member, made about the effectiveness of Boston teachers. I don’t know why PETR presumes that I was attacking charter schools. I do not find anything wrong with my tone. I was merely clarifying my previous response to someone who “chastises” my writing and motives at every turn. I find nothing wrong with defending teachers and speaking truth about those in power. Perhaps you are correct and I should ignore responses to my posts that are meant to initiate a visceral reaction.
SomervilleTom says
To answer your perhaps rhetorical question, exchanges between petr and columwhyte seem to follow the same trajectory as Democrats and the GOP in the House — anything one says is followed by a full-bore visceral attack by the other. There is no “edge” to the comment that provoked petr’s outburst. There is also no reference to any “charter schools”.
I think you are mistaken to include columnwhyte in your condemnation. I agree with you that I wish petr would take his hostility somewhere else.
petr says
columwhyte made a stupid remark that was a direct contradiction of the very thing the post was about. It was as if, in a thoughtful post about ad hominen attacks, somebody said ‘and your mama too..” I called columwhyte on it. and pointed out where it was in specific contrast to the exact argument, was repitition of previous arguments made and said, truthfully and forthrightly, that it added nothing new. I would do it if the exact same comments were posted by someone other than columwhyte. I would do so again if the subject, whatever, it was, was something other than public schools. I have done that. I would do so if you posted those comments. I would do the very same thing if anybody else posted such things. I have done it before and I’ll do it again. I will clearly call some one out if what they post as a comment is clearly, egregiously, a misread of what was posted.
If you’re going take time to post something thoughtful and lucid about criteria, variables, generalities and scope… and the very first comment uses blatant generalilzations to condemns in clear contravention of ALL the thoughtful, insightful, discussion presented before… well… you can call it ‘hostility’ if I call that out, but I would look in the mirror first, were I you…
columwhyte says
Is not a word I would use to modify my comment. I was merely pointing out the contradictions in Campbell’s contention that BPS teachers’ proficiency and student “achievement” (based on MCAS scores) mirror each other. Her “proficiency gap” theory really holds no weight, especially when her miracle school does not really hold up as a panacea under scrutiny – which was the intent of the post. My hope would be that readers understand that epidemiology is a largely ignored science in the current push to reform our school system. This quest for the undefinable “great” teacher in every classroom marginalizes the real issues our students face.
opusedge says
to hear the mayoral candidates weigh in on this