Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Boston-based Scholars for Globe Education Coverage

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Many of these issues don't come as a surprise to working teachers, but it's rare to see them any of these assertions receive fair play in the Globe. The topic du jour in education policy circles is performance pay, and the editors have added their shrill voice to public discourcse.

I've yet to encounter anyone who knows what they're talking about that understands how ludicrous–even the attractive value-added fad–the idea of performance pay. Phi Delta Kappan has an entire issue on the teacher pay. [Unfortunately, a subscription is required.]

In addition to hurdles and flaws in performance pay, Gratz also exposes the intellectually starved assumptions beneath ed reformist arguments for performance pay:

If poor teaching causes low student test scores, what causes poor teaching? Test-based compensation plans suggest that teacher motivation is the primary cause, and financial incentives are the primary solution. The assumptions implied in this reasoning are troubling:

• Many teachers aren’t trying hard enough because they aren’t motivated.

• These teachers know what to do, but they don’t do it because they lack a financial incentive.

• Financial incentives are more important to teachers than student success.

These are unlikely conclusions. While teachers want to be paid professionally, the evidence suggests that they aren’t motivated primarily by financial rewards. If they were, why would they enter teaching?

Studies of workplace motivation consistently down- play the value of financial incentives. Indeed, management consultants put such incentives last on their lists of effective tools for organizational improvement, after “approval; trust, respect, and high expectations; loyalty, given that it may be received; job enrichment; and good communications” (Grimes 2006: 56).

Professionals are motivated by positive working environments, the respect of their colleagues, the ability to apply their professional knowledge and skills in solving problems, and the opportunity to contribute to their immediate and larger communities. Thus the constant barrage of criticism and the demeaning assumptions hardly seem motivational. Potential unintended consequences of this approach include reducing teacher motivation…

It would behoove the Globe's editors and its reporters to improve their education coverage. As I hope I've demonstrated, it wouldn't be to hard. I've dug a list of Boston-area academics who can provide the additional perspective they need.

What's it going to take?

Mark

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  1. What’s it going to take? Organized political pressure.

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    p>Mark, I sincerely appreciate your efforts to present independent local researchers as resources for the media and others, but someone out there has to be interested in what they have to say, rather than intent on sweeping it under the rug. There’s the rub.

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    p>If a preponderance of evidence were the deciding factor, I think the debate would be over and we’d have moved on from the myriad high-stakes uses of standardized tests that our politicians continue to embrace.

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    p>After many years of digging up and presenting evidence to pols, policymakers, the media, etc., and seeing it ignored, I have to conclude that this is about politics, pure and simple. (That and money; see Juan Gonzalez’s reporting in the Daily News or see how much money the testing sector has made and are looking forward to making with national standards and new national tests, e.g., Kaplan and Pearson.)

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    p>Until voters are organized and mobilized to hold our political leaders accountable for pushing education policies that don’t work and are downright destructive (that will bring “ruination” to our system of public education, as Diane Ravitch was recently quoted saying), nothing’s going to change.

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    p>What’s it going to take to do that?

  2. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports that thousands of teachers in England are refusing to administer high-stakes standardized tests in reading writing, spelling and math this week.

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    Teachers are giving normal class lessons but won’t administer the tests in a strike called by the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers after a ballot of members earlier this year. Head teachers in Britain are the same as American school principals.

    The organizations say that there is too much pressure on teachers to “teach to the test” to get high results, and that head teachers can lose their jobs if they don’t boost results. They also say that head teachers can lose their jobs if test scores are not high enough.

    There’s more. The Telegraph reported that children’s author Alan Gibbons lamented the fact that students are no longer reading whole books as much as they used to but are instead being given excerpts to “spot the metaphor or the simile.”

    • I’ve mentioned several times that:

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      p>I support the concept of standardized tests.

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      p>I oppose the idea that of “teaching to the test”

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      p>I believe based on personal experience if material is taught correctly the test will take care of itself.  (ie My AP US History teacher did not slavishly teach to the test, but my classmates and I all passed the AP exam.)

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      p>We need to require some sort of assessment to get to the point where the US is not embarrassingly behind other nations in basic knowledge.  MA is first in the nation in student achievement so I’d like to not fix what “ain’t broke”.  I firmly believe there are certain things you should know before you move on and a test is an objective way to make sure kids aren’t being promoted/graduated without this knowledge.

      • Christopher,

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        p>The issue is not to test or not to test, it’s how to use testing in a way that doesn’t cause inflation and doesn’t have a range of corrupting influences on the educational process.

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        p>Harvard Graduate School of Ed’s Dan Koretz is great at communicating very clearly what are the problems with the way we’re using testing now and how we could change so tests are useful again.

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        p>For example, see this Q &A with Dan about his book Measuring Up.

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        p>

        How can education policymakers make testing a more effective part of accountability?  

        The advice I offer to parents about using and interpreting scores applies to educators and policymakers as well, but they have additional responsibilities for deciding how tests will be used.

        Let’s start with test-based accountability, which is perhaps the most pressing issue today.  As both a former schoolteacher and a parent of two children who went through public schools, I am convinced that we need more effective ways to hold educators accountable, and I believe that testing has to be a part of an effective accountability program. Doing this the way we do in many places now, however – treating one test as a comprehensive indicator of student achievement, pretending that scores taken by themselves are a trustworthy indicator of school quality, and rewarding and punishing teachers and students for scores – is just too simple. It ignores not only what we know about testing, but also what we know from many other fields, such as healthcare, about the effects of incentive systems. We face an enormous challenge in designing better educational accountability systems, and the first step in doing that is recognizing the limitations of what has been tried to date.

        What can educators and policymakers do now to start on the path toward more effective accountability? First, they need to step back and ask themselves what the goals of schooling are and what they want to see happening in schools.  For an accountability system to work well, it has to recognize the range of important goals that teachers should be addressing, not just the aspects of math and reading that are easily measured by standardized tests.  We don’t have a good recipe for doing this yet, and therefore, policymakers and educators need to experiment and try new approaches.  Second, because, due to score inflation, rising scores are not sufficient to indicate that reforms are working, it is essential to evaluate these efforts. Are we seeing the types of changes we want when we observe classrooms?  Are scores being inflated, or are teachers finding ways to boost student learning?

        What other advice do you have for educators and educational policymakers about testing?
        Leaving aside the issue of accountability, I offer educators and policymakers other advice in Measuring Up.  For example, we should stop placing so much emphasis on “performance standards” in reporting the performances of schools and students.  For any number of reasons, this is a very poor strategy for reporting, one that generates bad incentives, creates badly distorted views of trends in performance, and leads to serious misinterpretations by the public.  We should be more realistic about testing students with special needs so that we can begin designing more effective and helpful ways of assessing them.  All in all, we have to be realistic and careful in our uses of tests.  As I note at the end of Measuring Up, “In all, educational testing is much like a powerful medication. If used carefully, it can be immensely informative, and it can be a very powerful tool for changing education for the better. Used indiscriminately, it poses a risk of various and severe side effects. Unlike powerful medications, however, tests are used with little independent oversight. Let the buyer beware.”

         

      • and I do have a lot of respect for you, you need to improve your understanding of testing and MCAS. The number of unquestioned assumptions in your comments on these subjects is much greater than in your other writing. You are merely spouting the “party line,” and while you are more than free and welcome to hold any opinion you want, you are too intellgient, in my opinion, to hold them unquestioningly.

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        p>Mark

        • I substitute teach at the elementary level in my town and so have presented plenty of lessons left for me by the regular teacher designed specifically for the MCAS.  I believe there is more of this “teaching to the test” than is necessary.

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          p>A few years ago my State Senator, Sue Tucker, hosted an event in which I participated where adults could come and take a sample 10th grade MCAS and then discuss their impressions of it.  With a couple of exceptions at most I not only got the answers, but I remembered which high school class I learned the concept in.  In my discussion group there was one woman from Ireland where they test everyone at 16 and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

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          p>I went to high school before MCAS, also private and in NH anyway, but the material was taught as was reasonable.  I’m sure without the test hanging over us most of my classmates could have passed just based on what was taught anyway.

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          p>One catch-22 is that the test is given in 10th grade, which while I understand the theory that it gives time to retake, it does also mean that a few things might not have been covered yet, but will be by the actual time to graduate.  I’ve also wondered whether there should be different tests for academic vs technical high schools, or divide by subject area and require that each student pass, say, any three subject tests.  Even with these ideas there is still a base of knowledge I would want everyone to have.

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          p>If you want to call out specific assumptions you think I’m making that I shouldn’t I can try to address them.

          • Aside from teaching to the test, which may or may not be an issue, depending on the subject and community, what don’t you know?

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            p>1. Testing limitations. MCAS is a measure. How does it work? Does it work effectively? What are its limitations? If you want to understand MCAS, you need to understand the technicalities of testing.

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            p>2. Standards limitations. Do they work? Can tests provide clear results reflecting the standards?

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            p>Here are math and English standards:

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            p>

            AII.P.1 Describe, complete, extend, analyze, general¬ize, and create a wide variety of patterns, including iterative and recursive patterns such as Pascal’s Triangle.

            21.8: Revise writing by attending to topic/idea development, organization, level of detail, language/style, sentence structure, grammar and usage, and mechanics.

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            p>They sound reasonable, but are they testable, if so how?

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            p>3. Learning. How does MCAS affect learning? Here’s Campbell’s law, which I think LisaG has mentioned, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

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            p>In my experience, teaching to the test in English doesn’t matter. My colleague in biology says it makes instruction worse. Is this situation fixable?

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            p>These are a few areas to start with. I put up a link to an interview farther up in my comments.

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            p>BTW, are you thinking of becoming a teacher?

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            p>Mark

            • I am licensed to teach middle and high school history in Massachusetts, but not yet employed.  Teaching is one of a few career paths I’m pursuing, so we’ll see what happens.

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              p>You’ll need to expand on “technicalities of testing”.  Frankly, I’ve never understood the idea that some people “don’t test well”, though I’m not even sure this is what you mean here.  I do prefer the preponderance of questions be objective, but it’s not as if the concept of testing is a new one.  We all expect teachers to give tests (which kids might fail which could lead to non-promotion), but when the state does it we get upset.  We do have to guard against corrupting the results.  I have always believed that while they assess a student’s knowledge, they should at most be ONE of many factors used in assessing schools and teachers.

              • Did you take the test or go through an approved education program? Obviously, I don’t know you, except from here, but you strike me as someone who would do well in teaching.

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                p>History is, or at least was, the hardest subject to get a job in. There used to be a surplus of history teachers, unlike in math and science where there tends to be a shortage, and unlike English, there are fewer required courses.

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                p>There are major differences between classroom testing and state-testing. Two of these differences are sampling and cut points.

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                p>Classroom tests usually test everything a teacher has taught in a unit; a teacher also knows how to read his or her own test results best.

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                p>State tests take a tiny sample–sometimes as little as one question–of what students are supposed to have learned.

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                p>Large-scale testing is akin to polling or any statistical process in that you can either do a random sample or question an entire population. In spite of curriculum frameworks–which frequently include more than one learning objective, making results uninterpretable–there is no way to know everything a student has learned. There are no boundaries defining the whole of student learning.

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                p>In a Grade 10 ELA open-response question, for example,there is no way to tell how much of a student’s score is his inability to analyze a passage and his inability to express his analysis. Technically, he’s only graded on his analysis, but if he can’t express it well-enough… How much of his score of 2 out of 4 is due to his reading and how much is due to his expression? Maybe he’s one of those kids who scores what we informally call a high 2 or 2+ (those scores aren’t actual options). Did he score a 2 on analysis and a expression averaging out to a 2+, but ending up with a 2 due to the 4-point scale used? His score won’t tell you, even if you know the curriculum standard.

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                p>In short, the accountability that stems from MCAS is extremely limited. Imagine, for example, you were going to grade kids on how tall they grew over the course of their lives, but you could only measure them in one foot units. A kid could grow 11 inches in a year and still not be credited with growing a foot. That’s how MCAS evaluates kids individually. There’s a reporting measure called CPI that never makes the paper and I can’t find at the moment.

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                p>If you’re interested, I can email you an good article. I can’t post a link because it requires a subscription.

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                p>

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