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April 30, 2010 04:07 PM UTC
69 Comments
I think I can speak for everyone at ProgressNow when I say that despite any disagreement over individual legislation, we have nothing but respect for Laurie Zeller and her thoughtful point of view on this issue. here is the email we sent yesterday to our list.
Do you propose that we continue to inflict bad teachers on students until we get all other problems fixed? Bad teachers are not the only problem – but they are a significant one and we should address it.
“running off bad teachers” and ensuring that we provide our students with the highest quality teachers possible, while sounding identical on the surface, are not actually identical. There is still an unresolved disagreement about whether the former actually accomplishes the latter, or, in fact, ironically accomplishes exactly the opposite instead. Ignoring (and never having addressed) that disagreement does not make it disappear, nor render it irrelevant.
I know that you insist, without ever having mounted an actual argument, that the economic analysis employed in this unaddressed counterargument is irrelevant. That, however, does not make it so.
I do agree with you on this: Improving the overall quality of the teacher pool, and providing students with the best teachers possible, absolutely is an extremely important goal. We just need to make sure that the steps we take to accomplish it actually accomplish it, and not the exact opposite instead.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled dogmatic certainty….
But I have to restate my central points –
If we can’t even pass a law that helps to develop an effective measure for teacher effectiveness, can we ever find out what is working in the classroom? If testing is too flawed a tool, how do we know what students are learning? If poverty is a determinant so powerful in student achievement that it overrides all other factors, do we have to eradicate poverty before we can expect public education to address the needs of poor kids?
How long are we willing to wait?
The coalition supporting SB 191 includes the Urban League, Metropolitan Organizations for People, LARASA, Colorado Lawyers’ Committee and many other progressive community organizations. (ProgressNow had a fact sheet with an out-of-date endorsement list.) AND it includes the business organizations that helped progressive move the anti-labor amendments off the ballot in 2008. This breadth was the power of the Ref C coalition, and it will be necessary in blue Colorado to bring all these folks back to the table to accomplish anything really big in public policy in the future.
This does not have to be a left-right argument.
Why not allow the Gov’s Council to set the time frame for tenure. The bill says that 2 years of ineffective scores takes a teacher out of tenure. It then takes 3 years of effective scores to get back into tenure. Where does this time frame come from? It seems a little arbitrary.
Additionally, the bill only requires evaluations be performed once a year. So if a teacher gets a bad score once, they only have one shot at improving or they get placed back on probation. Considering there are countless factors that can lead to bad scores, such as poor student attendance, that teachers have no control of, I think the diverse council can come up with a more appropriate time frame.
Lastly, permanently changing our state laws in hopes of getting Race to the Top money is irresponsible. A one time payment of $175 million will hardly cover half of the cuts we made just this year to K-12. And why would Colorado even get the award? We have shown ZERO commitment to education. The administration wants to give money to states that will make their program look successful. I don’t see how Colorado can do that.
Why not wait and see what other states come up with and what actually works?
Are teachers really the primary cause? What about parents?
The Governor did blue ribbon commissions for nearly everything in his one term (and picked up a lot of flack for it) but this is one area where I think a commission would actually do a better job.
It seems like all of the stakeholders were not at the table for this law. Like you said, a lot of the time frames seem arbitrary.
And I completely agree that the guise of getting the Race to the Top money under which this law has been proposed is disingenuous.
Plus, I’m still not even close to being convinced that this law would even make the schools better. Unfunded mandates didn’t work under Bush, I’m failing to see how they would work under SB 191.
And before someone responds to me with “what’s your solution?”, my solution is to have a better solution through getting experts aside from Michael Johnston involved in this.
And even extends the timeline to make sure they have every opportunity to do the job right. Teachers were involved in every step of its formulation.
Race to the Top is a side issue; the policy is a good policy whether or not it leverages RTTT funding.
If more accountable and better supported teachers are not going to help – what do you think will? And how long will it take to get there?
I haven’t seen anything in this bill that explains how the teachers are going to be better supported–more accountable, perhaps, to the standards of the bill, and those who are supporting it, but not better supported.
How does this bill bring us up from 50th out of 50 in school funding? Once we’re out of the basement in that department, I think it might be a good time to talk about reforming teacher tenure.
And I disagree with your statement regarding the Race to the Top funds. I think that has been one of the carrots that supporters of this bill have been trying to dangle in front of them. It’s been one of the main motivations of this legislation, IMO.
The way the bill is written to work with the commission, this child will be in second grade before any change is felt even theoretically in her public school classroom.
My second child is graduating from a great DPS high school this spring, and I am very proud of him. Every child in DPS should have the same opportunity, regardless of their parents’ advocacy skills, language or origin, socio-economic status, neighborhood. Measuring teacher effectiveness is just on of many first steps we have to take to ensure that we can reach that goal – we have waited long enough.
Lots of people dislike Congress generally but have a much higher opinion of their personal representative.
The people here who complain so much about bad teachers rarely have anything particularly bad to say about a teacher their kids have, or the school their own kids are in. It’s always those other schools, those other teachers, the ones who really need to be fired.
For what, exactly? What could they be doing better? Nobody seems to have any concrete idea, and this bill doesn’t either. It just seems like doing something, anything, just so you can say you did. It makes the people who pass the bill feel good about themselves. And hey, self-esteem is important. But without knowing that teachers are causing the problem, finding a reason to fire some teachers is not going to be a solution.
And I’m getting tired of being told that I care less about kids’ educations because I disagree on these proposals.
I’ve had 3 girls go through public school. Most every year each of them had a dud.
Example 1: A 7th grade math teacher who taught the kids that the Pythagorean theorem worked for any triangle, not just right triangles. And this wasn’t a single item – this guy flat out did not know math.
Example 2: A high school science teacher who started his conversation with us saying he had 3 years to retirement and was not going to put in any significant effort.
My daughters had a good number of superb teachers. They had a lot of good teachers. But they also had ones that have no business in a classroom.
though I guess I’d want to hear exactly what the second one said. (Your rephrasing doesn’t sound like something even a really lazy teacher would actually say.)
If you have a longer list, I’d be interested in reading it. For example what else didn’t the math teacher know? (I remember you citing this same example before, but you say you have others.)
I’d be happy to list them out for you. I think you’ll find it illuminating. FWIW, I think most of them would do a much better job if the possibility of being fired was real. I think the big win if we get effective & real tenure reform is the incentive it will provide.
and I don’t even have children.
A local, 1st grade teacher here, who was my client and thought her miniature schnauzers were the most wondrous creatures on earth and thought it was adorable when they constantly jumped on you, apparently didn’t think so when it came to kids.
When a 6 year old would come up to hug her, she would shriek, “Body space! Body space!” and then carve an imaginary box around her body that the children were not allowed to step inside of…you know, so they could respect her body space. She’s tenured and she’s not going anywhere. I find her issues with children touching her utterly distasteful and I can’t help but wonder how many children she has traumatized with her “space” issue.
See, this is why I never get involved in these threads–because in every single profession on earth, there is a bad element that should not be in that profession. So to point out the ones that suck start to generalize, I think, all the rest, and I don’t like doing that.
I freak out when dogs come near me, and I’m a little uncomfortable when people I don’t know well try to hug me.
I can’t imagine why kids should try to hug their teachers. I once had a student try to hug me, and I told her I thought it was inappropriate.
I honestly don’t see anything wrong with the teacher in your example. True that I’ve never taught students that young, but I can totally understand where she’s coming from.
Not the dog part though. What’s up with that?
She thinks her dogs jumping up in strangers faces and licking them (double ick) is totally cool but a 6 year old that is looking for a hug is somehow bizarre. I worked with 10 and under kids for a couple of years at a DV safe house and that age just likes to hug. It’s totally normal and it’s what they do with people they feel they can trust.
I’m w/you as far as hugging total strangers. But this is their teacher, a woman they see for 8 hours a day over 150 days of the year. If she is so freaked out by being touched by a child, I don’t think she should be around them. I’ve had other teachers who are clients and work with her tell me it is just downright bizarre and they wish she would retire. Or at least find a less offensive way to express her lack of comfort with anyone who gets within 6 feet of her.
And my 2 kids have only made it to 4th and 6th grades.
but you could tell me what you dislike about them. Just saying you dislike some teachers without explanation is precisely the thing I was complaining about.
I care a lot less about how a teacher treats her dogs than about whether she can teach my child algebra.
that’s some teacher. (
Wow. That’s cool! Too bad he’s a slow learner, though…. 🙂
My son had a hard time sitting still in elementary school. In second grade, and again in 4th grade, the teacher’s response was to ride him until he sat in his chair sullen, glum, and resentful. He hated school.
Now, there are a couple of things to consider here. His K, 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade teachers had no such trouble. In fact he adored them and would do anything to please them – even sit down and shut up.
He’s plenty smart. That’s not an issue.
All this occurred in spite of our letting the teacher know, very early on, that all it took to keep my son behaving properly was some occasional praise – he responds well to praise, poorly to criticism, and especially poorly to a public upbraiding. We encouraged his teachers to talk to his past teachers. Either they never did, or they never bothered to try anything that had worked in the past.
And these weren’t particularly large classes: 22-25 kids.
After the fact, we find out that these teachers always had a problem with energetic kids, and boys in particular. They had no successful strategies for handling these kids. To be clear, I’m not talking about kids that are really outside the bounds of what you’d expect. Probably outside one standard deviation, but not two.
Now he’s in middle school (6th grade) and he’s doing great. In fact, his energy is an attribute. Teachers like that he can be counted on to participate in discussions and doesn’t just sit there.
I thought that was pretty bad.
Was anything done about it?
A teacher who can’t successfully choke a student can hardly be considered competent. You’re supposed to pass Choking 101 to get your teaching certificate. (In case you wondered why we needed it.)
(kidding, obviously)
He was a football coach/math teacher and we didn’t like each other. I was good at math and bad at football. I was pretty snotty in his class, because he treated me pretty shitty during football practice. I used to read the paper during his class (or other such disrespectful stuff) and then just kick the test’s ass.
One day after class he held me after and said “you can’t disrespect me in my classroom.”
I responded something like “I don’t respect you and like you said at practice, the best players get on the field, not the ones who try the hardest. You keep given those tests and I’ll keep acing them.” then I turned with a shrug and walked out.
He comes charging out of the class and grapples me (I was about 135lbs at the time and he was 200+, college linebacker type) and picks me up by neck and starts to squeeze. Other teachers came out of their classrooms, but nobody intervened. I don’t know if he was censured, no one in the administration talked to me about it, although I know they knew because they transferred me to a different math class. I didn’t tell me Mom because that was a time that I didn’t really communicate with my parents. So I don’t know if anything happened.
Well with this bill they’re sure not doing it quickly. So hopefully that means they’re doing it right.
SB 191 sets up a commission but doesn’t delegate all decision making to the commission. The bill REQUIRES that the commission make 50% of the evaluation based on standardized tests (can you say NCLB?). It also REQUIRES the arbitrary 2 year time frame for losing tenure.
Again, why not let the commission make those decisions? Please, tell me, why is this such a bad idea?
with all due respect
for the poster of this diary
you stated
“Obama has the right ideas for public schools”. I believed that then, and I believe it now.
did Bobby Kennedy Jr. think Obama had the right ideas on the environment too?
because just on April 2nd Obama stated the following about the expansion of offshore drilling:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress….
today we are seeing how wrong that statement was, as we watch the worst oil spill perhaps in US history.
We can not blindly accept legislation just because it has been given a rubber stamp of approval without careful consideration.
also, Sen. Johnston’s bill does not have the support of the Unions, a key provision necessary to qualify a state for Race to the Top funds.
If his aim is to get those funds, he should consult the Unions and craft a bill that they can approve of.
otherwise it’s a waste of time.
This bill is being debated on THIRD reading even as I write this – the passage yesterday, with a boatload of amendments, was the second reading debate. The OP needs to learn a tad more about how a bill comes law in Colorado.
And Bob Bacon is very torn on voting in favor of this bill, so I wouldn’t quite count your chickens just yet.
I was just thinking about sending Bob an e-mail to get his take on it.
As did 13 other Democrats – were it not for unanimous Republican support, the bill would have died.
Average income of a Reps constituents vs how they voted? Is there a listing of the average income by district?
congrats dems, you are pushing forward a bill that would only live with the overwhelming support of Republicans.
it must be an awful bill.
Oh wait, that turned out to be a really good improvement…
Or here in Colorado this session – fixing PERA.
The jury is coming an and welfare reform is a big loser. But I guess it works great if you don’t give a damn about the less fortunate in our society and think all people on welfare were Cadillac Queens!
http://www.usatoday.com/news/n… – is it a panacea? No. Did it improve things? Yes. Progress is steps forward.
USA Today? Not the most unbiased source in my estimation. Just a fore-runner of faux news. Tilts a bit to the right for me.
And there is strong evidence that the only apparent positives of welfare reform occurred during Clinton’s boom years when jobs were so plentiful they went wanting and companies had to bid for the employee.
During bust times, things are not so rosy and now we push off the problem to the private charity sector, EXACTLY as the right wing has wanted in this country since FDR’s time! Lot’s of hungry and homeless children out there these days with no strong public assistance to help them out of their dire straights.
The THREE Democratic governors of the last thirty years have endorsed SB 191. Pena and Webb support it. This is in line with the current DEMOCRATIC President’s agenda. It was introduced by a DEMOCRAT.
It is intended to serve children in chronically low-performing schools – typically, these are poor children in communities of color, our highest-needs children.
What part of Democratic priorities have I missed?
http://www.denverpost.com/opin…
I think you missed that part.
not just hyperbole.
Seriously? What a laugh.
The most it will do, the absolute most, is give districts the ability to fire a few teachers who are ineffective at their job. The private sector has been doing that forever with union jobs – and the unions still exist.
It’s a bill to provide poor children with a quality education which is their one means to break the cycle of poverty. Personally, I think giving poor children a chance at an economically secure life is central to what it means to be progressive.
Now does this bill do this effectively and efficiently? That’s a legit question. But saying that no one can be fired and in return we leave children in a cycle of poverty – that’s not progressive.
Why the hell are we jacking around with people’s job security before we fix the evaluations? I mean, the two Race to the Top winners are fixing their evaluations without interfering anyone’s rights to due process.
Where did I say that?
Why are we weighting the evaluation so heavily against the CSAP…50%, BEFORE the test has gone through its metamorphosis? It’s being revised now, even as we speak. Why would we do this now?
Nope, this is union-busting and teacher-targeting at its finest. Districts can’t even pay for the cost of this bill, forcing them to get into bed with neo-con education foundations just to pay the bills. It’s another sterling work from Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform. Education DE-form, I’d say.
Are you saying the system doesn’t know what an effective teacher is? That’s a horrible indictment of the entire system.
It’s not union busting because not a single union job will be lost due to this bill. Not one. What may (not will, may) happen is some union jobs will be held by a different union member. Same pay, same benefits.
what an effective teacher is, but we have a very hard time accurately reducing it to quantifiable measures, and disseminating it to others. The best teaching is “holistic,” it’s animated, inspired, creative, and passionate. Students exposed to it benefit from it, but each in his or her own way and in his or her own time. Though improving student mastery of basic skills (Math and Enlish, especially) is an imperative in this country, trying to reduce the mission to that objective will almost certainly undermine success both in that objective itself, and in broader academic objectives that form the context for success of all kinds, including in basic skills.
This is one of the perverse results of our current craze of educational reductionism. For example, music programs are being cut left and right, even though there is strong evidence that music education helps kids learn and understand math. Physical education is being cut back, despite a childhood obesity epidemic, and the impacts that poor health have on academic achievement (even if we decided that health weren’t a legitimate concern in itself).
David, I really do admire and respect your commitment to advocate for improvements in public education. That’s a commitment we share. But, lately, there has been no area of public policy more beleaguered by the proverbial doctor very assertively killing the patient.
Let’s not just bleed this already bleeding casualty of misguided priorities; let’s use all of our resources to find truly effective medicine instead.
Is why the bill keeps putting a disproportionate burden on teachers, all teachers. David’s argument that this is only to weed out the bad ones is a myth in my view.
Procedures already exist to remove really bad teachers for performance and other such issues, it’s just that administrators are often to busy (or too lazy?) to do the necessary tasks to remove bad teachers, like actually documenting problems over time.
Blaming “progressives” (can’t we start proudly calling ourselves liberals again?) for over-analyzing the problem is bad logic too. Saying we’re condemning “another generation of children” to failure is loaded language which does not in turn prove an argument that this form of reform will have any real tangible benefits.
And at the same time this legislation is moving through the state house, our fine legislature just cut funding for education another 6%. Doesn’t anyone here see the irony in this besides me?
I posted this article in another diary, but I think it fits here too. We need to be careful in our rush to reform that we don’t actually make things worse. It is my long held view that many conservatives who support “reform” do so in the hopes of actually killing public education as we know it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05…
As I understand the bill it primarily measures the impact each teacher has on each student. If I was a teacher I would welcome this as it would give me guidance as to what I could best improve on in my job.
Is there something I’m missing in the bill? Because I don’t see how that measurement puts any burden on a teacher and I am not aware of anything else in the bill that would be a burden.
But if I missed something, please do let us know – that is important.
Most teachers are rated satisfactorily, and most most by principals that have never stepped foot into their classroom to observe, as the current law specifies.
The reason why the burden is on teachers is because it’s not fixing the way that principals are falling down on the job. All it says is that principal effectiveness would include a 66% weight from the standardized test.
There’s no mechanism in the bill to give principals tools to handle an increased burden imposed by this bill in the frequency of evaluations, for example. If they’re not even successfully completing one review every three years, where’s the help to get them to do one every year?
Therefore, the burden is borne overwhelmingly by teachers.
I think your concerned about the wrong person though – I think from what you say that this places a giant new burden on the principal. There’s no way a single person can do this in even a middle school, much less a giant high school.
Very good point that the school administration has got to put in place a workable way to regularly evaluate the teachers. (And this shows a gigantic failure on the part of school administrations to date – that they clearly are not regularly evaluating teachers.)
It does not address this issue. This is why this bill needs to be scrapped, because to not also address the need for better way to use the evaluation system in the first place, makes this an anti-teacher bill.
Let it die. Let’s start over by letting the council of teacher effectiveness make its recommendations, fixing or eliminating the CSAP and then breaking the back of TABOR so that we can finally do this right.
We found a problem! Back to the drawing board! We must start over! I take it the imperfections in the healthcare reform bill had you saying we should have dumped it also?
This is not a reason to scrap it. It’s a very valid issue that needs to be addressed as they move forward implementing it. And this bill provides years to figure this out. Isn’t that enough time to put a process in place?
You don’t like what I say, so I’m a Republican. Very nice.
No, there isn’t enough time in the bill to do this properly. We’re trying to set a 150-year course aright here.
you think the ability to fire poor performing teachers will be the stick that pushes other teachers on the edge into higher levels of performance.
The bill apparently only addresses teacher performance in any significant way with this big stick of killing off tenure. Most principals and other high level administrators are protected by very sweet golden parachutes in their contracts even if they ever were dismissed. But because there is such a greater demand for these professionals then people qualified to fill the positions available, there is scant chance of a principal being fired. When was the last time this happened in Colorado, does anyone know?
And then where is the carrot? At least Pro-Comp gave a possible bonus as the carrot, but I haven’t seen or heard of one in this bill, just the stick.
often to make room for a friend of the superintendant (at least in one very large metro area school district, immediately to the west of Denver, that shall remain unnamed).
Principals are at-will employees. I don’t know what kind of actual due-process protections they have; probably considerably more than the term implies. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think there are generally any golden parachute provisions in principals’ contracts (in superintendants’, yes, but principals’, no).
A former principal, at Montbello, who I found very likeable at the time (and who was the principal in the story about the disagreement with a colleague), was fired for, apparently, good cause (some bizarre stuff, if the story that filtered out was roughly accurate, which is never certain). The year for that one was around 2005 or so.
Another principal, who was an excellent and respected team leader doing great work at a tough school, was ushered out a year before his retirement, with a buy-off, due to district politics (he took the principled stand, if you’ll pardon the pun, when faced with a “play along” or “do the right thing” choice). The year for that was 2005.
At the end of the next semester, his replacement (also an excellent and beloved team leader) was demoted to being a teacher, after 20-some years as an administrator, effectively driving him out of that school district (and out of the state to a job as principal in a neighboring state).
They were then finally replaced with the most incompetent, belligerent, dysfunctional excuse for a school administrator I ever imagined possible, who had been hounded by complaints (formal and informal) for years prior to this promotion, but who was a good friend of the superintendant. That principal remains in place, and the school completely foresaken.
And that’s one of the reasons why I am very, very leary of suggestions that granting more authority to administrators to fire teachers is going to have the beneficial effects that some, with very little actual knowledge or experience, are blindly certain they will.
But still think this bill puts more heat on teachers than administrators.
Haven’t had a chance to read the bill yet, so I don’t know.
Every job I’ve ever had included that I could be fired at any time – for any or no reason. And I have been fired a couple of times.
First off I agree that the principals and administrators need to be held even more accountable. I think administrators should be at will where they can be fired with no notice and no parachute. And principals at the end of a school year. This will have to become standard.
As to carrot, how about that with improvement the kids entering each class will be better prepared? The good teachers presently have to carry the poor teachers. With this, that need to make up for the deficiencies from others will drop – a lot.
Most companies I’ve worked for in the past 20 years had plans that made bonuses based on performance a significant piece of total compensation. Did you now have those?
I am strongly in favor of merit bonuses for teachers. However, I think the only way we’ll get that is we have to show improvement first, then ask for more money because of the improvement.
I’d call those bonuses then. Otherwise they’re part of of base compensation.
First of all, one of the strengths of this bill is that it will allow principals to better tailor professional development to teachers who are struggling. How many teachers do you know who complain about one-size-fits-all PD days where they all sit around the cafetorium? Better evaluations – and the evaluations will be built painstakingly slowly, over a five year period with input from teachers through the Council on Educator Effectiveness and the Colorado Department of Education – will lead to better professional development.
Those who are taking issue with this bill better be willing to defend the status quo, because that’s what they are doing. And the status quo is not working for students.
when I have time. I don’t want my comments here to be misconstrued: I have not taken a position on the bill, because I’ve been too busy with law school finals to give it the attention it requires.
Generically speaking, as I’ve pointed out to David, opposing a particular piece of legislation is not a defense of the status quo. Regardless of how bad the status quo is, it is always possible to propose legislation that is worse. Again, I’m not saying that that is the case here, but this particular argument against criticism is an invalid one: You must always make a comparative argument, demonstrating why a bill is an improvement over the status quo, rather than an absolute one, based on mere rejection of the status quo.
SB 191 as it is constructed is not prescriptive about the form of teacher effectiveness evaluation EXCEPT to say that 50% of the evaluation should be linked to student achievement. And, that principal evaluation should be re-defined to hold a school leader accountable for the support he or she gives the teachers in the building. Much of the rest of the means of evaluation is left to the work of the Council on Educator Effectiveness and the State Department of Education. Teachers and others on this thread have acknowledged that the current system is inadequate. Supporting this bill just says, let’s get that conversation started now and put a reasonable boundary on it. I would argue that many of those who are opposing it at this point are saying they don’t even want to have the conversation.
I can’t discuss the bill until I’ve examined it. If your characterization is accurate, then it can (and should) be framed as an argument why the bill is an improvement over the status quo, rather than that opposition is inherently a defense of the status quo.
My recommendation, for what it’s worth, is that you make every imaginable counterargument to your own position. Make the best arguments against the bill that you can (don’t worry, you’re not going to give the opposition any ammunition they don’t already have), and then demonstrate why those arguments are defeated by the arguments in favor of the bill. When advocates of any position fail to do that, they communicate to me that they either haven’t thought it all the way through, or that they are trying to use disingenuous means of persuasion. (I haven’t read all of your posts, so I don’t know if you’ve been doing this or not. It’s just a general suggestion, meant with nothing but goodwill).
to cast on anyone who questions the merits of this particular bill. I think many have dealt with the broader issues of context in student achievement that this bill does nothing about. There have also been arguments made about the abject failure of other reforms which had and still have great political backing (eg: the charter school movement). Using political support as a criteria for saying the bill is then good and effective is essentially meaningless.
I think you are trying to stop the conversation with comments like that that that are pejorative and misstate valid opposition.