Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

“When Test Scores Become a Commodity”

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Teacher Jonathan Keiler from Maryland absolutely nails it in this essay in EdWeek:

When student scores become like orange juice, pork bellies, or yen, the people with the greatest incentive to cheat are the weakest teachers and administrators. These people might be weak, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. Weak but clever educators will inevitably find ways to game the system, sometimes by cheating, but more often by coming close, but not stepping over the line: Educators could turn their courses into nothing but test-prep machines; they could refuse to collaborate with colleagues; they could curry favor with students to encourage better results; or take other steps we can’t imagine. Many of these weaker teachers, even short of cheating, might well end up with excellent “value added” scores, while stronger teachers who are honest and don’t play the sharp game end up looking bad.

This is not just a possible bad outcome, it is inevitable. It is inevitable because markets generate such behavior and dislocations, and the more volatile the market, the greater the undesirable behavior and dislocations will be.

So when we speak about value-added evaluations, let’s be clear about what kind of knot we’ve tied. It is a system that turns student scores into a market and, as such, creates cheating, disreputable practices, and dislocations. On the flip side, let’s also talk straight about the cheaters. Like dishonest or corrupt traders, the educators are not the victims, but rather sophisticated, savvy players. Many will get away with it and be honored for their work, as some cheating administrators and teachers were before they were caught. And many teachers and administrators who don’t technically cheat, but find ways to game the market “legally” will also be duly honored. Where could this lead? Schools could become little more than test-preparation institutes, ignoring subjects and skills that are not assessed, with faculty members who resent and distrust one another. Meanwhile, many honest and dutiful teachers will go down in flames.

If this is the kind of public school system the American people want, then fine. Let’s just be honest about it.

Amen.

“It’s All About Distrust”

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The scariest part of this story about how the new teacher evaluation policies in Tennessee are sending “morale into the toilet” is not that the framework is broken. It’s that someone actually created this stupidity in the first place. I mean, just read this:

Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.

To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.

“How stupid is that?” said Michelle Pheneger, who teaches ACT math prep at Blackman High and is also being evaluated in part based on writing scores. “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”

For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring.

Several teachers without scores at Oakland Middle School conferred. “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said Jeff Jennings, the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher.”

It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation. While this may have nothing to do with academic performance, it does measure a teacher’s ability to play the odds. There’s also the question of how a principal can do a classroom observation of someone who doesn’t teach a classroom subject.

My. Goodness. Who in their right mind would create and impose something as asinine as this? Really?

These are scary times.

Let's Just Scare the #$%& Out of Them, Ok?

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Some stories are so bizarre that you have to wonder if they’re true, but this one (via Ewan’s Delicious bookmarks) about a policeman in Cheyenne, Wyoming who was brought in to “teach” kids about MySpace is beyond the pale:

“Officer Gay chose it as an opportunity to take Shaylah’s pictures and her MySpace and use it as an example of what not to do, but then just really publicly humiliate her and mocked her,” said Nordic, who coaches wrestling at the high school and football and track at Windsor Middle School. “She left the auditorium in tears and busted out crying. He told the student body that he took her information from MySpace and showed it to a predator in prison and asked him what he would do with it.”

Nordic said Gay used inappropriate language when describing to the students what the predator would do to Shaylah.

It gets worse.

Anyone with any experience with social Web tools can tell you that INVITING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO AN ASSEMBLY TO SCARE THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL KIDS FOR POSTING STUFF TO MYSPACE IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST WAY TO “TEACH” THEM ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKS.

First of all, it’s too late by that point. Second of all, it’s LAZY. Schools do this because they don’t want to do the hard work of understanding what 75% or more of their kids are actually doing online.

Here is a suggestion: Go to your principal or superintendent right now and ask her/him this: Would you really rather have your students learn about safety online from some “authority” figure who drops in and attempts to make them fearful, or from people who they know and trust and see every day in their classrooms who over the course of time in appropriate and balanced ways can educate them instead?

Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.

Oy.

But then again, scaring them is so, so much easier…

“You could imagine her sitting there and hearing that,” Nordic said. “He asked everybody there, ‘Is Shaylah Nordic here?’ So she raised her hand and then he went on to post the pictures and talk about it. He said she was likely to be raped and murdered because how easy it was to access this stuff, and how easy it was to get information.”

Nordic said Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead.

Nice.