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Some Unintended Conclusions from Value Added Data

Emmanuel Parello — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:04:56 +0100

There has been a lot of debate for the past several years over whether or not to use "value added" data as a metric for evaluating teachers. Washington D.C. is already making 50% of a teacher's evaluation dependent on their value added rating. I thought I'd weigh in on the debate, as I happen to have a publicly available value added ranking of myself up on the internet. According to the prestigious Los Angeles Times newspaper, I am a "least effective teacher" in math and a "less effective" English teacher :

In August 2010, the Los Angeles Times published the value added rankings of teachers within the district who had taught 2nd through 5th grade. I remained unaware until a year ago that I was on there, assuming that they would not have published the scores of a one year teacher who no longer worked in LA Unified. Now, thanks to the LA Times, I have a permanent souvenir of that year; the fourth thing that comes up if you Google search my name.

Now far be it for me to defend my first and only year as a corps member; it wasn't pretty. I do think the value added score shows that I had a particular problem teaching math that year, and although I don't enjoy having that fact blared across the internet, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that I was far less effective than the average LAUSD math teacher. In an effort to teach conceptual rather than algorithmic thinking, I did not practice frequently enough the kinds of problems that would appear on the test, and test performance suffered. In English, I followed the Open Court program very precisely and had an easier time integrating what I learned in professional development, so despite classroom management being consistently chaotic, I managed to be closer to the average for Los Angeles Unified teachers.

But how valuable is that data, really? On a closer look at the site for this teacher rating project, I found that it is possible to draw some conclusions that really throw the value of the value added rating system into question. Although I get annoyed by the LA Times' publication of this data, since it's up on the internet and has been for some time, I think it's interesting to see some of the things that can be gleaned from it. I looked up my former program director from my first year. Although her value added math score was better than mine, in the average range, I found that her English rating was in the same statistical range as my own:

I can draw two possible conclusions from this: either TFA is hiring unqualified people to lead its corps members, or the value added score doesn't say much that's valuable about the effectiveness of a teacher. Personally, I lean towards the second conclusion. I'm pretty certain that my program director, with two years of teaching to my one, learned to be a more effective English teacher than I did. According to the value added model though, she was slightly less effective than me, and I have a hard time envisioning that anyone could get hired to a TFA staff position if that were the case. Nevertheless, since TFA is closely aligned with the movement to use value added data for evaluating teachers, they should be aware that they have hired at least one program director who, by that metric, is worse at teaching English than a corps member who quit after his first year.

On further viewing of the teacher ratings project, I came across a link to the LA Times list of the least effective schools based on value added ratings. Here's one of the ones I found:

This school has a 938 API, almost the maximum possible, and it is ranked as a "least effective school" by the Times. Again, this leads to a conclusion that I don't think the Times intended. If a school can have a 938 API and still be ineffective at contributing to student learning, it would seem to suggest that school and teacher quality have practically zero effect on how students perform in school. I don't actually believe that to be the case, but the fact that the value added date produces that conclusion in turn leads to the conclusion that ranking teachers' and schools' effectiveness based on student test data is pointless.

Thank you for this project, LA Times. I think the conclusions that it leads to should be enough from disqualifying value added from ever being used as a metric to formally evaluate teachers.

Class Size in Japan, Korea, and America

Emmanuel Parello — Sun, 05 May 2013 01:10:47 +0100

I freely admit that I don't understand how to run a multi billion dollar software company. I'm still intrigued, therefore, that Bill Gates continues to believe that he is qualified to make education policy. In today's New York Times, Sara Mosle discusses a plan from Gates, along with Michael Bloomberg and Arne Duncan, that would "increase class sizes for the best teachers," in order to increase the chance that students could study under an excellent teacher. This idea from Gates has been around at least since 2011, when he wrote an op-ed arguing for this in the Washington Post. In the world of many reformers, class size has never been conclusively shown to increase student achievement, whereas "excellent teachers" have been. Therefore, why not disregard the statistically inconclusive factor (class size), and focus on getting students in front of a high performing teacher. Mosle agrees that large numbers of educators are not jumping at the plan, so I don't fear that this plan is something that we'll have much reason to worry about. Still, the level of thinking that it reflects from some of our most important people in education policy is irritating. It is obvious to anyone who has ever taught before that it is easier to reach individual students the smaller the class is. The reason, I think, that class size cannot be proven to have an effect on student achievement is because all of the hundreds other variables that come in to play in any classroom that may be hard to statistically measure. Let me give one example with which I am familiar: Japan has much larger class sizes than the United States, and also scores better on international exams. This could lead one to the simple conclusion that the Japanese experience proves that class sizes do not matter. In fact, to bolster their arguments, ed reformers often mention Japan and South Korea as examples of countries that have huge class sizes but boast impressive test scores. Indeed, every class that I taught in Japan had around 40 students, but what the reformers who ridicule the notion that class size matters do not mention is that a vast majority of Japanese students past the age of elementary school attend private attend private prep schools called juku several times a week in the evenings after school. As the Economist reported in 2011, Japanese test scores tend to rise in direct proportion to the amount of money spent on private classes. In South Korea as well, about 74% of students attend private hagwon schools to supplement their education. Every Japanese teacher that I knew complained that the class sizes were too large and made it difficult to respond to students' individual needs. Teachers were typically strapped with workloads that kept them at work until around 8 PM, and all agreed that they could be more attentive to students if the class sizes could be reduced. The fact is that Japanese education is currently sustained by a massive network of private supplemental schools, the same as its neighbor South Korea. Neither of these countries provides good evidence that class size doesn't matter. If anything, the number of students attending remedial instruction show that the public education systems are not equipped to meet the needs of all their students. When statistical analysis fails, sometimes it's best to trust intuition. A teacher with fewer students can give more individual attention to each one, and that gives them a better chance of success. Just because this can't be definitively proven with data doesn't mean it isn't true.

Closing one chapter, but not the book...

draco — Thu, 02 May 2013 06:18:30 +0100

Dear Teach For America / Teach For Us blog friends, Due to a combination of circumstances out of my control, I had to leave the 2012 corps a few months ago. However, I am still in the Teach For America program, and the joys of teaching have been so incredible that I look forward to returning to the classroom in the future. In the meantime, I'm still as passionate as ever about education & would love for you to stay connected! Please follow me on my new videoblog Kindness Marathon at http://KindnessMarathon.com Rather than on the website itself, the videoblog is housed on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; the links to all of them are on the website. Everything is still quite new so barely any content is up...but stay tuned! Kindness Marathon features everything I'm passionate about, be it education or social justice or fitness or anything else! Still believing in the vision of "One Day"... Draco

The Diverse Views of Corps Members and Alums

Emmanuel Parello — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:07:45 +0100

During my interview for Teach for America in the spring of 2007, the interviewer asked me to explain what I felt was the cause of the achievement gap. I replied that I thought schools serving primarily low income and minority students were educating children who faced severe challenges in their lives due to poverty, and that the schools were not adequately equipped to address those problems. Earlier that day, in the group interview segment, I had argued that the readings we did focused too heavily on "low expectations" as the primary cause of educational inequity and that poverty was being treated as an "excuse." When my group had to look at an imaginary case study of a low performing school with low teacher morale, many of my group members focused on the need to have "tougher standards." I argued that in my experience with schooling in low-income California communities (during college I was a tutor at an East Los Angeles middle school), the standards were already quite rigorous and that the cause of the low scores and morale probably lay elsewhere. I proposed more professional development for teachers and collaboration time, as well as a chance to learn more new and up to date teaching methods. Given the amount of time that TFA spent in the following years minimizing the impact of out of school factors on student learning, I'm surprised in retrospect that my interviewer liked my responses. At the end of the interview she remarked that she appreciated how deeply I thought about things, and that she herself agreed that the achievement gap was much more complex than "high expectations" or "low expectations." Although TFA has a particular image that it projects to the public, I realized by being in the organization that there is a lot of diversity of thought- among corps members and alums as well as among staff. Ideologically, I had the sense that TFA was a big tent. One of our keynote speakers at induction was '92 LA alum and soon-to-be LAUSD board member Steve Zimmer, a pro-union teacher who regarded the charter movement with apprehension. It was around that I joined TFA however, that the organization became a fully embedded wing of the one particular brand of school reform that regarded unions as intransigent enemies and believed that teachers should be evaluated by their students' test score data. I first heard of Michelle Rhee during my first year, and she quickly because the organization's star alum. During that year, I often visited Steve Zimmer for advice and support at his his Northeast Los Angeles community center, and was always impressed by the way he insisted upon being a supporter, never a savior, of the community activists already working there. To me, there was no approach to reform more radically different from his than Michelle Rhee's: a top down approach that emphasized sanctions against an imagined horde of lazy teachers and shutting out community input. Sadly, it was brash and destructive people like Rhee and not the quiet and dedicated activists like Zimmer who became the face of TFA that year and the years that followed. Today I have more reasons for optimism regarding the direction of Teach for America than I did in 2007-2008. When I met with the new executive director of TFA San Diego, he mentioned that many people in the TFA organization had reacted favorably to the words of Camika Royal in her speech to incoming 2012 Philadelphia corps members. In that speech, Dr. Royal referred to the "achievement gap misnomer" and said, "You are not here to replace educators or to reinvent educational opportunities. You are here to reinforce the work that is already happening." (I might add that her speech received tremendous applause from the inductees in the audience). This sounds a lot more like the Zimmer model than Rhee, and I'm heartened to hear that it has been received positively by TFA. Corps members tend to learn on the job that the fight for educational equity is much more complex than many of the education reform slogans make it out to be. Most of the blogs that I read on this site are very nuanced in the opinions and views that they express. Just several hours before this posting, Mr. K on the blog Break Every Yoke told a story of one of his most behaviorally challenged students and remarked, "I no longer believe that poverty and other external factors don’t matter for students like IR—such arguments are naive at best, malicious at worst." In recent years, TFA has aligned itself who people who claim that external factors don't matter, that the achieving educational equity is a simple matter of removing bad teachers with low expectations, and that community engagement is not particularly important. But TFA corps members themselves know better and usually hold less simplistic views. In embracing those views once again, TFA is moving in a positive direction.

Reverse Culture Shock

Emmanuel Parello — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:51:22 +0100

My early days in Japan with the JET Program were full of cultural misunderstandings. I brought with me a lot of assumptions about how schools should work and how students should learn that simply did not mesh with the Japanese teachers' views. I had to unlearn a lot of things and be willing to understand how education operated in a new cultural context. It was a powerful opportunity for me to learn how to collaborate with people with very different approaches to teaching.

In one incident early in my first year, I had planned an activity for a group of elementary students involving blending letters and sounds together to form words. The teacher informed me that this was not possible because "elementary students cannot read in English yet." Everything in Japan seemed so rigid to me; every student had to follow the prescribed curriculum, and could not go beyond what that curriculum mandated. "But they can do it!" I insisted, and audibly sighed. I think somewhere in me, some of the old "savior teacher" mentality surfaced, and I wanted desperately to prove that the students were being subjected to low expectations that I could overcome with a lesson that was above grade level. I ended up doing a modified version of the lesson, and although the students did do well and I still believe that Japanese elementary students are capable of writing in English, my rudeness was unmerited and was detrimental to my ability to collaborate. I made a promise to myself to behave differently with the teachers I worked with from that point on.

After becoming better at accepting the elements of Japanese education that did not perfectly conform to my worldview, I ended up finding a lot of things that I liked. One thing, although minor, that made an impression on me was the fact that kids were allowed to play sports where they could get hurt without the threat of an impending lawsuit. If I student got hurt on the playground, they usually walked it off and got back to their games. Elementary and junior high school students participated in an athletic feat called "kumitaiso," or "class gymnastics." Students made a variety of human pyramids and other formations.

Today for my Japanese culture lesson with a 2nd/3rd grade combo class back in Chula Vista, I thought it would be great to teach the students some basic kumitaiso formations. Knowing that the bigger pyramids would never be allowed in an American school, I decided to have them do a simple formation where one student sits on their hands and knees and another student stands on their back with their arms outstretched. For small and light children, there is very little chance of injury. Nevertheless, no sooner had we started practicing than a playground supervisor came to me to let me know that what we were doing was unsafe and that we would have to stop. I caught myself in an audible sigh, just like the one I had let out in Japan two years earlier. Because I KNEW that the activity was safe. Just like the first time, I still hold my initial assumption to be correct. And just like the first time, all I accomplished was to be rude.

I apologized to the supervisor later in the day. It's easy to talk about being willing to collaborate and accept alternate points of view, but harder to put it into practice. I can disagree with someone while acknowledging that they are still thinking within a framework that has logic. Good collaboration with anyone, whether it be another teacher or the school support staff, demands it.

Does California really have teachers who never receive evaluations?

Emmanuel Parello — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:52:22 +0100

Teachers, like any other profession, should be evaluated and held accountable for their job performance. I don't honestly know anyone who doesn't believe this. If you listen to many of the ed reformers though, you'd think otherwise. I found this rather bizarre tweet from a StudentsFirst blogger in my Twitter feed today, retweeted by StudentsFirst themselves:

"Under the current system, a freshman can graduate h.s. without ever having a teacher that has been evaluated."

Come again? In California, provisional teachers are evaluated every year, and permanent teachers are evaluated every other year until the 10th year, after which they are evaluated once every five years. This means multiple observations and feedback over the course of any year when they are being evaluated. A twenty year veteran, for example, would have gone through eight years when they are under evaluation. Now I think the evaluation process in California needs massive improvement, but it's very false and misleading to say that a freshmen could graduate high school without ever having a teacher who has been evaluated. I tweeted her back to point out the untruth of the statement, and she replied that since permanent teachers (she never mentioned permanent after ten years of employment) are evaluated every five years, a student could go through high school having teachers that did not receive evaluations while they were there. It's easy to see that that is a vastly different claim than what her original tweet implied. It is currently impossible for a student to undergo any schooling with a teacher, unless it's with a first year teacher, who has never been evaluated. Now, I know that her opinions are her own even though she works with Students First and was retweeted by them, but this tactic of making grandiose and overstated claims has become very common among other more high profile ed reformers as well. In March, Gary Rubinstein called out Wendy Kopp for her claim that the students of TFA alums made one year of additional learning compared to the students of non-TFA alums. California's evaluation system needs an overhaul; I'm no defender of the "status quo" on this. But it seems like people trying to forge reasonable positions on improving education and achieving educational equity are constantly confronted with outrageous claims.

Teaching Foreign Language: A Good Cure for Cynicism

Emmanuel Parello — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:53:04 +0100

This month I've gotten the rare chance to spend Sunday evenings without planning or preparation. After finishing my second long term substituting assignment at my school in March, I become a collaboration teacher and day to day sub wherever I'm needed. On collaboration days (Tuesday and Thursday) I teach World Languages and Culture to students whose teachers are attending weekly meetings. (On the clock grade level planning time is ample at my school). On Monday, Wednesday, or Friday I either sub at my school or venture out to other schools in the Chula Vista school district. Collaboration days are delightful- and basically a rehash of the role I played with Japanese students in Kobe when I taught there. Whereas in Kobe my job was to teach English and Japanese culture to Japanese students, in Chula Vista I now teach Japanese and Japanese culture to students here. I've come full circle. Although I've occasionally bemoaned not having a full time position this year, teaching my language and culture unit really is a fantastic opportunity for me. While the other teachers are now in the final days of frantically prepping students for the CST tests, I've gotten to take a break from the stress just as it reaches its peak and focus on light subjects that the students enjoy. This isn't an opportunity that I expect to have again very often in my teaching career, so I'm going to savor it right now. Besides, I got plenty of chances to experience testing stress with the rest of the school's teachers this year; from September to December I was administering bi-weekly skills tests to the 6th grade class I was covering. As a sub in LA in 2008 and 2009, I often taught students French during moments of unplanned time. One constant that I have observed in every elementary classroom that I have been in- no matter how rough or chaotic- is that the students love learning foreign languages. In Japan the love of English had been thoroughly beaten out of the students by junior high, when it became a mandatory subject, but in my elementary schools the students went wild over it. With the Japanese classes that I teach now in Chula Vista it's the same, and probably the best reminder there is that nearly every child loves to learn more about the world and be exposed to other ways of communicating and thinking. That's an easy thing to forget when you're teaching full time and drilling students on standards that they're going to be tested on. A number of students have developed a thick shell of disinterest towards academic subjects by even the early elementary grades. Being able to see the levels of excitement they feel towards learning a foreign language is a good reminder for when I'm feeling jaded that most still love to use their minds and think. So now, I can turn my thoughts to pondering how I'm going to unlock that love of intellectual activity in future students once I have my own classroom again. Unfortunately, that's not quite as easy of a task! When teaching a foreign language in a stress-free environment, basically any question that I ask will have three fourths of the class eagerly trying to respond. I have no doubt that if I connected my class to a grade that there would be a lot more frustration and work-avoidance. But the basic love of learning is there, and that's what I can remind myself in future years when times get more difficult.

Adoring Ed Reform Journalists

Emmanuel Parello — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:27:43 +0100

It's been an interesting week in education news. Michelle Rhee is taking heat for her failure to acknowledge a memo regarding cheating in her district, and Ben Chavis's American Indian Public Charter School had its charter revoked by the Oakland Unified School District because of Chavis's money embezzlement. It comes to my mind that so many of these charlatans in the ed reform movement could never have gotten as far as they have without journalists willing to sing their praises. But even these adoring journalists may be increasingly unable to portray them in a positive light. Michelle Rhee benefits from journalists like Richard Whitmire, who praised her in his 2011 book, The Bee Eater, as well as David Gregory of Meet the Press. Gregory even had this to say to Rhee at an education panel in 2010 as she prepared to step down from DC Public Schools:

"Before we begin, we have Chancellor Michelle Rhee here, and I just want to say publicly what I say privately, which is, thank you for what you’ve done, thank you for your commitment, for your leadership, for your stick-to-it-ness and for the result that you have achieved. Washington, D.C. will miss you greatly... But your commitment to kids and to education endures and there will be a great many people lining up to support you and your efforts."

Fortunately, Frontline PBS poked a hole in the generally positive media narrative by raising serious questions about the cheating scandal.

As for Chavis, information about the ridiculous nature of the school that he was running has been available for a long time, but Washington Post education journalist Jay Matthews, as recently as this week, lamented the fact that the "nation's best high school," could be getting shut down. For years, Chavis's network of schools have been unapologetic in their use of humiliating disciplinary tactics, as well as their lack of computers and refusal to hold field trips earlier in the year before testing is finished. Every educator that I know recognizes it as a grim and joyless model of education, as well as one that does not prepare students to be innovative or creative thinkers. And yet, one of the nation's top education journalists chooses to allow himself to be enthralled.

Luckily, I think the public (and school districts) are starting to wake up to what phonies these supposed reformers are. It's becoming evident to more and more people that Rhee fostered a culture of fear and paranoia in DC related to testing that led to cheating. The evidence that she ignored a memo about this cheating casts her role in an even worse light. In Chavis's case, anyone who has bothered to read about his school can see that it was one of America's worst schools, not one of its best. I'm hopeful that even Jay Matthews' positive coverage will not be able to obscure this fact.

On this site, Gary Rubinstein has referred to the ed reform movement as a bubble. The bubble appears to be bursting.

TFA in San Diego: Chatting with Diane Ravitch and the new Executive Director

Emmanuel Parello — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:48:06 +0100

Teach for America is coming to my hometown. Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, they will be bringing in a small group of about 30 corps members to test the waters and see if they can develop a good working presence in San Diego. I was initially wary when I learned the news. San Diego Unified School District has maintained a skeptical stance towards Teach for America for years, and I've applauded the district in which I received my own schooling for not accepting TFA's grandiose claims at face value. Nevertheless, the district's opposition to TFA has finally broken. Much of my skepticism turned to optimism when I had the chance this weekend to meet the new executive director for TFA San Diego. Over breakfast, we discussed my trajectory with TFA and education, and his reasons for wanting to bring TFA to this city. HE is a San Diego native who attended San Diego Unified schools, and knows that teachers have been doing amazing work here for years to help all students achieve academically, long before any suggestion of TFA coming in. Acknowledging that TFA as an organization has made many missteps, he expressed his vision that TFA San Diego would be a partner with the community rather than an outside force claiming to know better how to serve low income students than the teachers and schools already here. He spoke approvingly of Dr. Camika Royal's speech to incoming corps members in Philadelphia where she warned them against thinking of them as outside saviors bringing light to the city. "The light is already here," she said in her speech. "Walk in it." Coming from the 2007 corps, when TFA was at the height of its hubris, hearing this sentiment from a TFA executive director heartened me. Last night I attended a lecture by Diane Ravitch at Kearny High School and took the time during the Q and A to ask her if she felt that the organization was turning a page and showing more humility in general. Although she expressed strong skepticism during her answer, I talked to her for a bit after the lecture and told her about my positive experience with TFA San Diego's executive director and his vision for the corps members coming into San Diego. Cindy Marten, the incoming superintendent of San Diego Unified joined us for the discussion and seconded my positive impression. She shared with me her unease at TFA's role in the education reform movement, but said that she thought the new director was returning to the roots of the organization: recruiting passionate young teachers to work towards educational equity- minus the political baggage of the ed-reform movement. Ravitch seemed pleased about the possibility of a TFA more integrated with the community, but remained unconvinced by what she saw as TFA's central problem: the placement in schools of teachers without sufficient training. I grapple with this issue myself, and know that my own lack of training contributed to many of my first-year failures. Nevertheless, in an environment where all first year teachers face a lack of effective preparation, whether traditionally or alternatively credentialed, I can't oppose the arrival of thirty passionate new advocates for students into San Diego's schools. I want TFA San Diego to have a chance to change the way TFA interacts with the communities it serves. If I can support the incoming corps members in any way, even just by being able to tell them that I went through hard teaching times myself and understand the challenge that they are about to take on, I will. TFA is coming to town and I wish it well.

My Education Career: Discouragement and Optimism

Emmanuel Parello — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:15:06 +0100

The 2012-2013 school year has been a blur; with only forty days left, it still feels like I've barely gotten into it. I've spent the entire year in a substitute role at my charter school, and I'm eager- or maybe desperate- to find a job as a full time teacher, hopefully at the same school. For the last two months of school, I've started teaching a special two hour class on world languages and cultures every Tuesday and Thursday while the teachers attend meetings. Knowing French and a bit of Japanese has given me a good tool to get the kids at my school excited about learning about foreign cultures. As spring moves towards summer, I'll be approaching six years in a profession that followed a dramatically different trajectory than the one I imagined when I began. When I joined the corps in 2007, I expected to stay in the classroom for a long time- at least for six years- before considering moving on to anything else. My unexpectedly rough first year led me to leave TFA before my two year commitment was finished and pursue a traditional credential. Whereas finishing my two years in the corps would have given me the Americorps education grant, I made the decision to take out loans and pay for my traditional credential entirely on my own. I've often looked back to this decision in recent years as the worst decision that I have made since graduating from college. Instead of over $40,000 in loans to pay back, I could have had a teaching credential fully paid off and been able to claim myself as a TFA alum. Sadly, in the current economy, student debt has often become bad debt. The state of my career has often left me feeling highly discouraged. Instead of being six years into the teaching career that I imagined when I applied to TFA in 2006, I am $40,000 in debt with one year of full time teaching in the U.S. under my belt. Nevertheless, the unexpected trajectory of my career took me places and gave me experiences that I never would have had if the first year of TFA had gone well and I had completed the program. As a substitute I got a chance to work with every elementary grade level in dozens of schools. I got to experience traditional student teaching in addition to an alternative credentialing program. Most importantly, if I had been securely locked into a job in 2010 I would never have gone to Japan, which turned into a defining experience for me. Although I continue to seek the opportunity to finish what I began and find a new permanent job as a full-time teacher, circumstances have allowed me to see some fascinating things. In his widely shared commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said that people can't connect the dots of their life forward; only backwards. So I stay optimistic that my unexpected trajectory in education will leave me with a trail of dots that will all make sense in retrospect some day. Until then, I certainly can't complain about the delighted audience of elementary kids that I have for my lessons on Japan and France. I've allowed myself to fall into unhappiness in the past, but there are so many good things to savor.