- Closer Look Puts D.C. NAEP Math Scores in Context
- D.C. Educators Rated ‘Effective’ Can Still Lose Jobs
- Halaska & Snyder: Confused Over ‘Accountability’ and ‘Flexibility’
- Stay Informed
Closer Look Puts D.C. NAEP Math Scores in Context
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 2, 2011
District officials hailed the solid gains in math achievement by public and public charter students on the 2011 NAEP scores released Tuesday. They show D.C. among just four jurisdictions — along with Hawaii, New Mexico and Rhode Island--that saw increases in both 4th and 8th grade math since 2009.
But other numbers place the math results in a more sobering context. D.C. also has, by a wide margin, the nation’s highest proportion of 4th and 8th graders in the “below basic” category--and the lowest in proficient/advanced. Even allowing for the apples-to-oranges issue (comparing D.C., a city-state, to other states) the numbers are disturbing.
Forty percent of fourth graders are below basic, far behind Mississippi (28 percent) Louisiana (27 percent) California (26 percent) and Alabama (25 percent). Just 21 percent are proficient/advanced, again trailing Mississippi (25), Louisiana (26) and Alabama (28)
The numbers are worse in 8th grade with 52 percent below basic, again trailing Mississippi (42) Alabama (40) and Louisiana (37). The District is dead last in proficient/advanced (17 percent).
Reading (flagged by D.C. State Board of Education member Mary Lord) is the same story: 56 percent of fourth graders below basic. States with the next highest proportions are New Mexico (47) Mississippi and Louisiana (45) and California and Alaska (44). D.C. is again at the bottom in proficient/advanced (19 percent). Forty-nine percent of 8th graders read below basic, trailing Mississippi (35), Louisiana (34) New Mexico and West Virginia (32) and Alabama (31). Sixteen percent of D.C. 8th graders are proficient/advanced in reading..
Lord also pointed out that D.C. is one of seven states where the reading gap between low-and high-income students has actually widened since 2003, along with Colorado, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.
D.C. Educators Rated ‘Effective’ Can Still Lose Jobs
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 2, 2011
In 11 years as a counselor at Malcolm X Elementary in Southeast Washington, Jacqueline Sutton mediated disputes, visited students’ homes, alerted authorities to possible child abuse and kept food in her office for kids who came to school weeping sometimes because they were so hungry.
Two years in a row, she earned “effective” ratings on new evaluations, designed to identify high-performing educators and remove weak ones. But Sutton is now unemployed — despite twice meeting or exceeding standards the District says are more rigorous than ever.
“My principal sat me down and said it was out of his hands,” said Sutton, a single mother in her mid-50s who lost her home and health insurance along with her $77,000-a-year job.
Headlines about D.C. school reform efforts have often involved the firing of teachers who scored poorly on the IMPACT evaluations — about 300 in the past two years. But the District has also shed 145 teachers, including counselors, deemed effective or even highly effective. This layoff method is known in the bureaucracy as “excessing.”
Reasons for excessing vary from school to school, with principals making the final call. They include budget cuts, rising teacher salaries, enrollment declines, changes in academic programs and staff overhauls mandated under federal law.
About 70 percent of the 522 teachers excessed since 2010 found other jobs in the system, school officials report. Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said schools can ill afford to lose any effective educators. He contends that a push for younger, lower-cost hires — some from programs such as Teach for America and D.C. Teaching Fellows — has wrongfully forced out seasoned practitioners.
“D.C. public schools ought not be firing effective and highly effective teachers,” Saunders said. He has filed a grievance on behalf of Sutton and 20 other educators who scored well on IMPACT twice but lost their jobs anyway.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said that while good evaluations are important, many of those let go held specialized positions for which there is less demand.
“The question is not solely about effectiveness,” Henderson said. “If we don’t have specific programs, even for effective teachers, should we employ people we don’t have an express need for?”
Saunders said Henderson’s position would be understandable if the District were not hiring hundreds of new teachers every spring and summer, many of them in fields where the excessed teachers worked. They include math, reading and other core subjects. Payroll records show that the city hires between 300 and 400 new teachers on average each year, many of them younger and less costly than the veterans let go.
A recent independent study showed that the proportion of first- and second-year teachers has grown sharply in five years, especially in high-poverty communities east of the Anacostia River.
Patricia Hoyle earned an “effective” rating in 2010 as an English teacher at one of the city’s most challenging schools, Luke C. Moore Academy, a Northeast D.C. high school where many students have dropped out elsewhere or been incarcerated.
“You meet the students where they are,” said Hoyle, who taught for 30 years at the now-closed M.M. Washington Career High School and the D.C. Street Academy, which later became Luke C. Moore.
Hoyle’s evaluation shows top ratings for her ability to “respond to student understandings” and “provide students multiple ways to engage with content.” But in summer 2010, she was excessed. Luke C. Moore had failed for five years to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law and was revamping its staff under a new principal. (It made AYP this year.)
Hoyle, who is 63 and earned $98,000 a year, said the teachers targeted for cuts were older and made top salaries. Base pay for first-year D.C. teachers ranges from $49,000 to $57,000 a year. When she later attended a meeting of excessed educators citywide, she said “it looked like an AARP meeting.”
Excessing was a major issue in the last teacher contract talks. Before the pact concluded in 2010, excessed teachers were guaranteed other jobs, even if it meant “bumping” less senior educators. Principals had limited control over teacher hiring. As a result, ineffective teachers were often shuffled from one school to another in what has been called “the dance of the lemons.”
Then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee successfully pressed for provisions that gave excessed teachers with good evaluations the option of a $25,000 buyout or an additional year on the payroll to find another permanent placement — but this time the principals had to agree.
Sutton and Hoyle opted to remain for a year in temporary assignments. In the last school year they again received effective ratings — Sutton at Hendley Elementary and Hoyle at Anacostia High. They also interviewed at other schools, but found nothing. There were job fairs sponsored by the District, but again, they were also attended by “hordes of new teachers” searching for work, Hoyle said.
“Could it be I’m just a terrible interviewer?” she asked over coffee one morning last week. She is a quiet, understated woman, who could easily come across in a job interview as low-energy. Saunders said he believes that teachers such as Hoyle should have gotten coaching from the District on how to present themselves.
Sutton is searching in charter schools and private counseling and hopes to land something soon. She said the constant churn of D.C. teachers — in the name of improving instruction — has had a toll.
“Children look for something in their lives to be consistent,” she said. Without that, she said, “You’re setting kids up.”
Halaska & Snyder: Confused Over ‘Accountability’ and ‘Flexibility’
The Washington Times
By Terrell Halaska and Martha Snyder
October 2, 2011
Accountability. Everyone is for it. It’s by far the most popular word used in reference to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization discussions this week and state efforts this month to get federal waivers to avoid NCLB sanctions for missing proficiency targets in reading and math.
As Inigo Montoya, a character in the endearing book and movie “The Princess Bride,” counsels his friend Vizzini, who keeps blurting “inconceivable”: “You keep repeating that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Merriam Webster defines “accountability” as an “obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.”
Even with its limitations, NCLB raised expectations for what every child could learn and held adults responsible for each child’s achievement - no excuses. For the first time in our history, we refused to mask shameful achievement gaps with aggregate student performance data. Instead, student progress was monitored according to race, income, special needs and English-language learners. It was a profound shift that focused America’s responsibility to educate every child no matter what his background. That is accountability.
The law set clear targets, which translate into numbers of children who are being educated adequately. School districts organized staffing, curriculum and support systems to meet the targets. School leaders, teachers, parents and the public are made aware when a school fails to meet them. This is accountability and should lead to productive discussions about why and what can be done to improve learning.
Through the implementation of NCLB, we’ve learned much about what works and what doesn’t. For example, not all schools that “need improvement” are the same, and those schools do not benefit from the same interventions. A more discerning approach is needed and can be guided by the unprecedented level of performance information NCLB provides. These are lessons that can improve accountability.
Proposals to reauthorize NCLB approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Department of Education’s plan to give waivers from current law introduce another favorite word in education land: “flexibility.” It’s useful to ask whether accountability and flexibility can and should coexist. It’s even more useful to ask who is being served by flexibility and accountability proposals - systems or students?
Congressional proposals and waivers are designed to allow states more flexibility in turning around low-performing schools. However, in today’s tough budget climate, are states and the federal government up to the task of developing and monitoring what amounts to 52 separate new accountability systems? We’re already two years into the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) program, which supports innovative efforts to improve student and teacher performance. Yet none of the 12 RTTT federal grant winners is meeting the deadlines established in those grants. More than 40 states adopted Common Core standards to help ensure that students are learning relevant, challenging material that prepares them for success. But only about half of the states are making any kind of meaningful progress in implementing the standards.
With so many schools and states struggling to meet current standards, new requirements would send them scrambling to set new targets all over again. Recent developments in states provide a cautionary tale about the importance of having a clear understanding of student performance and holding schools accountable for how well they are educating all of their students.
While New York recently increased its college-ready standard, a study revealed that too few graduates are prepared for college. The state’s graduation rate improved to 73.4 percent, but the college-ready rate, determined by those who graduate and achieve a certain score on the state’s Regents exam, is just 37 percent. Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch had it right when she said, “High school graduation should mean more than high school completion.” While New York clearly has some work to do, at least it has the courage to measure honestly how students are doing. Now the state is in a far better position to help students prepare for success in college and beyond. That is accountability in service of students.
In California, Gov. Jerry Brown inexplicably vetoed legislation designed to expand the state’s accountability system to include multiple indicators of student achievement with just 40 percent of the score based on test results. Other measures would have included dropout rates and a demonstration of a school’s ability to provide a college-ready curriculum. This is neither accountability nor flexibility.
Setting high expectations and holding our students and schools to them is vital to ensuring the kind of education our young people deserve and our economy demands. To do that, we must know how well all of our students are performing and which teachers are doing a good job and which ones are not. We must provide the right balance of flexibility and support for schools that need help but also have consequences for those that aren’t getting the job done. Then we will be truly accountable in meeting our obligation to educate all of America’s students.
Terrell Halaska is a founding partner of HCM Strategists and former assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration. Martha Snyder, former associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Bush administration, is an associate at HCM.
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