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Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Sun Archives
- Nevada out of ‘race’ for innovation funding (11-14-2009)
- For shot at a jackpot, state must ante up, alter law (10-25-2009)
The state teachers union has done an about-face and is working with legislators to change a state law that prevents test scores from being used to evaluate teacher performance.
The Nevada State Education Association is in talks with Democratic lawmakers to change the 2003 law. The state was unable to apply this month for a share of $4.3 billion in federal “Race to the Top” money in part because Nevada law does not allow officials to draw a nexus between teacher performance and student test scores.
The union has long resisted tying teacher evaluations to test scores. Union representatives this year argued that changing the law to pursue the federal money would further erode the state’s control of its education system.
But it appears the union has bowed to a bipartisan political shift toward linking testing and teacher evaluation — President Barack Obama and his Democratic education secretary have emphasized the need to use test scores in measuring teachers.
“I’m a realist. The law is going to change — Democrats and Republicans are willing to change the law,” said Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association. “We can be proactive, have an impact on the legislation. Or we can sit back and say, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ ”
He added: “It’s unfortunate that the Obama administration is going further with No Child Left Behind, and tying money and grants to school districts on this criteria. It’s part of a federal takeover of our schools.”
NSEA President Lynn Warne acknowledged that the changing political landscape contributed to the union’s decision to support the law change. Also, she said, federal officials recently clarified their guidelines, and test scores will not be the sole factor in evaluating teachers.
“It’s important for us to look at the changing political landscape, and apply for Race to the Top money,” Warne said.
As recently as last month, teachers union representatives opposed efforts to change state law to qualify for the federal funding. Warne told the Reno Gazette-Journal in October that the money available to Nevada “isn’t a poke in the eye, but it is not going to help what ails Nevada schools.” The real problem, she said, is that the state chronically underfunds education.
An undated article on the state teachers union Web site boasted that the organization has fought to prevent test scores from being used in teacher evaluations for “more than 20 years.” Test scores vary for a variety of reasons, including parent involvement and nutrition, the article stated. “Holding a teacher’s evaluation hostage, on a matter that they cannot completely control, is not only unfair but it’s not the proper way to evaluate whether a teacher is effective at what they do,” the article said.
The article argued that education is a state, not federal, issue and dismissed the amount of federal money available to Nevada, saying the $20 million the state could receive in the federal “Race to the Top” competition would equal less than 1 percent of school funding in the state.
(The U.S. Education Department, however, estimated Nevada would have been eligible for $60 million to $175 million in the first round of grants.)
Warne and Murillo both said the proposed legislative changes would leave the ultimate decision with local school boards when they negotiate contracts with county teachers associations. It would also make clear that test scores couldn’t be used as the sole criteria used to evaluate teachers.
Gov. Jim Gibbons has said that if a special session of the Legislature is needed, he would propose changing state law so Nevada could qualify for future rounds of Race to the Top funding. He added, however, that he wouldn’t call a special session just to deal with the education issue.
Whether a special session is needed because of the state budget crisis depends, in large part, on tax receipts the state will tally this month. Democratic and Republican legislators have been adamant that the state can limp along until early 2011, when the Legislature is next scheduled to meet, but the Gibbons administration has taken a more circumspect position on whether a special session will be necessary for financial reasons.
Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, D-Reno, said lawmakers and the teachers union are “in the phase where language is starting to be floated out there.
“We don’t even know if there’s going to be a special session,” she said. “But it makes sense that we’re talking about language for the next regular session.”
When the grants were announced this year, Nevada was one of four states that prohibited test scores from being used to evaluate teachers. Now, Smith and Warne said, we’re the only state, a reflection of the fact that the Nevada Legislature meets only every other year and wasn’t available to make the change.
Smith said other attempts at education reform have been abandoned because of the state’s budget crisis. A law passed in 2007 allowed teacher bonuses to be tied to higher test scores, but money earmarked for that was quickly lost during one of the early rounds of budget cuts.
Warne pointed to that legislation to counter the criticism that the teachers union is an impediment to reform.
“It makes better press to say the teachers union is a guardian of the status quo,” she said. “We have had legislators introduce on our behalf alternative compensation plans. We are reformists. We are agents of change.”
Murillo said: “We want members to be proactive, and have an impact on what reform looks like. We don’t want teachers thrown under the bus. We don’t want teachers blamed for everything that’s going wrong.”
Sun reporter Emily Richmond contributed to this story.
So it really is only about the money
TIME FOR THIS TEACHER TO APPLY IN GREEN VALLEY. IF THIS IS WHAT THEY'RE GOING TO DO, THEN LET THE GHETTO TEACH ITSELF.
Scratch that. Forget Green Valley. Time to get out of the classroom altogether, and grab some of the real funds, which will go middle management: bean counters.
This is really bad news and no one seems to really care (except teachers).
Tying teacher pay to test scores may seem like a reasonable thing to do, but once you talk to a current educator about the state of the education system you'll quickly realize that it is the worst possible measure of teacher performance. Teachers that decide to stay in the classroom will be forced to teach to an arbitrary test. Say goodbye to any critical thinking skills. The great majority care only about their child's education as far as getting them to the next grade. Very few actually spend time with their children outside the classroom going over homework. In fact, most parents complain about their children having homework... but you're going to tie that child's performance to teacher pay?
The teachers in this state are nothing but an arm of the Democrat Party. That's why I vote NO on every bond issue that relates to education and send my children to private school.
The fair way to grade teachers is called "value added assessment"
Students are compared to their own past scores rather than to other students or to some preset benchmark. Each individual student has their own trendline predicting future performance based on past results. Teachers with classrooms full of students who are at or above the trendline are doing a good job.
This method does not penalize teachers for having underachieving students, minority students, low-income students, mentally handicapped students or those students with parents who don't care. Value added assessment is the fairest way to evaluate teachers currently divised.
http://npri.org/publications/its-time-to...
This move is exactly what the RJ has been waiting for for decades. Now, with this new move to evaluate teachers on the basis of student academic scores you will see a real flood of retired professors from colleges and universities clammering for jobs here. Yeah...like that is gong to happen...
With this move there will begin to be a mass exit of quality teachers from education. What the RJ has dreamed of for decades will be the death of any quality in education in the CCSD within a very short while. Teachers will clammer to teach to the test, administrators will use every move possible to encourage that even to the point to cheating on standardized exams by letting copies of state exams out for use in the classroom. That has happened before and it will happen again in this district.
Linking student scores to teacher performance is not necessarily a bad or good thing -- it depends on what the linkages are. Annual student testing that focuses on student gains would be a useful indicator for student, teacher, school, and system performance. A potential underperformer could be identified and further assessed, which could then lead to corrective action by the appropriate stakeholders. Frankly, I think individual teachers have little to fear -- it's the CCSD as a whole that will probably be found to be underperforming (when cost-effectiveness is measured) when compared to other school districts and other options (private, charter, magnet).
Stop the scams, criminalize public school funding.
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Maybe it's time to look at how we teach the children. Step out of the box and become more innovative.
An idea, co-mingle first and second graders or first and fifth graders, change up the mix. Put some responsibility on the children to move forward in their studies. They have x amount to accomplish in the classroom this week and can do it in any order they choose, but they have to complete those x assignments. The reward being that they move on to the next set of assignments, the correction being that they have to repeat the assignments they didn't master. A little competition between the children to keep up with each other isn't necessarily a bad thing. Let the children assist each other; in fact encourage the older children to assist the younger children.
The undisciplined children are a difficult issue. The parents of these children have a moral and legal responsibility to insure their children's social behavior. It should not be the school district or the teacher's responsibility to raise your child. Just as it is mandated that every student receive an education, it should be mandated there should be progressive disciplinary action including the parents. If your child gets a weeks detention maybe you should sit there with your child for that week, find out how you can be part of the solution.
I will never forget the day my second grader learned that he didn't have to do what his teacher told him to do. My son and I walked straight up the middle of the classroom and I informed the teacher in front of him and his classmates that she had my permission to swat my son's backside the next time he acted up in class. It never became necessary, just the knowledge that she had my permission was enough.
Lets put our collective minds to work to find an affordable way to teach our youth, that elevates their academic achievements. You can find a hundred reasons why the above doesn't work, lets find a hundred ways to make something work.
I taught public high school for 33 years until I retired at the end of May of this year. I didn't choose the profession to become rich because I knew that I wouldn't. I chose it because I have always had a genuine interest in helping young people reach their potential. IMHO, that was my main goal for staying in the classroom as long as I did.
I don't think that teacher evaluations should be based solely on test scores because, as has been previously stated, there are many reasons why some students have problems passing the state-mandated tests, not all of them related to whether the teacher is trying to the best of his/her ability to help students learn. During my years in the classroom, I saw that many students entered high school in 9th grade who lacked basic reading skills, and since I taught U.S. History, it was a real problem for me. It is very difficult to get a high school student reading at a 5th grade level to read and understand any subject, even math. I made repeated pleas to the administration to provide some type of remediation for these students instead of putting all of the responsibility on the teachers for these kids' education, but all I got were excuses and more excuses.
Since NCLB, the systems and administrators are focused on test scores. Forget about whether the students can function as productive members of society after graduation just as long as they pass the tests. The public wouldn't believe how much "creative math" goes into data the systems report to the state BOEs. Another thing the public doesn't grasp is that teachers don't have a whole lot of control over decisions that are made about how subjects are taught. I don't know about Nevada, but here in GA everything every teacher teaches comes from the legislature and the state BOE. Teachers have little flexibility in how they teach the standards. I had a notebook full of performance standards I had to teach for each of my classes, with little time for slowing the process for my students who needed extra attention. We asked repeatedly that U.S. History be taught as a two year course so that students could have a better chance at mastering the material, and we were repeatedly denied.
I don't know the solution to the problems, but if I could operate my own school, I would administer diagnostic tests in reading, writing, and math, evaluate test results and remediate the students needing help while keeping them on track with their other subjects. It might add an extra class period to their daily schedule, but hopefully, they'd be better students by the time they graduated from high school. States and school systems will have to begin addressing these issues if real academic progress is to be made.
"If your child gets a weeks detention maybe you should sit there with your child for that week, find out how you can be part of the solution."
ECM, perhaps you aren't aware but we live in America and its not an authoritarian country yet. What a horrific idea you've shared.
Patrick R Gibbons, I completely understand your aversion, I feel the same way. What would be your solution for the parents that are truly not interested in raising their children and think it's ok to dump that responsibility on the schools and teachers?
Good schools figure out a way to get parents involved. Some private schools and charter schools, for example have parents sign contracts agreeing to stay involved with their child's homework or school activities. Some private schools even reduce tuition for parents who volunteer their time at the school. Most importantly, private and charter schools are schools of choice -- the parents have chosen to send their kids to these schools. We need more charters and an open enrollment system for one thing. Vouchers and tax credits would be a nice second step. Decentralizing the school district and giving budgetary and curriculum control back to the local school would help the public schools stay competitive with the private schools.
Whatever the answer, you can't expect parents to get involved if you don't try anything and don't even let them decide where/who/how their child is educated.
Those are all excellent points and suggestions. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get this ball rolling?
NPRI, BEACON (Business Education Alliance for the Children of Nevada) and the Public Education Foundation are all very supportive of school decentralization (moving dollars and decision making down to the school level). I don't think there is much talk about open enrollment but it may become a part of Clark County's decentralization program in the future. (As you probably know, open enrollment means parents get to choose whatever public school they want their child to attend). NPRI, the Alliance for School Choice and Democrats for Education Reform are groups supportive of vouchers/scholarships/and tuition tax credits. (If you want public schools to be able to compete against private schools, you need to do school decentralization so the local schools can operate almost like independent franchises providing innovative services for their unique students).
Look like all the teachers will end up in private schools or the admins will kick every last "sleeping in class kid" out on their ear. More non-educated workforce on the street applying for Walmart openings.
You teacher haters crack me up.
Dumbest town in America, because people seem to want it that way. How absolutely terrible for the kids.
By "dumbest" I mean "most undereducated."
For the sake of equity of teacher evaluations, does this mean that the state or district will create proficiency type tests for every grade and subject? If not, this really only affects 8th grade English and math teachers, 10th grade English, science, and math teachers, 11th grade English teachers, and certain grades in elementary. What about the grades and subjects that are not tested? Should they also be held accountable in a similar way for what they are teaching? How can we measure this in gym, art, history, music, and all other electives? How can this be measured in grades that don't get tested? We already have a hard enough time keeping science and math teachers, and yet they might get evaluated under a different set of standards than other teachers that make the same pay. I'm just saying...
In good schools, parents are already involved. In not-so good schools, guess what? Nobody shows up at Parent night except one drunk grandpa. Putting the burden on schools to dress, feed, educate, acculturate, guide, entertain and prepare for satisfying worklife skills seems a bit Nevada to me. Mom's off whorin and dad's in jail.
When parents pay for the education, things change a bit. Here in Nevada our gambling, booze and sex-slave addicts cover most of our bills. We don't contribute much and consequently don't give a hoot how well the kids do. Just as our noble governor and his wealthy contributors want, we have lots of hard-body babes to work in the casinos, bars and brothels to serve up his friends and donors.
Why not get the federal money, fudge on the firing of teachers for lousy performances by their kids, and just kick the can of worms down the road a ways? You're not going to have any effect on how well those poor kids do in their lives. 'In loco parentis' is a lie. When students arrive at school, they are either ready or not. If they're not ready to get learning, you're wasting everyone's time. Look at the waste Bush cooked up w/ NCLB. Doing that again makes pretty good sense, huh?
A 2.0 grade point average will get you on the honor roll in this state. WTF