The Education Wonks
100%? Airline pilot? =)
"I could not imagine a physician who would need to save 100% of his or her patients from death in order to avoid being labeled an "underperforming" physician."
That's a false analogy. The correct analogy would be a physician most of whose patients died -- and he would be out of business from malpractice lawsuits. This would correspond to all those teachers in California who had given passing grades to their students who could not pass the graduation exam.
The analogy, then, supports the original position.
Uh, how about the fact that teachers are promoted ENTIRELY based on tenure and not based on performance? That they fervently defend their work privileges through a union? That they have strict requirements regarding how many hours they work? That they must be paid to undertake additional training as opposed to doing it as part of their own professional development? And that they cannot be fired without an act of God?
Teachers who whine about teaching not being a profession need to look at their own behavior and that of their unions before pointing the finger elsewhere.
When comparing teaching to other occupations, one has to remember that no law compells anyone to ride on an airliner, seek medical treatment (unless they have a contagious disease or dangerous mental illness), or hire legal counsel. As an occupation, teaching is much like law enforcement in that teachers will have much greater measurable success in geographic areas that are economically affluent and have fewer social pathologies at work. Also, like law enforcement, teachers often have to deal with other people (the students; yeah they're people too) that are not receptive, or outright hostile to what they are offering in terms of a service. Teaching is not a real profession because the "experts" in our field (central office hacks, ivory tower blow hards, and other useless bureaucrats) no longer actually practice the discipline of teaching children in a classroom. Also, as a teacher who has always worked below the Mason-Dixon line in a "right to work" state with no collective bargaining, unions don't have a GD thing to do with me or my fellow Southerners.
Now let's examine the 100% proficiency meme.
1. As I've often pointed out, 1% of students are exempt from taking the standard test. This should cover most, if not all, students with true cognitive impairments, as opposed to the phony "learning disabilities" impairments taht are largely caused by bad teaching practices.
2. Proficiency in most states does not mean "at grade level." It typically means far below grade level. For example, Broookings recently analyzed the 8th grade math NAEP and found that almost all the questions contained within were at a first to fifth grade level and almost never dealt with fractions or decimals. Even by this pathetic standard, something like 2/3 are not proficient. More disturbingly, the state tests set the cut points much lower that the NAEP on tests of similar difficulty.
3. The teacher is not labeled as unerperforming when students are proficient, the school is. To the extent that the school is trying to pawn the underperformance off on the teachers is not a reflection on NCLB.
I don't understand why teachers keep using doctors as their benchmark for a professional. The requirements for both education and experience are very different for the two jobs. Lawyer would be a better comparison and accountant or engineer would be closer yet.
(Although, from what I saw when I was in college, a degree in teacher was a lot easier to get than a degree in engineering or accounting.)
As for professionals not being rated on outcomes...
Lawyers are tracked by hours billed and courtroom success. A lawyer that consistently looses cases or fails to bill the minimum hours will be fired.
Engineers are tracked by project cost, timing and warranty cost after completion. For fields that involve public safety 100% safe is expected. Or people get sued and fired. Mistakes do happen but it’s not uncommon to see someone fired for them.
Accountants are tracked by billable hours and will be fired if their clients aren't happy with the results.
Managers are scored by things like meeting the budget, not working unscheduled overtime and achieving a particular production goal. A manager that only meets the minimum target is unlikely to be promoted of given a large raise.
I do agree that there are a lot of factors that teachers can’t control. Many of them are so important that there’s reasonably no way for the teacher to overcome them. (a students who’s parents are drug users for instance.) But voters can’t do anything about that. So they focus on what they can do something about, public schools.
The 100% solution is foolish. And I think that is well understood by classroom teachers. The politicans will come to see it too. The public knew all along that it couldn't be done.
But, as usual, the topic of the posting is pretty much ignored in the comments. Educators seldom agree on anything about process.
Without process can the individual teacher act as a professional in any meaningful sense?
The word 'professional' may be the problem. I thought the article caught the gist of a professional - they have process, realize they must constant improve, that failures are certain despite any amount of training and judgement, and that the world does not exist to promote their success.
Unfortunately, this being called a "professional" is an emotionally charged topic for many of us teachers. It has nothing to do with doctors, lawyers or even pilots, but with the attitudes of the other people we come into contact with every day. Most of us work hard for our students and it is disheartening when someone implies that we're only teaching because we couldn't get "real" jobs. It's hard to not take it personally when friends say you shouldn't "whine" about how little money you make because you get "the whole summer off" (even though many of us use the time for professional activities).
As for education being an easy major, that may be true at some universities, but graduating summa cum laude with a major in the subject I teach was not easy at all. And the response from most people when they find out that a teacher graduated with honors from a prestigious university is "why is he/she teaching?".
I don't think other countries have this problem. The general assumption overseas seems to be that a person who teaches must be well-educated and intelligent. But here in the USA, a person who teaches must do so because he/she wants to have summer off?
A couple of comments on these postings:
1) KDeRosa's comment that only 1% of potential standards test takers have a "real" disability is laughable. KD, look at IQ chart of the general population. Everybody below 60 IQ points is gonna fail most, if not all, of the tests. Those below 80 IQ points are going to struggle, no matter how well they have been prepared. If they don't, then there is something wrong with the tests themselves. I have taught many SPED and "regular" students who were over the 1% cut off and had taken over 30 standardized tests without scoring proficient on ONE of them. Yet they were made to take and fail tests again and again. Talk about a self esteem booster! I would bet that over 5% of the kids out there are failing standards tests simply because they won't wear their glasses to school. When teachers are allowed to staple spectacles to students' heads, you let me know.
2)If we are to be judged as professionals by our outputs, let's let the public know what the inputs are for each individual school as well. Anytime standards test scores are released, publish the average Woodcock-Johnson IQ score for the students at that institution, as well as the average family income. Lets quit making believe, for political reasons, that all students have the same innate abilities. Telling the truth should be the basis of any professional standard (except maybe for lawyers).
Everybody below 60 IQ points is gonna fail most, if not all, of the tests.
That's right. An IQ of 60 represents about 0.4% of the population. They are permitted to take an alternative assessment consistent with their needs under NCLB. An IQ of 80 represents about 9% of the population,, Yes, many of these students will struggle to learn, but that is not the same question as being able to pass a test that tests material 1-5 years below grade level as the state tests do.
I have taught many SPED and "regular" students who were over the 1% cut off and had taken over 30 standardized tests without scoring proficient on ONE of them.
Gee, you don't think bad teaching had anything to do with that do you? note the irony of this statement and the act that this post deals with teacher professionalism.
When teachers are allowed to staple spectacles to students' heads, you let me know.
When you find some hard data to support your proposition, you let me know.
Lets quit making believe, for political reasons, that all students have the same innate abilities.
NCLB requires students to exceed set minimum cut score. It's understood that the lower performers might be just capable of meeting this minimum. It's also understood that higher performing students will easily exceed the minimum. Where's the problem.
24% of students in my district receive special education services. A large part of their IEPs and 504s is being excused from at least 30-50% of the practice the other students require. In many cases the percentage of accuracy these students are to attain has remained the same for year after year.
Then we wonder why this subgroup has difficulty reaching proficiency? And some of my students will be out in the real world within a year. No one seems to wonder how they will manage in a world without an IEP.
My husband works in a manufacturing plant. They start with raw materials. Raw materials that they can assume are very similar. And yet, they don't expect all the widgets to be exactly the same. There is some variation and some mistake pieces.
But we work in a school. We start with 5 year old materials. Materials that have been molded and shaped by very different parents. All of our materials contain the same basic bits, but put together in different ways. All of these individual pieces are put through similar, but not the same processes (ie experiences) throughout their time at school. And yet, we are expected to make them all come out nearly the same.
100% perfection?
Getting students to pass a test that any kid who has actually mastered grade-level material could have aced a year ago does not equal perfection.
And yet, we are expected to make them all come out nearly the same.
No, you are expected to get each past some very low set minimum threshhold. The distribution will be normally distributed as it always is.
Ms. Cornelius -- Five years ago our district had 19% SPED students. The number has been reduced to 13.5%. (Sorry I don't have the breakout between GATE, true special ed and learners who just cannot read, etc.) Two or three years ago our district combined GenED and SPED teachers, they gave the SPED students modified textbooks that covered the material GenED students covered. They started teaching the kids the material. Guess what? These kids started passing the test. Would you believe they had not been taught more than life skills to this point?
Profiency is the bare minimum a child needs to pass the test. To whomever said it thanks for confirming being proficient does not mean you are at grade level. The goal should be to get the kids to advanced. I hope and pray "advanced" means grade level or better. Does anyone know?
I think the problem that arises, and is frequently ignored, is the stubbornnes of the wordlview of the students themselves. Having been raised, in many cases, to believe less in the importance of education and more in the importance of their basketball skills, many of these students are less than willing to respond to the best of teaching. These students are the ones that consistently refuse to do schoolwork, sleep in class or cause disruptions.
Explain to me how other professionals, who have the benefit of dealing with their cases individually instead of 25 at ONCE, would address those students who will not respond now matter how good the educational quality is?
Explain to me how, if I get a student in 10th grade who begins my class on a 6th grade level is supposed to attain 11th grade level status 100% of the time, especially when they have given up on themselves?
While I absolutely agree that the MAJORITY should be passing the standardized tests, 100% is impossible. There has to be a margin for failure. Keeping in mind that these are kids, who will not always make the wisest choices when it comes to education.
As usual KDeRosa you spout a lot of rhetoric with no facts to back it up.
#1: As I've often pointed out, 1% of students are exempt from taking the standard test.
Where does this magical 1% figure come from? Here in Texas, 12% of the population is labeled, using federal guidelines, as having some kind of learning disability.
#2: Proficiency in most states does not mean "at grade level." It typically means far below grade level. For example, Broookings recently analyzed the 8th grade math NAEP and found that almost all the questions contained within were at a first to fifth grade level and almost never dealt with fractions or decimals.
Have you forgotten the 4th grade reading samples from NAEP on the 8th grade reading level? For anyone who is interested in seeing the facts you can go to the NAEP website, find the reading passage on the Mir space station, copy and paste it into word, and have it give you a grade level equivalent score. KDeRosa will claim that the test is invalid of course, based on his years of reading propaganda published on the DI site and the Fordham Foundations site. Anyone wishing to do so can find the instructions here If I remember correctly, 6 of the 8 reading samples for 4th graders were above a 6th grade reading level.
#3: 3. The teacher is not labeled as unerperforming when students are proficient, the school is.
Oh, I supposed one of the steps outlined in NCLB is NOT removal of the staff?
MiT,
1. I've pointed this out to you before in a jennyD comment thread. It comes from the special education law that allows for up to 1% to take an alternate assessments. Use your google skills. And labeling 12% as disabled does not make it so. It's that willingness to label so many normal kids as disabled that has gotten you saddled with the overly stringent 1% cut-off.
2. The results of a simple test that gives a rough and not always accurate estimate of reading level doesn't tell us much about the difficulty of the reading comprehension questions that go along with the passage. When you can do an analysis as thorough as Brookings, you let us know.
3. One possible step for turning around a failed school among many.
KDerosa,
The only place the Fleisch-Kinkcaid test is rough and simple is in your mind.
As for the special ed. students, remember it is federal law that stipulates the conditions.
My mind and in the minds of your handlers at the IRA as well:
The Delegates Assembly of the International Reading Association resolved against using grade-level scores in 1981. And the (U.S.) National Council of Teachers of English advise against uncritical use of readability formulas in assessing text for school use. After 1981, the College Entrance Examination Board decided not to use grade-level measures to ascertain reading abilities of college applicants.
In recent years, researchers have emphasized that readability tests can only measure the surface characteristics of text. Qualitative factors like vocabulary difficulty, composition, sentence structure, concreteness and abstractness, obscurity and incoherence can not be measured mathematically.
See All About Readability
And, it is federal law that stipulates the alternate assessments as well.
Part of the difficulty, as I see it, is in defining what exactly "on grade level" means. If the NAEP disagrees with the Fleisch-Kincaide disagrees with the Brooking Institute disagrees with the IRA disagrees with the level on Guided Reading, who do I as a teacher deem right in the discussion?
I think of leveling books. On the DRA level 28 is the end of 2nd grade, but in Reading Recovery that's early 5th. The NAEP apparently thought the Mir question was 4th grade material, someone else says it isn't--who's right?
And Ken, this one doesn't pass the sniff test:
The teacher is not labeled as unerperforming when students are proficient, the school is.
How would you react if the government deemed D-Ed Reckoning a failed website? How is any teacher supposed to react to being labeled a part of a failing school, besides taking that failure personally? That's not to say that they shouldn't--but I will argue the idea that they wouldn't.
I've just to say thanks for the discussion on this question. Reading the different opinions has been much more informative than anything reported by the press on NCLB standards.
BTW: I believe teaching should be accorded the respect that other professions receive and that's where I see a bit of a breakdown. The label isn't as important as the actual respect given teachers as a group.
Also I think it's too easy to blame teachers when there are so many variables in play, and it seems to me that the definition of 'success' in terms of teaching is rather vague to start. What is the desired outcome? Will 99% of children reaching arbitrary proficiency that (as one commenter noted) is already below grade level really make a difference?
I meant, "I'd just like to say thanks...".
One way is to use the methodology that the Brookings Institute used. They determined when each NAEP question was supposed to be taught in math and used that as the basis. Not sure how well that would work in reading.
How would you react if the government deemed D-Ed Reckoning a failed website?
If I took funding from the Feds and then failed to meet the strings they attached to those funds, I'd have no one to blame but myself.
Teachers are another matter. Administrators run schools, not teachers. Teachers do what they are told or are permitted to do. If the school fails, it is the administrators fault, not the teachers.
Thanks, Elizabeth. I would love to visit a school where the number of special ed students is reduced.
And I must point out that in an appalling number of the cases, the PARENTS have demanded that their children receive an IEP or 504, so that they have an easier time at home or so that their kids will get longer on standardized tests. It has not been the teachers. I do not believe that 20% (or more) of the population suffers from a learning disablity. I also do not think that most of these kids should be drugged-- many times merely to make them more manageable. Drugs do not solve problems-- they usually merely mask them.
(Ooooh, out on a limb on that one....)
Hooo boy. Just a few ideas here. True professions share a few defining characteristics: Those in the profession set the entrance requirements; those in the profession set the rate of compensation; those in the profession police the profession. While legislators often impose some regulation on professions, keep in mind that a great many legislators are lawyers, whose legislative efforts do not in any way hinder their kind.
By these measures, teachers will never be a profession. They can't set their entrance requirements, compensation or even police themselves. In many states, they have little more input into their "profession" and little more job security than those whose professional vocabularly consists largely of "you want fries with that?" The only reason anyone listens to them is because deep down, most of the public understand their sacrifices and understands that if the public affords them no respect and moral authority, we're all in trouble. Unfortunately, in most places, it doesn't go much beyond that.
Now, as to NCLB and 1%, ad nauseum. The true believers thinking goes something like this: A single test score on a high stakes test is all we need to know to determine the worthiness of any student to advance in grade or graduate from high school. The entity most qualified to determine the worthiness of any student to advance in grace or graduate from high school is an educrat at a desk in a state capital or DC armed with reams of test data. Hence, mandatory, high stakes testing is the solution to virtually any and every educational problem one can name.
Teachers tend to think: No single test score can tell us anything meaningful about anyone. No ten test scores can do that. Those best qualified to make such decisions are the teachers who have daily worked with each student for 12 years. Testing doesn't solve any problems; it is merely a potential indicator of a very narrow, even transitory, set of acheivement parameters.
If tests are all, why do we even bother with teachers? Wouldn't computer programs, controlled from the DOE in DC do the trick? But if tests are merely imperfect, transitory, potential indicators, all of this argument about percentages, difficulty, etc. is so much piffle.
Its just too easy to get a teaching license. I blame the ed schools.
Wow.
The shouting match here is deafening.
For those teachers who complain that they are not treated as professionals should spend ONE DAY delivering packags with UPS.
The drivers act professionally, are treated professionally, and feel professional.
And they get paid more money than teachers.
And they belong to a union.
And they do not whine.
They are expected to meet a good many standards, and they are held accountable. Those who do not meet the standards are summarily fired--no tenure, no grievance procedure, very little protection. Live up to the standards set by the company, or get the hell out.
You chose your profession, warts and all.
Love it or leave it.
I know your job ain't easy. But it ain't easy being a factory line worker, a plumber, or an investment banker. Or try flipping burgers for a day or two.
Just say no to whining.
Enough already.
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