"G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure" (NYT 2/1/2011)
On p. 1 of the NYT I read the words of Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada, "It's practically impossible to remove an under performing teacher under the system we have now." Here's a little more from the article: "Eliminating tenure, Mr. Sandoval said, would allow school districts to dismiss teachers based on competence, not seniority, in the event of layoffs."
After I read that I thought, in the event of layoffs, people who are the best at ingratiating themselves with the administration will be kept on and those who aren't will be let go. You know, the two skills-sets involved don't necessarily overlap.
I've always considered myself really dedicated to the students in my classes, to the point that I might go really out of my way to help an individual student learn the material...but I've never been good at interacting with the higher-ups. I've also been "not re-hired" - so I know my response to this article is very personal. Still, I'll leave it out of this except on the subconscious level.
I recognize that the unions need to come up with a better way to eliminate incompetent teachers, but getting rid of tenure just introduces a new type of obstacle to dedicated teaching: teachers who have to curry the favor of he/she who makes the rehiring decisions.
Will Ms./Mr. dedicated teacher fight the administration for a student who needs special help? I'm not arguing for the status quo, which clearly hasn't allowed (or forced - some might say) teachers to produce a well-educated citizenry.
But this blame-the-job-protection - the protection that allows teachers to focus on their students, on those people who don't sign the paycheck - this blame is not realistic about the real obstacles to teaching.
My hope is that these threats push unions and administration jointly to streamline the process for firing the incompetent, and I think that this has been happening. (I remember hearing about this, and I promise to look for the reference and post it here too).
I am slightly happier about tying teacher performance to test results (here I guess I'm comparing two possibilities: one - eliminating tenure altogether and -two - finding ways to have it better stimulate teaching excellence). Problem with measuring teachers based on student performance is that nobody can think of a way it could be implemented fairly except if these test scores were part of data collected over many years... I've had the class from Hell. I say that the class from Hell, the student from Hell, the year from Hell - none of those, if they brought down test scores, should get a teacher fired.
My favorite system is so labor intensive that it would demand an entire new corps of professionals... Wow - why not?
We need to have a system whereby classrooms/teachers always know they might be observed at ANY time - and they know that they would be observed at least twice a month (cameras in the classroom?). Once again I''m indebted to the NYT because a recent article described a pilot program in this vein.
In my view, this sort of observation would be paired with other input (students' test scores, socio-economic level of students, um.... I could add more - random samples of teacher's homework load and of the graded homework including time lapse between assignment turn-in and feed-back given to students. Maybe each teacher could identify his/her strengths, and there could be a special category... And now, I have gone absolutely to the dark-side of bureaucracy and paper-work and record keeping and things that rob teachers of time.
I'll just finish by saying why I maybe fantasized about this sort of real and consistent observation. In the past, as an adjunct college professor/lecturer, I've been frustrated that there is nobody coming to my classes to give me advice or support my desire to improve my teaching. In all, if I've taught twenty semesters, I've probably had an observer come in just 5 times. I'd love to have someone observe me, even if the observer couldn't give me advance notice. Anyway, I digress.
The bottom line is that it is really hard to evaluate a teacher unless you are willing to take a very broad and long-term view.
Shall I continue? I shall, but later.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _28 February 2011_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I went to a Methodological Developments in Teaching Spanish ...workshop in Barnard College on Saturday February 26. (The organizers were from the Barnard and Columbia University).
At 10 a.m. Guadalup Ruiz Fajardo spoke, "Tareas para sacar a los alumnos a la calle," and at 3 p.m a Brazilian educator Matilde Scaramucci spoke on "Evaluacion y Enfoque por tareas."
Both of these were interesting and useful in different ways. "Guada," as people called her made really effective use of samples of students' work to illustrate her thinking. Basic idea: we teachers of Spanish sometimes construct walls between classroom and community which are about "control" (for the teacher). This separation between students and the community of Spanish speakers ends up strengthening prejudice or discrimination in a way. Interesting thought.
One assignment that she discussed was to send students into the virtual "chat" world, which they are familiar with as a platform and find somebody to chat with in Spanish. The second assignment involved finding signs in Spanish (written Spanish) in the community, not hard to do in NYC. The students took photos and apparently answered a series of questions about each one and then put them in power points. The final assignment, and the most controversial I'd say, was to listen in on a conversation in Spanish on the street or some public space and report on it. The students were supposed to use their i-pod earphones (music player with no volume).
Anyway, the final twenty minutes were devoted to allowing us to think of feasible projects for the places/languages in which we worked. Our group was stumped because she put some strange restrictions on our work. (Strange as in NEW). We weren't supposed to assign anybody "roles" as in a "tourist" whose interactions are all very limited counter conversations.
This restriction seriously paralyzed my small group in the sense that we kept throwing out our ideas because they seemed to be putting students in roles. In the end, one group had an idea which I thought was fascinating (and the workshop director received enthusiastically). But, it really did involve putting students in roles as interviewers. The idea was to have students to filmed interviews in the community modeled on a tv show "Espanoles en el mundo." I really like the idea of being able to put a group of these interviews together as a way for a class to get to know the community a little better.
The second talk, by Matilde Scaramucci, reminds me that we teachers sometimes don't think to implement the pedagogic practices that we study and advocate. This presenter READ her power point. Then, in the end, we weren't able to get to some of her most interesting slides (these were examples of the products of tests she was describing to us).
I'm thinking that her talk would have been much more enlightening for me if she had sent us all the content of the first ten slides to read before she started with her speach. We could have spent so much more time trying to understand how these"task-based" assessments worked, how effective the grading/evaluations were. There is something very unsettling about rubrics. I find that one can't always predict what the practical effects of a rubric will be: skewing the grade distribution; affecting the students' efforts to prepare for the assignment.
There is nothing more frustrating to me when I see it in my son's homework, for example, when because of a rubric which assigned 10% of a grade to simply correctly filling in the title page and/or attaching the rubric to the assignment - some "distracted" students are penalized more harshly than they would be for poor content... I'm exaggerating perhaps.
The above digression is relevant because toward the very end of Dr. Scaramucci's discussion, she was explaining how the "rubric" worked and talking about how they had had to do adjustments after a trial run of 1,500 testers. They have two readers for all these tests, and the level of discrepancy between exams is the indication that they need to better calibrate their rubrics.
In this case, the first time around the rubric was a pretty holistic 1 - 5 rating of categories that produced five possible levels. The tweaking of the rubric involved adding a 3 point YES or NO addition which asked simply: 1) did the exam fufill the purpose of the assignment. 2) ... 3) ... Hmm... frustrating, I'm understanding the need to tweak that rubric, and how adding the three yes or no points helped improve accuracy. But, I can't remember the details.
One final note. Dr. Scaramucci's talk produced a lot of questions about the Brazilian educational system. In this sense, she really wasn't completely to blame for the fact that we couldn't see all of her slides. It was amazing. Her explanation of the "task-based" assessments and the system of test taking for entry into the "Universidade Estadual de Campinas" (Brazil) produced a bit of anger in the audience.
I don't understand its source. Partly it was because the test seemed difficult, and the audience perhaps judged that this made it classist or exclusive. But, I, for one, am all about raising standards. Also, from what I understood of the test, it seemed perhaps less excluding than an SAT test. Why? I felt that it really probed people's ability to think as well as to put their ideas on paper. I may be wrong, as I haven't seen enough, but I'm trying to say that it tested students' intelligence more than how much they had prepped, how many vocab words they had memorized; how many advanced science or math instruction they'd had.
