A Trip to Albany

Today United University Professions (UUP), the State University of New York (SUNY) union, held a news conference in Albany’s Legislative Office Building and called for an investigation of the State Education Department regarding the new state teacher licensure reforms. UUP President Fred Kowal invited teacher candidates, teacher educators, Board of Regents member Kathleen Cashin, and NYSUT Vice President Catalina Fortino, and Tom Pinto, a parent of a teacher education student, to share their experiences with the new certification exams. I braved the snow and drove up to participate, and I'm so glad I did.

The press conference happened against a backdrop of growing public outcry regarding new Common Core aligned curriculum and tests, and Governor Cuomo’s draconian budget and education reform proposals. Yesterday, supporters of charter schools from SuccessAcademy, KIPP, and Achievement First descended on Albany while teacher unions held their own rallies. 

As the education debates heat up, the teacher education debacle has to fight for any attention from the public, but as Tom Pinto passionately pointed out today, many families with college students who have admirably chosen teaching as their calling, find the new exams, implemented without the customary trial period and with obvious intent to increase failure rates, cause intense frustration of dreams derailed, new obstacles and financial hardship. Julie Gorlewski of SUNY New Paltz outlined the most serious concerns with the edTPA rollout and its negative impact on a diverse teaching force, saying it “will contribute to the creation of a teaching profession that is increasingly whiter and wealthier than the students it serves.”

            Below is a copy of my statement, and a commentary by one of my current student teachers, Sami-Beth Cohen, that she gave to me to share at the press conference. I strongly urge my readers and their friends to add their voices to the debate, to write letters to policymakers and legislators, to Governor Cuomo, to comment on media articles and multimedia coverage of these events, and to make some noise before budget decisions are finalized at the end of the month.

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“We ask schools to promote equality while preserving privilege, so we perpetuate a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning.”

                    David Labaree, 2010

          The degree to which we are setting up our educational institutions for failure in the United States is unprecedented. To satisfy the public’s need to believe that education can mean a better life and greater opportunities for success and happiness, we promote the idea that all citizens should be entitled to a meaningful education. We look for easy targets to blame when our lofty goals of equal opportunity fail to materialize as we had hoped. At the same time, those with privilege, power, and financial security seek to protect their self-interests to ensure those advantages will endure for generations to come. As David Labaree has written of schooling, “We want it to meet the ambitions of our children and also to protect them from the ambitions of other people’s children” (2010, p. 6).

            The dominant American value of competition has led to standardized testing being misused throughout our educational system, even as we acknowledge it is a flawed measure of quality. The testing industry is expanding exponentially, with more tests and more expensive ways to administer and score those tests, than ever before. We endlessly rank, sort, compare, rewarding the winners and humiliating and punishing the losers. Inevitably, those in the bottom seek desperate measures to improve in a contest that must result in failure for some. We know that these high stakes lead to undesirable consequences such as reduced learning, cheating, skewed priorities, and more inequity.

            At Mercy College I am blessed to work with teachers seeking to make a difference in the lives of children. It may seem corny and idealistic to a cynic, but these are people who have known hardship and have been positively influenced by teachers who helped them both academically and socially. They want to pay it forward, to work in their high-poverty communities inside schools that desperately need teachers who understand both how to reach children and inspire them, and how to teach them in ways that will leave a lasting impression. They embrace the challenges and opportunities afforded them in these highly diverse classrooms.

            The botched implementation of licensure reforms for new teachers in New York State has created havoc in its wake. Exams that lack requisite validity from pilot testing and analysis, with unreasonably high cut scores, have created financial hardship, low morale, and have little to do with the goals and values of improving teaching and learning. Peter Goodman provided data not publically available from early testing results that shows two of the exams, the EAS and ALST, are racially discriminatory. “The exams are not only reducing the diversity of our teaching force,” he wrote last November on his Ed in the Apple blog, “the exams ignore standards set by prior court decisions.”

These exams are not benign. They also don’t tell us what we need to know about prospective teachers. Consider these two stories, both from real examples:

A first year teacher, despairing at the learning needs of her first graders, declares to colleagues in the staff room that she has a class of “ones” even though those students will not take the state standardized tests in math and language arts scored from one to four until third grade.

A student teacher asks a second grade girl to put away her journal for quiet reading time, and notices the girl has hidden the journal inside her book. She has written, “I want to die.” Working with a paraprofessional because the cooperating teacher is absent that day, they discover the girl is a victim of ongoing harsh bullying. In talking with the girl, they confront the bullies, work on conflict resolution, and enable the girl to spend time with the school counselor to determine the types of support she needs in her moment of crisis.

No exam, no matter how cleverly designed, can assess whether a teacher would behave as the first year teacher did, or as the student teacher did. Yet clearly we want teachers in our schools who have sufficient knowledge, experience, and personal qualities that would treat all students with kindness and compassion, and would recognize the strengths and abilities of each and every student they are charged with teaching. The stark contrast between the type of technical writing one sees on the licensure exams and the deeply personal reflective writing that is typical of teacher education coursework is indicative of the comparison between the two teachers in my stories.

            What we are witnessing in these unprecedented times in education is an erosion of trust. We know that trust is the glue that holds our schools and communities together, especially in tough times. We need a diverse teaching force because we have diverse groups of students in our schools who need teachers they can trust. We may not be able to easily fix funding inequities, and variation in institutional supports and resources, but we can certainly fight the obstacles and barriers that prevent the hopes and aspirations of future teachers from becoming realized.

References:

Goodman, P. (Nov. 24, 2014). Are the new teacher preparationexams (edTPA) racially discriminatory? And why has the state failed to listento experienced educators? 

Labaree, D. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Statement by Sami-Beth Cohen

M.S.Ed '15, Mercy College

A few days ago, for the first time, I felt truly discouraged about the possibility of teaching. I am not discouraged by the seemingly insurmountable odds of educating children of all socioeconomic backgrounds, faiths, intellectual capacities, with various (occasionally horrific) personal histories and experiences that I will face. I am not discouraged by long hours, low pay or complex challenges. I am not discouraged by the extreme lack of resources with which public school teachers are forced to grapple. I am not intimidated or discouraged by any of these factors, because I am an intelligent, hard-working, dedicated and passionate person who will be working alongside other such individuals. Together, we can accomplish so much. This I know.

I am, however, discouraged by our governor. Our governor, who has spent next to no time in classrooms, sees it fit to make sweeping, inaccurate generalizations about teachers. Our governor, who is not an educator, but thinks he knows how we should do our jobs. I have a college education and an advanced degree in my field. I have taken many certification exams and passed them all. I am fully capable of doing the job I have trained for over the last four years of my continuing education. Yet Governor Cuomo still believes the deficit lies with me.

How is it that educators who have chosen to work in the most challenging, difficult environments end up being punished for that choice? How am I supposed to educate children who didn't sleep in a bed last night, didn't eat breakfast and don't have clean clothing? I recently spoke with a teacher who had moved from a large urban district to a suburban one. In her old, urban school, around 50% of her students passed the standardized tests, whereas at her new school, 96% of her students passed. Did she suddenly become 46% more effective, simply by changing districts? Of course not. The difference is that she began working with a population that had infinitely more resources and attention dedicated to it.

My first job in education was at a school with the highest percentage of children living in homeless shelters in the city of New York. Routinely, children would miss several school days a week. They would lose their placement in their current shelter and have to move to another, often in another borough. This causes an unimaginable amount of stress on both children and families. Not having a place to call home is especially traumatizing for a child.   This is only one example of what teachers must consider when they walk into work each morning. This is in addition to lesson plans, assessments, differentiating material, and addressing all types of learners. How is it not obvious that the deficit doesn't lie with the teachers, but with the deplorable reality in which improvised people exist? Closing such a school...firing teachers...this is so misguided I cannot even fathom it. For these kids, their teachers are some of the only constants in their lives. Take away a trusted teacher and they have no one. Closing their schools often means that in addition to all of the other hardships suffered, these children now spend upwards of 45 minutes commuting to and from their schools each day. Sounds awesome, if your goal is to make it impossible to succeed! 

Governor, if you cannot see how the logic of punishing teachers for working in difficult conditions is entirely flawed, perhaps the faulty cog in the machine has been identified once and for all: you.

PS- I voted for you four years ago and have come to really regret that choice. You look like Frankenstein. Just an FYI!

edTPA Implementation Run Amok

As the so-called “safety-net” deadline of June 30^th approaches, it seems the status of edTPA mayhem is quickly picking up speed. The Regents are now considering a proposed amendment to extend the deadline to June 30, 2016 for other certification requirements such as licensure exams other than edTPA, workshops required for certification, and even program requirements, for those candidates who fail the edTPA, use the “safety net” and take and pass the obsolete ATS-W, and file and pay for certification. This will likely be voted on in April. Meanwhile, let’s review the questions you likely have at this point:

How does the “safety-net” thing work again?

If you are confused, you’re not alone. A CUNY dean was until recently advising candidates to take the ATS-W if they hadn’t already, believing that it was good advice to pre-emptively be ready to use the safety net in case of edTPA failure. This made some sense because in the fine print the “safety-net” provision stated that candidates who had taken the ATS-W prior to April 30, 2014 did not need to retake the exam to qualify for the safety net provision. Therefore, the logic goes, a passing score on that test should be valid for any candidate who doesn’t pass the edTPA. But no! The passing ATS-W score only counts AFTER you have failed the edTPA. Unless of course you had previously (prior to April 2014) taken and passed the test in the good faith that it was a requirement for certification. There is still confusion out there. For example, a SUNY college in a FAQ says:

Q.    If I have already taken the ATS-W before failing the edTPA, can it be used in place of re-taking the edTPA?

A.    NO.  You must take the ATS-W after your edTPA failing grade is posted.

While another SUNY school has the correct information. 

 Meanwhile, if you do the math, those wanting to take the 4-hour ATS-W on paper rather than a computer have to be ready to submit their edTPA by the end of next month in order to have time to get a score and register and take the ATS-W in case they fail in time for the June 30^th deadline. Even if the Regents pass the amendment in April, candidates are still required to have failed the edTPA and taken and passed the ATS-W prior to June 30^th, 2015.

What do the websites say?

Apparently Pearson had no trouble taking money from candidates who believed they could take the ATS-W pre-emptively, and now that it’s become a problematic situation, they have added a note to the website explaining you should only take the test if you failed the edTPA. To get information about how to get a voucher to take the ATS-W for free, however, you have to dig through your college’s website and emails to know what to do. Here’s a handy PDF of the instructions in case you need it. 

Can you register pre-emptively?

That might not be a bad idea, if you are concerned as most candidates are about passing the edTPA, because computer-based test slots in the weeks leading up to the deadline are likely to fill up fast and you may have trouble getting a reservation. It’s going to cost you though, because without the free voucher you have to pay $119 and if you cancel (if you pass the edTPA after all) you’ll only get $84 back in the refund. Pearson, always earning.

Can’t I just submit a crappy edTPA and then take and pass the ATS-W and be done with this nonsense?

Not a good idea because that’s exactly the mentality of people in the state’s Department of Education, so they have put some vague language in the fine print about how an edTPA with an unscoreable code “may or may not” count as a failing grade. Plus that failing score does stay on the TEACH account, branding you forever as a dud. Not that your future employers may care as they can decide for themselves about your qualifications. I did hear a horror story though about a candidate who thought she was lined up for a job in the New York City Department of Education, who was then told she wouldn’t get hired without a passing edTPA score, even though she was certified with the safety net provision.

I’m not worried about the edTPA, it’s this stupid ALST that is killing me!

Your frustration is perfectly understandable. From all accounts, the testing conditions of the ALST are a nightmare and even reasonably smart people are not passing, even when they score a 3 out of 4 on the essay portion. That’s likely because when the cut score was determined, people who made that determination were aiming for a 50% - 60% passing rate. Because let’s face it, this is all about trying to certify fewer teachers and pretending that this will convince the public that these new tests mean we have better new teachers than we did before. Again, talk to people at your college because it is possible that if you failed the ALST you can get a voucher to try again, and know that you may have to try again after that. Don’t have a panic attack. You are not alone. Everyone hates this test.

I’m still waiting to get my other test scores! I thought they said “early 2015” and since my calendar is filling up with deadlines I’d like to know where I stand.

Yeah, the new multi-subject test scores are delayed until “early 2015” because those people who work on cut scores are still figuring out what the passing standards will be so that more people will fail than was previously the case, even though the tests themselves are also harder now than they used to be. My advice: be prepared for a retake. Unless the Regents pass the amendment in April and that will give you another year.

Letter to Duncan on Proposed Regulations

Docket ID ED-2014-OPE-0057

January 30, 2015

The Honorable Arne Duncan

Secretary, U.S. Department of Education

400 Maryland Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Secretary Duncan:

I am a professor of childhood education at Mercy College based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where I work in New York City’s public schools with our teacher candidates. Mercy is a private, nonsectarian, minority- serving institution with an enrollment of over 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students.  We have a rich tradition of community service both locally and abroad. I am responding to the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for teacher preparation programs released in the Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on December 3, 2014.

Like other teacher preparation programs in institutions of higher education throughout the nation, we have been actively engaged in improving our programs, getting national accreditation (and Mercy College was the first to gain dual initial accreditation from NCATE and CAEP), and working with our partnering districts to provide exceptional beginning teachers for our state’s schools.

In New York State, our teacher preparation programs have also undergone continual reform influenced by the latest policy changes regarding more difficult licensure exams, which felt to many of us like an intentional effort to certify fewer candidates who had already passed the previous exams and requirements. Professor Darling-Hammond even noted at the annual meeting of AERA in 2014, “New York is a prototype of how not to implement teacher performance assessment.”

The regulatory proposal put forward by the Department is flawed for many reasons, but I will focus on what I consider to be the four most important ones. It is an unfunded mandate that grossly underestimates the burden of the proposed regulations; it is a top-down mandate lacking requisite deliberation and input from stakeholders; it creates what are nothing short of perverse incentives for institutions of higher education that will ultimately harm rather than help educational goals; and finally, it uses inappropriate measures and proxies for those measures despite an abundance of evidence regarding the damage resulting from the irresponsible misuse of standardized tests to measure things they were never designed to measure.  

Overall, if these proposed regulations were adopted, they would create an overreach of federal authority into what is currently state-level and institution-level decision-making, and they would set a dangerous precedent to alter federal financial aid policy through regulation rather than through the legislative process. This simply cannot stand as it violates fundamental principles of our democratic processes.

The Department mandates the following indicators as the basis of the rating system to be used by each state (NPRM, pp. 71833-71836):

·       Student Learning Outcomes

·       Placement and Retention Data

·       Graduate and Employer Surveys

·       Accreditation or State Program Approval

The costs associated with gathering and analyzing all of this data are prohibitive, for states and for institutions. They also place a burden of time and effort on institutions and their faculty and staff that are already stretched beyond capacity by the burdens of accreditation. Ultimately such an unfunded mandate will mean harm to all stakeholders, from teacher educators, to teachers, to children, and to the educational institutions meant to help them.

As a top-down mandate, the regulations ignore extant research on a number of issues, and clearly lack the necessary deliberation and input from experts that is required when seeking such broad and far-reaching changes to teacher education. They continue an inappropriate reliance of standardized tests for accountability with no scientific validity, such as the use of value-added modeling (VAM) found in the determination of student growth and in teacher evaluations where student growth is among the measures used, as evidenced in p. 71837 of the NPRM.  The regulations seek to hold institutions accountable for things they have no direct control over, including working conditions of their graduates, employment trends, the ability to collect valid and complete data, and so on. Privacy concerns are not addressed, while we are witnessing a fast-growing national concern about the implications for the massive data tracking that is occurring in education.

These proposed regulations create perverse incentives that will harm rather than help the needed improvements in teacher education. Institutions will be rewarded for not partnering with the high-poverty schools that could benefit from having pre-service teachers and faculty working with them, for not accepting non-traditional candidates into their programs, and for not helping to place graduates in the schools where they are most needed. I wrote of these perverse incentives on my blog in 2013 when the CAEP standards were first released and expressed the concern that such a focus on teacher effectiveness as defined by increasing test scores would lead to a growing lack of attention to many other important factors in considering issues of quality that would have a detrimental effect on P-12 students. The “rigorous teacher candidate entry and exit qualifications” (NPRM, p. 71835) now in place in our state are already having a negative impact on our work, with little evidence to suggest that these licensure requirements will lead to better teaching. For example, the considerable work entailed in completing the edTPA during student teaching has meant a greatly diminished focus on many aspects of preparing pre-service teachers to be capable of having the confidence and skills to be successful first year teachers. I am not alone in believing that this type of performance assessment belongs in the induction years rather than at a time of intense learning as a guest in another’s classroom.

What concerns me the most is the continued irresponsible misuse of standardized test scores to measure things they were never designed to measure. Even as a measure of student learning, we know that standardized tests have considerable limitations. When high stakes are attached, we know that we can have unintended consequences including cheating and data manipulation. VAMs and SLOs were not designed to measure teacher quality. While it is true that for a student to learn in a meaningful way, good teaching is an important factor, effort and interest on the part of the learner is also required, as are opportunities to learn, and a social surround to support learning. That includes high quality curriculum, professional support and development for teachers, extra-curricular activities that enhance students’ educational experiences, access to technology, and more. We know that due to inequities in funding, segregated schools and communities, and the staggering growth of families living in poverty in our country, these elements are not in place in too many of our schools.

Similarly, placing such an overwhelming emphasis on outcome measures in teacher education, neglects other important factors in examining the quality of programs. While teachers’ knowledge and skills matter, so do other qualities such as their ability to communicate and partner with families, to contribute to the school community in meaningful ways, to connect with students and make a difference in their lives. Not everything that matters can be measured by a score or a number. To suggest otherwise is to perpetuate a false view of the purposes of education in a democratic society.

Institutions responsible for preparing teachers are driven by a mission to improve education. Other disciplines may seek knowledge simply for knowledge’s sake, to expand our understanding of the world, but in education we have always worked to make things better. In this era of high-stakes accountability however, we have seen that federal overreach can have disastrous consequences. Our national obsession with competition, rankings and ratings, and the misuse of data is demoralizing the ranks of educators who see in their work a deeper meaning than a better test score.

Thank you for your consideration. I urge you to listen to the voices of professionals who have grave concerns about the proposed regulations and the harm that would result from any implementations.

Sincerely,

Alexandra Miletta/s

Assistant Professor of Childhood Education, Mercy College

Washington State Democrats Lead the Way

Last Saturday, the Washington State Democratic Party passed resolution 707 opposing the Common Core State Standards by a margin of over two to one.

Like the coming snowstorm here in the Northeast, let's hope this is the start of a political blizzard. Teacher activist Susan DuFresne has issued a press release together with David Spring and Elizabeth Hanson to help get the word out. Increasingly, mainstream media is simply not covering important education stories with due diligence, perhaps because education journalists tend to have a lower status and do little investigative reporting compared to their colleagues. To help meet the public's need for information on growing resistance to high stakes testing and the Common Core, bloggers such as Anthony Cody provide a reliable alternative. 

I got my elementary teaching credential at the University of Washington and taught in the Edmonds School District just north of Seattle for four years before returning to graduate school to complete my PhD. Back in the mid-1990s, there were no high stakes tests. There was a concerted effort on the part of the district to involve expert teachers in developing performance assessment tasks, and I worked on the ones in elementary math together with colleagues. The test prep I provided for my class prior to the one standardized test given in the spring was a homework packet and some test taking strategies. Oh, the (g)olden days! Now test prep IS curriculum, and we've been swimming in those toxic waters long enough for it to seem almost normal in the city schools where I work with my student teachers. It's increasingly clear that we need the solid backing of parents to persuade politicians to say enough is enough. 

In an effort to help educate the public on the growing problematic misuse of standardized tests, I published my first op-ed piece last week in the Journal News 
Please have a look, share if so inclined, and comment if you have something to say. 

Standardized Testing: The Final Frontier

Tests seem so reasonable at first --  teachers teach, students learn, and demonstrate mastery by passing a test. But as Daniel Koretz says at the start of his 2008 book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, “Achievement testing is a very complex enterprise, and as a result, test scores are widely misunderstood and misused.” Now that is what I call an understatement. Furthermore, despite Common Core claims that better standards and tests mean fewer reasons for concern about their misuse, as Vito Perrone of Harvard University pointed out, “Most items on these various standardized tests remain well within the longstanding technology of testing, primarily to support the mechanical scoring procedures. They still seem to be limited instruments with too much influence” (1999, p. 152).

The testing “enterprise” is poised for a warp drive record-breaker of misuse insanity. In a nutshell, here’s how they plan to connect the dots.

A tiny fraction of what a student knows and can do is hypothetically captured, with some modicum of so-called scientific accuracy, by converting the number of correct answers out of the total number of questions on a standardized test to a raw score. Keep in mind that this single raw test score is still prone to error in its intent to measure what the student knows as the student may have made random choices, guessing correctly (or not), or may simply have had other contextual reasons for the performance including illness, distraction, nerves, etc. The test is also imperfect by design and is likely biased in some ways.

Now that raw score goes through some psychometric process to either be normed to a scale comparing it to other test scores, and/or it is ranked somewhere between unacceptable and excellent based on someone’s judgment of what students should know and be able to do. This is where all hell breaks loose as that converted score gets used.

How might it get used? For one, to tell the students and the parents or guardians how “well” they did which can involve labeling the converted score with a percentile rank, a grade-level equivalent, or just a descriptive meaning such as “meets standard.” However, it will likely be used in what is called a “high stakes” way to assign students to special education, to hold them back a year, or to track them into homogenous groups.

The most pernicious use is to group the scores to make claims about the quality of individual teachers. From there, it’s easy to see how tempting it is to make a claim about the quality of a school, and then a whole district. While we’re at it, let’s compare counties, states, regions, countries.

The cold hard truth, in Koretz’s words, is this:

Scores on a single test are now routinely used as if they were a comprehensive summary of what students know or what schools produce (p. 44-45).

He goes on later to add:

Simply attributing differences in scores to school quality or, similarly, simply assuming that scores themselves are sufficient to reveal educational effectiveness, is unrealistic. And more generally, simple explanations of performance differences are usually naïve. All of this is established science (p. 142).

Things get really tricky when hierarchical linear modeling kicks in to provide a “value-added” way to compare actual scores to a prediction and to use the difference to rate teachers’ effectiveness. Ignoring warnings from experts, these value-added models or VAMS, have been misused by policymakers to weigh heavily in the annual evaluation of teachers. Carol Burris, an outspoken principal who opposed this misuse of standardized test scores, recently wrote of a teacher’s lawsuit filed in New York State by my friend, Sheri Lederman, who hopes her case can become “a tipping point” in bringing this damaging unreliable practice to a grinding halt.

That may be wishful thinking because now the dots are being connected to the colleges and universities that educate teachers. They too are to be evaluated and ranked based on the performance of their candidates for teacher certification on standardized tests, which can be more than four in some cases. New federal regulations currently open for public comment until February 2nd would require these institutions of higher education to also track their teacher graduates, and collect their annual evaluation ratings including the VAMS measure, in order to be considered eligible for the TEACH grant program. (I have previously written of how similar perverse incentives plague the new CAEP accreditation standards for these institutions).

Here’s a test question for Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education:

TRUE OR FALSE?

“A program’s ability to train future teachers who produce positive results in student learning [as measured by standardized testing] is a clear and important standard of teacher preparation program quality.” (from p. 63 in proposed regulations document)

Here’s a hint, provided by Benjamin Campbell of Richmond,Virginia on the federal register of comments. “Current research indicates that no more than 14% -- and often far less – of a student’s learning as measured by standard tests – the only standardized measure – can be attributed to the teacher.”

The bad news is that Arne Duncan, and a whole slew of politicians and policymakers in line behind him, think the correct answer to this question is TRUE. They actually believe harsh punitive consequences work and lead to improvement. They think closing schools and teacher education programs is a good idea. They don’t care if any of their plans are based on faulty data, junk science, or illogical statistics. They blithely ignore extant research, recommendations from experts, and, to put it bluntly, common sense. The question remains – what are we going to do about it?

As Captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, “Engage.”