Good News About the Lederman Lawsuit on APPR

Today Judge McDonough ruled that Sheri Lederman had met the burden of proof for showing that her APPR VAM-based "ineffective" rating was "indisputably arbitrary and capricious." The recent actions of the New York State Regents to impose a four year moratorium on the use of VAM in teacher evaluations had led the state to seek a settlement with Lederman, but she held on for this important victory. The judge did rule that the second category of relief was moot by the actions of the Regents. What will be most useful moving forward is the language about inherent bias in the use of VAM. Judge McDonough wrote in his 15 page summary posted by Leonie Haimson that he found:

"...convincing and detailed evidence of VAM bias against teachers at both ends of the spectrum (e.g. those with high-performing students or those with low-performing students)....and most tellingly...a 'bell curve' that places teachers in four categories via pre-determined percentages regardless of whether the performance of students dramatically rose or dramatically fell from the previous year" (p. 11). 

I wrote about the hearing and Judge McDonough's difficulties with bell curve logic back in August. It seems increasingly that the public is understanding the many problems with standardized, normed testing and the inappropriate ways it is being used. Evidence is mounting that national tests such as PARCC are created to produce high rates of failure and are not even aligned with the common core standards. See for example this recent account of a teacher revealing in detail inappropriate content and questions on the 4th grade PARCC posted by Teachers College professor Celia Oyler on her blog.  Alan Singer also reported on his Huffington Post blog about high numbers of parents and students opting out  of the state tests, and outrage about the content and difficulty level.

This is a day for celebrating, but the truth is, this testing nonsense is not going away anytime soon. Time to open our eyes and make our outrage known. 

It’s All About the Bell Curve: Sheri Lederman’s Day in Court

I traveled up to Albany this morning to hear the oral arguments in the Lederman v. King case presented to Acting Supreme Court Justice Roger McDonough by Bruce Lederman, and Colleen Galligan representing the State Education Department. This is the first time in my life I have sat in a courtroom proceeding. I don’t even watch Law and Order. Let’s just say I was most definitely not in my element. But I’m a pretty good observer of human behavior, a decent note-taker, and I had personal reasons for caring deeply about the outcome of this case, above and beyond all the reasons we all should care about a case that may have far-reaching implications for the misguided reforms of Race to the Top (see full disclosure below). What I witnessed was a masterful take down of the we-need-objectivity rhetoric that is plaguing education. So I should begin by saying that I am hopeful, because it seems someone with the power to make a difference gets it. Judge McDonough gets that it’s all about the bell curve, and the bell curve is biased and subjective.

In case you need a refresher on how test scoring works these days (and who doesn’t) I suggest you start with the excellent fact sheets from Fair Test, first on norm-referenced tests, or NRTs, and then on criterion-referenced tests, or CRTs, and tests used to measure performance against state standards. In particular note the following important points:

“NRTs are designed to sort and rank students 'on the curve,' not to see if they met a standard or criterion. Therefore, NRTs should not be used to assess whether students have met standards. However, in some states or districts a NRT is used to measure student learning in relation to standards. Specific cut-off scores on the NRT are then chosen (usually by a committee) to separate levels of achievement on the standards. In some cases, a CRT is made using technical procedures developed for NRTs, causing the CRT to sort students in ways that are inappropriate for standards-based decisions.”

As you may notice, we’ve come a long way from getting a 91 out of 100 on a test and knowing that was an A-. Testing today is obtuse and confusing by design. In New York State, we boil it down to a ranking from one to four. That’s right, there’s even jargon for “ones and twos” that is particularly heinous when you learn that politicians have interests in making more than 50% of students fall in those “failing” categories. Today the state released the test score results for students in grades 3-8 and their so-called “proficiency” is reported as below 40% achieving the passing levels. By design the public is meant to read this as miserable failure.

The political narrative of public education failure extends next to the teachers, who must demonstrate student learning based on these faulty tests, even if they don’t teach the subjects tested, and even if they teach students who face hurdles and hardships that have a tremendous impact on their ability to do well on the tests. In Sheri’s case, her rating plunged from 14 out of 20 points to 1 out of 20 points on student growth measures. Yet her students perform exceedingly well on the exams; once you are a “four” you can’t go up to a “four plus” because you’ve hit the ceiling. In fact, one wrong answer could unreasonably mark you as a “three” and you would never know. Similarly, the teacher receives a student growth score that is also based on a comparison to other teachers. When it emerged in the hearing today that the model, also known as VAM, or value-added, pre-determined that 7% of the teachers would be rated “ineffective” Judge McDonough caught on to the injustice that lies at the heart of the bell curve logic: where you rank in the ratings is SUBJECTIVE.

In his affidavits, Professor Aaron Pallas of Teachers College brilliantly explains the many flaws with this misuse of student test scores to evaluate and rank teachers’ effectiveness. Predetermining a set percentage of ineffective teachers regardless of their actual “effectiveness” and their students’ achievements was the first major flaw. The second is that the model is not grounded in scientific definitions of teacher quality or effectiveness, as there are many factors beyond a teacher’s control that contribute to student performance on standardized tests and other measures of their knowledge and skills. Third, the model is not transparent on what “needs to be done to achieve effective or highly effective ratings” which is a requirement of the law. The model also violates the law’s definition of student growth as “change in student achievement for an individual student between two or more points in time.” Judge McDonough seemed to have picked up on this idea, and asked if a better model would test the student at the start and end of a given academic year. Pallas gives a far more nuanced explanation of the need for a different model of testing to measure growth over time, but suffice it to say, the model that produced Sheri’s absurd score is not measuring student growth as defined by the law. Pearson, the corporate entity behind the testing enterprise, even noted, “It is inappropriate to compare scale scores across grades as they neither measure the same content, nor are they on the same scale.” Yet that is what the growth model does.

The lame explanation from Colleen Galligan was that the model may not be perfect but the state tries to compare each student to similar students. The goal, she offered, is to find outliers in the teaching pool who consistently have a pattern of ineffectiveness, to either give them additional training or fire them. At this point Judge McDonough offered her a chance to explain the dramatic drop in Sheri’s score. “On its face it must mean students bombed the test (speaking as one who has bombed tests)” and this produced laughter in the courtroom. For who hasn’t bombed at least one test in their life? Who has not experienced that dread and fear of being labeled a failure? Then Judge McDonough asked rhetorically, “Did they learn nothing?” The only answer she could come up with, was that in this case Dr. Lederman’s students, although admittedly performing well compared to other students, did worse than 98% of students across the state in growth. At this point it was pretty clear to everyone present that this made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

 

Sheri Lederman speaking to reporters outside the courtroom in Albany

Full disclosure:

Sheri Lederman is my high school classmate and she is a highly regarded elementary teacher in the Great Neck Public Schools, which we both attended in our childhoods. She got her doctorate at Hofstra University, where my mother is a professor emerita, and where I know many of the faculty as personal friends. They confirm the high regard I have for Sheri’s intelligence and insights into education. I think she is absolutely heroic to be pursuing a lawsuit, with the expert guidance of her lawyer husband, Bruce Lederman, against the New York State Department of Education, to expose the irrational and illegal practices of evaluating teacher performance using “arbitrary and capricious” student growth models based on flawed science. I have previously written in my blog about Sheri’s hope that her lawsuit would prove to be a “tipping point” in halting the use of these erroneous student growth models. A bit of background on the case from last October can be found here.

On June 1^st, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that Sheri’s case could go forward despite the State Education Department’s claim that her lawsuit was baseless since Sheri’s overall evaluation was “effective” despite the “ineffective” label on the student growth portion, worth 20% of the total.

Today’s news was covered so far here, here and here. The local CBS station covered it here and WNYT here.

Almost like being there?

Video is seductive technology. It’s used as click bait on social media, to advertise on the sides of buildings in Times Square, and even to help pass the time in the back seat of a New York City taxi. In education, video has tremendous potential to instruct, to inspire, to raise awareness, and more. It is making its way into teacher education as a tool for analyzing teaching. Despite its potential, I am concerned about some trends I am noticing, and that I believe deserve careful scrutiny.

For example, at Relay, the website boasts that its instructors are not “sitting in ivory towers” but coaching and mentoring students who are learning to become teachers. “When they’re not right there in the classroom, they’re side by side with our students, watching and analyzing video of them…pausing, rewinding and replaying the video to give pinpoint feedback.” They even call these videos “game film” as in show that you’ve got game in the classroom. Video is also used to instruct, and Relay’s site explains “our students can watch and rewatch course modules as they complete our program.” One of the students featured in a Relay video  even claims, “Film doesn’t lie.”

One of my concerns lies in the false sense of objectivity that is ascribed to videos of classroom life. Like it or not, the camera is a presence. You can’t be unaware of it, and it comes with its own interpretive lens even sitting on a tripod in the corner of the room. It is not reality, it is a representation of reality. What’s more, classroom events are often incredibly complex, and require deep contextual knowledge to fully understand and even interpret. I know from my own research in classrooms that when revisiting classroom events with participants using video there is a lot of unpacking to do about the teacher’s intentions and beliefs, the students’ understanding, and the shifts and gaps between what is captured in film and what is remembered by the people afterwards.

Another concern is that the temptation in observing teaching to satisfy a checklist of items you are looking for is exacerbated with video. We have been there, done that, and the behavioral checklist doesn’t work. It’s a bit like getting on a sightseeing bus, driving around a city, and saying you saw this and that. You caught a glimpse, grabbed a bad photo or two, but what did you really see? Not much. Using video to evaluate teaching is also problematic because the likelihood is that only a short clip will be analyzed, a tiny sliver of what classroom life is really like, and the evaluator will probably only watch once. It’s as if instead of going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lingering over favorite paintings and talking with a friend about what you notice, like, appreciate, wonder about, and so on, and reading the contextual information provided by the curator, you watch a quick slideshow online where each image lasts for 15 seconds and you get the name of the artist and the title of the work on the bottom of the screen. It’s not likely that you will have a memorable and long-lasting experience.

What much of the video use in teacher education is intending to replace is the bothersome and expensive problem of actually being in the classroom. It is an acknowledged problem that full time faculty don’t generally supervise student teachers, and that the work is more often than not relegated to adjuncts and in large universities, to doctoral students. Principals are also hard pressed to find enough time to evaluate all the teachers in their schools, and rely on help from assistant principals and instructional coaches. Now that companies like EdThena are developing software to make it easy and intuitive to provide feedback on teachers’ videos, we are likely to see more and more remote evaluation. No one will remember anymore the value of being in the room, because teaching won’t be seen as relational work, but as a series of techniques to be micro-managed by data analysis and video software.

How is this creeping up on us? In preservice education, we are seeing how Pearson’s scoring of edTPA portfolios is micromanaged by very specific rubrics looking for particular instructional moves in video clips totaling approximately 15 minutes. This leads to some very problematic oversimplification as in this Powerpoint slide widely used to explain the rubric progression of edTPA scoring from one to five:

Why, for example, is a preservice teacher rewarded for a focus on individuals or flexible groups rather than on the whole class? This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of classroom moments that call for the teacher to focus on the whole class. The danger of delineating “best practices” in this sense is then certain approaches and teaching moves become de-facto no-nos. The truth is there are times when it is appropriate to be letting students explore and do inquiry, and others when students require explicit step-by-step instructions from the teacher. In the new teacher education accreditation standards from CAEP we see that clinical supervision is using “technology-based applications” and “technology-enhanced learning opportunities” that are likely stand-ins for video analysis of teaching. The call for external evaluators in schools as in Governor Cuomo’s budget will likely be done by video (see p. 18 here that says observations may be live or recorded video) and will claim to have teacher and union support. For example, Public Agenda’s initiative Everyone at the Table (with funding from the Gates Foundation) seeks to involve teachers in evaluation reform. Teachers will be persuaded to buy-in to the idea of external evaluation by video because there is some truth to the problem that principals and peers are biased and can have favorites, and video evaluation is seen as more objective. But precisely because it offers less context, and comes with more narrow parameters (that checklist rears its ugly head again), it is more problematic.  

 Although a recent piece by NPR on professions that are likely to be automated in the coming decades  said college professors only had a 3.2% chance of that happening, there is an increasing possibility that a bleak future for unemployed former teacher educators will entail scraping together a measly income from scoring edTPA portfolios, doing supervision and teacher evaluation by video analysis, and putting together data analysis reports from software made by EdThena or other similar companies.