"Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

OK, so every state basically had the same standards already, and they were basically already the same as the Common Core standards, except for the ones that weren't.

So, which kindergarten standards are a mess? And why would it cost "all that money" to switch to the Common Core standards that were basically already the same as the states' standards (that were all basically already the same) except for the kindergarten standards?

The CC people are pretty desperate to get these standards in all the states. Wow. Somebody's job must be on the line.

I don't understand your point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If the difference in standards from state to state isn't so huge then why all the pretense that so much control needs to be in the states, and why all the objections about just going ahead and making them uniform across the board? It's far more cost-effective to develop and maintain one standard, rather than independently developing and maintaining 50 different standards for each state. It's also pointless to have 50 different standards, given the needs from one state to the next really aren't different.

Why spend all that money when they already have standards they chose?

"All that money" - penny wise, but pound foolish. If you were to actually add up the expense of 50 states each independently and redundantly developing their own standard, that expense would by far exceed the cost of Common Core.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

OK, so every state basically had the same standards already, and they were basically already the same as the Common Core standards, except for the ones that weren't.

So, which kindergarten standards are a mess? And why would it cost "all that money" to switch to the Common Core standards that were basically already the same as the states' standards (that were all basically already the same) except for the kindergarten standards?

The CC people are pretty desperate to get these standards in all the states. Wow. Somebody's job must be on the line.

You seem pretty desperate to shut down the standard. Wow. Your job must be on the line.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

However, the probability is high that if the child does not pass the test, the child does not truly understand the information.

You are assuming two things:
1. That the test correctly tests the standards taught.
2. That the standards taught are appropriate.

No.

1. If the child does not pass the test, then the child does not truly understand the information the child needs to understand in order to pass the test. That is true regardless of what has or has not been taught.
2. The appropriateness of the standards is a different question entirely.

Also, it's not possible to teach standards. Teaching is curriculum.

People definitely teach to standards. Curriculum is developed according to standards. Why does this person get so hung up on this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

However, the probability is high that if the child does not pass the test, the child does not truly understand the information.

You are assuming two things:
1. That the test correctly tests the standards taught.
2. That the standards taught are appropriate.

No.

1. If the child does not pass the test, then the child does not truly understand the information the child needs to understand in order to pass the test. That is true regardless of what has or has not been taught.
2. The appropriateness of the standards is a different question entirely.

Also, it's not possible to teach standards. Teaching is curriculum.

People definitely teach to standards. Curriculum is developed according to standards. Why does this person get so hung up on this?

"Teaching to" standards is not the same as "teaching" standards. Just as "cleaving to" your wife is not the same as "cleaving" your wife.

[Anonymous]

"Teaching to" standards is not the same as "teaching" standards. Just as "cleaving to" your wife is not the same as "cleaving" your wife.

LOL. I wouldn't equate those. I think you knew what PP meant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
However, the probability is high that if the child does not pass the test, the child does not truly understand the information.


You are assuming two things:
1. That the test correctly tests the standards taught.
2. That the standards taught are appropriate.

No.

1. If the child does not pass the test, then the child does not truly understand the information the child needs to understand in order to pass the test. That is true regardless of what has or has not been taught.
2. The appropriateness of the standards is a different question entirely.

Also, it's not possible to teach standards. Teaching is curriculum.


People definitely teach to standards. Curriculum is developed according to standards. Why does this person get so hung up on this.

I agree. The poster acts as if standards and curriculum are not related to each other when in fact one is predicated on the other. If this were not true, nobody would be concerned about the standards. The curriculum is based on the standards. It's like a sentence that has a subject verb, and object. The subject is the standard; the verb is the curriculum; the object is the test. You cannot connect the subject (the standard) to the object (the test) without the curriculum (verb). The curriculum is the action that gets you to the test. You can't make a sentence without all three (subject-verb-object) just as you cannot have instruction without all three (standard-curriculum-test).

Without giving schools time to develop curriculum and pilot it, you cannot test---because there is no connector between the two that is effective. In fact, I think that writing the curriculum, which is basically translating the standards into day to day instruction is much harder than writing the standards in the first place. It's much more challenging to have the students in front of you and plan to make the standards workable in a classroom atmosphere. It's where the rubber meets the road. The teachers are the backbone of the process and they need time and support to make the standards practicable.

All that being said, it is only natural that students will increase their scores over the years as teachers develop curriculum that more closely mirrors the new standards. So what you may be seeing when students "increase" their scores is the effect of the teachers having time to write plans and understand the new standards. The standards do narrow the curriculum in this way. That is the danger of having a set of standards and this problem is magnified if teachers are evaluated based on their students' scores.

[Anonymous]

That is the danger of having a set of standards and this problem is magnified if teachers are evaluated based on their students' scores.


What I want to say is that this is the problem when you have a set of standards coupled with high stakes testing. Having standards by themselves is not a problem . . . of course we have had standards forever.

[Anonymous]

In fact, I think that writing the curriculum, which is basically translating the standards into day to day instruction is much harder than writing the standards in the first place. It's much more challenging to have the students in front of you and plan to make the standards workable in a classroom atmosphere.

The more affluent areas in America will have staff to write the curricula for the standards. The districts with less money will not have this and their teachers will struggle to write up some plans themselves. If there is no system for disseminating curricula that works, there will still be "gaps".

And counting on paying publishers for the curricula and related textbooks is not the complete answer either. For one thing, some schools will not have money to pay for this. For another thing, the best curricula is more local and pointed toward the specific students in a given area. The best situation would be one where teachers come up with curricula and then pilot the test. Teachers in another area will also write curricula and pilot the test. They can then compare how their curricula worked based on the test scores. They can share their best ideas and put them up online for other teachers in other districts who can then use them and make iterative changes to them. Everything should be open source. Nobody should have to spend tons of money for materials. This would be really cost effective. All of this takes time. The new tests should not be widespread until this process has been well underway.

I wonder if tests will be released to the public after they are scored. This would help enormously as well.

[Anonymous]

This whole "high stakes" characterization seems a bit warped to me... Testing has been around for decades. But, apparently we are to understand that now, if teachers' evaluations are based on whether or not kids show improvement in their classrooms, that's "high stakes" whereas before we apparently didn't give a shit if kids didn't show improvement as they progressed since that apparently wasn't "high stakes" testing...

[Anonymous]

This whole "high stakes" characterization seems a bit warped to me... Testing has been around for decades. But, apparently we are to understand that now, if teachers' evaluations are based on whether or not kids show improvement in their classrooms, that's "high stakes" whereas before we apparently didn't give a shit if kids didn't show improvement as they progressed since that apparently wasn't "high stakes" testing...

Testing has been around for decades, but it wasn't until 2001 (NCLB) that tests were used to take "punitive" actions (like forcing the school to pay for tutoring or reorganizing the school, or giving parents the choice to move their children to other schools). This is what "high stakes" meant. Those actions caused schools to do things that many would consider a corruption of the intention of the NCLB law (like teach to the test, take out classes that were not related to the test, and in extreme cases, cheat).

When the tests are related to teachers' evaluations, there may be unintended consequences, but that depends on what the whole thing means to the teacher. For example, if it means that the teacher has to come under some sort of punitive action, the teacher may take steps to make sure the students pass the test, but those steps may not be what the standards writers intended. There may be teachers who spend a lot of time on teaching testing strategy instead of teaching real content. There may be teachers who refuse to teach certain classes or groups of students if they know that those students will be unlikely to pass the tests. There may be teachers who refuse to teach in low income schools.

The words "high stakes" came into being because of the mandated testing and the legal consequences that were put into place based on the mandated testing. Testing had been around way, way before NCLB and we did give a shit, but schools were not sanctioned and individual teachers were not sanctioned in punitive ways. American schools were actually testing at higher levels before NCLB. And, the states with the highest scores have always been states with strong teacher unions. Go figure.

[Anonymous]

When you have "high stakes", you will also get teachers who fixate completely on the standards and don't teach anything else. They will be less likely to let students pursue their own interests within the subject area as a result of staying on the "pacing guide" (in order to get through the mandated instruction). New teachers (who feel especially vulnerable) will focus on the standards like a laser beam whether that makes sense or not for their particular students. They will either teach at too low or too high of a level without adjusting because they have no experience in doing that and feel pressured to "teach directly and strictly to the standards". New teachers don't have enough experience to make adjustments yet and, in general, they need to be allowed to make some mistakes in order to become good teachers (just like everyone else, teachers learn from mistakes). If everything is scripted, they don't get to that learning process. In "more challenging" classrooms, they are going to have more behavior problems if they aren't allowed to be flexible with the script.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This whole "high stakes" characterization seems a bit warped to me... Testing has been around for decades. But, apparently we are to understand that now, if teachers' evaluations are based on whether or not kids show improvement in their classrooms, that's "high stakes" whereas before we apparently didn't give a shit if kids didn't show improvement as they progressed since that apparently wasn't "high stakes" testing...

NCLB started "high stakes" testing. So it's been around for a little over a decade.

Basing teachers' performance evaluations on student test results might sound like a good idea in principle, but in practice it just plain doesn't work.

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable. Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.
2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Who Are Assigned to Them. Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and others with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students.
3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress. Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores.

http://www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/New%20Logo%20Research%20on%20Teacher%20Evaluation%20AERA-NAE%20Briefing.pdf

In fact, several studies have found logically impossible results for value-added models, for example that the strongest predictor of a student's test results in third grade was the student's fifth grade teacher.

[Anonymous]

But, apparently we are to understand that now, if teachers' evaluations are based on whether or not kids show improvement in their classrooms, that's "high stakes"

It is certainly "high stakes" when teachers may be fired. It's pretty scary for people who have put a lot of years into a profession. And it's scary when teachers are hearing that only 30% of students are expected to pass these tests. That's going to mean a lot of poor evaluations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

But, apparently we are to understand that now, if teachers' evaluations are based on whether or not kids show improvement in their classrooms, that's "high stakes"

It is certainly "high stakes" when teachers may be fired. It's pretty scary for people who have put a lot of years into a profession. And it's scary when teachers are hearing that only 30% of students are expected to pass these tests. That's going to mean a lot of poor evaluations.

No, that's not how the test-results part of the performance evaluation works. Nobody is proposing a simple "high test scores = good teacher, lower test scores = bad teacher" performance evaluation method.