Testing more while failing at school reform

There are schools that work well, and schools that work poorly.  The schools that work well almost always are in middle class neighborhoods, and the schools that work poorly are in poor neighborhoods.  When these students are brought together in comprehensive high schools- the lower class kids do poorly and the middle class kids do well.

There are skilled teachers, unskilled teachers, and poor teachers. The most recent evidence on Teach for America shows no particular merit in their approaches. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/teach-for-america

Research does not support the use of test scores, including value added testing as a reliable source of evaluation  http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/6276/. (See prior blog on this.) The New York Times has an article today by Sam Dillon that describes the controversy well http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html?_r=1&hpw

The essence of the argument around value added testing  as promoted in the Los Angeles Times series is that poor teachers should be eliminated.  One assumption is that individual teachers can change the school trajectory of kids.  While good teachers are important, the Broader, Bolder Approach work demonstrates that  communities need to improve the educational environment, not just hire and fire new teachers. http://www.boldapproach.org/

Imposed school reforms cost students $, do not improve schools

We know that the politically imposed school reforms have not worked, but the legislature does not.
Unfortunately the legislature usually will not look at the data. A new report from Education Testing Service again shows that school achievement in the nation and in California has –at best-been stagnant for the last twenty five years. (Kirsh, Braun, Yamamoto and Sum, 2007) The achievement gap between mostly middle class and white students and the growing poor and working class Latino and Black student populations, whether measured by test scores, drop out rates, or college attendance narrowed slightly between 1970 and 1988. There has been little improvement since 1990. ( NAEP, 2005. Perie and Moran)
California’s scores are lower than the national average and they are not significantly different from those in 1992. Contrary to claims by the California Dept. of Education, on the national NAEP test, the decade of test based school reform has not significantly improved scores in reading and math. (NAEP, 2005) There are good reasons why most schools have not improved. ( Rothstein, 2004, Anyon, 2005)
Working together at the school site can work. There are many examples of improvements of specific schools
In July 2006, The California legislature passed SB 1209 (Scott), entitled Teachers: teacher credentialing: out-of-state teachers: professional growth programs: teacher compensation. SB 1209 had 19 provisions, and claimed to be the implementation of existing law particularly SB 2042. Important issues in the bill include expansion of funding for charter schools, revision of teacher preparation laws for interns, provisions requiring ELL preparation and others. Provisions of the bill also mandated implementation of the teacher performance assessment system in all credential programs as of July 1,2008. These provisions required the application of the unproven process of teacher performance assessment WITHOUT BUDGET ALLOCATIONS. Interestingly, teacher preparation programs already used performance assessment for their fundamental decisions, however the assessment process is based upon clinical supervision over time rather than upon a single test as favored by testing advocates at the CCTC.
SB 1209 was presented to the legislature by Senator Scott as implementation of the several ideas advocated in reports by the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Santa Cruz. Both major teachers unions agreed to SB 1209 in support of other provisions in the bill. Many of the provisions are indeed designed to improve teacher preparation. However the items in dispute – changes to Section 44259 (3) of the Education Code will create havoc in teacher preparation and is already reducing teacher preparation to teaching to the test.
There was no discussion of the testing mandates in committee hearings while the legislature considered SB 1209. Indeed it is doubtful if the legislature or their staff understand what performance assessment is, and certainly do not understand the major weaknesses of the current state of assessment.
The bill SB 1209 (Scott) from 2006 imposes an unfunded mandate which will cost new teachers hundreds of dollars. One possible consequence of focusing on this new performance assessment in a test situation is to significantly reduce the dollars spent on teaching or supervision in order to pay for assessment. A second possibility is to pass along the significant cost of testing to teaching candidates. Our brief estimate is that it would cost $400 - $500 per candidate. Is this the way to recruit new people to teaching?

A major function of bureaucracies, in this case the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and their staff is to keep the public out of decision making. Their role is to substitute their own views for information. Since the 1990’s, the CTC and the California School board have been dominated by ultra conservative, pro corporate elements.
CTC staff and members make certain that the persons who do the work, teachers, faculty in teacher preparation, are not listened to.
In those rare occasions when the public breaks through the bureaucratic front, both CTC and the State School Board arrange for hearings where only their own “experts” are allowed to speak. In summary, the role of these bureaucracies, and at times of legislators and consultants to is block or prevent democracy.
We are presently looking for a legislator willing to sponsor legislation to repeal this unfunded mandate.

The issue is similar to the legislature deciding upon a reading program or a math program. In this case, the legislature accepted the CCTCredential Commission’s narrow definitions teacher preparation and assessment. The imposition of a regressive system offensive to teacher preparation professionals was passed with no discussion in the legislature of the impact. This is not democracy. This is incompetent meddling by the poorly informed.

Duane Campbell

California legislative meddling and pandering

About each decade someone in the legislature decides to re-write the rules for teacher preparation. They write in response to a view that teacher preparation programs need revision and that they will not change without outside pressure. In the case of SB 2042 (2000) and SB 1209 (2006) the California legislature has mandated a precisely controlled curriculum for colleges and universities. They have the power to re-write programs because the programs lead to a state credential (license). The state’s right to issue credentials gives them the power to control the teacher preparation curriculum.
In the case of SB 2042 (2000) and SB 1209 (2006) the California legislature has mandated a precisely controlled curriculum for colleges and universities. ( See prior posts)
Note that the legislature does not yet mandate such curriculum in other fields, such as history, sociology, chemistry, etc.
The legislature and staff members presume to know what is best for teacher preparation with little consultation with professionals in the field. And, they have made major destructive errors.
Part of the problem seems to be the presumption of the legislative staff that they can make these decisions. Of course they are aided by advocacy groups, including education professionals who want to advance an idea, a program, and/or their personal careers. For example, less contested items of both 2042 and 1209 were supported by advocates of BITSA, the beginning teacher support system and by advocates of conservative school control ( Emory, 2004). This allows legislators and staff to get testimony on their side for interventions into the curriculum of higher education institutions.
To some degree then teacher preparation is being treated as an troubled step child of the university. The legislature will intervene here while not intervening in other academic fields. And, the governor has an large bureaucracy to assist with this intervention in the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Once established, the pattern of legislative meddling is likely to grow. By extension the current legislation could well be interpreted to say that the academic preparation of future teachers (usually the B.A.) will cover the standards for the disciplines as developed by the California State Dept. of Education. You can argue from the current law that all teachers must take a U.S. history course or courses which cover the material in the California K -12 standards for history and government classes covering precisely the k-12 government standards. In fact people are already making this argument. And similar arguments are being made by Margaret Spelling, the Secretary of Education, on a national level.
These legislative interventions in the university curriculum may well be the proverbial camel with his nose under the tent.
With reflection upon this specific intervention we, the faculty, made a strategic error which we should recognize as we go forward. We were recruited into an extensive process of developing curriculum and an assessment model (PACT) in response to the state intervention and the “leadership” of private and elite universities. This took hundreds of hours of time. We could have instead spent our time more effectively developing a political resistance to the legislative/bureaucratic intervention.
Although the political power of the neo conservatives in politics has eclipsed as a result of the 2006 elections, the persons whom they placed in administrative and policy positions remain well entrenched. There will be additional interventions. If you read the statements of Margaret Spelling on higher education you can see the outlines of what is coming.
Our experience with SB 1209 and SB 2042 teach me that we need to intervene politically at an earlier stage. Early interventions require an improved policy development and monitoring apparatus and the development of legislative skills among faculty. Here is an example of developing new legislative/policy vehicles.

http://www.elladvocates.org/index.html
Duane Campbell

Legislative meddling and teacher preparation

Senator

California State Senate

Dear Senator X,

We are faculty in teacher preparation in State Universities in California with over 40 years of experience between us. In our professional work we have focused on issues of democracy, race and class, and we have worked to prepare language minority students and students of color for careers in teaching.
In the last three years we have seen our credential programs deteriorate as we responded to the mandates of Senate Bill 2042 which require all teacher credential candidates to engage in teacher performance assessments (TPA) that claim to assess whether teachers have in fact achieved state designed and mandated teacher performance expectations (TPE s). Few teacher educators believe that the TPA process in any of its various forms will actually improve the quality of teachers and contribute to closing the achievement gap, but most teacher educators are too overwhelmed with adjusting their curriculum and program to conform to the state demands to resist.
The 1998 legislation SB 2042 became an opportunity for persons working with the State Commission on Teacher Credentialing , including Alan Bersin and Margaret Fortune, to advance an accountability model of reform (SB2042, 2000). These two opinion shapers did not write the legislation. They were advocates and leaders in parallel parts of the conservative “school reform” movement. They have never been teachers and have never completed a teacher preparation program, yet they have vigorously asserted an business/corporate model of teacher preparation and they both advocate “alternative” routes to teacher credentialing. Like many advocates of the corporate/testing model these two opinion shapers had not, in fact, worked in corporations. Their prior work was government sponsored positions where they talked about corporate decision making.
.
In 2006 an omnibus Education bill SB 1209 was passed by the legislature with a long list of provisions, two of which are very troubling. SB 1209 includes a the mandate for Colleges of Education in the state to move forward with performance assessment of future teachers without additional funding to perform this required assessment. The focus in the hearing on SB 1209 was a number of other provisions designed to increase the number of teachers in California. The Governor’s office was a central player in bringing this bill together.
SB 1209 mandates the implementation of one part of SB 2042 (2000). The Legislative mandates of SB 2042 Standards for Program Quality Effectiveness in teacher preparation became an opportunity for persons working with the State Commission on Teacher Credentialing to reform credential programs in California without funding. As part of the recent SB 1209 mandates, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing has required that all teacher education programs implement Teacher Performance Assessments for credentialing candidates (TPA) by July, 2008.
The Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs) of SB 2042 and SB 1209 are based on reductive, corporate-driven teacher performance expectations (TPEs). They are even more simplistic and rigid than prior expectations. TPEs requires that teacher preparation become the development of lower-level teaching skills needed to teach the scripted curriculum promoted by the high stakes tests required under No Child Left Behind. I have a longer paper on this problem if you are interested.
With the TPA system of CTC, teacher education programs and teacher educators are going through contortions trying to fit a square peg into a round hole to comply with an ill-conceived and misguided state law.
There are a number of ideologically conservative groups who mis use education research to promote their own ideologies, charter schools and usually keep their taxes low. They have gained a major step forward in the unfunded mandates of SB 1209. This provision of SB 1209 was presented to the legislature as a way to increase the number of teachers in California. It will, in fact, decrease the number. And, it is driving many professors out of teacher preparation.
This process of manipulated legislative mandates has been well documented in California described in Cornbleth and Waugh, “The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking. “ (1995) and in Taylor, “Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science; The Political Campaign to Change America’s Mind about How Children Learn to Read. (1998) as well as my own book, Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education (2004).

I would like to talk with you about these problems. As an intermediate process,we should repeal provisions 5 & 12 of SB 1209 which imposed an unfunded mandate on teacher preparation in California.
Cordially,
( Your name and address)

Duane Campbell

Meddling, pandering and muddling in California Teacher preparation

The recent history of “school reform” efforts clearly reveals that legislatures at both the state and federal level can be a tool for change or as a tool for meddling, pandering, and muddling. (http://nochildleft.com/2006/aug06pandering.html) A small , united group of people can advance their personal careers by pushing an over simplified reform strategies but the problems which they create may extend far beyond the original intentions or understandings. Moving the legislature is particularly easy since legislators and their staff seek headlines and are so busy with other tasks. Selling a “reform” to the legislature is easy if your package your “reform” as a scientific process. Legislators seldom scrutinize the claim that a proposed “reform” is backed by scientific research. The abuse of claims of scientific research has been well documented in California described in Cornbleth and Waugh, “The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking. “ (1995) and in Taylor, “Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science; The Political Campaign to Change America’s Mind about How Children Learn to Read. (1998).

School achievement has –at best-been stagnant for the last twenty five years. The achievement gap between mostly middle class and white students and the growing working class Latino and Black student populations, whether measured by test scores, drop out rates, or college attendance narrowed slightly in the early 1980’s, and has begun to widen to pre ESEA levels.
School improvement is important to parents and other voters. As a consequence legislators often look for education bills as a mechanism for “ making a difference.”
One choice would be to provide adequate funding for public schools, particularly those serving low income areas. However the adequate funding approach would cost money and perhaps raise taxes.

When politicians don’t know what to do, or when the obvious solutions cost money, they often blame teachers for the problems of the society. As teacher unions mobilized to defend their members, a focus shifted to criticism of teacher preparation programs
The blame the teacher preparation program approach was organized and mobilized by advocacy groups working with and within the Commission on Teacher Preparation. They offered a (false) solution to the problem of stagnate achievement by seeking to redesign teacher preparation.
In 1998 the California Legislature passed SB 2042, which restructured and re designed the teacher credentialing process. In September of 2001, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) adopted Standards of Quality and Effectiveness for Professional Teacher Education Programs. The law and the standards changed the requirements for earning a Preliminary teaching credential, adding passage of a teaching performance assessment to measure the teacher candidate’s knowledge and skill with respect to the Commission’s adopted Teaching Performance Expectations (TPE). The California legislature passed SB 1209, an omnibus bill of several measures, in July 2006 that among other provisions mandated implementation of the teacher performance assessment system in all credential programs as of July 1,2008.
The legislature comes back to work next week. Lets see what they do this year.
Duane Campbell

More on nonsense in the California legislature and school reform

See the prior post for more.
SB 1209 (2006) was an omnibus bill containing a wide variety of issues, included among them was the mandate to move forward with performance assessment without funding.
The focus in the hearing on SB 1209 was a number of provisions designed to increase the number of teachers in California. Omnibus bills are put together when a wide variety of interests agree to a number of issues. The Governor’s office was a central player in bringing this bill together. There is no reason to accept this bill as a measure of actual opinion in the legislature, the mandate provisions were not discussed. The writers do not know why the prior hesitance of the Dean’s of Education were not advanced, however the mutual relationship, known as the compact, between the Chancellor’s office of the CSU and the Governor’s office seems a likely source.

There are a number of ideologically conservative groups who mis use education research to promote their own ideologies, charter schools and usually keep their taxes low. Among these folks are Alan Bersin and Margaret Fortune of the Governor's Office. We need to take these folks seriously. However, little is gained by us trying to out do these folks. Instead we need sensible, reasonable, public education campaigns and targeted approaches to legislators.

What would a political response include? We need to speak with other faculty in the field. Initiate and sustain dialogue among the professionals. Most faculty are accepting this legislative intrusion as natural. Help them to understand that PACT and TPA’s are a choice.

We need to develop ways to invite parent participation, particularly parents of the children currently not doing well in our schools. Writing goals, standards, and TPA’s, for the teaching profession should be in dialogue with teachers, parents, and professionals, not only the non representative, middle class, bureaucrats of the CTC.
Start communicating with our Senators and Assembly members to let them know you want this law changed to put more emphasis on teacher preparation rather than punative assessments.
Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your concerns. Illustrate the dangers of this law with specific and compelling examples. Emphasize concrete alternatives that would do more to improve the preparation of teachers. Use letter writing, blogs, and other tools to de mystify the rhetoric around TPA’s and PACT. Establish a system of monitioring of the media to respond to the over simplifications.
Duane Campbell