Teach Plus: In Education, Who's Leading Who?

from Education on HuffingtonPost.com by Teach Plus http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teach-plus/in-education-whos-leading_b_1383241.html

By Marcello Sgambelluri

Earlier this month, I attended the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, where the issue of educational leadership was front and center. This setting seemed a long way from my first grade classroom, but I found many points that resonated within the walls of my school.

A principal should not be the tip of the pyramid in a school, but rather a dot in the middle, said Ziga Turk, the Slovenian Minister of Education. This visual illustrates the principal not as a disseminator of commands in a top-down approach, but rather as a synthesizer, thought partner, and enabler to teachers.

This idea of the principal as part of the community, central but not hierarchical, led to the meat of the discussion: that real instructional leadership in education needs to come first and foremost from teachers. When teachers take the lead, we:

1) Feel valued and empowered.
2) Receive efficient and necessary professional development (after all, who knows what a teacher needs better than a teacher?).
3) See career growth while staying in the classroom.
4) Improve our personal classroom practice through self-reflection, and clarify our craft by teaching it to others.
5) Don't "shut our doors," but rather feel empowered to share our best practices with new teachers who desperately want for it.

In order for teachers to be leaders, we need to be given the time and resources to collaborate with and observe other teachers. We also need to be ready to open up to constructive criticism and open our classroom doors unabashedly to every teacher in the building. The principal must support these teams by providing resources (for example, time and space, professional development on collaboration, and opportunities for relationship building), and facilitate group discussions and sharing of ideas.

Here's one example of what this looks like: In my current school, each grade level's planning times are both staggered and aligned. During contiguous planning times, we can have team meetings; during staggered planning times, we have the option of observing each other teach. This way we, as teachers, can provide feedback to our peers.

We would all love for our principals to be experts of every subject and grade they lead -- and I do believe principals should to be instructors first and foremost -- but to expect them to be experts in science, math, reading, and social studies instruction, in up to six different grades, is not realistic. What is realistic, however, is the goal of building collaborative leadership teams where skilled teachers can share our expertise in our respective fields.

As Minister Bjorklund of Sweden pointed out, when we leave reform up to principals and administrators, we leave it to so few who can aim for change ... and so many who can oppose it. If we are to truly change education, we need to start with the foundation and not the tip of the pyramid; we need to start with ourselves, the teachers.

We are the leaders we have been looking for. Give us the time, the resources, and the framework. After all, no one is more equipped to lead the change in education than teachers.

Marcello Sgambelluri teaches first grade at Community Academy Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. He is currently a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow.

Community Conversations about Public Schools- 2 dates

Panel Presentation and Public Discussion http://bit.ly/GP7QTj Thursday, March 29th, from 6 to 8 pm Metropolitan Community Church (474 Ridge Street NW, 20001, near 5th and M Sts. NW, 2 short blocks from the Convention Center) Topics will cover: DC history of race, class and public education Where we are now Perspectives from Chicago neighborhoods Finding a path for our future Save the Date Community Conversation on the Future of Community Schools in D.C. Saturday, April 28th from 10-12noon Location: TBD Topics will cover: Release of DC VOICE Ready Middle School Data Presentations from Community Schools Advisory Committee

‘Rhee Effect:’ Why depending on private cash for reform is a bad idea

Posted at 10:09 AM ET, 03/24/2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/rhee-effect-why-depending-on-private-cash-for-reform-is-a-bad-idea/2012/03/23/gIQAvMfsXS_blog.html?wprss=rss_education

By Valerie Strauss

Michelle Rhee was a great fundraiser during the 3 1/2 years she was the chancellor of D.C.’s public schools.

During her tenure, from 2007 until 2010, when she resigned, she persuaded a handful of private foundations to pony up a total of more than $80 million to help cover a three-year labor contract she negotiated with teachers that included a performance-based pay assessment system.

But take a look at what my colleague Bill Turque reported on his D.C. Schools Insider blog:

“With Rhee gone and the three-year foundation commitment up, private largess is considerably more scarce. Grant funds are projected at just $3.8 million for FY 2013, an 82 percent drop. Officials have announced that the cost of the IMPACT bonuses has been passed on to the individual schools.”

Now Rhee has gone on to bigger things, becoming a national school reform advocate with her StudentsFirst organization and a goal to raise $1 billion to push for her agenda.

And back in D.C., the entities that had donated before — the Broad, Arnold, Walton and Robertson foundations — don’t seem to be opening their wallets quite as wide now that she’s gone. As Turque noted, the bonuses that teachers could earn under her IMPACT evaluation system now have to be borne by individual schools.

It is certainly true that public education funds ebb and flow with the health of state and federal budgets, and that programs funded with public dollars can be affected in a downward budget cycle. But that is far different from having private individuals pick and choose pet projects, with the effect, often, of redirecting public money and efforts toward them.

But the problem goes beyond pet projects. Last summer, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that money was so tight in the city budget that he was turning to private philanthropists — including himself — to donate $250,000 each to pay for state standardized testing that had been eliminated. The dangers of depending on rich private citizens to cover such core functions are apparent. “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”:

As education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”:

“There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people. . . . These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. . . .The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.”

Shaun Johnson: Occupying the Department of Education

posted in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shaun-johnson/occupying-the-department-_b_1378555.html

from Education on HuffingtonPost.com by Shaun Johnson

Between March 30 and April 2 of 2012, public school advocates will arrive in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Department of Education on Maryland Avenue to make a clarion call in opposition to test-driven and data-mad education reforms. The event will include four days worth of teach-ins, marches, a documentary screening, and a Sunday evening reception.

This is not a political occupation in the sense of what we've come to know in the last several months. In fact, United Opt Out National, the organization leading the event without any sponsorship of any kind, is behaving in a manner becoming of many educators. Permits and permissions have been secured, a detailed schedule is available, and everything within the organizers' control is, well, organized.

From my perspective, the myriad occupy movements operate based on a "nuisance of presence." That is, congregate in largely public and visible locations for extended periods of time to make a temporary home. The constant presence is by itself a form of protest, notwithstanding the additional marches, conversations, and visual representations that fit a more conventional view of protest movements.

Occupying the Department of Education on March 30 is an entirely legal occupation. It is a 96-hour congregation and discussion of like-minded educators, students, and parents who are resisting the prominence of high-stakes standardized testing, railing against attempts made by ALEC and other privately funded organizations to draft model legislation to ultimately privatize public schools, and to drown out the voices of charlatans and pundits who lack the credibility to comment on education.

So what is this about an occupation then? Well, we can argue all things occupy, but I'll let that debate play out in the comments. There are strong positions for and against the movement. There's also this huge abyss in the middle populated by folks who just don't care either way. We don't hear too much from them, probably because they don't make good media. I know a lot of people who never utter any derivation of the word "occupy" unless it refers to a bathroom, and that's all right with me.

The Occupy the DOE in Washington, DC on March 30 may be an "occupy" event in name only. That is, the proper authorities approved the permits. No one's sleeping in a tent. No one is unwelcome. But it is turning various sites at and around the DOE into temporary outdoor classrooms.

Alternative to an ongoing physical presence, United Opt Out National will temporarily "occupy" the conversation on education reform, demanding that educators, parents, and students, those who actually know about curriculum and teaching, receive an equal voice. As it currently stands, it is only those with money and political influence who make the key decisions regarding education reform and policy.

It has been the contention of United Opt Out all along that a powerful weapon against corporatized reforms is non-compliance with the current testing regime. It's that simple: Nothing needs to be done other than refusing to do something. Without the highly coveted quantitative information from which to discipline and punish students and their teachers, perhaps then those not part of the large foundations will get someone's attention.

Occupy the Ed Department starts Friday

By Valerie Strauss

A group of activists is planning a four-day protest event starting next

week called “Occupy the DOE in D.C.” that is aimed at alerting the

Obama administration to growing unhappiness with its education

reform policies.

The event includes seminars, led by professors, activists and others, a

s well as marches and speeches that together are designed to express

opposition to the education policies of President Obama and Education

Secretary Arne Duncan, which critics say have, among other things,

increased the importance of high-stakes tests and promoted charter

schools at the expense of traditional public schools.

Unlike some other Occupy protests, the organizers of this one got

the required permits to stage all of the planned events.
“Occupy the DOE” is being organized by United Opt Out, an

organization of parents, educators, students and social activists seeking

to end the high-stakes testing regimen in public education today and create

a balanced accountability system.

United Opt Out encourages parents to use “opt out” rules in their school

districts that allow students to stay home when standardized tests are given.

They say that the focus on high-stakes standardized testing in the No Child

Left Behind era — and now the Race to the Top program — has failed to

improve student achievement and instead has narrowed curricula,

wasted public resources and caused anxiety and fear for students

and teachers.

It remains unclear just how big a crowd “Occupy the DOE in D.C.”

will draw, but it is worth noting that people from different walks of life

who oppose federal education policy are taking increasingly public

stances against it.

Last summer, a protest march called “Save Our Schools” was held

near the White House; thousands of teachers from across the country

attended and listened to speakers including Diane Ravitch and Matt

Damon. More recently, there have been other public displays of dissatisfaction

with the path of school reform, which many see as promoting corporate

interests. In New York, for example, school principals organized a protest

the state’s new educator evaluation system, which ties the evaluations

and pay of teachers and principals to students’ performance on

standardized tests. Currently more than 1,418 principals in New

York and nearly 5,000 other people have signed an open letter of

concern about the assessment system.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown said in his 2012 State of the State address

in January that he wants to reduce the number of standardized tests

students take. And in Texas, the state education commissioner,

Robert Scott, cheered anti-testing activistswhen he said last month that

the notion that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion”

of what a quality education should be. And school districts by the score are

passing a resolution calling for more balance in assessment and a move

away from the high-stakes testing that now consumes as many as 45 days

of a high school student’s 180-day school year.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired the “Occupy the DOE

in D.C.” event, about which you can find details here .

D.C. Cheating Scandal: A Conspiracy of Silence

Great blog post posted at: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/dc_cheating_scandal_a_conspiracy_of_silence.html#ixzz1q28sCTVNMarch March 22, 2012 By M. Catharine Evans and Ann Kane

It took nine years for rumors of cheating on test scores by school personnel in Atlanta to percolate and trigger a devastating nine-month investigation by their governor. Will it take nine or more years for D.C. schoolchildren to get the same kind of justice?

Investigators in Atlanta reported '"a culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence" had existed during Superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall's reign. It took 60 agents with subpoena power to break through Hall's firewall and eventually determine that 178 teachers and principals of 44 schools cheated on the 2009 test "either by giving inappropriate help to students or altering answer sheets."'

Presently, teachers and others implicated in the illegal activity are under "a criminal investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard. Howard is looking into felony indictments against the educators for altering state documents, lying to investigators and stealing government funds." Though Hall was "not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena[,]" she still ended up losing her position and has become a pariah in the education community.

Educators reaping financial rewards -- i.e., increased teacher pay based on test scores -- by altering test answers can't be good for the students. Yet tying teacher pay to achievement data can have the same effect as that of asking a cat to ignore that mouse in the corner. The temptation to go after the mouse will be too strong.

In comparison, the D.C. cheating probe has three separate agencies "investigating" its questionable test scoring during the reign of Chancellor Michelle Rhee from 2008-2010, but the effort on the part of officials is nothing like Atlanta.

No 800-page reports (see Atlanta's) have been issued by anyone in D.C. involved in the case, even after the D.C. inspector general, the Department of Education's inspector general, and now the consulting firm of Alvarez and Marsal have all gotten in on the act.

The Team

As a change agent extraordinaire, Rhee rode into D.C. in 2007 promising to earn the trust of the school district through a hard-line emphasis on accountability and personal responsibility. Within months she lowered the boom. Chancellor Rhee, answering only to newly elected mayor Adrian Fenty, fired principals and teachers; closed schools; and implemented a controversial, data-driven teacher evaluation program.

After fifteen months in D.C., the woman who called herself the "decider," not a "negotiator," declared, "if there's one thing I have learned...it's that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated."

To ensure a seamless transition with minimal interference, Rhee's team included Kaya Henderson, a vice president at the non-profit The New Teachers Project (TNTP), which Rhee founded in 1997. Henderson acted as Rhee's second-in-command in D.C., then took over after her boss's resignation in 2010.

University of Chicago grad Jacqueline Greer, who also worked at TNTP, became Rhee's executive assistant during the transition, while Jenny Abramson, a 30-year-old advertising executive at the Washington Post and friend of fellow Stanford grad Chelsea Clinton, led Rhee's tight-knit group of "education specialists." A spokesperson for the chancellor's office noted that they were in daily contact with the Washington Postduring Rhee's tenure. Abramson returned to the Post during 2010.

Although DCPS is just one of many school systems being investigated for standardized test cheating, Rhee's superstar status and high profile as CEO of the billion-dollar StudentsFirst non-profit make the stakes much higher if evidence of wrongdoing materializes.

The former D.C. schools chief will have a hard time shifting blame to nonexistent collaborators if investigators find that cheating occurred not only under her watch, but under her successor and protégé Kaya Henderson's as well.

Just last week, in a separate inquiry, Hosanna Mahaley's D.C. Office of State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) hired an outside firm, Alvarez and Marsal, to examine 2011 test results in 35 flagged public and public charter classrooms. In a not-so-odd twist of fate, Alvarez and Marsal is the same firm hired by Rhee to conduct a forensic audit of DCPS's muddled finances back in 2007.

The company's website describes itself as "a global professional service specializing in turnaround and interim management." Nowhere does it purport to possess expertise in educational testing anomalies.

OSSE's hiring of A&M comes on the heels of increased press coverage by both the alternative and mainstream media regarding an ongoing federal investigation of alleged widespread cheating.

The Race Card

Bill Turque of the Washington Post interviewed Henderson in early March 2012 about the investigations. (Henderson, in an April 1, 2011 letter to DCPS staff just days after USA Today published a detailed account of the allegations, requested the D.C. inspector general to look into the matter.) When asked by Turque if either the local IG or Duncan's DOE IG, who joined the investigation in July 2011, had been in touch with her, a defensive Henderson responded:

BT: Do you see the Ed Department Inspector General's or the D.C. IG's tracks? Is there any evidence that they are around, doing an investigation?

KH: I don't know because there is a firewall. And if I did know, you'd accuse me of, not you but...

BT: They haven't talked to you?

KH: No one from the IG's office has contacted me personally.

Henderson then expressed the same sentiment of her predecessor Rhee who had stated in an earlier interview that cheating accusations "were an insult" to hard-working minority children:

Henderson: And the subtext, frankly, is that there are a lot of people who do not believe that kids in DCPS, or in Atlanta, or Baltimore or any other place where they look like me could make significant gains. We're not putting that on the table as squarely as we're putting some other stuff on the table. So I just feel like we've got to tell the truth and shame the devil, right?

Coincidentally, Beverly Hall's response to the preliminary investigation in Atlanta echoed Rhee and Henderson, projecting blame onto those who believe that poor, disadvantaged children could not excel in reading and math.

The issue is not a question of whether low income students can learn; the issue is whether the Rhee administration created a culture of cheating.

Unfortunately for Hall in Atlanta, where charges of racism didn't work, two grand jury subpoenas were issued last September for records dating to the late 1990s, when she had taken over the failing urban district. Will the race card help D.C.?

The Inspectors General and Private Consulting Firms

In July 2011, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Education would join the District's IG Charles Willoughby to look into the cheating allegations. Willoughby's spokesperson, Charles Burke, told the Post reporter at the time that he did "not know how long it [DOE] had been playing a role or whether its help had been requested by the District." A cursory search of the internet pulls up no information on exactly who from the DOE has actually been assigned the case.

Seven months later, things heated up when a February 26, 2012 New York Times article questioned Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's appearance with Michelle Rhee at a January education conference given the DOE's pending involvement with the case.

When asked by the Times about the apparent conflict of interest, Mr. Duncan's spokesperson called the columnist "irresponsible ... to presume guilt before we have all the facts."

Richard L. Hyde, who led the Atlanta investigation, disagreed:

I'm shocked that the secretary of education would be fraternizing with someone who could potentially be the target of the investigation.

But the same Times article fails to mention that the DOE's inspector general, Kathleen Tighe, also heads the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board overseeing Stimulus fund distribution. How can the IG of the DOE be a watchdog over $100 billion in Stimulus funds designated for that same institution? Another conflict of interest to add to the growing list?

The stakes are high for Ms. Rhee, who has secured a place in the national spotlight as an education reformer par excellence. Her relentless pursuit of a data-driven, pay-for-performance educational model led to a rapid rise in test scores over a three-year period. Rhee rewarded schools, principals, and teachers with bonuses in addition to receiving federal and private funds for the improved scores.

It wasn't until over half of D.C. schools were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of wrong-to-right erasure rates that an outside firm -- Caveon Consulting Services LLC, a test security firm -- was called in to investigate in 2009.

Caveon, the same firm hired by disgraced Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall, "did not find any evidence of cheating at any of the schools." The president of Caveon admitted later that the investigations were limited but that the company did what it was asked to do by D.C. officials.

In 2011, Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal investigators criticized Caveon in the 800-page report, noting that "many schools for which there was strong statistical evidence of cheating were not flagged by Caveon."

With three ongoing investigations, Michelle Rhee's troubles are far from behind her. After the USA Today published its extensive report in March 2011, over 3,700 parents and teachers petitioned the Department of Education and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct an in-depth analysis of the test scores from 2008 through 2010. They also requested that Rhee and others be questioned under oath about their possible involvement in the high number of wrong-to-right erasures.

The petition presumably led to the DOE's July 2011 announcement of their intention to join the probe ensuring a thorough and comprehensive investigation. Secretary Duncan, who said he was "stunned" by the widespread cheating uncovered in Atlanta last summer, also suggested that this "was not an isolated individual or two, this was clearly systemic, this was clearly a part of the culture in Atlanta. That simply can't happen, that is absolutely inexcusable."

However, Secretary Duncan's shock over the educational culture of corruption under Beverly Hall has not motivated him to aggressively pursue the truth surrounding the same possible corruption in play under Rhee. When asked recently about the federal probe, Mr. Duncan's spokesman Justin Hamilton echoed the cover-up language of former Atlanta officials, stating that "our inspector general is investigating the cheating issue in DC public schools and we should let the findings speak for themselves."

Sitting side by side at the January 19, 2012 Data Quality Campaign conference in D.C., Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan argued that education personnel can use student data, including test scores, to rate teachers. Despite the looming D.C. cheating scandals, both are still on message, pushing the importance of quantifying the progress of individual students. Rhee summed it up at the conference:

The data can be an absolute game changer[.] ... If you have the data, and you can invest and engage children and their families in this data, it can change a culture quickly.

The desire to change a culture quickly and deliberately is the personality type of a dictator, and unless taxpayers want an education system with a top-down "do as I tell you" approach, there's no place in our children's classrooms for this kind of leader.

According to a 2009 Atlantic profile, Rhee's fanatical devotion to numbers began early on when she was a Teach for America recruit:

What makes a good teacher? And how do you recognize one? For Rhee and her fellow reformers, the answer is data. Lots of data. There may be many unquantifiables in teacher quality, but most of the traits that matter to reformers can be put into numbers.

It's an attitude born of Rhee's experience in Teach for America..."TFA is a machine," says Jennifer Kirmes, who taught for the program in Washington and now works in its Chicago office. "Everything is done with data and analysis."

Rhee's promise of transparency, accountability, and merit-based compensation in 2007 rings hollow as she continues to elude the press when it comes to speaking about her area of expertise -- test data as it relates to teacher performance and subsequent charges of cheating under her watch.

Friends in High Places

A year after the USA Today exposé, Rhee, the media darling, is still riding high. Appearing on cable news shows, PBS, and network television; crisscrossing the country, speaking to varied audiences; pushing legislation; and heading up StudentsFirst, the advocacy group she founded, Rhee appears unstoppable. If her public image remains mostly untarnished, it may be due to nothing less than friends like Arne Duncan and former White House operatives.

In late summer 2011, after a USA Today reporter made a number of attempts to get Ms. Rhee on the record about the cheating scandal, Rhee's StudentsFirst PR representative, SKDKnickerbocker's Anita Dunn (also President Obama's former communications director), advised the D.C. chancellor's office to "just stop answering his [Jack Gillum's] e-mails."

Hari Sevugan, Rhee's VP of Communications at StudentsFirst, served as former national press secretary for the DNC and before that worked as senior spokesman for President Obama's 2008 campaign. Along with Dunn, he covered for Rhee, saying reporters "were provided unprecedented time and access to report their story." Answering for D.C. officials last fall, Sevugan suggested that they were running out of patience with reporters' attempts to get a statement from Rhee.

Rhee did answer written questions submitted by USA Today last May, but out of the eleven pertaining to the cheating scandal, she refused to respond to ten.

Secretary Duncan's closeness to Rhee poses a significant obstacle to getting to the bottom of the D.C. investigation. In Atlanta there were "subpoenas for signed copies of any and all oaths of office" taken by the former superintendent Beverly Hall. Where are the subpoenas for information from Michelle Rhee and DCPS? After nine months, there are still no definitive conclusions from the DOE inspector general's office. Who's protecting whom?

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/dc_cheating_scandal_a_conspiracy_of_silence.html#ixzz1q28sCTVN

Teacher Turnover Affects All Students' Achievement, Study Indicates

By Stephen Sawchuk on March 21, 2012 12:45 PM posted on http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2012/03/when_teachers_leave_schools_ov.html

When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student achievement.

But a couple years back, two researchers did an analysis that showed, counter-intuitively, it's actually the less- effective teachers, rather than the more- effective ones, who tend to leave schools with a high concentration of low-achieving, minority students. It raised the question of whether a degree of turnover might be beneficial, since it seemed to purge schools of underperforming teachers.

When reporting on that study, I played devil's advocate by pointing out that it didn't address the cultural impact of having a staff that's always in flux. The recently released CALDER paper suggests I may have been right in probing this question.

Written by the University of Michigan's Matthew Ronfeldt, Stanford University's Susanna Loeb, and the University of Virginia's Jim Wyckoff, the new paper basically picks up on the same question. Even if overall teacher effectiveness stays the same in a school with turnover, it's well documented that turnover hurts staff cohesion and the shared sense of community in schools, the scholars reasoned. Could that have an impact on student achievement, too?

To find out, they looked at a set of New York City test-score data from 4th and 5th graders over the course of eight years. The data were linked to teacher characteristics.
(All the usual caveats about limitations of test scores apply, of course.)

Among their findings:

• For each analysis, students taught by teachers in the same grade-level team in the same school did worse in years where turnover rates were higher, compared with years in which there was less teacher turnover.
• An increase in teacher turnover by 1 standard deviation corresponded with a decrease in math achievement of 2 percent of a standard deviation; students in grade levels with 100 percent turnover were especially affected, with lower test scores by anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of a standard deviation based on the content area.
• The effects were seen in both large and small schools, new and old ones.
• The negative effect of turnover on student achievement was larger in schools with more low-achieving and black students.

"Turnover must have an impact beyond simply whether incoming teachers are better than those they replaced—even the teachers outside of this redistribution are somehow harmed by it," the authors conclude. "Though there may be cases where turnover is actually helpful to student achievement, on average, it is harmful."

They authors call for more research to identify the mechanics of the decline—whether a loss of collegiality, or perhaps a loss of institutional knowledge among the staff due to turnover, is the cause of the lower achievement.

How to learn from mistakes- TEd Education

Why I Decided to Become a Private School Teacher by Nadia Zananiri

by Nancy Flanagan posted in EDWeek

This is a guest post from Nadia Zananiri, who teaches AP World History at Miami Beach Senior High School, and serves as AP World History mentor teacher for Miami Dade county. She is founder of the Facebook group Florida Parents

and Educators for Legislative Change.

I am not a private school teacher yet; but I am planning on becoming one. I have taught at a wonderful public school with a college prep program that allows all students access to a world class education for my entire teaching career.

I teach in an urban area with a mix of students. In the Advanced Placement classes I teach, I have students from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, to some of the poorest. Families that have been here for generations, to families who are recent immigrants and the parents don't speak English. Regardless of their background, my principal likes to always say "we have the best students in the world," and we do.

Many of my students' parents are wealthy and could easily afford to send their children to exclusive private schools, yet they choose to send their children to their local public school because they believe in public education. They have not bought into the hype that all of our public schools are in crisis. That all public school teachers are lazy and incompetent and that they cower in their classrooms scowling at their students, all the while waiting to collect their larded pensions.

During the nine years I have been teaching at my public school, the school has received grades of D, C, B and finally this year we achieved an A. Next year, due to the state of Florida changing the grading standards (which they have done every year since they decided to grade schools) we are projected to become a C school. The State Board of Education has reached the absurd conclusion of expecting special education students and English language learners to reach the same proficiency levels as regular students; and that out of date science test scores should be used as data (doesn't sound very scientific to me). Whichever grade the state decides to assign my school, I will know the truth, we are still an A school.

So why am I planning on leaving such a wonderful public institution for a private school? Well, I wasn't. Even after the state Legislators decided to exempt Advanced Placement classrooms from the twice voter approved class size amendment, and my student work load ballooned to 190 students without any extra pay, I was planning on staying.

But after the last faculty meeting, the state dealt the final blow to my teaching career in Florida public schools. We were told about the wonders of a magical algorithm that would be able to predict student growth. It's called the "value-added model." I refer to it as voodoo mathematics. If teachers do not meet the predictions of student growth projected by the algorithms in relation to their peers, they will be rated "ineffective." Teachers are ranked on a curve, thus a certain percentage will always be considered failures.

When the value added ratings were published in New York newspapers last week, many were surprised to see talented teachers ranked in the lowest percentiles. I was not surprised. One teacher of the gifted was ranked in the 6th percentile after her students' mean score dropped from a 3.97 to a 3.92. Students are placed in gifted and Advanced Placement classrooms because they have scored at the top range of state tests. If they are scoring high already, they will have a difficult time showing growth and statistically they are more likely to regress towards the norm.

Good teachers can now be fired because of bad math. As mandated by Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers imposed under current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, which require districts and states to use standardized test scores as a significant portion of teacher evaluations, the Florida Senate passed bill 736 last spring. Under Race to the Top and Senate Bill 736, teachers with two years of "ineffective" rankings will be fired and their teaching license will be revoked by the state of Florida, thus banning them from teaching in any other public school in the United States.

Well, not exactly. These fired and banned teachers will probably be able to find work at a charter school where teachers don't have to have professional teaching licenses and are not subject to this new teacher evaluation system, despite the fact that charter schools also receive public funds. The exemption of charter school teachers from both the state and federal mandates, leads one to believe that politicians are less interested in accountability than they are in busting unions and making sure no teacher lasts long enough to collect a pension. In the name of firing the worst teachers, we will be firing some of the best.

I refuse to be a victim of the Russian roulette nature of value added models. I will not let myself be labeled an "ineffective" teacher after continuously striving to improve my instruction, my knowledge base, my relationship with my students and parents. I will not be labeled an ineffective teacher after spending hours on the phone, in person and over email contacting parents over skipping students, sick students, struggling students, amazing students....I will not be labeled an ineffective teacher after spending hours on my weekend and evenings grading student papers when I should be reading to my own young children.

I can't play by the rules of your game. It has reached the point where I know that I will inevitably end up a loser, no matter how hard I work. Private schools have become the Promised Land. Small class sizes, no government testing, unscripted curriculum and only accountability to my students, parents and administrators. I am a proud product of public schools from elementary to university, but the policies imposed in recent years by politicians are destroying the same system politicians claim to be saving.