Dear Colleagues,
One would have to buy into Student Growth Measures being valid to accept that teachers have been put on “improvement plans” to help them become better teachers. Fortunately, I am not among the believers, mostly because I am pretty sure I still have a grip on some sense of reality. For teachers with SLOs, I believe teachers were put on “improvement plans” because either reasonable growth targets were rejected on their SLOs last year or there was no way to know how to guess how much student scores might grow during the year, or a combination of the two. If teachers were put on a plan from Value Added data, well who knows – maybe one of their students was sick that day, maybe the kids were too far behind to catch up by the time the test was given, or perhaps the tests really don’t reflect what goes on in classrooms. Maybe the reading level of the tests is a year above the grade. Maybe some students drew pictures out of the bubbles.
Maybe one of a hundred reasons. The state and some in our administration seems to believe that the teacher is the root of the problem and therefore the teacher needs to work harder, longer, and on more jargony, popular strategies and all will be better. Perhaps if the special ed teacher worked harder the kids would all be at grade level, healed from their disabilities, and enroll themselves as new students of the Lake Wobegon School of the Heights. Or maybe not.
Our teachers guessed at growth targets last year or were forced to use the “all-knowing” Austin Formula for setting their targets. This formula has as much reliability and research behind it as a dart in the hands of a one-eyed, drunken thrower. Some teachers refused to use it and created their own. Some were accepted by administration and some were not. There were about 10 or so that ARC had to mitigate last year. What a senseless waste of time – guessing how kids might do on invalid measures. I guess that means we should be using more norm-referenced tests, like MAP? This year many teachers are stuck with MAP’s guesswork – at least it is based on how thousands of kids have done in the past. Does that mean it will work for our kids? Probably not, since many of our kids are not testing on MAP where other kids test at the beginning of the year. Maybe even more of our teachers will have an “improvement plan” next year. Oh boy, more paperwork!
Please reach out to colleagues who have been branded as needing “improvement.” It makes no sense. They will not be “cured” of having low scoring students automatically, unless we too, figure out how to game the system into getting more kids to score higher. This seems to me to be different than actually learning something. In the meantime, I hope that our colleagues on these plans don’t get too dismayed at their random selection and lose sight of the fact that we all make a difference, all the time. Sooner or later the general public, with all of our help, will see just how absurd and hurtful this whole system of testing and punishing works. I know that some good teachers will leave CHUH beforehand because they cannot bear a brand that they did not earn. I only hope that it changes before the end of my career.
In Union,
Ari Klein
CHTU President