In order to assess Trombetta, thirty-eight, a ten-year teaching veteran and winner of teaching awards from both her school district and her county, the district required her first graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art that school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectured her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape—bullet points on Colorado’s fine-arts curriculum standards. Something similar was happening in the district’s gym classes, where a test asked second graders, “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head.”
When I visited Trombetta’s cheery, colorful classroom on a November afternoon in 2010, she really wanted to talk. As she ate a TV dinner for lunch, she said she liked the idea of exposing her young students, many of whom had never visited a museum, to great works of art. But, she complained, preparing the children for the exam meant teaching them reductive half-truths—that dark colors signify sadness and bright colors happiness, for example. “To bombard these kids with words and concepts instead of the experience of art? I really struggle with that,” she said. “It’s kind of hard when they come to me and say, ‘What are we going to make today?’ and I have to say, ‘Well, we’re going to write about art.’ ” She confided that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue working in the district. And sure enough, at the end of that school year Trombetta quit her job and moved to Vienna, Austria, where she now teaches at the American International School. There her students are assessed only on the art projects they create.
Douglas Harris, the value-added economist, warns in his book, “There might be good reason to extend testing, but doing it solely for measuring educator performance could be a grave error. Decisions about standardized testing should be driven by the testability of particular subjects and with an eye toward ensuring that they don’t distort teaching in unproductive ways.” In the absence of guidelines from Washington, states and districts have forged ahead on their own to create new tests. Harrison District 2 now supplements its paper exams with what testing experts call “performance-based assessments”: In elementary grades, phys-ed students must show they can dribble a basketball; high school music students perform three songs; art students must demonstrate the difference between a one- and two-point perspective drawing. South Carolina’s fourth-grade music exam, administered via computer, asks: “When singing a melody together with a friend, what dynamic level should you sing? A) Louder than your friend B) Not too loud and not too soft C) Softer than your friend or D) the same as your friend.” (The correct answer is D.) Students are then shown a measure of sheet music and asked to identify which of four electronic recordings matches the notation. Florida plans to create new tests for every grade and subject level that is currently untested, a plan that Bill Gates, in a 2013 interview with me, called rushed and “crazy.”
Can creativity be quantified? The upside to high-stakes assessment programs like these is that they signal to teachers, students, and parents that the arts matter. A downside is the ever-increasing amount of paperwork for teachers and principals, and the increased testing time for kids. And high-quality performance assessments are more difficult to administer and grade than are traditional tests. So some districts and states are finding easier and cheaper ways to measure achievement. In New York City, teachers of non-tested grades and subjects, like kindergarten or music, are often graded according to school-wide test score gains in core subjects. This could conceivably encourage all teachers in a school to focus on worthy goals; it’s easy to imagine how a social studies teacher might include more essay writing in his course, which would help kids do better on an English test. But in September 2013 the Web site Chalkbeat New York reported on how some New York principals were gaming this system by choosing their school’s strongest tested area—for example, fourth-grade math—as the means by which to evaluate gym and theater teachers with no math expertise. In Florida, Tennessee, and other states, kindergarten, first-, and second-grade teachers are held accountable for third-grade test scores, even the scores of students they never taught. That’s what happened to Kim Cook, a second-year first-grade teacher at Irby Elementary in Alachua, Florida, a K–2 school. She received a perfect score on her lesson study and 88 points out of a possible 100 on an appraisal from her principal. She was even voted “teacher of the year” by her colleagues. But she received an unsatisfactory evaluation because third graders at a school down the street performed poorly on exams. If she receives another “unsatisfactory” next year, she can be dismissed. The NEA has sued the Florida Board of Education on behalf of Cook and six other teachers, to protect teachers from a practice that defies common sense: being rated based on the test scores of students they have never even met.
Some union critics hope today’s young teachers will shift the profession away from its strong identification with organized labor. In 2010 Educators 4 Excellence launched in New York City to give a voice to teachers who support accountability reforms and sometimes oppose traditional union protections. It quickly attracted funding from the Gates Foundation and expanded to Los Angeles, Connecticut, and Minnesota. A 2012 survey of ten thousand American teachers showed their opinions have shifted during the era of accountability reform. Respondents believed tenure should be granted after 5.4 years on the job, an increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. Other polls show almost half of teachers younger than age thirty-five support charter schools, compared to less than a third of teachers over the age of fifty. But overall, American educators remain strongly committed to their unions. Over 80 percent of teachers support collective bargaining, and the majority believe they should have the right to go on strike.
President Obama’s accountability agenda took on the teachers unions. But was the public as hostile to unions as the political elite was? In late 2010 D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid. Polls showed Washington’s black middle class had turned against Fenty’s education reform agenda, frustrated by Michelle Rhee’s brash management style, her closure of underperforming schools in black neighborhoods, and her layoffs not only of teachers, but of 121 staffers in the district’s central office. Student test scores had increased incrementally under Rhee, but it turned out D.C. voters saw their public schools—which had been some of the first in the nation for African Americans—as more than just achievement factories: They were neighborhood meeting places, sources of treasured civil service jobs, and repositories of community history and racial pride.
Teachers unions got another unexpected boost in public support in February 2011, when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker introduced a plan to roll back public sector collective bargaining and cut pensions. Teachers helped lead massive protests at the state capital in Madison, and shortly afterward a poll found 70 percent of Wisconsinites had a favorable opinion of public school teachers. A national poll from Gallup and USA Today found 61 percent of Americans opposed laws, like Walker’s, limiting teachers’ rights to collective bargaining. (In the weeks before the protests, the Wisconsin state teachers union had actually agreed to a number of reforms: value-added teacher evaluation, weakened tenure, and higher employee contributions to health care and pension plans. None of it swayed Republican lawmakers, who approved Walker’s plan.)
Even more surprising was public opinion in the wake of a teachers’ strike in Chicago in September 2012. The city’s students missed seven days of school, throwing parents’ work and child care plans into turmoil. But polls showed the majority of parents—and even higher proportions of black and Latino parents—supporting union teachers, who, two years earlier, had rejected the relatively moderate, reform-oriented politics of Randi Weingarten and her local allies and elected the far more confrontational Karen Lewis as president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Lewis called Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s reform agenda—especially his policy of using low test scores to select fifty schools for closure in poor neighborhoods, sometimes replacing them with nonunionized charter schools—“a corporate attack on public e
ducation … This is warfare now.”*5
Accountability reformers, including Emanuel and the organization Stand for Children, had worked with the Illinois state legislature to pass a law making it harder for teachers to strike, by requiring 75 percent of union members, an increase from 51 percent, to vote in favor of any walkout. Nevertheless, nearly 90 percent of CTU members authorized the 2012 strike. The result was a compromise contract. It provided a 3 percent raise and more funding for support services, such as social workers and guidance counselors, especially in high-poverty schools, in exchange for a longer school day. The contract continued to tie teacher salaries and bonuses to years in the classroom and advanced degrees earned. But the CTU agreed, at least in theory, to professional evaluations that include evidence of student learning (which usually means test scores). In the event of layoffs, only high-performing teachers would be protected.
The following spring the Chicago Public Schools did indeed lay off 1,000 teachers, citing a budget shortfall. Another 161 teachers in the city, all with good evaluation scores, were left without assignments because their schools were being shut down. Teach for America emerged as a flash point, since it expected to place 500 corps members in Chicago public and charter schools despite the crisis, at a cost of $1.6 million to the struggling district.*6 At TFA’s July 2013 conference in Detroit, which I attended, some Chicago-based alumni reported a job market so tight that veteran, traditionally trained teachers were applying to TFA in the hopes of using the organization’s connections to secure coveted jobs in charter schools, which are not affected by the district’s hiring freeze and tend to favor TFA-affiliated candidates.
A vocal group of TFA alumni believe sending corps members into districts experiencing staff reductions, or into functional charter schools with already high test scores, betrays Kopp’s original mission, to send the youngest and least experienced teachers only to schools experiencing shortages of qualified teachers. One of the alumni critics is Steve Zimmer, a member of the Los Angeles school board who had tried to carve a middle path between accountability reformers and the teachers union—only to find, after he was endorsed by the union, that reform philanthropists began heavily funding his challenger, whom he nonetheless defeated in 2013. “There are still places in the United States where it is difficult or impossible to staff schools,” Zimmer said, mentioning rural areas. “And that’s where TFA should be. It shouldn’t be in charter schools.”
Robert Schwartz agrees. He taught for seven years at Stevenson Middle School in East L.A., where TFA placed him in 1994. He then jumped over to the charter school sector, where he eventually became the chief academic officer of the Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF), a fifteen-school network. At ICEF, he often hired TFA alumni as teachers. They had taught for two years in the toughest schools in the city, then decided to stay in teaching beyond their initial commitments. That was impressive. They also knew how to analyze student performance data, a priority at ICEF. But he preferred to avoid first-year teachers who were learning on the job and were unlikely to commit to his schools long term, including TFA corps members, and he says that new teachers with only five weeks of training should be working only at schools that lack better options.
Teach for America alumni are popping up in another unexpected place: charter school unionization campaigns. Rob Timberlake, a member of Teach for America’s 2010 corps, was one of several TFA alumni leaders of the union drive at Detroit’s four César Chávez charter schools, part of the larger Leona Group, a for-profit network active in five states. At the end of each school year, Timberlake says, his principal would lay off “at least one or two teachers, and those were unexpected.” Some of his colleagues had received evaluation reports when no administrator had visited their classroom for an observation, and it was unclear to teachers how they might earn a raise or promotion. “One of the interests I and other teachers had in organizing was to make sure there was a process for teachers to work on improving their practice, rather than a process for merely getting rid of lower performers,” Timberlake said. “Before I came to Detroit, I thought the conversation was ‘unions vs. TFA.’ But it’s not as clear-cut as that. People are attracted to the social justice aspects of TFA’s mission, and union organizing follows in line with that. It’s about trying to correct what teachers in the community see as problems with the school system.”
Twelve percent of charter schools are now unionized, but that number may grow quickly. New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia have all experienced bursts in charter organizing. In Chicago, where the teacher wars have been the nastiest in recent years, a quarter of charters are now represented by the AFT. The “no excuses” ideology of many of these schools—they expect teachers to work twelve hours a day, hold weekend test-prep sessions, and be available at all times by e-mail or phone—motivates some teachers, especially those who intend to teach for more than just a few years, to seek representation. “There’s a problem when we’re creating a job you can’t do if you have kids,” Dennis Van Roekel, former president of the National Education Association, told me. “There are a lot of us who spend too much time working. But ultimately, you need time for family, time for community, time for church.”
According to a union executive who has negotiated charter school contracts across the country, at many schools teachers are expected to eat lunch with their students, and have no prep period to plan lessons. At others, when a teacher calls in sick, the school will not hire a substitute, but will instead require other teachers to fill in during their prep periods. At one Chicago charter school, teachers complained that they had so little free time during the day that they could not visit the bathroom. Some of the most prominent charter school and TFA funders were interested in these models in part because of their potential to weaken teachers unions’ sway over education policy.*7 By making their schools particularly difficult—even unpleasant—environments in which to work, some charter school outfits are opening the door for a new generation of educators to seek protection in teachers unions.
By 2011 results of value-added reform efforts began to trickle in. Research from the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University found that where teachers had been eligible for bonuses according to value-added ratings, whether $3,000 per teacher in New York City or $15,000 per teacher in Nashville, student outcomes did not seem to improve. In Austin, where teachers could earn up to $3,000, only a third of teachers reported changing their practice in response to the incentives. As in previous experiments in merit pay, the assumption underlying these policies was simply incorrect. Underperforming teachers were not hiding some sort of amazing skill set they failed to use either because they were too lazy or were disgruntled about low pay; they were already trying as hard as they could to improve student learning, but they did not have the skills to do so. This seemed to suggest that, absent serious professional development efforts, merit pay was a nonstarter in terms of raising student achievement.
The push to change how teachers were evaluated did, however, impact teachers’ working lives. Principals were spending more time than ever before in classrooms, and more time filling out paperwork describing what they had seen there. In New York City in 2012, under pressure from the Bloomberg administration, nearly half of all teachers who applied for tenure were denied; 3 percent of those were fired, and the rest were kept on probation. Just five years earlier 97 percent of teachers who applied for tenure had been approved.
In Washington, D.C., by 2012 10 percent of the teacher corps had been laid off based on performance evaluations. It’s worth looking more deeply at Washington, in part because Michelle Rhee’s agenda for teachers anticipated, by several years, many of the policy trends that Race to the Top spread nationwide. Despite the wave of research suggesting that merit pay was ineffective at raising student achievement, the District of Columbia stuck with its plan. Each year, six hundred to seven hundred teachers were offered annual bonuses, typically of $15,000 or less, though 20 to 30 percent
of them were turning the money down because they were unwilling to lose their tenure protections in exchange. The city’s average teacher salary rose to $77,512, higher than in the surrounding suburbs or in the region’s charter schools. But only one or two teachers per year, out of four thousand, earned the city’s top bonus of $25,000. Perhaps the biggest question is whether D.C. will be able to afford this generous pay moving forward: The program’s philanthropic funding has run out, and it now costs the district $6 million annually.
Was teaching improving in D.C.? A 2013 study reported hopeful results. It found a significant number of low-rated teachers were choosing on their own to leave the district, while those low-rated teachers who stayed produced higher student test scores the following year. A separate report from The New Teacher Project presented more mixed evidence. It found 88 percent of the city’s highest-rated teachers chose to stay, yet highly rated teachers who left were more likely than teachers in other districts to cite the evaluation system itself as one of the reasons they were unhappy. Historically, teachers have gotten little feedback on what they need to do better, much less how. New systems were meant to offer improvements, but often they failed to. Indeed, professional development in D.C. remained patchy, with only one-third of low-performing teachers and one-quarter of high-performing teachers reporting that they had received constructive feedback on their practice. Even more problematically, the data revealed that inexperienced and low-performing teachers were increasingly clustered in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, east of the Anacostia River. It was unclear why this was the case: because it was easier to score well if one worked in a middle-class school, or because many effective teachers in D.C. were avoiding high-poverty schools.
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