Editor’s note: Jeanne Kaplan is a member of the Denver school board.

Since I was first elected to the Denver Public Schools Board of Education in November 2005, improving our middle school programs has been a top priority.

As noted in Jeremy P. Meyer’s Denver Post story of Thursday, August 19, 2010, some of our middle schools are making academic and enrollment gains of which we can be proud.

However, Mr. Meyer’s story about Hill Middle School does not tell the whole story, so I would like to elaborate on its success.

In 2003, Denver taxpayers voted for a mill levy specifically to revitalize neighborhood schools in areas where schools were underperforming, under enrolled and not meeting neighborhood needs.

Over the past many years, we have been inundated with articles, columns, essays and rants about the widening red-blue divide in this country. People on one side of the divide can no longer even fathom the perspective of people across the way. We are a long way from reconciliation.

I’m afraid a similar chasm has opened in the world of public education. On one side are people who favor data-driven accountability, school choice, autonomy and pay-for-performance (to name a few issues). I’ll call them (somewhat inaccurately) “outsiders.” On the other are “insiders,” those who feel that market-based reforms and an over-emphasis on testing constitute an assault on public education and specifically on teachers.

Rhetoric on both sides is tilting toward invective. Name-calling is crowding out dialogue. The pitched battle earlier this year over Colorado’s Senate Bill 191 – now the educator effectiveness law – exemplifies the tenor of the debate.

An ongoing Los Angeles Times series, “Grading the Teachers,” provides the latest flashpoint in this escalating rhetorical war. The newspaper hired a researcher and crunched seven years of data from standardized tests to create “value-added” scores for 6,000 third- through fifth-grade Los Angeles Unified School District teachers.

Hello EdNews readers. I’ll be checking in occasionally with blog entries here focused on new and worthwhile research. For this first blog, I want to point you to a research brief published on Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute.

The piece, with the dry but informative title of “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers,” is authored by an extremely impressive collection of accomplished researchers. If you read nothing else about education this week, please read the three-page executive summary (then continue on and read the rest!).

Before discussing this research brief, I want to re-introduce myself. I teach school policy and law at the CU Boulder School of Education, where I also direct the Education and the Public Interest Center. In my blog entries here, I will try to point readers to useful resources on the EPIC website in addition to resources – like the new Economic Policy Institute brief – from other places.

The main point of the EPI research brief is straightforward: while value-added modeling (VAM) is a technical advancement that highlights student growth, the numbers generated are nevertheless too inaccurate to be used as a primary factor in making high-stakes decisions about teachers. That is, if someone tells you that a teacher is good or bad based on a VAM calculation, you are wise to take the judgment with a sizeable grain of salt. This is the same warning that I — with far less impressive credentials — issued a couple years ago, as did the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year.

Complaints about some evaluators not fully understanding our true value … a sense that points were taken away unfairly, despite reviewer training in the appropriate rubrics …. evaluators not understanding, and not crediting us, for the things we do well… a sense that someone in a higher position should reverse the injustice. It all feels unfair.

Yes, but, most of these Colorado complaints about the round two R2T scoring could also be applied to premature teacher evaluation based upon the inappropriate use of faulty test score data.

Isn’t there some irony in the fact that some of the folks complaining about unfair R2T scoring of Colorado’s application are also among the ones who turned a deaf ear to, or brushed aside, some of the legitimate concerns about using current test scores to evaluate teachers?

My colleague Robert Reichardt made a similar point in April, after Colorado lost round 1 of R2T. Now we feel twice the pain.

Get ready to see a cheer from those who oppose any type of student data used to evaluate teachers after a report by the Economic Policy Institute is released late Sunday. The report titled, “Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers,” is already being heralded by anti-test groups like Fair Test. The report is actually a nod to policies like SB191 which state that student data should only play a part in teacher evaluation. This is something that I and other supporters emphasized in our support of the bill. The report says:

“A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.”

The report goes on to conclude:

” What is now necessary is a comprehensive system that gives teachers the guidance and feedback, supportive leadership, and working conditions to improve their performance, and that permits schools to remove persistently ineffective teachers without distorting the entire instructional program by imposing a flawed system of standardized quantification of teacher quality.”

I am good with that.

Defeat often begets a scapegoat. In the wake of the twice-short Colorado application to R2T, this has now solidified: the judges were “perplexed by local control” which led to a lack of objectivity. This is a familiar refrain — them pointy-headed Eastern elites jest don’t git the way things work out West, what wid our frontier sensibilities ‘n all. So local control is the Western value we refuse to sacrifice to appease these high-fallutin fiscal brutes.

Except I think it would be prudent to entertain, at least briefly, one small possibility:

Um… What if they are right?

Colorado has 178 independent school districts, and the differences in size are staggering. Using CDE data (Fall 2008), let’s look closer at these 178 districts that contain over 800,000 students:

Read the rest of this entry »
August 29, 2010 | Accountability,CDE and state board of ed.,Governance,The national stage | 6 comments | »

I started student teaching today, but I think that instead of discussing this exciting milestone in my life, I would like to offer some exposition to this week. This year we have a new principal at my Wildly Diverse High School (the name I have assigned to my high school where I am student teaching), and as a result many changes have taken place from last summer until now.

In a school that attempts to teach about 3,500 every year, there were 40 new hires, many of which were first or second year teachers. Additionally, nearly every department chair was replaced. Murals were replaced, mottos changed, and ideas altered.

The first day of our preparatory week, our principal gave us an hour-long speech. He said there were problems at Wildly Diverse High School, but that was no excuse. He told us to ignore other responsibilities in favor of doing our jobs – in other words, in exchange for teaching our students. Success for every student does not appear to be just a slogan to him, but something worth striving for – a high, but still reachable goal. I found his excitable, energetic demeanor inspiring.

Colorado can’t win; that is lesson of the Race to the Top (R2T) competition. Actually the lesson is that states that can’t enforce compliance by schools are not going to win in national competitions. This means Western states where local control means something very different than in does east of the Mississippi will always be left out. (Hawaii is a singular case with a single statewide school district).

At the same time, Colorado districts have proved they can innovate with the best of them. Two Colorado districts (DPS and St. Vrain) won in the much more competitive Investment in Innovation (I3) competition where there were 49 winners out of over 1,600 applications.

It is not that Colorado lacks the ideas or the innovators at the state level, but when we can’t draw that straight line of authority from the Colorado Department of Education to classrooms, we won’t win…at least as long as the current top-down perspective on how education systems work prevails among education thinkers and leaders.

Many people in Colorado are angry, frustrated or just confused after the U.S. Department of Education passed over Colorado while awarding grants in the Race to The Top (RTT). After a similar loss in round one, Colorado made advances in the last legislative session that were politically painful to achieve, but repeatedly praised and defended because they would help Colorado’s chances at winning this competition.

Nevertheless, the state managed to rank only 17 out of the 19 finalists. After the Feds decided to award only 10 grants, friends in Colorado are asking, “What’s up with that?”

A few assertions appeared throughout this process that deserve a response. Over the last year, I have repeatedly heard statements such as the following:

“But President Obama and Secretary Duncan want to support all our reforms, and they especially want to help Colorado’s new Senator, Michael Bennet. Since he is such a reform champion, and potentially vulnerable in the next election, surely they’ll help him bring home the bacon to Colorado.”

Or

“This is too important a competition to leave it up to the bureaucrats and some peer reviewers. With 3.4 billion dollars at stake, the political appointees are definitely going to make sure the “right” states win, and we are certainly among the chosen in Colorado. They can’t deny us!”

As these ideas, or more subtle versions of them, were raised over the last year and a half, I have politely tried to explain that federal grant competitions don’t work that way.

Sure, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman can come across as a self-important blowhard at times. But he is a smart guy, and more important, he gives a hell of a plug to “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary about public education that opens in Denver in October.

There is a lot of publicity building around this film. In Colorado, education reform groups are going to launch a major campaign to get people to see the movie, and based on their anticipated reactions, to get involved in demanding serious systemic change to education in Colorado, and across the nation.

Can a movie prompt such a movement? We’ll see. It’s directed by Davis Guggenheim, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth,” so there is some track record.