The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) just released its new reports on teacher quality around the country.
Kentucky didn’t fare well. Overall the state got a “D+” for its teacher management policies.
We got slammed pretty much across the board for things like having, “all the elements of a student- and teacher-level longitudinal data system,” but not using, “this system to provide value-added evidence of teacher effectiveness" (of course, this would be based on our CATS assessments, which the NCTQ didn’t evaluate).
In fact, the report says, “While the state does require classroom observations of teachers, it does not mandate the inclusion of objective measures of student learning as a component in the evaluation.” So, whatever our teachers are getting evaluated for, it doesn’t include what you and I would consider the bottom line most important factor of all – do the teacher’s students learn anything?
By the way, the top-ranked state in the area of evaluating teachers with objective longitudinal data on students was Tennessee, a state which we have spoken favorably of in the past.
The report has lots more disappointing findings. It says Kentucky’s “Requirements for permanent licenses have not been shown to advance teacher effectiveness.” Decoded – you can get tenure as a teacher in this state even if you are not really effective. In fact, the report actually says, “The awarding of tenure appears to be virtually automatic.”
A big surprise to many will be one of the report’s general comments that applies to all states. The NCTQ says, “Research is conclusive and emphatic that master’s degrees do not have any significant correlation to classroom performance.” In other words, all that time and money we have been spending on requiring teachers to get a master’s degree doesn’t matter! Another education fad idea bites the dust, at least according to the NCTQ.
If you have the courage to read more, here’s the link to the Kentucky report.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
National Group Pans Kentucky's Teacher Program
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3 comments:
"In other words, all that time and money we have been spending on requiring teachers to get a master’s degree doesn’t matter!"
What you conveniently neglected to mention is the courses are paid for by the teacher--not by the state.
So the state hasn't paid anything for those courses.
What's lacking and what you don't advocate, is requiring that the test results of standardized tests be reported in grade-equivalent scores. All those standardized tests have just such conversion tables readily available.
What's lacking is a public outcry to require that these results be reported in grade-equivalency scores instead of stanines. It doesn't matter which assessment test is given. The CATS would be fine if the results would be reported in grade-equivalent scores.
Then teachers, parents and students would know how well they were doing in comparison to how well they should be performing.
These reports on "teacher quality" have no more credibility than any other opinion, because they don't evaluate states by where students are testing based upon grade-equivalency scores.
They are as equally culpable as you, the state departments of education, that won't require similar grade equivalency reporting.
Richard, thanks for sharing this information. The issues of teacher quality are deeply systemic, tied certainly to student assessment, as you note, but also shaped by the professional culture of schools and the nebulus roles and responsibilities of school administrators (whose evaluation systems are also poor and not tied to student outcomes).
You are absolutely right that tying teacher performance to student outcomes is the way to go. It's just not quite as easy as it sounds (even using Hempy's grade equivalency suggestion). One problem is that CATS does not give us good longitudinal student data so that you can measure the value a teacher adds over the course of a year to a single student's achievement.
The public needs to demand more from our schools, but also try to understand the inner workings of assessment. CATS does not need to be scrapped, but it needs to be seriously overhauled to give us valid, criterion-referenced, longitudinal data on students. It's fine to use grade equivalents, as Hempy noted, in our reporting, but you've got to remember that is usually based on national norms which are constantly shifting. The one good thing about CATS is the attempt to measure student performance against a common, consistent standard.
My own experience working with teachers confirms that the master's degree adds nothing to teacher performance (and it does cost the taxpayer because law requires teachers to get the MA and then we pay them considerably more for doing so). The universities are currently revising their master's programs to make them more responsive to districts' needs and centered more around adding value to teacher performance. I've been impressed with WKU's efforts so far. Time will tell the impact. We are justified in being skeptical.
Brushfire addresses some of Hempy’s comments pretty nicely, but I have a few added points.
Kentucky taxpayers support the public colleges where the vast majority of our teachers get their master’s degrees. The tuition doesn’t come close to covering the total costs involved.
Also, I think there are some tuition support and forgiveness programs, both state and federal, especially for shortage areas like math, science and special education. I don’t have time to research that right now. Does any other reader know about that?
As far as the issue of score reporting formats goes, some formats are easier for the public to grasp, but a high quality longitudinal assessment program probably operates best with scale scores. However, whatever is used, those scores have to be valid and reliable for individual students, and that is where CATS fails muster on two counts.
First, thanks to open-response questions, CATS is unlikely to ever achieve high-accuracy scoring that is essential to value-added methodologies.
Second, for real value-added programs to work, you have to get the scores back fairly quickly, a criterion that open-response questions have proved incapable of meeting again and again both here in Kentucky and elsewhere like Maryland (which recently dropped open-response questions completely in its assessment).
Another point, the question of whether an assessment is “criterion-referenced” or “norm-referenced” has blurred a lot recently. To be honest, the criterion cut scores are generally set by a sort of normative process, anyway. People who decide what “proficient” looks like generally have a slice of the student group, a norm if you will, in mind. Very rarely does the cut score setting process consider what the students actually need next in life, which is why the CATS criterion scoring is so out of line with college and workforce needs. That process could be improved, of course, by giving business and higher education considerable say in the score-setting process; but, so far, the P to 12 community in this state has been highly resistant to allowing “outsiders” to have a meaningful hand in the cut score setting. Sure, they invite some of the “chosen” from industry to participate, but the slice of industry that gets involved may not be terribly representative. And, I have heard plenty over the years from higher education folks who should be involved but definitely consider themselves to be on the outside of the process.
Finally, I do strongly disagree with one point Brushfire tries to make. CATS has not maintained a constant cut score scheme. I demonstrate that very clearly in “CATS in Decline: Federal Yardstick Reveals Kentucky’s Testing Program Continues to Deteriorate,” which is on line here: http://www.bipps.org/pubs/2007/CATSinDecline.pdf. This assessment simply has an unstable history of scoring that cannot reliably support any conclusions about education.
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