OpEd on Common Core State Standards, Education and Juvenile Justice

You can check out my OpEd in the Chicago Tribune here where I articulate some of the successes and challenges of teaching the Common Core State Standards in my alternative education setting. Thanks to Teach Plus Chicago and the national Teach Plus team for helping me field the OpEd.

Professionalism and Assessment in Education: A recommended solution for a more professional approach to Performance Task Grading in Urban Schools

In the educational industry it is essential at times to demonstrate to a skeptical public the professionalism in education. Traditional and social media outlets recently have derided the educational profession. Much of this criticism is due to the tumultuous implementation of reforms driven by local, state, and federal governments over the past few years which disrupted traditional structures of education. It should be the goal of teachers to try to be honest with ourselves and our profession and embrace this moment as a time to steer the conversation away from negative pushback on accountability and student outcomes. Instead let’s take the opportunity to build a consensus of acceptance of the new reality and find solutions that we can come up with that meet and exceed the expectations our country, state, or district have now placed upon us. The more professional we are the more we legitimize education to skeptics of public education and assert more control over our profession. This is especially pertinent in regards to teacher evaluations and assessment, which is now inextricably connected with one another due to the Race to the Top reforms of the past five years and NCLB .

Many districts and states throughout the country have high stakes testing for students with serious implications for student and teacher evaluations based on growth and effectiveness. It is true that most states and districts have adopted multiple measures for student growth and teacher effectiveness. Education managers look to these scores to make important decisions including student placement in magnet or special schools as well as retaining or letting teachers go due to effectiveness, or lack thereof. It is necessary to analyze how assessments are scored and what measures constitute growth in order for these high stakes tests and evaluation systems to improve teaching and learning instead of being another failed reform effort. For large districts across the country, including Chicago Public Schools, these scores have serious ramifications for teaching practices and much is at stake, especially for teachers in regards to evaluations. Most are aware of the heated debate concerning the role assessments have and how  scores are used due to the reforms adopted by Race to the Top federal funds. For example in CPS 25% of teacher evaluations are based on student outcomes which are comprised of teacher graded performance tasks and standardized tests given at the beginning and end of the year. These outcomes will be used to give value-added scores to teachers in order to measure effectiveness and in turn reward successes or warn ineffective teachers so that they can improve. This type of accountability is new to many teachers throughout the country, but due to new laws it is now an inevitable part of teaching, so it is best that teachers stop fighting this accountability and instead focus their attentions on raising the professionalism of education by leading the conversation on how teachers should be accountable, especially in assessment.

To have a more honest, transparent accountability structure it is important to note that often teachers are in charge of scoring their own performance tasks of their students at the beginning and end of the year in order to measure growth. The problem with this structure is that despite the rubric and professional expectations, teachers are still sometimes tempted to score students lower on the first performance task at the beginning of the year and then score the students higher at the end of the year to show growth. This may not happen at all, but it still gives the impression that there could be a lack of professionalism due to its tendency for subjectivity. One approach that would give more credibility to performance task scores is to have other teachers in a district anonymously grade other teachers’ students in a sort of swap. One way to do this effectively is to have teachers volunteer or be selected by the administrator(s) in a building based on previous history of high quality teaching and consistent positive student results. These effective teachers could receive a stipend for their work and could be department or grade level leads. These teachers would be given the responsibility of scoring performance tasks that have similar grade levels and demographics as their students. The teachers would have a different group of students to score at the beginning and end of the year and could receive specialized professional development at the beginning of the year to ensure that scoring is honest, transparent, and effective. This group of teachers would also be having their students’ performance tasks scored by others and it would be anonymous so there would be no fear or distrust of this process.

This would be a more transparent and honest scoring system that rewards effective teachers with additional responsibilities that include some compensation for their work on scoring performance tasks. It also provides an avenue for honest assessment that promotes teachers truly looking at their instruction and student outcomes instead of giving in to the pressures of high stakes testing by being transparent in the assessment process. It has an added bonus of providing another layer of professionalism to the educational sector. There are many complaints about teachers wanting to receive taxpayer dollars but unwilling to show results where most other professions are taken more seriously because they are results-oriented.

In our current educational milieu assessment is inextricably connected with teacher evaluations. In order for educators to teach effectively and students to learn successfully it is essential to reward effective teachers by giving options and financial incentives to receive more responsibility so they can remain in the classroom instead of being tempted to move to an administrative or district-level job. This is one approach that if applied will help retain high quality teachers by providing ladders of responsibility that can enable them to continue to be leaders without leaving the classroom.