Evaluation That Matters

In education, there is a great deal of discussion of using value-added measures as part of the determining factor for teacher evaluation. The concept behind this is that there should be some quantitatively measurable product that lets us compare teacher to teacher. Good teachers should produce higher levels of measurable value-added on standardized tests and poor teachers will produce less. Furthermore, it is conceptualized that this works in business.

Does it? Should it? Will it? The Gates Foundation which has been funneling hundreds of millions of funds has been a significant proponent for value-added. The same leadership from Microsoft that built a software empire and with Bill Gates as Chairman of the Board has watched their empire start to fade into decline. It is easy to think of the ubiquitous nature of Microsoft products, Windows, Office, and Xbox. However, only one of those products has a future (Xbox) where as new Windows products are frequently being ignored, only purchased by enterprise that is dependent on legacy software and consumers not quite ready to switch to OS-X, Chrome, Android, or iOS. The real story is how Microsoft lost its innovative edge. To understand that is to understand it's employee evaluation system that pitted employee against employee, destroyed team work, and eliminated trust. The story of this is Stack Ranking. Microsoft, as well as Adobe and others, began evaluating their employees on a curve. In each group, based on the performance and value given during that time, a few employees were evaluated real high, a few real low, and most in the middle. As a result of this methodology, top performers moved around the company to avoid working with other top performers. Cut throat competition occurred, the type that produced only a few winners and multitudes of losers. Employees looked at only their value, knowing that it was better for them if others did worse. Team work, innovation, and creativity were all lost as individuals looked only to short term gains. While the Department of Education through Race to the Top requirements, prompted by the Gates Foundation looks to push forward value-added measurement, Adobe, Microsoft, and others are backing away from it having seen their innovation edge gone and as corporations that are shells of their once great selves.

The interesting thing is that teachers are prideful people. They are caring people who entered the profession to make a difference. Principals and district administrators are the same, they simply discovered that they could help more kids learn and grow if they were supporting instructional development for whole schools and whole school communities. I've worked with growth measurements for eight years. Each time a teacher gets their results, they analyze and over analyze each student's performance. They question why students went up. They perseverate on each child that didn't grow or didn't grow enough. Instantly they have fifteen adjustments that they are preparing to do to support children. Growth measures, when consistently shared, just by their very existence are powerful tools. They are one part of the complex picture that is a child's development.

For evaluation to matter, it isn't an experience of some "boss" telling some "employee" you need to change this or do that. Evaluation that matters starts with the leader asking questions and listening to the employee. Conversations that cultivate brainstorming, exploration, and the development of interdependent innovation. Very little of the world of evaluation is about removing employees from the workplace in any career field. The majority of evaluation is about finding and generating greatness within ourselves and our work group. Great leaders find ways to create synergy within their work groups. They curate their questions so that employees can generate solutions that make a difference.

Teachers get it. They understand that administrators come and go. Many teachers have been here long before the principal arrived and will be here long after the principal is gone. Over the journey of time, our judgements matter very little. It is their judgement that matters most. They will react to the Excellent, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement, or Unsatisfactory ranking, but those our external valuations. Temporary titles based on the judgement of a temporary individual. Their pride in performance and their view of each child's growth is what matters. As leaders, if we can facilitate through questions, support, and discovery personal reflective growth in our teachers, we will make a difference in our teachers' lives and the lives of each child they teach.

Finding Corporate Synergy

Meaningful Assessment

Franchises for Educational Assessment?

Every once in a while there are small pleasures in life that we have the opportunity to enjoy. Mine is when you feel like a company is always abusing you, the ability to fire it and find a new product. When we lived in an apartment in Michigan, my wife and I would always complain about Ameritech cable. It rarely worked and when it did, the reception was poor. Many times I would go through the customer service rigamarole trying to get it fixed, but in the end, the product was the product. Unfortunately, Ameritech had a franchise at the time with the village and was the only provider of cable in the area. In addition, the apartment complex didn't allow satellite at the time (it was the 90's). Thus we had two choices, rabbit ears television or to take the abuse from Ameritech. It was a great pleasure to become a homeowner and to have my choice between cable and satellite television. I gladly fired the cable company and chose a satellite service. I still smile about it.

Recently, the Village of Deerfield, where I live, had been having trouble with their electric service. The village had a franchise with ComEd and ended up suing the provider for lack of reliable service. Eventually, after years of wrangling with ComEd, the village joined an electricity aggregation consortium and opened up more freedom of choice for its residents. Simply they got frustrated and had to find a way out from the lack of competition creating monopoly-like service.

One critical question in education is why are we allowing assessment providers to have franchise rights for large scale assessment. Why is Illinois a PARCC state and California a Smarter Balanced state? Why can't they and the ACT corporation, the College Board, the Northwest Evaluation Association, Pearson Education, and anyone else who wants in on the assessment business go through an approval process and compete district by district for providing assessments. People trust SAT and ACT scores because we have known them for years and they are less impacted by legislative influence. They are seen as valid, reliable, and constant. Many adults still know the SAT and ACT scores. They remember taking the tests and what it meant for their future. State assessments aren't viewed in the same way. They are not viewed as reliable, and with the state frequently changing the assessments and the cut scores, they are not constants. Many districts, including my own, want outside evaluation mechanisms of our choice. Why not give it to us? What should states franchise their assessment mechanisms? These corporations and certainly our state and federal education leaders are capable of running correlation studies between the assessments to determine achievement and growth profiles. Why is it that schools need to become more competitive but the assessment providers don't? If open market reforms are so good for education, then lets try it with measurement devices also.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot of money involved here. For many states assessment costs for PARCC and Smarter Balanced will significantly increase. Furthermore, the amount of student and teacher time will significantly increase in many states. There are vested interests in having guaranteed revenue streams for these assessment providers. However are those interests the same as parents, students, school districts, and school communities. We don't need to reinvent the cable franchise. For the most part, these are for-profit companies, let them compete for our business. It will help increase their customer service and create a greater level of quality for all of us. 

Stick it to the Man Commercial

Leaps of Faith

So this weekend I have the opportunity to study together with a group of families from my religious community and the topic is "Leaps of Faith." In the first gathering, I had the opportunity to listen to two of my former students share their ideas regarding what is a leap of faith. They are bright, intelligent, and articulate youths who described brief visions of what it takes to move forward and the trust one needs to have that one will land safely on the other side of the journey. In their comments, I started to question the mechanisms and tools we use in our journeys.

At the start of this school year, a retiring first grade teacher shared with me her favorite moments of teaching. She described the miracle of first grade as a majority of students enter the room as non-readers and yet somehow through a variety of twists and turns, they each in their own way become readers. It is in this story essence of this blog truly comes forth. Teaching, as well as life, is a blend of scientific artistry. There is no set formula for a child to become a reader. We have tools, we have resources, but we do not have an exact recipe. There isn't a list of steps in which #37 states upon completion of these previous 36 steps and doing this now the child is a reader. It isn't like programing the alarm clock or entering the code on a garage door, when upon completion of these specific steps the child will become a reader. Learning is not a product of a recipe from the back of a Betty Crocker Brownie Mix. Learning is a blend of scientific artistry. Tools, knowledge, and ideas when put into the hands of an expert becomes a fanciful product. It is the expertise and freedom the artist has; the relationship between the artist and the canvas that creates the learning moment. Furthermore, the freedom and tools we provide can allow for the learning moments to be standardized and palatable or gourmet and exquisite. It is our choice as teachers, principals, and district leaders to decide if the child learns to read through a series of worksheets and stale texts or through delightful stories and exquisite visuals. It is our choice to decide if our learning experiences are likely to lead that child to their "Home Run" book that encourages them to be a reader for a lifetime. Becoming a reader is a leap of faith. A trust by the teacher, the student, and the parent that you will succeed, you will magically break the code. A journey in which we will add a little bit of this and a dash of that to get you there.

As we drove to our first gathering this weekend, my wife who is also an educator and I were discussing Common Core learning experiences in the car. Although our children sitting in the back on their iPads, the eldest interjected into the conversation that the Common Core was easy and boring. It's just more skills and worksheets that they make you do. He's ten and he's bright. He picked up on what was being labeled Common Core and hit the nuances of it from his experience. For him, the Common Core was like Michael and Jane serving castor oil or gruel in Mary Poppins. As we look at the corporatization of learning in the United States, we are given many static recipes to promote learning. They are "scientifically researched" that when implemented with "integrity and fidelity" will provide "valid and reliable" results. Each of these recipes lacks the leap of faith. They don't trust the artist to look at the canvas and adjust to the medium in front them. The results are Betty Crocker and not gourmet. Our children often walk away and find it to be boring stuff.

This corporate experience of learning is a choice by district leaders, school leaders, teachers, and parents. Yes, it is admittedly being pushed on us from all sides. However, the Common Core State Standards can be accomplished without using static recipes and tasteless learning experiences. We as leaders and practitioners can decide what resources to use, how to use them, and when to stop using them. We can create and build our learning if we wish and have the internal stamina to stand up to the constant electronic bombardment of Common Core aligned sales pitches. We choose the learning experiences and we get to decide whether the medicine is served in castor oil and gruel or with a spoonful of sugar.

The Common Core State Standards make many assumptions about the pace and order students should learn things. If we look at them as targets and recognize that our children will not learn them at the same pace or in the same way, they are more likely to be palatable and we are more likely to help our children to be successful. Furthermore, if we focus on growth and moving children forward in meaningful ways through this Common Core journey, we can create experiences that engage children and ourselves. We can have every tool available to us, but it is us the learner and the leader that cultivates that tasteful experience. Learning is a leap of faith, one in which we must have belief if we want to be successful.

The Leap of Faith

Luke learns to trust himself even with the best tools available

I Teach Dead People

Last month, I had the opportunity to sit around with some associates in our temple and as will happen from time to time people will ask me about trends in education. As parents, community members, and products of public schools, often it is hard for them to conceptualize the changes that are occurring in and around education. Now, to give context to my conversation, it is important to understand that I live and work in outlier communities. I live in a community with a less than 1% free and reduced lunch population and work in a community with just under 10% free and reduced lunch population. It was only in my first principalship where I led a learning community which had a state average, 50% free and reduced lunch population. In each setting however, I have had a large involved parent and community group that cherished and was invested in their public schools. As I sat talking with this group of well-educated, successful, involved friends, we began discussing the new Common Core State Standards and their children's ISAT results.

I've blogged before about the challenges of new assessments and new data lines. That, as they say, is a story for a different time. These parents understood the process of re-norming and  changing the content of the assessments. What struck this group of intelligent and articulate individuals was when I explained why. I shared the emphasis of "rigor" being placed on educational experiences, standards, and assessment. One of the physicians looked at me oddly, paused, and asked, "Wait, you teach dead people." We paused. We laughed. We pulled out our phones and looked up the definition. The humor left the group as we all stared at our screens and pulled bits and pieces from the definition found on the Merrian-Webster.com website:

• 1) "the difficult and unpleasant conditions or experiences that are associated with something" - Wait, can't children have fun as they learn? Shouldn't they like school?

• "a (1) :  harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity" - Schools are being asked to become harsh and inflexible places. Should teachers become harsh in opinion or judgement?

• "(2) :  the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness"  - Will this definition foster the innovative entrepreneur? Is the child who is the product of this learning experience going to be our next inventor or scientist?

• "severity of life :  austerity" - Are we teaching children to be reasonable in their approaches, interactions, and choices?

• "b :  an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty" - Isn't there a difference between strictness and cruelty. Does one need to go hand in hand with another? We want our children to be high achievers but also be balanced in their approach to life.

• 2) "a tremor caused by a chill" - As we got this far into the definition I was longing for the days before smartphones as a chill truly had overtaken the group.

• 3) "a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially :  extremity of cold" - This seemed to be the first definition that began to somewhat make the group feel better. They wanted their children to be challenged, but not to the point of being extremely uncomfortable. They wanted achievable challenges. Ones that can be overcome and the students feel value from doing. The extremity of cold as the example didn't resonate with the group as being a valuable challenge. Rather than wanting war stories of walking to school uphill five miles through the blizzard, this group wants to know what cool things you did in the classroom.

• 4) "strict precision :  exactness <logical rigor>" - Precision is valuable, but the highest level of precision will always come from computers and robots. As parents we hope for innovative, collaborative, and creative. We want good skills, but value the process as much as the product.

• 5) "a obsolete :  rigidity, stiffness" - Perhaps this definition is an accurate product of the children this process is trying to cultivate?

• "b :  rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli" - It was here that the physician's definition began to come forward. Are we working to create rigid individuals, teachers, principals, or students who are prevented to responding to stimuli.

• "c :  rigor mortis" - Are we teaching dead people?

Rigor, the new goal in education. I was at a loss to explain why this was an emphasis by the state. A movement of national importance. Bright people had taken down my walls and shown that yes the emperor before them had no clothes. Foiled again by the information age: a smartphone and the Merrian-Webster online dictionary.

I went home and thought about this. I thought about challenge our kids, raising them to be good people who can handle hard questions. Then I thought about one of our middle school math teachers. When reviewing page 2 of a new math book, he explained that the problem on the page was one of those "Somebody out there hates you problems." The challenge to the problem was not the mathematics, but the wording and the way the units were organized. He explained that the language is meant to fool the students. The children are just beginning to understand the concept of slope and in the language of the problem they use x and y differently as variables and thus make the children flip their understanding of procedural knowledge. Even if the children understand how to calculate slope and what slope means, the problem challenges them to reanalyze the variables. It's like calculating gallons per mile instead of miles per gallon. The answer doesn't make conceptual sense, hence a "Somebody out there hates you problem."

At MIT, a group of professors, looked at the challenge of assessments and learning. Developing some of the best and brightest engineers in our country, the instructional leaders began to question the grade-focus of the students and wished to develop a learning and achievement focus in their classroom. Paul Henry Winston outlines guidance for grading that they developed for their 6.034 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class:

• "We should find a way to deemphasize grades so as to make room for big ideas"

• "We should test understanding, not speed and general intelligence"

• "We should not care whether a student demonstrates understanding early in the semester, or late, as long as the student demonstrates understanding."

• "We should give an A to every student that demonstrates A-level understanding"

Winston goes on further when discussing assessment (at MIT!!!!):
"Further guided by our desire to test subject understanding rather than general intelligence, we decided to resist the temptation to be so clever that our quizzes test the students on how well they can penetrate our cleverness, rather than their understanding of the material."

The lessons here are fundamental. The concept that learning should be assessed by not the adult capacity to create clever problems meant to trick students but rather the child's ability to understand a concept. Assessment should be about learning. Schools need to be about learning. The goal of creating "rigorous learning experiences" may not create the type of learning situations the promoters of the term wish to obtain. Creating intrinsic learners who work on meaningful problems in situations which promote innovation  and understanding should be our goals. It is in Dr. Winston's classes at MIT and the results, are amazing:

"When we first tried our new grading procedure in the fall of 2006, we expected many students to leave by the end of the first hour or two of our three-hour final, because there were a substantial number who were in the highest category for all or all but one of the four quizzes. As time went by, we noted, with some alarm, that many known-to-be-excellent students stayed the entire three hours. When the exam was over, we asked one of the highest-category students why she did all five parts when we had made it clear she needed to do only one. “Oh,” she said, “I did the rest for fun!” Our pride was palpable. We knew we were on to something."

Let's not teach dead people but those who zest for life and learning as these MIT students do.