- Annual Principal Shake-Up Begins
- Many Cool on Making Teacher Ratings Public
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
May 30, 2012
It’s the season for principal shuffling at DCPS, as word starts to trickle out about school leaders who will not be returning next year, either through retirement, resignation or what the system politely calls “non-reappointment.” Only three names are known for sure at this point, according to parents and teachers, who are not identified so they could freely provide the information: Gwendolyn Grant at Cardozo High School at Meyer Elementary, Barbara Campbell at Langdon Education Campus and Keesha Blythe at Prospect Learning Center. None returned an e-mail message asking for comment.
There will be more to come. “We’ll have more specifics to announce about principal turnover in the coming weeks,” said DCPS spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz.
The churn has subsided since the days of Michelle A. Rhee, when nearly two-thirds of the principals’ jobs turned over. For the 2008-09 school year alone, she named 46 new leaders. Just 19 posts out of 125 changed hands under Chancellor Kaya Henderson last year. The process is also a bit more low-key than under Rhee, who famously axed one principal in front of a documentarian’s camera.
USA Today
By Greg Toppo
May 30, 2012
The Obama administration's push to make student test scores a bigger part of teacher evaluations may be having an unintended side effect: It's cooling officials' appetite for making the data public.
Teachers' unions have always opposed publishing individual public school teachers' class results in newspapers or online, saying the scores students produce each spring in math and reading, for instance, don't tell the whole story. Now even education reformers — and reform-minded public officials — are having second thoughts about releasing the data.
Thousands of teachers in the USA's two largest school districts are now part of searchable online databases that detail their "value-added" scores, ranking them relative to one another based on skills gains their students show in a given school year: In New York City, the education department in February released individual rankings of 18,000 teachers. In August 2010, the Los Angeles Times produced a database of ratings that has grown to include 11,500 Los Angeles elementary school teachers. It's planning later this year to publish middle-school teachers' scores as well.
Elena Silva of the Washington, D.C., think tank Education Sector said many reformers believed publicizing teacher rankings would change everything. "The world would know and we would be able to dismiss ineffective teachers and reward effective teachers and everyone would be happier — and the system would be better," she said. "And that's a wonderful vision, but in fact we aren't as far along as most would have hoped with teacher evaluations."
In the absence of reliable evaluations that fully capture how teachers affect students, publicly rating teachers "is a faulty approach," she said. "I do think people are backpedaling on that and I do think they are rightly backpedaling."
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and a self-proclaimed "strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness," wrote in March in The Wall Street Journal that she was "baffled and embarrassed" by New York City's decision to release the data. The mother of students in city schools, Kopp said that when she dropped her kids off at school that week, "I had a hard time looking their teachers in the eye."
The Obama administration has long sought to make value-added scores part of individual teachers' evaluations. It required, for instance, that states seeking federal stimulus aid get rid of legal barriers that would prohibit tying the scores to teacher pay and retention. As the tests' importance has risen, so has skepticism about their usefulness and accuracy, both from researchers and teachers.
Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has changed his thinking about making the scores public. In 2010, after the Times published its analysis, Duncan said parents have a right to information indicating if their children's teachers are effective: "What's there to hide?" he said. By 2012, Duncan was more circumspect. Speaking to Education Week, a trade publication, he credited the Times with shining a light on the data, but asked, "Do you need to publish every single teacher's rating in the paper? I don't think you do."
New findings from Education Sector show that about six in 10 teachers say the feedback they get from evaluations is meaningful. But since 2007, the percentage who approve of measuring their effectiveness by student test scores has grown only slightly, from 49% to 54%. "There is increasing awareness that teachers are not going to be supportive about this," Silva said. Teachers, she said, are not opposed to being measured. "They just are very concerned about these specific measures — and there's good reason for that."
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