May 06, 2010 05:42 PM UTC

Oppose Senate Bill 191 - Teacher Performance Pay

•  
• by: Angela Engel

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Performance Pay in the Colorado Legislature

Senate Bill 191 will make its way to the House Education Committee to be debated this Thursday May 6, 2009. The deciding vote will be cast by Representative Karen Middleton of Aurora. This legislation has very serious implications for all of us.

The arguments:

Educator and principal evaluations are a good idea.

I agree with the majority of Americans who feel that teachers and principals should be evaluated annually. Although I am an ardent supporter of the preservation of freedom of thought and the highest standards of professional teacher excellence, I would be willing to concede tenure. So long as we recognize that all evaluation is subjective, even quantifiable measurement tools are developed and graded by human subjects. In any profession, the best appraisals come from experts in that particular field. Public defenders should not be assessed by their clients or jurors. Although they are recipients of a lawyer’s services, they are not experts in the law.

As an educator, I have always surveyed my students and parents. When I taught for Douglas County Public Schools the questionnaires from students and parents were helpful. While we recognized the limitations of those valuations, those surveys helped inform the professional goals I developed and accomplished each year. However, my most valuable assessments came from my principal, vice principal and building resource teacher – experts in my field. Their careful valuations came from direct formal and informal assessment and were guided by education and experience.

Why quantify?

Let’s face it. There is an over reliance on technology and an obsession to assign quantitative values to everything.  We have forfeited wisdom for the safety of the numeric. Governor Ritter earlier this year said, “Only what can be measured, can be improved.” That’s a stupid comment. I know that as a parent my relationship to my daughter’s is the most important element in effective parenting. When I returned from a recent business trip my little Sophie (10 years old) asked me if I would cuddle with her. I always make time for cuddling and so we climbed into her bed where I listened attentively as she caught me up on her weekend. This kind of experience cannot be measured. Even so, I’m still improving my listening skills – eliminating distractions, making eye contact, focusing my attention, asking interesting questions, and demonstrating understanding. Education is not the only professional field being reduced to the numeric. Nurses are spending so much time quantifying and accounting that they have little time to actually treat their patients. I wonder what number Governor Ritter would assign the nurse that holds her patients hand.

Proponents of SB 191 say that the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) won’t be used. When I asked one of the sponsors of the bill what tools would be used in calculating a teacher’s value and compensation, he replied, “A standardized test.”  He wasn’t in the legislature in the late 90’s for the debate over grading schools according to CSAP. Back then they said CSAP was a better tool but in the 10 years of high-stakes testing, CSAP was never independently evaluated for validity or reliability. Yet the legislature appropriated millions of dollars over the last decade on developing and administering that test and tracking the subsequent student data. CSAP data told us the same things we’ve known all along. Children of low-income families perform lower on standardized tests and their growth rate is slower than their middle class white counterparts.

We measured it. We did not improve it. In fact, the schools throughout Colorado that are being closed predominantly have the highest populations of low-income and minority children in their respective districts. I asked a legislator if it would be appropriate to assess his leadership ability through the means of a standardized test. Being a statistician, he answered, “yes.” Only that wouldn’t be the model driving SB191. The same paradigm behind SB191 applied to legislators would mean that their pay would be determined by how well their constituents scored on the standardized test. This concerns me greatly. I live in Centennial, Colorado.  While our test scores are guaranteed to be high as indicated by income – we are one of the wealthiest House Districts in the state – our elected representative is Spencer Swalm. Enough said.

How much will it cost?

The current investment in No Child Left Behind is 26 billion each year. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan is proposing $350 million to revise tests. The projected cost to redevelop CSAP is $80 million. Wasted opportunity will cost even more. This past decade of high-stakes and grading schools according to a single measurement tool has failed. Here in Colorado and throughout the nation drop-out rates have increased and the achievement gap has remained unchanged. Money spent on CSAP and the growing bureaucracy needed to manage all the data and reporting has meant less money for higher education. College tuition since the passage of No Child Left Behind has undergone the highest rate increase ever reported in our nation’s history. College is becoming a distant dream to too many families now left in the “Race to the Bottom.” I recently served on a panel with Stephen Krashen. When asked about the alternative to high-stakes testing reforms he said, “food and books.” See the appendix below.

What else does the research say?

SB 191 would require an expansion of testing, at a time when children are already over-tested. There is no research evidence that supports the idea that tying the success of teacher to a standardized test score improves teacher quality. In fact, the evidence shows that high-stakes testing reforms have not correlated to improved student achievement.

Nichols, Glass, and Berliner (2006) found in general no relationship between testing “pressure” in 25 states and achievement on the NAEP math and reading tests. Research by UC Berkeley scholars Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Saltelices shows that high school grades in college preparatory courses are a better predictor of achievement in college and four-year college graduation rates than are standardized tests (the SAT).  Geiser and Saltelices found that adding SAT scores to grades did not provide much more information than grades alone, which suggests that we may not need standardized tests at all. Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson  (2009) reached similar conclusions.

Education is Accountability.

When 49 Governor’s first met in 1989 at the National Education Summit to bring state standards to public education what they didn’t realize was that we already had academic standards. They weren’t uniform but neither are our kids and neither are our communities. When they met again in 1996 at the 2nd Annual Education Summit along with 44 executives they developed the plan to drive education through commercial tests and government mandates.        Assessment is a fundamental component to teaching and learning. The difference is that classroom assessments are applied in real world contexts, without artificial time constraints. Reading, writing, and mathematical problem solving previously were evaluated on an ongoing basis by professional educators, not Kelly Girls or other temp agencies that contract to score state tests.  I’d like to think those Governor’s and business men were simply uniformed and misguided. But that’s not really true. You see, the job of business is to find market opportunities and exploit them. Our schools represent an enormous investment in our tax dollars. It is the role of text book and testing publishers to capitalize, expand their business lines, and grow their profits. And it is the role of parents and teachers to protect our children from those interests. Our job is to fortify our schools of learning and assert our role to elect and direct our local school boards. When our forefathers determined that if “we the people” through the process of representative democracy are to direct our own future, then “we the people” must be educated and empowered. When it comes to government or business defining “what”, “how” and “when” our children must learn, or “how teachers are evaluated” we as citizens must cry foul. Humanity is not a perfect science and it never will be. We are living in a climate of distrust. On the subject of education policy, we have the opportunity to restore our faith in educators, parents, and students or we will lose not only our classrooms but democracy too.

“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”   — United States Supreme Court in American Communications Association v. Douds