Roadblocks to Student Success

Ever since the release of A Nation At Risk, education reformers have been crying doom and gloom.  The report outlined issues like the following (The National Commission on Excellence in Education):

• Student grades have increased despite a reduction of homework and student performance
• A high number of low rigor electives courses can be used for credit toward graduation
• Many students are able to "master" course content without ever using the textbook, which hints at lowered levels of expectations for students
• Teachers have to supplement their incomes by gaining other modes of employment
• Many teachers are technically unqualified to teach courses like mathematics and the sciences

The intent of the report has been to help those who could not seem to help themselves, like minorities and the impoverished who are underrepresented in politics, by shedding light on these problem areas, so it is thought.  The ripples of the report have led to several recent federal directives, like No Child Left Behind (DOE, 2001) and Race to the Top (DOE, 2009).

Yet, as most things in life, there was something deeper happening in the world of policy-making and education.   The information in the Nation At Risk Report may have been guilty on technical grounds.  The Sandia Report exposed a statistical issue, defined as Simpson's Paradox (Ansary).

Simpson's Paradox is a phenomenon best described by the change in statistical direction that can occur when looking at data from disaggregate sets and its aggregate set.  Ender (1998) uses an example to illicit the paradox by showing how several minority groups can have an increase in test scores, but when the aggregate data (total information) is formed, it shows a different -- overall declining -- result.  It ultimately stems from disproportionate subpopulation numbers that can be misleading when grouped as a whole.

A skeptical person could interpret the error as purposeful.  Or, it may be ignorance of statistics on a grander scale, which has permeated the upper echelon of education researchers.  In either case, it is imperative that data in education be used very carefully, especially when evaluating teachers (Karadimos), entire school districts, or a national education system.

The focus on minorities in education have encouraged some educators to cite a 'sphere of control' defensive argument.  They point to the detriments of low socio-economics, like language skill deficits, high drop-out rates, and reduced learning speeds (APA).  A new study connects absenteeism in schools to mental illness and depression (Wood).

Focusing on negatives, although necessary to understand the limitations of a learning community, is a less than effective way to approach school improvement.  Doing so would be called 'deficit thinking,' where educators view students living in poverty as lacking and consequently blame students and their parents for barriers in the classroom (Jeffords).

Instead, institutions have been leaning toward the implementation of Danielson's Framework and focusing on improving teacher performance (University of Chicago).  Student performance indicators, like test scores, has been finding its way within teacher evaluations (Hunsberger).  If it is to be done properly, to help teachers and schools reach their true potential, this data must be used with more care than has been used in the past.

The track record of schools has indicated they use data improperly.  For instance, there is a school district (purposefully unnamed) that noticed high test scores of students who take college preparatory courses, like four years of mathematics and the trifecta of sciences: biology, chemistry, and physics.  Consequently, this district mandated students to take these courses, thinking it would raise test scores.

However, it was a spurious correlation to assume the courses alone was the key to raising student performance on test scores.  Hidden connections were overlooked.  For instance, it is possible that the students who would normally take such course loads would have had sufficient background skills, the necessary support structure at home, and the intrinsic motivation to help them be successful in those courses.

What is not in debate is that student data should be harvested and used for school improvement purposes and for teacher evaluation.  How it is gained, which data to analyze, and to what proportion the data is used within an evaluation is in question.  The goal is to make teachers a quintessential part of the improvement process, not alienated or somehow separate from it.

According to School-Based Management, called SBM (Wohlstetter and Mohrman):

"The role of teachers also changes in a fundamental way.  Although they have always managed their own classrooms, SBM implies an extension of their focus to include participating in shaping the school environment, creating the school vision, working with other stakeholders to determine goals and objectives, and taking responsibility for resource allocation and use.  Their influence shifts from individual control over their classroom domain to influence exercised in a variety of collective forums, including councils, problem-solving groups, and various kinds of work teams."

Within this School-Based Management strategy, teachers are inherently necessary in gaining success in a learning community.  This requires mutual respect and autonomy among teachers, administrators, and community members.

When Michelle Rhee ran Washington schools, she expected principals to maintain orderly hallways and classrooms (Whitmire).  This certainly can only be accomplished by empowering teachers and making them mutual partners in the education process.

Despite the necessary partnership that must exist to gain an effective school, part of the problem is the lack of teacher respect.  Making teachers serve breakfast to students (Libman) and endure students who taunt and then video tape teachers (Downey) speak volumes of the impact politics has had on the role of being an effective teacher these past few years.

When we acknowledge these roadblocks and create mutually inclusive decision-making practices, schools will be able to overcome them.  Until then, schools will continue to dodge stones cast by outsiders who see fractured systems and less than optimum learning taking place.

Resources

Ansary (2007) Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk

American Psychological Association (2011) Education and Socioeconomics.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-education.aspx

Downey (2011) Cyberbaiting teachers: In the media, but is it in the schools?  Atlanta Journal-Constitution Blog.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/12/22/cyberbaiting-teachers-in-the-media-but-is-it-in-the-schools/?cxntfid=blogs_get_schooled_blog

Ender (1998) Education Introduction to Research Design and Statistics: Simpson's Paradox.  Accessed on December 26th, 2001 at: http://www.philender.com/courses/intro/simpson.html

Jeffords (2011) Helping poor students 'comes with a cost.'  Niagara Falls Review.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www.isbe.state.il.us/peac/pdf/nat_implications_uoc.pdf

Hunsberger (2011) The War Over Teacher Evaluations Misses the Point.  Huffington Post's Teach Plus.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teach-plus/the-war-over-teacher-eval_b_1162891.html

Karadimos (2011) Education The Politics of Data in Education.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://gigagod.blogspot.com/2011/01/politics-of-data-in-education.html

Libman (2011) Why so much disrespect toward teachers?  Chicago Tribune Opinion.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-1127-school-20111127,0,6535204.story

The National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/findings.html

U.S. Department of Education (2001) No Child Left Behind.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html

U.S. Department of Education (2009) Race to the Top.  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/legislation.html

University of Chicago (n.d.) National Implications of “Rethinking Teacher Evaluation”  Accessed on December 26th, 2011 at: http://www.isbe.state.il.us/peac/pdf/nat_implications_uoc.pdf

Whitmire (2011) What's Working in Urban Schools.  Huffington Post.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-whitmire/whats-working-in-urban-sc_b_1153297.html

Wohlstetter and Mohrman (1993) School-Based Management: Strategies for Success.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CPRE/fb2sbm.html

Wood (2011) School Absenteeism, Mental Health Problems Linked.  Accessed on December 27th, 2011 at: http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/12/25/school-absenteeism-mental-health-problems-linked/32937.html

The Politics of Data in Education

Educators attend teacher in-services, where they learn of changes in law, best practices, and current research. Teachers benefit from the experience by blossoming into higher performing educators.

But, what does it mean to be higher performing?

One such in-service addressed that issue – indirectly. An analogy was drawn to the healthcare industry, where doctors use research via innovative and ethical new practices to help patients. Data gathered as a result of new procedures and comparatives made between doctors' patients help determine what is best in the medical kingdom.

Likewise, it has been argued, teachers should open their classrooms to equal scrutiny and data collection. Allowing data to drive the education realm would help educators to determine how students best learn, who is adopting best practice strategies, which students need special interventions (Hechinger, 2009), and ultimately who could be harming student progress, which would be akin to medical malpractice.

Data like this would be invaluable to educators. Teachers would allow the data to naturally stream and guide them toward innovation, student success, and perfection. Administrators who monitor teacher progress would love it because they would be able to utilize the data to evaluate teachers, rank them by performance, and then fire teachers who were outright harmful to students.

It sounds like a panacea, right?

Used correctly, meaning judiciously and with the needs of students in mind, it may be a panacea. However, all men and women are not created equal, nor do they always have students’ interests in mind. Also, not everyone knows how to utilize data in a way that will bring helpful knowledge to the education design table. [Evaluators would need to be trained in order to be effective in its use and they too should have a proven track record of success (Bell, 2011).]

In medicine, there is a science that is unmistakable. Consider the assignment of dosage in medication, double blind studies with placebos to determine their benefits, and statistical techniques when analyzing patient sets.

In education, data is perceived abhorrently simply misused, or underused, despite what the reader may think he knows about education. Allow me to explain.

Teacher evaluations are being scrutinized in Illinois (Banchero, 2011). Due to funding issues and federal stimulus monies, Illinois is considering many changes in the way it evaluates teachers. Without considering the radical ideas that have been proposed, consider simply the inclusion of student grades within a teacher’s evaluation.

If a teacher being evaluated were to have students’ grades included, it may help to provide a good snapshot of a teacher’s success as an educator. The data could be a distribution of grades the teacher has assigned for a semester delineated by grade, as in the number of As, Bs, and so on al the way to the number of Es. Or, the data could simply be a lump sum of the number of Es a teacher has assigned or a lump sum of the number of combined As, Bs, and Cs as a total.

It sounds great, right?

Yet, such data in isolation can and would be skewed for a teacher who dealt with students who were chronically absent. What about teachers of low ability students who had huge language deficits? Teachers who helped low-income students, as the research does indicate, would be at a great disadvantage, too (Rose, 2008). Teachers who have to deal with all of these factors would have a compounded problem.

Let it be understood that the inclusion of data within teachers’ evaluation plan is certainly a good idea. It is a step toward objectivity. It should force the evaluator to take steps to isolate areas of concern, develop strategies to overcome them with teacher input, and then monitor performance based on those key indicators. Personally, I am all for it as are many teachers as reported by one Chicago mayor candidate (Paulson, 2011).

If the reader is familiar with politics in Illinois, however, he or she will know this phrase applies: “Statistics do no not lie, but liars do use statistics.” This is not to say the numbers will be bogus, but how the numbers will be used and the choice of which numbers will get used is up for grabs and will certainly skew a teacher’s evaluation.

Within a nationally contentious political climate for teachers, and quite pronounced in Illinois (Finke, 2010), skewed data will be a problem. If there was a school administrator who wanted to reduce his budget, he could do it quite easily. Here is how he could do it.

He would load his School Improvement Planning (SIP) panel with teachers who teach top end students, like teachers of honors and advanced placement classes. These teachers deal with highly motivated students, or at least students who put up less of a struggle with the day-to-day operations within a class.

He would inform this SIP panel that he would be instituting an evaluation system that will place meaningful data, like students’ grades, within the evaluation. These teachers will naturally agree, because they deal with students who are exceptional performers who also gain higher grades.

He would then target veteran teachers who were not on this SIP panel. These teachers would either not have grade patterns that would match the general population of teachers or the grades may be similar, which could suggest the grades were potentially inflated. Despite these teachers being assigned students with hardships, grade distribution data could be used to find unjust reason for dismissal.

Albeit the above circumstances outline a cynical view of how data collection could be used within a school, it also demonstrates the need for safeguards within the teacher evaluation process. Whether a school utilizes a widely respected panel or group of teachers within a school, it also provides insight to the role of teacher unions and how they communicate with administrators to promote systemic learning and growth.

If the data door is to be opened within the realm of teacher evaluations, then there is a way to make it meaningful. The factors that should be included are: student attendance, teacher attendance, student grades, and the number of behavior problems within a semester. Including other data like the number of behavior strategies implemented by the teacher, alignment of teaching to the curriculum, a percentage of students completing assignments, and student test performance would also be helpful.

In order to develop a clear picture of what a teacher has done during any length of time, it is clear more data as opposed to less data is necessary. The inclusion of data within a such a holistic framework would best be a means for measuring teacher success and helping them grow. Teachers who had to deal with myopic evaluators should make a larger pool of data readily available and also include it within evaluations, if necessary.

To understand the inclusion of more data as opposed to less data, return back to the analogy between teaching and medicine. If a doctor was to prescribe medication to a patient, it is assumed the patient will take it so as to ward off the ailment and get healthier. It is understood not following the doctor's prescription may very well be detrimental to one's health.

However, such negative cycles are exactly what happens to teachers. When students do poorly, it is usually due to simple issues like not doing the following: attending class, doing assignments, and choosing to engage oneself in class activities. Despite efforts to meet students at their ability levels and make activities meaningful to them, some students (more students within certain populations of students) choose not to do what is expected of them. This is akin to not taking one's medication and not following doctor's orders.

This may provide insight to the challenges teachers face and the inherent weakness of comparing teaching to medicine. Most patients want to get healthier and therefore follow doctors' orders. Not all students follow teachers' orders and therefore restrict themselves from the opportunities of their peers who do what is asked of them.

The use of data has to be used carefully when comparing one teacher to the next. An evaluator must not confuse a lack of teacher performance with a lack of student willingness to learn. An evaluator can still find meaning by making comparables between teachers, but the evaluator who does so should also factor in the types of students being taught, levels of courses being taught, years of experience between educators, and more. A judicious use of data is welcomed, but how it is used and to what end is the issue when politics enter the arena.

As reported by 60 Minutes (Kroft, 2010), state governments have a looming crisis of high debt and shrunken income to handle. Under such circumstances it may also be less than a stretch to see how the mismanagement of public funds could lead to the mismanagement of education data. Since labor is the biggest piece of the pie when reflecting on school budgets, it is certainly not a leap in logic to suggest how data could be manipulated to force veteran teachers, those at the upper end of the pay schedule, out of teaching.

Simply cherry picking veteran teachers out of education would be disastrous. Veteran teachers mentor new teachers by providing them with coping skills, like classroom management strategies and instructional techniques, which are two areas new teachers desperately require assistance. Besides, whether dealing with student who take their medicine or not, all of them should have the right to be taught by these master educators.

Let us not allow present day politics and the mismanagement of monies and policies that led us here (Zorn, 2011) to interfere with the growth of students. Data should be used as a tool to help educators improve instruction (Chute, 2006), moving education forward, not backward.

There is a trail of money that suggests Illinois education reformers may be letting outside agencies not influence the debate but actually control it (Bell, 2010). This sentiment trickles down to the local level by administrators who misuse data to attack teachers (Michie, 2011). One has to ask, "If one swings data like a mallet, does it really help kids learn?" Only through the objective use of fields of data may the experience help educators reach more students, which is closer to the way data is used for health care.

Resources

Banchero (2011) "Illinois Attempts to Link Teacher Tenure to Results." The Wall Street Journal. Accessed on January 13^th, 2011 at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576060122295287678.html

Bell (2010) "Imperative to Keep an Eye on School ‘Reform’." The State Journal-Register. A letter to the editor. Accessed on January 13^th, 2011 at: http://www.sj-r.com/letters/x1808785140/Letter-Imperative-to-keep-an-eye-on-school-reform

Bell (2011) "Punishing Teachers Won’t Spur Success." The State Journal-Register. A letter to the editor. Accessed on January 13^th, 2011 at: http://www.sj-r.com/letters/x493326056/Letter-Punishing-teachers-won-t-spur-success

Chute (2006) "Back to School: Performance Data Driving Education Now." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Accessed on January 14th, 2010 at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06241/717104-298.stm

Fenke (2010) "Illinois House Committee to Take on Education Reform Proposals." The State Journal-Register. Accessed on January 14th, 2010 at: http://www.sj-r.com/carousel/x1757257545/Illinois-House-committee-to-take-on-education-reform-proposals

Hechinger (2009) "Data-Driven Schools See Rising Scores." The Wall Street Journal. Accessed on January 14th, 2011 at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124475338699707579.html

Kroft (2010) "State Budgets: The Day of Reckoning." 60 Minutes. Accessed December 10th, 2010 at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/19/60minutes/main7166220.shtml

Michie (2011) "How to Be Taken Seriously as a Reformer (Don't Be an Educator)." The Huffington Post. Accessed on January 14th, 2011 at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-michie/how-to-be-taken-seriously_b_808889.html

Paulson (2011) "Chicago Mayoral Candidate Miguel Del Valle in the Teachers' Corner." Accessed on January 13^th, 2011 at: http://www.examiner.com/dupage-county-conservative-in-chicago/chicago-mayoral-candidate-miguel-del-valle-the-teachers-corner

Rose, Jazmen (2008) "What Affects Graduation Rates of Illinois Public High Schools?" Undergraduate Economic Review: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 9.
Accessed on January 14th, 2011 at: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/uer/vol4/iss1/9

Zorn (2011) "The Can Stops Here -- Democrats' Tax Hike Aims at Ending Years of Game-Playing in Springfield." This is a blog item on The Chicago Tribune. Accessed on January 14th, 2011 at: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2011/01/taxes.html