What to do When Education Reforms Fail

Each week local newspapers report that more and more school boards have been forced to lay off education staff and cut student services because of a severe state-wide budget crisis caused by increasing retirement costs and the many unfunded mandates by state and federal authorities. What is the answer of our State Department of Education to this crisis? Our State Superintendent whose own job security is now firmly protected by his alliance with Governor Jindal, is recommending that local school systems use mostly imagined surplus funds to cover these mandated costs. In addition he is pushing legislation that will implement a new teacher and administrator evaluation system designed to fire teachers and principals based on student test scores. The idea is that if school systems fire and then replace the bottom 5% to 10% of teachers based on student test scores, student achievement on LEAP and other tests will automatically go up. This assumption is based on national studies that distort the effect of teacher quality related to student achievement. The state instead of providing support to local school systems to deal with increasing costs and budget shortfalls will develop a state mandated evaluation system aimed at producing such teacher dismissals. In addition, the State Department of Education will simply create alternative certification processes for replacing fired teachers. As Diane Ravitch points out in a recent Teacher magazine article, education policy makers may soon be tempted to waive all teacher credentials and certification requirements in favor of employment of anyone who can raise student test scores. Click on this link to read an interesting discussion between Ravitch and Mike Rose on the current state of education reform.

Our state Department of Education should be the strongest ally of local public schools. Instead it is an adversary. It supports outside interest groups (Charter Management Organizations) who want to remove local schools from supervision by locally elected school boards. It supports increasing vouchers for parents wanting to use public funds to send their children to private schools. Now it wants to set quotas for firing and replacement of locally employed teachers.

Much of this is a desperate effort to divert attention from the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in the last ten years on ill conceived reforms. Taking over schools in New Orleans and other parts of the state is a fiasco, and when the Katrina based federal funding dries up, the state will either have to pick up the tab or abandon many expensive programs and highly paid administrators. Charter school operators are increasingly leery of taking responsibility for handicapped students, many of their test scores are backsliding, graduation rates are dismal, state bureaucratic costs are out of control, yet the State Superintendent somehow finds a way to keep blaming local school systems that are out-performing the state's takeover schools.

Because of the ill conceived “college prep for all” agenda pursued by Superintendent Pastorek, attention has been diverted from vital technical skills programs leaving Louisiana with almost no young people trained for promising careers requiring modern construction and technical skills. Louisiana businesses are having to recruit workers from other states while our dropouts and flunk-outs go on welfare or to prison.

So what does our Department of Education do when reforms fail? Blame the teachers and local school systems and start up a new round of reforms.

The High Cost of Our State Education Bureaucracy

A recent article in the Baton Rouge Advocate points out that the Education Bureaucracy at the State Department of Education just keeps on growing despite serious state budget shortfalls. The article (click here to view article) points out that the State Department of Education has approved more than 6000 contracts for outside services over the last 6 years. This fiscal year alone the outside contracts amounted to 342 million dollars with $175 million of that going for test related agreements that span 12 years. Appropriations Chairman, Jim Fannin, said he would like to see reductions in the 20 million dollars of professional services contracts for educational services funded from the state general fund.

In addition, State Superintendent Pastorek has steadily increased the number of very highly paid unclassified positions in the State Department of Education. Since he assumed the position of State Superintendent, it was noted in state records that he has added over 20 unclassified positions, some with salaries up to $140,000 according to news reports. Very recently positions were added in the Department to help pursue the Race to the Top federal program. The state was unsuccessful in the first round of this application for federal dollars yet the bureaucracy continues to grow. All this is happening at a time that local school systems are being urged by the State Superintendent to implement plans to reduce central office costs and shift more funding to the school level.

House bill 1033 which would establish value-added teacher and principal evaluations is moving through the legislative process with no fiscal note attached. (Such a note is usually required to indicate the cost to the state of implementation of legislation) This legislation is based on part of the Race to the Top application that would have set up a new state mandated teacher and administrator evaluation system based on growth in student achievement as measured by state tests. The as yet unfunded application included approximately 30 million dollars over a 4 year period for implementation of this program. Such costs would have included more contracted services, but also the employment of more State Department employees. If the program is funded, possibly in the second round of the R2T competition, the federal government requires that any programs started by the federal funding must be continued by state and local agencies after the federal grant runs out. This means that sooner or later Louisiana will have to pay for this as yet untested scheme.

There have been some cuts in the past year, mostly in the areas providing actual educational services such as the regional service centers. One other notable cut was the cancelation of the contract with JBHM Education Group of Jackson, Miss. For the past couple of years this outside contractor had been employed to monitor and audit low performing schools in the Recovery District at a cost of more than $1 million dollars a year. Its contract was cancelled after it issued an extremely critical report on 4 new charter schools in the Baton Rouge area. This contract was canceled in favor of a new in-house school monitoring process that's being developed.

Value Added Teacher Evaluation Bill Approved by Committee

Strong support by the Governor's office was instrumental in gaining approval of HB 1033 by the House Education committee Wednesday. Prior to approval, the bill was amended by the author to specify that student scores would be limited to 50% of the teacher's evaluation. This had been proposed in the past but had not been in the original bill. Also the legislation was amended by the author, Rep. Hoffman, to provide for a 2 year trial period where the evaluation system would be tested in a limited number of local school systems. Testimony by State Dept. officials indicated that the two year trial period would apply to approximately 27 parishes and the Recovery District and Charter schools.

Expected performance by a particular classroom of students would be calculated using an index that would take into account such factors as free lunch participants, prior student attendance, and discipline or suspension records. The apparent aim of the program is to put in the hands of each administrator evaluating a teacher a report showing the average growth of student performance during the year they were in the charge of that particular teacher.

Even though the legislation would make the evaluation of all teachers and administrators theoretically based on student performance, there are many teachers at present for which such a system could not be applied. All teachers with self-contained classes where basic skills tested by LEAP are taught would be included, but many teachers particularly at the Middle and High School level who do not teach LEAP or GEE tested subjects would not initially be affected. Superintendent Pastorek testified in committee, that Federal funding may make it possible to develop testing or methods of applying student performance to these other areas.

Part of the support for the bill from the education community came from TAP school principals who have been using value added student performance as part of their teacher evaluation and promotion system. “TAP” stands for The System for Teacher and Student Advancement. As I understand it, TAP schools are schools supported by the Milken Foundation who adopt an extensive faculty and student improvement model that includes mentoring and assistance of beginning or regular teachers by successful Master and Mentor teachers. This system seems to be producing good student performance results by using a team approach that constantly focuses on strategies for finding and fixing student deficiencies in the basic skills.

It remains to be seen if using primarily one element of the TAP program (student growth as a teacher evaluation tool) can be fairly and successfully applied in regular schools that have not had the benefit of the other teacher supports included in the TAP program.

There is no question that the technology now exists for tracking and correlating student performance directly with each individual teacher. My experience has been that when technology exists it will be used whether for good or for bad.
 
My biggest concern continues to be that particularly in schools serving economically depressed communities, the outside factors may have a greater effect on student performance than that of individual classroom teachers. These teachers and principals may be punished for low student performance even though they may be working harder than staff in more privileged schools.  These schools need a broader approach focusing on positive parental involvement to change the entire educational climate of the school if the teachers are to be successful. Another major concern is that when teacher evaluations depend heavily on student performance on state tests, we will see an increasing trend of simply teaching the test .... or worse. Many teachers complain that the emphasis on teaching for the test has resulted in more superficial teaching of subject matter with less emphasis on in depth knowledge. Under these pressures teaching and learning can become a grueling, boring process that destroys creative teaching approaches. There is evidence of this in recent testing results of Louisiana public schools. Even though student test scores have steadily improved on LEAP, the NAEP test (which is the National test measuring basic skills) has shown almost no improvement for Louisiana in the last 6 to 8 years.