What would you ask Bill Gates?

Ask Bill

Recently CNN asked their viewers to submit questions for Bill Gates for an interview that he was giving on Africa. Remember now, the more money you have, the more you know…right!?

I thought that I would pose that question to this “audience” in terms of education or any other subject for that matter since Bill does seem to know a lot about a lot of different subjects.

So think about it for a minute then ask away. Some questions might be posed at the March 1st Seattle Day of Action for Public Education event culminating at the Gates Foundation.

Dora

This Goes Under “Cashing In On Ed Reform” : K12 Inc.

I am posting this article, Virtual ed. company faces critical press and a recent lawsuit, in full because you will not be able to read it otherwise unless you subscribe to Education Week. If they sue me, I’ll start asking for donations. This kind of greed and self-interest just can’t go unnoticed.

By the way, do you think that  this guy’s son goes to a charter school?

And one other thing, this is the League of Education Voters next push. Don Neilson is waiting in the wings as well.

Dora

Ronald J. Packard, center, the chief executive of K12 Inc., and his son Chase celebrate the company’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007, along with John F. Baule, the chief operating officer of K12. Don't they look happy.

In a scant few months, K12 Inc. and its fluctuating performance on Wall Street are proving that the combination of being a publicly traded company and operating in the school marketplace can lead to heightened levels of scrutiny in a growing but controversial sector of education.

On Dec. 12, the common stock price for the company, the nation’s largest for-profit operator of online K-12 schools, sat healthily at $28.79 per share, a dip from highs of $39.37 earlier in the year but a $10 increase from two years before.

The following day, The New York Times published a front-page article casting K12 Inc. as the center of a broken for-profit online school movement. K12, the newspaper said, yielded big profits despite data suggesting its students were performing well below average.

K12 Inc. has been able “to use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending,” the article said.

Three days later, K12 Inc. stock, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had plummeted 34 percent, to $18.90 a share.

K12 at a Glance

Founded: 2000

Public Offering: 2007

New York Stock Exchange Symbol: LRN

Founders: Ronald J. Packard (formerly of Knowledge Schools, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs), William J. Bennett (former U.S. Secretary of Education; no longer with the company)

FY 2011 Revenue: $522 million

FY 2011 Net Income: $12.8 million

Outstanding Shares: 36,381,336 (as of Dec. 31, 2011)

Current public school enrollment: 105,070

States with operations: 29, plus the District of Columbia

Employees: 2,500 (as of June 30, 2011)

SOURCE: Education Week

Some education experts excoriated the company, for-profit education, and online schools. Others have picked apart the criticism as one-sided and unempirical. Either way, the company occupies a complex space in education. K12 and other education providers can find it especially tricky to operate as public companies. (“Publicly Traded Ed.Companies Are Rare,” this issue.)

The Business Model

K12 Inc.’s contracts with school districts are paid for with public dollars. It must answer to taxpayers and navigate the increased focus on accountability and performance data in public schools. But as a publicly traded company, it also must answer to shareholders and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Just over a month after the New York Times article was published, a K12 Inc. shareholder filed a federal lawsuit against the company. The suit claims its executives, specifically Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Packard and Chief Financial Officer Harry T. Hawks, pumped up stock prices by misleading investors with false student-performance claims.

Company officials say the criticisms are exaggerated.

“I’m a big believer in transparency and accountability. I do think the more visible you are, the easier it is to try and attack you,” Mr. Packard said in an interview last week. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, there are a lot of people who don’t like for-profit companies in education.”

K12 Inc. is expected to generate around $680 million in revenue this year, from a variety of sources. It sells K-12, college-preparatory, and foreign-language curricula to school districts, individual schools, and home-schoolers; operates online and blended-learning private schools domestically and abroad; and sells education software and learning-management systems to schools.

Recently, the company has bought all or part of companies that provide similar products, including online schools operator Kaplan Virtual Education, education software maker American Education Corp., and Web International Education Group, a China-based provider of English-language courses.

But its management of public online charter schools is by far its most-scrutinized line of business. K12 Inc. is the rare company where the performance of its end-users—students—can have an impact on the bottom line. A significant portion of the income for online school operators is tied to enrollment, and if student-performance numbers are down, parents may be less likely to enroll their children and the virtual schools could risk being shut down.

Legal Claims

According to the lawsuit filed against K12 Inc., the Herndon, Va.-based company misled shareholders and inflated stock prices by not disclosing data showing that K12 Inc. students perform below state averages and by not being truthful about student-to-teacher ratios and student-recruitment practices.

“I’m more convinced than ever that there are valid claims against the company, but also the business model has questions that need to be answered,” said Richard Gonnello, a lawyer with the New York City-based firm Faruqi & Faruqi LLP. Mr. Gonnello represents David Hoppaugh, a K12 Inc. shareholder from Cado Parish, La., who filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. After a 60-day window for other shareholders to join the suit as part of a class action, a lead plaintiff and trial court will be determined.

The suit says that “additional facts supporting the allegations” will be submitted after that window.

“K12 disputes the claims and will vigorously defend itself,” company spokesman Jeff Kwitowski said about the lawsuit. He and Mr. Packard declined to comment further on the suit because it is ongoing.

Most of the allegations in court documents center around the New York Times article, but specific instances in which Mr. Packard allegedly misled investors about test scores stand out.

In separate instances in February and March of 2011, Mr. Packard told investment analysts that K12 Inc. students’ performance exceeded state averages in terms of proficiency and test scores.

In a presentation given to investors at that time, a bar chart, titled “Academic Performance Relative to State Average Across Six States,” shows a purple bar with +18 next to it and “Math” beneath it, and a green bar with +20 and “Reading.” No source is listed for the data.

Mr. Kwitowski said he could not comment further on the data because that information is related to the lawsuit.

The suit also says that in October 2011, on a conference call with investors, Mr. Packard said the Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania (mislabeled in the suit as “Aurora Virtual Charter School”) produced test scores “higher than the typical school on state-administered tests for growth.”

The New York Times article that caused stock prices to drop precipitously cited data that Agora students performed well below the average for Pennsylvania students in reading and math. Agora enrolls more than 8,000 students and, in fiscal 2011, accounted for 13 percent of K12 Inc.’s overall revenue.

“Plaintiff would not otherwise have purchased or acquired K12 stock had plaintiff known the truth,” the suit says.

Following each of the February, March, and October 2011 instances cited in the suit, K12 Inc.’s stock prices improved negligibly.

In a Dec. 13 response to the Times article, the company said the student-performance measurement used for Agora—adequate yearly progress, or AYP, mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act—was “broken” and not representative of online schools that enroll large numbers of students across states.

In an interview with Education Week, Mr. Packard admitted that test scores had slipped. But he also pointed to data showing that arriving K12 Inc. students, typically from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds, perform better on proficiency exams the longer they enroll in its schools.

A common criticism of online schools, however, including those run by K12 Inc., is high student-turnover rates.

In individual states, the company points to the K-12-operated Florida Virtual Academy’s rating of A on its state accountability report between 2006 and 2009. (That school is not to be confused with the Florida Virtual School, the largest state-sponsored virtual school.)

K12 also cites the above-state-average proficiency levels of most grade levels at the company-run Ohio Virtual Academy last year, though the school did not make AYP.

And University of Arkansas researchers found that a cohort of about 180 students at the K12-operated Arkansas Virtual Academy achieved larger performance gains on Arkansas Benchmark exams between 2008 and 2011 than a similar group of students in traditional schools.

But in Agora’s case, the school performed poorly on the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System for 2011. The school’s average growth index, which measures performance on state tests, is minus 12.1, among the lowest in the state.

More Contracts Signed

K12 Inc. has signed 200 local contracts nationwide since December, Mr. Packard said during a conference call with analysts Feb. 7, following the release of the company’s quarterly financial report. The company reported a 29.1 percent increase in revenue from the same quarter the previous year and an increase in enrollment from 98,300 students to 143,900, but a 50 percent decrease in operating income, attributed to increased costs.

In addition to the article by The New York Times, recent reports by The Arizona Republic, the Detroit Free Press, the Tampa Bay Times, and CNN have questioned the effectiveness of virtual schools.

“Do we see questions about it? Yes,” Mr. Packard said on the conference call, referring to the bad publicity. “Is it affecting us? I think it’s too early to tell.”

Mr. Packard was asked if the company would do more to seek out independent data to counteract poor performance numbers for online schools that have been reported recently.

“We’re planning to work more with outside researchers than we’d done previously,” Mr. Packard said.

On the Feb. 7 call, analysts also focused on an $8 million reduction in fiscal 2012 expected revenue (down to $680 million in revenue), related to potential budget cutbacks and policy changes on the state level.

Mr. Packard would not disclose details on the measures, including in what states they may occur. He did say the measures were not related specifically to K12 Inc.

Trend Eyed Warily

Overall, states are cautiously embracing online schools, including those with for-profit management. Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Oregon, and Tennessee recently passed measures making virtual schools more easily established, helping to spur K12 Inc.’s enrollment growth. Mississippi is considering a virtual charter school bill.

But other states are beginning to grapple with some of the ethical considerations that come with for-profit and virtual schooling.

In Pennsylvania, superintendents are asking the state legislature to examine the per-student costs being paid to cyber schools run by management organizations versus the costs of cyber schools run by districts.

Thomas Seidenberger, the superintendent of the 8,000-student East Penn school district, in Lehigh County, said his district pays $8,800 for each student who attends a cyber school, including Agora, despite “dismal” test scores. Twenty-six East Penn students attend Agora, he said.

Along with neighboring districts, East Penn offers its own cyber school with an in-house curriculum and technology services contracted to a Pittsburgh company. Thirty East Penn students are enrolled at the school at $4,400 per student, Mr. Seidenberger said.

“I’m not opposed to choice, but we think we’ve designed a model that’s fair to parents and students and fair to taxpayers,” he said.

In response to Mr. Seidenberger’s information on costs, Mr. Packard said: “My guess is they aren’t counting all of their costs.”

In Franklin County, Ohio, Judge John F. Bender made a potentially precedent-setting ruling on Feb. 6 that White Hat Management, a for-profit, privately held operator of online schools throughout Ohio, must disclose financial records with information on how it manages its schools. Ninety-six percent of White Hat’s payments derive from public funds, the ruling says.

Many of the schools that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit against White Hat have struggled academically, and a few of them have closed, said James D. Colner, a lawyer representing the Ohio schools.

Charles R. Saxbe, a lawyer representing White Hat, said the company plans to appeal the judge’s order, which he described as using “tortured reasoning.”

Judge Bender’s ruling that “the White Hat defendants are public officials” is a “groundbreaking decision” that could serve as a model in other states, Mr. Colner said. K12 Inc. must disclose its financial documents because it is a public company, but the Ohio order may have broader ramifications.

In Michigan, a bill that would remove a cap on online schools and enrollment has narrowly passed at the committee level in the legislature, but could stall before a full vote, according to local reports.

Post Script: I have just been informed that K12, Inc. has a full-time paid lobbyist who haunts the halls in Olympia.

Weekly Update: Smart ALEC, Black Teachers Fired En Masse in Chicago and Chalk Face Radio

Glen Ford nails it in his commentary on A Black Agenda Radio Black Teachers Fired En Mass.

In his introduction Mr. Ford states:

Educational policy in the Obama era isn’t about education at all. It’s about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

“Blacks currently make up only 29 percent of Chicago’s teachers, but they comprised 43 percent of those recently fired…”

I would like to add to this that this same action also delivered a blow to African-American women in Washington DC when Michelle Rhee went about firing teachers, most of them minority women, during her tenure as Chancellor of DC public schools.

This segment is a must hear.

Next up, ALEC. In the state of Washington we have experienced over the last two years the whack-a-mole strategy of having a number of ed reform bills that are generally the same coming up all at once and overwhelming even the best of us in terms of staying up-to-the-minute on where each bill is. In addition to that, several of us believe that there was a strategy involved in introducing the charter school bill knowing that it would probably not go through but using it as leverage to pass a teacher evaluation bill that relies heavily on student test scores in terms of evaluating a teacher’s performance. More to follow on that teacher evaluation bill on Monday.

By the way, we can’t let that evaluation bill ESSB 5895 go through. Articles that follow will explain why.

The strategy that I just described is right out of the ALEC playbook.

In the Phi Delta Kappan magazine article A smart ALEC threatens public education, Julie Underwood and Julie F. Mead describe as they call it:

Coordinated efforts to introduce model legislation aimed at defunding and dismantling public schools is the signature work of this conservative organization.

To follow is an excerpt:

“A legislative contagion seemed to sweep across the Midwest during the early months of 2011. First, Wisconsin legislators wanted to strip public employees of the right to bargain. Then, Indiana legislators got into the act. Then, it was Ohio. In each case, Republican governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures had introduced substantially similar bills that sought sweeping changes to each state’s collective bargaining statutes and various school funding provisions.

What was going on? How could elected officials in multiple states suddenly introduce essentially the same legislation?

The answer: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Its self-described legislative approach to education reads:

Across the country for the past two decades, education reform efforts have popped up in legislatures at different times in different places. As a result, teachers’ unions have been playing something akin to “whacka- mole” — you know the game — striking down as many education reform efforts as possible. Many times, the unions successfully “whack” the “mole,” i.e., the reform legislation. Sometimes, however, they miss. If all the moles pop up at once, there is no way the person with the mallet can get them all. Introduce comprehensive reform packages.

ALEC’s own “whack-a-mole” strategy also reveals the group’s ultimate goal. Every gardener who has ever had to deal with a mole knows that the animals undermine and ultimately destroy a garden. ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.”

And speaking of undermining our public school system, starting with the teachers, Diane Ravitch writes an article in The New York Review of Books titled No Student Left Untested. This is where the teacher evaluation bill ESSB 5895 come into play in the state of Washington. Heads up Seattle, don’t think that ultimately this wouldn’t happen in our schools. It’s the goal of ALEC et al.

In the article Dr. Ravitch states:

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

To read the article in full, which I would highly recommend doing, particularly for folks in the state of Washington, go to the NYR blog at the New York Review of Books.

Next up, would you send your kids to this school? Bruce Baker writing at School Finance 101 asks the question in his article Borrowing wise words from those truly market-based, Private Independent schools… To follow is an excerpt:

Lately it seems that public policy and the reformy rhetoric that drives it are hardly influenced by the vast body of empirical work and insights from leading academic scholars which suggests that such practices as using value-added metrics to rate teacher quality, or dramatically increasing test-based accountability and pushing for common core standards and tests to go with them are unlikely to lead to substantial improvements in education quality, or equity.

Rather than review relevant empirical evidence or provide new empirical illustrations in this post, I’ll do as I’ve done before on this blog and refer to the wisdom and practices of private independent schools – perhaps the most market driven segment and most elite segment of elementary and secondary schooling in the United States.

Really… if running a school like a ‘business’ (or more precisely running a school as we like to pretend that ‘businesses’ are run… even though ‘most’ businesses aren’t really run the way we pretend they are) was such an awesome idea for elementary and secondary schools, wouldn’t we expect to see that our most elite, market oriented schools would be the ones pushing the envelope on such strategies?

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we’d expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we’d certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?

To read the answers to his posed questions, go to School Finance 101. I think that you’ll enjoy his remarks.

To follow is an e-mail that was sent to the Washington State PTA (WSPTA) list serv last week and is an introduction to my last piece regarding Chalk Face radio.

The WSPTA is pushing hard on the teacher evaluation bill unfortunately, as they have on all other ed reform bills that have gone through Olympia in the last two years. In fact a few of the LEV/SFC/PTA members have been participants in writing the bills.

This is what PTA member John Cummings had to say about the teacher evaluation bill:

Hi Everyone,

My name is John Cummings and I am new to this list-serv. Before I share my perspective on this legislation I just wanted to say thank you to the WSPTA for all the hard work that you folks are doing for our kids.

I am currently a stay-at-home dad but prior to that I taught Special Education here in Washington and also in New York and Vermont. I have worked in a variety of settings and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly (it’s not just a spaghetti western ).

Now, while I don’t doubt the good intentions of the people who are advocating for the new evaluation system that would be put into place if the compromise legislation becomes law, I do have some concerns about the legislation and the effect it would have in our schools if it passes.

As it stands right now, the Federal Government mandates that students with IEP’s are to be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) because these kids have a Civil Right to a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). I agree not only with this mandate itself but the spirit behind it. The placement of a child with an IEP in a general education class is not a gift or privilege for that child. It is their right to be in that gen.ed class. The problem with this is that, Special ed kids may benefit greatly from being Included in a regular education class but the benefits may not be apparent even when allowing for multiple measures. Sp.ed kids don’t test well compared their classmates and they may not experience the same rate of growth over the course of time as their grade-level peers. How will this be accounted for when a teacher is being evaluated/? In the best of situations, placing a sp.ed kid in a gen.ed class can be met with resistance from the gen.ed teacher and administration as well. I can see the potential for even more resistance from faculty if their evaluations will suffer as a result of this new system.

Special Education and the inherent difficulties of evaluating special education teachers has not been mentioned much in the debate over this legislation. What criteria will be used to evaluate sped teachers? How do you chart the progress of some of our most challenged kids? How does an administrator who may have little background in Special Education gain the knowledge necessary to be able to evaluate a sp.ed teacher’s effectiveness? Considering that special education students make up roughly 12% of the student body in most schools, this is not a trivial matter.

I wanted to make sure to highlight the special education piece, but really I actually have only 1 issue with this legislation and it is this;

The legislation itself is based upon a myth that is being sold as truth to folks (many of them elected officials) who don’t know better. While a teacher can have a profound and life-changing influence on a student, to say that the Teacher is the most important in-school factor in a child’s education is a gross oversimplification and there is no objective tool that can be used to show the validity of such a claim. This assertion overlooks the myriad of experiences that a student has over the course of a day, week, month and year.

Furthermore, school is just one aspect of a child’s life. A person’s life cannot be neatly sliced up and placed into compartments with each component examined exclusively. One piece influences and is influenced by the others. This is true of all of us. How many of us have had moments when we have been overwhelmed by something that has occurred in our lives? It happens in both good and bad situations. I remember being at work when my wife was pregnant and her due date was near. I had that pager glued to me and checked it constantly because I swore I felt it vibrate. When it finally did go off I almost jumped out of my skin! I will admit that I was not the most effective teacher that day. And what about 9/11? Where were you? How did you do on the job that horrible day? I point out these two obviously important yet different life-events because what holds true for us is especially true of children who haven’t developed the coping methods that healthy adults have.

Now, compound this inability with the reality of Washington 2012. We have more poverty, more kids going hungry and living in the chaos and turmoil that is inevitable when the people who care for them are going through the fear and anxiety of not being able to provide for them. They have more pressure in school as we march toward the Great Land of Assessment. There is less time for play, for art, for music and if the kids are ‘behind’ they have more and more remediation. I could go on about how it is impossible, considering all of this, to hold the teachers up as the ones who are responsible for the success of a child, but if you have spent any time in a school in a poverty-stricken area anywhere in this state (and I don’t mean on tour with the principal) you would see how messy lives can be. You would also see teachers doing their best in the absolutely impossible situation that has been handed to them by a legislature that refuses to fulfill its constitutional obligation to our children.

I would support this legislation if it were proposed after we restored the Billions that have been taken out of education, social and health services, after we fully funded k-12 education, after we reduced class sizes (remember that vote?) and after we had a chance to let these positive steps take effect. To do so now is premature to say the least. It seems almost irresponsible to me because the teachers and students are working in conditions that are unacceptable.

Teachers as a group are really bad at one thing and that is standing up for themselves as individuals and saying that the job has become too hard and that it must change. No, instead they will simply walk away from their careers, silent scapegoats for a system that has been broken and starved by the people they counted on to do the right thing.

John Cummings

I will leave you with a Chalk Face radio episode with Bill Ayers on teachers and the question “What will it take for a teacher to say that ‘enough is enough’ “?

The bonus is at the end of the three segments, Tim Slekar and Shaun Johnson speak to Diane Ravitch.

Enjoy

Dora

The League of Education Voters is at it again. This time they’re going after the teachers.

Nick Hanauer, one of the founders of the League of Education Voters (LEV) and a proponent of charter schools has lately decided to take it upon himself to publicly target teachers in general and the teachers’ union specifically in his quest to turn the state of Washington into charter school country staffed by none other than TFA temps putting students in front of computers for their online learning courses. As you might recall, just last week Rainier Beach High School said “Thanks but no thanks” to the paternalistic approach that LEV was taking in  “helping” the children on the south end of Seattle. That ended with Rainier Beach High School demanding an apology from LEV for basically pushing the organization’s agenda in an extremely bold face manner.

Now Mr. Hanauer has decided to turn it up a notch by trying his best to demonize the teaching profession in our state. To  follow is a letter written by Mary Lindquist, the President of the Washington Education Association in response to Mr. Hanauer’s most recent attack.

Dear Nick,

Your most recent letter begs for a response centered on facts and what is actually taking place in our public schools. To those of us who work with students every day, you appear unaware of what is actually happening in our schools and what WEA is doing to support the work of outstanding educators.

Let me start by disabusing you of one significant misunderstanding presented in your letter. You write:

“But in my experience as a business leader and entrepreneur, I have observed that all high-performance organizations share elements that are largely missing from our state’s public education system: relentlessly high standards, a culture of excellence, and a systemic commitment to innovation.”

It is not true these qualities are missing from our schools. Educators all across Washington are, each and every day, bringing high standards, requirements of excellence and dedicated, focused commitment to our students, in spite of the chronic underfunding of our schools. Educators working in our schools do not accept a “culture in which outstanding performance is resented or even discouraged, mediocrity is accepted, and low performance is tolerated.”

Here’s what I can state based upon what I see in our schools:

• The SPRINT program in Spokane, the Tri-Tech Skills Center in Spokane, Beacon Hill International School in Seattle, Aviation High School in Highline, and the School of Arts and Academics in Vancouver are all examples of innovative schools – and there are hundreds more across the state. Just last week the Seattle School board approved the Creative Approach Schools document to encourage innovation in Seattle – an agreement reached with the Seattle Education Association to promote “new different and creative approach that supports raising achievement and closing the achievement gap.” I’ve been in these schools. The teachers there are inspiring. I invite you to join me in visiting some of these innovative schools so you can see, firsthand, the commitment to academic excellence which our educators have and how our Association supports that work;

• At West Seattle Elementary, Totem Middle School in Marysville, and in 17 other schools across the state, “School Improvement Grants” (SIG) are transforming schools previously classified as low-performing or under-achieving. I’ve watched the dedicated teachers and principals working to transform these schools. I’ve seen them cry out of frustration and celebrate their successes. What do they all have in common? High expectations, an unwavering commitment to student achievement, a shared responsibility for student achievement and an infusion of federal and grant money. After school programs, parent outreach, and other social services provided at the schools demonstrate that it takes more than just the educators to boost student achievement. Do we need to do more to address the problems in our neediest communities? Absolutely. And it will take a better funding system than we currently have to do that. The Washington Supreme Court just came firmly down on the side of these educators and students;

• Two years ago WEA lead the charge for a new evaluation system with Senate Bill 6696. It created a system that will provide meaningful feedback to improve every principal’s and teacher’s performance. Working with superintendents, principals and school board members, WEA has been supporting the work in Anacortes, Snohomish, Central Valley in Spokane, and in 14 other schools districts for nearly two years. This year we added over 70 new districts while Seattle, Peninsula and other districts pioneered this work years ago. That’s nearly one-third of our districts moving in the right direction in less than two years. As teachers we knew we needed a new data-driven, research-based and fair system to provide every teacher with the opportunity to improve. The key here is research-based and what will really make a difference in student achievement, not some theoretical scheme from someone who has never stood in front of a classroom of students;

• Washington now ranks fourth in the nation for the number of teachers who have achieved National Board Certification, with nearly 10% of our teachers earning this highest honor, a rigorous, objective, uniform and national standard of what it means to be a great teacher. WEA is there to support these teachers from start to finish in the year-long process of achieving national certification. Each summer I speak to the new group of candidates. The energy in the room, their passion for teaching and their commitment to strengthening our profession is palpable. Engaging professionals in improving our schools is the only lasting way to produce change;

• For the ninth consecutive year, the average score for Washington students on the three major SAT exams – reading, writing and math – was the highest in the nation among states in which more than half of the eligible students took the tests. This consistent result, year after year, belies your sweeping rhetorical statement that, “Washington public schools are not delivering the kind of results that families in this state deserve and our economy requires.” What do our best schools have in common? The same dedicated educators combined with communities of high social economic status, parents who are engaged in their child’s school and resources beyond the current inadequate level of state funding.

You write of the lack of outrage around South Seattle public schools. I invite you to join me in visiting some of those schools – and hearing, firsthand, from teachers not only about the challenges they are confronting, but what they are also doing to turn things around. We can start at Hawthorne Elementary where amazing things are happening. Maybe you could ask the educators there how you could contribute to their efforts and what would really make a meaningful difference in the lives of these students.

Finally, you write of “The WEA’s efforts to stop any of the changes needed to transform our system puts you and the politicians who support and enable this intransigence on the wrong side of kids, families, and history.”

You are wrong. As the professionals on the frontline of public education every day, we are putting our children and families first. We – not you – are the ones who see, firsthand, what is needed to ensure all our children and students are equipped for the significant challenges of the 21st century.

We do not have the luxury of theorizing from behind locked doors of high rise office buildings in downtown Seattle. We work with students every day. Often we work without enough books for every child, in buildings desperately needing repair with more students than we faced last year or the year before. And every day we focus on providing all of our children with the best, well-rounded education we can provide, one tailored to their individual needs and talents, given the resources we have. I invite you to work with us instead of attacking the professionals who are asked to do the most important work for our state’s future.

Sincerely,

Mary

National Cost of Aligning States and Localities to the Common Core Standards: Listen up Washington State PTA

This is a recent press release from the Pioneer Institute:

STUDY ESTIMATES COST OF TRANSITION TO NATIONAL EDUCATION STANDARDS AT $16 BILLION

Cost far exceeds sums doled out in federal grants used to persuade states to adopt.

BOSTON/WASHINGTON, D.C./SAN FRANCISCO – Aligning state and local educational systems to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and math will cost the 45 states plus the District of Columbia that have adopted them nearly $16 billion over seven years according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute, the American Principles Project, and the Pacific Research Institute of California. This does not include additional spending for reforms to help students meet the new standards.

“Very few of the states that adopted Common Core vetted the costs and benefits beforehand,” said Theodor Rebarber, lead contributor to the analysis, National Cost of Aligning States and Localities to the Common Core Standards. “While test-development costs will be covered by federal grants, these states are also likely to see their overall expenditures increase significantly.”;

The study, which only calculates expenses directly associated with the transition, finds that states are likely to incur $10.5 billion in one-time costs. These include the price of familiarizing educators with the new standards, obtaining textbooks and instructional materials aligned with the standards, and necessary technology infrastructure upgrades.

An estimated $503 million will be incurred in first-year operational costs like technology training and support and higher assessment costs for some states.

AccountabilityWorks (AW), which developed the analysis, estimates that an additional $801 million will be incurred annually in years two through seven for ongoing support of the enhanced technology infrastructure and the introduction of new assessments that are currently under development.

“The nearly $16 billion in additional costs is nearly four times the federal government’s Race to the Top grant awards,” said Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios. “With state and local taxpayers footing 90 percent of the bill for K-12 public education, the federal government’s push to get states to adopt national standards and tests amounts to one big unfunded mandate.”;

The study uses California, whose current academic standards are among the nation’s best but has adopted Common Core, as an example. AccountabilityWorks estimates the Golden State will incur additional costs of over $1 billion for technology and support, $606 million for professional development and $374 million for textbooks and materials over seven years. The additional costs would exacerbate California’s recent budget woes, which have been even worse than what most other states have endured.

“In coercing states to adopt the Common Core State Standards program, the US DOE and various private trade groups have denied the American people and their elected state legislators any meaningful chance to study either its academic quality or cost implications,” said Emmett McGroarty of the American Principles Project. “;Sadly, now state and local taxpayers will have to pay for Common Core’s distortion of the democratic process.”;

The study includes several recommendations. The first is that the 45 states and the District of Columbia that have adopted Common Core and joined one of the two federally-sponsored testing consortia should engage in a public discussion about the costs and benefits of adoption and whether it represents the best investment of scarce education resources.

“The cruel irony is that in their chase for elusive federal grant dollars states have largely ignored the cost of implementing the national education standards that the US DOE and DC special interests are foisting on them,” said Lance Izumi, Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. “Especially in deficit-plagued states like California, it was simply fiscal madness to agree to the national-standards regime and its massive future costs.”

AccountabilityWorks also recommends that states conduct a technology feasibility assessment to determine their readiness to implement the standards, ensure that thorough professional development is available to all teachers so students have an adequate opportunity to learn the material they will be tested on, identify the resources needed to fully align instructional resources and materials with Common Core, and analyze the future annual costs associated with national standards-based assessments that are currently under development.

AccountabilityWorks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the dual goals of research that supports sound educational policy as well as supporting states and schools in implementing high quality assessment and accountability systems. Among its initiatives, AW has conducted cost studies on the implementation of federal education initiatives, developed paper and online assessments, and conducted research on state standards. Theodor Rebarber is chief executive officer of AW. Previously he was chief education officer of a system of charter schools, served as staff in Congress and at the U.S. Department of Education, and researched state education reform at the Vanderbilt Institute of Public Policy Studies. Rebarber has testified to Congress on state costs of implementing federal education initiatives.

Pioneer Institute led a campaign in 2010 to oppose the adoption of national standards, producing a four-part series reviewing evolving drafts. The reports compared them with existing Massachusetts and California standards, and found that the federal versions contained weaker content in both ELA and math. The reports, listed below, were authored by curriculum experts R. James Milgram, emeritus professor of mathematics at Stanford University; Sandra Stotsky, former Massachusetts Board of Education member and University of Arkansas Professor; and Ze’ev Wurman, a Silicon Valley executive who helped develop California’s education standards and assessments.

In addition, along with the Federalist Society, the American Principles Project, and the Pacific Research Institute, Pioneer recently released a research paper co-authored by former general counsel and former deputy general counsel of the United States Department of Education, Robert S. Eitel and Kent D. Talbert, on the legal concerns about national standards and assessments.

Post Script: For additional information regarding the Pioneer Institute, check out Susan Ohanian’s website.

What a teacher does

Sometimes a little humor can go a long way.

Dora

Seattle Education Association candidate’s coffee chats : Meet Eric Muhs

Meet Eric Muhs, get to know him and his views on teaching, education and union leadership.

Friday, Feb 24th

9:30 am to 11:00 am

Capitol Hill

Cafe Presse

1117 12th AVENUE SEATTLE, WA 98122

TEL:206.709.7674

 

Saturday, Feb 25th

9:30 am to 11 am

Georgetown

All City Coffee

1205 S Vale Street, (between S Corson Ave & S 12th Ave)

Seattle, WA 98108

(206) 767-7146

Sunday Feb 26th

9:30 am to 11 am

Ballard

Cafe Fiore

5405 Leary Avenue Northwest

Seattle

(206) 706-0421

You can check out Eric’s involvement with Social Equality Educators (SEE) at their website and Eric’s testimony in Olympia regarding charter schools at A Teacher Testifies in Opposition to House Bill 2426, the Charter School Bill.

Dora

League of Education Voters to Apologize to Rainier Beach High School

The LEV flyer with notations by Rainier Beach High School

To follow is a statement that was issued by the Rainier Beach PTSA this afternoon:

On Monday, Feb 20, 2012, a few parents from Rainier Beach High School (RBHS) and South Shore Middle School met with Kelly Munn of LEV to discuss the 37th District Mailer that was sent to roughly 10,000 37th District households. This mailer contained inaccurate and misleading information that negatively targeted Rainier Beach High School. Was this a coincidence or a plan to send the mailer during open enrollment?

We shared that we would no longer tolerate LEV’s continued negative attacks on RBHS and that if their goal was to enter the Southeast Seattle in an effort to help students and families of color that they failed miserably.

The truth of the matter is that the District average for Reading is 51% and RBHS matches this average.

Four overlooked facts are that:

1) 80% of the 9th grade students taking the exam for RBHS were ELL or SPED students and yet still they achieved the same pass rate as the District Average MAP score. (Many of these ELL students are new to the U.S. and have had little to no formal education. They can barely read.).

2) RBHS 9th graders are entering HS at a 5th to 6th grade reading level. Yet still they obtained the same pass rate as the District Average Map score.

3) RBHS students growth rate was +3 as compared to the District Average +1 which means that RBHS students are improving in Reading at 3X the rate of the average District students.

4) The District dumps missing students in RBHS totals which negatively impact RBHS totals. (Missing students are students who did not withdraw from SPS using proper protocol. As a result these students remain in the District enrollment count, and the District places these missing students in RBHS totals due to the open seats at the school. The District needs to clean up their missing students.)

And for Math RBHS students growth rates surpassed the District average for all grade levels. Yes, despite the fact that many of these students are entering HS well below grade level.

It’s time LEV, the District, a few City Council members and a Board member that will remain unnamed stop pointing the finger at RBHS and put the blame where it belongs: On Elementary and Middle Schools that are not preparing our students for High School.

Resolution:

1) LEV will publicly apologize for disseminating inaccurate and false information.

2) LEV will no longer single out any one school when sending out mailers.

3) LEV will speak to the proper people in the Southeast Community to assure they have accurate information.

Closing:

If you continue to tell someone they can’t achieve they will begin to believe that they cannot achieve.

Yet RBHS students triumph above this negativity and are striving for the best which is evident in the growth they are achieving which exceeds the District’s average growth.

Rainier Beach High School students and staff should be awarded for the heroics that they continue to achieve day in and day out despite the continued negative attacks and false innuendos.

Humbly Submitted,

Rita Green, MBA

RBHS PTSA VP and Alum

To follow is an additional page of notes that were part of the meeting minutes. To view all of the documents more clearly, and I would recommend that you do, go to The LEV Meeting with Rainier Beach High School.

For the background to this situation, go to Rainier Beach Responds to the League of Education Voters Attack on Its School and Community.

A Look at Race to the Top

The “scientific evidence or research for the four interventions proposed for school improvement grants is, at best, sketchy. …. If we are going to mandate interventions from the federal level we need to be clear about why we are mandating such reforms and what evidence we have for our actions. Otherwise I worry that we are not learning from NCLB and are just repeating our mistakes.”

Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee

Education Week, May 21, 2010

Someone in our listening audience last night during the Parents Across America conference call asked a question regarding Race to the Top. To follow was my answer.

Based on Arne Duncan’s experience as CFO of Chicago Public Schools, he has brought to our nation a program that was used in Chicago titled Renaissance 2010 with mixed results.

Arne Duncan with Eli Broad at Obama's Inauguration Ball.

Secretary Duncan has established prerequisites that a state must follow to receive Race to the Top funds. This money was a total of $5.4B which seems like a lot of money. Someone calculated that each child in the state of Washington would have received $22 of funding with the money that would have been awarded. This isn’t much compared to the disruption of schools and neighborhoods that is demanded by the Race to the Top requirements or the cost that it would have taken to make these changes by each district.

The requirements to receive funding was that these “low performing” schools, based on test scores, were to do one of the following:

Close the school.

Close the school and re-open it as a charter school also referred to as a school “turnaround”.

Fire half of the teaching staff.

Replace the principal

When looking at what Arne Duncan did in Chicago, close schools and turn them into charter schools, we see that over the last several years, that “reform” provided no results beyond what other school districts have achieved and others have achieved greater success by different means.

One of many concerns regarding the edicts of RTTT is that with high stakes testing, most of the focus is placed on teaching to the test which denies students the opportunity to explore a wider range of subjects or gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

And closing schools might seem like a simple task but then what happens to the students who attend those schools? Where do they go?

To answer that question, you can read Chicago School Closings Found to Yield Few Gains. Here is the opening sentence:

A majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released last week finds.

Regarding the notion of school “turn around” or replacing half of the staff, a good article on that is Drastic School Turnaround Strategies Are Risky.

Here is an excerpt:

Strategies to turn schools around are modeled after turnarounds in the corporate world, where it is easier to fire and rehire staff and leaders. Yet even in the business world, results are rarely positive. One review of the literature found that only about one-fourth of businesses that undertook turnaround initiatives were able to institute major changes in their structure and management, and even those businesses did not show increased economic performance (Hess & Gift, 2008).

 Studies that have looked at attempts to replace entire school staffs—referred to as reconstitution—agree that merely replacing teachers does not lead to improved instruction. Case studies of three reconstituted schools in one large urban district found that replacing the staff had little effect on quality, school organization, or student performance (Malen, Croninger, Muncey, & Redmond-Jones, 2002). Even a U.S. Department of Education guide shares this conclusion: “The school turnaround case studies and the business turnaround research do not support the wholesale replacement of staff” (Herman et al., 2008, p. 28).

And here is a teacher’s viewpoint on the subject, Letter from a Teacher in a School Designated for Closing by the DOE in order to receive “Race To The Top Money”.

Here is an excerpt:

Regardless of his intentions, Bloomberg is seriously demoralizing hundreds of hard-working and gifted teachers, making it harder for us to enthusiastically adopt any future changes. He is creating a negative image of their schools and their children’s teachers in the eyes of parents and community. The damage will persist long after this spat between DOE and UFT has been resolved.

To date there have been about 100 schools in Chicago “turned around” as started when Arne Duncan was the CFO of the Chicago School District. Most, if not all of these schools, have been in the most impoverished communities. When these school turn-arounds occur, everyone is affected, even the lunch ladies. See Firing Everyone, Even the Lunch Ladies, to Fix Failing Schools.

In Chicago, dozens of lunch ladies are leaving the schools they’ve worked at–sometimes for years. That’s because those schools are being “turned around”–a strategy that involves removing the entire staff at failing schools to “reset” the culture there. It’s a strategy Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now pushing nationwide. But a question is: Is it necessary to remove lunch ladies, janitors, and security guards to create better schools?

In terms of firing a principal at a “low-performing” schools, the results can be disastrous and completely unnecessary, see Federal Program Blamed For Long Island City High School Scheduling Chaos. Here is an excerpt:

Long Island City High School is getting millions of dollars to improve under a federal program, but now teachers and administrators say it’s that effort that spun the school into chaos to begin with.

The Queens high school is one of 33 schools in the city that won federal funding to fix its problems rather than shut down. Each gets up to $2 million a year for three years to make some big changes.

However, as NY1 first reported, the changes at Long Island City have not been good.

“What happened to these kids should never have happened to anyone,” said Queens City Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr.

Last week, 120 class sections were cut out of the schedule. Four course offerings were canceled entirely, meaning 900 students attended two months of classes in courses that no longer exist. All 3,500 students were given new class schedules with different teachers.

The school blames the transformation program.

“There were a lot of things that weren’t broke that they wanted fixed, and sometimes that causes more problems that really have to be fixed. And it’s been a difficult time dealing with people from Washington feeling that they know better than the people on the ground,” said teacher Ken Achiron.

The grant required replacing the school’s longtime principal, who teachers say dealt well with the complicated scheduling, and also called for the school to be divided into smaller “learning communities.”

And finally, charter schools have achieved mixed results and have brought on many abuses in terms of financial mis-management. Most charter schools are selective in which students are admitted and which students are “counseled out”.

The CREDO report was published three years ago with these findings:

While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.

In 2010 Vanderbilt University came out with a research brief regarding academic gains in mathematics. To follow is the summary.

 Mathematics achievement gains were similar for students who attend charter schools and students who attend traditional public schools.

Also see Access Denied: New Orleans Students and Parents Identify Barriers to Public Education, written by the Southern Poverty Law Center,  regarding the selectivity of these publicly funded charter schools.

Another by-product of these schools is high turnover of teachers. See A revolving door for charter teachers. Here is the introductory sentence:

Catalyst’s analysis of employee lists for charter schools confirms what some charter observers have long suspected: High teacher turnover is the norm.

After several years of this notion of reform, the NAACP came out with a resolution regarding charter schools. These are the last sentences of that resolution:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the NAACP rejects the emphasis on charter schools as the vanguard approach for the education of children, instead of focusing attention, funding, and policy advocacy on improving existing, low performing public schools and will work through local, state and federal legislative processes to ensure that all public schools are provided the necessary funding, support and autonomy necessary to educate all students; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the NAACP will urge all of its Units to work to support public schools throughout the nation to educate all children to their highest potential.

And finally, regarding Renaissance 2010, Arne Duncan’s program in Chicago when he was CFO of the Chicago Public School system:

The purpose of Renaissance 2010 [in Chicago] was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability – a code word for legitimizing more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago’s 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district’s alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification.

Most of the new experimental schools have eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney to write Renaissance 2010, which called for the closing of 100 public schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters to circumvent state limits) and “performance” schools.

Kearney’s web site is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one that John Dewey thought should be avoided at all costs. It states, ‘Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education transformations.

Duncan’s advocacy of the Renaissance 2010 plan alone should have immediately disqualified him for the Obama appointment.”

Henry Giroux & Kenneth Saltman
Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education?
Truthout

There is a grassroots effort that is bubbling up to demand that Arne Duncan be replaced. Secretary Duncan has no background in pubic education as a  teacher or as an administrator and that is apparent in this program that he developed which he termed “Race to the Top” that swept the country with devastating results.

Dora

Legislative Action Alert on Teacher Evaluation Bill 5895

The LEV/PTA/SFC backed teacher evaluation bill was shoved through the Senate last week without more than a few hours for anyone to review and evaluate it and yet it would have a tremendous impact on our students.

From the Washington Education Association regarding Bill 5895:

(The bold is mine)

The Senate’s new teacher evaluation bill (SB 5895) was released publicly just four hours before the deadline for legislation to pass the Senate. WEA’s education policy experts are reviewing the legislation and will provide a more in-depth analysis, but based on a cursory review of the bill:

We have concerns with some aspects of the bill. A lot rests with how this legislation is implemented at the local and state levels. This new legislation must not derail, short-circuit or otherwise interfere with the evaluation pilot work that is already underway, and educators must be allowed the flexibility to meet the unique needs of students in their local schools.

The larger concern: Teachers, the professionals who are directly affected by this legislation, were not at the table where the bill was negotiated. We didn’t know what was in the bill until a few hours before it passed. For any education reform to work, the voice of teachers needs to be heard and respected. We expect to work with the House to improve on the bill.

Additionally, this bill ignores the real crisis facing our K-12 public schools — the Legislature’s failure to amply fund K-12 schools as mandated by the state Constitution. As the state Supreme Court ruled in January, the Washington Legislature is failing to fulfill its paramount duty to our children. Simply changing education policies isn’t enough to ensure all children have the opportunity to receive a great education. It is time for the same legislators who passed this bill to comply with the state Constitution and fund our public schools.

So basically no one had a chance to look at the bill and yet the PTA and LEV are calling it a triumph…over what?…the democratic process?

And now from one of our PAA parents who has been following this bill:

This was originally the bill supported by the governor and the union, but a striker amendment was adopted yesterday with significant changes which were approved through a closed-door deal.

http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=5895&year=2012

Where is it?

The bill has been passed by the senate and is currently in the House Education Committee

 What is the next step?

SB5895 has been scheduled for a public hearing in the House Education Committee on 2/16/2012. After that it will be heard in executive session on Friday (2/17) at 1:30.

How much will it cost?

About 5.8 million for the first few years

What are the biggest concerns?

The most significant change that I see from the original 5895 is that now student growth data “must” be used. (Instead of just using if available and relevant) I don’t know how this will be applied to teachers who don’t teach reading, math, and science subjects with readily applicable standardized tests. If I were an art teacher I would be really worried about how this would apply to me. I’d also hate to see the state or districts creating more and more tests in more and more subjects just to satisfy this legislation.

What can we do about it?

Write and call your representatives and members of the house education committee and ask:

How do you expect this will apply to teachers without standardized tests in their subject matter?

Can we please get this clarified through an amendment?

Explain your concerns about the one size fits all nature of requiring student growth data for *all* teacher evaluations.

And from another PAA parent, more questions regarding the bill  that need to be posed to our legislators:

Do you understand how measures of student growth will be developed for teachers of all subjects? In other words, who, and at what expense, will develop measures of student growth for Auto Tech, Theory of Knowledge, Family and Consumer Science, IB Business, and so on? For subjects for which standardized district-based or state-based assessments don’t exist, will teachers then have the latitude to develop classroom-based assessments that will figure into their own evaluations? If so, what incentive would anyone have for (1) teaching in a district-based or state-based tested subject, (2) taking on classes of historically low-growth students, (3) teaching, say, three preps instead of one or two, (4) taking on a new course, or (5) working an especially difficult schedule (teaching a 7th or 0 period, working an 1.2 FTE contract, and so on)?

In the absence of funds to develop new measures of student growth, won’t most high school assessments be classroom-based? In that case, why would anyone want to teach language arts or math?

Parents ask the darndest things don’t they? At least PAA parents do. Why is the PTA not asking these same questions?

And from another PAA parent:

As I understand the evaluation frameworks from TPEP (the pilot) don’t use VAM (Value Added Measures eg: student test scores), but use other student growth measures. This is a minor technicality though since non-VAM growth data is no better than VAM.

After watching the working session on Monday, I came away with two main impressions:

1. It is, at best, way to premature to mandate the use of student growth data in teacher evaluations. TPEP provides no data that shows this is beneficial and we know from prior research that it’s not.

2. That said, I was impressed with the TPEP project. It seems like a collaborative effort with educators to improve teacher evaluation.

And from another PAA parent:

One of the Highline schools has a transient rate of 80%. In other words, only 20 out of 100 start and then end the year at that one school. These value added measurers would be a mess in that situation. I don’t know of any teacher that would want to teach at that school, and have student evaluations on top of that. I’m not sure the supporters that come from stable schools understand this issue either.

And this is what happens when you’re too hasty in pushing legislation through that is of no value but costly in terms of money and the time spent on testing and the evaluation of those tests as well as the psychic energy expended by students, teachers and school staff. See States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations

Please contact the following legislators and ask them a few questions about this bill before it becomes law and then too difficult to fix:

santos.sharontomiko@leg.wa.gov,

Steve.Litzow@leg.wa.gov,

Tracey.Eide@leg.wa.gov,

joe.fain@leg.wa.gov,

Nick.Harper@leg.wa.gov,

andy.hill@leg.wa.gov,

Steve.Hobbs@leg.wa.gov,

king.curtis@leg.wa.gov,

sharon.nelson@leg.wa.gov,

Rodney.Tom@leg.wa.gov,

Rosemary.McAuliffe@leg.wa.gov,

Christine.Rolfes@leg.wa.gov,

kristine.lytton@leg.wa.gov,

fred.finn@leg.wa.gov,

andy.billig@leg.wa.gov,

sam.hunt@leg.wa.gov,

connie.ladenburg@leg.wa.gov,

maxwell.marcie@leg.wa.gov,

john.mccoy@leg.wa.gov,

probst.tim@leg.wa.gov,

bruce.dammeier@leg.wa.gov,

glenn.anderson@leg.wa.gov,

Lisa.Brown@leg.wa.gov,

cathy.dahlquist@leg.wa.gov,

john.ahern@leg.wa.gov,

susan.fagan@leg.wa.gov,

mark.hargrove@leg.wa.gov,

brad.klippert@leg.wa.gov,

kevin.parker@leg.wa.gov,

jt.wilcox@leg.wa.gov,

edward.murray@leg.wa.gov