Ryan Goes and Gives the Quality Education Council a Piece of His Mind

The post that I wrote over the summer on measuring teacher effectiveness was well received in a lot of quarters; I didn't realize just how well until I received an invitation last month to be part of a panel of teachers talking to the Data Governance Workgroup that's a part of the Quality Education Council, which is the new big committee that was formed out of HB2261.

We met at the WEA Headquarters in Federal Way, and it was a pretty impressive group. The Chair, Bob Butts of OSPI, is a pretty nice guy, and he was sitting next to Cal Brodie, a financial wiz who's helped me with some impact aid issues in the past. Lots of good questions, lots of brainpower, a really good conversation about the data that teachers use, how we use it, and how the system could be improved to the benefit of our kids and ourselves.

The last question, though, was the biggie--linking evaluation to student testing data. I essentially repeated what I always do, that designing a system sensitive enough to suss out the good teachers from the bad mathematically would be almost impossible given the testing apparatus that we have now. A couple of the teachers on the panel were strongly in favor of doing exactly that, a couple strongly against.

Given that I <3 politics I'm looking forward to the legislative piece, when a bill gets constructed and the fight begins. That'll be fun to watch.

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After Al Gore Invented the Internet, Eric Oemig Invented the Number System

Senator Oemig was the first to think about data and measurement in public education. Just ask him, he'll tell you:

So getting, reporting and acting on data has been a priority of Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, since he took office in 2007.

“How do you change a system that is entrenched?” Oemig asked. “You make compelling cases supported by data.” But he remembers the initial reaction.

“My first year, everyone was ‘Data What?’ Now it’s, ‘of course we need data,’” he said. “It’s a big transformation.”

Every EdD issued before 2007 is hereby revoked.

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What the Data Says About the Teachers

There’s a grade level in my school where every teacher is new to the building or the grade after the big shuffle we experienced last spring. Now consider the MAP scores that their kids came out with during the spring testing:

In 2007, 83% of the kids met the goal in math.
In 2008, 71% of the kids met the goal in math.

In 2007, 19% of the kids scored in the gifted range on the test.
In 2008, 4% of the kids scored in the gifted range on the test.

In 2007, 5% of the kids scored more than one grade level below the goal.
In 2008, 18% of the kids scored more than one grade level below the goal.

I knew that the scores in this particular grade were going to tank; the 2007 team had been working together for quite some time, and they really knew their math inside and out. They were super teachers who had a really great system in place; there was no way that the 2008 group could equal what they did.

Data doesn’t care, though. The trouble with data is that sometimes numbers shouldn’t be allowed to speak for themselves, because without context they’re worse than meaningless—they’re just mean.

And this is why we as teachers shouldn’t fear data, but instead we should accept it for what it is and listen to what it tells us.

The history of education can be written in numbers, and that’s never been more true than it is today.

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Leadership Week, Day 4: Data Wise

Yes, I know that leadership week has stretched into leadership weeks. There’s just that much leadership!

The recent Harvard Education Letter has an article related to the book Data Wise by Jennifer Steele and Kathryn Boudett. The beginning is an important lesson for anyone trying to move their staff in a number-savvy direction:

When delivering her opening-day speech to faculty at McKay K-8 School in Boston, second-year principal Almi Abeyta hoped that displaying recent state test results would “light a fire” among teachers and spark a powerful conversation about instructional improvement. Instead, teachers reacted with stunned silence, quickly followed by expressions of anger and frustration. It was the first they had heard about the prior year’s decline in language arts scores. Almi felt as if she “had dropped a bomb” on the room. Far from igniting collaborative energy, her presentation of achievement data seemed to have squelched it.

Teachers are defensive about numbers. We should be; increasingly, that’s how we’re judged as professionals and people, and if the powers that be start linking the numbers to our pay then the issue becomes a deeply important one. That balancing act between numbers as a hammer vs. numbers as a scalpel might be the most critical discussion we have as we move education forward, and it’s why every teacher needs to have a good idea of what data means to them.

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Everett: On the Front Lines of RTI

Neat article in the Seattle Times yesterday about some good things going on in the Everett School District:

No school likes to publicize the number of students who are failing, but in the Everett School District, focusing on students with a single F grade has allowed teachers and counselors to get more teenagers on track to graduate.

Last year, district administrators presented each high school with lists of students failing a single class. Principals and teachers were surprised to learn that 60 percent of students with F grades were failing only one subject.

"The staff was shocked when they looked at the data," said Terry Cheshire, principal of H.M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek.

The reasons for student failure are often complex and include poor attendance, lack of academic skills, a family crisis or drug or alcohol abuse. With most high-school teachers seeing as many as 150 students a day, trying to solve any of those problems for even a single student can seem overwhelming.

But Cheshire said that when teachers saw that their failing students were succeeding in their other five classes, they saw a chance to make a difference.

"Suddenly teachers with 150 students could take ownership. They said, 'I'm going to do everything in my power to get these kids to graduate,' " Cheshire said.

And that's when the data becomes actual information: when it's used for the good of the kids.

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Data Rich, Time and Manpower Poor

We've made a sea-change in my grade level team this year that would make any ed researcher giggle like a school girl.

It's a function of the Professional Learning Communities process that we began three years ago. We've finally gotten to the stage where we all are using the same assessment (theme skills tests from the Houghton-Mifflin reading series) and sharing our data. S takes all our scores (which are broken out by grammar, high frequency words, spelling skills, etc.) and puts them on a big spreadsheet so that we can see exactly which kid mastered which skill and which skills had the biggest failure rates.

The piece that we're struggling with is the "What do you do when a child doesn't get it?" step. Each theme test has about 12 to 14 areas on it; we look at the 3 that had the most trouble (this past test it was identifying nouns and verbs, using the 's possessive, and inflectional verb endings) and invite every kid who fails in any one of those three areas. For the kids who came we had an intensive 2 week bootcamp, 4 days a week, where we hit those three skills hard and fast. At the end I wrote up a new post-test based off of the theme skills test, and most of the kids showed good growth in the areas that they were identified for.

We're dealing with three distinct problems, though:

1) What do you do with the kids who still aren't getting a particular concept? Take inflectional verb endings (-ing, -ed, -s), for example. It's going to spiral up again in our reading curriculum, and they're going to get ample practice with it, so is it crucial that they pass a test RIGHT NOW?

What we've chosen to do is put together packets to send home to the parents so that they can practice those skills with their kids, but to truly see if that works or not I'll need to write another assessment on those areas and test them again, and the cynic in me wonders if it's really worth the trouble.

2) Then there's the kids who were invited to the before school progam but didn't come, about 10 in all. Ideally I would be able to make the time during the school day to intervene with them, but the twin competing pressures of time and curriculum make that a damn hard thing to do. With a student teacher I have the ability, right now, but when she goes away in March the time just won't be there any more.

3) Touching on the curriculum aspect of it, it's not like time has stopped while we try to remediate the skills they didn't get. We've moved into the long vowels (tough for 1st graders, believe me) for theme 6, but I'm still working with some kids on skills from theme 3 and 4. At what point do we let go and move on?


It feels good to be using the data the right way, and I can see the potential this holds to really help our students achieve to their maximum. My problem is that I'm getting burnt out in a hurry; last week I spent a minimum of 10 hours planning the remedial curriculum and pulling together the packets we need, and that's hard time to find with a baby at home and all the other obligations.

And that's why I drink.

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