Teachers get a number score with the state's value-added model.
I finally know my worth as a teacher—and now that the “value-added model” scores mandated by our state legislature are public, everyone else knows, too.
I’m a 37.5.
But, I have no idea what that number means.
Along with my 37.5, I was told I’m “highly effective” and given a $230 bonus. In case you’re wondering, that’s about half what the average teacher spends of his or her own money on school supplies per year.
Even though I don’t understand my 37.5, I do know a lot more about than I did last year about value-added formulas. I left the classroom and I’m currently in a doctoral program in education.
I have access to many of the statisticians who create these kinds of models for their research. The funny thing is, many of these experts say that the formulas shouldn’t be used to make decisions about teacher performance—the very thing we’re using them for.
That’s right: Many researchers think value-added models can’t accurately measure a teacher’s performance in one year. And studies have shown that the same teacher may get a high score one year and a low score the next, and that neither number may actually tell us much about their teaching.
Sixty years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, not all classrooms reflect the dream of desegregation.
Here’s a question:How do you teach a class of all black students in an all black school that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation decades ago?
That isn’t a hypothetical question, but one I remember clearly asking myself. I was teaching American History for the first time in one of our nation’s many embarrassingly homogeneous schools. I could not, with a straight face, teach my students that segregation had ended. They’d think that either they or I didn’t know what the word segregation meant. Continue Reading →
A former Miami-Dade teacher says she got little help dealing with the stress of teaching.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Marie Roberts is the kind of person most education policy-makers dream of attracting to the teaching profession. She intelligent, sensitive and able to handle a classroom full of teenagers. She is herself a public school graduate and an Ivy League-educated woman of color.
She’s also the teacher highlighted in an earlier post about adding value — the teacher whose students demanded “small books.” She responded by securing a class set of novels to help them experience an authentic reading experience.
But despite her commitment to children and to education, she left the classroom after three years.
“I left teaching because I didn’t know how to make it sustainable,” she told me. “I didn’t have the resources or the tools professionally or emotionally [to deal with] all the demands of the students that weren’t just academic or even just social. There was always more work to be done—I never felt a task was complete. There was always more.”
Many new teachers often feel overwhelmed because, like Roberts, they are often assigned to the most difficult schools. Her first year was in a large high school in a high-poverty neighborhood in Miami-Dade County.
One reason teachers say they leave the field? Not enough training or feedback.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
How often do budding investment bankers leave the field in their mid-20s to try their hand at teaching?
Not often. And that’s only one of the things that makes Henry Rodriguez special. We met him earlier in this series as he helped a disengaged student find her voice as a consumer educator. Rodriguez fits the mold of what many say the profession is looking for. He’s young, well-educated, vibrant and personable — and great with kids.
Rodriguez told me he was attracted by the promise of the field of education and its significance.
“I wanted to make an impact on a personal level instead of just on the bottom line,” he said.
He did just that for four years. I heard very positive things about Rodriguez from both his colleagues and a former student.
But now he’s gone back into the private sector, this time in technology instead of finance, and in our conversation he mentioned a few reasons he left, reasons that help begin to explain why the teaching profession loses half of its recruits within the first five years.
Paying a student to read Animal Farm didn't inspire him to read more. But he reminded the teacher of who she should be in the classroom.
Editor’s note: Names of students and teachers have been changed.
Knowing we were going to be talking about former students, Lisa Perry told me she got out some letters she had saved and read through them. The exercise inspired her to get in touch with four of her students from over 20 years ago. (“Facebook is a wonderful thing,” she told me.)
But it also showed her some themes about her teaching, things that were mentioned repeatedly by students as they expressed appreciation.
Perry told me that she saw again and again phrases like: “You really opened my eyes;” “You valued what I said;” “You took me into the world of literature and helped me relate it to life.”
But her most memorable story was what she sees as her failure as a teacher.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Are search engines really more complicated than children?
That question occurred to me last week when the annual earnings report for Yahoo! came out and it became clear that CEOs are cut a lot more slack than teachers are.
New Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer was hired with much fanfare last year and tasked with turning the company around (or at least bringing it out of the doldrums in relation to its competitors). She just finished her first year so I expected these revenue numbers were going to tell us whether she was doing a good job or not
It turns out that Yahoo! revenue was down — 7 percent as compared to the same point the year before. If advertising commissions were taken out of the revenue numbers, it was a 1 percent decline.
And revenue in the private sector is the bottom line, right? So I guess Marissa Mayer was a failure.
Not according to Yahoo! Mayer wasn’t fired. Her salary wasn’t cut. In fact, it was supplemented.
A teacher's civics lessons inspired a student to create a consumer education club.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Henry Rodriguez had a lot of ideas as a young, energetic teacher. He wanted to make his civics class relevant and to help his students be more aware of what was going on in the world. One of his ideas involved requiring his kids to watch a brief news program every morning for the whole year.
At first, students had to write simple summaries of what happened, but then the exercise got more advanced as the year progressed. Rodriguez helped them start to build a narrative about the news, no longer just summarizing, but connecting the dots and predicting the effects of events. They wrote about how things were related, and more.
But activities like that don’t automatically turn students into engaged learners, no matter how well-designed, and some students continued to remain relatively unaware and uninvolved. Rodriguez described one student, Carmen, as oblivious to the world around her.
“She was just going through the motions of life,” he says.
You pay teachers for the classroom work. The advice is included for free.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
While most of these stories about the values teachers add come from the teacher’s point of view, I thought it would be interesting to hear one from a student.
Benny Rawlings went to a middle school in Miami.
“It was not a great school,” he said. “There were hallways you couldn’t walk down. You either had to find somewhere to hide or find strength in numbers.”
This environment was part of the reason that Benny joined a gang.
But that didn’t mean he gave up on school. While he played dumb sometimes in classes, he also would occasionally tell his other classmates to pay attention — particularly in his social studies class.
He thinks this is what drew the attention of his teacher, Mr. Edmonds.
Madame Logan's lessons were about more than French.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Madame Logan is a retired high school French teacher. She was filled with stories of former students who had contacted her to tell her of the effects she had on them.
Most of these effects were, at best, indirectly related to the French they had learned in her class.
One of her students is now a film critic, and he said the the foreign films he watched on French class trips (this was before DVD players when Madame Logan took students to an actual movie theater near the school) contributed to his career choice.
Another said Madame Logan’s speeches about the best ways to handle stress are why she teaches yoga.
Madame Logan organized beach clean-ups and fundraisers to purchase acres of rainforest. Many students went into environmental sciences, and many more have attributed their environmental awareness to her.
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