Miami-Dade high school advanced calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy writes out the formula that will grade and help determine the pay of Florida teachers.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is “value added.”
We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
We now throw this term around a lot. The mathematical formulas designed to identify the effect an individual teacher is having on an individual student are called “value-added” models. Administrators, researchers and policy-makers speak of the “value added” by a particular teacher — the difference in a student’s learning between excellent, good and poor teachers.
And, Orwell was right. It sure is making us foolish.
The transition to Common Core may be a challenge that some teachers choose not to take.
Before she retires, Shara Holt is getting teachers around the state ready to use Common Core standards. Holt is a literacy coach in St. Johns County who’s spent 41 years as an educator.
It’s a new way of teaching that focuses heavily on fewer subjects, sets benchmarks for students at each grade level, and forces students to explain their answers.
“Gone are the days when a teacher can go to the filing cabinet and pull out a lesson plan from five years ago, blow the dust off and use the same lesson plan,” said Holt. “Now we have to look at the needs of the students…instead of just teaching what’s there and (saying) ‘If they get it, fine – if they don’t get it, too bad.'”
It’s a change that Holt thinks could lead to an exodus from the classroom.
“I’ve seen teachers already who have left the system,” Holt said, “not only because of the change coming with Common Core but also with the teacher evaluation system.”
Florida State University physics professor Paul Cottle said Florida can't overlook science standards.
State leaders should not overlook improving science lessons while schools prepare for new English, literacy and math standards, according to a Florida State University physics professor.
Paul Cottle said the state is unlikely to bolster science standards if schools are struggling with the Common Core State Standards scheduled to take effect in the fall of 2014. Florida is one of 45 states which have fully adopted the standards. The standards ask students to know fewer topics, but have a deeper knowledge of those topics.
States are weighing whether to adopt a similar, but separate, cooperative effort to draw up new science guidelines known as the Next Generation Science Standards.
Florida science educators are rounding up support for NGSS. So far, 26 states have said they will consider adopting or have adopted the standards, but Florida is not yet among those states. The Florida Department of Education is accepting public comment on the standards now.
The Common Core standards and accompanying standardized test will be more difficult for students. If schools are already worried about students struggling in reading or math, Cottle said, they’re unlikely to raise science standards as well.
“So they’re going to do what human being do,” Cottle said. “They’re going to double-down on the Common Core. They’re going to try to focus their resources on improving students’ performance – especially the lower-tier students’ performance – in reading and mathematics.”
Sen. John Legg, R-Port Richey, says some Florida schools might not be ready for a fall 2014 deadline for new education standards and testing.
Port Richey Republican Sen. John Legg has founded a charter school and is chairman of the Senate Education committee.
So people listened when Legg raised some of the first warnings about whether Florida would be ready for new English, literacy and math standards — and the accompanying tests — by the start of the 2014 school year. Legg recently sat down with StateImpact Florida to discuss state progress on the new standards.
Florida is one of 45 states which have fully adopted the Common Core State Standards. The standards require students know fewer topics, but have a deeper understanding. The new standards will also come with new standardized tests.
A teacher says test scores often don't reveal much about how well he does his job.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Let’s take a moment to look closely at test scores, which are the basis of our new “teacher accountability” system.
I just got back the test results for the students at the magnet school where I taught this year, and I honestly don’t think they tell you much of anything about my teaching.
This isn’t sour grapes; my students did well on the test. But that doesn’t surprise me because they are at a wonderfully designed small school full of the arts — an experience I think would benefit all students. So, of course their scores were high as a whole.
But when I looked closely at individual scores, I saw some results that made me wonder exactly what was being tested.
One student who did absolutely no homework and very little classwork, not only passed the FCAT, but his scores went up from last year. I’ll get credit for teaching him well even though he failed my class.
His foil, a student who did all her assignments while continuing to improve her writing and analytical skills, saw her test scores go down this year. She still earned the highest rating on the FCAT — a five — but her actual numerical score was slightly lower than last year.
These teachers are learning how to make math an interactive, engaging experience for students under the new Common Core State Standards.
They were led by Ilea Faircloth, a staff training specialist for Bay County schools.
“With Common Core, if we are implementing the math practices with fidelity and to the intent of the mathematical Common Core writers, we are instilling in them the love of mathematics,” Faircloth said. “We are challenging them and pushing them. We’re not giving them answers – we’re making them think.”
And “It’s fun and it’s engaging, and it’s not boring,” Faircloth said.
Teachers in this training session are learning techniques that Faircloth says will work for students of all ages.
Common Core will have kids thinking out loud, discussing solutions with each other, and explaining their answers. Continue Reading →
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Professionals should be responsible for their job performance and should be evaluated and retained accordingly.
Who doesn’t agree with that?
My problem isn’t with accountability or evaluating teachers. My problem is with the schemes I’ve encountered so far in my career that have been designed to hold teachers accountable.
I’ve been lucky enough to teach at a range of schools. And even though I’m the same teacher, I’ve been treated (and paid) differently in ways that had more to do with the kind of school in which I was working than with my performance in the classroom.
My first encounter with Florida’s school grading system and the accompanying bonuses for teachers happened when I was teaching in a large urban school in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County. The system is designed to combine many pieces of data, such as student test scores or percentage of students taking advanced classes, and reduce it to a simple A through F letter grade.
My high school was graded an F. My colleagues and I not only suffered the shame of being publicly labeled failures, we were denied the bonus given to the “successful” teachers at higher-performing schools.
Three years later, I taught at one of those higher performing schools, located in an affluent suburban neighborhood. My school received an A grade and I got my accolades and my bonus.
This new way of teaching is designed to better prepare students for college and a career.
Thousands of teachers are getting help from the Florida Department of Education at training sessions this summer – studying a different way to guide student learning.
Principals and other school personnel are learning, too.
K-12 Deputy Chancellor Mary Jane Tappen says administrators need enough knowledge about the standards to recognize them in the classroom and lead teachers through the transition.
“It’s to help administrators recognize what a classroom where Common Core is being taught should look like and how to support teachers with resources and lesson study,” Tappen said this week during a training session near Pensacola. “So administrators have some skills but also some resources to help them.”
It’s a big change for long time educators like Bagdad Elementary School Principal Linda Gooch in Santa Rosa County. She’s worked in education more than three decades, seven of those years as an administrator.
Q: What are administrators learning at these summer institutes?
A: We are learning how to be the instructional leader that we need to be to make sure that our teachers are able to implement Common Core in the way that it should be.
We have to have a little bit of information about all of the different areas because it’s up to us to make sure that we are providing the professional development that our teachers need and encouraging our teachers to be leaders – to work with their grade levels and to work with other grade levels because we can’t do it all. Continue Reading →
Tea Party members, Lois Miller, right, and Charlie Batchelder, left, hold signs to protest Common Core across the street from Marion Technical Institute where school administrators were meeting on Southeast Fort King Street in Ocala, Fla. on Wednesday, April 3, 2013.
The training session by Washington, D.C.-based FreedomWorks was tied to a rally protesting a national conference on Common Core State Standards. The two events were scheduled for neighboring hotels on June 29.
Hotel officials told FreedomWorks they were concerned about unpredictable crowds after seeing people mention the protest and training session on social media.
Florida State College at Jacksonville is questioning a new national ranking of education schools.
A Florida college rated “substandard” in national rankings of education schools said the rankings were “inaccurate and misleading” and rely too much on information obtained on the Internet.
But Tiffany Hunter, Florida State College at Jacksonville dean of education, said the school only has an early childhood education program. Florida has two certifications for early childhood education and elementary education, Hunter said, and the requirements for each are different.
Therefore, the school should not have been included in the evaluation of elementary education programs.
“It seems very apparent that the evaluation was inaccurate and misleading on all levels for our program at FSCJ,” Hunter said by email. “There is a division between Early Childhood and Elementary education and it does not appear to be understood by the NCTQ.”
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