CAT Tracks for March 15, 2012
TEACH FOR AMERICA'S WENDY KOPP

...denounces the shaming of teachers.


Below is a three-fer:


From the Education Week Website...

Link to the Original Story


TFA's Kopp Denounces the Teacher 'Blame Game'

By Liana Heitin on March 9, 2012 12:04 PM

Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp caused some buzz (what else is new?) by writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal condemning the public release of teachers' value-added scores in New York City. She writes:

Kopp says that rather than playing the "blame game," schools should focus on supporting teachers through team-building, feedback, and professional development.

Protesting the value-added release is another area where Kopp and the unions are in agreement. Any chance these groups are inching closer together, as NEA members who rebuked their president for co-authoring an op-ed with Kopp in January seem to fear?

This recent op-ed, much like that previous one, is overall pretty vague. So for now, I'm going to go with, no, the two groups are not on the verge of some sort of unification. But maybe they are trying to de-polarize certain discussions. (Taking a cue from Senator Olympia Snowe's departure letter, perhaps?) Thoughts from our readers?


From the Wall Street Journal Website...

Link to the Original Story


OPINION (Updated March 7, 2012, 12:11 a.m. ET)
The Trouble With Humiliating Teachers

Making rankings public undermines the trust educators need to build collaborative teams...

By WENDY KOPP

When I dropped my kids off at school last week, I had a hard time looking their teachers in the eye. The New York City government had just posted their performance assessments online, and though I'm a strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness, I was baffled and embarrassed by the decision.

So-called value-added rankings—which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores—are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn't help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for.

The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that "fixing" teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

No single silver bullet will close our educational achievement gaps — not charter schools, or vouchers, or providing every child with a computer, or improving teachers. Each of these solutions may have merit as part of a larger strategy, but on their own they distract attention from the long, hard work required to ensure that our schools are high-performing, mission-driven organizations with strong teams, strong cultures and strong results.

It's true that teachers are vitally important. The current focus on them stems from an important body of research showing that highly effective teachers have a profound and lasting impact on students' academic trajectories, while the least effective teachers hold their students back for years to come.

But the question is how to cultivate high-quality teaching. At Teach For America, we are sometimes accused of relying on the examples of a few super-teachers who overcome every obstacle. In fact, our experience over the past 20 years has taught us how difficult it is for individual teachers — even exceptional ones — to achieve great results working within schools and systems that aren't set up to support them.

A few years ago, my son had a teacher who under the current system would probably be ranked in the bottom quartile of her peers. This wasn't for a lack of enthusiasm or effort on her part — you could see how desperately she wanted to connect with her students and be a great teacher. Knowing my son was in a subpar classroom didn't make me angry at the teacher. It made me frustrated with the school — for not providing this young educator with the support and feedback she needed to improve.

If you ask the principals of top-performing schools the secret to their success, they will tell you that it's about building teams and investing everyone in the mission of high achievement. At these schools, there is leadership and accountability at every level.

Teachers are not left by themselves to sink or swim — they are given feedback, support and professional development. Moreover, they operate in environments designed to meet the extra needs of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds while keeping expectations high.

We should make individual teacher ratings available to school principals to inform their work recruiting and developing teaching faculties, but releasing them publicly undermines the trust they need to build strong, collaborative teams.

Ensuring that every child receives an excellent education is going to require reshaping our schools so they have the mission, culture and operating approach that support strong teacher performance. We cannot produce 3.7 million effective teachers without overhauling the context in which they work.

That's why Teach For America focuses on channeling the energy of our country's future leaders against the problem of educational inequity. Investing in their success as teachers is important not only for today's students but also for cultivating their long-term leadership potential inside the classroom and outside of it — preparing them to drive changes in the ways schools operate, in the ways our school systems promote teacher development, and in the political and community contexts in which schools exist.

We've spent too much time over the past two decades caught up in a blame game. Just as we now know how wrong it was to blame kids and their families for the achievement gap, we should be careful not to get swept up in the trend of blaming teachers. Rather, we need to give all those who are engaged in this hard work the respect and support they deserve.

Ms. Kopp is founder and CEO of Teach For America and co-founder and CEO of Teach For All.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 7, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Trouble With Humiliating Teachers.


CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

I shall be brief...

REALLY!

  • Wendy knows that publishing teacher "grades" may not reflect well on her "temp corps"...overwhelmed newbies trying to find their stride before they take their early exit (a two-year commitment) from the "profession". Like the IEA and the NEA, Wendy is trying to get ahead of the looming train wreck.

  • Is it an omen? That this March 7th Op-Ed and March 9th "assessment" arrived in my e-mail box this morning...March 15th?

BEWARE: The Ides of March!