The Seattle MAP flap

yes Michael J. Petrilli / January 28, 2013

The MAP is exactly the type of "good" assessment that many educators claim to favor Photo by albertogp123.

Shame on the teachers of Garfield High. Shame on them for resisting a modicum of personal responsibility for student learning. Shame on them for obfuscating what their resistance is really about. And double-shame on them for likening their selfish crusade to the noble acts of resistance of the Civil Rights era.

As you probably know, the teachers of Seattle’s Garfield High School are “boycotting” the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is required by the district. Ostensibly, their protest is about the overuse of tests, the instructional time that those tests devour, and the culture of soulless data-driven instruction that animates today’s brand of school reform.

Yet it’s hard to square their complaints with the actual test they decry, for the MAP is precisely the type of “good” assessment that many educators claim to favor. It’s instructionally useful; it provides instantaneous feedback to teachers and students alike; and it’s not used for high-stakes decisions on issues pertaining to students and schools.

The real reason the Garfield teachers attack the MAP, one must presume, is because it’s a small part of Seattle’s new teacher-evaluation system. (If students show low growth on the

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The Seattle MAP flap

2012 State Teacher Policy Yearbook

yes Daniela Fairchild / January 24, 2013

Spanning a manageable 2,000 pages, this sixth edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ’s) annual teacher-policy yearbook focuses attention on states’ teacher-preparation policies (one of five areas tracked by NCTQ as part of this initiative). And, once again, NCTQ finds them wanting. Across the items investigated (including the rigor of admission requirements in teaching programs, student-teaching expectations, and accountability systems linked to the performance of prep programs’ alumni when they reach the classroom), the U.S. averages a D-plus. Only four states earn respectable marks (still a meager B-minus): Alabama, Florida, Indiana, and Tennessee. Three others (Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming) earn Fs. Looking closely at specific policies is even more depressing: Just three states (Indiana, Minnesota, and Tennessee) require high school teachers to pass content-area tests in their subjects without allowing loopholes (most of which are for math and science teachers). And Texas is the only state that norms its admissions exam to the general college-bound population (all others norm it to the prospective teaching population, setting a lower bar than for other college and university students). Still, NCTQ acknowledges that states are slowly moving in the right direction. In 2007, when the organization began scrutinizing these data, no state held its prep programs accountable for the quality of their graduates; today, eight do. And since 2011, fourteen states (including Ohio) have improved their teacher-preparation policies in some way. Kudos to NCTQ for continuing to spotlight one of

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2012 State Teacher Policy Yearbook

The MET study: implications, winners, and losers

yes Andy Smarick / January 14, 2013

Bill and Melinda Gates funded possibly the most important K–12 research study of this generation. Photo by Kjetil Ree.

The final report from the Gates-funded “Measures of Effective Teaching” project may prove to be the most important K–12 research study of this generation.

Many others have summarized its findings and opined on its various features, so I’ll only do that lightly here, spending more time on its implications. (See here for Amber and Daniela’s very good synthesis and here for the Washington Post story.)

It’s hard to believe that it’s taken this long for our field to undertake a research project of this level of sophistication on arguably the most important and confounding aspect of K–12 practice and policy: educator effectiveness.

The upshot is that we know far more than before about how to assess a teacher’s ability to improve the learning of students in his/her classroom. That means we now have the power to identify—in every state, district, and school—the teachers likeliest to help kids learn. The consequences for policy are profound.

We don’t yet know enough about how to find individuals who will eventually become great educators or how to train people to get there, but at least now we’re not flying blind. Some will argue

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The MET study: implications, winners, and losers