• Create a long-term instructional plan for the school year, considering when standards will be introduced, pre-assessed, and monitored.
• Deconstruct standards so that planning can be explicit and clear for students and develop or identify aligned performance tasks that will be used to measure performance.
• Utilize the scoring rubric to develop task-specific expectations.
• Collect Point A work at the most appropriate time within the instructional plan.
• Score and sort Point A student work artifacts into differentiated groups (emerging, proficient,advanced) based on the scoring rubric, task specific expectations, knowledge of students, and other assessment data such as universal screeners or entry inventories. See the section titled Point A ELA Student Work Artifacts: Collecting, Scoring, and Differentiating Grouping for additional information on the sorting process.
• Differentiate instruction for specific needs and strengths that were identified within the Point A student work artifacts.
• Collect Point B work at the most appropriate time within the instructional plan.
• Score Point B student work artifacts and analyze growth between Point A and Point B student workartifacts.
• Determine which samples within each differentiated group demonstrate the most representativegrowth; this guides the process of purposeful sampling. See the section titled Point B ELA Student Work Artifacts: Collecting, Scoring, and Purposeful Sampling for additional information on purposeful sampling.
• Submit the purposefully sampled student work artifacts into portfolio collections using the online platform prior to the April 15 due date.

I hope you follow those instructions better than I do. In any case, it should not be surprising that the release of scores was delayed from mid-May until late-July, because nothing communicates “drives instruction” like releasing data near the beginning of a new school year. Also not surprising, errors were found within the results. According to the State Education Commissioner this was due to teacher error, as opposed to problems with the system.

According to the state, some teachers mismatched students and standards which led to them receiving 1’s. Why the potential for that to happen wasn’t recognized on the front end and safeguards built-in to account for such occurrences, I’ll never understand. But it seems as much as we worship at the church of critical thinking, we put very little of it into practice. The TNDOE response to complaints leaves a lot to be desired:

If you have a concern with your score, you will need to go through each one of your submissions where you received a 1 on the Educopia site and check on the items that are listed above and below before filing a grievance.

Check:

Check to make sure you have a context form for each student and achievement level for point A and point B that received a score of a 1
Check to make sure that you didn’t have two different standards between point A and point B on each submission and achievement level where you received a 1.
Check to make sure that you didn’t upload two different student work samples for point A and point B for each achievement level where you received a 1 on the submission.
Check to make sure that you didn’t include multiple standards on the context form or included on the context form on submissions where you received a 1.
Check to make sure that you had 3 different individuals for each achievement level for the submission where you received a 1. Make sure duplicate work samples were not submitted.

Review your collections thoroughly to look for any of the items above. If a submission error is found, it does not qualify for a grievance. If you have double checked your submission and did not find a submission error, a grievance form can be submitted. The grievance window has been extended to October 1st.

I am not going to pretend to have a full grasp of any of this process. While I understand that I am not a professional educator, I believe that education policy needs to be written in a manner that can be grasped by parents, and this policy, and subsequent DOE communication, fails that test. I also believe that this process is entirely too labor-intensive. Even though the window to file grievances has been extended to October, is this really where a teacher’s attention needs to be focused at the start of school?

Some have pointed out that this is a trial year and that scores won’t actually count against teachers. That may be true officially, but do you know anybody that would be comfortable under any circumstances with a 1 on their record? Secondly, unofficially those scores are out there and there is nothing to protect teachers from opinions being formed based on those scores.

Business long ago realized that there are only a limited number of hours in the day. That’s why when you go to buy a car, the salesperson is focused solely on the sale. He’s not completing your credit check, or your loan application, nor is he completing the final sale paperwork. The most effective salespeople are focused on only one thing, selling the product. Everything else distracts from the primary objective. Why can’t we provide that same consideration to teachers? Instead of just being allowed to teach, they are continually forced to devote as much time to proving they are teaching as they are actually teaching.

By creating a process where an early elementary teacher has to decipher dense instruction, create artifacts, upload those artifacts, and then review them, after the fact, to ensure that they were uploaded properly, creates a number of distractions. Time wise alone, something has to be sacrificed, and invariably that becomes focus on children. Surely a better process can be created.

TEACHER MENTAL HEALTH

Chances are that if you drove by an MNPS school this past weekend, it was littered with cars. These cars belong to teachers who are sacrificing their own time, uncompensated, in order to get their classrooms ready to receive students. This is due to the district continually failing to provide adequate time to do so. I brought up this issue with several teachers this weekend, and all answered that it was “just part of it,” “it had to get done,” and “what are you going to do?” I had one teacher offer as a compliment to the principal, “Our principal is only unlocking the doors to the school one day. Other principals are opening the building both days.”

Principals need to understand that teachers, despite the best efforts of Betsy DeVos and her ilk, are members of the service sector. They entered the profession to help kids and as such will do just about whatever is necessary to give kids the best opportunities available. Often to their own detriment.

This dedication to service has been exploited for years and continues to grow. Case in point, the proliferation of back-to-school sale fliers directed at teachers. Principals posting social media messages, or even inter building messages, extolling those teachers working long extra hours and sacrificing personal time subconsciously reinforces a culture of sacrifice. Who’s going to even consider refusing to sacrifice when acceptance comes from adherence?

What do you think would happen if, in response to the district failing to schedule adequate classroom prep time, teachers didn’t self-sacrifice and classrooms were unprepared for students upon arrival? I’m willing to bet that ensuing chaos and disruption would lead to a re-evaluation of scheduling the next year, and that provisions would be made. However, teachers refuse to take that step because they always put kids first and are unwilling to take action that could be detrimental to children and so the self-sacrificing expectations continue to grow.

2015 National Teacher of the Year Shanna Peeples has an excellent piece out today, How Your Back-To-School Messages are Hurting Teachers. She points out the following:

There’s tremendous pressure on teachers to be up and on, always positive, always “engaging.” When the issues students bring to school with them accumulate to a degree that they feel too heavy for many teachers, there’s not many places to turn.

This can cause what feels like a constant, low-grade emotionally abusive relationship. Too much of school, in my experience, fosters a dark co-dependency where staff are told that if they just work harder, give up more hours of their lives, tutor more, then students will “achieve.” Achievement, in this regard, of course means higher scores.

It’s an observation that I see play out endlessly. She echoes my thoughts when she points out this:

Often, these messages are delivered from a corporate or business partner who will send in a marketing person to hand out baskets full of old chocolate while using her most dramatic voice to tearfully tell teachers: “You are all candles. You consume yourself so that you can create light for others.” As my friend Justin says, that’s not only completely unsustainable as a metaphor or a policy, but it’s also a literal prescription for burnout.

That’s not a recipe for a healthy culture. A subliminal message is continually sent that you can’t effectively teach without giving a pound of flesh. In other professions, that expectation may exist, but in those cases compensation that offsets the sacrifice is offered. For teachers, the only compensation is the success of their students.

What if, instead of unlocking the school on weekends, the principal made a public announcement highlighting that over the weekend, “Ms. Johnson spent Saturday at her kid’s soccer game, which they won 4 to 3. Ms. Smith joined friends for a wonderful dinner at Husk and then they saw a concert afterwards. Mr. Brown took his family hiking and if anybody needs recommendations on good trails, he’s your guy.” What kind of cultural impact would that have?

Many of you are probably chuckling right now. Nobody has any time for any of that because it doesn’t add to achievement scores. Or does it? Who is going to be more effective as a teacher? The one who is hanging by their last emotional thread because they’ve been working ungodly hours due to a combination of internal and external expectations? Or the one who disconnected for a bit in order to recharge and refresh? Teacher mental health is a real issue and needs to be treated with the same priority as student growth scores because the two are intertwined.

I think everyone needs to heed Peeple’s concluding message:

Education critics act as though there is an unending supply of people standing outside their administrative offices waiting to apply for teaching jobs. This self-serving fantasy is giving way to real numbers of teachers retiring and those who are refusing to go into teaching in the first place.

Much like the #MeToo movement forced the culture to see the reality of sexual harassment, teacher walkouts and teacher attrition will finally make us all see the reality of the emotional labor and abuse we’ve heaped upon our teachers for too long.

And no amount of discount door prizes at meetings, banal speakers, or slides dripping with edu-guilt and edu-shame will make that go away.