Laid off teachers in Chicago surprised by "secret" rating method. New Teacher Project involved.

[madfloridian]

It seems Chicago's laid off teachers were told to apply online instead of with individual schools. It was said to be more efficient that way.

About half of the teachers have had their applications marked "not recommended" or "recommended with reservation", and they had no idea why.

More from the Chicago Public Radio site.

Some laid-off teachers applying for jobs in Chicago Public Schools have complained they can’t get hired. Maybe a secret rating system has something to do with it.

PRICE: Just recently on Monday, I went for an interview at a school, and the principal was going to the online application. When she pulled it down, she said, “Mmm. Something’s wrong.’ She said, ‘Williette, I need to let you see this.’ On my application—online application— there was ‘not recommended.’”

That designation was put there by a teacher Price doesn’t know, who’s never seen her teach or looked at how well any of her students has done in the past.

Chicago Public Schools says it’s using 30 reviewers—all top-notch, National Board Certified teachers—to look over its online teacher applications. They’ve so far reviewed 4,000 applications and added a designation to each one. Winckler said reviewers are trained and are using a rubric developed several years ago by CPS and The New Teacher Project. That’s a national group dedicated to getting high quality teachers into needy schools.

The New Teacher Project? Let's talk about that a minute. That's the group that was founded by Michelle Rhee.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a United States non-profit organization founded by Michelle Rhee.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a national nonprofit dedicated to closing the achievement gap by ensuring that high-need students get outstanding teachers. Founded by teachers in 1997, TNTP partners with school districts and states to implement scalable responses to their most acute teacher quality challenges. Since its inception, TNTP has trained or hired approximately 37,000 teachers, benefiting an estimated 5.9 million students nationwide. It has established more than 75 programs and initiatives in 31 states and published four seminal studies on urban teacher hiring and school staffing.

NYC has paid that group a lot of money to recruit teachers for them...while all the while they were laying off experienced teachers. From earlier this year:

The city may lay off 8,500 teachers, but education officials still want approval for a contract of up to $5 million a year to recruit even more teachers.

The agency's Panel for Educational Policy will vote later this month on the hefty contract, but already critics are questioning the need to spend money to recruit during a time of layoffs.

"We should put a freeze on any spending related to new hiring. We should not even be going through the expense of negotiating a contract now," said Patrick Sullivan, the panel's Manhattan representative.

Since 2000, the New Teacher Project has contracted with the city to recruit New York City Teaching Fellows. For this school year, the group received $2.8 million for recruiting 705 teachers.

Just imagine! A city can hire teachers for free by interviews at the local level. It boggles my mind how they get away with paying groups like New Teacher Project or Teach for America such huge amounts to hire teachers.

Now we find out this group had developed a method in which teachers are able to rate other teachers, yet the other teachers don't know who is doing it.

The Chicago Public Schools tried to explain the new rating that was catching teachers and their union unaware.

CPS Explains Secret Teacher Rating System

Chicago Public Schools started a new online application system for teaching jobs this year… in the past teachers have applied to individual schools. CPS says that’s inefficient, and it often leaves principals in the poorest neighborhoods with few candidates to choose from.

But teachers applying in the online system say they had NO IDEA they would be graded based on the online application. That application asks for basic information about education and experience, and poses four open-ended questions about teaching.

The district paid 30 of its best teachers to review 4,000 applications in their off hours. Ten percent of the applications received the lowest grade—"Not Recommended." Some receiving that designation have taught in CPS for years but were laid off this summer in budget cuts.

Here is a comment after the last article by one of the "evaluators" supposedly. Sounds like there has been a lot of game-playing going on by officials of the CPS.

Saturday, September 25, 2010 @ 5:57 PM

I was one of the evaluators. The records we accessed included the following: 1) Resume. 2) Answers to 4 application questions: a) Why are you interested in urban education and/or Chicago Public Schools? b) Please describe a lesson you have taught or observed that was extremely successful. How was student achievement measured? Please be as specific as possible. c) Describe a time when you were not successful in the classroom or at another job. What went wrong? How would you approach the situation differently next time? d) Describe your experience working with students with special needs. Please provide a specific example where you differentiated your instruction. CPS informed us we would be evaluating *new* teacher candidates and that our evaluation was intended to assist principals in identifying promising candidates from a huge pool of applicants. We had no idea these preliminary ratings would be utilized after teachers were interviewed and offered jobs. That is a completely inappropriate use of these most basic ratings. The process reminds me a bit of the high stakes testing that takes place in schools right now: no one really knows what will be on the exam, but we're supposed to prepare for it anyway. The rubrics we used to evaluate candidates were not made available to the applicants. That also is inappropriate. These candidates should have been informed of how they would be evaluated, but they were not. The intent of these evaluations is reasonable: help principals prioritize when confronted with a massive quantity of applications. That process would have taken place one way or another. But, as is often the case in CPS, the implementation and real world application of that strategy was twisted and manipulated and the Board failed to be honest and up front with both the evaluators and the candidates. I feel duped.

I can guarantee to that evaluator that teachers who have taught for years, then laid off, then find out a secret method has found them "not recommended".....are feeling "duped" big time as well.

Some extra special teacher that never even saw them teach, never came into their classroom....just pronounced judgment on them from on high.

These underhanded tactics are being allowed to occur and grow because of the new atmosphere formed nationally toward public school teachers by the guy who started all the reforms in Chicago...Arne Duncan.

[chimpymustgo]

1. Teachers must be evaluated. Some teachers should be fired. But everyone should know why and how

decisions are made.

[woo me with science]

4. +1 nt

[madfloridian]

8. Teachers ARE evaluated.

[chimpymustgo]

25. I know...and they should. But the process should be transparent, with defined

standards and expectations and feedback.

[WinkyDink]

119. They are extant, as well. THEY ARE JUST NEVER DISCUSSED, BECAUSE THAT WOULD MEAN CRITICIZING BOSSES.

[emsimon33]

13. That's not the issue here

The issue is that CPS is using unproven methods to deny long-time teachers reinstatement. It reminds me of Gallup's Teacher Insight survey that has no relevance to whether a person will be a successful teacher or not but which is being adopted as a screening method throughout the country.

[msanthrope]

71. How are essay questions an 'unproven method?' n/t

[dotymed]

59. IMO, The individuals

who set the curriculum need to be evaluated much more stringently than the teachers. "Texas" sets the standards and now our children will (shortly) be taught how much better Christianity is than Islam.
Of course, the crusades and even the Holocaust will no longer be taught.
Ours has become a country that Orwell seemingly wrote the blueprint for, even though his only intent was to warn through fiction.
America is becoming more Fascist and more of a police state daily.
People applying for jobs must have satisfactory credit ratings?
That is just like a bank...you can't borrow money unless you prove that you don't need it.
If we do not stand up immediately against this bastardization of America, mostly by the wealthy, carried out by the American Taliban, then we don't stand a chance.

[msanthrope]

67. How did they not know?

Did they read the questions on their job application?

Were they unable to figure out these were important questions?

Unable to recognize them, from their content, for what they are?

I'd like to see the answers of the bottom 10%. I suspect that it would reveal quite a few who answered not at all, or so poorly that their basic teaching skills were called into question.

[Me.]

2. Frankly It Sounds Like A Money Grab & A Con To Me

[Angry Dragon]

3. duncan learned what made great teachers by playing basketball

who knew sports was so important to the education system, maybe that is why they are paid so much

[dkf]

5. It's a teaching job application for goodness sakes!

Of course it makes a difference. Shouldn't it?

And the indignation over secret grading methods is hilarious since that's what teachers always do for essays. +1 here blah blah blah.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. What secret grading methods?

Teachers use rubrics and scoring guides and they are shared with the students BEFORE they complete the assignment. Many are mandated by state deses.

The application should count but it shouldn't be the only criteria. Sounds like it is in Chicago. If these are experienced teachers, why are their previous evaluations not being considered? They are far more relevant than an application.

[dkf]

10. Are you kidding me? Guidelines are shared with students?

I don't ever remember getting guidelines on an essay exam much less guidelines for a job application.

Some employers use psychological testing to screen applicants while they look up your facebook account and your credit scores. Tell me if that is more relevant than application questions asking about actual teaching practices.

Are you guys for real?

[proud2BlibKansan]

15. Of course they are

How long has it been since you were in school?? I've been teaching 3+ decades and this has been common practice as long as I can remember.

I would also hope that employers using psych testing to screen applicants would use actual trained psychologists to do the screening, instead of TFA interns, as Chicago is doing.

[dkf]

34. I went to college about 20 years ago.

Honestly I don't remember having guidelines other than "you will be tested on your grasp of the concepts" or some other vague description of a grading standard.

[proud2BlibKansan]

39. When you were assigned a term paper,

you weren't given a scoring guide? What the paper should cover? How long it should be? Single or double spaced? Pages numbered or not? Title page? How you were to cite your sources?

That's a scoring guide.

[laughingliberal]

47. I got those in relation to my assignments. Sometimes even what % of the grade each criteria...

would count for.

[MineralMan]

55. When I graded Freshman level college term papers, all of that stuff was known to the

students. Those things were check-offs. The actual grade, however, was based on things that were more intangible. If you were a student who couldn't even get the format right, you were bound to fail on content and delivery, anyhow. Given that the non-writing stuff was right, the paper was judged by the writing. The goal was always to improve the quality of that writing, not how the stupid paper looked. For me that stuff was worth about 10% of the grade. The rest was based on content, and my markings dealt with how to improve that the next time.

[proud2BlibKansan]

57. A check off is the same thing as a scoring guide

I don't call student papers "stupid". I was usually quite proud of mine, especially the way they looked. And with computers today, there is no excuse for turning in a paper that doesn't look professional. The content is important and good teachers let the students know before they begin the assignment how much the content counts toward the grade. So that would be included in the scoring guide. Also, most scoring guides are in the course syllabus. That's how all my good college teachers handled it.

[Recursion]

121. Seriously?

I graduated from high school in the mid-90s. Never in my life was I given a scoring guide for an essay. We were told an approximate word count to shoot for and the topic. Grades were more or less mysteriously assigned, though more red marks generally correlated with a lower grade (though not always).

[Jakes Progress]

50. I don't want to "get into" anything here

but I think that you used the term "I don't remember" twice in the thread is probably the way if is for most of those who sort of have a feeling that schools are terrible and teachers are bad. We all have vague memories of institutions that we were in contact with long ago. It makes if easy for the people who churn out propaganda to build on those and add in their lies. So if someone had a bad time with a teacher or with a school, it is easy to play on that and use that memory to expand the feeling into a whole system. And there are people who spend money and time developing those stories and "fleshing out" those memories. They have a lot to lose and a whole lot more to make when the public is convinced that teachers need to be fired.

If you asked me for a general feeling about the military, I would be the same way. It was decades ago that I had any personal experience there. I have no idea what really goes on and how it really works. Truth is that I only had a small, very personal view back then.

But here we have people like MadF and Proud and Hanna who know what it is like from decades of being there. They've got nothing to gain by lying. No one could think that they want children to suffer.

Education is a very complicated business. I worked at the trade and left to try the arts and business. I did well at both, but came back to teaching because of that complexity, the fascinating interplay of ideas and people. What is being done now is an attempt to simplify education, reduce it to numbers on a test of a severely narrowed curriculum. The people who want to do this will make billions. They want thinking teachers gone. They want drones who can follow a script and pass out the work sheets. They want compliant workers. Hence, the need to do away with tenure and experience.

Now it is likely that you didn't have any guidelines from your teacher. My students wrote papers based on a rubric that we developed from analyzing best examples of a type of writing. We spent most of the class time going over what made one piece of writing more successful than another and practicing those things. The papers were the end result. Toward the end of my career, students got to write me a post script to each paper telling me how they thought they had met the rubric. i taught in public schools. I was not unique in my practices.

[sabrina 1]

95. Excellent post, thank you ~

[madfloridian]

96. Very good post.

Made me feel better.

:hi:

[readmoreoften]

90. Well, it ain't that way these days. Rubrics and syllabi are quasi-legal contracts.

In fact, to the point of stupidity.

[woo me with science]

30. Our kids do get guidelines for how essays will be scored.

So many points for organization, so many points for grammar and spelling, so many points for supporting evidence, etc.

They have detailed rubrics for many assignments. I noticed an oral presentation rubric that had a specific numbers of points assigned for making eye contact with the audience, being animated, and speaking loudly enough to be heard.

[riderinthestorm]

32. Heh, jinxed ya. We posted at virtually the same time.

:toast:

I'm guessing you from the teacher side, and me from the parent side....

[woo me with science]

36. Actually from the same side. :)

I was talking about kids in our family, too.

[dkf]

37. Hey so my entire education was unfair!

I wonder how many teachers got marked down for spelling and grammar and if they did is that considered relevant to teachers or not.

[Name removed]

42. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[dkf]

73. Whatever...

[Diane R]

85. Why insult someone just because they disagree? Why not evaluate teachers before they're hired?

[woo me with science]

43. I don't think I said that.

I was just responding to your apparent doubt that kids today do receive guidelines for how their compositions will be graded.

I personally think essay questions could be a marvelous component of teacher evaluation/screening, for the reasons MineralMan alludes to below.

But I also feel strongly that existing teachers should have a right to be told why they were deemed ineffective.

[reggie the dog]

107. as a history teacher i dont grade down for spelling or grammar

when it is handwritten work, but if it is typed i take off presentation points and write "at least pass this through spell check before printing it off"

[riderinthestorm]

31. I have kids still in school and yes, they do get guidelines on how they will be graded

For her recent essay exam in her government and civics class for example,, my 8th grader knew that she had to have a 2 paragraph answer (and from her Language Arts class she already knows a para has to contain at least 5 sentences) containing 5 facts, complete sentences, correct punctuation and spelling.

Most job applicants "know" their resume should be 1 page, and their cover letter 3 paragraphs with certain specific information.

The teacher application however, looks a whole lot like a subjective college application essay which is way too easy to be judged by completely subjective criteria; a cynical evaluator isn't going to appreciate the schmaltzy "success" story for example. A literal thinking evaluator isn't going to be persuaded by the teacher who felt they "failed" the high school drop out (who later comes back after dropping back in, thanking them for "never giving up on them and encouraging them to come back anytime"). Can the exquisite math teacher articulate his vision on paper nearly as well as they do in class? I mean, what's the correct answer? It surely isn't 2 paragraphs with 5 facts, complete sentences, correct punctuation and spelling (although that may be part of it).

You don't see any problem with the teacher application?

[MineralMan]

38. Well, those essay questions on that application are serving

as a screening mechanism. In an interview, you are also asked open-ended questions, and are judged on your answers. There are always subjective assessments made in the employment process.

As I said below, it would be useful to do a blind review of how the decisions were made on these questions. A separate panel could look at a random sampling of the applications and make their own assessments. Then, a comparison could be made of the results. If the second panel made the same recommendations, then the process probably was fair.

I do not know of a way to select a set of employees from a larger group of applicants without a screening process. It's an essential step in the process if actual people are going to be hired.

I read the questions. They seemed like a good set of questions for such a screening. Poor responses to that set of questions should be a decent way to make an initial screening decision and eliminate the worst set of the applicants. The remaining applicants, no doubt, got personal interviews, where additional questions and answers can be evaluated.

Is teaching somehow different in that regard than other type of employment? I don't think so.

[riderinthestorm]

45. As an employer, I understand a weeding out process for applicants

I completely get that, but for a government agency, that theoretically has to have some kind of objective standards in hiring, there doesn't appear to be any kind of objective critique of how one would be judged in order to get an interview.

What percent was content graded, or punctuation, or emotion, or length (or brevity)? Did they measure the math teacher applicants written essays in the same way they did the composition/reading teachers? Did the gym teachers get evaluated the same way the special ed teachers were evaluated? And would that be fair?

I guess what sticks in my craw is the "secret" nature of it. Like you I'd love to see a blind review of how the decisions were made. Like you I also bet I can guess who got the "recommended", and who got the "not recommended" evaluations but for now it looks as though cronyism or prejudice or differences of opinion or methodology conflicts or (insert your quibble here with the applicant) could have played a part in whether one got the interview. I really hate seeing anyone with that much experience get thrown over - it smells like they are trying to eliminate the higher paying (cough - older more expensive) teachers.

[MineralMan]

52. I don't see any particular evidence that such cronyism was involved.

As for methodology, that's a valid area of evaluation, I think. As for the actual metrics of the evaluation, I don't see that it matters all that much. It's a job application. I've never encountered an application process that told applicants how they'd be judged. That's up to the people doing the hiring. If methodology was one of the issues, then that's a valid consideration. If one of the metrics was that the essay had to be correctly spelled and punctuated, then that's a valid consideration. I can't even imagine a teacher who couldn't write a brief essay with incorrect grammar or punctuation. Anything can be used in an evaluation, and the applicant isn't necessarily entitled to know those criteria.

You make the application. You give the answers your best shot. You present yourself. It's the same thing as having an interview. You show up, you answer the questions the interviewer asks you in the best way you can. What you do is evaluated. They don't tell you what answers they want, or everyone would give the same answers. They want to assess you, based on whatever criteria they deem important.

I don't see why a school should be any different from any other employer in that regard. Time in service isn't really the issue. Competence and compatibility with goals do seem to be the issue in this case. A resume and screening questions seems a valid way to do initial weeding.

As you say, you also think you could predict who passed and who failed by looking at these applications. I'm sure your could, just as I'm sure I could. You'd probably make the same choices they did. There it is. The difference is that they're doing the hiring and you're not.

[msanthrope]

64. What floors me is the idea that this was somehow "secret."

To whom?

Were there teachers who read those questions and didn't understand what they were?

I would not hire anyone who could not read those questions and figure out that they were important...in fact, I'll bet that lots of the bottom 10% simply didn't answer those questions, or otherwise gave answers that showed their indifference to them.

[caliform]

132. I think you last sentence identifies the problem

"Is teaching somehow different in that regard than other types of employment? I don't think so."


I have been reading publications like Education Weekly and voting (in favor of) education bonds for about 25 years now. Teachers unions have worked hard to establish a separate culture for recruiting, compensating, correcting and laying off teachers. With budget cuts and agitation for reform - the protected status teachers have carved out for themselves is under attack. It's gotta feel horrible - I'll grant them that up front. I think they perceive it as axe chops to the root of education itself.

In the linked article, the head of the teacher's union says (paraphrasing) "We were never ever consulted about this." The sense of betrayal is marked - note the 'never ever' earnestness. She sees something deeply cruel in the use of the screening tools and is aghast that it ever happened. In the past, teachers have always been able to set the rules for how they were evaluated. If it was a written test, then 'a written test can not evaluate a teacher correctly!' If it was an oral exam, then 'an oral exam in an inappropriate measure!' In class observation, then 'it was only one class period! what can you tell from that!' This type of control over how an employee is evaluated is unknown in businesses outside of union shops. I just had to pass an application screening, oral exam, and written exam to earn the right to an interview - and they still are not required to ever see me. I had no say in this process but then, I never had it in the first place so I was not shocked. That's where the pain is, I believe, in this issue for teachers. Throughout the material in this thread and at the link - time served appears to be the primary measure that teachers expect to be evaluated on. In my employment history - time served means nothing (I and my colleagues were laid off after 20 plus years of provable success. If I had worked for 20 years believing that time served would always be honored and then suddenly, it evaporated - well that would be a shock.
Usually, when a new means of proposed teacher evaluation is proposed - teachers can defeat it or alter it to become somethign acceptable to them. Much is made, in this thread, about 'top teachers' evaluating others. Some posters want to know the qualifications of those teachers and say it is key to determining if the evaluations were fair. I submit that it is key to them dismantling any effort to screen teachers by methods they did not originate themselves. Once again - in my world I never had the opportunity to know deep information about how I was screened for employment. The article states that the teacher evaluators were given a rubric and trained how to use it. I expect any functioning teacher to be able to apply a rubric, given training, to job applications. What is really missing here is the rubric developed by CPS. If teachers could get that information, I believe they would dismantle screening one again by stating that the rubric doesn't adequately evaluate the teaching profession.
Some say the essay questions have no reflection on teaching ability. This is the start of the dismantling process. But a teacher is called upon to present materials to the public (conferences, panels, parents, community activities) so I believe it is fair to expect that someone seeking employment can perform a task like that.
The article says that 10% if 4000 applicants received a 'not recommended' rating. That seems fair - how severe could the rubric be if that many received a variation of recommended?. I had to be one of the top ten (not percent) candidates, once my application review-oral exam- and written exam scores were totaled, just to get a chance at an interview. Do I like this? No. Is it real life?
Yes. What the teachers are losing is real and valuable in the job satisfaction realm. I took an HR class that identified a key driver of job satisfaction as 'control over what happens to you'. For teachers to lose this control is a major hit to key job satisfaction to their life's chosen profession. I think transition and coaching to adopt and modify the existant culture would have helped. But the unions, once alerted to impending changes, would have halted such cultural changes. So teachers wake up one morning and feel kicked in the face for no reason.
I read up on Chicago schools after reading this thread and found that the teacher's unions are meeting mid Oct. to reject broad measures meant to bring about reform (take control of schools away from mayor, reject Race To The Top, and others). This is an attempt to preserve job satisfaction and a nurturing culture they adopted when they entered the profession. However - their goals are sweeping indeed and they do not propose alternative 'reforms' to satisfy the pressure for change felt by the non-teaching community (IMHO). I don't know how the cultural battle will turn out. It looks like reforms are being dive bombed into public schools to evade the status quo effects of the unions. It seems unfair that we are down to chooing reforms or teacher trauma. :(

[dkf]

41. I don't see any problem that is worse than any other job application or process.

I went through 4 job interviews to get my job. I have no idea what each person wanted or how subjective they were. I don't know what they screened for when they saw my letter or resume.

[woo me with science]

48. I think screening a new applicant is different than firing somebody.

Yes, you can screen out anyone you want.

These teachers had already been fired and were going through a rehiring process, so I suppose you could argue that the district has a right to screen them any way it wants.

However, others will argue with some persuasiveness that these are not new applicants, and that any determination of "ineffectiveness" should have taken place before the firing and been transparent to the teachers who were being dismissed.

[Diane R]

86. Maybe they were fired BECAUSE they were ineffective.

[woo me with science]

89. Yeah, but then why rehire a bunch of them, if they were truly fired for being ineffective?

It was a mass firing of a bunch of teachers, and then they have to reapply to get their jobs back, right? Only some will be rehired, upon renewed determination that they can be effective. That is my understanding of the situation (please correct me if I'm wrong). So it sounds like there was a decision made to clean sweep both effective AND ineffective teachers and then rehire the effective ones, rather than firing only the ineffective ones from the start.

Why? Why not just fire the ineffective ones?

Those on one side will probably say it was a deliberate attack on ALL teachers to stigmatize them and the current system.

Those on the other side will probably wonder why the clean sweep was felt to be necessary. Is it possible that there was no realistic, rapid, and effective process in place to do it the other way? Too many bad teachers that needed to go and no efficient system to do it? I have no idea - I am guessing. I also don't know what percentage will be rehired.

I don't know enough about this to come down definitively on either side, but I am sure the whole process was traumatic for both good and bad teachers. I hate to see good teachers go through that. And I would hope that those who were fired permanently were given some feedback as to why.

In a healthy and functioning system, only the bad ones would be fired, and the determination of ineffectiveness would occur prior to firing, not afterward.

I don't doubt that there may be an explanation, but I haven't heard a clear explanation from those who did this as to why it was the best or the necessary way to weed out the ineffective.

[boppers]

105. When you have to do a headcount cut, contracts that figure in seniority alter the issue.

On the extreme end, junior teachers are fired, regardless of their effectiveness, while senior teachers are kept, regardless of their effectiveness.

When you hear people complaining about "tenure", they often aren't actually talking about tenure per se, they're talking about rules that favor, or factor in, seniority when considering who to let go, and how it's done.

[sabrina 1]

97. Well, we don't know, you don't know, and that's the problem, isn't it?

[LWolf]

61. I'm for real.

My students know exactly how they will be scored on any writing assignment. They have opportunities to check in with me during the writing process. They also have an opportunity to go over those scores with me after they get the paper back.

[msanthrope]

68. "The application should count but it shouldn't be the only criteria."

Why not?

The prospective employer gets to set the standards.

As an initial screening, why shouldn't they use this method?

[sabrina 1]

99. Are you serious?

You don't know much about the teaching profession, do you?

[msanthrope]

126. Quite. n/t

[reggie the dog]

108. it is not an initial screening

teachers who had worked and had been evaluated in the jobs by their principals and their peers yet laid off for budget reasons and who were trying to get re hired for last minute openings should not have the same initial screening proceess that people who had never worked for the CPS have as they are not new to the CPS.....the prior evaluations are what should be important when you are talking about rehiring as opposed to hiring in which the essay questions i guess can be used but for all the teaching jobs i have got myself here in france there were interviews and never essays.

[msanthrope]

125. Why should fired teachers be given priority? n/t

[reggie the dog]

134. they were laid off, not fired

being fired is when you lose your job due to performance, being laid off is losing your job due to economic conditions

[madfloridian]

7. You think they should be graded by secret methods developed by

companies that get paid to recruit teachers?

[Rex]

9. Yeah...wait no, what a horrible idea. Why not just let corporations teach

children in public schools! I'm sure WalMart would JUMP at that idea!

1 satisfied customer + 3 angry customers = 0 management concern.

[msanthrope]

65. How was this secret?

Seriously--how was this secret?

Did the teachers read the questions, answer them? They weren't 'secret questions' were they?

Were they unable to figure out that questions on a job application were important?

What I can't understand is how any person reading those questions couldn't figure out that they were important--

[Radical Activist]

69. So secret that it's in the newspaper.

Nobody reads newspapers.

[msanthrope]

72. So double-secret they used their own employees for the evaluations. n/t

[dsc]

74. It is one thing to think they were important

it is quite another to think they were dispositive. Apparently they were dispositive in that if one's answers were considered substandard a substandard rating was given to the teacher. I also have a problem with them having used teachers in the district for this without, apparently, telling those teachers just what the ratings were being used for. Finally, I don't see any evidence that, presuming they used good teachers to grade these, those teachers actually were competent at grading those questions.

[msanthrope]

76. Why should these prospective employees be treated specially?

When you go apply for a job, are you told how the employer will score your resume, or application?

When you apply for a job, are you normally allowed to inquire if the person interviewing you, or scoring your application is competent?

When you apply for a job, are you told which questions are more important?

Why should teachers get special consideration?


And I understand WHY the district didn't tell the grading teachers what the rating were being used for--that might have affected objectivity.

[dsc]

79. Pardon me for thinking the school should be trying to get good teachers

I think that you should have people who are experts at staffing schools not necessarily 'good teachers' decide how to staff the school. Using four questions and apparently nothing else, having them graded by people who both aren't told why they are grading them and who we have no idea about any qualifications they might have, or any axes they might have to grind, is problematic. I think a far better idea would have been to have the teachers answer the questions and then pass the answers on to the principals without comment.

[msanthrope]

81. How do you know they didn't? n/t

[dsc]

82. because the article says the principal interviewing a candidate

showed the rating to the candidate. Presumedly she or he couldn't have shown what wasn't shown to him or her. Thus the questions were not forwarded without comment.

[msanthrope]

83. No, how do you know they didn't hire good teachers? n/t

[dsc]

84. I have no idea if they did or if they didn't

nor do I really care (here I mean the people they hired to grade the essays). They need to hire good evaulators of other teachers and just because one is a good teacher doesn't make one a good evaluator. I am not saying they wouldn't be but they wouldn't necessarily be. I would think a good principal or ap would be a better evaluator than a good teacher.

[reggie the dog]

110. because they already worked for the cps and were already

evlauated by principals and division heads within the cps and should be considered for re hire based on their previous work with the district

[reggie the dog]

109. what was secret is that they were not told of this new ranking

system seeing as that they were REHIRES whom had already been evlauated in the positions by the same CPS that was re hiring them.

[reggie the dog]

106. What class was that in?

as a history and sociology teacher i hand the kids out the rubric that i use to evaluate their essays and if they can argue that they deserve more points in a certain category than i have given them and they are able to cite examples in the graded copy that i missed i will raise their grades. You cannot expect kids to give quality written work if they do not understand how they are being graded.

[MineralMan]

11. It looks like much hung on those four questions, which required

essay-type answers. It would be interesting to look at a cross-section of the answers to those questions from candidates who were recommended and those not recommended. Those could be released publicly without the names of the persons giving the answers attached. That would give people a chance to see something about the process and to look at what might have been the reason for the decisions.

Resumes are fairly simple to judge. The answers to those four questions are another matter. Yup...I'd like to be able to look at some of those answers. I'll bet I could predict which sets of answers belonged to those who were recommended and which were not with a very high degree of accuracy.

It might not be as much of a secret as it looks like. In fact, it might just be obvious to anyone.

[madfloridian]

16. These are experienced teachers, laid off...they have a classroom background

and evaluations to go by.

They should NOT be judged by a secret panel of teachers chosen secretly.

I see no reason to defend this, but then they are in the eyes of many at DU now....only teachers after all.

And just any old thing is okay to do to teachers.

[MineralMan]

20. I'd still like to see a sampling of the answers. It would be

instructive, I'm sure. If I made an application that included four essay questions, I'd figure my answers were going to be used as part of the decision process. That's not secret.

And before you go after me for having no experience, I taught Freshman comp classes at a University for a year while in graduate school. Lots of essay grading involved with that process. I helped many, many students become better writers, especially non-English majors.

Again, I'd like to see samples of these answers, and I'll bet I'd be over 90% accurate in predicting whether the person who wrote them was recommended or not. I'll bet you'd be just as accurate at it. I like essay questions. They tell you a lot about the thinking process of the person answering them, along with their language and communications skills. In this case, the questions seem likely to reveal something about how that teacher practices his or her profession.

There are always some teachers who, despite their experience and "evaluations," are not very good at what they do. Some.

[madfloridian]

21. You seem to think 4 answers are all that is needed to judge a teacher.

Which I find very hard to understand.

[MineralMan]

22. No, I don't think that at all. I think, however, that when there are more

applicants than positions available, screening techniques can be useful in selecting those who will proceed to the interview stage. Most places of employment use such techniques. In this case, the four questions, along with the resume were the screening process. Anyone who made that application should have realized that and done the very best job possible in answering those questions. Why were they asked, after all?

For example, let's say you were reviewing the application of someone who had been teaching for ten years, had good evaluations, but who couldn't provide a coherent answer to those questions. If it were me, I'd have to wonder about the quality of that experience and the correctness of those evaluations. If I had another candidate with the same experience and evaluations, but who provided good answers to the questions, I believe I'd eliminate the first candidate if I had only one position to fill.

Weeding. It happens in all situations where there are more candidates than positions.

[madfloridian]

23. They are paying private companies to recruit new teachers...

to replace those laid off. Cheaper teachers.

[MineralMan]

26. Well, I don't like that idea much. Are the laid off teachers allowed

to apply? In any case, where there are more teacher candidates than positions, some sort of screening process is bound to be used.

I don't like the idea of hiring cheaper teachers to replace existing ones. That's a different issue than the screening methods being used. I was only addressing the screening, and even then I was suggesting that someone do a blind review of the questions and answers of a sampling of successful and unsuccessful applicants to see if the reasons for the selections were pretty obvious. I suspect they were fairly obvious.

[reggie the dog]

112. yes, the laid off teachers are the ones pissed off about this

essay question evaluation being used instead of their on the job evaluations, an essay question is good to see how you would do something in theory a classroom observation is a good way to evaluated the practice, teaching to a classroom in which only 40 to 50 percent of students want to graduate is quite different from teaching a classroom in which 99 percent or more want to graduate. Your abilty to handle the classroom is much more important where half of the kids want to graduate, it comes easily when all the kids want to graduate so there should be a lot of difference in the essay answers depending on where the teachers worked.

[woo me with science]

24. +10000

I bet you're absolutely right.

[MineralMan]

29. Well, it would be worth a review, anyhow. I'll bet I'm right, too,

but there's no way to know that without actually checking. I'm surprised I'm being attacked over this. More positions than applicants, so there is screening. It can be done on paper or online as a first step to thin down the number being interviewed, where more judgments will be made. Applying for any job means you will be judged, based on things like this.

[msanthrope]

66. I'm not surprised you are being attacked---sensible posts that note

that teachers are being treated like other professionals tend not to be handled well.

[eridani]

77. Yes, we must do that. Engineers send back raw materials that do't meet their specs

Let's let teachers send the raw material that doesn't meet their specs back to their parents.

[madfloridian]

87. Great idea. But will never happen.

:hi:

[woo me with science]

92. All kids can make progress.

It is insulting to refer to certain kids as raw material that doesn't meet specifications. Even severely challenged kids can learn. Teaching quality matters for all kids, not just the advantaged ones.

People keep making the false suggestion that reformers want to compare the scores of advantaged to disadvantaged kids and penalize the teachers of the latter group because their scores are lower. That's false and something of a smokescreen. Most of the reform systems I have seen being considered measure students' *progress* over the course of the school year relative to themselves.

I don't think anyone is claiming that teachers should be able to take a class of severely environmentally challenged kids who have never held books in their hands and immediately get them to compete in absolute scores with the kids whose parents read to them every night. A good teacher SHOULD be able to help those students make progress relative to where they began.

[eridani]

102. The insult is directly derived from the assumption that teachers should be evaluated

--like engineers. Reductio ad absurdum, etc.

[woo me with science]

104. Who said they should be evaluated like engineers?

They should be evaluated as teachers.

[reggie the dog]

114. kids who come to school to sell drugs and gang bang

are examples of raw material that is not up to specifications, kids who dont want to graduate and just come to set up drug deals and fight other gangsters are just the type of kids that need to be pulled out of the general population.

[reggie the dog]

113. so if a company lays you off they would not evaluate you

on what you had done while you worked for them but instead evalutate you based on your answers to essay questions??? why do you need to screen re hires if they were already evaluated??? why not just re hire based on past performance?

[sabrina 1]

98. Thinking processes used for writing an essay have little to do

with what makes a good teacher. Brilliant mathematicians and authors while excelling at their own professions, do not necessarily make good candidates for the teaching profession.

This isn't a game. Do you know what makes a good teacher? I see nothing in those questions that would tell me anything about what kind of teacher the respondent might be. Especially without ever having met that person. This is so amateur, so unprofessional, it's hard to find words to express the disgust I feel towards what is happening to this country's schools.

What a travesty this whole war on teachers and the Public Schools has become. Hopefully it will not take ten years to see the harm it will and is doing before it is stopped. But as long as there are millions of dollars to be made, the predators, like Duncan et al, will be there trying to get their hands on it and the only recourse will probably be home-schooling for many concerned parents. In fact, maybe that will be the future of education. Certainly the Bush/Duncan 'system' will not produce educated students.

I do know teachers who have left the profession but are working privately with home-schooling groups. And those students are doing beautifully. I feel for the children who are the victims of these practices and for the future of this country when this is considered a professional method of hiring professionals to teach in our schools.

[xchrom]

12. Recommend

[Name removed]

14. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MineralMan]

18. Hmm. that seems quite a bit over the top, there....

[Dappleganger]

17. This is nothing short of shameful!

:mad:

[Starry Messenger]

19. k & r

[Bozita]

27. K&R - outfuckingrageous!

[foxfeet]

28. K&R

[sulphurdunn]

33. Who picks the reviewers?

The district paid 30 of its best teachers (all top-notch, National Board Certified teachers) to review 4,000 applications in their off hours.

I should have known that sooner or later national board certification would be put to a bad use and that some of these "best teachers" would lend themselves to it.

[MineralMan]

35. Sounds like the answer to your question is in your post.

The district picked the reviewers. Maybe they are some of its best teachers. Do you know, somehow, that they are not?

Also, 4000 applications for how many positions?

[Hannah Bell]

40. the whole district picked them? & how did the district know they were "the best"?

being as they're instituting the secret rating system which purports to determine who "the best" are.

[Bozita]

44. That's a secret too! ... Don'tcha love the transparency?

[MineralMan]

49. Not being there and not being involved with that, I cannot

answer your question. Are you directly involved with this process in Chicago? If not, you do not know the answers either.

I assume that most school districts can identify the best teachers, with the help of local school administrators. Generally, those teachers stand out from the rest pretty clearly. If that's who was chosen, then I suppose they probably picked pretty well. But I don't know who was chosen to do these reviews or what method was used, and I suspect you do not either.

Every employment situation requires that evaluations be made of the applicants, using some method or another. There are always more applicants than positions. Some will get the jobs and some won't. How do you suggest that process proceed?

There's no secret system here. There is a resume and a series of questions that are answered by the applicants in essay form. These are evaluated and recommendations are made by the evaluators. According to the OP, the decisions are still made by the district, as they would be in every hiring situation. What is secret about that? It sounds like every process for getting hired I've ever heard of. In some cases, some sort of test is given. In others, applicants are evaluated by the HR department through interviews or some other process. In all of those cases, there are probably mistakes made and the wrong applicants are hired. But, in all those cases, some sort of evaluation process is required to choose the number of people being hired from a larger group.

Now, if you were presented with an application for employment that included four essay questions, would you not expect that those questions were part of the selection process? Would you not make your best effort to answer them in a way that demonstrated your professionalism? I assume that every applicant did their very best to answer those questions. Other people read them and assessed those answers. It's the same process as having the same questions asked by an interviewer. You are evaluated based on your answers, and evaluated by whatever criteria the employer chooses to use. Normally, you aren't told what those criteria are. If you were, everyone would answer in a way that matched the criteria.

I'll give you an example: When I had a small software company, I needed to hire a programmer to handle some of the coding involved. I needed one person, but got 20 applications. What was my evaluation process? I asked each person to write a short routine that did a particular thing, in the programming language I used. I gave the person as much time as he or she needed to do that, but I did time the process. In the end, that part of the evaluation was based on how long the process took, how the routine was coded and how well it functioned. What was the process? I didn't tell the applicants that. The individual I hired was going to be expected to take a specification and do the coding. I was looking for efficiency, creativity, and speed. That should have been obvious to any of the applicants. In the end, I hired the applicant who produced the cleanest, most efficient code, in a reasonable time. Any professional programmer would have known that's what I was looking for.

I've taught, both at the university level and in technical classes outside of the academic environment. I understood those questions quite well, and could predict the answers that would have produced a recommendation. I assume that any professional teacher would be able to understand what was being asked and what the expectations were. No secret there. Basic stuff about the job of teaching. If an applicant couldn't produce a satisfactory answer to any of them, then I'd remove them from consideration. Pretty simple stuff.

[Hannah Bell]

53. if most districts can already identify the "best" teachers, then why are schools spending millions

of bill gates money to institute value-added ratings which purport to identify the "best" teachers?

your stance is illogical. you say you don't know the situation in chicago, but you're defending it regardless. your stance is not neutral.

no, these "best" teachers are hand-picked by administration, in secret -- and not even told explicitly what their ratings will be used for.

the secrecy is one's first clue the process is not on the level.

[msanthrope]

70. The employer gets to determine who will review, and how.

Nothing wrong with that.

[riderinthestorm]

80. But aren't "we", the taxpayers, the employers?

I don't agree that a corporation founded by Michelle Rhee is the best way to hire teachers. I'm not even sure her theories have merit. I have no substantial proof that charter schools (which she advocates for) are any better than what we have now.

I see a lot of older, experienced teachers (ie. more $$, more health care costs etc.) getting fired and then having to "re-apply" in what feels like a "gotcha" conundrum. These teachers (some, all, how many?) can honestly articulate theories that they know/believe/have demonstrated can work, or they can spew the corporate line and get hired.

And what's wrong with your premise, is that we honestly are having a grueling debate over the way forward for education in this country. I'm not sure that NCLB is the way forward (which Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Obama etc. believe in.) I'm not sure that parent apathy, poverty, computer games, childhood obesity (and other dietary measures), the cutting away of physical activity and recess etc. etc. aren't also substantial contributors to our academic decline and find it hard to blame teachers solely for this rapid degeneration.

I'm worried about the privatization of education in this country and anyone who isn't worried, isn't paying attention. The first line is who gets hired (just like Bush packing the courts with conservatives). We could lose a generation over this - just like "new math" lost a generation of math thinkers.....

[sulphurdunn]

56. I cannot prove what is not.

I am also unsure how a national board certification qualifies one to rate the desirability of other teachers. This sets a very bad precedent I think, but it fits nicely with the highly touted divide and conquer merit pay system that is also a bit fuzzy around the edges after standardized test scores are factored in as a percentage of what constitutes said merit.

[dsc]

63. I went for national board certification two years ago

and missed by one point. My subject area test is what kept me in the game, with my entries not being the greatest. I resubmitted one entry last year and will find out in November if I passed or failed. Honestly, regardless of the outcome I don't think I would be magically fit to become an evaluator of who would or wouldn't be a good teacher sight unseen. I fail to see why the resume and four question essay would be somehow a better gage than the evaluations the teachers previously had.

[sabrina 1]

100. Do you know that they are? You don't know but you're bound and determined

to defend it anyhow.

'Maybe they are some of its best teachers'. And who would determine that? Who did? Why don't the applicants KNOW who is evaluating them? And how do you evaluate a professional without ever having spoken to them?

Do we know how much money these evaluators were paid? Do we know who THEY know and whether or not they were hired because of who they know? Was this job advertised, was it funded with public money? Did these evaluators respond to those questions themselves, since they are teachers, before being given the job?

There is no way to defend this without getting some answers to some obvious questions. If I had a child in that district I would certainly want to know who was evaluating my child's teachers before hiring them. I hope some transparency as to how these people were chosen will be forth-coming because it is impossible to accept this as a proper method of hiring teachers with so much unknown about the process.

[laughingliberal]

46. K & R nt

[JDPriestly]

51. Someone needs to make sure that there is no discrimination based on

past support of a union or political activities on the teacher's own time.

[w4rma]

117. Political activism and union support is probably the very basis of their "rating" system.

It's McCarthyism against teachers.

[Nikki Stone1]

54. The educational system is being stolen out from under the American people

It was gutted beforehand (in the 80s and 90s) so it could be "piratized". The corporation that controls the money controls the message.

[madfloridian]

88. Yes, and it is happening so quickly.

.

[Nikki Stone1]

93. It only seems that way. These guys have been working behind the scenes for years, I think

Getting politicians to gut schools financially and demoralizing teachers in the press. Both have been going on for at least a decade or two. My guess is that much of this was planned in the 80s along with all other privatization schemes, like energy. Remember that vouchers and their backers have been around a long time, and that was the precursor to total piratization.

[LiberalFighter]

58. Who are these National Board Certified teachers?

What are their qualifications?

[madfloridian]

60. It's secret.

:shrug:

[madrchsod]

62. my friend is a tenured music-english teacher.

the budget cuts forced her to teach math. she is horrible at math and she said she has`t a clue on how to teach math. she will get a bad review next year through no fault of her own.

the suntimes or the tribune had an article about this issue. the majority of the commentators blamed the teachers and the union.

life is`t as easy as some folks think

[boppers]

78. So your friend took a job she knew she couldn't do properly?

How is that not her fault, *as well as* a fault of whoever gave her that job?

[readmoreoften]

91. It's called rent and a paycheck.

Who the fuck are you that you can afford to turn down a job when you're unemployed?

[woo me with science]

94. I wouldn't accept a job as an airline mechanic if I knew I'd screw it up and endanger people

I wouldn't take a job as a criminal defense lawyer if I knew my incompetence would get my innocent clients jailed.

Stealing a full year of quality instruction from kids is also destructive.

[boppers]

101. I'm somebody who values children more than a paycheck, apparently.

:shrug:

[reggie the dog]

115. i got hired like this too

i am a history teacher and they hired me and then told me that half of my classes were to be ESL which i have never been trained to teach, so in order to make a living i had to take half my hours in a subject i didnt know, i told them this and the principal said teachers are expected to be dynamic enough to teach other subjects, seeing as they would just as easily hire an esl teacher to teach history i took the job. i would prefer a job teaching all history but as someone else said i need to pay the bills and eat.

[AngryAmish]

111. Your friend is a bad person

If teachers want to be taken seriously as professionals then they have to act as professionals. Knowing your limits is about the most important thing a professional can know.

[Whisp]

130. how about letting down all those kids that are getting a crap teacher?

[reggie the dog]

135. how is it letting them down

the person hiring knows you are not trained for it but they dont care because they want to fill in a vacant spot that is not in and of itself enough to be a full time post. The principals that propose this kind of crap dont care about the quality, it is a poor situation for the teachers and the students but whether i take such a post or not does not matter as they still assign classes like that because such administrators expect that teachers should be able to teach subjects they are not certified in for whatever reason. personally i think it should be illegal. why did i have to get sociology and history/social studies certification if you dont need to have a background in a subject to teach it? why should i as a teacher have to choose between unemployment and taking a job where they expect that i will just know how to teach a subject i was never trained in?

[blaze]

75. It's like watching an accident in slow motion...

I remember slipping on the stairs going down to my basement one day. I was home alone and in a split second, I remember thinking, "I'm here all alone and if I don't catch myself and smack my head, no one will find me for a long time."

I kinda feel like that's what's happening to public education. It sorta feels like a slow motion free fall, but it's astoundingly fast how quickly support is sliding away.

[madfloridian]

123. There is no one in power who defends teachers.

No one.

[boppers]

103. My teachers never published their quantifiable, mathematical, formulas for grading.

Karma's funny that way.

[reggie the dog]

116. what year were you in school???

i always pass out rubrics explaining grading, 3 categories, form (organization, the essay flows, paragraphs are logically divided), knowledge (the facts they cite in their arguments) and analysis (their arguments) they get points in each category, 5 for form, 7 for knowledge and 8 for analysis the kids had a sheet too explaining what kind of work would get them low, mid or high grades in each category. The same rubric was used for oral presentations but of course form was oral form not written form. before i assigned a first lesson i passed out the rubrics and their homework was to read them, the next class we spend a good half an hour discussing the criteria. This way i was able to groom the kids writing and when i would grade I would give the kids the grade total for each of the 3 categories so the kids would see just where they needed to improve. My 8th graders able to write 3 page double spaced essays at home based on 3 or 4 documents i gave them and could write 4 to 5 hand written pages in a 2 hour long test with 3 documents to evaluate by the end of the year. my juniors in high school were writing the same length but with far far longer documents (ten to 15 pages of reading to do)in their 3 hour long tests by the end of the year. most all the kids improved their writing, even their English teacher talked to me about an improvement in the kids organizational skills that carried over into english class (or that carried over into my class from her use of clear critera as well) when I took my students to a mock UN conference in Fontainbleau in march 4 of my 9 students were awarded, only 20 awards were given out of 400 kids so 5 percent of kids there got awarded but 44 percent of my students were awarded (yes some of that is due to prior ability but some of it is due to my making them work so hard on their written and oral communication skills with clear criteria in front of their eyes.

[WinkyDink]

120. Thank you. You KNOW much of the anti-teacher crap is based on personal antipathy from childhood.

FTR, I couldn't stand some of my teachers, and, later, some of my lazy-arse teaching colleagues. But one TRIES to operate on facts.

And one observable FACT is that the curent Administration is hell-bent on bribing public-school Administrators/Boards of Directors to give up autonomy for cash.

[boppers]

128. "to give up autonomy"

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Should children be taught that "evolution is just a theory"? That Christianity wasn't a driving force behind the dark ages? That the bible is inerrant? That Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas? That humans aren't animals? That being marginally illiterate is acceptable?

If anything, the Texas school boards are providing countless glaring examples of *why* schools should not be given too much autonomy.

[boppers]

127. I was in the system from the 70's to the 90's.

i always pass out rubrics explaining grading, 3 categories, form (organization, the essay flows, paragraphs are logically divided), knowledge (the facts they cite in their arguments) and analysis (their arguments) they get points in each category, 5 for form, 7 for knowledge and 8 for analysis, the kids had a sheet too explaining what kind of work would get them low, mid or high grades in each category.Run-on sentence The same rubric was used for oral presentations but of course form was oral form not written form. before i assigned a first lesson i passed out the rubrics and their homework was to read them, the next class we spend a good half an hour discussing the criteria. This way i was able to groom the kids writing, and when i would grade I would give the kids the grade total for each of the 3 categories so the kids would see just where they needed to improve. My 8th graders able to write 3 page double spaced essays at home based on 3 or 4 documents i gave them, and could write 4 to 5 hand written pages, in a 2 hour long test, with 3 documents to evaluate by the end of the year. my juniors in high school were writing the same length, but with far far longer documents (ten to 15 pages of reading to do)in their 3 hour long tests by the end of the year. most all the kids improved their writing, even their English teacher talked to me about an improvement in the kids organizational skills that carried over into english class (or that carried over into my class from her use of clear critera as well) when I took my students to a mock UN conference in Fontainbleau in march 4 of my 9 students were awarded, only 20 awards were given out of 400 kids so 5 percent of kids there got awarded but 44 percent of my students were awarded (yes some of that is due to prior ability but some of it is due to my making them work so hard on their written and oral communication skills with clear criteria in front of their eyes. Run-on sentence, unclosed parenthesis, poor punctuation.

Other notes
Needs to be broken into paragraphs
More attention needs to be paid to capitalization
Suggest tutoring sessions on use of the comma and period

....

I apparently grew up with higher expectations being placed upon me, as in the 8th grade, we were expected to be reading 300-500 page books and producing 30-40 page reports (for English, Social Studies, etc.). 4-5 hand written pages was what was expected of us in the 4th grade, or (in the 8th grade) when we were writing in our 2nd or 3rd language(s) (but perhaps that is what you teach?).

While we did get rough breakdowns of the expected percentages, and how it was factored into a grade, it was often based on entirely subjective criteria (for example, you give 8 for "analysis"... is there a precise formula to determine the difference between a 5 and a 6?), which meant that we spent a great deal of time guessing what a teacher would like. For example, some teachers preferred "A leads to F" for it's brevity, and would give higher marks for that, but other teachers preferred everything spelled out explicitly, and preferred "A therefore B therefore C therefore D therefore E therefore F". So while there's no longer a huge guessing game at a single number, there's now multiple guessing games about multiple numbers.

[reggie the dog]

133. 8th graders in France and the USA

have never had to write so much as you had to. English is their first language. I show them examples of what kinds of work get how many points in each category. Are you sure you wrote 30 to 40 pages in jr high??? i only had to write that much in graduate school from 2001 to 2003

[boppers]

136. This was in the USA, and yes, 8th grade.

It was the kind of schooling track where we were tested and challenged constantly, 4-6 hours of homework a night, from the moment we entered the track (Usually in K-3, I got in late at the 4th grade and struggled for a year or two) until we graduated, or cracked out.

I can't find a wikipedia page on the 8th grade school, but this is what they were getting us ready for (this is the next school in this track):
http://tinyurl.com/27lqrjr

"In December 2009, US News and World Report identified UHS as one of "America's best high schools- Gold Medal list".<1> In 2007, US News and World Report ranked UHS at 13 among public high schools as well as earning a gold medal in achievement according to US News' ranking system.<2> In May 2006, Newsweek named UHS as one of "The Public Elites," schools that, "NEWSWEEK excluded...from the list of Best High Schools because so many of their students score well above average on the SAT and ACT."<3>"

They expected a heck of a lot from us, so we gave them a heck of a lot.... a sample anecdote: because so many kids got perfect SAT scores, the competition wasn't to get a good score, it was to get a perfect score *faster* than anyybody else could.

There's no way we could have performed like that unless we had years, and years, of intense preparation, which is where writing longer and longer papers, reading harder and harder books (etc. etc.) factored in along the way, along with teachers, parents, etc. who expected great things from us.

[reggie the dog]

137. i would love to teach in such a school

[madfloridian]

118. Wonder what Obama thinks about these Chicago schools?

He seems unaware how much his administration is hurting teachers and opening up an atmosphere of humiliation and pain for them.

I wonder what he would say about Chicago schools now?

[izzybeans]

122. The sad thing is that many if not most of the teacher's that got laid off

were very good at their jobs. My son's school lost several high quality staff members. They kept a couple of really bad ones instead.

CPS sucks. It is not the schools that need reform, it is the districts.

[woo me with science]

124. Don't use an apostrophe to form the plural of "teacher."

You need a semicolon instead of a comma in that last sentence.

You should use "who" instead of "that" when referring to teachers.

You should use commas to set off, "if not most."


Incompetent employees usually are not aware they are incompetent, for the same reason that so many people criticize education in general but believe that they, themselves, were well-taught.

It is very difficult for anyone to be aware of what he or she has not been taught.

[izzybeans]

131. Don't act like a copy editor an informal forum.

It makes you seem like you are inflating something...not sure what. If you had a point it was lost in a thicket of irrelevant formality.

[Fire1]

129. Doesn't surprise me. n/t