One plus of the newspaper analysis is that the data question the conventional wisdom of what is a “good” teacher.

Cuban goes on to challenge the notion that “everyone knows” who the good and bad teachers are:

If only that were the truth! The fact is that notions of “good” teachers vary among parents, other teachers, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and, of course, journalists–see above with Caruso and Polacheck. Traditional and progressive beliefs about how children should learn, what knowledge is of most worth, and how teachers should teach differ among the above groups and vary even more within each of those groups. Desired outcomes–high test scores, problem solving skills, independent thinking, creativity–will vary according to each version of “goodness.” Thus, relying on standardized test scores to evaluate effective–a synonym for “good”–teaching concentrates on only one version of being a “good” teacher since most of the other desired outcomes are missing from standardized test items.

Larry Cuban, Using Test Scores To Out Ineffective Teachers

Added commentary 9/8/10:
I find it painful to admit that Cuban is right – we may not know who’s effective and who’s not, because we may be using different definitions of “effective.” We can’t let tests determine everything, but we also can’t let niceness mask ineffectiveness at ensuring student learning.

I think the best way to deal with both of these problems – tests mistakenly labeling effective teachers as ineffective, and administrators giving rosy evaluations to ineffective teachers – is by doing what Seattle’s new teacher contract does: using value-added data to trigger increased scrutiny and support, without triggering penalties for teachers who may have no idea what they’re doing wrong.

If principals don’t know why teachers are getting poor results, the next step should be for the principal to investigate and find out if the data are a fluke or if there’s really something amiss. That’s instructional supervision at its core – using data but looking beyond the numbers to determine what’s really going on.

One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn’t stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
…
Meanwhile, the District of Columbia began evaluating teachers based on test scores last school year, and fired more than 150 teachers after the school year because of poor performance. Test scores count for 50% of teacher ratings in subjects that are tested.
…
A report from the Department of Education released last month shows that even with three years of data, one in four teachers is likely to be misclassified because unrelated variables creep in.

Even with these questions, relying on student test scores to create a quantitative assessment of teachers might be better than the current standard practice. At many schools, principals grade teachers based on a few minutes of classroom observation (and then give most of them high scores).
–Carl Bialik, Needs Improvement: Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short (WSJ)

One of the most visually arresting elements of the article is this chart that shows the instability of value-added ratings from year to year:

Source: WSJ.com

As you can see, the idea that excellence in teaching (as defined by impact on student learning) is a stable construct is not supported by the data from this study. Value-added is not ready for prime time.

But is it better than what we currently use for teacher evaluation?

But even skeptics of test-score-based evaluations acknowledge that a uniform, data-based approach for ranking teachers could be superior to subjective methods—such as principals’ observations—that still predominate in schools. “Damn near anything is going to be an improvement on the status quo,” says Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Indeed, the sad state of teacher evaluation is not due to a lack of data, but a lack of diligence on the part of school administrators. But I would disagree sharply with Willingham’s prescription for change. Far too much energy has been devoted in recent months to making a show of doing something – anything – to address issues of teacher performance. We seem to be enamored of anything that uses data and promises accountability, even if the results are patent nonsense, as in the illustration above.

We like this approach because it’s neat and quantitative, even if it’s dead wrong. Truly improving instruction is a lot more complicated. In order to do a better job of identifying effective and ineffective teachers, and ensuring that the latter make the necessary improvements, principals will have to make time to observe instruction, provide feedback, and take responsibility for the quality of teaching in their schools.

See this follow-up post for more analysis from Bialik.

So why are folks still talking about individual merit pay when it’s clear that it won’t work? Because the idea of holding teachers accountable for their students’ test scores sounds so obvious—and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a bunch of powerful politicians are enabling that gut feeling.
…
First, those who advocate performance-based accountability are absolutely right that student achievement needs to be front and center. It’s not enough to observe teachers’ classroom performance; we need evidence that students have learned.

Second, research has clearly established that teachers and principals make a huge difference to student achievement. They shouldn’t be ducking responsibility.

Third, when people are acknowledged for a job well done, it’s affirming and energizing. That’s true even for idealistic and intrinsically motivated educators.
–Kim Marshall, Merit Pay or Team Accountability?

As always, great thoughts from Kim Marshall.

I’ve made an effort to describe each major app that I use, with special attention to its usefulness in my work as a school leader. I hope you find my comments helpful in considering how the iPad can support your work.

Mail
Email is increasingly how work is done – especially the work of leadership. I use my iPad to stay abreast of email as it comes in throughout the day, and to respond to email when I’m away from my computer but have my Bluetooth keyboard (see this post).

The iPad’s built-in email app is excellent, and it will probably work with your school or district email system. Check your desktop computer to see the server addresses and account settings, or check with your district tech staff to find out if there are any special settings to use. iPad does not have any special requirements – if you can access your email from your home computer, you can access it on the iPad.

A note about webmail – if you can access your email through a web browser, it might be tempting not to bother setting up the Mail app. However, webmail often lacks important features such as your district address book and the “mark as unread” button. It’s worth the effort to set up Mail to have access to its great features. In addition, other iPad apps need an email account to send files from (as described above), so you’ll want to have the Mail app configured.

iCal
Planning my time and keeping appointments are essential parts of my work as a school leader, so I need a reliable calendar. Paper or a desktop-based calendar will work, but I’ve found it enormously helpful to have a powerful electronic calendar with me at all times.

The iPad’s built-in calendar app is a dream to use. Add new appointments, accept or reject meeting invitations, set reminders (which will turn on your iPad when they pop up), and modify your schedule all from the slick interface. You’ll never go back to a paper calendar again after using iCal.

My secretary can add appointments directly to my calendar through Microsoft Outlook’s designee feature, and they’ll show up automatically in iCal. You can also subscribe to web-based .ical feeds, such as those generated by Google Calendar.

 
OmniFocus
I need to keep track of countless projects, tasks, ideas, and plans in my work as a principal. I found that if I keep only simple paper-based lists, they get out of control quickly. OmniFocus is my hub for to-do items.

This $40 app is pricey but amazing. If you’ve found that your paper or simple electronic to-do lists get unwieldy after a while, OmniFocus is the solution. Check out this video introduction to this complex but powerful app.

OmniFocus is one of the best-designed iPad apps on the market, and is a joy to use. However, if you’re looking for a simpler (and cheaper) solution, try Things. I haven’t used Things, but I’ve heard good things (ahem) about it.

Whichever to-do app you use, the key is to write ALL of your tasks in it, instead of leaving them scattered across multiple apps.

Evernote
As a principal, I receive a large amount of information that I may need to reference in the future. I have a good paper filing system, but I don’t want to print and manually file anything if I can avoid it.

Evernote is my file cabinet. It will accept text (emailed, pasted, or typed in), photos, and file attachments, and make all of them searchable. For example, if I’m at another school and see a playground rules poster I like, I can take a picture with my phone and email it to Evernote. Searching for “playground” will bring up the photo, because Evernote can actually read text (including handwriting) inside photographs.

Best of all, your data lives on Evernote’s servers, and is instantly synched between your iPad, iPhone, desktop or laptop computer (Windows or Mac), and the web interface. In other words, your reference information is always on hand. If you’re feeling ambitious and have a sheet-fed duplexing scanner, you can even scan your paper files into Evernote and get rid of your file cabinet. There’s also a bookmarklet to clip items you find on the web.

iPad Reading Apps
A note about reading apps: if you need to read something by a specific date (e.g. for a meeting), put it on your calendar or to-do list. Otherwise, you can use the following apps to read material of interest whenever you get a chance.

Instapaper
I believe that leadership is creative work, and creative work requires inspiration and new ideas. Reading is therefore an essential part of the work of leadership, yet we don’t read as much as we should. If you have a pile of unread leadership magazines in your office or home, you know what I mean. When you want to read something (eventually) but don’t have time right now, save it to Instapaper.

Instapaper works best for those moments when you find yourself wanting to read an article, but you realize you aren’t going to have time to finish it without interruption. Instead of printing the article and using the resulting clutter as a reminder to read the article, save the article to Instapaper and read it at your convenience. The typography is the best I’ve ever seen – I’d rather read an article in Instapaper than any other way.

It helps to install the Safari bookmarklet to easily save articles you find online. This will take a minute but it’s worth it.

Most education publications such as EdWeek, Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, etc. offer their content free online to print subscribers. Since I don’t want a pile of EdWeek papers filling my office or home, I flip through the paper, search for the articles I want to read online, and save them to Instapaper.*

*Instapaper saves public web articles and anything you email to it. For reading material that isn’t already on the public web (e.g. EdWeek articles, which require that you be a logged-in subscriber), you can copy and paste into Evernote, then email the Evernote document to a special Instapaper email address. While this is a bit of a pain, it has the added benefit of giving you a searchable backup copy in Evernote.

iAnnotate PDF Reader
Sometimes you need to read an article more carefully and take notes for later reference. If you’re taking graduate or advanced certification classes, you probably receive plenty of PDFs. While Safari, Mail, and Evernote can all open PDF files, a specialized reader app such as iAnnotate will save your place and let you mark up the article.

iAnnotate’s interface is very easy to learn, and it’s easy to save PDF files to the app. It’s easily worth the $10 price tag.

Again, if you need to read a document by a certain date, I don’t recommend simply saving it to iAnnotate – put it on your calendar or to-do list as well.

Kindle & iBooks
An increasing number of popular and education-related titles are available for Amazon’s Kindle app or the iBooks reading app. Last Spring, I bought a paperback copy of Kim Marshall’s Rethinking Teacher Supervision & Evaluation, but I also clicked the “I want to read this book on Kindle” link on Amazon’s website. A few months later, a Kindle edition was released. It works, and reading on the iPad is much more convenient than reading a paper book.

A little-known feature of the Kindle app is that you can highlight important passages and view a list of all the passages you’ve highlighted, either on the iPad or on Amazon’s website. This is a great way to review what you’ve learned from a book. iBooks has a similar feature.

Explore
The above apps are those I find indispensable and use daily, but I have dozens of other apps that I downloaded just to try or for fun. Don’t be afraid to spend a few dollars trying new apps.

The key, as I said in my iPad workflow article, is to limit the number of apps holding actionable information; otherwise, each new app is simply another place to lose something important.

What apps do you use on the iPad? Are you considering getting an iPad? Let me know what you think.

Image credit: Brandi Sims

[Arne] Duncan and [Bill] Gates propose developing measures of effectiveness to get rid of bad teachers and increase the pay of good ones. It sounds like common sense. Or does it?

This approach was called the “inspection” method by W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the science of quality improvement. Inspection, he wrote, is not an effective way to improve quality because it has no effect on the process that caused suboptimal results in the first place. Real and continuous improvement, Deming argued, occurs only when the workers themselves study outcome variability and the processes that produce it.
–James Stigler, Rethinking Teacher Accountability – Before It’s Too Late (EdWeek, June 9, 2010)

I almost recycled this issue of EdWeek when I came across this essay from James Stigler of UCLA. He goes on to describe the Japanese practice of lesson study, and explains how it is both a form of accountability and a form of professional development.

Quick Tips (Summary):

1. Cut down on email by unsubscribing from mailing lists and setting expectations with others.
2. Use your mobile phone to keep up with “FYI” messages that require no action or that you can deal with while out and about in your school; keep others marked as unread and deal with them on your computer.
3. On your computer, read a message once and deal with it; if necessary, add a task to your to-do list rather than repeatedly marking it as unread.
4. Use a text shortcut program to write commonly used phrases more quickly.
5. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for your email application, and work on your typing speed.
6. Only process your email once or twice a day; close your email program or turn off automatic downloading to avoid distractions.
7. Don’t answer email immediately when it comes in; it’s meant to be asynchronous. Strive to answer within a day, but at a time that works for you.
8. Save your email to your computer, and make it search-friendly by adding keywords to messages you think you might need to locate later.
9. Don’t over-file or create elaborate rules – they only slow you down.
10. Set the example in your school by using email to communicate more efficiently.

Read the full article

Image credit: Esparta Palma

“If you have a principal who knows there’s a poor-performing teacher and chooses not to evaluate him or her effectively, who’s really the incompetent person?” Mr. Weil said.

–EdWeek on the “Dance of the Lemons” process for transferring teachers

Named for sociologist Donald T. Campbell, the precept holds, essentially, that the more that numbers are used for political purposes, the more they will be manipulated—and distort the decisions they were supposed to inform.

The very measures that get bandied about most often—like those stellar test gains—turn out to be the most suspect, because their main purpose all along was to promote policy decisions that were already made. And where there’s one set of bad numbers, there will be others.
–New York Magazine: What Downgrading the Too-Easy Grading of City Schools Means for Bloomberg’s Reform

From Wikipedia:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

H/T: Diane Ravitch

Workflow
First, a word about workflow – if you just do discrete things in different apps, your important information will be dispersed among them, and may be hard to keep track of. For example, you don’t want to do great brainstorming in a whiteboard app but then forget to do anything with it. If you have 20 different apps holding your work, it’s easy to forget what you’ve done and where it is.

The key to managing your app workflow is to limit the number of places where actionable information resides. Most apps have a way to email a document either as plain text or as an attachment. Use this feature to send your work to your own email inbox so you can follow up later.

For example, if you do some brainstorming in a whiteboard app, you can email an image of the whiteboard to yourself so you have it in your inbox for later processing.

If you identify action items, add them to your to-do list rather than leave them in another app (see below for my recommended to-do list app).

Core Workflow Apps
Of course, some apps, such as the calendar, are the best repository for their own information, and you’ll have to commit to checking them regularly or setting reminders so you don’t miss anything important. If you find yourself forgetting to check something important (like your calendar for the next day), put a recurring popup reminder on your calendar.

My “repository” apps include:

• OmniFocus – a powerful to-do list manager. If it’s a task or project I’m responsible for, it’s in OmniFocus.
• Mail – the built-in email app on the iPad is excellent. Needless to say, it contains my work email, including any documents that I’ve emailed to myself from other apps.
• iCal – the built-in calendar app on iPad, which syncs with my Outlook/Exchange work calendar and my Mac personal calendar.

If I need to deal with something and it’s not in one of the above apps, I put it on my to-do list or calendar to ensure that I don’t lose it.

Batching
Another key is to batch – to do similar items together in a group. Having similar items in one app – for example, all the EdWeek articles I want to read together in Instapaper – makes it much easier to get everything done quickly, since I’m not switching back and forth between different apps.

Wireless Keyboard
Finally, I highly recommend getting a Bluetooth wireless keyboard. Apple’s model is extremely light and portable, and makes your iPad an excellent replacement for a laptop in meetings, on the road, or in classroom observations. (I don’t recommend the Apple iPad keyboard stand, which isn’t portable.)

I’m getting fairly fast typing on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard, but for extended typing, it’s extremely helpful to have a real keyboard.

I will have more detailed posts on other apps soon, but here’s my advice for now:
1. Limit the number of apps containing actionable information
2. Email yourself or put a to-do item on your list for other information in apps
3. Do similar items together in a batch
4. Get a Bluetooth wireless keyboard

I find myself using email to:

• Delegate
• Inform
• Request
• Monitor
• Celebrate

You?